SYMHC Classics: James Baldwin

This 2020 episode covers James Baldwin, who was a brilliant essayist, one of the chroniclers of the Civil Rights Movement, and a powerful voice against racism.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. James Baldwin was born August second, nineteen twenty four,
or one hundred and one years ago today, on the
day this episode is coming out, so he is Today's
Saturday classic. This episode originally came out on June seventeenth,
twenty twenty, so we recorded it in the immediate aftermath
of the murder of George Floyd. That may Baldwin's writing

(00:24):
and work felt deeply relevant in that moment, and that
continues to be true today. Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

(00:47):
The last thing we recorded before I got to work
on today's episode was our June fifth behind the Scenes,
and if you've listened to that, I was clearly having
a hard time figuring out what to do next, and
when I remembered that I'd had James Baldwin on my
list for a while. But my inward response was like, yes, obviously,
James Baldwin. Of course, why didn't you even think of

(01:10):
this before? This description by Jan Williams in a piece
called Baldwin the Witness's testament, which was published in The
Washington Post the day after Baldwin's death in nineteen eighty seven,
illustrates why I had that response quote. Given the messy
nature of racial hatred, of the half truths, blasphemies, and

(01:30):
lies that make up American life, Baldwin's accuracy in reproducing
that world stands as a remarkable achievement. His accuracy was
key and his works the reader could resonate to the
sounds of the street Corner as drawn by Baldwin, could
feel the anger of Black Americans so long denied a
role in American life. As Baldwin wrote about that anger,

(01:51):
black people reading Baldwin knew he wrote the truth. White
people reading Baldwin sensed his truth about the lives of
black people in this of a racist nation. Interest in
James Baldwin's work has just really grown in the United
States over the last several years, in conjunction with the
Black Lives Matter movement. His nineteen sixty three book The

(02:13):
Fire Next Time is frequently on anti racism reading lists.
Sometimes it's paired up with Tana Hasse Coats Between the
World and Me, which was inspired by it, or with
The Fire This Time a New Generation Speaks about Race.
That's a book that came out in twenty sixteen. Basically,
James Baldwin was a brilliant essayist and one of the
chroniclers of the civil rights movement and a really powerful

(02:35):
voice against racism. And that is why we are talking
about him today. So we're going to start with his background.
James Baldwin was born James Arthur Jones in Harlem, New York,
on August second, nineteen twenty four. His mother was Emma
Burtist Jones, and she was a domestic worker when James
was born. Emma was not married and she never told
him who his biological father was. When James was three,

(02:58):
his mother married David Baldie, who was a factory worker
and an evangelical minister, and they went on to have
eight children together. The family was really poor. They were
living in a part of Harlem that Baldwin later called
Junkie's Hollow, and part of James's early years also took
place during the Great Depression. David Baldwin was strict, unyielding, authoritarian,

(03:20):
and cruel, including telling James that he was ugly and
reminding him of the circumstances of his birth, and of
course that was heavily stigmatized at the time. As an adult,
Baldwin described the whole household constantly working to appease his stepfather.
James also said David taught him to fight because he
had to continually fight back with patience and a kind

(03:42):
of ruthless determination, because I had to endure it, to
go under and come back up to wait. James Baldwin
attributed his stepfather's treatment of him and his mother and
siblings as being the product of living as a proud
man and a racist society where he just could not
make enough money to really support his family. And Baldwin

(04:03):
also credited his younger siblings as being a big part
of what kept him off the streets and largely out
of trouble in his youth. As the oldest, James was
always helping to look after the younger ones, and that
was something he described doing with a book in one hand,
because reading became one of his biggest means of escape.
He liked to tell people that he read every volume

(04:25):
in Harlem's library branches, and that he had to go
to the New York Public Library on forty second Street
to find any books that he hadn't read yet. He
also credited religion with helping to keep him out of trouble.
He had a religious conversion experience at the age of
fourteen and became a youth minister at Fireside Pentecostal Assembly.
He was a youth minister for three years, and during

(04:46):
that time he crafted his use of language and his
speaking style. Throughout all this, James had been attending New
York public schools, first at PS twenty four, whose principle
was Gertrude Ayers. That was the first black principle new
York City. From there, he moved to Frederick Douglass Junior
High School, where Harlem Renaissance poet County Cullen was his

(05:07):
French teacher and the director of the school's literary club.
While at Frederick Douglas Junior High James was editor of
the school's newspaper, The Douglas Pilot, and also tried to
make money to help the family by shining shoes and
selling shopping bags. For high school, James was selected to
attend DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. This was
one of New York's more elite schools, with a predominantly

(05:29):
Jewish student body. There, James again worked on the school newspaper,
The Magpie, and he excelled in his English and history courses.
He also met painter Viewford Delaney, who became a friend
and something of a mentor, as he demonstrated for Baldwin
that a black man could become an artist. James didn't
do nearly as well in his other courses as he

(05:49):
did in English and history, and his high school years
were personally very turbulent. In addition to all the stresses
of his home life, he had started to question his sexuality.
He had also started questioning the church as he began
to learn about the ways that Christianity had been used
as a weapon during slavery, and as he heard people
within his church and his stepfather make anti Semitic comments.

(06:13):
He ultimately left the church in nineteen forty one. James
Baldwin graduated from high school in nineteen forty two, six
months after the rest of his class. The internal turmoil
connected to his faith in his sexuality contributed to a
mental health crisis that derailed his studies. He had hoped
to go to the City College of New York, but
he couldn't afford a tuition Instead, he got a defense

(06:36):
industry job in Bellmeade, New Jersey, to try to help
support his family financially. By this point, James's stepfather was
struggling with his own mental health, with symptoms that included
depression and paranoia. Baldwin's job in Bellmead involved building a
new Army quartermaster depot, and it was Baldwin's first real
experience with overt racism on the job. The US Army

(07:00):
still segregated, and Baldwin continued to act the way he
had acted back in Harlem when he was around white
Southern service members, and they, of course expected him to
be totally deferential to them and to stay out of
their way. Of course, racism had existed in Harlem as well,
but this was a whole different set of social expectations
and consequences. Baldwin described this experience as learning what it

(07:23):
meant to be a Negro. He refused to back down
in the face of racism and harassment on the job,
and he was fired. A friend helped him get his
job back, and when the harassment resumed, he again pushed
back against it and was once again fired. On his
last night in Bellmead, Baldwin and some friends were refused
service at a diner because of their race, and Baldwin

(07:45):
really reached a breaking point. He threw a water pitcher
and that shattered the mirror behind the bar. He described
this moment as revelatory, realizing that he had been angry
enough to kill someone and that his own life was
in danger. In him words quote from the Hatred I
Carried in my own Heart. David Baldwin Senior died on

(08:05):
July twenty ninth, nineteen forty three, which was also the
day James's youngest sibling, Paula Maria, was born. Two days later,
on August first, an uprising swept through Harlem. It was
sparked when a black soldier tried to intervene as a
white police officer was trying to arrest a black woman.
The officer shot the soldier, and rumors spread that he

(08:26):
had been killed. This was one of a series of
similar riots that took place in cities around the United
States in nineteen forty three, and in Harlem, six black
people were killed as thousands of police were dispatched in
response to the violence. Baldwin really felt like living in
Harlem had become untenable and he moved to Greenwich Village
to try to make a living as a writer, while

(08:47):
also waiting tables and doing other work just to try
to make ends meet and to send what money he
could back to his family. He had relationships with men
and with women, and at one point became engaged to
a woman, but ultimately broke off that engagement. He also
became friends with a man named Eugene Wurse, who encouraged
Baldwin to join the Young People's Socialist League, although it's

(09:07):
not entirely clear how long Baldwin was involved or exactly
what his involvement even was. In the years just after
World War Two, he spent at least some time with
various political groups that were connected to things like socialism, communism,
and labor rights, but he didn't become exclusively focused on
any of them, or in some cases ever officially become

(09:28):
a member. Yeah One of the biographies that I read
of him characterize this period as kind of bouncing around
from one group to another, getting a sense of what
different ideas were, but not really committing to any of
them at that point. In nineteen forty four, Baldwin met
Richard Wright, who helped him get Harper's Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship,
and that fellowship provided some of the funding to help

(09:50):
him launch a literary career. He started getting published and
established magazines, but then in nineteen forty six, Eugene Worth
died by suicide. That was something that traumatiz and haunted
Baldwin for the rest of his life. Two years later,
Baldwin had become certain that he could not live in
the United States anymore. It circled back to what he
had realized that last night in bell Mead. He had

(10:12):
a clear minded certainty that if he didn't leave the
US in its systematic racism and oppression, he would be
killed or he would kill someone. He finally decided to
go to France at the age of twenty four, or
get to that. After a quick sponsor break, James Baldwin

(10:37):
left for Paris on November eleventh, nineteen forty eight, using
the last of the money from a fellowship to pay
for a one way ticket by sea. Beyond that, he
had almost no money, virtually no connections, and nowhere to stay.
He also did not speak French, and his words quote,
I had no idea what might happen to me in
France but I was very clear what would happen if

(10:58):
I remained in New Baldwin faced some criticism for leaving
the US, with people arguing that he was abandoning a
country that he should have stayed in and tried to
help fix, but this first stretch of time in Paris
was critically important to his work and identity as a writer.
Unlike many of the other writers and artists who left
the US for Paris, he didn't think of himself as

(11:20):
an expatriate, but more as a commuter. He still felt
a deep connection to the United States, and he made
frequent trips back, and he spent long stretches of time
in other parts of the world, including Istanbul. Shortly after
arriving in Paris, Baldwin met Swiss artist Lucien Happersberger, who
was white, bisexual, and at one point married to a woman.

(11:41):
When they met, Baldwin was twenty four and Happersberger was seventeen.
They eventually started a relationship that went on for almost
forty years. Baldwin described Happersberger as the love of his life,
and he became godfather to Happersberger's children. Along with other
relationships in his life. Happersberger was one of the inspirations
for Baldwin's novel Giovanni's Room. While in France, Baldwin wrote

(12:05):
Everybody's Protest Novel, which argued that political novels like Harriet
Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Richard Wright's Native Son
were reinforcing stereotypes about black people and in particular, dehumanizing
black men. Although Wright had helped Baldwin secure his first
writing fellowship, the two men did not see eye to

(12:26):
eye on a number of issues, and they frequently criticized
one another. On December nineteenth, nineteen forty nine, Baldwin was
arrested for being in receipt of stolen property after he
borrowed a bedsheet that a friend had stolen from a hotel.
This whole experience led him to think about identity and
policing in the United States versus in France. The police

(12:47):
in France saw him as an American, while police in
New York would have seen him as an inherently criminal problem.
But he also became aware that most of the people
who were in jail with him in Paris were from
Northern Africa, and the French colonialism had its own part
to play in Racism in France. This first stretch of
time in France let Baldwin look back on the US

(13:08):
from a distance, seeing things from angles that just were
not possible for him while he was living in it.
He started coming to terms with both his own history
and with his sexuality while living in France. In Switzerland,
he finished his semi autobiographical novel Go Tell It on
the Mountain she had actually started writing in high school,
as well as a play called The Amen Corner and

(13:30):
a series of essays. In nineteen fifty two, Baldwin made
a trip back to the US with financial help from
Marlon Brando. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in June
of nineteen fifty four, and other fellowships followed. In nineteen
fifty nine, he was awarded a Ford Foundation grant to
work on the novel Another Country. When This novel included
a fictionalized depiction of his friendship with Eugene Wirth, including

(13:53):
Worth's suicide. Professor and literary critic Fred Stanley later wrote
of Another Country quote, Baldwin has been audacious enough prior
to most other artists to grapple candidly with the usually
taboosed subjects of American society and culture, interracial sexual intercourse,
homosexuality as a normative mode of experience, and bisexuality as

(14:16):
a real phenomenon. After similar back and forth travel, Baldwin
returned to the US for a longer stretch, starting in
July of nineteen fifty seven. A lot of his written
work during this time documents or reflects on the Civil
Rights movement, a movement that he wasn't really sure how
he fit into. He had become well known and well
established as a writer by this point, and while he

(14:37):
did not want to describe himself as the movement's spokesperson,
there were definitely people who thought of him that way.
As the Civil rights movement grew and evolved, Baldwin found
himself aligned in some ways with Martin Luther King Junior's
approach through nonviolent action, and in other ways with Malcolm X,
the Nation of Islam, and the Black Power movement. For example,

(14:58):
as time went on, Baldwren increasingly favored the Black Power
movement's focus on immediate radical change instead of non violent
incremental progress, But he really did not agree with the
Black power movement's focus on black separatism. One hallmark of
Baldwin's writing during the Civil rights movement was that it
was accessible to and sometimes written specifically for a white audience.

(15:22):
Much of this written work carried an implicit or explicit
warning that racism was not just harming black people, that
it was also destroying white people as well. Some of
it has also been described as prophetic, foreseeing that the
movement would become more militant if nonviolent activism did not
meet its goals, and foreseeing that white activism would turn

(15:43):
away from that militancy. Baldwin's work in the movement was
not just about writing, though he also made speeches. He
donated money, wrote letters, sim petitions organized during the lunch
counter sit ins that we talked about on the show.
Earlier this year, James Baldwin traveled to Tallahassee to interview
student demonstrators. In nineteen sixty one, he became a sponsor

(16:05):
for the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, and
he also helped sponsor a rally to disband the House
on American Activities Committee. In nineteen sixty three, he took
a speaking tour through the South in conjunction with the
Congress of Racial Equality. During this tour, he met and
started working with civil rights activists and NAACP Field secretary
Medgar Evers. Baldwin's book The Fire Next Time came out

(16:29):
during this tour as well. It contains two essays, My
Dungeon Shook Letter to my Nephew on the one hundredth
anniversary of the Emancipation and Down at the Cross Letter
from a Region of My Mind. The latter essay dwells
on Baldwin's experiences with religion, including both Christianity and the
Nation of Islam, relating them to race and racism, and

(16:50):
reflecting on his own beliefs. The Fire Next Time spent
more than forty weeks in the top five of the
New York Times bestseller list. On May seventeenth, nineteen sixty three,
during Martin Luther King Junior's Birmingham campaign, Baldwin was on
the cover of Time magazine under a banner that read
Birmingham and Beyond the Negro Push for Equality. A few

(17:12):
days before that Time magazine cover, Baldwin had sent a
telegram to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy criticizing the United
States lack of response to the civil rights movement, especially
in the face of increasing violence and brutality against the
people who were participating in that movement. Baldwin framed this
inaction and the failure of the nation to make black

(17:34):
liberation a priority, as a moral treason. The result was
that Kennedy met with Baldwin for breakfast on May twenty third,
asking him to gather writers and activists to meet with him.
The next day, they met in Kennedy's apartment in New York,
where Kennedy was joined by Department of Justice lawyer Burke Marshall.
Baldwin had brought his brother David, as well as Harry Belafonte,

(17:56):
Lorraine Hansbury, Lena Horn, and Rip Torn, along with REPAT
representatives from the Chicago Urban League, Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited,
the NAACP, and core Clarence Benjamin Jones, who was one
of Martin Luther King Junior's advisors, was also there. But
Kennedy's goal for this meeting was not so much to
get a sense of what Black Americans needed, or what

(18:17):
the civil rights movement's goals were, or how the government
might incorporate those goals. He was more focused on figuring
out who among them might serve as sort of a
mouthpiece for the government, promoting the government's policies to the
black community to improve race relations, and also on outlining
what the government had done already so far to the
assembled group while basically asking for their patients. This meeting

(18:42):
consequently did not go well. Baldwin and the other assembled
activists were trying to describe the systemic racism that went
well beyond what was encoded in law, while Kennedy was
talking about how his own family had been oppressed for
being Irish. Kennedy came off as deeply naive and unwilling
to listen. Eventually, Lorraine Hansbury walked out and several others followed. Afterward,

(19:07):
the FBI started monitoring Baldwin, placing him on its security
Index of potentially dangerous people and amassing a file on
him that was more than seventeen hundred pages long. This meeting,
though while not immediately successful, is often credited with starting
to shift Robert Kennedy's perspectives, leading him to encourage his brother,

(19:27):
President John F. Kennedy, to address the nation on a
subject of civil rights. Kennedy gave his Civil Rights Address
on June eleventh, nineteen sixty three, in the early morning
hours of June twelfth, Medgar Evers was assassinated in his
driveway in front of his children. The culprit was Byrondella Beckwith,
who was found guilty of the crime more than thirty
years later. Baldwin continued his writing and work during the

(19:50):
nineteen sixties, but the assassination of Medgar Evers was the
first of a series of events that sort of shifted
his work and his outlook. Others included the Sixteenth Street
b Baptist Church bombing in nineteen sixty three, as well
as the assassinations of two other men that he had
known and worked with, Malcolm X in nineteen sixty five
and Martin Luther King Junior in nineteen sixty eight. And

(20:11):
we're going to get to more on that after we
first have a sponsor break. As we noted earlier, James
Baldwin never seemed really sure where he fit within the
civil rights movement. Although he participated in the nineteen sixty

(20:33):
three March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, he wasn't
a big part of its public presence or its planning.
There's been some speculation that this was because of his
sexual orientation, but as We've noted on earlier episodes of
the show one of the major planners of the march
was Byered Rustin, who was also gay. It's more likely
the Baldwin's views were becoming less and less aligned with

(20:54):
Martin Luther King Junior's nonviolent arm of the movement. As
time went on, Baldwin became increasingly radical. When the Black
Panther Party was established in nineteen sixty six, Baldwin supported
many of its efforts, including school breakfast and lunch programs,
community healthcare programs, schools, and armed self defense programs meant

(21:15):
to protect black communities from violence, including violence at the
hands of police. Baldwin's written work had always been focused
on both racism and homophobia, and he had been both
critically acclaimed and a bestseller through this work, but in
the late sixties and early seventies, reviewers increasingly criticized him
for becoming more pessimistic, accusatory, and vehement and two directly

(21:39):
focused on civil rights. This included the three act play
Blues for Mister Charlie, which was based on the murder
of Emmett's Hill. And it wasn't just white literary reviewers
who were criticizing his work. His advocacy for Palestinian liberation
was criticized as anti semitic, although he also criticized anti
semitism within black activism. Members of the Black Arts movement

(22:01):
criticized his work because it was intended, at least in part,
for white audiences, rather than being written for other black people.
The non violent arm of the Civil rights movement criticized
his more radical and confrontational views, while the Black Power
movement criticized his sexual orientation and his integrationist stances. His
sexual orientation was also criticized from outside the movement. The

(22:25):
Kennedys nicknamed him Martin Luther Queen. He basically was criticized
from every conceivable direction. In nineteen seventy, Baldwin returned to France,
where he bought a farmhouse in the medieval village of
Saint Paul de Vance. Although he's still did a lot
of traveling, thus became his permanent home for the rest
of his life. Locals named it Shay Baldwin. Baldwin's writing

(22:47):
in political views had always been anti capitalist, anti colonial,
anti imperialist, anti racist, anti homophobic, Pan African, pro Palestinian liberation,
and against mass incarceration. He also made connections between black
liberation in the US and United States foreign policy, noting

(23:07):
that a nation that truly supported black liberation would be
supporting black freedom fighters elsewhere in the world and supporting
people who were fighting for independence from colonial powers. All
this work had also been primarily focused on men in
the nineteen seventies and eighties. That started to change, in
part through televised conversations with poets Nikki Giovanni and past

(23:28):
podcast subject Audrey Lord. Both women really pushed Baldwin on
issues of gender, gender roles, and sexuality, ultimately leading him
to criticize the whiteness of the mainstream feminist movement, as
well as its homophobia and anti lesbianism. But like Bayard Rustin, James,
Baldwin never took a leadership role within the gay rights

(23:49):
movement as it became more public and widespread in the
nineteen seventies and eighties. He also expressed some ambivalence about
exactly how to describe himself in his own identity. In
one nineteen sixty five interview, he said, quote those terms homosexual, bisexual,
heterosexual are twentieth century terms which for me really have

(24:10):
very little meaning I've never myself, in watching myself and
watching other people, been able to discern exactly where the
barriers were. I read one piece as I was working
on this that noted that this has some similarities to
conversations happening today about all of these ideas being socially
constructed and what they mean. Baldwin continued to travel and

(24:34):
teach and write and work until late in his life,
but by the late nineteen eighties he was having serious
issues with his health. He had developed hepatitis and experienced
liver damage back in the nineteen seventies, followed by two
heart attacks. Then in nineteen eighty seven, he was diagnosed
with esophageal cancer. I actually also found references that it
was stomach cancer or pancreatic cancer, and I don't know

(24:55):
which of those is correct. Regardless, though the cancer progressed
really quickly. He gave his last interview to journalist Quincy
Troop just days before his death. James Baldwin died on
December one, nineteen eighty seven, at the age of sixty three.
Lucian Happersberger was there with him, as well as a
household attendant. His funeral was held at the Church of

(25:16):
Saint John the Divine in Manhattan with five thousand people
in attendance. A Mary Baraka delivered the eulogy with tributes
from others including Maya Angelou and Tony Morrison. In the
words of a. Mary Baraka's eulogy, quote, this man traveled
the earth, like its history and its biographer. He reported, criticized,
made beautiful, analyzed, cajoled, lyricized, attacked, saying made us think,

(25:41):
made us better, made us consciously human, or perhaps more
acidly prehuman. And also in the words of Tony Morrison,
addressing the late Baldwin as Jemmy, quote, in your hands,
language was handsome again. In your hands we saw how
it was meant to be, neither bloodless nor bloody, and
yet alive. It should surprise no one who knows anything

(26:03):
about Tony Morrison. That tribute to Baldwin from the funeral
is beautiful and I highly encourage reading it. During his lifetime,
James Baldwin wrote twenty two books, including six novels. He
was a member of the National Advisory Board of the
Congress on Racial Equality, as well as being a member
of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

(26:24):
The Authors League, the International Pen the Dramatist Guild, the
Actors Studio, and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.
He also hoped that his Holme in France would be
turned into a writer's colony after his death, but it
was eventually sold to developers and torn down. Baldwin had
been a bestseller during his career, especially during the prolific

(26:45):
nineteen sixties, but by the end of his life he
was not as widely read. That started to change, as
we said at the top of the show, with the
rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the many
connections between the movement and Baldwin's ideas and writings decades earlier.
In the last few years, there's also been a film
adaptation of his novel If Beale Street Could Talk, which

(27:07):
came out in twenty eighteen, as well as the award
winning twenty sixteen documentary called I Am Not Your Negro.
As we said at the top of the show, Baldwin's
work is frequently part of anti racism courses and reading lists,
so we thought we would end with just a couple
of quotes quickly from that work. One is from the
end of the Fire Next Time quote everything now we

(27:28):
must assume is in our hands. We have no right
to assume otherwise. 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.

(27:50):
If we do not now dare everything The fulfillment of
that prophecy recreated from the Bible in a song by
a slave is upon us. God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
no more water, the fire next time. The other quote
is from an interview that he gave in nineteen seventy
where he said, I'm optimistic about the future, but not
about the future of this civilization. I'm optimistic about the

(28:13):
civilization which will replace this one, not as James Baldwin.
I talked to various friends as I was trying to
figure out what I needed to work on next, and
in every case when I said I think James Baldwin,
the answer was like, obviously yes, so yeah, I hope

(28:34):
I have done his life and work justice today. Thanks
so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd
like to send us a note, our email addresses History
Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to
the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

(28:55):
you listen to your favorite shows.