MY DUNGEON SHOOK

Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of

the Emancipation
 Baldwin initially expressed the difficulty of writing the letter,
reflecting a desire to protect and inspire his nephew, but also a

I
Dear James:
sense of anguish and conflict.

HAVE BEGUN this letter ve times and torn it up ve times. I

keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my
brother. Like him, you are tough, dark, vulnerable, moody—with a
very de nite tendency to sound truculent because you want no one
to think you are soft. You may be like your grandfather in this, I
don’t know, but certainly both you and your father resemble him
very much physically. Well, he is dead, he never saw you, and he
had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at
the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said
about him. This is one of the reasons that he became so holy. I am
sure that your father has told you something about all that. Neither
you nor your father exhibit any tendency towards holiness: you
really are of another era, part of what happened when the Negro left
Baldwin warned the land and came into what the late E. Franklin Frazier called “the
his nephew not to cities of destruction.” You can only be destroyed by believing that
believe negative you really are what the white world calls a nigger. I tell you this
definitions of because I love you, and please don’t you ever forget it.
black people I have known both of you all your lives, have carried your Daddy
because they in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed and spanked him and
would destroy his watched him learn to walk. I don’t know if you’ve known anybody
self-worth. from that far back; if you’ve loved anybody that long, rst as an
infant, then as a child, then as a man, you gain a strange perspective
By describing

on time and human pain and e ort. Other people cannot see what I
family and the

see whenever I look into your father’s face, for behind your father’s past, Baldwin

face as it is today are all those other faces which were his. Let him highlights how

laugh and I see a cellar your father does not remember and a house racism affected

he does not remember and I hear in his present laughter his laughter his brother

as a child. Let him curse and I remember him falling down the cellar
steps, and howling, and I remember, with pain, his tears, which my
hand or your grandmother’s so easily wiped away. But no one’s
hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one
hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs. I know what
the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has
survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime
of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which
neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have
destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do
not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one
must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning
destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been
best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of
mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the
authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence
which constitutes the crime.
Now, my dear namesake, these innocent and well-meaning
people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under
conditions not very far removed from those described for us by
Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago. (I
hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, “No! This is not true!
How bitter you are!”—but I am writing this letter to you, to try to
tell you something about how to handle them, for most of them do
not yet really know that you exist. I know the conditions under
which you were born, for I was there. Your countrymen were not
there, and haven’t made it yet. Your grandmother was also there,
and no one has ever accused her of being bitter. I suggest that the
innocents check with her. She isn’t hard to nd. Your countrymen
don’t know that she exists, either, though she has been working for
them all their lives.)
Well, you were born, here you came, something like fteen years
ago; and though your father and mother and grandmother, looking
about the streets through which they were carrying you, staring at
the walls into which they brought you, had every reason to be
heavyhearted, yet they were not. For here you were, Big James,
named for me—you were a big baby, I was not—here you were: to
be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to
strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that: I know
how black it looks today, for you. It looked bad that day, too, yes,
 we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we
had not loved each other none of us would have survived. And now
you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your
children and your children’s children.
This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact,
it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I
mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my
dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and
faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no
It reveals the bad other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be
social environment set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with
of black people and brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a
the restrictions of worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to
American society excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.
on the fate of black Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth,
people. you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and
how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could
marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this,
and I hear them saying, “You exaggerate.” They do not know
Harlem, and I do. So do you. Take no one’s word for anything,
including mine—but trust your experience. Know whence you came.
If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you
can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately
constructed to make you believe what white people say about you.
Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they
do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but
to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James,
through the storm which rages about your youthful head today,
about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and
integration. There is no reason for you to try to become like white
people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent
assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old
buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously.
You must accept them and accept them with love. For these
innocent people have no other hope. They are, in e ect, still trapped
in a history which they do not understand; and until they
 understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to
believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men
are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but,
as you will discover, people nd it very di cult to act on what they
know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in
danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white
Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you
would feel if you woke up one morning to nd the sun shining and
He used this

all the stars a ame. You would be frightened because it is out of the
metaphor to
express the
order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it
challenge of racial
so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the
equality to white
black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a xed star,
society
as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven
and earth are shaken to their foundations. You, don’t be afraid. I
said that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish
by never being allowed to go behind the white man’s de nitions, by
never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many
of us have, defeated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible
paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment
made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are
your brothers—your lost, younger brothers. And if the word
integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love,
shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease
eeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home,
my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great
things here, and will again, and we can make America what
America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from
sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers
and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds,
achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a
long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One
of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and
my chains fell o .
You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one
hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot
be free until they are free. God bless you, James, and Godspeed.

In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin writes a powerful letter to his nephew, addressing
the struggles Black Americans face in a racist society.
Your uncle,
James