I like Barack’s soaring rhetoric fine. Getting past red America and blue America, change, hope – I’m all for it.

But the race speech was something different. It was not soaring, it was penetrating. It recognized that if America wants to believe in its promise for the future, it had better deal directly with the original sin of its past, a sin that festers and divides still, a sin where “the old ways” have not done and will not do.

It asked America to understand the Jim Crow world that Jeremiah Wright’s anger was born of, and it required of people who remember that experience and hold that anger to recognize that America has become better, and can be better still – and that they have some responsibility to take it in that direction.

It was a speech that had both the spine and soul of James Baldwin.

Baldwin – black, gay, funny-looking, son of an unpredictable and domineering father – came of age in Harlem in the 1940s. He wrote several works of fiction, but I think his essays are what make him special.

As a young man, he left America for Europe to escape the indignity of segregated coffee shops and the brutality of Harlem police officers. But he found that Europe was a stranger to him. When he was mistakenly identified as a thief in Paris and taken to a French jail, he had a morbid wish to be going through the ordeal in the cells of Harlem, where at least he knew how to interpret the facial expressions of the cops. When he met North Africans in the streets of Paris, he realized that they were not his brothers any more than white Parisians were. They did not share his experience of alienation, his anger or his ache for acceptance. Their mothers had sung them different songs. It was Americans of all walks, black intellectuals and white country boys, that Baldwin understood. He followed the logic of this observation and realized that as murderous as America had been to his ancestors, it was the only place that he could call home.

And Baldwin, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Langston Hughes, and most recently Barack Obama, made of that surprising fact an opportunity: he started to view himself as a citizen with a stake in the success of America: “I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.” And he started to realize that the experience of blacks in America had provided them with “a special attitude” - an attitude that had given rise to America’s only indigenous expressions, blues and jazz, and some of its most significant heroes, ranging from Frederick Douglas to Harriet Tubman. Black people had been prevented from integrating into American society and had somehow still managed to have a profound impact on the American imagination.

Baldwin believed deeply that America could be redeemed and become a place where people from everywhere collectively created a home. But he also knew that redemption would not come cheap. Above all, it would require courage. “One can only face in others what one can face in oneself,” he wrote in Nobody Knows My Name. “On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only hope for ours.”

Baldwin knew that while one end of the bridge of hope lies in the future, the other end is in the past. The journey is long and treacherous – and we have no choice but to begin it, and to do so together. As Baldwin wrote at the end of The Fire Next Time: “If we – and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others – do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”

That is, in essence, the challenge that Barack Obama threw down to the nation last week.

(Click here to read and listen to my NPR piece on Baldwin)