Some audience members appeared confused on the night I attended, so let’s clear one thing up first. No, actor and writer Anna Deavere Smith does not appear in “A Rap on Race,” Spectrum Dance Theater’s ...

The book, organized in sections centered around the writer's four great loves, details how Baldwin spent decades wrestling with his own sexuality, racism in the U.S. and abroad and the cost of fame.

"In 1970 James Baldwin and Margaret Mead met for an extraordinary seven-and-a-half-hour discussion about race and society. Mead brought her knowledge of racism as practiced in remote societies around ...