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He begins “Everybody’s Protest Novel” by dismissing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which had been a favorite novel of his as a child, as “a very bad novel” which, because it is primarily a protest novel, ignores the real, “the carnal man, the man of the flesh.”
It was Jimmy’s hope that Arnold would succeed as a jazz musician in the Paris clubs. But Arnold had left his vibraphone in New York at his family’s house, having learned to prefer the guitar, an instrument in no particular demand at jazz clubs.
Had Django worn out his welcome?
The method in his novels is consistent. In each of them Baldwin uses clearly traceable events from his own life as a basis for fictional explorations of and sometimes almost allegorical depictions of his philosophy of life.
Giovanni’s Room as an “all-white” novel is not a bastard among the literary offspring of James Baldwin; it is one of the more impassioned expressions of the story he told all his life.
What is happening to blacks in America, he told his primarily white Kalamazoo audience, is also happening to whites. The oppressor destroys himself as he destroys the oppressed. The only identity Americans—black and white—have has been achieved through their shared experience as Americans.
This is a nice thought, but you’d be hard-pressed to convince the oppressor that he’s losing something when he oppresses.
An important part of Baldwin’s message to this point, as indicated in speeches like “In Search of a Majority,” was based on the idea of unbreakable, if painful, “blood ties” between white and black Americans and the notion that the unique American experience, for all its problems, was the best hope for the future.
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.
But his family had pulled themselves up. With luck, a black man could be president in forty years.
1968 + 40
John Lewis of SNCC was forced to tone down his speech in order not to alienate the white religious establishment involved in the march.
He announced publicly that he considered the “American adventure in Vietnam a desperate and despicable folly.”
The fact that Turkey was a Moslem country had nothing to do with it, “except, perhaps, that it’s a relief to deal with people who, whatever they are pretending, are not pretending to be Christians.”
None of this was to support in any way the war in Vietnam. It was a racist war, and Americans had no right to “liberate” Southeast Asians if they could not liberate their own people. A future for America and the West depended on there being a future for black people in America and the rest of the world.
When asked what book he would recommend to a “Black Power militant,” he suggested Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima, and for Lyndon Johnson he recommended Don Quixote and, more seriously, Richard Wright’s Black Boy. Northern liberals should read Dostoevsky’s The Possessed and the southern redneck should try Crime and Punishment.
Lady Sings the Blues, a film “related to the black American experience in about the same way, and to the same extent that Princess Grace Kelly is related to the Irish potato famine,”
