Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

In his two closing chapters, Glaude employs violent imagery to jolt readers into acting against racism. The South and the country are guilty of violence toward Black people, an untold truth that is like a pile of unburied dead: “the suffering beneath the country’s and region’s feet […] allowed the bodies to continue to amass” (150). Glaude employs similar imagery in his description of the Legacy Museum, a narrative museum that tells the story of the continuous and vicious strands of racial violence to counter Confederate monuments that glorify slavery and the era of lynching. Glaude describes his experience of the space as “sounds and sights [that] bleed from one exhibit section into the next” (188), alludes to the blood of the Black people the museum commemorates, including lynching victims, King, and those killed by police. The Lynching Memorial, moreover, comprises 800 vertical steel slabs that abstractly represent lynching victims. To Glaude’s eye, they look like “a prairie full of rusted, brown coffins” and “bodies swaying from poplar trees” (191). This imagery does not sensationalize violence. Rather, it acknowledges the truth about the country’s ugly history, which is the first step toward dismantling the lie.

Glaude’s reliance on the imagery of violence mirrors the violence Black people have suffered (and continue to suffer) at the hands of White people. While searching for the bodies of three civil rights workers killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964, local and national law enforcement kept discovering other Black bodies: “They had all been decapitated. Heads were gone. Cut up and everything else […] They were finding black people buried under trees, floating in rivers and everything else” (159-60). The body of the only Black man among the three missing civil rights workers bore signs of such brutal torture that one pathologist claimed he had “never witnessed bones so severely shattered” in his 25-year career (160). The violence did not end after the civil rights years. Glaude urges readers to see the link between the past and present. Contemporary police violence against Black people, for example, cannot be divorced from 20th-century lynchings: Both are grounded in the lie.

Glaude underscores the importance of truth in his closing chapters. He argues that Trump is not an anomalous bad actor, just as Baldwin claimed that that King’s murder was not the work of a lone madman. Rather, Trump has a relationship to the lie: “The lie is the lifeblood of Trumpism. […] Anyone who doesn’t fit the view of America as a white nation or refuses to submit to it is cast as a traitor or as someone who hates America” (211). While Conservatives claim that Trump’s election was about economics, Glaude demands honesty, “an honest confrontation with and condemnation of one’s complicity with a way of life that insists that some people matter more than others and with a society organized to reflect that belief” (172). If America does not confront the past honestly, it is doomed to repeat past mistakes. Trump is the successor to Reagan: his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” echoes Reagan’s “Let’s make America great again.”

New beginnings feature prominently in Glaude’s final chapters, as they do throughout the book. The book’s title and the title of Chapter 7 reference a passage in Baldwin’s last novel, Just Above My Head: “‘Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again’” (193). No matter how critical Baldwin was of American society, he never lost hope for a better future. For Baldwin, beginning again was shorthand for the work that had to be done to achieve this future. Baldwin asked Americans to reexamine the values and commitments that shaped the country’s self-understanding.

Moreover, he urged his compatriots to look back to those beginnings, not to reaffirm America’s greatness or reinforce the myths that secure the nation’s innocence, but rather, to identify where the country went wrong and to reimage it in light of what it initially set out to be. As Glaude notes, beginning again does not entail the wholesale rejection of the past: “A new story doesn’t mean that we discard all of the elements of the old story, nor does it mean that we dwell only on our sins. Instead, we narrate our national beginnings in light of our contradictions and our aspirations.” (203). This new beginning, which Glaude refers to as the third American founding, demands that the country undergo a profound political transformation. Americans must reject Trump and everything he represents. They must accept responsibility to create a new American.