Be a part of a live, interactive conversation with New York Times best-selling author, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., on his book Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.

We live, according to Eddie S. Glaude Jr., in a moment when the struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by events from the past four years. We have been here before: for James Baldwin, these after times came in the wake of the civil rights movement, when a similar attempt to compel a national confrontation with the truth was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In these years, spanning from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin transformed into a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair.  

In the story of Baldwin’s crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography—drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews—with history, memoir, and trenchant analysis of our current moment, Begin Again is Glaude’s endeavor, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University and author of Democracy in Black. He will be in conversation with Tameca Beckett, Reference and Access Services Librarian at Delaware State University. Co-sponsored by the Southern Delaware Alliance for Racial Justice and supported by Delmarva Public Media.

We invite you to support the author by purchasing a copy of the book from one of our local independent bookstore, Browseabout Books, by clicking HERE. Call-in orders are accepted or you can stop by the store to purchase a copy. For store hours, please visit their website. Each copy purchased comes with a signed archival bookplate. Browseabout Books is donating 25% of book sales to The Bryan Stevenson School of Excellence.

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