Liberty, This Beautiful and Terrible Thing

James Baldwin's essay (1963/1993) was written in anticipation of the Emancipation Proclamation's centennial. It locates itself in a tradition of living letters one generation writes to and for another; and, in particular, the tradition of one generation of slave descendants speaking to a younger one on this important anniversary—most recently exemplified in 2013 when Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote to his 15-year-old son fifty years after Baldwin wrote to his 15-year-old nephew. The existence of this tradition underscores the fact that the Emancipation was and is only the beginning of freedom for African slaves in America; and, that American freedom truly occurs over the course of several, if not many, generations.

This tradition brings to mind a poem that has often moved me, a poem I first encountered when I was a teenager: “Frederick Douglass” by Robert Hayden (1966). It is a poem that helps complicate what freedom is and how it is achieved, and its last incarnation—the first version was published in 1947—was completed during the period of the centennial, and serves as a contemporary to Baldwin's essay: