Bill Moyers speaks at the Carnegie Hall Juneteenth Celebration

June 17, 2021

This is a 1989 story, reprinted in the Washingtonian in 2020, about a Black man representing many others who, because of the caste system, was never able to reach his full potential.  Nevertheless, he contributed incredible medical advances and opened doors for many Black Americans who followed.  

On September 25, 2020, the Southern Poverty Law Center published this article in commemoration of the 63rd Anniversary of the integration of Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas - the first  real test of the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court.

The article provides considerable detail about what the Black students went through, not only in their initial attempts to enter the school, but also for long after, as they continued attending classes. Much of this detail is usually glossed over in American History classes.  

On May 24, 1963, Robert F. Kennedy invited James Baldwin, along with a number of black cultural leaders, to a "quiet, off-the-record, unpublicized get-together of prominent Negroes" to discuss the state of race relations. The meeting in Kennedy's New York apartment lasted almost three hours.  Kennedy was shocked by the level of passion, rancor, and confrontation that the meeting generated. 

In 2018, Michael Eric Dyson published a book based on that meeting, What Truth Sounds Like: RFK, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation about Race in America.  Dyson says that "the brutal battering that he [Kennedy] suffered at the hands of the Baldwin crew offers an important lesson to white people about how to start real change...sometimes sitting silently and, finally, as black folks have been forced to do, listening, and listening, and listening, and listening some more."