James Baldwin’s America, a Reading & Discussion program at Woodstock Public Library

Author Sheila Isenberg will lead a discussion group reading the novels of James Baldwin at Woodstock Library. In six sessions, this course will examine two novels by James Baldwin in an attempt to understand their relevance to this country’s history — in terms of slavery, racism, relations between blacks and whites, and the continuance of social and cultural behaviors that separate blacks and whites. “Americans cannot afford not to see how the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow shape the present,” Baldwin has written. “Our blindness, in other words, is lethal.”