Welcome to the liturgist podcast. You are now listening to Black History is

American History.

Hey everyone it's William Matthews. On the final episode of Black History is

American History. We highlight two poets James Baldwin and Maya Angelou. Both

were best-selling authors and world-renowned poets. We highlight their words as

it relates to art, the creative process, and the moral responsibility that an

artist carries to humanity and to society. Here's James Baldwin wrestling with

that very tension, that very question at the University of Chicago May 21st, 1963.

Now the vision, I wish an artist is possessed and here we can use the word possessed I think

legitimate. Because no one in his right mind I assure you would want to be a writer.

I know almost two people say they would like to be writers. I discovered that I was one and

I'm still trying to make it. He's possessed the artist, is possessed by a vision which is

precisely this nothing less than this. It is the vision of the new Jerusalem. It is the

vision of the kingdom of heaven on earth and where the war begins between the artists

and society is precisely here. It is the only the artist as distinguished from the priest,

the psychoanalyst, the pope. It is only the artist. It is the only artist who is the

artist who is really, you can check me out, I hope. Given us any sense of what is

life, to be alive, to be trapped and to glory in this fact that one is forever of a very

short time, I mean both things at once, between that sky and this earth and you came from

some place, you're going someplace else, you don't know where you're going, you don't

know where you came from and what it feels like to be here and to triumph in it. The

artist has given us his record and the war is a very strange war when you begin to realize

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