What Is The Significance Of Baldwin's Letter

King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” discusses the topic of segregation and just and unjust laws, whereas Baldwin in his “Notes of a Native Son” places an emphasis on relationships, particularly the relationship between his father and him. Additionally, Baldwin discusses the impact of racism on the lives of African Americans during that time. Although these essays are dated back over fifty years ago; the topics discussed in them are still very common today.

Men who were enslaved, also left their families to fight the Confederates, by enlisting in the Union army. Later argued by men in Michigan, “Linking their willingness to provide military service to their treatment, they indicate their readiness to “obey our country’s call...”. This dedication to the country showed there are willing to immerse in the American society. This is just one example of how Edna Greene Medford argues the effect African Americans had on their freedom on January 1, 1863. Medford approaches the topic with perspective of African Americans, and the role they played in the Emancipation Proclamation. She interprets this views through analysis of social, economic, and political views of the Africans Americans at the time, to make a generalization about how it affected them.

Baldwin, however, describes his father as being a very black-like “African tribal chieftain” (64) who was proud of his heritage despite the chains it locked upon him. He is shown to be one with good intentions, but one who never achieved the positive outcome intended. His ultimate downfall was his paranoia such that “the disease of his mind allowed the disease of his body to destroy him” (66). Baldwin relates the story of a white teacher with good intentions and his father’s objection to her involvement in their lives because of his lack of trust for any white woman. His father’s paranoia even extended to Baldwin’s white high school friends. These friends, although they could be kind, “would do anything to keep a Negro down” (68), and they believed that the “best thing to do was to have as little to do with them as possible” (68). Thus, Baldwin leaves the reader with the image of his father as an unreasonable man who struggled to blockade white America from his life and the lives of his children to the greatest extent of his power. Baldwin then turns his story to focus on his own experience in the world his father loathed and on his realization that he was very much like his father.

Baldwin determines that violence and racial separatism are not acceptable solutions for achieving “power”. Baldwin believes that black people will only be able to achieve lasting influence in America if they love and accept white people. In contrast, writing 52 years after Baldwin, Coats tells his own son to “struggle” but not

On one hand James Baldwin is addressing his letter to his nephew, but on the other hand the text is also applicable to the entire black community who is oppressed by society; and to the whites who need to recognize the need for equality. Baldwin addresses the letter to the teenager, James, and additionally descriptively clarifies how this deadly situation applies to many dark-skinned men. Contrastingly, the novelist realizes how the privileged population will hear this message as well, which Baldwin makes clear when he metaphorically states, “I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, ‘No! This is not true! How bitter you are!’”(Baldwin

James Baldwin is known to be one of the best essay writers in the twentieth century who wrote on a few topics including race, discrimination, sexuality and most of all his personal experiences. In “Notes of a Native Son”, he uses two main strategies to get his point across. First, he likes to tell a story in a narrative view. Following is normally his analysis of the event. He describes the event and then gives his theory on the matter. By doing this, he grants the reader a chance to decipher the meaning. His interpretation may not be what the reader’s is. He likes to argue and provides the basis for his argument in “Notes of a Native Son”. Throughout the essay he talks about himself and his father,

In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin addressed the problem of racism that existed in the early 1960s. He gives very powerful accounts of his life growing up in Harlem in the 1930s and 40s. Throughout the book he gives accounts of how whites, blacks, Christians, and Muslims all can be blamed for the racial tensions that existed in the early 1960s. While Baldwin spends much of the criticism on whites, Christians, and Jews, and their inability to give up their hold on the political, financial, and religions power of the country, he also holds the Black and Muslim communities responsible for not working harder to make things better. Baldwin does not feel that the Whites are totally accountable for the racial situation that exists in the

Baldwin uses the experiences he faced in New Jersey and the personal relationship with his father to show ethos throughout his essay. At one point in his essay, Baldwin finds himself in New Jersey where segregation still exist. “I learned in New Jersey…one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people” (68). Here Baldwin expresses how circumstances in New Jersey were like at the time, but also portrays the way people were viewed based on the color of their skin. Baldwin later goes on to mention the year he spent in New Jersey, was the year in which “[he] first contracted some dread, chronic disease” (70). This “disease” Baldwin contracted is not an actual disease, but more of a way in which he begins to feel and see the world around him differently. The disease Baldwin is referring to throughout his entire essay is bitterness. Living in New Jersey caused Baldwin to gain the sense of bitterness that his father had lived with during his life. Baldwin’s bitterness comes from the way he was specifically treated in New Jersey and how he allowed that feeling to affect his behaviors. Baldwin specifically mentions the moment in New Jersey where the white waitress approaches him at the restaurant stating, “We don’t serve Negroes here” (71). At this point we begin to see Baldwin as he acts out in violence by stating, “I wanted her to come close enough for me to get her neck

An article in the New York Times newspaper depicted this problem in which it talked about the merged labor movement, which is a part of NAACP, not stopping widespread segregation and discrimination in unions. (Union Aides Rebut) The method of using the American legal system also has much irony within it based on the fact that it is partially at fault for separating the races, and is controlled by people who did it. The NAACP even with flaws seen by Baldwin, do not believe that all Whites are evil and this can be seen in how they’re a part of NAACP’s infrastructure. This point is were Baldwin confers with them on the fact that they should be creating a nation where Blacks and Whites are equal because “[Baldwin] did not care if White and Black people married” (Baldwin 327). From this point one can interpret the fact that Baldwin agrees with the overall goal of the NAACP to unify the two races. This future they look for is what he wants and sits well with Baldwin even though their methods are slow.

James Baldwin argues that “such Frustrations, so long endured, is driving many strong, admirable men and women whose only crime is color

Yet, what made Baldwin so much like his predecessors was his desire to understand what it meant to be black in America. How do they define themselves? How can they self-determine a better future?

Baldwin opens his argument acknowledging the distortion of segregation for the segregationists. According to Baldwin, people who, since birth, have been taught to think a certain way towards the African American race. “The white South African or Mississippi sharecropper or Alabama sheriff has at bottom a system of reality which compels them really to believe when they face the Negro that this

James Baldwin was a prominent African American writer, social critic, and racial justice advocate in the 1960’s and 70’s. In his 1963 Talk to Teachers he aimed to persuade an audience of teachers that education must exist to challenge systems and structures of power and that when it does not, it only serves to reinforce them and amplify their injustice. He specifically focuses on racial hierarchies and white supremacy in the United States. He achieves his persuasive purpose through the strategic use of first, second, and third person pronouns and the use of evocative language, and emphasizes the actionability of his message with anaphora.

African Americans have to strive extremely hard to be successful and obtain a place in America. When reading Baldwin’s statement it seems much like Martin Luther King Jr. statement: “One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land”(3). African Americans are trying to obtain their place in American society but are restricted to the area that the white Americans set aside for them. Both Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin are striving to make a difference to better America by publicly sharing their emotions.

The text continues with Baldwin warning his nephew about the struggle he is going to endure for just being born black and nothing else. Also telling him that he must survive for his children and his children’s children. He warns him, telling him that this country will set him up for failure and that they will try to control where he could go, what he could do, and how he could do it. He continues to articulate that he must stay true to himself because no matter how much he tries to resemble white people they will never accept him. He later states how corrupt the white mind is, for example, he says, “They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for so many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they