James Baldwin

Published Jun 17, 2020, 1:00 PM

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

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. The last thing we recorded before I got to work on today's episode was our June five 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, my inward response was like, yes, obviously, James Baldwin. Of course, why didn't you even think of this before? This description by Juan Williams and a piece called Baldwin The Witnesses Testament, which was published in The Washington Post the day after Baldwin's death in illustrates why I had that response quote. Given the messy nature of racial hatred, of the half truths, blasphemies and lies that make up American life, Baldwin's accuracy and 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, black people reading Baldwin knew he wrote the truth. White people reading Baldwin sensed his truth about the lives of black people and the sins 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 Fire Next Time is frequently on anti racism reading lists. Sometimes it's paired up with Tana hassy 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 Basically, James Baldwin was a brilliant essayist and one of the chroniclers of the civil rights movement and a really powerful voice against racism. And that is why we are talking about him today. So we're gonna start with his background. James Baldwin was born James Arthur Jones in Harlem, New York, on August two. His mother was Emma Bertas 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, his mother married David Baldwin, 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, 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. At as an adult, Baldwin described as a whole household constantly working to appease his stepfather. James also said David taught him to fight because he had to continually fight back with patients, and a kind 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 in a racist society where he just could not make enough money to really support his family. And Baldwin 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 in Harlem's library branches and that he had to go to the New York Public Library on Fort 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 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 Ayres. That was the first black principle in New York City. From there, he moved to Frederick Douglas Junior High School, where Harlem Renaissance poet County Cullen was his 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 buy 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 Jewish student body. There, James again worked on the school newspaper, The Magpie, and he excelled in his English and history courses. He also meant painter view for 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 and as other courses as he 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. He ultimately left the church in ninety one. James Baldwin graduated from high school in nineteen 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 industry job in bell Mead, 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 bell Mead involved building a new Army quartermaster depot, and it was Baldwin's first real experience with overt racism on the job. The U. S Army was 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 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 Belle Meade, Baldwin and some friends were refused service as a diner because of their race, and Baldwin really reached a breaking point. He threw a water picture 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, and his words quote from the hatred I carried in my own heart. David Baldwin Sr. Died on July three, which was also the day James's youngest sibling, Paul Maria, was born. Two days later on August one, and 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 had been killed. This was one of a series of similar riots that took place in cities around the United States in ninety 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 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 Worse, who encouraged Baldwin to join the Young People's Socialist League. Although it's 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 a member. One of the biography US that I read of him characterized this period is 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 Baldwin met Richard Wright, who helped him get Harper's Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship, and that fellowship provided some of the funding to help him launch a literary career. He started getting published and established magazines, but then in ninety six, Eugene Worth died by suicide. That was something that traumatized 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 Belle Meade. He had a clear minded certainty that if he didn't leave the US and 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. We'll get to that. After a quick sponsor break, James Baldwin left for Paris on November eleventh, 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. In his words quote, I had no idea what might happen to me in France, but I was very clear what would happen if I remained in New York. 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 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 Happersburger, who was white, bisexual, and at one point married to a woman. When they met, Baldwin was twenty four and Happersburger was seventeen. They eventually started a relationship that went on for almost forty years. Baldwin described Happersburger as the love of his life, and he became godfather to Happersburger's children. Along with other relationships in his life, Happersburger was one of the inspirations for Baldwin's novel Giovanni's Room. While in France, Baldwin wrote 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 eye on a number of issues, and they frequently criticized one another. On December nineteenth, Aldwin was arrested for being in receipt of stolen property after he borrowed a bed sheet 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 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 that 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 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 plague called the Amen Corner, and a series of essays in nine In fifty two, Baldwin made a trip back to the US with financial help from Marlon Brando. He was awarded a Googgenheim 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 Worth, including worth suicide. Professor in 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 taboo subjects of American society and culture, interracial sexual intercourse, homosexuality as a normative mode of experience, and bisexuality as 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 did not want to describe himself as the movement 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 Jr's approach through non violent action, that in other ways with Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Power movement, for example, As time went on, Baldwin 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 movements 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. 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 non violent activism did not meet its goals, and foreseeing that white activism would turn 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 sci 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 for the National Committee for a Saying Nuclear Policy, and he also helped sponsor a rally to disband the House An 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 in double a cp field secretary Medgar Evers. Baldwin's book The Fire Next Time came out during this tour as well. It contains two essays, My Dungeon Shook Letter to my Nephew on the one 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 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 Jr's Birmingham campaign, Baldwin was on the cover of Time magazine under a banner that read Birmingham and Beyond the Negro Pushed for Equality. A few 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 in the failure of the nation to make black liberation a priority, as a moral treason. The result was that Kennedy met with Baldwin for breakfast on May, 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, Lorraine Handsbury, Lena Horn, and Ripped Torn, along with representatives from the Chicago Urban League, Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, the n double A CP, and core Clarence Benjamin Jones, who is one of Martin Luther King Junior's advisers, was also there. The Kennedy's goal for this meeting was not so much to get a sense of what Black Americans needed, or what 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 ray relations, and also on outlining what the government had done already so far to the assembled group while basically asking for their patients uh. This meeting 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, 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, President John F. Kennedy to address the nation on the subject of civil rights okay, and he gave his civil rights address on June eleventh, nineteen sixty three. In the early morning hours of June twelve, 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 worked during the 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 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 Jr. In nineteen sixty eight, and 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 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 Bayard Rustin, who was also gay. It's more likely that Baldwin's views were becoming less and less aligned with Martin Luther King Jr's non violent 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 health care programs, schools and arms self defense programs meant 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 best seller through this work, But in the late sixties and early seventies or yours increasingly criticized him for becoming more pessimistic, accusatory, and vehement, and too directly focused on civil rights, as included the three act play Blues for Mr. 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 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 Kennedy's 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 Devance. Although he's still did a lot of traveling, this became his permanent home for the rest of his life. Locals named it Sa Baldwin. Baldwin's writing 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 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 Nicki Giovanni and past podcast subject Audrey Lord. Both Women Really Is to Baldwin on issues of gender, gender roles, and sexuality, ultimately leading him to criticize the whiteness of the mainstream feminist movement as well as it's homophobia and anti lesbianism, but like Bayard Ruston, James Baldwin never took a leadership role within the gay rights 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 five interview, he said, quote those terms homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual, our twentieth century terms which for me really have 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 that noted that this has some similarities to conversations happening today about all of these ideas being socially constructed and what they mean. Um. Baldwin continued to travel and 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 eight 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 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, nine seven, at the age of sixty three. Lucien Happersberger was there with him, as well as a household attendant. His funeral was held at the Church of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, with five thousand people in attendance. A Mary Baraca delivered the eulogy, with tributes from others including Maya Angelou and Tony Morrison, and the words of Amary Baraca's eulogy quote, this man traveled the earth, like its history and it's biographer. He reported, criticized, made beautiful, analyzed, cajoled, lyricized, attacked, saying made us think, made us better, made us consciously human or perhaps more acidly pre human. And also in the words of Tony Morrison addressing the late Baldwin is 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 about Tony Morrison Um. 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, the Author's League, the International Pen the Dramatist Guild, the Actor's Studio, and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Paul to See. He also hoped that his home 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 best seller during his career, especially during the prolific 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 Beal Street Could Talk, which came out, as well as the award winning 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 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. 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 nine where he said I'm optimistic about the future, but not about the future of this civilization. I'm optimistic about the civilization which will replace this one, and that is James Baldwin. UM. I talked to two various friends as I was trying to figure out what I needed to work on next UM and then every case when I said I think James Baldwin, the answer was like, obviously yes, UM so yeah, I hope I have done his life and work justice today. Would you also like to cover some listener mail? I have uh some listener mail from Jackie. It goes back to our Bureau of Home Economics podcast and Jackie says, good afternoon, Holly and Tracy, thank you so much for the wonderful podcast. I found the podcast early on last year and was hooked immediately. I'm always excited when an episode coincides with something or someplace I've experienced. I'm a school counselor for a private school in Florida. This morning, as I listened to the podcast about the Bureau of Home Economics, I realized I can finally share something with you. At my school, we still offer family consumer Sciences one and two. I've been in a few a few school districts in Florida, and this is the first school I've been at with this particular program. Family Consumer Science one is for incoming freshmen and throughout the year learn about child development, sewing, cooking, nutrition, and meal planning. Sewing normally coincides with fall, and the students learned to sew pat jama bottoms. It is amusing before and after school to see the girls wear they're brightly colored pajama bottoms under their school uniforms to keep warm. I guess next year they will include face mask patterns. Family Consumer Science too, is for juniors and seniors and takes an approach to prepare them for going away to college. One semester is focused on health, nutrition, and of course food. The other semester focuses on management of personal finances. These classes are two of the most popular electives that we offer and typically have a waitlist. Boys and girls love this course and the faculty enjoys getting to sample the goodies made. Also thank you for your work on the Rosewood incident in the Six Impossible episodes. As a school counselor, every spring, I walk students through the application of the Florida Bright Future Scholarship, a scholarship award for students who decide to tend to higher education institution in the state. One of the questions on the application is are you a descendant of a family member that was affected by the Rosewood incident in Florida during the nineteen twenties. So many times students ask what it is, and counselors, including myself, glass over it. Up until your episode, I knew it was something terrible, but didn't know that details. Now when asked about it, I tell students and they get a look of disbelief at something like that happened in their state. With some it Foster's great conversations about how little Florida history they knew. Jackie goes on to talk about being really delighted to learn that Frankie Manning was born in Jacksonville. Uh, and then says, thank you for your research. I listened to the podcast on my way to and from work or wherever else I'm traveling. You have made the ride more pleasurable and less lonely. Thank you so much, Jackie. Uh. Wow, I kind of wish I had had a class specifically about like the finances part. Uh. What I actually had when I went off to college was this book. There were two of them. One was called Where's Mom went? Now that I need her? And the other was called Where's Dad uh now that I need him, which you know is unnecessarily gendered in a way. But the like the mom one talked about basic food stuff and basic first aid and how to tell if you need to get to the doctor now um, and the dad one was like basic called maintenance and fixing stuff and that kind of thing. Uh So a class probably would have been helpful anyway, Thank you, Jackie. Uh if you would like to write to us about the surrending other podcast or history podcast at I heart radio dot com that we're all over social media at missed in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, of Pinterest and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, then I heart radio app and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff You Missed in History Class

Join Holly and Tracy as they bring you the greatest and strangest Stuff You Missed In History Class  
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 2,410 clip(s)