It was out of despair, Glaude writes, that in 2018, two years after what he calls “the disastrous election of Donald Trump”, he started to write this book, “saying to myself, they have done it again. Nor is the trauma felt across black America in his parents’ generation when in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated, crushing hopes for “fundamental change” that had been gathering around the US civil rights movement for the best part of a decade. The trauma of that inheritance – “our bodies carry the traumas forward,” Glaude writes – is never far from the page. Glaude, who is distinguished professor and chair of the African American studies department at Princeton University (where he has been teaching a seminar on Baldwin for several years), is also a native of Jackson County, Mississippi, the US state that suffered the highest number of lynchings – 581 between 18.
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