Author James Baldwin | Folks (1986)

coming up today on folks author activist james baldwin to many he is considered to be the most widely quoted black writer of the past two decades then we'll visit the college of agriculture at southern university baton rouge we'll take a look at some of the problems facing black farmers today and share with you some of the career opportunities available in the field of agriculture i'm robin hinton those stories and more today on folks [Music] the world is [Music] everybody just falls everybody's hello everyone and welcome to another edition of folks today we conclude our salute to black history month with a report on one of the nation's leading black authors now a lot of black literature has been linked with the racial reality that has surrounded the black writer a classic example the sometimes controversial james baldwin born in new york city baldwin turned to writing after an early career as a boy preacher in harlem now sonja massengale has more on baldwin in the last of our pause for pride reports saluting black history month we have chosen the state library as the backdrop for our paws for pride segment because our report features an author who is probably the most quoted black writer of the past two decades his name of course is james baldwin who was born in harlem in new york city in 1924 at the age of 14 he became a child preacher in the pentecostal church he was outspoken in the civil rights movement and is considered an activist school desegregation did not come to louisiana until 1960 it was then that four black girls integrated the new orleans public school system it caused a lot of controversy back then and the issue is still a sore one for other school systems throughout the state during a recent visit to baton rouge baldwin said that desegregation has not been successful in this country well what i try to suggest was that the supreme court decision offers desegregation first of all in schools and martin luther king demanded desegregation for example in um public transport in a cure in a very curious way this word was translated into integration and from my point of view um no black person could have asked for integration because given the history of the country given our history of black people in this country integration was the last thing we were talking about we were all integrated we could tell that from the colors of our skins you know it was not that was not the question we've been integrated for 400 years at least the question was to liberate the children so that you have to explain to a child why you couldn't have a drink here or no or go to the bathroom there in short to be treated like everybody else in this republic that was the demand and if you remember there were people then a long time ago said i'm not sure i want to be integrated into a burning house so we are accused now of demanding integration we never ask for that we ask for a legal debt we ask for legal freedom for ourselves and for our children many people in the south can recall a time when it was difficult to find the works of any black author baldwin was in town to speak at lsu a university which wasn't desegregated until the late 1950s surely this shows that some progress has been made in desegregation it depends on who you think has made the progress i don't i'm not going to put this thing's always changing you know and change is always complicated or complex what i am not able to do is to [Music] graduate my countrymen what they think of is progress because i know what is happening up and down the streets of this nation to leave it is that black children and not only black children i don't want to pretend that i don't know what i know considering all of the difficulties involved in desegregation in this country baldwin does believe that racial harmony can be achieved in fact i do but the price is going to be higher than people think you see now this is very difficult to express um the categories white and black with a capital w and capital b are not real categories do you know not only because i and every black person in this country have uh nieces and nephews and kin folk who are as blond as greta garbo and everybody knows it but because i'm going to put this this is not in my country and the great impediment to what we think of as racial harmony hopeful is racial harmony is a curious idea that this a country which is gone through what we've gone through and i speak about both black and white cannot be called white you know there are at least two victims here to overstate my case perhaps but there is the there's black there's also the poor white who finds himself in a peculiar time of prison because he thinks it is important to be white you know and doesn't realize that the prison he thinks he is watching the black one is a mirror of his own baldwin has been quoted as saying that there is a difference between northern and southern whites he spoke to us about his perceptions the difference is not very um put it to you this way years ago when um the so-called civil rights struggle i say so-called because it's a very loaded way of describing the battle of citizens for the civil rights but when was below the mighty nixon line the northern liberals very condescending to the south and um in fact one very famous black not i'm sorry not black white well he thought he was white intellectual when i came back from my first journey south asked me very seriously why didn't all the negroes of the south move north but he meant that this was in 1957 and i knew that question triggered a certain apprehension which was then when the battle moved up from washington into new york and to detroit into the northern shore it would be even worse than it was in birmingham and all not all but most of the north and the roots fled and he'd behind their checkbooks baldwin is extraordinarily well read and well liked by the literary communities of the united states and europe he spoke to us about some of his favorite writers well maybe asked me a difficult question again because i would certainly forget somebody and then you know they'd be mad at me well that is what you write religious hands ralph ellison the late langston hughes went into the present day um john weidman johnny morrison but then you see i'm in trouble again because my uh but you know for me the fact that i have to think about so many names indicates i'm i come from a long ways off and when i was a kid there had been at most six names so when i talk about change i'm not talking about change within the context of the american vocabulary i'm talking about something which happens in any case whether one wants it or not and change is simply another to deal with present and to create the future after all from my point of view my ancestors are responsible in a sense for me that means that we are responsible for our children no matter what somewhat panic stricken republic now blames on us the let's go blame the victim as a young man of 24 baldwin embarked on the first of many journeys back and forth to europe mainly to paris although baldwin retains citizenship in this country he divides his time between new york city and a home in southern france when i got to the old world and this is the new one and i could after a very short time i could see very well but the people in new york would be who beat me up and frighten me i could see where they came from they came from amsterdam getting embarrassed they came in the only difference between them and in the old world in the new world was that in the overall they were germans they were french they were spanish they were greek they were polish these all became white they became white because they had to organize themselves in order to keep me black and that is part of the history of the so-called new world i found in paris for a certain time um a space in which i could write and i was able to see my country for the first time and in a sense reconcile myself to it for the first time and when i could do that i came home baldwin's latest book the evidence of things not seen is an expanded essay based on the trial of wayne williams who was convicted of two of the 28 murders of black youths in atlanta the book has been well received and has made the best sellers list baldwin is currently at work on a novel and a new play called the welcome table thanks sonia for that report okay time now for a question from the folks almanac the question this week centers around another black writer this writer was born in alexandria louisiana his works include godsend sunday drums at dusk and story of the negro can you name him well the answer will be coming up later in the program we now turn our attention to agriculture the black role in agriculture here in this country has been great but it's a role that has been diminishing since the 1920s today we will be visiting the college of agriculture at southern university baton rouge and hopefully you'll discover like we did that agriculture is a lot more than just farming the college of agriculture at southern has an enrollment of about 200 students many of them with farm roots the average student that we would receive in the college is generally a student that's once removed from the farm generally living in small communities mainly in louisiana most of our students come from various parts of louisiana students that at some point in their life they would have been either in future farmers of america or 4-h other like they would have in other words some background in agriculture and they would be interested in in pursuing a career in some phase of it generally not in the production aspects though the agriculture college offers degrees that could lead to career opportunities in three basic areas agriculture economics agribusiness animal science and plant and soil science within plant soil science we deal with horticulture agronomy forestry pre-foster program in animal science we have beef cattle dairy portrait science aquaculture rabbits we also have a pre-veterinary program which is a program linked with louisiana state university where our students spend two to three years here and then they go over there and finish their veterinary degree now a lot of people think that agriculture and farming are synonymous but in reality farming is just one aspect of agriculture well obviously this is this is the the biggest problem that we have to undertake in in trying to let our students understand and know that that that agriculture is much more broader than the farming or production side that that's generally depicted or denoted with agriculture in general we attempt to explain to our students and let them know that that there's a scientific side of agriculture very few of our students if any will ever be farmers we do however because of the land-grant mission train students to to be qualified to be farmers but we're more concerned about them being research scientists or technical support staff and the like this is the area in which most of our students would obtain jobs one student hoping to obtain a job in the agriculture field is senior keith moore he's an animal science major now agriculture it's um as we see it now you have small farms basically around every corner in the future i don't think there'll be small farms as far as production is concerned they'll be basically large scale operations and the small fellas just won't be there and as far as research is concerned which which i would like to go into i think there'll be plenty of opportunity in that aspect of act senior alan smith is majoring in agribusiness because the financial aspect of foreign agriculture and just so the blacks let's look at the black farmer and how he is decreasing and i believe as educators those of us who are in agriculture economics it is our duty to educate and broaden the traditional farm and let them know that agricultural and the related fields is it's much more than the traditional area and inclines that we become educated and become involved in the computer world and the other technical fields which will help us in maintaining our agricultural industry plant and soil science deals with the scientific study of plants and their relationship with soil and environment it is also the area of agriculture that senior andrew randall is focusing his attention there are many disciplines in plant soil science first as horticulture which deals with let's say your different floras shrubbery there's also um perhaps entomology which deals with how insect affects um plant life and under the sauce um science curriculum um there's a psalm physics saw chemistry for instance the department of plant and soil science at southern's college of agriculture has some 13 acres of horticultural farms and some 375 acres of agronomic farm where teaching and research are done students like the ones you see here can find career opportunities as sales representatives of agricultural products plant and landscape contractors and soil conservationists students majoring in agriculture economics agribusiness can find job opportunities as assistant research economists or technicians at colleges and universities the college of agriculture has four major livestock areas there's a modern dairy which provides students exposure in the areas of dairy science reproduction and physiology the swine and poultry facilities provide laboratory training in the areas of management production and reproduction the beef cattle farm is located on 371 acres it provides teaching and learning opportunities in the care and management of beef cattle another impressive aspect of the college of agriculture is the center for small farm research established by a state mandate back in 1982 our small farmers were traditionally growing the expensive and low in well let's say low profit crops these crops are labor intensive and capital intensive at the same time the profits that you derive from these crops are marginal small the crops i'm talking about soy beans uh cotton uh sugarcane rice and so forth these are agronomic crops row crops and they they need an extensive amount of uh labor and capital for a farmer to make make any money from them and you need large acreages now these small farmers do not have these resources therefore if they try to imitate what the large farmers are doing they are bound to fail and that's the problem there now we've taken a different approach we are saying to these farmers you must diversify and intensify so what we try to do we we develop techniques and show these farmers how they can improve their productivity on these small acreages of land a major example would be intercropping where you use more than one crops in culture at the same time on the same piece of land for example you may plant some vegetables you put in some cabbage some greens the cabbage material before the the the grains then we may follow that by uh by some snap beans and so forth the idea is for the farmer to diversify in such a way that if one of the crop fails it can fall back on another and in addition to that he can spread out his production over a longer period of time in other words if he just plant cabbage reap the cabbage in three months and leave the land there idle for for the rest of the year he's losing money we are saying now diversify and plan your cropping system so that you have as much as possible year-round income when it comes to livestock we say stay away from things like dairy cattle or even beef use small ruminants like the goat sheep or rabbits right now we have in the small farm center we have a rabbit project which is very successful and and in april we'll be having the livestock i mean the rabbit show where we bring in 4-h clubs members and other small farmers from all over the state to see to tell them about cultural techniques and see what we're doing and and show them ways in which they can develop this as a small farm commodity as we mentioned earlier the number of black farmers in america has been declining rapidly since the 1920s doctors feels and alan shared with us their thoughts on the decline of the black farmer black farmers are continuing to decrease because they have not been competitive with other farmers but it's not just black farmers it's small farmers in general it's it's more of the family type of farm and that's that's the type of farm that's vanishing most of our small farm farmers in louisiana are what we would describe as limited resource people they are limited in land resources and quite a sizable percentage of them are limited in education they lack the capital the land and equipment to be successful farmers in addition to that they do not have access to the markets as the big large commercial farmers do and those are primarily the problems the major problems that are hurting these small farmers of the state understand so why with the number of black farmers declining should black students look to agriculture as a possible field of study agriculture is part of the heritage of black people in america at one time we owned some three million acres of land or more presently the the total land mass owned by blacks in america is is less than 600 000 acres and and greatly diminishing if we could let students know that that that there's a there's a a place out there for them uh in agriculture either production or research academics they still could partake of the true american dream and yet not be the the labor so to speak of agriculture as what they were originally brought over here to do and why should students interested in agriculture look to southern's college of agriculture for education and training we feel that it's outstanding number one because of its small size it's one of the smallest colleges on campus it has both federal and state banking in that thereby we're able to spend more time with our students and and intensify them in the various type of disciplines that they're pursuing this college will enable you and show this individual that agriculture is more than just farming it's more than just traditional because many students think and many of our black students think that agriculture is only farming and that's all it inclines and entails but this college will enable you that agriculture is yes it's agricultural and but it's an application and applying the other fields and the other areas to agriculture and it'll help help them broaden their horizons and know that agriculture is a field that they can be proud of and students at southern's college of agriculture do find success most of our students that have graduated over the past five years so years in agriculture have gone into mainly professional fields and graduate school masters and phd type type agriculture very few of them have gone into into production type of agriculture we have everything from county agents to research technicians to managers of usda labs and the like a very large percentage of our students wind up in in usda soil conservation service forestry service economic research development so on and so forth my education won't stop here i will go on to seek to get a master's and a ph.d and i am interested in international studies not that i'm not interested in the us itself but there's a lot of individuals out here focus on on the u.s but there is study abroad that needs to be done and just as in ethiopia and other other countries where development is very at the very low and minor levels this is where i would like to go in and possibly make some input and make myself useful to these individuals who you can actually see who are really in need of agricultural input and agriculture new ideas to help them in making new crops okay time now to answer today's question from the folks almanac this black writer was born in alexandria louisiana his works include godsend sunday drums at dusk and story of the negro can you name him well the answer is arnabonto well that's our program for this week thanks for watching we'll be away for several weeks but when we return we'll have a report on author ernest gaines be sure to check it out until then make it a good week bye [Music] so folks is celebrating its fifth year on lpb and to celebrate the occasion we have had designed a five-year commemorative poster now if you are interested in having one write us and let us know send your inquiry to folks and care of louisiana public broadcasting 7860 and selmo lane baton rouge louisiana 708.10 we'll be sure to get one off to you right away [Music]

Channel: Louisiana Public Broadcasting

Views: 37,210

Keywords: James Baldwin, Authors, Race, African Americans, HIGHER EDUCATION, Southern University and A & M College, Agriculture

Id: l3N4VI8gOFw

Length: 28min 21sec (1701 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021