Everyone familiar with the American Civil Rights movement knows there was a huge divide between MLK and Malcolm X. Do you know who stood between the two? James Baldwin. Baldwin understood MLK’s vision of perfect love, and he understood Malcolm’s thirst for real, tangible justice, and Baldwin explained the truths of each side. In fact, I suspect Baldwin is the loudest voice in the Civil Rights movement articulating the extent to which wrongs of white dominance merited serious and absolute recompense. In my opinion, he did a lot more than that. He stared into the pain. He brought pain to life on the pages of his books and in the characters he invented for the stage, and that pain fueled his intellect as he debated the heck out of William Buckley before British students (the whole debate is on YouTube; FYI). Was he some sort of masochist, a person deriving pleasure from pain? Listen to him speak on YouTube, and dive into the body of work he created that is still available on every media platform, and judge for yourself. You see, he isn’t finding gratification in the pain of those who have hurt him except in imagining justice justly meted out; he’s staring at the pain of people he LOVES – because he loves them so much as to share their pain. The man was a lover of love, and he just got angrier when he realized that society was trying to say his vision was for naught. Is one to live for nothing high and elevated above the crud of our banale minutia? When we close our eyes in order to search our memories for a concept of what life is truly about, do we find at the end of that rainbow a mountain of merchandise and materialistic thinking? Is that what it’s all about? Would Baldwin not be disappointed by a society whose ideals were so low as to appear as graffiti? That’s why Baldwin – in my humble opinion – remains qualified to explain both MLK and Malcolm. I personally can learn from them all.