| In August of 1924, one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century was born in a hospital in Harlem. From New York and Paris, James Baldwin would produce a string of piercing and poignant works about race, sexuality, and history, in the form of unforgettable novels, such as “Another Country” and “Giovanni’s Room,” and critical essays. In 1962, as the civil-rights movement was gaining momentum, The New Yorker published “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” Baldwin’s sweeping reflection on his life and treatment as a Black American. “To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it,” he writes. “It is learning how to use it.” In the essay, Baldwin—who would have celebrated his hundredth birthday on Friday—traces his intellectual growth across a variety of experiences: his youthful embrace of Christianity and his subsequent rejection of it; a memorable dinner with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam. He considers America’s abuse of Black soldiers during the Second World War (German P.O.W.s, he recalls, received “more human dignity”), the rise of African American separatism, and what Baldwin sees as the true motive behind the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Our national circumstances may have changed, but every sentence resonates still, by virtue of a magic explained, some decades later, by The New Yorker’s Hilton Als. Baldwin, Als observed, “alchemized the singularity of his perspective into art.” | 
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