In November of 1971, fifteen months after his remarkable conversation with Margaret Mead about race and identity, James Baldwin (August 2, 1924-December 1, 1987) sat down with another extraordinary woman, the poet Nikki Giovanni (b. June 7, 1943), for another conversation of astonishing timeliness today. The event was hosted by the PBS television series SOUL! and took place in London. Baldwin was forty-six and Giovanni only twenty-eight. For hours of absolute presence, intellectual communion, and occasional respectful rebuttal, they explored justice, freedom, morality, and what it means to be an empowered human being. The transcript was eventually published as A Dialogue (public library).
“To be honest today in this tinsel America,” the trailblazing African American journalist Ida Lewis writes in the preface, “one must be willing to put one’s soul on the line” - an observation even truer amid our present global tinsel of ready-made opinions, packaged and flung across at the other side, in a divisive culture where there is always an other side. Lewis saw the dialogue between Baldwin and Giovanni as an effort to “begin to draw upon each other’s strengths rather than wallow in each other’s weaknesses” - an effort all the more urgent today.