Baldwin’s fading memory reflects collective trauma from the civil rights movement’s betrayal.

Evidence

But it would be wrong to read this caution as mere reference to the fading memory of an aging mind. Instead, it is a consequence of trauma, not merely Baldwin’s own, but the collective trauma experienced in the course of a decade and a half of the betrayal of the civil rights movement. Over the sixteen years since Dorothy Counts attempted to desegregate Harding High School, Baldwin witnessed up close the horrors of American racism. So many black children, in the South and in the North, had been subject to what she had experienced. Others had endured campaigns of violence against black people and the beatings and murder of protesters. Who knows how many black people line the bottom of the Mississippi River simply because they wanted to exercise their right to vote. Black leaders had been assassinated. Terror and disappointment had become defining features of the intervening years. And, through it all, America was still stuck in the morass of the lie. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 145

Categorization

• DEFINE: Begins defining ‘the lie’ — America’s claim to have changed while remaining stuck in racism — central to the reader’s thesis on ‘the after times.’
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s stated goal of defending late Baldwin; the ‘morass of the lie’ is a load-bearing concept for that argument.