The draining away of James Baldwin’s magic was a drama much discussed in the years leading up to his death in 1987 at the age of sixty-three. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
Baldwin gave expression to the longings of blacks in exalted prose. He was embraced, in the tradition of Negro Firsterism, even by those who never sat down with a book, as our preeminent literary spokesman, whether he liked it or not. Neither athlete nor entertainer, but nevertheless a star. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
History is a sly boots, and for a generation of blacks that cannot identify with the frustrations of Jim Crow, and for whites who cannot understand the hard deal that faces working-class blacks, it is difficult to reconcile Hughes’s reputation as a poet-hero with his topical verse and uncomplicated prose. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
The history of black people in Manhattan is a story of people getting pushed farther uptown as land acquires new uses and increases in value. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
Manhattan was the capital of the twentieth century for black writers, artists, and intellectuals as much as it was for their white counterparts. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
I grew up in Indianapolis, Ind., then a conservative, provincial city. Anglophilia was the first foreign language I was exposed to. Or maybe it was a way of one-upping the local white people. Or maybe it was an early manifestation of homohood. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
When I was in high school, I looked for the black presence in a British historical tradition – before too much slavery and empire – that would not cost me my self-respect. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
I was a slow and lazy reader as a kid. ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ was the only non-school book I would read, over and over, between television, records and radio, until I picked up my aunt’s copy of ‘In Cold Blood’ and she didn’t ask for it back. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
Race pride, socialist ideals, and a sincerity as exalted as that of Carlyle’s visionaries coalesced in Asa Philip Randolph. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
