James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket

By NYPL Staff
April 6, 2016
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
James Baldwin 37 Allan Warren

By Allan warren CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Novelist, essayist, playwright, activist, son, brother, friend, lover, man, human, Black.  There are many words of which to describe a person, but never enough of which to describe someone who poured their heart and soul like James Baldwin.  

 Baldwin allowed his readers to explore the depths of his own humanity and the paths of his imaginations in his own words.  His talent to express through writing did not only offered a peak  into own life, but the stories of those who are afraid to tell their own.  He did this through works such as: Giovanni’s Room, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and many others.  

One of the most prevalent themes of Baldwin’s writings, was race.  It is most evident in  The Price of a Ticket, a collection of Baldwin’s most powerful essays exploring the social interaction of race, particularly in America.  

Baldwin’s own rhetoric, as impactful as it was, was not enough to truly capture his own essence.  It was through the 1989 documentary, James Baldwin: The Price of a Ticket, that we are able truly see Baldwin for who he was, and what he stood for.  Through the intimate interviews on behalf of family members, friends, and of Baldwin himself, we witness his complexities and his attempt to navigate through a world of which he believed that “all men are brothers.”  

This documentary, re-mastered in a 2K HD version, will be shown for the first time at the at Schomburg since 1989 during a special presentation on behalf of the the Schomburg Center and Maysles Cinema, April 6, 2016 at 6:30PM.