To tell the story of James Baldwin’s perspective on politics and patriotism, acclaimed scholar, political philosopher, and award-winning author Nicholas Buccola centers James Baldwin’s love for his country and its people and how this framework underscores everything James Baldwin did.

James Baldwin wasn’t afraid to engage with those who disagreed with him. Nicholas Buccola is the author of The Fire Is Upon Us, which delves into the legendary debate between William F. Buckley and James Baldwin about America’s racial divide. Nicholas Buccola described the debate as “an intellectual clash for the ages.” Televised and now available on YouTube, the debate between the two contemporaries born 15 months apart still resonates 60 years later. In the book and his events, Nicholas Buccola explores each man’s ideas, “what they believed, why they believed it, and what we might be able to learn…”

“There’s something about Baldwin, just as a human being, who embodies a kind of curiosity. There’s a way that he’s always examining his life and the lives of those around him. He really wanted to engage with people who had different life experiences and world views. He held a sincere desire to understand, to try to get a sense of what the world looks like through the eyes of other people. [T]hinking about ethics, thinking about leadership, and dialogue across difference [are ways to honor his legacy]. Those ideas are essential to Baldwin.”

The idea that love has a place in public life has been criticized for being impractical, impossible, and dangerous. Yet, this was the way James Baldwin lived his life. Philosopher of emotion and acclaimed author Myisha Cherry suggests James Baldwin had it right and that these criticisms are mistaken due to our limited conception of love, where we often reduce love to how we feel.

By offering an action-oriented account of love and using the life of writer and activist James Baldwin as an example, Myisha Cherry demonstrates how we can take love public in practical and productive ways rather than abstract and destructive ones.

“The actions I suggest are often seen as irrelevant or antithetical to love, but I'll show how they are examples of love nonetheless. Ultimately, I hope to convince audiences that because love is 'politically possible,' we have a responsibility to get to the task of making the world better via love.”

Myisha Cherry’s book on James Baldwin’s example of action-oriented love will be published soon. It follows several acclaimed titles including: Failures of Forgiveness, The Case for Rage, and UnMuted: Conversations on Prejudice, Oppression, and Social Justice.

“Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time… you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance.” —James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers”

How then do we resist? Jamilah Pitts believes we must step into a liberatory mindset in education and life. In Jamilah’s talks and her acclaimed book, Toward Liberation she pioneers new pathways for educators—or anyone—to repair harm and foster transformative learning spaces. This road map for liberatory pedagogy is rooted in the conversation James Baldwin started and builds on that foundation with strategies drawn from Jamilah’s experiences as a young Black girl, a Black student, a teacher, a former school leader, and a consultant with schools across the country. The tenets of Jamilah’s talks—rooted in truthtelling, activism, healing, wellness, self-care, and, ultimately, love—both call us back to James Baldwin’s brave words and reimagine the role of the teacher. As James Baldwin did, Jamilah Pitts enjoys equipping others with the brave ideas they need to carve a path toward liberatory educational practices, ensuring that students are afforded the full range of their humanity, in and out of the classroom.

Leading urbanist, historian, cultural critic, Black social movements scholar, and author Davarian L. Baldwin believes coming back to the ideas and activism of James Baldwin is essential for this moment.

James Baldwin is an essential cultural touchstone to return to “because of his courageousness, force of nature, ethical posture, faithfulness to everyday people, impatience with pettiness, and all qualities held with flare and wit.”

A leading expert in the sights, sounds, and people of Harlem—he even helped design an award-winning puzzle about it!—Davarian L. Baldwin can trace James Baldwin’s life across the Black social movements that formed the world as we know it today. From the Harlem Renaissance or “New Negro” movements in progress at the time of his birth to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements that James Baldwin helped shape, Davarian L. Baldwin reveals both the intricate historical details and the overarching ways James Baldwin influenced and was influenced by these movements.

Davarian L. Baldwin also builds on many of the topics that James Baldwin found important and puts them into the lens of today, including gentrification, public protest, policing, and reparations. But, if Davarian had an opportunity to suggest a topic, one of his favorite ways to explore the life of James Baldwin would be to examine his story through the lens of the global cities he loved and how they shaped his journey as an activist and author.

In thirteen books published this century, Ed Pavlić’s work spans genres: fiction, nonfiction, poetry and scholarship. A leading Baldwin scholar, he has authored dozens of ground-breaking essays illuminating Baldwin’s career as novelist, essayist, activist, and performer. His 2016 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners traces the importance of Black musical traditions to Baldwin’s artistic approaches and political interventions. His next book, the biography, Darker Than Blue: The Radical Life of James Baldwin, is forthcoming in 2027 with Henry Holt. The new biography will emphasize Baldwin’s shifting engagements with the literary, cultural, racial, sexual, and political contexts of his changing times.

Frank Leon Roberts believes that Baldwin’s moments of experimentation, failure, and “rehearsal” are vital to understanding him as an artistic icon. Frank Leon Roberts is an expert in the underexamined aspects of James Baldwin’s career, intellectual legacy, and queer artistic genius. He is currently at work on two book-length projects devoted to the life and legacy of James Baldwin including James Baldwin's Critical Stages, which is the first book dedicated to Baldwin’s career as a dramatist, and James Baldwin’s Magpie Years: A Harlem Preacher’s Literary Coming of Age, which examines his student writings. While Baldwin is celebrated as a novelist, essayist, and public intellectual, his first dream was to be a playwright. By examining Baldwin’s early writings and stagecraft, Frank Leon Roberts reveals how Baldwin’s imagination and aesthetic practice, although defined by disruption, pushed back against the dominant paradigms of artistic success and instead offered a new vision of art and worldmaking.