I found the reading by Baldwin very interesting; I think it is a piece of writing that honestly displays the prejudice that existed during the mid 1900s.  I believe the book was published in 1955, when the Civil Rights movement created animosity between whites and blacks was at it highest.

  In Notes of a Native Son: “The Harlem Ghetto”, James Baldwin speaks about the comities of Harlem attempting to “right the wrongs” of the neighborhood in order to make it less of a social liability.  He says that without taking steps in order to fix the ghetto, these attempts are useless.  He compares their attempts to putting make up on a leper.  I found this comparison very interesting because in a sense, Baldwin is comparing the community of Harlem to a leper.  Lepers have always been shunned from their homes and communities.  Once one caught the disease, they were an outcast and nothing could be done to help them.  Now, maybe I am reading too far into this analogy, but it seems as if Baldwin were saying that at some point in time, (I am assuming the time in which the African American community was forced to move from 34^th street to over priced buildings in Harlem in order to construct Pennsylvania Station) Harlem caught a fatal, incurable disease and the only way to make it any better is to just cover it up.

From the tone of his writing, I think that Baldwin feels that the “disease” Harlem caught were the African Americans that moved there.  He speaks about the newspapers aimed at and African American audience as if he finds them pathetic.  He connects the term “Negro Leader” with a negative connotation and he describes how police officers wait on the corner for a situation to get overly violent.  He speaks about black ministers in the church who use the hot topics of the time, such as war, as a basis for their sermons.  Baldwin thinks that these ministers have an underlying message in all their sermons- white people are soon to get the punishment they deserve.  He explains the intentions of the religious ceremony as a revenge plot against white people.  I think this is highly unlikely and his assumption is very typical of the stereotypes of the time. 

I fell as if this passage sounds as if it were written from the perspective of a white man in the 1950s.  His words seem to be more than just facts; they sound as if there is a bitter tone in his references to the black community in Harlem. 

From reading this, I have gotten a much better insight as to the way different races viewed each other, and cant help but think- Does this still go on today?  Everyone knows that different races and cultures have stereotypes associated with them.  Does that fact that these stereotypes exist mean that people truly believe them?  Maybe the assumptions of the evils of other cultures are not as strong as it once was, but I believe they still exist.