Hi Brian Lehrer here, up next Brian Lehrer 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 WNY and W on WNYC. Welcome back everyone. I'm Cusha Navadar. I'm hopping in for Brian today.

Now let's do another installment of our W NYC 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 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 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 children, to raise his children to be men and women,

in the T-S-Souve 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 Glod Jr.

Glod is a professor at Princeton and author of many books including Begin Again, James Baldwin's America and

its urgent lessons for our own, and also his most recent book, We Are The Leaders We have been looking for.

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