I came to my Marxist view as a result of having struggled as a nationalist and found certain dead ends theoretically and ideologically, as far as nationalism was concerned, and had to reach out for a communist ideology.
It seems natural to me that as a writer, you should have some kind of, you know, there should be some kind of projection that you actually have influenced people who are closest to you.
Spike Lee is part of a retrograde movement in this country.
Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.
A rich man told me recently that a liberal is a man who tells other people what to do with their money.
Howard University shocked me into realizing how desperately sick the Negro could be, how he could be led into self-destruction, and how he would not realize that it was the society that had forced him into a great sickness.
Alas, we have not yet the power to render completely sterile or make impossible the errors and lies which will merely be America being itself rather than its unconvincing promise.
You have to get an individual who's willing to actually struggle with the system to change it. As long as you have people who - to make substantive changes, to make infrastructure changes.
Jimmy Baldwin was the creator of contemporary American speech even before Americans could dig that. He created it so we could speak to each other at unimaginable intensities of feeling, so we could make sense to each other at yet higher and higher tempos.