No Name in the Street

by James Baldwin

I have written both too much and too little about this man, whom I did not understand till he was past understanding.

A newborn baby is an extraordinary event; and I have never seen two babies who looked or even sounded remotely alike. Here it is, this breathing miracle who could not live an instant without you, with a skull more fragile than an egg, a miracle of eyes, legs, toenails, and (especially) lungs. It gropes in the light like a blind thing—it is, for the moment, blind—what can it make of what it sees? It’s got a little hair, which it’s going to lose, it’s got no teeth, it pees all over you, it belches, and when it’s frightened or hungry, quite without knowing what a miracle it’s accomplishing, it exercises its lungs.

By the time it has managed to crawl under every bed, nearly suffocate itself in every drawer, nearly strangle itself with string, somehow, God knows how, trapped itself behind the radiator, been pulled back, by one leg, from its suicidal investigation of the staircase, and nearly poisoned itself with everything—its hand being quicker than your eye—it can possibly get into its mouth, you have either grown to love it or you have left home.

Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.

Perhaps, however, the moral of the story (and the hope of the world) lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.

Nothing could be more unutterably paradoxical: to have thrown in your lap what you never dreamed of getting, and, in sober, bitter truth, could never have dreamed of having, and that at the price of an assumed betrayal of your brothers and your sisters!

American democracy has always been at the mercy of the dollar:

How can one say that freedom is taken, not given, and that no one is free until all are free? and that the price is high.

This is the way people react to the loss of empire—for the loss of an empire also implies a radical revision of the individual identity—and I was to see this over and over again, not only in France.

Some of the things written during those years, justifying, for example, the execution of the Rosenbergs, or the crucifixion of Alger Hiss (and the beatification of Whittaker Chambers) taught me something about the irresponsibility and cowardice of the liberal community which I will never forget.

that brilliance without passion is nothing more than sterility.

they spent hours debating whether or not McCarthy was an enemy of domestic liberties. I couldn’t but wonder what conceivable further proof they were awaiting: I thought of German Jews sitting around debating whether or not Hitler was a threat to their lives until the debate was summarily resolved for them by a knocking at the door.

for their complicity with the patriots of that hour meant that the policeman was acting on their orders, too.

Yet, hope—the hope that we, human beings, can be better than we are—dies hard; perhaps one can no longer live if one allows that hope to die. But it is also hard to see what one sees. One sees that most human beings are wretched, and, in one way or another, become wicked: because they are so wretched. And one’s turning away, then, from what I have called the welcome table is dictated by some mysterious vow one scarcely knows one’s taken—never to allow oneself to fall so low. Lower, perhaps, much lower, to the very dregs: but never there.

I had never, thank God—and certainly not once I found myself living there—been even remotely romantic about Paris. I may have been romantic about London—because of Charles Dickens—but the romance lasted for exactly as long as it took me to carry my bags out of Victoria Station.

Anyone who has ever been at the mercy of the people, then, knows something awful about us, will forever distrust the popular patriotism, and avoids even the most convivial of mobs.

And yet, he must surely have known, must have seen with his own eyes, some of the results of French “justice” in Algeria. (“A legal means,” said an African recipient, “of administering injustice.”)

become spokesmen for “black” capitalism—a concept demanding yet more faith and infinitely more in schizophrenia than the concept of the Virgin Birth.

If the Christians do not believe in their Saviour (who has certainly, furthermore, failed to save them) why, then, wonder the unredeemed, should I abandon my gods for yours? For I know my gods are real: they have enabled me to withstand you.

There was unutterable pride, tension, and anguish in that girl’s face as she approached the halls of learning, with history, jeering, at her back.

was old enough to recognize how deep and strangling were my fears, how manifold and mighty my limits: but no one can demand more of life than that life do him the honor to demand that he learn to live with his fears, and learn to live, every day, both within his limits and beyond them.

People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these individual abdications menaces life all over the world. For, in the generality, as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today.

They were attempting to get an education, in a country in which education is a synonym for indoctrination, if you are white, and subjugation, if you are black.

It is hard for anyone under twenty to realize that death has already assigned him a number, which is going to come up one day.

All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.

If they attempt to work out their salvation—their autonomy—on terms dictated by those who have excluded them, they are in a delicate and dangerous position, and if they refuse, they are in a desperate one: it is hard to know which case is worse.

Hunger has no principles, it simply makes men, at worst, wretched, and, at best, dangerous.

For a very long time, for example, America prospered—or seemed to prosper: this prosperity cost millions of people their lives. Now, not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits: they can neither understand them nor do without them, nor can they go beyond them. Above all, they cannot, or dare not, assess or imagine the price paid by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life, and so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolting. They are forced, then, to the conclusion that the victims—the barbarians—are revolting against all established civilized values—which is both true and not true—and, in order to preserve these values, however stifling and joyless these values have caused their lives to be, the bulk of the people desperately seek out representatives who are prepared to make up in cruelty what both they and the people lack in conviction.

The representatives of the status quo are sickened and divided, and dread looking into the eyes of their young; while the excluded begin to realize, having endured

What made him unfamiliar and dangerous was not his hatred for white people but his love for blacks, his apprehension of the horror of the black condition, and the reasons for it, and his determination so to work on their hearts and minds that they would be enabled to see their condition and change it themselves.

What I tried to say then, and will try to repeat now, is that whatever hand pulled the trigger did not buy the bullet. That bullet was forged in the crucible of the West, that death was dictated by the most successful conspiracy in the history of the world, and its name is white supremacy.

It is one thing to know that a friend is dead and another thing to accept, within oneself, that unanswering silence: that not many of us are able to accept the reality of death is both an obvious and a labyrynthine statement. The imagination, then, which has been assigned the job of recreating and interpreting a life one witnessed and loved simply kicks like a stalled motor, refuses to make contact, and will not get the vehicle to move.

In spite—perhaps because of—all my efforts to feel relaxed and free and at home (for America is my home!) I began to feel unreal—almost as though I were playing an unworthy part in a cheap, unworthy drama. I, who have spent half my life in hotels, sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, terrified, wondering where I was. But, though I scarcely realized it, and might even have been ashamed to admit it to myself, I think that this had partly to do with the fact that I was the only black person in the hotel. I must stress that in no way whatever did anyone in the hotel ever make me feel this, nor, indeed, did I ever consciously feel it—it’s only now, in looking back, that I suspect it had to be partly that. My presence in the hotel was absolutely unquestioned, even by people who did not know who I was, or who thought I was Sammy Davis. It was simply taken for granted that I would not have been in the hotel if I had not belonged there.

In the long meantime, I can only say that the authority of my countrymen in these matters is not equal to my own, since I know what black Americans endure—know it in my own flesh and spirit, know it by the human wreckage through which I have passed.

But everything that might have charmed me merely reminded me of how many were excluded, how many were suffering and groaning and dying, not far from a paradise which was itself but another circle of hell.

In America, I was free only in battle, never free to rest—and he who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle.

is only very lately that white students, in the main, have had any reason to question the structure into which they were born; it is the very lateness of the hour, and their bewildered resentment—their sense of having been betrayed—which is responsible for their romantic excesses;

For it is a very different matter, and results in a very different intelligence, to grow up under the necessity of questioning everything—everything, from the question of one’s identity to the literal, brutal question of how to save one’s life in order to begin to live it.

White people have managed to get through entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac.

People who cling to their delusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning:

The truth which frees black people will also free white people, but this is a truth which white people find very difficult to swallow.

Let us tell it like it is: the rhetoric of a Stennis, a Maddox, a Wallace, historically and actually, has brought death to untold numbers of black people and it was meant to bring death to them. This is absolutely true, no matter who denies it—no black man can possibly deny it.

Nothing would ever reach the conscience of the people of this nation—it was a dream to suppose that the people of any nation had a conscience. Some individuals within the nation might, and the nation always saw to it that these people came to a bad, if not a bloody end.

it must be becoming increasingly clear to some, at least, that all of us are standing in the same deep shadow, a shadow which can only be lifted by human courage and honor.

In spite of all that one knew, and feared, it was a very stirring day, and one very nearly dared, in spite of all that one knew, to hope—to hope that the need and the passion of the people, so nakedly and vividly, and with such dignity revealed, would not be, once again, betrayed.

Malcolm was very caustic about the March on Washington, which he described as a sell-out. I think he was right. Martin, five years later, was five years wearier and five years sadder, and still petitioning. But the impetus was gone, because the people no longer believed in their petitions, no longer believed in their government.

if a poor man in trouble with the law receives justice, one can suppose heavenly intervention.

The police are very sensitive about being accused of violating a suspect’s constitutional rights—they are, indeed, as sensitive to any and all criticism as aging beauty queens—and

The prison is overcrowded, the calendars full, the judges busy, the lawyers ambitious, and the cops zealous. What does it matter if someone gets trapped here for a year or two, gets ruined here, goes mad here, commits murder or suicide here?

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.