The video begins with a timer counting down the seconds until James Baldwin appears before us, seated in a living room in the Manhattan apartment building he purchased in 1965. Baldwin is poised, attentive and beguiling as he speaks to Sylvia Chase, a correspondent for the ABC newsmagazine "20/20." Across the segment, we see him grinning as he watches a rehearsal of his play "The Amen Corner"; we see him speaking to a group of children in Harlem; we see B-roll of him outside, catching his scarf before it's swept away by the wind. Toward the end, the writer's mother, siblings, nieces and nephews gather on a sofa and chairs around him. "There's a price this republic exacts from any Black man or woman walking," Baldwin asserts, "and that is a crime." He reaches for the child seated next to him on the sofa. "They will not do to him," he says, "what they failed to do to me." We meet his unblinking gaze as his words resonate. "I was 7 years old 47 years ago," he says, "and nothing has changed since then."

Today it is that child who might say the same — that he was 7 years old, 40-some years ago. Whatever America has or has not done to him in the meantime has already occurred. This interview was filmed in 1979, before the publication of Baldwin's 19th book, "Just Above My Head." It was never aired; only last month was the finished segment circulated by its producer, Joseph Lovett. Watching it, we are staring into a past that has already lived its course, from a present that has yet to learn from it. Baldwin was born in 1924, and we see him half a century later, in a country on the other side of the civil rights era but, by his measure, fundamentally unchanged. Almost the same window of time has now passed in the child's life. Is the same still true? "What is ghastly and really almost hopeless in our racial situation now is that the crimes we have committed are so great and so unspeakable that the acceptance of this knowledge would lead, literally, to madness," Baldwin wrote in 1964, inspired by the murder of Emmett Till. "The human being, then, in order to protect himself, closes his eyes, compulsively repeats his crimes."

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