Hi, Brian Lairer here.

Up next, Brian Lairor Weekend,

three of our favorite segments from the week,

packaged together for you to listen to on the weekend.

So enjoy, and I'll see you back on the radio Monday at 10 a.m.

on WNYC and on WNYC. Welcome back, everyone. I'm Kusha Navadar. I'm hopping in for Brian today.

Now let's do another installment of our WNYC Centennial series. We're calling it 100 years of 100

things. And for our eighth installment, the timing's pretty perfect because 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 are forced to leave in this country.

Everybody knows, no matter what they do not know,

that 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 children, to raise his children to be men and women,

in the teeth of a structure which is built to deny that I can be a human being, or my child can be.

Here to talk to us about James Baldwin is Eddie Gleod Jr.

Gleod is a professor at Princeton and author of many books, including Begin Again,

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