Episode Details

James Baldwin left Harlem for Paris because he was convinced America would kill him — not with a bullet, but with the slow poison of racial hatred that was destroying every Black person he knew. From that exile, he wrote the essays, novels, and speeches that told white America the truth about itself with a clarity and fury no other writer could match, before or since.

This episode traces Baldwin from his storefront church childhood in Harlem through his escape to Paris, the civil rights essays that made him the most important public intellectual in America, and the personal struggles that shadowed his prophetic voice.

• Baldwin's childhood as a teenage preacher in Harlem and the stepfather whose cruelty shaped his worldview
• The escape to Paris and the novels — Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room — written in exile
• The Fire Next Time, the civil rights movement, and Baldwin's role as America's moral conscience
• His relationships with Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. and the toll of witness