Burning All Illusions: Writings from The Nation on Race

by Paula J. Giddings (Editor)

Burning All Illusions is a collection from The Nation archives of the best writing on race and civil rights from the magazine’s founding in 1865 to the present. It features selections by such insurgent American writers as Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ishmael Reed, and Patricia J. Williams, representing a diverse range of political and personal points of view that illuminate The Nation’s steadfast commitment to racial justice, each infused with the moral passion and urgency that the subject demands. The writers in this anthology have addressed these questions not to embitter but to provoke, educate, arouse, and inspire. James Baldwin once wrote that “the story of the Negro in America is the story of America.... It is not a very pretty story.” Baldwin and others in this collection shed light on the ugliness of American racism to certify that it is intolerable, that America can—must—do better. “The Nation’s editors ... have provided space for those persistent and ... often lonely voices inveighing against the evils of racial injustice.”—Derrick Bell

Genres: Race

320 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2001

About the author

Paula Giddings (born 1947 in Yonkers, New York) is a writer and an African-American historian. She is the author of When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America and In Search of Sisterhood. She is a professor of African-American Studies at Smith College and has previously taught at Spelman College, where she was a United Negro Fund Distinguished Scholar and Douglass College at Rutgers University where she held the Laurie Chair in Women's Studies. Giddings has also taught at Princeton University, North Carolina Central University and Duke University. She is also a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.

Giddings grew up in an integrated neighborhood of Yonkers, New York, where she suffered from day-to-day discrimination. Later, she participated in Freedom rides where she first experienced political commitment. In 1975, she travelled to South Africa where she had the opportunity to meet leaders of the Anti-apartheid movement.

(from Wikipedia)