To them, my knowledge of history - especially Black history - was important because they knew that the K-12 educational system would fail to teach me, and that U.S. Because of their experiences, they instilled in me the importance of loving myself as a Black person, as well as pride for Black people and being an educated person. As children of the 1950s and ’60s from rural East Texas and central Louisiana, they experienced systemic and individual racism and discrimination. My parents were not historians, not Afrocentric, not overly pro-Black, were not liberals, nor were they overly political, but they were supportive in my endeavors. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Booker T. I was the kid who liked to learn history on my own, so I read about historical figures from the encyclopedia book sets from our living room, scouring our Ebony magazine collections for historical articles written by Lerone Bennett and going to the local library to learn about Dr. Growing up, I attended schools in the 1980s and ’90s in Louisiana. Martin Luther King, Jr., center front, marches for civil rights, arms linked in a line of men, in the March on Washington. I give my K-12 educational experiences credit as these history narratives - which were disconnected from me, my conversations with Black folks about their life and my experiences living in the Deep South - influenced me to be curious about the histories of people who looked like me. I learned Rosa Parks was just tired, Black folks had to achieve equity only through nonviolence and racism was over after the civil rights movement in the 1960s. I learned that the Civil War was about states’ rights - not slavery - and I was taught to have compassion for white Southerners and their way of life. Still, when my teachers did, I learned that slavery was a paternalistic system, and that Black people were content as slaves - or at least accepted their oppressed conditions because slaves were well taken care of by their masters. I am not sure when I fell in love with Black history, but I know it was not based on my K-12 educational experiences.Īs an elementary student, I distinctly remember sitting through history lessons thinking, “Some of this history stuff does not make sense.” My schooling rarely taught about Black people and events. A current copy of the story can be found in the paperback version of Going to Meet the Man, which was published by Vintage Books in 1995.I love history, but I LOVE Black history. Baldwin's short stories contain many of the same themes he explores in other works and offer a portrait of the artist at various stages of his writing development. Most critics consider Baldwin's short stories inferior to his novels, which are in turn considered inferior to his essays. The story addresses the issue of violence between African-American men, the violence inherent in African-American families, and the power of religion in Depression-era Harlem. When the story was first published in the 1960s, America was in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, in which Baldwin was an active participant. Roy gets hurt, and John gets blamed by his stepfather, although Elizabeth faces her husband and sticks up for John. In "The Rockpile," which takes place in Depression-era Harlem, John, the illegitimate son of Elizabeth Grimes, is unable to stop his brother, Roy, from getting into a fight on a rockpile with some other African-American boys. The short story draws on the same pool of characters from the novel, and the main incident in "The Rockpile" is similar to a scene from the novel.
Critics believe that it may have been written much earlier, when Baldwin was working on his 1953 novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. James Baldwin's "The Rockpile" was first published in 1965 in the author's first and only short story collection, Going to Meet the Man.
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