Claudia Roth Pierpont
Each of Us Contains the Other:
James Baldwin’s Steadfast Morality
By Claudia Roth Pierpont
Growing up in Harlem in the ’20s and ’30s, James Baldwin had no shortage of reasons to fear the police and to hate the wider white population. In the early ’40s, when he was turned away from a New Jersey diner—the American Diner, no less—he wanted to kill the waitress who told him “We don’t serve Negroes here.”
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