Down At The Cross By James Baldwin Essay

The two letters that were arranged by James Baldwin in the late 20th century, The Fire Next Time, are significant pieces of African American literature that touched on the topic of social injustice in America. The themes that consistent throughout the book are white innocence, integration vs separatism, love and forgiveness, limitations on mobility, beauty, escapism, and repressed pain, however, integration vs separation is the most recurring theme in the book. After the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, social change would increase by a small amount, giving authority to people who have hatred for other races and not entitling human rights for the people that have been persecuted. Integration vs Segregation is a prevalent theme that is

incorporated in the book, textbook, articles, and the History course to array that segregation was a social, political, and monetary framework that set African Americans in a second rate position, disfranchised them, and was authorized by custom, law, and authority and vigilante viciousness. This theme that has been established by Baldwin is symmetrical to other historical artifacts, some of which are articles by Mary McLeod Bethune, and Jack M. Balkin; books by Richard Wright and Michael L. Conniff by instituting the efforts of decreasing segregation and how it improved people’s lifestyle. These authors seek the social change for African Americans rather than seeking violence for the abuse that African Americans had faced in the past.
In the beginning of his novel, his first article, My Dungeon Shook, Baldwin alludes to public figures that assistance him to sum up his contention over the span of his letter. For instance, he refers to the humanist E. Franklin Frazier while portraying his family's turn into urban areas. Frazier authored the expression "the cities of destruction" to allude to the manners by which this development of African Americans into urban spaces, which was joined by good faith that it would enhance the prospects for the vagrants, could in reality be ruinous for them. In the article, What Does Democracy mean to me, Bethune indicates that “[t]he great masses of Negro workers are depressed and unprotected in the lowest levels of agriculture and domestic service” and the quality of black life back then was “sordid” and “unhealthy” with extreme amounts of labor and being paid poorly. (Bethune). African American have assisted in raising America with labor, nourishing America with faith, and “enrich[ing.] it with song”. (Bethune). There was hope that there would be a primitive transformation for having the same respect and comprehension between African Americans and whites because “you can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger” (Baldwin 4).
Baldwin’s next article in his book, Down at the Cross, with the first part Baldwin explains how at a young age he felt that he was near getting associated with a criminal way of life, himself because although white Americans may trust their position was allowed by God, to African Americans their energy was plainly maintained by criminal and vicious means; it was a power they dreaded, rather than regarded.

Therefore, reacting to this sort of energy with viciousness appeared like a characteristic answer for a significant number of Baldwin's companions. There were no "moral barriers" amongst him and this way of life, since profound quality had been so skewed by the power elements between African Americans and their white comrades that he didn't feel it would fundamentally be unethical to wind up a criminal, and he didn't need white individuals to characterize his personality and allocate him constraints. (Baldwin 23). In the book, White Man Listen, Wright argues that for the Africans who had been “westernized” felt that they were oppressed. The West would deny the responsibility of what they did to “make every white man alive on earth today a criminal” (Wright 653). Back then, men were responsible for consequences of their actions. The West needs to accept

their
responsibility so that they could be released from their thoughts of “fear, panic, and terror” when approaching colored people. African Americans were striving to be treated better.
How does social hierarchy relate to segregation? The second part of the letter in Down at the Cross, Baldwin compares the events that happened to the Jews to African Americans in the United States. Because of the social indifferences, Baldwin has the fear of having a day “that the United States decided to murder its Negros systematically” instead of murdering them in small amounts and “catch-as-catch-can” (Baldwin 53). In the novel, Africans in the Americas since Abolition, Conniff explains that in the United States, Afro-Americans have had to “struggle against the oppression of the overarching political culture” since their ancestors were forced to come to the Americas (Conniff 250). Baldwin felt that it would be difficult to share the white man's vision of himself for the justifiable reason that the white men in America don't carry on toward black men in America don't act toward black men the way that they act towards each other. Also, Baldwin introduces an example how blacks were treated by whites when they were face to face, if the black man was “helpless” at the time, “terrible things were revealed” (Baldwin 53).
With the last section of in Down at the Cross, Baldwin touches on the Supreme Court decision that had taken place in 1954 outlawing the segregation of schools. Baldwin coins that the gestures that White Americans have pleased themselves with their gestures as “tokenism” (Baldwin 86). In the article, Would African Americans Have Been Better Off Without Brown v. Board of Education”, Balkin touched on the Brown vs. Board of Education case. The decision of the case “polarized” the public’s opinion, “stiffened white southern resistance, and put southern white racial moderates in apolitically difficult position”, which determined the success of the civil rights movement (Balkin). Without having the Brown case, the civil rights movement would have been quicker with less resistance from whites. Both authors prove that the desegregation of school had made a progress in American society, but Baldwin analyzes as not being able to be “refuted at all” because all decisions amid to this have been solved out of ““necessity”. Racial segregation is a system that creates hatred towards other races, and it has occurred for more than a century in the United States that African Americans had been oppressed to “but, whether it is a fact or not, this is what the black population of the world, including black Americans really believe”, and with integration, African Americans could gain insight of what society holds (Baldwin 87).