Activism for Sustainable Socio-Political Change

---

I open our blog series with the following questions to all our readers:

Do you consider yourself a social and/or political activist?

Do you relate more with the activist stance of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X?

If so, consider this: Embracing either one, potentially places you smak dab at the extremes of a stance that perpetuates a social/political binary.

Haven’t we, the human race been here since time immemorial?

God vs Satan, bad vs good, left vs right, right vs left, white vs black, black vs white, rich vs poor, America vs (name our nemesis) yourself vs myself, binary vs non-binary, et cetera et cetera et cetera!

If you haven't had the good fortune to read his books, let us introduce you to a Literary Icon and Civil Rights Activist, James Baldwin. A giant amongst peers. James Arthur Baldwin was a writer, playwright, essayist, and activist who is widely considered the civil rights movement's voice.

He is best known for such works as "Go Tell It on the Mountain" (1953), "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), “Giovanni’s Room” (1956), ("Another Country" (1962), and "If Beale Street Could Talk" (1974), Biography reports. His work gave language to the struggles of Blacks in America and served as the impetus for more in-depth discussions surrounding race, sex, and class.

Compared to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, Baldwin would today be labeled as a Centrist.

Despite their differences, it’s been known that both King and Malcolm X's political activism flowed from the same source, the civil rights scholar. They were fundamentally spiritual men. While we remember them for their social and political activism, they were religious and spiritual at their core.

Ironically, much of Baldwin’s writing came to exist during moments of American crisis: the civil rights movement and its aftermath, the decimation of the Black Power movement, the rise of Reaganomics, the devastating AIDS epidemic. Baldwin was forged in the crucible of an America perpetually teetering on the edge of self-destruction, unwilling to heed the warnings of those who understood the immensity of the peril. The result of that heedlessness, as we’ve seen in these pandemic years, is quite literally death. He bore witness to the bitter realities of his life as a young man — and to the Black church as a place of existential and spiritual nourishment, even as it was parochial and unyielding.

It’s conceivable that Baldwin left the church because he knew he would not have survived its stifling rigors, and had little desire to try. Certainly, the exacting and capricious God of his upbringing — The church imprinted him with its music, its pathos, its soaring rhetoric, the stalwart and fragile souls of the faithful — these were dear to him and found full expression in “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” At once an indictment of the faith Baldwin left an enduring testimony to its power.

In honor of James Baldwin, here are some of our favorite quotes:

1. “Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.”

2. “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.” “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

3. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

4. “There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.”

5. “Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.”

6. “I am what time, circumstance, and history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.”

7. “I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.”

8. “If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.”

9. “Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.”

10. “Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.”