James Arthur Baldwin was born in 1924 in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. Baldwin, who died in 1987, eventually became one of the most influential African-American writers and intellectuals of the twentieth century. His early passion for reading and writing seemed to make him destined from the start to become a man of letters. As the oldest of nine children, Baldwin was charged with much of the responsibility for caring for his younger siblings, and to balance these responsibilities with his sweet tooth for literature Baldwin was often said to be seen with a baby in one hand and a book in the other.[1] The first of these books was the Bible. Baldwin’s adoptive father, David Baldwin, was a strictly religious man whom James did not get along with. In part to spite his father, and in part to keep away from “the whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue,” James, for a time in his teens, became a preacher at a different Church than the one his father preached at.[2] Though Baldwin would soon turn away from religion, his religious upbringing continued to play a large role in his writing for the rest of his life. Baldwin himself admitted how influential these early religious years were, commenting that, “[t]hose three years in the pulpit- I didn’t realize it then- that is what turned me into a writer.”[3]
Baldwin looking back on Harlem and how it has changed over the years. II
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As he reached adulthood, Baldwin began to move farther and farther away from home, first to Greenwich Village, then to Paris, but his writings and his thoughts seemed to remain in Harlem. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the distance he had from the racial turmoil taking place in Harlem and the larger United States, Baldwin became one of the most uniquely American writers of his time. Once living abroad in France, Baldwin seemed surprised to find himself becoming more invested in the problems of the country he had tried so hard to escape. When explaining the strange dynamic of becoming more mentally entangled in the United States the farther he moved from it, Baldwin commented that in his mind he was only a “commuter” because:
Only white Americans can consider themselves to be expatriates…Once I found myself on the other side of the ocean, I could see where I came from very clearly, and I could see that I carried myself, which is my home, with me. You can never escape that. I am the grand son of a slave, and I am a writer. I must deal with both.[4]
Indeed, Baldwin did deal with both. In fact, dealing with his own history, his own lineage is one of the things that helped turned Baldwin into one of the most important voices of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Baldwin's exploration in his writing of African American history and its relation to the race relations of his time, elevated Baldwin to being one of the most prominent African American intellectuals of the time.
Baldwin with Charlton Heston, Marlon Brando, and Harry Belafonte at Civil Rights March 1963. III
The reputation and success he gained from these writings resulted in him becoming a public figure, doing television interviews, large debates, such as the one with William F. Buckley Jr. at Cambridge University, and even meeting with, then, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in May 1963 to discuss the government's role in the Civil Rights Movement.
Debate at Cambridge University Regarding the American Dream and the American Negro. IV
Full Debate Video Available Through UC Berkeley Here
Though it is a bit depraved to try and reduce the works of such prolific and complex writer as Baldwin to one ideological message or position, if one was to do so with regards to his views on civil rights, it would most surely revolve around his exploration of cultural identity versus assimilation.
The roots of Baldwin’s exploration of African American cultural identity are firmly placed in one of his earliest works, Notes of a Native Son, a collection of essays he wrote during the 1940's and early 1950's. The essays first published in 1955, the same year as the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmitt Till in Mississippi and Rosa Parks' bus seat boycott in Alabama, came at an instrumental time in the beginnings of the civil rights movement. The most prominent of these essays revolve around Baldwin’s discussion of two books, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and, his early supporter and mentor, Richard Wright’s Native Son.
Baldwin’s essay on Uncle Tom’s Cabin entitled, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” criticizes the novel for being overly sentimental and dishonest. Early in the essay Baldwin contends that Stowe’s novel was intended to do nothing more than prove slavery was wrong, which in Baldwin’s eyes “makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel.”[5] Baldwin goes further to say that Stowe does the worst damage in “the method she used to solve the problem of writing about a black man,” which Baldwin believes resulted in her having to find “a lie more palatable than the truth.”[6] This lie Baldwin believes is presenting every black man in the book as not black at all but instead “as white as she can make them,” which in Baldwin’s mind results in Tom being “robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex.”[7]
Baldwin assigns this guilt not only to Stowe, but to the very idea of the protest novel. Baldwin feels that because society sees the protest novel as an attempt to “bring greater freedom to the oppressed” these novels are allowed, by society, a great deal of forgiveness with regards to the constraints of reality, which he feels leads to “badly written and wildy improbable” literature.[8] Baldwin stipulates that this unrealistic literature, with its whitening of black characters, seems to have the same assimilationist intentions as “those alabaster missionaries [in] Africa” who aim “to cover the nakedness of the natives.”[9] This aim to “reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe,” Baldwin finds disturbing, both in its attempt to make blacks something they are not, and something they inherently cannot be, white.[10] Baldwin finds this assimilationist ideology akin to that indoctrinated into slaves, that black is inherently evil, inherently sinful and that “only the robes of the saved are white.”[11] This Baldwin feels results in African Americans being born into a paradoxical cage that tells them to aim to be something that they cannot be, which results in “the allegedly inferior [being] actually made so, insofar as the societal realities are concerned.”[12]
Richard Wright. V
After lambasting Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Baldwin looks to Richard Wright’s character Bigger Thomas in Native Son. Though Baldwin respected Wright and acknowledges Native Son as “the most powerful and celebrated statement we have yet had of what it means to be a negro in America,” he felt the book and Bigger Thomas were simply a descendant of Uncle Tom and the protest novel.[13] Baldwin contends that the novel’s success was based almost solely on the revelry in the feeling that the publishing of such a shocking book proved “what strides might be taken in a free democracy…that Americans were now able to look full in the face without flinching the dreadful facts.”[14] Baldwin likens Bigger Thomas to Uncle Tom in the mutual shallow simplicity of the two characters. Baldwin views them as two sides of the same coin, Uncle Tom representing the too-perfect, sexless, whitened black and Bigger Thomas as the “ ‘nigger,’ black, benighted, brutal, consumed with hatred.”[15] Baldwin felt what connected the two and what explained the problem of the protest novel was their sub-humanity. Their simplicity, and in turn the protest novel’s led to a “rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread power…[an] insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”[16]
Moreover, Baldwin deduces that because Bigger Thomas’s character is so limited the story loses any feel for “the relationship that Negroes bear to one another,” which Baldwin feels serves only to show that in “Negro life there exists no tradition, no field of manners, no possibility of ritual or intercourse.”[17] Baldwin feels this depiction false, as he believes tradition is “nothing more than the long and painful experience of a people,” something African Americans no doubt have.[18] Baldwin contends that this ignoring of African American tradition stems from the rapid speed at which the African American has progressed and the presiding psychology behind this progression, that for the African American to progress he must assimilate, he must ignore his own cultural past and “not pause to conjecture on the darkness which lies behind him.”[19] Baldwin feels this assimilationist attitude highly detrimental, saying that if this attitude is accepted:
[T]he Negro in America can only acquiesce in the obliteration of his own personality, the distortion and debasement of his own experience, surrendering to those forces which reduce the person to anonymity and which make themselves manifest daily all over the darkening world.[20]
Baldwin in 1958. VI
In 1957 Baldwin wrote his literary answer to the problems he saw in Native Son and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This answer came in the form of the short story “Sonny’s Blues.” Though first published in '57, the story was republished in Baldwin's short story collection Going to Meet the Man in 1965 during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement and the same year as Malcolm X's assassination. The story follows an unnamed narrator and his brother, Sonny, shortly after Sonny is incarcerated then released for using heroin. The two brothers have two very different ideologies about life. The narrator went to the army, then to college and became an algebra teacher trying to fit into society. Sonny, on the other hand went to the navy and when he came back pursued a bohemian lifestyle of jazz and heroin in Greenwich Village. The narrator very much seems to represent the assimilationist ideology, while Sonny seeks his own path. While the story does seem to convey Baldwin’s own views, it acts more to observe than to preach.
As with Baldwin’s other works Sonny’s Blues points out the futility in assimilation. Though the narrator has achieved a sort of middle class status and he seems to live a fairly comfortable life, he still lives in the same housing projects that he grew up in and as a neighborhood algebra teacher seems to have little chance of any further upward mobility. Moreover, the narrator sees himself as one of the lucky few who made it out of poverty. In the beginning while teaching his class, the narrator realizes his brother started doing heroin around the same age as his students. Though disturbed by the idea, he contemplates that perhaps heroin could do more for them than algebra, because like he and his brother’s generation these boys “were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities.”[21] Despite these insights the narrator is still perplexed by his brother’s path, which he sees not only as fruitless, but detrimental, and in a sense suicidal. When speaking to another junkie who knows his brother, the narrator questions him as to why his brother seems to want to die so badly, to which the junkie responds, “[h]e don’t want to die. He wants to live.”[22] From this point on the idea that perhaps Sonny’s path is not simply one of self destruction and hedonistic drug abuse begins to enter the story.
In an argument with the narrator about the practicalities of working as a musician, the narrator comments that people can’t always do what they want to do in life, to which Sonny replies, “I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?”[23] This exemplifies the difference in the two ideologies. The narrator believes in sacrificing one’s own hopes, dreams and desires in the name of practicality, of fitting into the system that already exists. Sonny on the other hand believes truly living is following one’s dreams and desires regardless of how that fits into the existing system of society. Additionally, it is no coincidence that Sonny’s hopes and dreams revolve around avant-garde jazz, something uniquely African American.
Baldwin at Jazz Club. VII
The culmination of the story and the turning point for the narrator’s view of his brother takes place in a jazz bar where Sonny is playing. As the band begins to play, the music begins to affect the narrator. He realizes that the music they are playing is not something new, it is “the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph.” [24] He realizes that this music, this story is necessary, that “[t]here isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”[25] The music becomes for the narrator something bigger, something absent from the rest of the story: hope. Finally during a solo, he sees Sonny in a new light, commenting, “[f]reedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.”[26] Baldwin does not offer up Sonny as a solution to all the world’s woes, Baldwin’s Sonny is complex and in some ways flawed, he is human. What Baldwin does seem to offer up in the story, however, is the idea that if the African American is to truly achieve anything, to truly change anything it will certainly not come from assimilating or fitting in, but instead from something radical, something genuine, something deeply rooted in the suffering and sweat of the past.
“Sonny’s Blues” and Notes of a Native Son, along with other works such as The Fire Next Time, played an undeniable role in the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. When Baldwin returned to the United States in the 1960’s to participate in the Civil Rights Movement, which he often referred to as “the latest slave rebellion,” he found himself stuck between two factions.[27]
Baldwin on the meaning of the phrase "Civil Rights Movement." VIII
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On the one side was Dr. Martin Luther King and the integrationist ideology, whom Baldwin agreed with on the grounds that only love, not hate, could bring true freedom. On the other side was Malcolm X and the separationist ideology, whom Baldwin agreed with in its denial of letting white society off the hook and its emphasis on African America self-reliance.[28] Baldwin’s ideals were an amalgam of both leaders’ ideals, he felt both the hope of Dr. King and the anger of Malcolm X. He participated in King’s marches, met with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, and moderated debates between Malcolm X and students, yet he remained his own, he remained analytical and critical, and because of this he was never fully accepted on either side.
Baldwin on Violent v. Non-Violent Protest, and Malcolm X v. Martin Luther King Jr. IX
Perhaps because of his early experience with the profession, Baldwin’s writing never preached to its reader, it never contained absolute solutions, only ideas and observations, and because of these qualities Baldwin’s writing remains some of the most insightful and intelligent writing of the civil rights movement. Though Baldwin’s opinions and thoughts evolved and changed over time, the idea of change through embracing cultural identity not assimilation remained at the very core of his work.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. "Everybody's Protest Novel." Notes of a Native Son. New York: Bantam Books, 1955. 9-17.
Baldwin, James. "Many Thousands Gone." Notes of a Native Son. New York: Bantam Books, 1955. 18-36.
Baldwin, James. "Sonny's Blues." Going to Meet the Man. New York: The Dial P, 1965. 103-41.
Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: The Dial P, 1963.
Daniels, Lee A. "James Baldwin, Eloquent Writer In Behalf of Civil Rights, Is Dead." 2 Dec. 1987. The New York Times. 21 Apr. 2009
Excerpt of Speech from My Film James Baldwin Anthology. Perf. James Baldwin. 19 Dec. 2007. 21 Apr. 2009
"James Baldwin - About the Author | American Masters |." PBS. 21 Apr. 2009
Pfeffer, Robert. "The Fire This Time." Literacy Education Online. St. Cloud State University. 21 Apr. 2009
Rosset, Lisa. James Baldwin Author (Black American Series). Boston: Holloway House Company, 1990.
[1] Rosset, Lisa. James Baldwin Author (Black American Series). Boston: Holloway House Company, 1990. 24.
[4] Daniels, Lee A. "James Baldwin, Eloquent Writer In Behalf of Civil Rights, Is Dead." 2 Dec. 1987. The New York Times. 21 Apr. 2009
[5] Baldwin, James. "Everybody's Protest Novel." Notes of a Native Son. New York: Bantam Books, 1955. 10.
[13]Baldwin, James. "Many Thousands Gone." Notes of a Native Son. New York: Bantam Books, 1955. 18-36.23.
[27] Excerpt of Speech from My Film James Baldwin Anthology. Perf. James Baldwin. 19 Dec. 2007. 21 Apr. 2009
[28] Pfeffer, Robert. "The Fire This Time." Literacy Education Online. St. Cloud State University. 21 Apr. 2009
