James A. Baldwin
James A. Baldwin
James A. "Jim" Baldwinwas an American football player, track athlete, coach of football, basketball, and baseball, and college athletics administrator. He served as the head football coach at Rhode Island State College—now the University of Rhode Island, the University of Maine, Trinity College in Durham, North Carolina—now Duke University, Lehigh University, and Wake Forest University, compiling a career college football record of 41–32–14. Baldwin was also the head basketball coach at the same five schools, amassing a career college basketball...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth2 August 1924
CountryUnited States of America
I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side.
Whose little boy are you?
It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.
We can make America what America must become.
European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition--of intellectual activity, of letters--and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.
Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance.
Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance.