WHITE PROFESSOR SCHOOLED ON RACIST AMERICA

Here’s American Black writer James Baldwin explaining why he fled to France in the 1940s. Put simply, there was a ‘danger of death to negros’ in the U.S. and he had to get out.

He’s on a 1968 episode of the Dick Cavett Show, and had just been asked by a White Yale professor: ‘Why must we always concentrate on colour, when there are other ways of connecting men?’

Baldwin quickly exposes the out-of-touch academic. And reels off the list of realities facing Blacks. From the segregated congregations of the Christian church, to the real estate lobby that kept him ‘in the ghetto.’

Baldwin arrived in Paris with just $40 in his pocket. But he didn’t care. France was able to release him from the ‘social terror’ he’d experienced in the United States.

His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was published in 1953, and it made Time magazine’s top 100 list.

Baldwin died in 1987, and is remembered for his civil rights activism as well as his writing. And, of course, passionate interviews like this.