At the age of 24, James Baldwin fled racism to Paris in hopes for a better life.
"Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue."
Later, Baldwin came back to his roots & wrote about the transparent details of racial injustice.
"Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it has been faced. History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals."
"I can't be a pessimist, because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I'm forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive." -#IAmNotYourNegro