Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Baldwin + Christianity - Coggle Diagram

- - - - "Elijah began to speak of the Christian religion, of Christians, in this same soft, joking way. I began to see that Elijah’s power came from his single-mindedness. There is nothing more calculated than him; he means every word he says" (p. 19).
      - " Elijah’s mission is to return “the so-called Negro” to Islam, to separate the chosen of Allah from this doomed nation...Black men ruled the earth and the black man was perfect. This is the truth concerning the era that white men now refer to as prehistoric" (p. 19).
      - The tone of the NOI's teachings reminded Baldwin of the Church.
    - - "We have taken this journey and arrived at this place in God’s name. This, then, is the best that God (the white God) can do. If that is so, then it is time to replace Him—replace Him with what? And this void, this despair, this torment is felt everywhere in the West, from the streets of Stockholm to the churches of New Orleans and the sidewalks of Harlem" (p. 16).
      - The NOI says Islam is: "God is black. All black men belong to Islam; they have been chosen And Islam shall rule the world. The dream, the sentiment is old; only the color is new. And it is this dream, this sweet possibility, that thousands of oppressed black men and women in this country now carry away with them after the Muslim minister has spoken, through the dark, noisome ghetto streets, into the hovels where so many have perished. The white God has not delivered them; perhaps the black God will" (p. 16).
      - "Furthermore, it is now absolutely clear that white people are a minority in the world—so severe a minority that they now look rather more like an invention—and that they cannot possibly hope to rule it any longer. If this is so, why is it not also possible that they achieved their original dominance by stealth and cunning and bloodshed and in opposition to the will of Heaven, and not, as they claim, by Heaven’s will?" (p. 20).
      - "As they watch black men elsewhere rise, the promise held out, at last, that they may walk the earth with the authority with which white men walk, protected by the power that white men shall have no longer, is enough, and more than enough, to empty prisons and pull God down from Heaven" (p. 23).
- - - - Baldwin met Malcom in NYC, whom he had only know as a "legend" before.
    - - Evers was a member of the NAACP investigating a mruder, and Baldwin joined him.