It's the Brian Laird show on WNYc,

welcome.

It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYc

Welcome back everyone. I'm Cusha Navadar. I'm hopping in for Brian today.

Now let's do another installment of our WNYC Centennial Series, we're calling it a hundred years of a hundred things, and for our eighth installment, the timing is pretty perfect because we're celebrating a 100th birthday, or I guess more specifically, we're celebrating a 100th birthday or I guess more specifically we're celebrating a

person an icon who would have been turning 100 just two days from now. James

Baldwin, the writer and civil rights activist, was born on August 2nd,

1924. He was born in Harlem and while his roots here go deep,

he had a complicated relationship growing up in this city, in this country as a black man with a sexual identity

that didn't neatly fit into the categories of the time.

Over the course of his life, his work as a writer and novelist made him a leading voice in the

United States on race and civil rights. Let's listen to a clip of Baldwin from

1968 talking about why so many riots had broken out at the time, especially within

black communities across the country. The reason that black people are in the

streets has to do with the lives they're forced to leave in this country.

Everybody knows, no matter what they do not know,

they wouldn't like to be a black man in this country.

They know that,

and they shut their minds against the rest of it,

all the implications of being a black father

or a black woman or a black son and all of the implications

involved in a human being's endeavor to take care of his wife to take care of his wife, to take care of his children, to raise his children to be men and women

...