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27 pages 54 minutes read

James Baldwin

A Talk to Teachers

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1963

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Background

Historical Context: The Civil Rights Movement in 1963

In April 1963, the Children’s Crusade of Birmingham, Alabama, saw the nation’s youngest civil rights activists take to the streets to protest draconian police rule under commissioner Bull Conner. Throughout the protests, youth were arrested, assaulted with water hoses, and attacked by dogs. In the face of such extreme violence, they continued to march and fight.

On May 28, in Jackson, Mississippi, students trained in nonviolent protest staged sit-ins at Woolworth’s lunch counter. They were then attacked by angry white mobs. In June, after Alabama Governor George Wallace made a televised vow to defend segregation at all costs, President Kennedy made a speech of his own in which he promised to send a civil rights bill to Congress. On the heels of this, Medgar Evers, who was the state field director for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) was murdered in his driveway on June 12. This was an event that devastated Baldwin. On August 28, thanks to the organizational expertise of leaders such as Bayard Rustin, the March on Washington took place.

Baldwin’s lifetime overlapped with more than just strides and regressions in the civil rights movement. When he writes that the society “in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within” (Paragraph 1), he refers to enemies of equality such as Bull Connor and Governor Wallace. However, as an author, Baldwin demonstrated an awareness of international events. In referring to Khrushchev, Baldwin momentarily widens the scope of his speech and America’s visage. Nikita Khrushchev was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and an omnipresent enemy to Americans in the grip of the Cold War.

The term “Cold War” demarcates the period between the end of World War II in 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Americans feared the start of World War III as Khrushchev flirted with the armament of nuclear weapons in Cuba. In mentioning the Russian leader but then quickly returning to internal threats that pivot around racism, Baldwin asserts that such external matters actually pose less threat to American citizens—namely Black Americans—than the threats posed by racial inequality imbedded in US society. In fact, these external threats distract from the civil rights movement and the daily oppression of Black Americans. With this essay, Baldwin aims to draw attention back to these internal threats to human rights and equality.

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