james baldwin essays online

CHAPTER ONE Collected Essays By JAMES BALDWIN The Library of America Read the Review Autobiographical Notes I was born in Harlem thirty-one years ago. I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again. In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies. As they were born, I took them over with one hand and held a book with the other. The children probably suffered, though they have since been kind enough to deny it, and in this way I read Uncle Tom's Cabin and A Tale of Two Cities over and over and over again; in this way, in fact, I read just about everything I could get my hands on--except the Bible, probably because it was the only book I was encouraged to read. I must also confess that I wrote--a great deal--and my first professional triumph, in any case, the first effort of mine to be seen in print, occurred at the age of twelve or thereabouts, when a short story I had written about the Spanish revolution won some sort of prize in an extremely short-lived church newspaper. I remember the story was censored by the lady editor, though I don't remember why, and I was outraged. Also wrote plays, and songs, for one of which I received a letter of congratulations from Mayor La Guardia, and poetry, about which the less said, the better. My mother was delighted by all these goings-on, but my father wasn't; he wanted me to be a preacher. When I was fourteen I became a preacher, and when I was seventeen I stopped. Very shortly thereafter I left home. For God knows how long I struggled with the world of commerce and industry--I guess they would say they struggled with me--and when I was about twenty-one I had enough done of a novel to get a Saxton Fellowship. When I was twenty-two the fellowship was over, the novel turned out to be unsalable, and I started waiting on tables in a Village restaurant and writing book reviews--mostly, as it turned out, about the Negro problem, concerning which the color of my skin made me automatically an expert. Did another book, in company with photographer Theodore Pelatowski, about the store-front churches in Harlem. This book met exactly the same fate as my first--fellowship, but no sale. (It was a Rosenwald Fellowship.) By the time I was twenty-four I had decided to stop reviewing books about the Negro problem--which, by this time, was only slightly less horrible in print than it was in life--and I packed my bags and went to France, where I finished, God knows how, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next--one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next. When one begins looking for influences one finds them by the score. I haven't thought much about my own, not enough anyway; I hazard that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech--and something of Dickens' love for bravura--have something to do with me today; but I wouldn't stake my life on it. Likewise, innumerable people have helped me in many ways; but finally, I suppose, the most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality. (Truce, by the way, is the best one can hope for.) One of the difficulties about being a Negro writer (and this is not special pleading, since I don't mean to suggest that he has it worse than anybody else) is that the Negro problem is written about so widely. The bookshelves groan under the weight of information, and everyone therefore considers himself informed. And this information, furthermore, operates usually (generally, popularly) to reinforce traditional attitudes. Of traditional attitudes there are only two--For or Against--and I, personally, find it difficult to say which attitude has caused me the most pain. I am speaking as a writer; from a social point of view I am perfectly aware that the change from ill-will to good-will, however motivated, however imperfect, however expressed, is better than no change at all. But it is part of the business of the writer--as I see it--to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source. From this point of view the Negro problem is nearly inaccessible. It is not only written about so widely; it is written about so badly. It is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about. ("You taught me language," says Caliban to Prospero, "and my profit on't is I know how to curse.") Consider: the tremendous social activity that this problem generates imposes on whites and Negroes alike the necessity of looking forward, of working to bring about a better day. This is fine, it keeps the waters troubled; it is all, indeed, that has made possible the Negro's progress. Nevertheless, social affairs are not generally speaking the writer's prime concern, whether they ought to be or not; it is absolutely necessary that he establish between himself and these affairs a distance which will allow, at least, for clarity, so that before he can look forward in any meaningful sense, he must first be allowed to take a long look back. In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly. I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use--I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine--I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme--otherwise I would have no place in any scheme. What was the most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of his public progress; that I hated and feared white people. This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt. In effect, I hated and feared the world. And this meant, not only that I thus gave the world an altogether murderous power over me, but also that in such a self-destroying limbo I could never hope to write. One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. The difficulty then, for me, of being a Negro writer was the fact that I was, in effect, prohibited from examining my own experience too closely by the tremendous demands and the very real dangers of my social situation. I don't think the dilemma outlined above is uncommon. I do think, since writers work in the disastrously explicit medium of language, that it goes a little way towards explaining why, out of the enormous resources of Negro speech and life, and despite the example of Negro music, prose written by Negroes has been generally speaking so pallid and so harsh. I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else. I don't think that the Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it. I believe this the more firmly because it is the overwhelming tendency to speak of this problem as though it were a thing apart. But in the work of Faulkner, in the general attitude and certain specific passages in Robert Penn Warren, and, most significantly, in the advent of Ralph Ellison, one sees the beginnings--at least--of a more genuinely penetrating search. Mr. Ellison, by the way, is the first Negro novelist I have ever read to utilize in language, and brilliantly, some of the ambiguity and irony of Negro life. About my interests: I don't know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified. Otherwise, I love to eat and drink---it's my melancholy conviction that I've scarcely ever had enough to eat (this is because it's impossible to eat enough if you're worried about the next meal)--and I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh. I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything. I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer. (C) 1998 Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. All rights reserved. ISBN: 1-883011-52-3 Return to the Books Home Page Return to the Books Home Page

Subscribe to our newsletter

15 great articles and essays by james baldwin, stranger in the village, notes of a native son, how to cool it by james baldwin, letter from a region in my mind, a talk to teachers, the american dream is at the expense of the american negro by james baldwin, autobiographical notes by james baldwin, a report from occupied territory by james baldwin, if black english isn’t a language, then tell me, what is, many thousands gone, a letter to my nephew, sonny’s blues, the creative process, 150 great articles and essays.

On Literature

Everybody’s protest novel, why i stopped hating shakespeare by james baldwin, collected essays : notes of a native son / nobody knows my name / the fire next time / no name in the street / the devil finds work / other essays.

About The Electric Typewriter We search the net to bring you the best nonfiction, articles, essays and journalism

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Letter from a Region in My Mind

By James Baldwin

Take up the White Man’s burden— Ye dare not stoop to less— Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloak your weariness; By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples Shall weigh your Gods and you.

Down at the cross where my Saviour died, Down where for cleansing from sin I cried, There to my heart was the blood applied, Singing glory to His name!

I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use “religious” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls of a church—in fact, of our church—and I also supposed that God and safety were synonymous. The word “safety” brings us to the real meaning of the word “religious” as we use it. Therefore, to state it in another, more accurate way, I became, during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid—afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without. What I saw around me that summer in Harlem was what I had always seen; nothing had changed. But now, without any warning, the whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue had become a personal menace. It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances. Many of my comrades were clearly headed for the Avenue, and my father said that I was headed that way, too. My friends began to drink and smoke, and embarked—at first avid, then groaning—on their sexual careers. Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices. Like the strangers on the Avenue, they became, in the twinkling of an eye, unutterably different and fantastically present . Owing to the way I had been raised, the abrupt discomfort that all this aroused in me and the fact that I had no idea what my voice or my mind or my body was likely to do next caused me to consider myself one of the most depraved people on earth. Matters were not helped by the fact that these holy girls seemed rather to enjoy my terrified lapses, our grim, guilty, tormented experiments, which were at once as chill and joyless as the Russian steppes and hotter, by far, than all the fires of Hell.

Yet there was something deeper than these changes, and less definable, that frightened me. It was real in both the boys and the girls, but it was, somehow, more vivid in the boys. In the case of the girls, one watched them turning into matrons before they had become women. They began to manifest a curious and really rather terrifying single-mindedness. It is hard to say exactly how this was conveyed: something implacable in the set of the lips, something farseeing (seeing what?) in the eyes, some new and crushing determination in the walk, something peremptory in the voice. They did not tease us, the boys, any more; they reprimanded us sharply, saying, “You better be thinking about your soul!” For the girls also saw the evidence on the Avenue, knew what the price would be, for them, of one misstep, knew that they had to be protected and that we were the only protection there was. They understood that they must act as God’s decoys, saving the souls of the boys for Jesus and binding the bodies of the boys in marriage. For this was the beginning of our burning time, and “It is better,” said St. Paul—who elsewhere, with a most unusual and stunning exactness, described himself as a “wretched man”—“to marry than to burn.” And I began to feel in the boys a curious, wary, bewildered despair, as though they were now settling in for the long, hard winter of life. I did not know then what it was that I was reacting to; I put it to myself that they were letting themselves go. In the same way that the girls were destined to gain as much weight as their mothers, the boys, it was clear, would rise no higher than their fathers. School began to reveal itself, therefore, as a child’s game that one could not win, and boys dropped out of school and went to work. My father wanted me to do the same. I refused, even though I no longer had any illusions about what an education could do for me; I had already encountered too many college-graduate handymen. My friends were now “downtown,” busy, as they put it, “fighting the man.” They began to care less about the way they looked, the way they dressed, the things they did; presently, one found them in twos and threes and fours, in a hallway, sharing a jug of wine or a bottle of whiskey, talking, cursing, fighting, sometimes weeping: lost, and unable to say what it was that oppressed them, except that they knew it was “the man”—the white man. And there seemed to be no way whatever to remove this cloud that stood between them and the sun, between them and love and life and power, between them and whatever it was that they wanted. One did not have to be very bright to realize how little one could do to change one’s situation; one did not have to be abnormally sensitive to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and gratuitous humiliation and danger one encountered every working day, all day long. The humiliation did not apply merely to working days, or workers; I was thirteen and was crossing Fifth Avenue on my way to the Forty-second Street library, and the cop in the middle of the street muttered as I passed him, “Why don’t you niggers stay uptown where you belong?” When I was ten, and didn’t look, certainly, any older, two policemen amused themselves with me by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and probable sexual prowess, and, for good measure, leaving me flat on my back in one of Harlem’s empty lots. Just before and then during the Second World War, many of my friends fled into the service, all to be changed there, and rarely for the better, many to be ruined, and many to die. Others fled to other states and cities—that is, to other ghettos. Some went on wine or whiskey or the needle, and are still on it. And others, like me, fled into the church.

For the wages of sin were visible everywhere, in every wine-stained and urine-splashed hallway, in every clanging ambulance bell, in every scar on the faces of the pimps and their whores, in every helpless, newborn baby being brought into this danger, in every knife and pistol fight on the Avenue, and in every disastrous bulletin: a cousin, mother of six, suddenly gone mad, the children parcelled out here and there; an indestructible aunt rewarded for years of hard labor by a slow, agonizing death in a terrible small room; someone’s bright son blown into eternity by his own hand; another turned robber and carried off to jail. It was a summer of dreadful speculations and discoveries, of which these were not the worst. Crime became real, for example—for the first time—not as a possibility but as the possibility. One would never defeat one’s circumstances by working and saving one’s pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear. It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else—housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers—would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities. Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough. There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

People more advantageously placed than we in Harlem were, and are, will no doubt find the psychology and the view of human nature sketched above dismal and shocking in the extreme. But the Negro’s experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live. His own condition is overwhelming proof that white people do not live by these standards. Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people. Even the most doltish and servile Negro could scarcely fail to be impressed by the disparity between his situation and that of the people for whom he worked; Negroes who were neither doltish nor servile did not feel that they were doing anything wrong when they robbed white people. In spite of the Puritan-Yankee equation of virtue with well-being, Negroes had excellent reasons for doubting that money was made or kept by any very striking adherence to the Christian virtues; it certainly did not work that way for black Christians. In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever. And those virtues preached but not practiced by the white world were merely another means of holding Negroes in subjection.

It turned out, then, that summer, that the moral barriers that I had supposed to exist between me and the dangers of a criminal career were so tenuous as to be nearly nonexistent. I certainly could not discover any principled reason for not becoming a criminal, and it is not my poor, God-fearing parents who are to be indicted for the lack but this society. I was icily determined—more determined, really, than I then knew—never to make my peace with the ghetto but to die and go to Hell before I would let any white man spit on me, before I would accept my “place” in this republic. I did not intend to allow the white people of this country to tell me who I was, and limit me that way, and polish me off that way. And yet, of course, at the same time, I was being spat on and defined and described and limited, and could have been polished off with no effort whatever. Every Negro boy—in my situation during those years, at least—who reaches this point realizes, at once, profoundly, because he wants to live, that he stands in great peril and must find, with speed, a “thing,” a gimmick, to lift him out, to start him on his way. And it does not matter what the gimmick is. It was this last realization that terrified me and—since it revealed that the door opened on so many dangers—helped to hurl me into the church. And, by an unforeseeable paradox, it was my career in the church that turned out, precisely, to be my gimmick.

For when I tried to assess my capabilities, I realized that I had almost none. In order to achieve the life I wanted, I had been dealt, it seemed to me, the worst possible hand. I could not become a prizefighter—many of us tried but very few succeeded. I could not sing. I could not dance. I had been well conditioned by the world in which I grew up, so I did not yet dare take the idea of becoming a writer seriously. The only other possibility seemed to involve my becoming one of the sordid people on the Avenue, who were not really as sordid as I then imagined but who frightened me terribly, both because I did not want to live that life and because of what they made me feel. Everything inflamed me, and that was bad enough, but I myself had also become a source of fire and temptation. I had been far too well raised, alas, to suppose that any of the extremely explicit overtures made to me that summer, sometimes by boys and girls but also, more alarmingly, by older men and women, had anything to do with my attractiveness. On the contrary, since the Harlem idea of seduction is, to put it mildly, blunt, whatever these people saw in me merely confirmed my sense of my depravity.

It is certainly sad that the awakening of one’s senses should lead to such a merciless judgment of oneself—to say nothing of the time and anguish one spends in the effort to arrive at any other—but it is also inevitable that a literal attempt to mortify the flesh should be made among black people like those with whom I grew up. Negroes in this country—and Negroes do not, strictly or legally speaking, exist in any other—are taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world. This world is white and they are black. White people hold the power, which means that they are superior to blacks (intrinsically, that is: God decreed it so), and the world has innumerable ways of making this difference known and felt and feared. Long before the Negro child perceives this difference, and even longer before he understands it, he has begun to react to it, he has begun to be controlled by it. Every effort made by the child’s elders to prepare him for a fate from which they cannot protect him causes him secretly, in terror, to begin to await, without knowing that he is doing so, his mysterious and inexorable punishment. He must be “good” not only in order to please his parents and not only to avoid being punished by them; behind their authority stands another, nameless and impersonal, infinitely harder to please, and bottomlessly cruel. And this filters into the child’s consciousness through his parents’ tone of voice as he is being exhorted, punished, or loved; in the sudden, uncontrollable note of fear heard in his mother’s or his father’s voice when he has strayed beyond some particular boundary. He does not know what the boundary is, and he can get no explanation of it, which is frightening enough, but the fear he hears in the voices of his elders is more frightening still. The fear that I heard in my father’s voice, for example, when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction. A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other. He reacts to the fear in his parents’ voices because his parents hold up the world for him and he has no protection without them. I defended myself, as I imagined, against the fear my father made me feel by remembering that he was very old-fashioned. Also, I prided myself on the fact that I already knew how to outwit him. To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced. As for one’s wits, it is just not true that one can live by them—not, that is, if one wishes really to live. That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church.

As I look back, everything I did seems curiously deliberate, though it certainly did not seem deliberate then. For example, I did not join the church of which my father was a member and in which he preached. My best friend in school, who attended a different church, had already “surrendered his life to the Lord,” and he was very anxious about my soul’s salvation. (I wasn’t, but any human attention was better than none.) One Saturday afternoon, he took me to his church. There were no services that day, and the church was empty, except for some women cleaning and some other women praying. My friend took me into the back room to meet his pastor—a woman. There she sat, in her robes, smiling, an extremely proud and handsome woman, with Africa, Europe, and the America of the American Indian blended in her face. She was perhaps forty-five or fifty at this time, and in our world she was a very celebrated woman. My friend was about to introduce me when she looked at me and smiled and said, “Whose little boy are you? “ Now this, unbelievably, was precisely the phrase used by pimps and racketeers on the Avenue when they suggested, both humorously and intensely, that I “hang out” with them. Perhaps part of the terror they had caused me to feel came from the fact that I unquestionably wanted to be somebody’s little boy. I was so frightened, and at the mercy of so many conundrums, that inevitably, that summer, someone would have taken me over; one doesn’t, in Harlem, long remain standing on any auction block. It was my good luck—perhaps—that I found myself in the church racket instead of some other, and surrendered to a spiritual seduction long before I came to any carnal knowledge. For when the pastor asked me, with that marvellous smile, “Whose little boy are you?” my heart replied at once, “Why, yours.”

The summer wore on, and things got worse. I became more guilty and more frightened, and kept all this bottled up inside me, and naturally, inescapably, one night, when this woman had finished preaching, everything came roaring, screaming, crying out, and I fell to the ground before the altar. It was the strangest sensation I have ever had in my life—up to that time, or since. I had not known that it was going to happen, or that it could happen. One moment I was on my feet, singing and clapping and, at the same time, working out in my head the plot of a play I was working on then; the next moment, with no transition, no sensation of falling, I was on my back, with the lights beating down into my face and all the vertical saints above me. I did not know what I was doing down so low, or how I had got there. And the anguish that filled me cannot be described. It moved in me like one of those floods that devastate counties, tearing everything down, tearing children from their parents and lovers from each other, and making everything an unrecognizable waste. All I really remember is the pain, the unspeakable pain; it was as though I were yelling up to Heaven and Heaven would not hear me. And if Heaven would not hear me, if love could not descend from Heaven—to wash me, to make me clean—then utter disaster was my portion. Yes, it does indeed mean something—something unspeakable—to be born, in a white country, an Anglo-Teutonic, antisexual country, black. You very soon, without knowing it, give up all hope of communion. Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away. And the universe is simply a sounding drum; there is no way, no way whatever, so it seemed then and has sometimes seemed since, to get through a life, to love your wife and children, or your friends, or your mother and father, or to be loved. The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people , has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs—as who has not?—of human love, God’s love alone is left. But God—and I felt this even then, so long ago, on that tremendous floor, unwillingly—is white. And if His love was so great, and if He loved all His children, why were we, the blacks, cast down so far? Why? In spite of all I said thereafter, I found no answer on the floor—not that answer, anyway—and I was on the floor all night. Over me, to bring me “through,” the saints sang and rejoiced and prayed. And in the morning, when they raised me, they told me that I was “save.”

Well, indeed I was, in a way, for I was utterly drained and exhausted, and released, for the first time, from all my guilty torment. I was aware then only of my relief. For many years, I could not ask myself why human relief had to be achieved in a fashion at once so pagan and so desperate—in a fashion at once so unspeakably old and so unutterably new. And by the time I was able to ask myself this question, I was also able to see that the principles governing the rites and customs of the churches in which I grew up did not differ from the principles governing the rites and customs of other churches, white. The principles were Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two others. I would love to believe that the principles were Faith, Hope, and Charity, but this is clearly not so for most Christians, or for what we call the Christian world.

I was saved. But at the same time, out of a deep, adolescent cunning I do not pretend to understand, I realized immediately that I could not remain in the church merely as another worshipper. I would have to give myself something to do, in order not to be too bored and find myself among all the wretched unsaved of the Avenue. And I don’t doubt that I also intended to best my father on his own ground. Anyway, very shortly after I joined the church, I became a preacher—a Young Minister—and I remained in the pulpit for more than three years. My youth quickly made me a much bigger drawing card than my father. I pushed this advantage ruthlessly, for it was the most effective means I had found of breaking his hold over me. That was the most frightening time of my life, and quite the most dishonest, and the resulting hysteria lent great passion to my sermons—for a while. I relished the attention and the relative immunity from punishment that my new status gave me, and I relished, above all, the sudden right to privacy. It had to be recognized, after all, that I was still a schoolboy, with my schoolwork to do, and I was also expected to prepare at least one sermon a week. During what we may call my heyday, I preached much more often than that. This meant that there were hours and even whole days when I could not be interrupted—not even by my father. I had immobilized him. It took rather more time for me to realize that I had also immobilized myself, and had escaped from nothing whatever.

The church was very exciting. It took a long time for me to disengage myself from this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral level, I never really have, and never will. There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to rock. Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, “the Word”—when the church and I were one. Their pain and their joy were mine, and mine were theirs—they surrendered their pain and joy to me, I surrendered mine to them-and their cries of “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” and “Yes, Lord’ ” and “Praise His name!” and “Preach it, brother!” sustained and whipped on my solos until we all became equal, wringing wet, singing and dancing, in anguish and rejoicing, at the foot of the altar. It was, for a long time, in spite of—or, not inconceivably because of—the shabbiness of my motives, my only sustenance, my meat and drink. I rushed home from school, to the church, to the altar, to be alone there, to commune with Jesus, my dearest Friend, who would never fail me, who knew all the secrets of my heart. Perhaps He did, but I didn’t, and the bargain we struck, actually, down there at the foot of the cross, was that He would never let me find out.

He failed his bargain. He was a much better Man than I took Him for. It happened, as things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it—the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress—from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoevski. By this time, I was in a high school that was predominantly Jewish. This meant that I was surrounded by people who were, by definition, beyond any hope of salvation, who laughed at the tracts and leaflets I brought to school, and who pointed out that the Gospels had been written long after the death of Christ. This might not have been so distressing if it had not forced me to read the tracts and leaflets myself, for they were indeed, unless one believed their message already, impossible to believe. I remember feeling dimly that there was a kind of blackmail in it. People, I felt, ought to love the Lord because they loved Him, and not because they were afraid of going to Hell. I was forced, reluctantly, to realize that the Bible itself had been written by men, and translated by men out of languages I could not read, and I was already, without quite admitting it to myself, terribly involved with the effort of putting words on paper. Of course, I had the rebuttal ready: These men had all been operating under divine inspiration. Had they? All of them? And I also knew by now, alas, far more about divine inspiration than I dared admit, for I knew how I worked myself up into my own visions, and how frequently—indeed, incessantly—the visions God granted to me differed from the visions He granted to my father. I did not understand the dreams I had at night, but I knew that they were not holy. For that matter, I knew that my waking hours were far from holy. I spent most of my time in a state of repentance for things I had vividly desired to do but had not done. The fact that I was dealing with Jews brought the whole question of color, which I had been desperately avoiding, into the terrified center of my mind. I realized that the Bible had been written by white men. I knew that, according to many Christians, I was a descendant of Ham, who had been cursed, and that I was therefore predestined to be a slave. This had nothing to do with anything I was, or contained, or could become; my fate had been sealed forever, from the beginning of time. And it seemed, indeed, when one looked out over Christendom, that this was what Christendom effectively believed. It was certainly the way it behaved. I remembered the Italian priests and bishops blessing Italian boys who were on their way to Ethiopia.

Again, the Jewish boys in high school were troubling because I could find no point of connection between them and the Jewish pawnbrokers and landlords and grocery-store owners in Harlem. I knew that these people were Jews—God knows I was told it often enough—but I thought of them only as white. Jews, as such, until I got to high school, were all incarcerated in the Old Testament, and their names were Abraham, Moses, Daniel, Ezekiel, and Job, and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. It was bewildering to find them so many miles and centuries out of Egypt, and so far from the fiery furnace. My best friend in high school was a Jew. He came to our house once, and afterward my father asked, as he asked about everyone, “Is he a Christian?”—by which he meant “Is he saved?” I really do not know whether my answer came out of innocence or venom, but I said, coldly, “No. He’s Jewish.” My father slammed me across the face with his great palm, and in that moment everything flooded back—all the hatred and all the fear, and the depth of a merciless resolve to kill my father rather than allow my father to kill me—and I knew that all those sermons and tears and all that repentance and rejoicing had changed nothing. I wondered if I was expected to be glad that a friend of mine, or anyone, was to be tormented forever in Hell, and I also thought, suddenly, of the Jews in another Christian nation, Germany. They were not so far from the fiery furnace after all, and my best friend might have been one of them. I told my father, “He’s a better Christian than you are,” and walked out of the house. The battle between us was in the open, but that was all right; it was almost a relief. A more deadly struggle had begun.

Being in the pulpit was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked. I knew the other ministers and knew the quality of their lives. And I don’t mean to suggest by this the “Elmer Gantry” sort of hypocrisy concerning sensuality; it was a deeper, deadlier, and more subtle hypocrisy than that, and a little honest sensuality, or a lot, would have been like water in an extremely bitter desert. I knew how to work on a congregation until the last dime was surrendered—it was not very hard to do—and I knew where the money for “the Lord’s work” went. I knew, though I did not wish to know it, that I had no respect for the people with whom I worked. I could not have said it then, but I also knew that if I continued I would soon have no respect for myself. And the fact that I was “the young Brother Baldwin” increased my value with those same pimps and racketeers who had helped to stampede me into the church in the first place. They still saw the little boy they intended to take over. They were waiting for me to come to my senses and realize that I was in a very lucrative business. They knew that I did not yet realize this, and also that I had not yet begun to suspect where my own needs, coming up (they were very patient), could drive me. They themselves did know the score, and they knew that the odds were in their favor. And, really, I knew it, too. I was even lonelier and more vulnerable than I had been before. And the blood of the Lamb had not cleansed me in any way whatever. I was just as black as I had been the day that I was born. Therefore, when I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike. When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life. Were only Negroes to gain this crown? Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto? Perhaps I might have been able to reconcile myself even to this if I had been able to believe that there was any loving-kindness to be found in the haven I represented. But I had been in the pulpit too long and I had seen too many monstrous things. I don’t refer merely to the glaring fact that the minister eventually acquires houses and Cadillacs while the faithful continue to scrub floors and drop their dimes and quarters and dollars into the plate. I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door. When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that that meant every body . But no. It applied only to those who believed as we did, and it did not apply to white people at all. I was told by a minister, for example, that I should never, on any public conveyance, under any circumstances, rise and give my seat to a white woman. White men never rose for Negro women. Well, that was true enough, in the main—I saw his point. But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded. But what I did was my responsibility, and I would have to answer, too—unless, of course, there was also in Heaven a special dispensation for the benighted black, who was not to be judged in the same way as other human beings, or angels. It probably occurred to me around this time that the vision people hold of the world to come is but a reflection, with predictable wishful distortions, of the world in which they live. And this did not apply only to Negroes, who were no more “simple” or “spontaneous” or “Christian” than anybody else—who were merely more oppressed. In the same way that we, for white people, were the descendants of Ham, and were cursed forever, white people were, for us, the descendants of Cain. And the passion with which we loved the Lord was a measure of how deeply we feared and distrusted and, in the end, hated almost all strangers, always, and avoided and despised ourselves.

But I cannot leave it at that; there is more to it than that. In spite of everything, there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare. Perhaps we were, all of us—pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children—bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love. I remember, anyway, church suppers and outings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about “the man.” We had the liquor, the chicken, the music, and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not. This is the freedom that one hears in some gospel songs, for example, and in jazz. In all jazz, and especially in the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them—sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been “down the line,” as the song puts it, know what this music is about. I think it was Big Bill Broonzy who used to sing “I Feel So Good,” a really joyful song about a man who is on his way to the railroad station to meet his girl. She’s coming home. It is the singer’s incredibly moving exuberance that makes one realize how leaden the time must have been while she was gone. There is no guarantee that she will stay this time, either, as the singer clearly knows, and, in fact, she has not yet actually arrived. Tonight, or tomorrow, or within the next five minutes, he may very well be singing “Lonesome in My Bedroom,” or insisting, “Ain’t we, ain’t we, going to make it all right? Well, if we don’t today, we will tomorrow night.” White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality and do not any longer understand it. The word “sensual” is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

White Christians have also forgotten several elementary historical details. They have forgotten that the religion that is now identified with their virtue and their power—“God is on our side,” says Dr. Verwoerd—came out of a rocky piece of ground in what is now known as the Middle East before color was invented, and that in order for the Christian church to be established, Christ had to be put to death, by Rome, and that the real architect of the Christian church was not the disreputable, sun-baked Hebrew who gave it his name but the mercilessly fanatical and self-righteous St. Paul. The energy that was buried with the rise of the Christian nations must come back into the world; nothing can prevent it. Many of us, I think, both long to see this happen and are terrified of it, for though this transformation contains the hope of liberation, it also imposes a necessity for great change. But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reëxamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.

“The white man’s Heaven,” sings a Black Muslim minister, “is the black man’s Hell.” One may object—possibly—that this puts the matter somewhat too simply, but the song is true, and it has been true for as long as white men have ruled the world. The Africans put it another way: When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible. The struggle, therefore, that now begins in the world is extremely complex, involving the historical role of Christianity in the realm of power—that is, politics—and in the realm of morals. In the realm of power, Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty—necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels. This particular true faith, moreover, is more deeply concerned about the soul than it is about the body, to which fact the flesh (and the corpses) of countless infidels bears witness. It goes without saying, then, that whoever questions the authority of the true faith also contests the right of the nations that hold this faith to rule over him—contests, in short, their title to his land. The spreading of the Gospel, regardless of the motives or the integrity or the heroism of some of the missionaries, was an absolutely indispensable justification for the planting of the flag. Priests and nuns and schoolteachers helped to protect and sanctify the power that was so ruthlessly being used by people who were indeed seeking a city, but not one in the heavens, and one to be made, very definitely, by captive hands. The Christian church itself—again, as distinguished from some of its ministers—sanctified and rejoiced in the conquests of the flag, and encouraged, if it did not formulate, the belief that conquest, with the resulting relative well-being of the Western populations, was proof of the favor of God. God had come a long way from the desert—but then so had Allah, though in a very different direction. God, going north, and rising on the wings of power, had become white, and Allah, out of power, and on the dark side of Heaven, had become—for all practical purposes, anyway—black. Thus, in the realm of morals the role of Christianity has been, at best, ambivalent. Even leaving out of account the remarkable arrogance that assumed that the ways and morals of others were inferior to those of Christians, and that they therefore had every right, and could use any means, to change them, the collision between cultures—and the schizophrenia in the mind of Christendom—had rendered the domain of morals as chartless as the sea once was, and as treacherous as the sea still is. It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

I had heard a great deal, long before I finally met him, of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and of the Nation of Islam movement, of which he is the leader. I paid very little attention to what I heard, because the burden of his message did not strike me as being very original; I had been hearing variations of it all my life. I sometimes found myself in Harlem on Saturday nights, and I stood in the crowds, at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, and listened to the Muslim speakers. But I had heard hundreds of such speeches—or so it seemed to me at first. Anyway, I have long had a very definite tendency to tune out the moment I come anywhere near either a pulpit or a soapbox. What these men were saying about white people I had often heard before. And I dismissed the Nation of Islam’s demand for a separate black economy in America, which I had also heard before, as willful, and even mischievous, nonsense. Then two things caused me to begin to listen to the speeches, and one was the behavior of the police. After all, I had seen men dragged from their platforms on this very corner for saying less virulent things, and I had seen many crowds dispersed by policemen, with clubs or on horseback. But the policemen were doing nothing now. Obviously, this was not because they had become more human but because they were under orders and because they were afraid. And indeed they were, and I was delighted to see it. There they stood, in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club or a fist or a gun. I might have pitied them if I had not found myself in their hands so often and discovered, through ugly experience, what they were like when they held the power and what they were like when you held the power. The behavior of the crowd, its silent intensity, was the other thing that forced me to reassess the speakers and their message. I sometimes think, with despair, that Americans will swallow whole any political speech whatever—we’ve been doing very little else, these last, bad years—so it may not mean anything to say that this sense of integrity, after what Harlem, especially, has been through in the way of demagogues, was a very startling change. Still, the speakers had an air of utter dedication, and the people looked toward them with a kind of intelligence of hope on their faces—not as though they were being consoled or drugged but as though they were being jolted.

Power was the subject of the speeches I heard. We were offered, as Nation of Islam doctrine, historical and divine proof that all white people are cursed, and are devils, and are about to be brought down. This has been revealed by Allah Himself to His prophet, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. The white man’s rule will be ended forever in ten or fifteen years (and it must be conceded that all present signs would seem to bear witness to the accuracy of the prophet’s statement). The crowd seemed to swallow this theology with no effort—all crowds do swallow theology this way, I gather, in both sides of Jerusalem, in Istanbul, and in Rome—and, as theology goes, it was no more indigestible than the more familiar brand asserting that there is a curse on the sons of Ham. No more, and no less, and it had been designed for the same purpose; namely, the sanctification of power. But very little time was spent on theology, for one did not need to prove to a Harlem audience that all white men were devils. They were merely glad to have, at last, divine corroboration of their experience, to hear—and it was a tremendous thing to hear—that they had been lied to for all these years and generations, and that their captivity was ending, for God was black. Why were they hearing it now, since this was not the first time it had been said? I had heard it many times, from various prophets, during all the years that I was growing up. Elijah Muhammad himself has now been carrying the same message for more than thirty years; he is not an overnight sensation, and we owe his ministry, I am told, to the fact that when he was a child of six or so, his father was lynched before his eyes. (So much for states’ rights.) And now, suddenly, people who have never before been able to hear this message hear it, and believe it, and are changed. Elijah Muhammad has been able to do what generations of welfare workers and committees and resolutions and reports and housing projects and playgrounds have failed to do: to heal and redeem drunkards and junkies, to convert people who have come out of prison and to keep them out, to make men chaste and women virtuous, and to invest both the male and the female with a pride and a serenity that hang about them like an unfailing light. He has done all these things, which our Christian church has spectacularly failed to do. How has Elijah managed it?

Well, in a way—and I have no wish to minimize his peculiar role and his peculiar achievement—it is not he who has done it but time. Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue. In those days, not so very long ago, when the priests of that church which stands in Rome gave God’s blessing to Italian boys being sent out to ravage a defenseless black country—which until that event, incidentally, had not considered itself to be black—it was not possible to believe in a black God. To entertain such a belief would have been to entertain madness. But time has passed, and in that time the Christian world has revealed itself as morally bankrupt and politically unstable. The Tunisians were quite right in 1956—and it was a very significant moment in Western (and African) history—when they countered the French justification for remaining in North Africa with the question “Are the French ready for self-government?” Again, the terms “civilized” and “Christian” begin to have a very strange ring, particularly in the ears of those who have been judged to be neither civilized nor Christian, when a Christian nation surrenders to a foul and violent orgy, as Germany did during the Third Reich. For the crime of their ancestry, millions of people in the middle of the twentieth century, and in the heart of Europe—God’s citadel—were sent to a death so calculated, so hideous, and so prolonged that no age before this enlightened one had been able to imagine it, much less achieve and record it. Furthermore, those beneath the western heel, unlike those within the West, are aware that Germany’s current role in Europe is to act as a bulwark against the “uncivilized” hordes, and since power is what the powerless want, they understand very well what we of the West want to keep, and are not deluded by our talk of a freedom that we have never been willing to share with them. From my own point of view, the fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority, except in technological terms. White people were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But I very much doubt whether black people were astounded—at least, in the same way. For my part, the fate of the Jews, and the world’s indifference to it, frightened me very much. I could not but feel, in those sorrowful years, that this human indifference, concerning which I knew so much already, would be my portion on the day that the United States decided to murder its Negroes systematically instead of little by little and catch-as-catch-can. I was, of course, authoritatively assured that what had happened to the Jews in Germany could not happen to the Negroes in America, but I thought, bleakly, that the German Jews had probably believed similar counsellors, and, again, I could not share the white man’s vision of himself for the very good reason that white men in America do not behave toward black men the way they behave toward each other. When a white man faces a black man, especially if the black man is helpless, terrible things are revealed. I know. I have been carried into precinct basements often enough, and I have seen and heard and endured the secrets of desperate white men and women, which they knew were safe with me, because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.

The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War marks, for me, a turning point in the Negro’s relation to America. To put it briefly, and somewhat too simply, a certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded. One began to pity them, or to hate them. You must put yourself in the skin of a man who is wearing the uniform of his country, is a candidate for death in its defense, and who is called a “nigger” by his comrades-in-arms and his officers; who is almost always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to do; who knows that the white G.I. has informed the Europeans that he is subhuman (so much for the American male’s sexual security); who does not dance at the U.S.O. the night white soldiers dance there, and does not drink in the same bars white soldiers drink in; and who watches German prisoners of war being treated by Americans with more human dignity than he has ever received at their hands. And who, at the same time, as a human being, is far freer in a strange land than he has ever been at home. Home! The very word begins to have a despairing and diabolical ring. You must consider what happens to this citizen, after all he has endured, when he returns—home: starch, in his shoes, for a job, for a place to live; ride, in his skin, on segregated buses; see, with his eyes, the signs saying “White” and “Colored,” and especially the signs that say “White Ladies” and “Colored Women ;” look into the eyes of his wife; look into the eyes of his son; listen, with his ears, to political speeches, North and South; imagine yourself being told to “wait.” And all this is happening in the richest and freest country in the world, and in the middle of the twentieth century. The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless. I and two Negro acquaintances, all of us well past thirty, and looking it, were in the bar of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport several months ago, and the bartender refused to serve us, because, he said, we looked too young. It took a vast amount of patience not to strangle him, and great insistence and some luck to get the manager, who defended his bartender on the ground that he was “new” and had not yet, presumably, learned how to distinguish between a Negro boy of twenty and a Negro “boy” of thirty-seven. Well, we were served, finally, of course, but by this time no amount of Scotch would have helped us. The bar was very crowded, and our altercation had been extremely noisy; not one customer in the bar had done anything to help us. When it was over, and the three of us stood at the bar trembling with rage and frustration, and drinking—and trapped, now, in the airport, for we had deliberately come early in order to have a few drinks and to eat—a young white man standing near us asked if we were students. I suppose he thought that this was the only possible explanation for our putting up a fight. I told him that he hadn’t wanted to talk to us earlier and we didn’t want to talk to him now. The reply visibly hurt his feelings, and this, in turn, caused me to despise him. But when one of us, a Korean War veteran, told this young man that the fight we had been having in the bar had been his fight, too, the young man said, “I lost my conscience a long time ago,” and turned and walked out. I know that one would rather not think so, but this young man is typical. So, on the basis of the evidence, had everyone else in the bar lost his conscience. A few years ago, I would have hated these people with all my heart. Now I pitied them, pitied them in order not to despise them. And this is not the happiest way to feel toward one’s countrymen.

But, in the end, it is the threat of universal extinction hanging over all the world today that changes, totally and forever, the nature of reality and brings into devastating question the true meaning of man’s history. We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement. We have taken this journey and arrived at this place in God’s name. This, then, is the best that God (the white God) can do. If that is so, then it is time to replace Him—replace Him with what? And this void, this despair, this torment is felt everywhere in the West, from the streets of Stockholm to the churches of New Orleans and the sidewalks of Harlem.

God is black. All black men belong to Islam; they have been chosen And Islam shall rule the world. The dream, the sentiment is old; only the color is new. And it is this dream, this sweet possibility, that thousands of oppressed black men and women in this country now carry away with them after the Muslim minister has spoken, through the dark, noisome ghetto streets, into the hovels where so many have perished. The white God has not delivered them; perhaps the black God will.

While I was in Chicago last summer, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad invited me to have dinner at his home. This is a stately mansion on Chicago’s South Side, and it is the headquarters of the Nation of Islam movement. I had not gone to Chicago to meet Elijah Muhammad—he was not in my thoughts at all—but the moment I received the invitation, it occurred to me that I ought to have expected it. In a way, I owe the invitation to the incredible, abysmal, and really cowardly obtuseness of white liberals. Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals’ attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge—revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man. When Malcolm X, who is considered the movement’s second-in-command, and heir apparent, points out that the cry of “violence” was not raised, for example, when the Israelis fought to regain Israel, and, indeed, is raised only when black men indicate that they will fight for their rights, he is speaking the truth. The conquests of England, every single one of them bloody, are part of what Americans have in mind when they speak of England’s glory. In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks, and the only way to defeat Malcolm’s point is to concede it and then ask oneself why this is so. Malcolm’s statement is not answered by references to the triumphs of the N.A.A.C.P., the more particularly since very few liberals have any notion of how long, how costly, and how heartbreaking a task it is to gather the evidence that one can carry into court, or how long such court battles take. Neither is it answered by references to the student sit-in movement, if only because not all Negroes are students and not all of them live in the South. I, in any case, certainly refuse to be put in the position of denying the truth of Malcolm’s statements simply because I disagree with his conclusions, or in order to pacify the liberal conscience. Things are as bad as the Muslims say they are—in fact, they are worse, and the Muslims do not help matters—but there is no reason that black men should be expected to be more patient, more forbearing, more farseeing than whites; indeed, quite the contrary. The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes—I am not speaking now of its tactical value, another matter altogether—is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often. At the end of a television program on which Malcolm X and I both appeared, Malcolm was stopped by a white member of the audience who said, “I have a thousand dollars and an acre of land. What’s going to happen to me?” I admired the directness of the man’s question, but I didn’t hear Malcolm’s reply, because I was trying to explain to someone else that the situation of the Irish a hundred years ago and the situation of the Negro today cannot very usefully he compared. Negroes were brought here in chains long before the Irish ever thought of leaving Ireland; what manner of consolation is it to be told that emigrants arriving here—voluntarily—long after you did have risen far above you? In the hall, as I was waiting for the elevator, someone shook my hand and said, “Goodbye, Mr. James Baldwin. We’ll soon be addressing you as Mr. James X.” And I thought, for an awful moment, My God, if this goes on much longer, you probably will. Elijah Muhammad had seen this show, I think, or another one, and he had been told about me. Therefore, late on a hot Sunday afternoon, I presented myself at his door.

I was frightened, because I had, in effect, been summoned into a royal presence. I was frightened for another reason, too. I knew the tension in me between love and power, between pain and rage, and the curious, the grinding way I remained extended between these poles—perpetually attempting to choose the better rather than the worse. But this choice was a choice in terms of a personal, a private better (I was, after all, a writer); what was its relevance in terms of a social worse? Here was the South Side—a million in captivity—stretching from this doorstep as far as the eye could see. And they didn’t even read; depressed populations don’t have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have been their help, didn’t, as far as could be discovered, read, either—they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes. Also, I knew that once I had entered the house, I couldn’t smoke or drink, and I felt guilty about the cigarettes in my pocket, as I had felt years ago when my friend first took me into his church. I was half an hour late, having got lost on the way here, and I felt as deserving of a scolding as a schoolboy.

The young man who came to the door—he was about thirty, perhaps, with a handsome, smiling face—didn’t seem to find my lateness offensive, and led me into a large room. On one side of the room sat half a dozen women, all in white; they were much occupied with a beautiful baby, who seemed to belong to the youngest of the women. On the other side of the room sat seven or eight men, young, dressed in dark suits, very much at ease, and very imposing. The sunlight came into the room with the peacefulness one remembers from rooms in one’s early childhood—a sunlight encountered later only in one’s dreams. I remember being astounded by the quietness, the ease, the peace, the taste. I was introduced, they greeted me with a genuine cordiality and respect—and the respect increased my fright, for it meant that they expected something of me that I knew in my heart, for their sakes, I could not give—and we sat down. Elijah Muhammad was not in the room. Conversation was slow, but not as stiff as I had feared it would be. They kept it going, for I simply did not know which subjects I could acceptably bring up. They knew more about me, and had read more of what I had written, than I had expected, and I wondered what they made of it all, what they took my usefulness to be. The women were carrying on their own conversation, in low tones; I gathered that they were not expected to take part in male conversations. A few women kept coming in and out of the room, apparently making preparations for dinner. We, the men, did not plunge deeply into any subject, for, clearly, we were all waiting for the appearance of Elijah. Presently, the men, one by one, left the room and returned. Then I was asked if I would like to wash, and I, too, walked down the hall to the bathroom. Shortly after I came back, we stood up, and Elijah entered.

I do not know what I had expected to see. I had read some of his speeches, and had heard fragments of others on the radio and on television, so I associated him with ferocity. But, no—the man who came into the room was small and slender, really very delicately put together, with a thin face, large, warm eyes, and a most winning smile. Something came into the room with him—his disciples’ joy at seeing him, his joy at seeing them. It was the kind of encounter one watches with a smile simply because it is so rare that people enjoy one another. He teased the women, like a father, with no hint of that ugly and unctuous flirtatiousness I knew so well from other churches, and they responded like that, with great freedom and yet from a great and loving distance. He had seen me when he came into the room, I knew, though he had not looked my way. I had the feeling, as he talked and laughed with the others, whom I could only think of as his children, that he was sizing me up, deciding something. Now he turned toward me, to welcome me, with that marvellous smile, and carried me back nearly twenty-four years, to that moment when the pastor had smiled at me and said, “Whose little boy are you?” I did not respond now as I had responded then, because there are some things (not many, alas!) that one cannot do twice. But I knew what he made me feel, how I was drawn toward his peculiar authority, how his smile promised to take the burden of my life off my shoulders. Take your burdens to the Lord and leave them there. The central quality in Elijah’s face is pain, and his smile is a witness to it—pain so old and deep and black that it becomes personal and particular only when he smiles. One wonders what he would sound like if he could sing. He turned to me, with that smile, and said something like “I’ve got a lot to say to you , but we’ll wait until we sit down .” And I laughed. He made me think of my father and me as we might have been if we had been friends.

In the dining room, there were two long tables; the men sat at one and the women at the other. Elijah was at the head of our table, and I was seated at his left. I can scarcely remember what we ate, except that it was plentiful, sane, and simple—so sane and simple that it made me feel extremely decadent, and I think that I drank, therefore, two glasses of milk. Elijah mentioned having seen me on television and said that it seemed to him that I was not yet brainwashed and was trying to become myself. He said this in a curiously unnerving way, his eyes looking into mine and one hand half hiding his lips, as though he were trying to conceal bad teeth. But his teeth were not bad. Then I remembered hearing that he had spent time in prison. I suppose that I would like to become myself, whatever that may mean, but I knew that Elijah’s meaning and mine were not the same. I said yes, I was trying to be me, but I did not know how to say more than that, and so I waited.

Whenever Elijah spoke, a kind of chorus arose from the table, saying “Yes, that’s right.” This began to set my teeth on edge. And Elijah himself had a further, unnerving habit, which was to ricochet his questions and comments off someone else on their way to you. Now, turning to the man on his right, he began to speak of the white devils with whom I had last appeared on TV: What had they made him (me) feel? I could not answer this and was not absolutely certain that I was expected to. The people referred to had certainly made me feel exasperated and useless, but I did not think of them as devils. Elijah went on about the crimes of white people, to this endless chorus of “Yes, that’s right.” Someone at the table said, “The white man sure is a devil. He proves that by his own actions.” I looked around. It was a very young man who had said this, scarcely more than a boy—very dark and sober, very bitter. Elijah began to speak of the Christian religion, of Christians, in this same soft, joking way. I began to see that Elijah’s power came from his single-mindedness. There is nothing calculated about him; he means every word he says. The real reason, according to Elijah, that I failed to realize that the white man was a devil was that I had been too long exposed to white teaching and had never received true instruction. “The so-called American Negro” is the only reason Allah has permitted the United States to endure so long; the white man’s time was up in 1913, but it is the will of Allah that this lost black nation, the black men of this country, be redeemed from their white masters and returned to the true faith, which is Islam. Until this is done—and it will be accomplished very soon—the total destruction of the white man is being delayed. Elijah’s mission is to return “the so-called Negro” to Islam, to separate the chosen of Allah from this doomed nation. Furthermore, the white man knows his history, knows himself to be a devil, and knows that his time is running out, and all his technology, psychology, science, and “tricknology” are being expended in the effort to prevent black men from hearing the truth. This truth is that at the very beginning of time there was not one white face to be found in all the universe. Black men ruled the earth and the black man was perfect. This is the truth concerning the era that white men now refer to as prehistoric. They want black men to believe that they, like white men, once lived in caves and swung from trees and ate their meat raw and did not have the power of speech. But this is not true. Black men were never in such a condition. Allah allowed the Devil, through his scientists, to carry on infernal experiments, which resulted, finally, in the creation of the devil known as the white man, and later, even more disastrously, in the creation of the white woman. And it was decreed that these monstrous creatures should rule the earth for a certain number of years—I forget how many thousand, but, in any case, their rule now is ending, and Allah, who had never approved of the creation of the white man in the first place (who knows him, in fact, to be not a man at all but a devil), is anxious to restore the rule of peace that the rise of the white man totally destroyed. There is thus, by definition, no virtue in white people, and since they are another creation entirely and can no more, by breeding, become black than a cat, by breeding, can become a horse, there is no hope for them.

There is nothing new in this merciless formulation except the explicitness of its symbols and the candor of its hatred. Its emotional tone is as familiar to me as my own skin; it is but another way of saying that sinners shall be bound in Hell a thousand years . That sinners have always, for American Negroes, been white is a truth we needn’t labor, and every American Negro, therefore, risks having the gates of paranoia close on him. In a society that is entirely hostile, and, by its nature, seems determined to cut you down—that has cut down so many in the past and cuts down so many every day—it begins to be almost impossible to distinguish a real from a fancied injury. One can very quickly cease to attempt this distinction, and, what is worse, one usually ceases to attempt it without realizing that one has done so. All doormen, for example, and all policemen have by now, for me, become exactly the same, and my style with them is designed simply to intimidate them before they can intimidate me. No doubt I am guilty of some injustice here, but it is irreducible, since I cannot risk assuming that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms. Most Negroes cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color. And this leads, imperceptibly but inevitably, to a state of mind in which, having long ago learned to expect the worst, one finds it very easy to believe the worst. The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it. In the beginning—and neither can this be overstated—a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he does not know what he has done to merit it. And when he realizes that the treatment accorded him has nothing to do with anything he has done, that the attempt of white people to destroy him—for that is what it is—is utterly gratuitous, it is not hard for him to think of white people as devils. For the horrors of the American Negro’s life there has been almost no language. The privacy of his experience, which is only beginning to be recognized in language, and which is denied or ignored in official and popular speech—hence the Negro idiom—lends credibility to any system that pretends to clarify it. And, in fact, the truth about the black man, as a historical entity and as a human being, has been hidden from him, deliberately and cruelly; the power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions. So every attempt is made to cut that black man down—not only was made yesterday but is made today. Who, then, is to say with authority where the root of so much anguish and evil lies? Why, then, is it not possible that all things began with the black man and that he was perfect—especially since this is precisely the claim that white people have put forward for themselves all these years? Furthermore, it is now absolutely clear that white people are a minority in the world—so severe a minority that they now look rather more like an invention—and that they cannot possibly hope to rule it any longer. If this is so, why is it not also possible that they achieved their original dominance by stealth and cunning and bloodshed and in opposition to the will of Heaven, and not, as they claim, by Heaven’s will? And if this is so, then the sword they have used so long against others can now, without mercy, be used against them. Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.

I said, at last, in answer to some other ricocheted question, “I left the church twenty years ago and I haven’t joined anything since.” It was my way of saying that I did not intend to join their movement, either.

“And what are you now?” Elijah asked.

I was in something of a bind, for I really could not say—could not allow myself to be stampeded into saying—that I was a Christian. “I? Now? Nothing.” This was not enough. “I’m a writer. I like doing things alone.” I heard myself saying this. Elijah smiled at me. “I don’t, anyway,” I said, finally, “think about it a great deal.”

Elijah said, to his right, “I think he ought to think about it all the deal,” and with this the table agreed. But there was nothing malicious or condemnatory in it. I had the stifling feeling that they knew I belonged to them but knew that I did not know it yet, that I remained unready, and that they were simply waiting, patiently, and with assurance, for me to discover the truth for myself. For where else, after all, could I go? I was black, and therefore a part of Islam, and would be saved from the holocaust awaiting the white world whether I would or no. My weak, deluded scruples could avail nothing against the iron word of the prophet.

I felt that I was back in my father’s house—as, indeed, in a way, I was—and I told Elijah that I did not care if white and black people married, and that I had many white friends. I would have no choice, if it came to it, but to perish with them, for (I said to myself, but not to Elijah), “I love a few people and they love me and some of them are white, and isn’t love more important than color?”

Elijah looked at me with great kindness and affection, great pity, as though he were reading my heart, and indicated, skeptically, that I might have white friends, or think I did, and they might be trying to be decent—now—but their time was up. It was almost as though he were saying, “They had their chance, man, and they goofed!”

And I looked around the table. I certainly had no evidence to give them that would outweigh Elijah’s authority or the evidence of their own lives or the reality of the streets outside. Yes, I knew two or three people, white, whom I would trust with my life, and I knew a few others, white, who were struggling as hard as they knew how, and with great effort and sweat and risk, to make the world more human. But how could I say this? One cannot argue with anyone’s experience or decision or belief. All my evidence would be thrown out of court as irrelevant to the main body of the case, for I could cite only exceptions. The South Side proved the justice of the indictment; the state of the world proved the justice of the indictment. Everything else, stretching back throughout recorded time, was merely a history of those exceptions who had tried to change the world and had failed. Was this true? Had they failed? How much depended on the point of view! For it would seem that a certain category of exceptions never failed to make the world worse—that category, precisely, for whom power is more real than love. And yet power is real, and many things, including, very often, love, cannot be achieved without it. In the eeriest way possible, I suddenly had a glimpse of what white people must go through at a dinner table when they are trying to prove that Negroes are not subhuman. I had almost said, after all, “Well, take my friend Mary,” and very nearly descended to a catalogue of those virtues that gave Mary the right to be alive. And in what hope? That Elijah and the others would nod their heads solemnly and say, at last, “Well, she’s all right—but the others! ”

And I looked again at the young faces around the table, and looked back at Elijah, who was saying that no people in history had ever been respected who had not owned their land. And the table said, “Yes, that’s right.” I could not deny the truth of this statement. For everyone else has, is , a nation, with a specific location and a flag—even, these days, the Jew. It is only “the so-called American Negro” who remains trapped, disinherited, and despised, in a nation that has kept him in bondage for nearly four hundred years and is still unable to recognize him as a human being. And the Black Muslims, along with many people who are not Muslims, no longer wish for a recognition so grudging and (should it ever be achieved) so tardy. Again, it cannot be denied that this point of view is abundantly justified by American Negro history. It is galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them. On the other hand, how is the American Negro now to form himself into a separate nation? For this—and not only from the Muslim point of view—would seem to be his only hope of not perishing in the American backwater and being entirely and forever forgotten, as though he had never existed at all and his travail had been for nothing.

Elijah’s intensity and the bitter isolation and disaffection of these young men and the despair of the streets outside had caused me to glimpse dimly what may now seem to be a fantasy, although, in an age so fantastical, I would hesitate to say precisely what a fantasy is. Let us say that the Muslims were to achieve the possession of the six or seven states that they claim are owed to Negroes by the United States as “back payment” for slave labor. Clearly, the United States would never surrender this territory, on any terms whatever, unless it found it impossible, for whatever reason, to hold it—unless, that is, the United States were to be reduced as a world power, exactly the way, and at the same degree of speed, that England has been forced to relinquish her Empire. (It is simply not true—and the state of her ex-colonies proves this—that England “always meant to go.”) If the states were Southern states—and the Muslims seem to favor this—then the borders of a hostile Latin America would be raised, in effect, to, say, Maryland. Of the American borders on the sea, one would face toward a powerless Europe and the other toward an untrustworthy and nonwhite East, and on the North, after Canada, there would be only Alaska, which is a Russian border. The effect of this would be that the white people of the United States and Canada would find themselves marooned on a hostile continent, with the rest of the white world probably unwilling and certainly unable to come to their aid. All this is not, to my mind, the most imminent of possibilities, but if I were a Muslim, this is the possibility that I would find myself holding in the center of my mind, and driving toward. And if I were a Muslim, I would not hesitate to utilize—or, indeed, to exacerbate—the social and spiritual discontent that reigns here, for, at the very worst, I would merely have contributed to the destruction of a house I hated, and it would not matter if I perished, too. One has been perishing here so long!

And what were they thinking around the table? “I’ve come,” said Elijah, “to give you something which can never be taken away from you.” How solemn the table became then, and how great a light rose in the dark faces! This is the message that has spread through streets and tenements and prisons, through the narcotics wards, and past the filth and sadism of mental hospitals to a people from whom everything has been taken away, including, most crucially, their sense of their own worth. People cannot live without this sense; they will do anything whatever to regain it. This is why the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose. You do not need ten such men—one will do. And Elijah, I should imagine, has had nothing to lose since the day he saw his father’s blood rush out—rush down, and splash, so the legend has it, down through the leaves of a tree, on him. But neither did the other men around the table have anything to lose. “Return to your true religion,” Elijah has written. “Throw off the chains of the slavemaster, the devil, and return to the fold. Stop drinking his alcohol, using his dope—protect your women—and forsake the filthy swine.” I remembered my buddies of years ago, in the hallways, with their wine and their whiskey and their tears; in hallways still, frozen on the needle; and my brother saying to me once, “If Harlem didn’t have so many churches and junkies, there’d be blood flowing in the streets.” Protect your women : a difficult thing to do in a civilization sexually so pathetic that the white man’s masculinity depends on a denial of the masculinity of the blacks. Protect your women : in a civilization that emasculates the male and abuses the female, and in which, moreover, the male is forced to depend on the female’s breadwinning power. Protect your women : in the teeth of the white man’s boast “We figure we’re doing you folks a favor by pumping some white blood into your kids,” and while facing the Southern shotgun and the Northern billy. Years ago, we used to say, “ Yes , I’m black, goddammit, and I’m beautiful!”—in defiance, into the void. But now—now—African kings and heroes have come into the world, out of the past, the past that can now be put to the uses of power. And black has become a beautiful color—not because it is loved but because it is feared. And this urgency on the part of American Negroes is not to be forgotten! As they watch black men elsewhere rise, the promise held out, at last, that they may walk the earth with the authority with which white men walk, protected by the power that white men shall have no longer, is enough, and more than enough, to empty prisons and pull God down from Heaven. It has happened before, many times, before color was invented, and the hope of Heaven has always been a metaphor for the achievement of this particular state of grace. The song says, “I know my robe’s going to fit me well. I tried it on at the gates of Hell.”

It was time to leave, and we stood in the large living room, saying good night, with everything curiously and heavily unresolved. I could not help feeling that I had failed a test, in their eyes and in my own, or that I had failed to heed a warning. Elijah and I shook hands, and he asked me where I was going. Wherever it was, I would be driven there—“because, when we invite someone here,” he said, “we take the responsibility of protecting him from the white devils until he gets wherever it is he’s going.” I was, in fact, going to have a drink with several white devils on the other side of town. I confess that for a fraction of a second I hesitated to give the address—the kind of address that in Chicago, as in all American cities, identified itself as a white address by value of its location. But I did give it, and Elijah and I walked out onto the steps, and one of the young men vanished to get the car. It was very strange to stand with Elijah for those few moments, facing those vivid, violent, so problematical streets. I felt very close to him, and really wished to be able to love and honor him as a witness, an ally, and a father. I felt that I knew something of his pain and his fury, and, yes, even his beauty. Yet precisely because of the reality and the nature of those streets—because of what he conceived as his responsibility and what I took to be mine—we would always be strangers, and possibly, one day, enemies. The car arrived—a gleaming, metallic, grossly American blue—and Elijah and I shook hands and said good night once more. He walked into his mansion and shut the door.

The driver and I started on our way through dark, murmuring—and, at this hour, strangely beautiful—Chicago, along the lake. We returned to the discussion of the land. How were we—Negroes—to get this land? I asked this of the dark boy who had said earlier, at the table, that the white man’s actions proved him to be a devil. He spoke to me first of the Muslim temples that were being built, or were about to be built, in various parts of the United States, of the strength of the Muslim following, and of the amount of money that is annually at the disposal of Negroes—something like twenty billion dollars. “That alone shows you how strong we are,” he said. But, I persisted, cautiously, and in somewhat different terms, this twenty billion dollars, or whatever it is, depends on the total economy of the United States. What happens when the Negro is no longer a part of this economy? Leaving aside the fact that in order for this to happen the economy of the United States will itself have had to undergo radical and certainly disastrous changes, the American Negro’s spending power will obviously no longer be the same. On what, then, will the economy of this separate nation be based? The boy gave me a rather strange look. I said hurriedly, “I’m not saying it can’t be done—I just want to know how it’s to be done.” I was thinking, In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have. I didn’t feel that the things I had in mind, such as the pseudo-elegant heap of tin in which we were riding, had any very great value But life would be very different without them, and I wondered if he had thought of this.

How can one, however, dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power? The boy could see that freedom depended on the possession of land; he was persuaded that, in one way or another, Negroes must achieve this possession. In the meantime, he could walk the streets and fear nothing, because there were millions like him, coming soon, now, to power. He was held together, in short, by a dream—though it is just as well to remember that some dreams come true—and was united with his “brothers” on the basis of their color. Perhaps one cannot ask for more. People always seem to band together according to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility.

Yet I could have hoped that the Muslim movement had been able to inculcate in the demoralized Negro population a truer and more individual sense of its own worth, so that Negroes in the Northern ghettos could begin, in concrete terms, and at whatever price, to change their situation. But in order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is: in the present case, to accept the fact, whatever one does with it thereafter, that the Negro has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other-—not to Africa, and certainly not to Islam. The paradox—and a fearful paradox it is—is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. How can the American Negro’s past be used? The unprecedented price demanded—and at this embattled hour of the world’s history—is the transcendence of the realities of color, of nations, and of altars.

“Anyway,” the boy said suddenly, after a very long silence, “things won’t ever again be the way they used to be. I know that.”

And so we arrived in enemy territory, and they set me down at the enemy’s door.

No one seems to know where the Nation of Islam gets its money. A vast amount, of course, is contributed by Negroes, but there are rumors to the effect that people like the Birchites and certain Texas oil millionaires look with favor on the movement. I have no way of knowing whether there is any truth to the rumors, though since these people make such a point of keeping the races separate, I wouldn’t be surprised if for this smoke there was some fire. In any case, during a recent Muslim rally, George Lincoln Rockwell, the chief of the American Nazi party, made a point of contributing about twenty dollars to the cause, and he and Malcolm X decided that, racially speaking, anyway, they were in complete agreement. The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another—or others—always has been and always will be a recipe for murder. There is no way around this. If one is permitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to endure, and, since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch. This is precisely what the Nazis attempted. Their only originality lay in the means they used. It is scarcely worthwhile to attempt remembering how many times the sun has looked down on the slaughter of the innocents. I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. I think I know—we see it around us every day—the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads. It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself. That is not a mystical statement but a most realistic one, which is proved by the eyes of any Alabama sheriff—and I would not like to see Negroes ever arrive at so wretched a condition.

Now, it is extremely unlikely that Negroes will ever rise to power in the United States, because they are only approximately a ninth of this nation. They are not in the position of the Africans, who are attempting to reclaim their land and break the colonial yoke and recover from the colonial experience. The Negro situation is dangerous in a different way, both for the Negro qua Negro and for the country of which he forms so troubled and troubling a part. The American Negro is a unique creation; he has no counterpart anywhere, and no predecessors. The Muslims react to this fact by referring to the Negro as “the so-called American Negro” and substituting for the names inherited from slavery the letter “X.” It is a fact that every American Negro hears a name that originally belonged to the white man whose chattel he was. I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross. I am, then, both visibly and legally the descendant of slaves in a white, Protestant country, and this is what it means to be an American Negro, this is who he is—a kidnapped pagan, who was sold like an animal and treated like one, who was once defined by the American Constitution as “three-fifths” of a man, and who, according to the Dred Scott decision, had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. And today, a hundred years after his technical emancipation, he remains—with the possible exception of the American Indian—the most despised creature in his country. Now, there is simply no possibility of a real change in the Negro’s situation without the most radical and far-reaching changes in the American political and social structure. And it is clear that white Americans are not simply unwilling to effect these changes; they are, in the main, so slothful have they become, unable even to envision them. It must be added that the Negro himself no longer believes in the good faith of white Americans—if, indeed, he ever could have. What the Negro has discovered, and on an international level, is that power to intimidate which he has always had privately but hitherto could manipulate only privately—for private ends often, for limited ends always. And therefore when the country speaks of a “new” Negro, which it has been doing every hour on the hour for decades, it is not really referring to a change in the Negro, which, in any case, it is quite incapable of assessing, but only to a new difficulty in keeping him in his place, to the fact that it encounters him (again! again!) barring yet another door to its spiritual and social ease. This is probably, hard and odd as it may sound, the most important thing that one human being can do for another—it is certainly one of the most important things; hence the torment and necessity of love—and this is the enormous contribution that the Negro has made to this otherwise shapeless and undiscovered country. Consequently, white Americans are in nothing more deluded than in supposing that Negroes could ever have imagined that white people would “give” them anything. It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free. This, in the case of the Negro, the American republic has never become sufficiently mature to do. White Americans have contented themselves with gestures that are now described as “tokenism.” For hard example, white Americans congratulate themselves on the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools; they suppose, in spite of the mountain of evidence that has since accumulated to the contrary, that this was proof of a change of heart—or, as they like to say, progress. Perhaps. It all depends on how one reads the word “progress.” Most of the Negroes I know do not believe that this immense concession would ever have been made if it had not been for the competition of the Cold War, and the fact that Africa was clearly liberating herself and therefore had, for political reasons, to be wooed by the descendants of her former masters. Had it been a matter of love or justice, the 1954 decision would surely have occurred sooner; were it not for the realities of power in this difficult era, it might very well not have occurred yet. This seems an extremely harsh way of stating the case—ungrateful, as it were—but the evidence that supports this way of stating it is not easily refuted. I myself do not think that it can be refuted at all. In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity—and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top. I think this is a fact, which it serves no purpose to deny, but, whether it is a fact or not, this is what the black populations of the world, including black Americans, really believe. The word “independence” in Africa and the word “integration” here are almost equally meaningless; that is, Europe has not yet left Africa, and black men here are not yet free. And both of these last statements are undeniable facts, related facts, containing the gravest implications for us all. The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power, but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream.

This has everything to do, of course, with the nature of that dream and with the fact that we Americans, of whatever color, do not dare examine it and are far from having made it a reality. There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior. And this human truth has an especially grinding force here, where identity is almost impossible to achieve and people are perpetually attempting to find their feet on the shifting sands of status. (Consider the history of labor in a country in which, spiritually speaking, there are no workers, only candidates for the hand of the boss’s daughter.) Furthermore, I have met only a very few people—and most of these were not Americans—who had any real desire to be free. Freedom is hard to bear. It can be objected that I am speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms, but the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation. We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels. Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster. Whoever doubts this last statement has only to open his ears, his heart, his mind, to the testimony of—for example—any Cuban peasant or any Spanish poet, and ask himself what he would feel about us if he were the victim of our performance in pre-Castro Cuba or in Spain. We defend our curious role in Spain by referring to the Russian menace and the necessity of protecting the free world. It has not occurred to us that we have simply been mesmerized by Russia, and that the only real advantage Russia has in what we think of as a struggle between the East and the West is the moral history of the western world. Russia’s secret weapon is the bewilderment and despair and hunger of millions of people of whose existence we are scarcely aware. The Russian Communists are not in the least concerned about these people. But our ignorance and indecision have had the effect, if not of delivering them into Russian hands, of plunging them very deeply in the Russian shadow, for which effect—and it is hard to blame them—the most articulate among them, and the most oppressed as well, distrust us all the more. Our power and our fear of change help bind these people to their misery and bewilderment, and insofar as they find this state intolerable we are intolerably menaced. For if they find their state intolerable, but are too heavily oppressed to change it, they are simply pawns in the hands of larger powers, which, in such a context, are always unscrupulous, and when, eventually, they do change their situation—as in Cuba—we are menaced more than ever, by the vacuum that succeeds all violent upheavals. We should certainly know by now that it is one thing to overthrow a dictator or repel an invader and quite another thing really to achieve a revolution. Time and time and time again, the people discover that they have merely betrayed themselves into the hands of yet another Pharaoh, who, since he was necessary to put the broken country together, will not let them go. Perhaps, people being the conundrums that they are, and having so little desire to shoulder the burden of their lives, this is what will always happen. But at the bottom of my heart I do not believe this. I think that people can be better than that, and I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is. Anyway, the point here is that we are living in an age of revolution, whether we will or no, and that America is the only western nation with both the power and, as I hope to suggest, the experience that may help to make these revolutions real and minimize the human damage. Any attempt we make to oppose these outbursts of energy is tantamount to signing our death warrant.

Behind what we think of as the Russian menace lies what we do not wish to face, and what white Americans do not face when they regard a Negro: reality—the fact that life is tragic. Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them. And this is also why the presence of the Negro in this country can bring about its destruction. It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depth—change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears. And by destruction I mean precisely the abdication by Americans of any effort really to be free. The Negro can precipitate this abdication because white Americans have never, in all their long history, been able to look on him as a man like themselves. This point need not be labored; it is proved over and over again by the Negro’s continuing position here, and his indescribable struggle to defeat the stratagems that white Americans have used, and use, to deny him his humanity. America could have used in other ways the energy that both groups have expended in this conflict. America, of all the Western nations, has been best placed to prove the uselessness and the obsolescence of the concept of color. But it has not dared to accept this opportunity, or even to conceive of it as an opportunity. White Americans have thought of it as their shame, and have envied those more civilized and elegant European nations that were untroubled by the presence of black men on their shores. This is because white Americans have supposed “Europe” and “civilization” to be synonyms—which they are not—and have been distrustful of other standards and other sources of vitality, especially those produced in America itself, and have attempted to behave in all matters as though what was east for Europe was also east for them. What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are , we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them. The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro; it is not too much to say that he, who has been so long rejected, must now be embraced, and at no matter what psychic or social risk. He is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his. And the Negro recognizes this, in a negative way. Hence the question: Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?

White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption—which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards—is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy’s assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals. It is the Negro, of course, who is presumed to have become equal—an achievement that not only proves the comforting fact that perseverance has no color but also overwhelmingly corroborates the white man’s sense of his own value. Alas, this value can scarcely be corroborated in any other way; there is certainly little enough in the white man’s public or private life that one should desire to imitate. White men, at the bottom of their hearts, know this. Therefore, a vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man’s equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. And I submit, then, that the racial tensions that menace Americans today have little to do with real antipathy—on the contrary, indeed—and are involved only symbolically with color. These tensions are rooted in the very same depths as those from which love springs, or murder. The white man’s unadmitted—and apparently, to him, unspeakable—private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro. The only way he can be released from the Negro’s tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become a part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveller’s checks, visits surreptitiously after dark. How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should? I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of the American civilization. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now—in order to support the moral contradictions and the spiritual aridity of my life—expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse. The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power—and no one holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being. And I repeat: The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind. Why, for example—especially knowing the family as I do—I should want to marry your sister is a great mystery to me. But your sister and I have every right to marry if we wish to, and no one has the right to stop us. If she cannot raise me to her level, perhaps I can raise her to mine.

In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation—if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women. To create one nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task; there is certainly no need now to create two, one black and one white. But white men with far more political power than that possessed by the Nation of Islam movement have been advocating exactly this, in effect, for generations. If this sentiment is honored when it falls from the lips of Senator Byrd, then there is no reason it should not be honored when it falls from the lips of Malcolm X. And any Congressional committee wishing to investigate the latter must also be willing to investigate the former. They are expressing exactly the same sentiments and represent exactly the same danger. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that white people are better equipped to frame the laws by which I am to be governed than I am. It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.

This past, the Negro’s past, of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred, and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own, and made all love, and trust, all joy impossible—this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering—enough is certainly as good as a feast—but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth—and, indeed, no church—can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one’s bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry. The apprehension of life here so briefly and inadequately sketched has been the experience of generations of Negroes, and it helps to explain how they have endured and how they have been able to produce children of kindergarten age who can walk through mobs to get to school. It demands great force and great cunning continually to assault the mighty and indifferent fortress of white supremacy, as Negroes in this country have done so long. It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate. The Negro boys and girls who are facing mobs today come out of a long line of improbable aristocrats—the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced. I say “this country” because their frame of reference was totally American. They were hewing out of the mountain of white supremacy the stone of their individuality. I have great respect for that unsung army of black men and women who trudged down back lanes and entered back doors, saying “Yes, sir” and “No, Ma’am” in order to acquire a new roof for the schoolhouse, new books, a new chemistry lab, more beds for the dormitories, more dormitories. They did not like saying “Yes, sir” and “No, Ma’am,” but the country was in no hurry to educate Negroes, these black men and women knew that the job had to be done, and they put their pride in their pockets in order to do it. It is very hard to believe that they were in any way inferior to the white men and women who opened those back doors. It is very hard to believe that those men and women, raising their children, eating their greens, crying their curses, weeping their tears, singing their songs, making their love, as the sun rose, as the sun set, were in any way inferior to the white men and women who crept over to share these splendors after the sun went down. But we must avoid the European error; we must not suppose that, because the situation, the ways, the perceptions of black people so radically differed from those of whites, they were racially superior. I am proud of these people not because of their color but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty. The country should be proud of them, too, but, alas, not many people in this country even know of their existence. And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played—and play—in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know.

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing. One watched the lives they led. One could not be fooled about that; one watched the things they did and the excuses that they gave themselves, and if a white man was really in trouble, deep trouble, it was to the Negro’s door that he came. And one felt that if one had had that white man’s worldly advantages, one would never have become as bewildered and as joyless and as thoughtlessly cruel as he. The Negro came to the white man for a roof or for five dollars or for a letter to the judge; the white man came to the Negro for love. But he was not often able to give what he came seeking. The price was too high; he had too much to lose. And the Negro knew this, too. When one knows this about a man, it is impossible for one to hate him, but unless he becomes a man—becomes equal—it is also impossible for one to love him. Ultimately, one tends to avoid him, for the universal characteristic of children is to assume that they have a monopoly on trouble, and therefore a monopoly on you. (Ask any Negro what he knows about the white people with whom he works. And then ask the white people with whom he works what they know about him. )

How can the American Negro past be used? It is entirely possible that this dishonored past will rise up soon to smite all of us. There are some wars, for example (if anyone on the globe is still mad enough to go to war) that the American Negro will not support, however many of his people may be coerced—and there is a limit to the number of people any government can put in prison, and a rigid limit indeed to the practicality of such a course. A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay. “The problem of the twentieth century,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois around sixty years ago, “is the problem of the color line.” A fearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world—here, there, or anywhere. It is for this reason that everything white Americans think they believe in must now be reëxamined. What one would not like to see again is the consolidation of peoples on the basis of their color. But as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible for the great unwashed to consolidate themselves according to any other principle. Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. But this is a distinction so extremely hard to make that the West has not been able to make it yet. And at the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk—eviction, imprisonment, torture, death. For the sake of one’s children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion—and the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion. I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand—and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.

When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty? For black people, though I am aware that some of us, black and white, do not know it yet, are very beautiful. And when I sat at Elijah’s table and watched the baby, the women, and the men, and we talked about God’s—or Allah’s—vengeance, I wondered, when that vengeance was achieved, What will happen to all that beauty then? I could also see that the intransigence and ignorance of the white world might make that vengeance inevitable—a vengeance that does not really depend on, and cannot really be executed by, any person or organization, and that cannot be prevented by any police force or army: historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance, based on the law that we recognize when we say, “Whatever goes up must come down.” And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. 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, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!  ♦

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Toni Morrison

By Evan Osnos

By Charles Bethea

By Eric Lach

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

Collected essays

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

1,021 Previews

15 Favorites

Better World Books

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

EPUB and PDF access not available for this item.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by Lotu Tii on June 21, 2012

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

The New York Public Library

Archives & manuscripts, james baldwin papers 1936-1992 d.

• Toggle Mini Map
• View as Network
• Collection Overview

Scope and arrangement

Administrative information, using the collection.

The James Baldwin Papers document Baldwin's career as an African American writer, intellectual, and activist in the United States and abroad. Dating to 1938, this archive of writings and related documents is indispensable to understanding the significance of Baldwin's career as a writer and an engaged public man of letters. The archive will enable researchers to trace the textual evolution of virtually all of Baldwin's writings. Each of his novels, essays, screen treatments (including the treatment for an unproduced film about Malcolm X) and dramatic adaptations of his novels are present in the form of detailed manuscript notes, heavily reworked manuscript drafts or significant manuscript fragments, and typescript drafts with his often copious manuscript annotations and emendations. The archive contains draft manuscripts and typescripts of his poetry and his important reviews. In addition, there are also personal papers and business records produced by Baldwin and his estate.

The James Baldwin Papers document Baldwin's career as an African American writer, intellectual, and activist in the United States and abroad. Dating to 1938, this archive of writings and related documents is indispensable to understanding the significance of Baldwin's career as a writer and an engaged public man of letters. The archive will enable researchers to trace the textual evolution of virtually all of Baldwin's writings. Each of his novels, essays, screen treatments (including the treatment for an unproduced film about Malcolm X) and dramatic adaptations of his novels, divided into published and unpublished subseries, are present in the form of detailed manuscript notes, heavily reworked manuscript drafts or significant manuscript fragments, and typescript drafts with his often copious manuscript annotations and emendations. The archive contains draft manuscripts and typescripts of his poetry and his important reviews. In addition, there are also personal papers and business records produced by Baldwin and his estate.

The James Baldwin papers are arranged in four series:

This series is divided into eight subseries consisting of materials collected primarily by Baldwin and his estate. Biographical Files (.8 lin. ft.) includes a copy of  The Douglass Pilot  (1938), a school literary journal edited by Baldwin when he was 13 or 14 years old, featuring four articles written by him. Additional early writings include an untitled essay about his life and a bibliography of his works. The file also contains stenographer's minutes for a 1954 case against Baldwin and four others for disorderly conduct. Other items of note include a transcription of Take This Hammer , a 1963 documentary film featuring Baldwin which was produced by NET and KQED-TV in San Francisco, as well as tributes to Baldwin, among them a program for "Evensong and a Celebration Honoring James Baldwin" (1974). Lastly, a small group of research materials, artwork and works by others including a play script for To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, edited by Hansberry's former husband, Robert Nemiroff, complete this section.

Correspondence (1.6 lin. ft.) consists of incoming and outgoing letters (some of Baldwin's letters are unsigned and undated), and telegrams from friends, family, business associates and admirers. Significant correspondents include friends, colleagues and collaborators Alex Haley, filmmaker Elia Kazan, and Toni Morrison. There are also letters received from Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Marlon Brando, Owen Dodson, Jean Blackwell Hutson, Harold Jackman, Coretta Scott King, Jacqueline Onassis, Bobby Seale, Nina Simone and William Styron, although Baldwin's responses are not included. Other correspondents include Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Louise Meriwether, Robert Nemiroff, and publisher Sol Stein.

The Interviews (.4 lin. ft.) files contain several substantive and unique documents that illuminate Baldwin's thoughts on a variety of /various topics including race, history and literature. The interviews are comprised primarily of transcriptions with edits and copies of published versions. Although this series includes interviews featured in James Baldwin: A Legacy (1989) and James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (2014), it appears that several/many of the interviews have not been collected in any published volume. Among the most significant interviews are "Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde," published in Essence Magazine (1984?) and "Is There a Case for Segregation," a segment for the NBC television show, The Open Mind , in 1962.

The Organizations and Projects (.4 lin. ft.) files provides a snapshot of Baldwin's activities and interests, although his activism is recorded throughout the collection (see WRITINGS series, particularly nonfiction work such as The Fire Next Time , The Evidence of Things Not Seen , among others). Among these files is a file of correspondence, flyers and other materials related to the appeal and conviction of six Harlem youth, known as the Harlem Six, for the murder of Margit Sugar (1966). Baldwin's file for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) (1961-1967) is comprised of letters, copies of Student Voice newsletters and information about a benefit held in 1967 where Baldwin raised funds for the Harlem Six and civil rights work in Dorchester County, South Carolina. Groups he sponsored such as National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, Inc. (SANE) (1961-1964) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1961-1967) are filed here. The Recommendations File (.1 lin. ft.) include letters supporting candidates for The Black Scholar 's annual W.E.B. DuBois Essay Awards, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, among others.

The Travel File (.1 lin. ft.) documents some of his travel for speaking engagements/ appearances and is comprised of a small number of itineraries, receipts for air travel, accommodations and car rental and other expenses. (Evidence of Baldwin's other travels is represented across the collection, most prominently in the BUSINESS RECORDS series.) The Fan Mail File (.4 lin. ft.) includes letters from admirers of Baldwin's across the world. The Awards File (.8 lin. ft.) contains files for honorary degrees, awards and citations Baldwin amassed during his lifetime and posthumously.

The largest and most substantive series, Writing, is divided into the following two subseries, Published and Unpublished; each subseries is further divided into subgroups (novels, plays, nonfiction, short stories, poetry, screenplays, and reviews). The published subseries has an additional subgroup, collaborative work, while the unpublished subseries includes other work and other writing. Materials within each subgroup are arranged by order of composition moving from handwritten manuscripts, multiple drafts or notes, to annotated typescripts and galleys. Baldwin seldom dated his handwritten or typed scripts, so files have been placed intellectually within each subgroup. Published and unpublished works mostly include the following formats: handwritten drafts, typed scripts, galleys, correspondence, reviews, and other related materials. Early in his writing career, Baldwin often composed on orange Rhodia notebooks and letter and legal yellow pads, which are included as well.

The final series, Business records, (1940s-ca.1992, 8.6 lin. ft.) remarkable for its depth and expansiveness, records Baldwin's career as a writer and public speaker spanning over four decades. Along with the Writing series, this series provides a complex look at Baldwin's relationships with publishers, literary agents, lawyers, and other business associates. The files include contracts, correspondence, proposals, royalty statements, telegrams, carbons of Baldwin's letters, and other records.

With few exceptions, this series has been kept primarily as it was organized by the Baldwin Estate. Some of these files were possibly maintained by Baldwin's representatives, his sister and secretary Gloria Smart, author David Leeming, secretary Bernard Hassell, and literary agent Robert P. Mills.

Invitations to Speak. (1.4 lin. ft.) The subseries features hundreds of letters and telegrams requesting Baldwin to speak from various high schools, colleges and universities, arts councils, libraries, civil rights organizations, religious institutions, and book clubs, to name a few. The letters are often dated and annotated (e.g., "replied," "out of town," "cancelled," etc.) and sometimes include a carbon copy of Baldwin or his representative's responses. These records at best illuminate the author's busy writing, traveling and speaking schedule. In one note to David, Baldwin's brother, an unnamed secretary writes: here are the two lectures Jimmy consented to do. There are about 30 or 40 that we turned down…" (1963). A sample of requests includes letters from the American Civil Liberties Union, Dartmouth College, Frederick Douglass Junior High School, Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU), Howard University, Mensa, The Poetry Center, Temple Beth Emeth of Flatbush, and the University of Washington.

Agents and Agencies. (1.2 lin. ft.) The agents and agencies are filed alphabetically and include short and long term representation. Included in this series are files for Edward Action (1980s), Rodlphe Ankaoua (1970s), Beldock, Levine and Hoffman (1980s), Eugene C. Braun-Munk, Bruna and Zoons (1970s), Conference Speakers International, Inc., (1980s), Cohen and Meyohas (1970s), Enterprise Unlimited (1970s), Robert Lantz (1965-1970s), Ruth Liepman (1970s), Michael Joseph Ltd (1964-1966), Robert Mills Ltd (1967-1971), and the William Morris Agency (1948-1970s). It is not known whether these files constitute a comprehensive record of Baldwin's business associates, but cover the late 1940s until his death in the 1980s. There is also considerable overlap within the subseries, as there is correspondence involving two or more parties related to a specific publication, lecture or project.

The bulk of the Publishers Files (1 lin. ft.) concern Dial Press and include contracts, publicity materials, flyers, clippings and original letters and carbons of Baldwin's letters to publisher's representative Donna Schrader for the publications Go Tell It On the Mountain, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, as well as a guest book for a party at Small's Paradise in 1962 to celebrate the publication of Another Country. 

Other publishers include Doubleday, Knopf, Inc., Lippincott, McGraw-Hill (a photocopy of a signed contract for "Remember This House," also known as "Death Come Creeping in My Room"), Open Gate Books, and magazines and journals such as  Daedalus , Harper's , The Nation ,  Preuves , and  Saturday Review . The files contain correspondence, contracts, clippings, fan mail, and other items. The Lawyers Files (.2 lin. ft.) for the firms Ramseur and Witofsky, and Shanks, Davis and Remer, include letters, fee schedules and other related items.

Invitations to Speak. (1.4 lin. ft.) The file contains requests for speaking engagements, and responses from Baldwin's literary agents and secretaries. The bulk of the letters dated 1963, the year he published The Fire Next Time and participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. There are letters from Brandeis University, Dartmouth, Congress of Racial Equality, Columbia University, New York University, among for hundreds of others, filed in this section. 

A separate file for Contracts (.2 lin. ft.), maintained by the Estate, includes original but mostly photocopies of contracts for publishers, appearances, an unsigned photocopy of an option for the screen rights to Giovanni's Room, some correspondence, and clippings. Similarly, the Permissions Files (.2 lin. ft.) includes contracts for the use of his works for anthologies, textbooks, and documentaries. Notably, there is a 1982 letter from Oxford University Press thanking Baldwin for granting permission to convert The Fire Next Time into computer-readable form.

The very last section, Business Correspondence (1.2 lin. ft.) is organized chronologically (1955-1989) and includes inquiries for projects such as "Bessie" by Michael Wilcox, the NAACP, Herbert Kline Productions, and a file of letters concerning dramatic productions for  Giovanni's Room ,  Blues for Mister Charlie , and  The Amen Corner .

Source of acquisition

Purchase, Estate of James Baldwin, 2017. (SCM 17-3, MG 936)

Revision History

The Writing series was reprocessed by Lauren Stark in order to divide the material into published and unpublished subseries. For citations prior to January 2020, see folder level listings for original locations of materials. (2020-01)

Processing information

Processed by the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 2017.

Separated material

Photographs have been transferred to the Photographs and Prints Division, and the audio materials have been transferred to the Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division.

Related Material

The following collections are all held in the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture:

James Baldwin "Five Years" Poetry Manuscript, Sc MG 934

Collection of screenplays on Malcolm X, 1968-1975, Sc MG 969

Occupations

Access to materials, conditions governing use.

Photographs, scans, and photocopies are prohibited for all material.

Access restrictions

Special restrictions apply. Correspondence with David Baldwin, Beauford Delaney, Lucien Happersberger, and Mary Painter is closed until 2036. Material related to "Remember This House", the basis for the documentary, I Am Not Your Negro , directed by Raoul Peck, is closed until 2026.

Container List

Includes article on the March on Washington from The Miami Herald , August 29, 1963.

Includes cover proof.

Published in August 1987 issue.

Also published in The Price of the Ticket .

Published in The Price of the Ticket , 1985.

Published in Nugget , February 1963.

Includes six page typescript and published version (foreword only). According to the preface, published from material held in the Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature and History.

Excerpts from The Fire Next Time , 1963.

Published in Nobody Knows My Name , 1961.

Includes correspondence with the publisher, Houghton Mifflin.

Excerpt from "Letters from a Journey", published in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings , 2010.

Published in the New Statesman , 1986, and The Cross of Redemption , 2010, as "The Fire This Time: Letter to the Bishop".

Published in The Price of the Ticket .

Essay written for Richard Avedon book, Nothing Personal , published in 1964.

Published in The Cross of Redemption as " A Man's Life: An Autobiography by Roger Wilkins".

Published in Urbanite , 1961.

Possibly written for the Signature Editions publication.

Published in The Nation , 1979.

German version published in December 1977; English version remains unpublished.

Published in Baldwin: Collected Essays (1998).

Book published in 1979.

Published in Baldwin: Collected Essays .

Also includes "James Baldwin's 'Sonny's Blues': Complicated and Simple", by Donald C. Murray, Studies in Short Fiction , vol. 14, #4, fall 1977.

Includes notes, typescript with Edits (8 pages), sketch (7 pages), and manuscript (6 pages).

Possibly drafts for "Letters From the South" ( Nobody Knows My Name ).

Published in The Cross of Redemption .

Published in Nobody Knows My Name .

Published as "Is A Raisin in the Sun a Lemon in the Dark?" in The Cross of Redemption .

Includes Algren's 5 page typescript.

Published in The New York Times .

Correspondence with David Baldwin, Beauford Delaney, Lucien Happersberger, and Mary Painter is closed until 2036.

For Raama and Daniel French.

Arranged into two subseries: (1) Published and (2) Unpublished.

Material relating to "Remember This House," the basis for the feature documentary, I Am Not Your Negro , directed by Raoul Peck, is closed until 2026).

Early version of Go Tell It on the Mountain .

Draft of "Letters from a Journey", published in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings , 2010.

The first subgroup of the Published subseries focuses on Baldwin's novels; each of his six novels are represented here in order of publication: Go Tell It On the Mountain , Giovanni's Room , Another Country , Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone , If Beale Street Could Talk , and Just Above My Head . The Go Tell it On the Mountain (1953) file contains a sixteen-page outline of the novel (1950) and several handwritten and typed manuscripts with annotated notes and fragments. The first proof for the novel with marked corrections and questions (1952) is listed here. The Giovanni's Room (1956) files feature the publisher's original manuscript for the novel (1956); several typescripts with Baldwin's and the editor's corrections and edits; annotations, fragments, and playscripts (1964 and 1982); a stage layout; and several iterations of the adapted screenplay. Another Country (1962) includes Baldwin's plan for the novel, the original publisher's manuscript, early draft typescripts (some incomplete and several with author edits), and a galley. Several rewrites, additions, inserts, notes, contracts, a screen treatment, a screenplay, correspondence with Claude Jauvert, and Baldwin's response to reviews from The New York Times and Time Magazine augment this file. Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968) consists of two incomplete handwritten manuscripts, incomplete typescripts with edits, handwritten notes, and the galley for the book. The If Beale Street Could Talk file (1974) includes two handwritten manuscripts, a typescript, a tentative casting list for a film project, and notes. There are also letters from Dial Press and Universal Pictures, the latter requesting a copy of the novel (1970-1975). The file for Baldwin's last novel, Just Above My Head (1979), encompasses several handwritten partial manuscripts on yellow pads and numerous original and photocopied typescripts with annotations and notes. Act one of the playscript with edits based on the novel, sheet music and scores, and a copy of a contract for a French edition of the novel are filed here. The playscripts subgroup includes two of Baldwin's original plays, The Amen Corner and Blues for Mister Charlie , for which he oversaw the productions. A dramatization of Giovanni's Room , the playscript, and related materials are filed under novels. The majority of the The Amen Corner files contain playscripts with typed and handwritten edits, a cast list, and notes (ca. 1964). Notably, one playscript is inscribed by the members of the Actors Studio cast (1964). A French translation of Amen (1982) by Belgian-born French novelist and essayist, Marguerite Yourcenar, is also filed here. Correlative materials include a flyer, a program, playbill, a press release for a European Festival Tour in 1965, and a book jacket for the published play. Blues for Mister Charlie files include a manuscript on a yellow notepad and loose sheets of paper; a handwritten manuscript and typescripts with notes and rewrites; a galley; screen treatments; and background research. Additionally, there are production notes, opening night telegrams, a sketch of a set design, letters from the Actors Studio, contracts, letters discussing the possibility of Mister Charlie as a film, and fan mail. Included in the third subgroup, Nonfiction, are drafts of Baldwin's published nonfiction collections and individual essays. Seven collections, Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), The Devil Finds Work (1976), The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), and The Price of the Ticket (1985) are represented in handwritten drafts, typescripts, and sometimes, final published versions. Of special note is a revised typescript and correction for the essay "Notes of a Native Son", a signed carbon copy of "Nobody Knows My Name", "Faulkner and Desegregation" with clippings, an original typescript copy of "Down at the Crossroads", returned from The New Yorker , and a handwritten draft of No Name in the Street . Some previously published and unpublished essays collected posthumously in The Library of America's Baldwin: Collected Essays (1998) and the Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (2010) are included as well. The Short stories subgroup contains draft materials for Baldwin's only short story collection, Going to Meet the Man , published in 1965. The file contains manuscripts, typescripts, and notes for the stories "Come Out the Wilderness", "The Outing", "Previous Condition", "Sonny's Blues", and "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon." Baldwin began writing poetry in high school and published one volume of verse his during his lifetime, Jimmy's Blues (1983), which is included here. Additionally, two collections published posthumously, Gypsy and Other Poems (1989), and an edited edition of Jimmy's Blues , with an introduction by poet Nikky Finney (2014), are included. The first edition of Jimmy's Blues is represented by a galley, a photocopied version of the work, and iterations of several poems that appeared in the work. The Screenplay section includes proposals, manuscripts, galleys, correspondence, notes, and related items for One Day When I Was Lost , based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X . In Collaborative works, there is information about Baldwin's only children's book, Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood (with Yoran Cazac) (1976), which includes a photocopy of the published book. Reviews include Baldwin's response to Nelson Algren's review, "Is '[A] Raisin in the Sun a Lemon in the Dark", published in Tone magazine in 1961. An 8-page edited typescript for the review, "On Catfish Row", Baldwin's assessment of George Gershwin's 1934 film, Porgy and Bess , which first appeared in nonfiction collection The Price of the Ticket , initially titled "On the American Performer", is also filed here. Baldwin's take on Andre Gide's Madeleine , published under the title, "The Male Prison", which first appeared in the magazine New Leader (1954) and was reprinted in the collection Nobody Knows My Name (1961), can be found here.

Arranged into eight subgroups: (1) Novels; (2) Plays; (3) Nonfiction; (4) Short stories; (5) Poetry; (6) Screenplays; (7) Collaborative works; and (8) Reviews.

Published in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings , 2010.

Balwin wrote the English introduction for this exhibition catalogue.

Published in The Cross of Redemption as "Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Personal Notes".

Originally a speech delivered at Monterey Peninsula College; published in The Cross of Redemption .

Includes 8 handwritten pages (drafts have various titles) and 14 typed pages.

Published in 1989.

Includes legal size typescript (8 pages), letter size typescript (5 pages) and 3 handwritten pages.

Within the unpublished subseries, there are two typescripts and other material for an unfinished novel, "No Papers for Mohamet". Also included is an unfinished play, The Welcome Table (ca. 1970s), which focuses on Josephine Baker's home and her proclivity for inviting people of all cultures into her family. These files contain original and photocopied handwritten and typed playscripts and a sketch for a set design. Included in the third subgroup, Nonfiction, are various unpublished essays and an alphabetical file of mostly untitled essays. In terms of poetry, unpublished poems are filed alphabetically by title or subject. Baldwin's unproduced screen works include "The Inheritance" (also titled "In the Cross, a Trembling Soul: The Inheritance") and "The Swordfish" (also known as "The Sacrifice" and "Holding On"). The "Inheritance" file includes edited drafts, a bound copy of the screenplay, a note on potential casting for the production, and handwritten notes. "The Swordfish" file, based on a novel by Osmen Naomi Gurmen, consists of various handwritten and typed drafts with edits. The Other works subgroup includes notes, lectures, and speeches. The notes files features a typescript recalling Baldwin's meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., and notes on Birmingham, Alabama, amongst others. Also filed here are ideas for a novel, "Any Boot-Legger"; ideas for a speech, "Bring Me a Minstrel"; and a short story, "The Outer Life". Throughout his life, Baldwin was in-demand as a speaker, nationally and internationally (see Invitations to Speak in the Business Records series for more detailed information). The lectures and speeches section includes handwritten notes for a speech at Harvard entitled "The Cultural Implications of the Negro Revolt" and a 9-page transcription of an untitled speech on civil rights. The remainder of this subseries, Other writing, includes proposals, librettos, teleplays, and other miscellaneous writings in handwritten drafts, typescripts, and letters. There are copies of a four-page proposal for "Unto the Dying Lamb," a project that Baldwin stated "...would document, in photographs and in prose, the influence and awaiting entrapment of storefront churches in Harlem for the African Americans who frequented them". According to biographer David Leeming, this project was never completed for lack of a publisher (Leeming 55).

Arranged into nine subgroups: (1) Novels; (2) Plays; (3) Nonfiction; (4) Short stories; (5) Poetry; (6) Screenplays; (7) Other works; (8) Reviews; and (9) Other writing.

• Privacy Policy
• Rules and Regulations
• Using the Internet
• Website Terms and Conditions
• Gifts of Materials to NYPL

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin audiobook review – from the civil rights frontline

Law & Order’s Jesse L Martin narrates two powerful essays examining the Black experience in the US, the first in a series marking the author’s centenary year

F irst published in 1963 at the height of the US civil rights movement, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time comprises two astonishing essays examining the Black experience in the United States and the struggle against racial injustice.

The first, My Dungeon Shook, takes the form of a letter to Baldwin’s 14-year-old nephew, and outlines “the root of my dispute with my country … You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.”

The second, Down at the Cross, is a polemic examining the relationship between race and religion, and finds Baldwin reflecting on his Harlem childhood, his encounters with racist police, and a spiritual crisis at the age of 14, which, triggered by his fears of getting drawn into a life of crime, “helped to hurl me into the church”. There, he was filled with anguish “like one of those floods that devastate countries, tearing everything down, tearing children from their parents and lovers from each other”.

The essays are narrated by the Law & Order actor Jesse L Martin, who highlights the rhythmic nature of Baldwin’s prose, and channels his anger and devastation at the unceasing suffering of Black Americans. This audiobook is one of several new recordings of Baldwin’s writing being published over the next few months, to mark the influential author’s centenary year, which also include Go Tell It to the Mountain, Another Country, Giovanni’s Room and If Beale Street Could Talk.

Available via Penguin Audio, 2hr 26min

Further listening

Fire Rush Jacqueline Crooks, Penguin Audio, 11hr 3min Leonie Elliott narrates this coming-of-age story set in the late 1970s about the daughter of a Caribbean immigrant who finds kindred spirits and thrilling new sounds at an underground reggae club.

after newsletter promotion

Two Sisters Blake Morrison, Harper Collins, 10hr 28min A tender account of the life of Gill, Morrison’s younger sister who died from heart failure caused by alcohol abuse, and his half-sister, Josie. Read by the author.

• James Baldwin
• Audiobook of the week
• Society books

Most viewed

James Baldwin

Major works: Go Tell It on the Mountain • Notes of a Native Son • Giovanni’s Room • The Fire Next Time • No Name in the Street • The Devil Finds Work

With the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a distillation of his own experiences as a preacher’s son in 1930s Harlem, and the essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955), James Baldwin established himself as a prophetic voice of his era. Some such voices may grow fainter with the passage of time, but Baldwin remains an inescapable presence, not only a chronicler of his epoch but a thinker who helped shape it. One of the great modern prose stylists, he applied his passion, wit, and relentlessly probing intelligence to the fault lines and false fronts of American society while remaining true to his early credo: “One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.”

“I fell under the spell of Baldwin’s voice. No other black writer I’d read was as literary as Baldwin in his early essays, not even Ralph Ellison. There is something wild in the beauty of Baldwin’s sentences and the cool of his tone, something improbable, too, this meeting of Henry James, the Bible, and Harlem. I can see the scratches in the desk in my room where I was reading ‘Notes of a Native Son,’ Baldwin’s memoir of his hated father’s death the day his father’s last child was born in 1943, one day before Harlem erupted into the deadliest race riot in its history. I can feel the effects of this essay within me still.” —Darryl Pinckney, The New York Review of Books , April 4, 2014

“Nobody Knows My Name”

What it comes to, finally, is that the nation has spent a large part of its time and energy looking away from one of the principal facts of its life. This failure to look reality in the face diminishes a nation as it diminishes a person, and it can only be described as unmanly. And in exactly the same way that the South imagines that it “knows” the Negro, the North imagines that it has set him free. Both camps are deluded. Human freedom is a complex, difficult—and private—thing. If we can liken life, for a moment, to a furnace, then freedom is the fire which burns away illusion. Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Benefits of Using Safe Crypto Casinos. One of the most captivating reasons people drift towards Australian casinos online-casino-au com is the promise of anonymity. Safe platforms guarantee that your identity remains a secret. Quick Payouts and Minimal Fees. No one likes waiting, especially for winnings. Safe crypto casinos ensure that payouts are swift and the fees minimal, if not non-existent.

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come. Ozwin Casino offers an exciting array of top-notch slots that cater to every player's preferences. From classic fruit machines to cutting-edge video slots, Ozwin Casino Real Money collection has it all. With stunning graphics, immersive themes, and seamless gameplay, these slots deliver an unparalleled gaming experience. Some popular titles include Mega Moolah, Gonzo's Quest, and Starburst, known for their massive jackpots and thrilling bonus features. Ozwin Casino's slots are not just about luck; they offer hours of entertainment and the chance to win big, making it a must-visit for slot enthusiasts.

The Light Between Us

By maria popova.

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.

In learning this afresh — as we must learn all the great and obvious truths, over and over — I was reminded of a passage by James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) from Nothing Personal ( public library ) — his 1964 collaboration with the photographer Richard Avedon, his high school classmate and lifelong friend, which contains some of Baldwin’s least-known yet most intimate writings, including his antidote to dog-hour despair and his counterforce to entropy . (In the years since I first wrote about this forgotten treasure, it has been unforgotten in a new edition by Penguin Random House — regrettably, without Avedon’s photographs, razing the spirit of collaboration between friends that occasioned the project in the first place; redemptively, with a foreword by the dazzling Imani Perry , who considers herself Baldwin’s “pupil in the study of humanity” and who writes splendidly about his enduring gift of reminding us how reading “allows us to recognize each other” and “makes everything seem possible.”)

In the final of the book’s four essays, Baldwin writes:

One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light.

This light, Baldwin intimates, is most often and most readily found in love — that great and choiceless gift of chance .

Love becomes a lens on the world, on space and on time — a pinhole through which a new light enters to project onto the cave wall of our consciousness landscapes of intimate importance from territories of being we would have never otherwise known.

Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed. What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

A master of metaphor — that handle on the door to new worlds — Baldwin takes the case of what we call long-distance love and finds in it a miniature of all love.

All love bridges the immense expanse between lonelinesses, becomes the telescope that brings another life closer and, in consequence, also magnifies the significance of their entire world.

All love is light’s battle against the entropy continually inclining spacetime toward nothingness, against the hard fact that you will die, and I will die, and everyone we love will die, and what will survive of us are only shoreless seeds and stardust .

— Published January 31, 2022 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/01/31/james-baldwin-nothing-personal-love/ —

www.themarginalian.org

Nonviolence, Black Power, and “the Citizens of Pompeii”: James Baldwin’s 1968

The radicalization of an unparalleled figure in american literature and african american cultural politics.

September 22, 1963: James Baldwin addresses a crowd of approximately 7,000 at Foley Square in lower Manhattan during a rally held to mourn six Black children murdered in Birmingham the previous Sunday. Notable persons seated behind Baldwin at the podium include James Farmer, James Forman, Bayard Rustin, Norman Thomas, Reverend Thomas Kilgore Jr., and James Peck. Photograph by Morris Warman, used with permission.

The following is an excerpt from an essay that appeared in  James Baldwin Review, Volume 8 (Fall, 2022).

From the early 1950s, Baldwin’s literary fame had been built on long, elaborate—at times equivocating—sentences which brilliantly emphasized the private, personal dimensions of human experience. Fame abruptly changed that phase of his life and work. Jane Howard put it this way in Life magazine’s May 24, 1963 issue: 

For ten years his novels sold well, his essays were accorded respectful criticism, and Baldwin swam around fairly anonymously in the intellectual fishbowls of New York and Paris … Then early this year a searing essay he wrote for the New Yorker was combined with a gentle letter to one of his nephews, and became a best-selling book called The Fire Next Time . So intuitively does it dissect the nation’s explosive race problem that Baldwin found himself a celebrity overnight.

Published in January 1963, The Fire Next Time marked a kind of crescendo of Baldwin’s early literary voice and its capacity to draw together disparate but nonetheless proximate corners of the American reading public. Those connections had been tough enough to forge in books and magazines. The chances of such a reconciliation in American experience were long if they existed at all. In this, as he’d long understood, and as he repeated in the often-quoted last paragraphs of The Fire Next Time , Baldwin envisioned the impossible necessity for Americans to recover from delusions of exceptionalism and come to terms with their place as part of “human history in general, and Negro history in particular.” The chances of that were, indeed, beyond long. At the time, it didn’t matter. In Baldwin’s understanding, those histories themselves testified “to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.”

Baldwin played his newly high-profile role of a politically engaged man of letters through much of 1963. He gave lectures in support of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. His “whistle-stop speaking tour” in the Deep South—New Orleans; Jackson, Mississippi; Durham, North Carolina—in January was covered by Life . In May 1963, with his portrait on the cover of Time magazine , and, yet again on tour for CORE, he made the documentary film Take This Hammer , focused on Black poverty and anger and white gentrification in San Francisco. A week later he led an acrimonious meeting with then–US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy about the dire, national implications of racism and of violence in Birmingham. Outspoken (and / or maybe just “out”) in ways that kept him off the podium of speakers at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Baldwin supported the march, nonetheless, in Paris and in a roundtable discussion with Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Charlton Heston, and others broadcast live on TV in the US on the evening of the march, August 28, 1963.

On the third Sunday after the march, September 15, 1963, six Black children were killed in three separate incidents—one of which was the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church—in Birmingham. That day marked the end of Baldwin’s brief career as a literary celebrity and the beginning of his radicalization, as such. Following the killing of Medgar Evers in Mississippi on June 12, the murder of those children changed the rhythm of Baldwin’s development as an artist and activist. It didn’t take long; part of him had been radical all along. But still the shift was clear. Less than one week after the killings in Birmingham, on September 18, Baldwin appeared with longtime pacifist activist and Deputy Director of the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin, in a press conference where they called for federal intervention in Alabama. The press conference was preparation for a “National Day of Mourning for the Children of Birmingham” to occur on September 22, the following Sunday. Baldwin would speak at a mass rally at the Federal Court in Manhattan on the 22nd.

Also that same day, as part of the National Day of Mourning, Baldwin appeared with famed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on a public television show titled Our Protestant Heritage and themed “The Meaning of the Birmingham Tragedy.” The activist-pastor at Friendship Baptist Church in Harlem, Dr. Thomas Kilgore Jr., hosted the conversation wherein Niebuhr said that the Black church constituted the most important social force among American churches. Baldwin responded:

There’s a great paradox occurring in this country, what you say about the Negro church, for example, is I think entirely true, and Martin has used the Negro church as a kind of tool, not only to liberate Negroes but to liberate the entire country. And on the basis of the evidence, and maybe overstating it a little bit, but as far as one can tell the only people in the country at the moment who believe either in Christianity, or the country, are the most despised minority in it.

Gesturing to Kilgore on his right and Niebuhr on his left, and staring out beyond the camera as if searching for the words, Baldwin continued:

Negroes have done—with a really incredible, and agonized, restraint—more it seems to me in this decade to force Americans to begin to reassess themselves, than has been done since I was born. It’s ironical, I’m trying to say, that the people who were slaves here, the most beaten and despised people here, and for so long, should be at this moment, and I mean this, absolutely the only hope this country has. It doesn’t have any other. None of the descendants of Europe seem to be able to do, or have taken on themselves to do, what Negroes are now trying to do. And this is not a chauvinistic or racial argument.

Baldwin concluded his thought: “It probably has something to do with, um, with the nature of life itself, which forces,” and reaching for Niebuhr’s arm, “ you at any extremity, any extreme , to discover what you really live by, whereas most Americans have been for so long, so safe and so sleepy, that they don’t any longer have any real sense of what they live by. I think they really think that it may be Coca-Cola.” 

If September 1963 had been the beginning, King’s assassination made Baldwin understand that his radicalization was complete. In his letter on April 12, 1968 , after describing his perilous feeling of isolation as a target in the lethal spotlight, Baldwin wrote to Cezzar, “Whatever move I make is, in the eyes of the American government (and, more seriously, in fact) a political move.” On Malcolm X’s birthday—May 19—in 1968, Baldwin participated in a panel discussion with the actor-singer, journalist, and activist Maggie Hathaway; former Nation of Islam minister Ernie Smith; and the Black Panther’s Deputy Minister of Information for Southern California, Earl Anthony. Hakim Jamal moderated the event. Addressing himself to the occasion, Baldwin searched for a way to communicate his position as a radicalized artist and person:

I’m a writer. I’m not, um … I’m a writer who is part of the revolution, it’s true. I’m not. I have another obligation, I have another responsibility. To argue with you, for example. To argue with Malcolm, as I did. I had to take the position that I’m, um, I had to take the position that you produced me. I’m the poet that you produced. And I’m responsible for something which I may not always be able to name, which has to be there for the people who produced me when I’m gone and when this particular aspect when this particular battle is over … But I have to be aware that my major role is what I do by myself in the dark, for all of us I hope, and not what I do on stage or on television in the light. I’m trying to clarify something to me, to you, and to this very dim republic.

That radical pulse moved Baldwin in ways few at the time followed across the 1970s and into the 1980s, and in ways few understand now. Baldwin fused the texture of his life and career with conundrums of American history; he knew that understanding the one meant casting aside delusions about the other. That went both ways, which is not easily done. Initiated by the Birmingham murders and completed by King’s assassination, Baldwin felt that the “perpetual achievement of the impossible” in history had been left to him as a kind of personal responsibility. As he’d come to understand and explore through the 1970s and 1980s, Black personal responsibility had always been a complexly collective and mutual reality. Personal life was social life. Privacy didn’t turn upon ownership of the space; and it was as much about intimacy as it was about solitude. As Baldwin sensed powerfully by 1968 and would explore and elaborate upon for the rest of this life, to regard personal life as a privately owned, individual matter was to be frozen. A person’s real life was a social reality, not an autonomous one. People who lived lives focused primarily on securing owned solitudes—often by producing salable things—became “immobilized,” as Baldwin put it a little later , like “the citizens of Pompeii.”

Ed Pavlić lives in Athens, GA, and is the author of numerous books across and between genres.

Ed Pavlić is an American writer whose work travels across genres: poetry, fiction and nonfiction

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Latest + Beyond the Issues

Public Seminar is a journal of ideas, politics, and culture published by the Public Seminar Publishing Initiative at The New School. We are a non-profit organization, wholly supported by The New School, and by the generosity of our sponsors and readers.

Connect With Us

James Baldwin Insisted We Tell the Truth About This Country. The Truth Is, We’ve Been Here Before

P olice violence against Black people in this country is as American as bald cypress trees and Southern magnolias. In each generation we have to experience the haunting ritual of a Black family grieving in public over the loss of a loved one at the hands of the police.

Recent years have been particularly tough. Cell-phone videos have brought us a torrent of cruel images of Black death. Perhaps that is the source of the intensity of our current moment.

The videos of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks dying have combined with the vulnerability caused by COVID-19 and the feeling that the country is broken to bring us all to the brink of madness and, apparently, to the precipice of significant change. An odd admixture, but an understandable consequence of our troubled times. We now face a moral reckoning : Americans have to decide whether this country will truly be a multiracial democracy or whether to merely tinker around the edges of our problems once again and remain decidedly racist and unequal.

We have been here before. Martin Luther King Jr. and countless others risked everything to persuade the country to live up to its stated ideals and to rid itself of the insidious view that white people mattered more than others. They marched. They suffered the billy stick, fire hoses and police dogs. They watched as friends and fellow travelers ended up at the bottom of the Mississippi River. And they witnessed King’s dream shattered to pieces like windowpanes facing hurricane-force winds.

More From TIME

America’s betrayal of the civil rights movement gave way to urban explosions across the country, declarations of Black Power and interminable debates about the slogan’s meaning. White politicians stoked white resentments as the “silent” majority shouted that they were the true victims; rioted in hard hats against anti–Vietnam War protesters; violently resisted forced busing; and eventually elected Ronald Reagan, a man as notorious among Black activists as the segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace. More than a decade after King’s murder, Reagan’s election represented a stark reassertion of the value gap–the idea that white lives matter more than others’. In that moment of reckoning, the country made its choice and sealed Black America’s fate for two more generations.

James Baldwin, the great American writer and critic, witnessed it all. He traveled the South as early as 1957 and saw the promise of the movement’s early days. He experienced the rage caused by betrayal and clenched his teeth as the country doubled down on its ugly commitments. As he said in his last ever interview, with Quincy Troupe, in 1987, “Ronald Reagan represent[ed] the justification of their history, their sense of innocence … the justification, in short, of being white.” With cancer ravaging his body in his last years, Baldwin was a despairing witness desperate to tell the story of how the country had arrived at such a moment. As the nation today faces yet another moral reckoning, it would do us well to listen to Jimmy tell the story of how we failed when faced with a similar choice, and how we can still muster the faith to begin again.

In 1979, Baldwin wanted to write an essay about the South for the New Yorker . He would retrace his footsteps from his 1957 trip and tell the story of what had happened since those fateful days. It would be an essay about fractured memories, the trauma of loss (of the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and King) and America’s betrayal–an extension of what he had explored seven years earlier in his powerful book No Name in the Street . Then, Baldwin had sought to pick up the pieces after the assassination of King in 1968, which threw him into a deep depression. He attempted suicide in 1969 and for a period found himself flailing. No Name represented his effort to make sense of what had happened and to announce his survival.

No Name in the Street is an extraordinary achievement. If The Fire Next Time , Baldwin’s powerful polemic published in 1963, was prophetic, No Name was his own reckoning. It was his answer to how we might respond to the collapse of the Black-freedom movement and to the country’s failures. At the level of form, the book mirrors the fragmenting of memory by trauma. He anticipates the beginnings of mass incarceration and offers a scathing criticism of the way the criminal-justice system crushed Black people with intention. “If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country,” he writes, “one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected … and listens to their testimony.”

As Baldwin imagined it, this essay would take up these themes once again and extend the account through the decade of the ’70s. He would show that the true “horror is that America … changes all the time, without ever changing at all.” Baldwin, however, never wrote the essay. Instead, he worked with an English filmmaker, Dick Fontaine, and his partner, Pat Hartley, to produce a documentary film about his return to the South. I Heard It Through the Grapevine would capture on film the tragic aftertimes of the Black-freedom struggle on the eve of the election of Reagan in 1980.

The film opens with Baldwin sitting in his brother’s apartment looking over photographs of the civil rights movement. As he turns the page, we hear the voice-over of his whiskey- and cigarette-coated baritone:

“It was 1957 when I left Paris for Little Rock, Ark. 1957. This is 1980, and how many years is that? Nearly a quarter of a century. And what has happened to all those people–children I knew then, and what has happened to this country and what does this mean for the world? What does this mean for me? Medgar, Malcolm, Martin dead. These men were my friends … But there is another roll call of unknown, invisible people who did not die, but whose lives were smashed on the freedom road.”

In some ways the film is a return to the scene of the crime–an exploration of the heroic efforts of those Baldwin described elsewhere as “spiritual aristocrats” and the tragic consequence (for them and for us) that followed from the choices made by a nation that refused to change.

As I was researching my new book, Begin Again , I visited the Harvard Film Archive, where the Dick Fontaine Collection is housed. I was able to examine the research and production materials for the film and read transcriptions of interviews that were left on the cutting-room floor. One interview stood out, and I am still haunted by the intensity of the exchange.

At the historic Dooky Chase’s restaurant in New Orleans, Baldwin sat down with civil rights leader Ben Chavis. In 1972, with nine others, Chavis was wrongfully convicted on charges of arson and conspiracy in Wilmington, N.C., in the midst of a campaign to desegregate the city’s schools. The group would become known as the Wilmington 10, and between them they were sentenced to a total of 282 years in prison. After Jimmy Carter was elected President, Baldwin wrote an open letter in the New York Times urging him to rectify the injustice. “I am not so much trying to bring to your mind the suffering of a despised people … as the state and the fate of a nation of which you are the elected leader.” North Carolina Governor James Hunt commuted their sentence in 1978 but refused to pardon them. Baldwin sat down with Chavis some two years later and asked him to tell his story.

As Chavis recounted the traumatic story of the police and the Ku Klux Klan in Wilmington, I felt the rage in Baldwin’s responses leaping from the page. Jimmy kept describing what was happening and what had happened as genocide. Then he offered words that seem as relevant today as they were then: “What we are dealing with really is that for Black people in this country there is no legal code at all. We’re still governed, if that is the word I want, by the slave code. That’s the nature of the crisis. [Y]ou haven’t got to have anything resembling proof to bring any charge whatever against a difficult, bad nigger.”

When I spoke to Chavis in early June about the interview, he said you could see the rage in Baldwin’s eyes as he spoke. “You know, Jimmy didn’t just express himself with his pen and his voice. His eyes damn near started protruding.”

Fontaine and Hartley didn’t include the scene in the finished film. Chavis told me that he didn’t know the transcript existed, and that he has never seen the documentary. But he had an idea why the directors might have left the interview on the cutting-room floor. With Reagan’s election, Chavis recalled, “There was a lot of hopelessness in Black America at the time.” And Fontaine and the film crew seemed to disagree with what he and Baldwin were saying or, more accurately, how they were saying it. “At one point the film crew cut off the camera,” Chavis said, “and said, ‘I think we need to take a break.’ Jimmy said, ‘No we don’t!'” By the time they’d wrapped the interview, Chavis said with a mischievous chuckle, Fontaine and Hartley “were physically and emotionally exhausted.”

In the end, I Heard It Through the Grapevine was Baldwin’s attempt to tell the story of the ruins–of what happened after the country refused to change. He was angry, but he still held on to the faith that we could be otherwise. As he told Chavis, “They have never confessed their crimes, and they don’t know how to confess their crimes … If you can’t confess, you can’t be forgiven, and if you can’t be forgiven, you can’t get past it. That is the sin against the Holy Ghost … The only way to get past it is to confess.”

Baldwin and Chavis’ conversation took place as white America slammed the door shut on the opportunity for the fundamental transformation the civil rights movement had occasioned. The Reagan years would undo so much. We are now facing what those years have wrought. The ghosts still haunt, but we now have a chance again to choose a new America. We have some difficult days ahead. The current crisis around policing and the protests in the streets confront us with the ugliness of who we are as a nation. As Baldwin knew, that ugliness cuts deep–to the marrow of the bone. In such moments, in fact throughout our days, Baldwin insisted that we tell ourselves the truth about what we have done and what we are doing. We cannot stick our heads back in the sand or seek comfort in our national illusions or our so-called innocence. This moral reckoning requires confession and repair. If we fail this time, and it may well be our last chance, ours will be the latest addition to the ruins.

More Must-Reads From TIME

• Putin’s Enemies Are Struggling to Unite
• Women Say They Were Pressured Into Long-Term Birth Control
• What Student Photojournalists Saw at the Campus Protests
• Scientists Are Finding Out Just How Toxic Your Stuff Is
• Boredom Makes Us Human
• John Mulaney Has What Late Night Needs
• The 100 Most Influential People of 2024
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

James Baldwin

James Baldwin was an essayist, playwright, novelist and voice of the American civil rights movement known for works including 'Notes of a Native Son,' 'The Fire Next Time' and 'Go Tell It on the Mountain.'

(1924-1987)

Who Was James Baldwin?

Writer and playwright James Baldwin published the 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain , receiving acclaim for his insights on race, spirituality and humanity. Other novels included Giovanni's Room , Another Country and Just Above My Head, as well as essays like Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time .

Writer and playwright James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, in Harlem, New York. One of the 20th century's greatest writers, Baldwin broke new literary ground with the exploration of racial and social issues in his many works. He was especially known for his essays on the Black experience in America.

Baldwin was born to a young single mother, Emma Jones, at Harlem Hospital. She reportedly never told him the name of his biological father. Jones married a Baptist minister named David Baldwin when James was about three years old.

Despite their strained relationship, Baldwin followed in his stepfather's footsteps — who he always referred to as his father — during his early teen years. He served as a youth minister in a Harlem Pentecostal church from the ages of 14 to 16.

Baldwin published numerous poems, short stories and plays in the magazine, and his early work showed an understanding for sophisticated literary devices in a writer of such a young age.

After graduating from high school in 1942, he had to put his plans for college on hold to help support his family, which included seven younger children. He took whatever work he could find, including laying railroad tracks for the U.S. Army in New Jersey.

During this time, Baldwin frequently encountered discrimination, being turned away from restaurants, bars and other establishments because he was African American. After being fired from the New Jersey job, Baldwin sought other work and struggled to make ends meet.

Aspiring Writer

On July 29, 1943, Baldwin lost his father — and gained his eighth sibling the same day. He soon moved to Greenwich Village, a New York City neighborhood popular with artists and writers.

Devoting himself to writing a novel, Baldwin took odd jobs to support himself. He befriended writer Richard Wright , and through Wright, he was able to land a fellowship in 1945 to cover his expenses. Baldwin started getting essays and short stories published in such national periodicals as The Nation , Partisan Review and Commentary .

Three years later, Baldwin made a dramatic change in his life and moved to Paris on another fellowship. The shift in location freed Baldwin to write more about his personal and racial background.

"Once I found myself on the other side of the ocean, I see where I came from very clearly...I am the grandson of a slave, and I am a writer. I must deal with both," Baldwin once told The New York Times . The move marked the beginning of his life as a "transatlantic commuter," dividing his time between France and the United States.

'Go Tell It on the Mountain'

Baldwin had his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain , published in 1953. The loosely autobiographical tale focused on the life of a young man growing up in Harlem grappling with father issues and his religion.

" Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else. I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal, above all, with my father," he later said.

Gay Literature

In 1954, Baldwin received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He published his next novel, Giovanni's Room , the following year. The work told the story of an American living in Paris and broke new ground for its complex depiction of homosexuality, a then-taboo subject.

Love between men was also explored in a later Baldwin novel Just Above My Head (1978). The author would also use his work to explore interracial relationships, another controversial topic for the times, as seen in the 1962 novel Another Country .

Baldwin was open about his homosexuality and relationships with both men and women. Yet he believed that the focus on rigid categories was just a way of limiting freedom and that human sexuality is more fluid and less binary than often expressed in the U.S.

"If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy," the writer said in a 1969 interview when asked if being gay was an aberration, asserting that such views were an indication of narrowness and stagnation.

'Nobody Knows My Name'

Baldwin explored writing for the stage a well. He wrote The Amen Corner , which looked at the phenomenon of storefront Pentecostal religion. The play was produced at Howard University in 1955, and later on Broadway in the mid-1960s.

It was his essays, however, that helped establish Baldwin as one of the top writers of the times. Delving into his own life, he provided an unflinching look at the Black experience in America through such works as Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961).

Nobody Knows My Name hit the bestsellers list, selling more than a million copies. While not a marching or sit-in style activist, Baldwin emerged as one of the leading voices in the Civil Rights Movement for his compelling work on race.

'The Fire Next Time'

In 1963, there was a noted change in Baldwin's work with The Fire Next Time . This collection of essays was meant to educate white Americans on what it meant to be Black. It also offered white readers a view of themselves through the eyes of the African American community.

In the work, Baldwin offered a brutally realistic picture of race relations, but he remained hopeful about possible improvements. "If we...do not falter in our duty now, we may be able...to end the racial nightmare." His words struck a chord with the American people, and The Fire Next Time sold more than a million copies.

That same year, Baldwin was featured on the cover of Time magazine. "There is not another writer — white or Black — who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South," Time said in the feature.

Baldwin wrote another play, Blues for Mister Charlie , which debuted on Broadway in 1964. The drama was loosely based on the 1955 racially motivated murder of a young African American boy named Emmett Till .

This same year, his book with friend Avedon entitled Nothing Personal , hit bookstore shelves. The work was a tribute to slain civil rights movement leader Medgar Evers . Baldwin also published a collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man , around this time.

In his 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone , Baldwin returned to popular themes — sexuality, family and the Black experience. Some critics panned the novel, calling it a polemic rather than a novel. He was also criticized for using the first-person singular, the "I," for the book's narration.

Later Works and Death

By the early 1970s, Baldwin seemed to despair over the racial situation. He had witnessed so much violence in the previous decade — especially the assassinations of Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. — caused by racial hatred.

This disillusionment became apparent in his work, which employed a more strident tone than in earlier works. Many critics point to No Name in the Street , a 1972 collection of essays, as the beginning of the change in Baldwin's work. He also worked on a screenplay around this time, trying to adapt The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley for the big screen.

While his literary fame faded somewhat in his later years, Baldwin continued to produce new works in a variety of forms. He published a collection of poems, Jimmy's Blues: Selected Poems , in 1983 as well as the 1987 novel Harlem Quartet .

Baldwin also remained an astute observer of race and American culture. In 1985, he wrote The Evidence of Things Not Seen about the Atlanta child murders . Baldwin also spent years sharing his experiences and views as a college professor. In the years before his death, he taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Hampshire College .

Baldwin died on December 1, 1987, at his home in St. Paul de Vence, France. Never wanting to be a spokesperson or a leader, Baldwin saw his personal mission as bearing "witness to the truth." He accomplished this mission through his extensive, rapturous literary legacy.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: James Baldwin
• Birth Year: 1924
• Birth date: August 2, 1924
• Birth State: New York
• Birth City: Harlem
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: James Baldwin was an essayist, playwright, novelist and voice of the American civil rights movement known for works including 'Notes of a Native Son,' 'The Fire Next Time' and 'Go Tell It on the Mountain.'
• Politics and Government
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Writing and Publishing
• Fiction and Poetry
• Education and Academia
• Theater and Dance
• Civil Rights
• Astrological Sign: Leo
• DeWitt Clinton High School
• The New School
• Death Year: 1987
• Death date: December 1, 1987
• Death City: Saint-Paul de Vence
• Death Country: France

We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

• I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
• When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

Watch Next .css-smpm16:after{background-color:#323232;color:#fff;margin-left:1.8rem;margin-top:1.25rem;width:1.5rem;height:0.063rem;content:'';display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;}

William Shakespeare

How Did Shakespeare Die?

Christine de Pisan

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

14 Hispanic Women Who Have Made History

10 Famous Langston Hughes Poems

5 Crowning Achievements of Maya Angelou

Amanda Gorman

Langston Hughes

7 Facts About Literary Icon Langston Hughes

Maya Angelou

• Search Menu
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Biblical Archaeology
• Browse content in Art
• History of Art
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical History
• Classical Literature
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Literature
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Music Cultures
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Browse content in Religion
• Christianity
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cultural Studies
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Browse content in Law
• Company and Commercial Law
• History of Law
• Law and Society
• Legal System and Practice
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Environmental Science
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Browse content in Economics
• Economic History
• Browse content in Education
• Higher and Further Education
• Browse content in Environment
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Politics
• Political Economy
• Public Policy
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• Asian Studies
• Native American Studies
• Browse content in Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Race and Ethnicity
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

• < Previous chapter
• Next chapter >

Four Stranger at Home: James Baldwin on What It Means to Be an American

• Published: January 2019
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

This chapter analyzes the work of one of the most influential essayists, James Baldwin. It is argued that Baldwin’s essays engage with what it means to be an American. It argues moreover that Baldwin employs the form of the essay to provide crucial insights into the relationships among citizenship, race, the nation, and identity. At the beginning of his career, Baldwin deploys what the author deems “strategic American exceptionalism”. That is, he adopted the language of American exceptionalism to advance the political interests of African Americans. While this rhetorical strategy is deployed partially to be make his views comprehensible to the larger public, it also illuminated his belief in American democratic ideals. This chapter charts Baldwin’s engagement with national and democratic discourse to provide a political indictment of the failure of the U.S. to enact these principles as it engaged black Americans. This chapter charts Baldwin’s complex and ambivalent relationship to the nation and democracy.

Signed in as

Institutional accounts.

• Google Scholar Indexing
• GoogleCrawler [DO NOT DELETE]

Personal account

• Sign in with email/username & password
• Get email alerts
• Save searches
• Purchase content
• Activate your purchase/trial code
• Add your ORCID iD

Institutional access

Sign in with a library card.

• Sign in with username/password
• Recommend to your librarian
• Institutional account management
• Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Sign in through your institution

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

• Click Sign in through your institution.
• Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
• When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
• Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

• Click Sign in through society site.
• When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

• View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
• View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Rights and permissions
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

13 episodes

James Baldwin was an influential African American novelist, playwright, essayist, and activist who explored the intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, predominantly in mid-20th-century America. Born on August 2, 1924, in Harlem, New York City, Baldwin grew up in an environment rife with poverty and racial tensions. Baldwin's stepfather, a strict preacher, had a significant impact on his early life, which was reflected in his first novel, "Go Tell It on the Mountain" (1953), a semi-autobiographical story of a young boy in Harlem. Baldwin's works often address issues of identity, as he himself struggled with his place within the realms of the Black community and the predominant white society, as well as his sexual orientation. In the 1940s, disillusioned by the racial prejudice in the United States, Baldwin moved to Paris, France, where he felt more freedom to explore his identity and writing. His time abroad also deepened his perspective on the American social and political landscape, which influenced much of his later work. One of his most notable essays, "The Fire Next Time" (1963), delves into the deep-seated tensions of race relations and forewarns of potential violence if these issues remained unresolved. His fierce critiques of American society made him a prominent voice in the civil rights movement, although he maintained a complex relationship with it due to his expatriate status and his stance on nonviolent resistance. Other works, such as "Giovanni’s Room" (1956), which explored homosexual relationships, and "Another Country" (1962), which delved into interracial relationships and complex social and psychological pressures, showcased Baldwin’s courage in confronting taboos of the time. Baldwin continued writing until his death on December 1, 1987, leaving behind a legacy that has had a lasting impact on the literary world and the ongoing discourse around race, sexuality, and human rights. His writings are celebrated for their insightful, powerful, and unflinching examination of difficult social and personal issues.

James Baldwin Essens Book Summaries

Listen on Apple Podcasts Requires macOS 11.4 or higher

Just Above My Head (1979)

"Just Above My Head" is a novel by James Baldwin that explores themes of love, faith, family, and racial identity, centering on the life and struggles of a gospel singer named Arthur Montana and the impact of his life and death on those around him.

Nobody Knows My Name (1961)

"Nobody Knows My Name" is a collection of essays by James Baldwin that explores themes of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, particularly in mid-20th-century America, through personal reflections and social critique.

The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985)

"The Evidence of Things Not Seen" is a book by James Baldwin that explores the social and racial issues underlying the Atlanta Child Murders of the late 1970s and early 1980s, challenging the official investigation and reflecting on the nature of American society and its treatment of black communities.

Going to Meet the Man (1965)

Get the Full Audiobook for Free: https://amzn.to/3V3PVW2 "Going to Meet the Man" is a harrowing short story by James Baldwin that delves into the deep-seated racism in America through the perspective of a white deputy sheriff who recounts violent and racially charged memories that culminate in his arousal at the gruesome lynching of a Black man.

Giovanni's Room (1956)

Get the Full Audiobook for Free: https://amzn.to/3T6PYhb "Giovanni's Room" is a novel by James Baldwin that explores the complex emotional and sexual turmoil of an American man living in Paris, as he engages in a tumultuous relationship with an Italian bartender, leading to a profound personal crisis relating to his sexual orientation and identity.

The Fire Next Time (1963)

Get the Full Audiobook for Free: https://amzn.to/3v5EfHD "The Fire Next Time" is a powerful exploration of race relations in America through two essays, where James Baldwin examines the deeply rooted issues of identity, religion, and systemic oppression faced by Black people, and calls for both Black self-realization and a profound, morally-driven change in the nation's consciousness to avert the destructive fire of racial conflict.

Top Podcasts In Fiction

You might also like.

Fact Check: About a James Baldwin Quote That Suggests Reasons Those in Power Dismiss Protests by Black People

James Baldwin wrote, "When the South has trouble with its Negroes — when the Negroes refuse to remain in their 'place' — it blames 'outside agitators' and 'Northern interference.' When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin."

Correct Attribution ( About this rating? )

On April 30, 2024, a post on X ( archived ) purported to cite U.S. author James Baldwin writing about outside parties leading Black Americans to protest. The quote read:

When the South has trouble with its Negroes — when the Negroes refuse to remain in their "place" — it blames "outside" agitators and "Northern interference." When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.

The X post reshared another post that commented on the ongoing pro-Palestinian demonstrations on U.S. university campuses. The suggestion in both posts was that for those in power, it has always been easy to dismiss loud discontent by claiming that external actors manipulated protesters. 

The X user correctly attributed the quote, we found. A search on Google Books confirmed that it was taken from Baldwin's book "Nobody Knows My Name," published in 1961. In the paragraph in which the quote appeared, Baldwin recognized that external actors do join movements for less-than-noble reasons, but he argued that instead of creating discontent, they in fact exploit existing grievances:

Now, I do not doubt that, among the people at the U.N. that day, there were Stalinist and professional revolutionists acting out of the most cynical motives. Wherever there is great social discontent, these people are, sooner or later, to be found. Their presence is not as frightening as the discontent which creates their opportunity. What I find appalling — and really dangerous — is the American assumption that the Negro is so contented with his lot here that only the cynical agents of a foreign power can rouse him to protest. It is a notion which contains a gratuitous insult, implying, as it does, that Negroes can make no move unless they are manipulated. It forcibly suggests that the Southern attitude toward the Negro is also, essentially, the national attitude. When the South has trouble with its Negroes — when the Negroes refuse to remain in their "place" — it blames "outside" agitators and "Northern interference." When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin. And this, by no means incidentally, is a very dangerous thing to do. We thus give credit to the Communists for attitudes and victories which are not theirs. We make of them the champions of the oppressed, and they could not, of course, be more delighted.

We confirmed another quote by James Baldwin in April 2024, in which he discusses education.

Baldwin, James.  Nobody Knows My Name . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013.

41 new books for summer reading in 2024

For your summer reading pleasure, here is a selection of 41 new books to choose from, including ones by Wisconsin writers, with a subset of choices for children and teens. In each case, I've either read the book already or browsed it, or been impressed by a previous work from the same author, or had the new book recommended by a trusted source of information.

Thanks to my colleague Chris Foran for contributing pop-culture selections.

"Between the Lines: Steppenwolf’s Seagull and a Reluctant Actor’s Journey Back to the Stage" (Blue Jay Ink), by Eric Simonson. Despite his chronic stage fright, playwright Eric Simonson ("Lombardi," "Run Bambi Run" ) went back on stage as an actor — at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. The Milwaukee native and Lawrence University grad turns this adventure into a smart and sober reflection on that production, working on a show and the "golden age" of Chicago theater (which he defines as 1980-1995).

"Between You and Us" (WaterBrook) by Kendra Broekhuis. In this Milwaukee writer's novel, a woman lives alternative versions of her life where she experiences a loving relationship with either her husband or her daughter, but not both.

"Birding to Change the World: A Memoir" (Ecco), by Trish O'Kane. Ornithology meets environmental activism in O'Kane's book, which includes the work she did to preserve Madison's Warner Park as a home for birds while she was earning her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin.

“The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv and the Making of an American Film Classic” (Grove/Atlantic Monthly Press), by Daniel de Visé. This blow-by-blow accounting of the making of “The Blue Brothers” movie (including an infamous scene shot in Milwaukee) also serves as a dual biography of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.  

"The Brides of High Hill" (Tordotcom), by Nghi Vo. The new entry in a Milwaukee writer's exceptional fantasy series. A traveling cleric accompanies a young bride-to-be to the dilapidated estate where she is to be married. Hint: Some scary things are happening.

"Broiler" (Soho Crime), by Eli Cranor. An exploited worker at an Arkansas chicken plant strikes back with a kidnapping, which leads to other brutal events in Edgar winner Cranor's crime thriller.

"A Chance Meeting: American Encounters" (New York Review Books), by Rachel Cohen. Grounded in research, seasoned with mild speculation, Cohen writes about real meetings and encounters between American literary, artistic and public figures from 1854 through 1967. To mention a few names: Matthew Brady, Willa Cather, James Baldwin, Richard Avedon. Her deftly written essays interlock in fascinating ways.

"Chaos in Kinshasa" (Catalyst), written by Thierry Bellefroid with artwork by Barly Baruti, translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger. In this intense graphic novel, a Harlem street thug at the Ali-Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle" in 1974 gets mixed up in a lethal coup attempt.

"Chasing the Stars: How the Astronomers of Observatory Hill Transformed Our Understanding of the Universe" (Wisconsin Historical Society Press), by James Lattis and Kelly Tyrrell. In this friendly book for general readers, the authors explore the role University of Wisconsin researchers and the Washburn Observatory have played in 20th century astrophysics.

“Cocktails With George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’” (Bloomsbury), by Philip Gefter. In retrospect, casting newlyweds Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor as the battling spouses in Edward Albee’s searing drama seems like a no-brainer. Gefter shows it was anything but in this richly told history. 

"Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil" (Tor, on sale June 18), by Ananda Lima. After a woman has a thing with the devil, she keeps writing stories and keeps running into him. Brazilian writer Lima, who lives in Chicago now, will speak at 6:30 p.m. June 25 at Boswell Books.

"Dear Readers and Riders: The Beloved Books, Faithful Fans, and Hidden Private Life of Marguerite Henry" (Trafalgar Square Books), by Lettie Teague. Henry, author of "Misty of Chincoteague" and many other horse-centered books for children, was a Milwaukee native. Teague's biography includes a substantial number of photos as well as choice letters from Henry's fans. Teague will speak at 6:30 p.m. June 5 at Boswell Books.

“Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls” (St. Martin’s Press, on sale June 18), by Susan Seidelman. Seidelman made her filmmaking debut with “Smithereens,” a DYI indie that debuted at the Cannes Film Festival; her first Hollywood movie, “Desperately Seeking Susan,” rode and fueled Madonna’s skyrocketing career. She gives the inside stories on those, and on a life just ahead of the pop-culture curve while still trying to comprehend it, in this personable (and tune-filled) memoir.  

"The Downloaded" (Shadowpaw Press), by Robert J. Sawyer. In this Canadian science fiction master's new novel of uploaded minds and space settlement, astronauts and criminals have to find a way to work together after a disastrous event. The Audible audiobook of Sawyer's novel is a full cast production starring Brendan Fraser.

"Familiaris" (Blackstone, on sale June 11), by David Wroblewski. A prequel to Wroblewski's hit novel "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle," "Familiaris" is a mammoth read with Wisconsin and the human-dog connection at the heart of it.

“From the Moment They Met It was Murder: ‘Double Indemnity’ and the Rise of Film Noir” (Running Press/Turner Classic Movies), by Alain Silver and James Ursini. Billy Wilder’s 1944 crime classic “Double Indemnity” didn’t invent film noir, but Silver and Ursini make an excellent case for the movie’s foundational role in this rich, well-written history.  

"Hip-Hop Is History" (AUWA, on sale June 11) by Questlove with Ben Greenman. A personal history of the musical genre from one of its great musicians and thinkers.

"I Cheerfully Refuse" (Grove) by Leif Enger. The author of "Peace Like a River" brings his meditative style to a near-future dystopian novel set around Lake Superior.

"I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition" (Penguin Press), by Lucy Sante. A prominent cultural writer braids the story of her later-life transition with an account of the earlier years that shaped her personality.

"Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants" (Grand Central), by Jacob Kushner. Xenophobic neo-Nazi terrorists stoked anti-immigrant violences in Germany unchecked for years — in the 21st century. Kushner details this real-life horror story with an eye on surging anti-immigrant rhetoric in this country. Kushner, a University of Wisconsin alum, will speak at 6:30 p.m. May 16 at Boswell Books.

"Monsters We Have Made" (Vintage), by Lindsay Starck. Inspired by the Slender Man case, Milwaukee native Starck's literary novel with an undercurrent of horror fiction looks deeply at the parents of one of the perpetrators, who are alarmed about the apparent return of the monster.

"The Moviegoer & Other Novels 1961-1971" (Library of America), by Walker Percy. The first three novels by a one-of-a-kind philosopher-novelist, including his debut "The Moviegoer," a surprise winner of the National Book Award in 1962.

"Music Stories" (Everyman Pocket Classics), edited by Wesley Stace. This winning anthology of classic and contemporary fiction, chosen by a notable writer-musician, covers the gamut of musical situations in killer stories by Ian McEwan, Vikram Seth, Langston Hughes, Dana Spiotta and others.

"My Life in Seventeen Books: A Literary Memoir" (Monkfish Publishing), by Jon M. Sweeney. A spiritually minded bibliophile's account of books that mattered so much to him he carried them around for a long time. "A few of these chapters tell stories of how I organize business and work around locating secondhand bookstores," the Milwaukee writer confesses.

"One Perfect Couple" (Scout Press), by Ruth Ware. In a new suspense novel from the author of "The Woman in Cabin 10," five couples competing in a reality show are trapped on a deserted island with a killer. English writer Ware will speak at 7 p.m. May 24 at Boswell Books in conversation with Milwaukee novelist Carole E. Barrowman. Tickets for this event, at $23.99 plus tax and fees, include a copy of Ware's new book. Get tickets via boswellbooks.com .

“The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story” (Harper), by Sam Wasson. Coppola is the ultimate American dreamer in this passionate portrait of the Oscar-winning filmmaker during two of his most ambitious projects: “Apocalypse Now,” which wrecked him physically, and “One From the Heart,” which wrecked him financially.  

"The Price You Pay" (G.P. Putnam's Sons), by Nick Petrie. In the eighth novel in Shorewood writer Petrie's action series, lethal sidekick Lewis turns to Peter Ash for help when shadowy figures comes after Lewis for vengeance. Parts of this book are set in Riverwest and in northern Wisconsin.

"Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring" (Harper), by Brad Gooch. Haring packed an incredible amount of art, music and life into his 31 years., Gooch's sympathetic biography deepens the picture of Haring as a Warhol-like genius.

"Real Americans" (Knopf), by Rachel Khong. Three generations of Chinese-Americans try to find their way in an ambitious novel that touches everything from the Chinese Cultural Revolution to gene editing. Khong will speak at 6:30 p.m. May 15 at Boswell Books, 2559 N. Downer Ave.

"Restoring Prairie" (Cornerstone Press), by Margaret Rozga. Former Wisconsin poet laureate Rozga's new environmentally oriented collection includes a number of poems inspired by the UWM at Waukesha Field Station, a decades-long effort to restore native plants and animals to acres near Waterville Road.

"Strangers No Longer: Latino Belonging and Faith in Twentieth-Century Wisconsin" (University of Illinois Press), by Sergio M. González. A Marquette University professor traces a century of Latino life in Wisconsin, with a focus on the roles played by churches and religious movements.

"Too Much Too Young: The 2 Tone Records Story" (Akashic Books), by Daniel Rachel. A chronicle of the comet-like record label that brought the world the ska-meets-punk sounds of The Specials, Selecter, Madness and The Beat.

“What Have We Here? Portrait of a Life” (Knopf), by Billy Dee Williams (Knopf). Williams is so smooth on the screen – in star turns ranging from “Brian’s Song” to “The Empire Strikes Back” — that he’s underestimated. But he’s also an artist, a thinker, a lover (yes, he names names) and more, as he shows in this charm-wrapped memoir.  

“Wisconsin for Kennedy: The Primary that Launched a President and Changed the Course of History” (Wisconsin Historical Society Press), by B.J. Hollars. The state’s 1960 primary, which set the stage for John F. Kennedy winning the Democratic nomination, is retold by focusing on the stories of the Kennedy clan and the Wisconsin players who rallied to their candidate.  

“The World Is Yours: The Story of ‘Scarface’” (Hanover Square Press), by Glenn Kenny. Kenny goes down the rabbit hole on the 1983 crime spectacle “Scarface,” crafting a making-of story with a critical eye and lengthy interviews to get at how a violent, over-the-top remake of a 1932 gangster movie became a touchstone of our time, for good and ill.  

New books for children and teens

"Caged" (Kokila, on sale May 28), by Kao Kalia Yang, illustrated by Khou Vue. In this picture book written by a prominent Minnesota writer, a young Hmong girl born and raised in a refugee camp wonders what life could be like outside. For readers 4 to 8 years old.

"Being Home" (Kokila), by Traci Sorell, illustrated by Michaela Goade. A young Cherokee girl and her mother pack up their home in the city and move to the Cherokee Nation Reservation, where they are warmly welcomed. For readers 6 to 10 years old.

"Painting the Game" (McElderry), by Patricia MacLachlan. In the late MacLachlan's final novel, the daughter of a minor league pitcher practices in secret, trying to master the knuckleball. For readers 8 to 12 years old.

"Tales From Cabin 23: The Boo Hag Reflex" (Balzer + Bray), by Justina Ireland. The author of the acclaimed alt-history horror novel "Dread Nation" delivers a spooky story for middle graders. A grieving girl at summer camp finds out that monsters preying on old people in a trailer park are more than legends. For readers 8 to 12 years old.

"Moonstorm" (Delacorte, on sale June 4), by Yoon Ha Lee. In this science fiction novel rooted in Korean culture, a teen and her classmates are rushed into training to pilot robot warriors, only to learn of problems that threaten everything. For readers age 12 and older.

"Brownstone" (Versify, on sale June 11), by Samuel Teer, illustrated by Mar Julia. Teen Almudena is sent to the city to live with her Guatemalan father for the summer, where she copes with a million changes, including the question of how she fits in. For readers 14 and older.