Baldwin’s remembrance of the movement’s betrayal involved trauma.

Evidence

Baldwin viewed this demand for gratitude from the vantage point of someone who had lived through and was deeply wounded by the betrayal of the black freedom movement, someone whose recollection or remembrance of that moment involved trauma. In 1979, on the eve of the election of Ronald Reagan, for example, in a short piece for Freedomways, Baldwin wrote of the difficulty of recalling the past. “Let us say that we all live through more than we can say or see. A life, in retrospect, can seem like the torrent of water opening or closing over one’s head and, in retrospect, is blurred, swift, kaleidoscopic like that. One does not wish to remember—one is perhaps not able to remember—the holding of one’s breath under water, the miracle of rising up far enough to breathe, and then, the going under again….” Here Baldwin captures beautifully the cycles of the after times that illustrate how horrific the white expectation of gratitude is. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 563

Categorization

• XREF: Provides biographical grounding for defending late Baldwin — his 1979 Freedomways piece shows the wounds, not mere bitterness, behind his later essays.