Every month, we’ll send you a blast highlighting our team’s inspirations, favorites, and projects. This month, as we gear up for our production of James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner, we’re bringing you our favorite things about the visionary writer and activist. Study up with us, and we’ll see you at the show in a few weeks!
1) “While licensing photos for our Summer of Baldwin graphics (we landed on some amazing ones from the photographer Sedat Pakay), I got to dig through the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s digital archives. It’s full of treasures including this photo of Baldwin and Nina Simone, his inkwell, this photo of Baldwin having dinner with his friends at his house in the South of France, and the program from the very first performance of The Amen Corner.” —Jesse Roth, Communications Manager
2) “Baldwin’s speech on Jan 15th 1979, where he discussed his time in Paris (just before he wrote The Amen Corner):” —Jesse Roth, Communications Manager
“I dropped into a silence in which I heard, for the first time—really heard and began to be able to try to deal with—the beat of the language of the people who had produced me.”
3) “This post, a collaboration between Converge Media and Black Heritage Society of Washington State, is about Baldwin’s visit to Seattle and speech at what’s now the Egyptian Theatre on Capitol Hill in ’63.” —Executive Director Ellen Abram
4) A Spotify playlist based on Baldwin’s record collection—left at his house in the South of France upon his death. —Jesse Roth, Communications Manager.
5) “This essay by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is an old favorite, a version of which also is collected in Jesmyn Ward’s anthology The Fire This Time. It’s about the author’s visit to Baldwin’s home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, and about her discovering and deepening a relationship with Baldwin the person, seeing beyond all the ways in which Baldwin’s legacy gets invoked as symbolism or flattened into tokenism, especially by white Americans. Beautiful writing.” —Executive Director Ellen Abram
6) “Ade ‘Acyde’ Odunlami’s piece for GQ about Baldwin as not only a writer and activist but also as a fashion icon.” —Jesse Roth, Communications Manager
“What is style? It’s where confidence meets comfort, where anything a ‘motherfucka’ does, wears, or says is just easy, effortless, efficient…cool. Baldwin is a true literary stylist—sharp, enigmatic, witty, and brutally honest. He writes like the best jazz-music moves: rhythmic, elegant but angular, with some spellbinding staccato. No nonsense.”