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Blues for Mister Charlie: A Play

James Baldwin

In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of violence--which is loosely based on the notorious 1955 killing of Emmett Till--James Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race. For where once a white storekeeper could have shot a "boy" like Richard Henry with impunity, times have changed. And centuries of brutality and fear, patronage and contempt, are about to erupt in a moment of truth as devastating as a shotgun blast.

In his award-winning play, Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicated--and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion.
To Be Young, Gifted and Black: An Informal Autobiography

Lorraine Hansberry

A special autobiography told in a very special voice. Both the story and the voice belong to a young black woman who was born in Chicago, came to New York, won fame with her first play, A Raisin In The Sun, and went on to new heights of artistry before her tragically early death. Photos throughout.
The Amen Corner: A Play

James Baldwin

Only a boy preacher who had grown up to become one of America's most eminent writers could have produced a play like The Amen Corner. For to his first work for the theater James Baldwin brought all the fervor and majestic rhetoric of the storefront churches of his childhood along with an unwavering awareness of the price those churches exacted from their worshipers.

For years Sister Margaret Alexander has moved her Harlem congregation with a mixture of personal charisma and ferocious piety. But when Margaret's estranged husband, a scapegrace jazz musician, comes home to die, she is in danger of losing both her standing in the church and the son she has tried to keep on the godly path.

The Amen Corner is a play about faith and family, about the gulf between black men and black women and black fathers and black sons. It is a scalding, uplifting, sorrowful and exultant masterpiece of the modern American theater.
One Day When I Was Lost

James A. Baldwin

Based on Alex Haley’s bestselling classic The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a rare, lucidly composed screenplay from one of America’s great masters of letters.

Son of a Baptist minister; New York City hustler; honor student; convicted criminal; powerful minister in the Nation of Islam; father and husband: Malcolm X transformed himself, time and again, in order to become one of the most feared, loved, and undeniably charismatic leaders of twentieth-century America. No one better represents the tumultuous times of his generation, and there is no one better to capture him and his milieu than James Baldwin. With spare, elegant, yet forceful dialogue and fresh, precise camera directions, Baldwin breathes cinematic life into this controversial and important figure, offering a new look at a man who changed himself in order to change the country.
The Amen Corner

James Baldwin
One Day When I Was Lost: A Scenario

James Baldwin
One day, when I was lost: A scenario based on The autobiography of Malcolm X

James Baldwin