Nonviolence, Black Power, and “the Citizens of Pompeii”: James Baldwin’s 1968

The radicalization of an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics

On the third Sunday after the march, September 15, 1963, six Black children were killed in three separate incidents—one of which was the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church—in Birmingham. That day marked the end of Baldwin’s brief career as a literary celebrity and the beginning of his radicalization, ...
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Nonviolence, Black Power, and “the Citizens of Pompeii”: James Baldwin’s 1968