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Tina Jordan, NY Times - The writer James Baldwin — one of the most important voices of the 20th century — was born 100 years ago today, and to mark the occasion, we’ve assembled a marvelous collection of vintage pictures: news photos, family snapshots, manuscript pages, telegrams. Here is Baldwin speaking, writing, dancing, strolling down a Harlem street, embracing Marlon Brando at the March on Washington and so much more. When I was combing our archives a few years ago, I stumbled upon all the reviews Baldwin wrote for us. My very favorite might be his assessment of Alex Haley’s “Roots,” which, he wrote, was “a study of continuities, of consequences, of how a people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one — the action of love, or the effect of the absence of love, in time. It suggests, with great power, how each of us, however unconsciously, can’t but be the vehicle of the history which has produced us. Well, we can perish in this vehicle, children, or we can move on up the road.”
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