ABSTRACT
The persistence of the black ghetto, created and maintained by the white racism of racial residential segregation, is why James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and a modern Baldwin book, Ta-Nahesi Coates’s Between the World and Me, each pointing to what Coates calls the “killing fields” of black ghettos, speak truth to power. Writing about historian John Hope Franklin, Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, pointed not only to Franklin’s insistence upon the relevance of history but upon its preeminence as an instrument of change. He came to see, Faust wrote, that we could not do what we need to do as a nation, and as individuals, until we confronted our past and saw it for what it was. Our reluctance to engage in that confrontation is illustrated by numerous American history textbooks that render our white racist history virtually invisible. The authors hope that their “brief history” may contribute to stimulating that needed confrontation.
