James Baldwin

Watch James Baldwin share his ever-incisive observations late in his life on Chicago Tonight in 1985. "When Americans say progress, they really mean how quickly, and to what extent, and how profoundly, a black person becomes white," Baldwin says.

"I want to be an honest man, and I want to be a good writer," James Baldwin tells Studs Terkel in this eloquent and incisive conversation from 1961. He achieved both, in his clear-eyed writing and speaking about America and race, as is brilliantly obvious here.