What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America

In his latest book, Dyson (Tears We Cannot Stop) uses the historic 1963 meeting between then attorney general Robert F. Kennedy and a group of black cultural leaders organized by James Baldwin to frame the current state of the black artist in America. Dyson jumps between the two moments of cultural change to look at how the fractured racial landscape of America has morphed over the last 50 years. While he never ignores the echoes of pre-civil rights movement racism, Dyson's goal is to highlight the artists and activists who continue to bear witness to the messages that Baldwin, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Jerome Smith, and Lorraine Hansberry delivered that day in May. His list of contemporaries includes Jay-Z, Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Kamala Harris, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cornel West, Erin Aubry Kaplan, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Colin Kaepernick, among others. The book concludes with a paean to Wakanda and its imagined "momentum of blackness."