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February 24 - March 15, 2023
Baldwin had long seen this turn against King on the horizon.
in 1961, he had penned an article for Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King.” In it, he noted the difference in King’s voice from the heady days of the bus boycott and detailed the challenges King was destined to face as a black leader in a revolutionary time.
Seen in this way, the civil rights movement could easily be conscripted into a story of how Americans perfected the Union, where all of their sacrifices would become, with vicious irony, proof of America’s inherent goodness.
The history they were making, in real time, could be bent in the service of the lie.
King didn’t mince words: America was a decidedly racist country. “The problem can only be solved when there is a kind of coalition of conscience,” he said. “Now I am not sure if we have that many consciences left. Too many have gone to sleep.
King told the audience that night, “was that black people have been kept in oppression and deprivation by a poisonous fog of lies that depicted them as inferior, born deficient, and deservedly doomed to servitude to the grave.”
“so long as the lie was believed the brutality and criminality of conduct toward the Negro was easy for the conscience to bear.”
what shocked him was the fact that white America killed someone who espoused love, an apostle of nonviolence. King’s death revealed the depths of their debasement and the scope of our peril.
I imagine his brow furrowed, with a slight smile in the beginning, only later turning to an intense gaze:
you can only begin to change yourself and save yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history.
I have said that America is an identity that white people will protect at any cost, and our history—our founding documents, our national heroes, our actions that cast us as a moral force in the world—is the supporting argument that underpins that identity.
Black Reconstruction, the final chapter of which, “The Propaganda of History,” is devoted to exposing the lies at the heart of the historiography around Reconstruction.
Du Bois’s chapter, “The Propaganda of History.” King spoke about the lie of Reconstruction, and his words speak directly to us now:
the people who promulgated the lie, those Frederick Douglass called the “apostles of forgetfulness,” helped build monuments to their willful amnesia.
What I am referring to here, however, is the kind of story we tell that comes to us as a critical feature of our identity as Americans.
Interpretation matters: What we do with the facts, the kinds of questions we ask about them, and for what ends, matter.
“One may see that the history, which is now indivisible from oneself, has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same thing as seeing that, for millions of people, this history…has been nothing but an intolerable yoke, a stinking prison, a shrieking grave.”
Being free to reject the stories, for Baldwin, is the precondition to becoming open to accepting them on one’s own terms.
One of the unique features of American nationalism is how closely interwoven the idea of America is with the individual identity of white people in this country.
“People who imagine that history flatters them,” he wrote in Ebony, “are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world.”
True freedom, for all Americans, requires that we confront them directly.
In 1963, Baldwin lectured throughout the South to raise money for CORE, and he viewed SNCC as a more radical organization than any of the traditional civil rights organizations.
But I contend that Baldwin’s later work was a determined effort to account for the dramatic shift in the times, not a concession to them.
He cited their behavior during the McCarthy era, cowed in the face of the witch hunts, and their failure to push back against the country’s response to the civil rights movement.
“Color,” as he wrote in 1963, “is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.”
black people would look to the fact of their blackness as a key source of solidarity and liberation. White people make black identity politics necessary. But if we are to survive, we cannot get trapped there.
“The Uses of the Blues”:
all of it inevitably distorts your sense of self.
It is a consequence of white America’s problem. We are simply trying to keep our heads above water and prevent our babies from drowning.
For Baldwin, the problem rested at the feet of white America. All they had to do was look down.
This is Baldwin’s revolutionary act: to shift or invert the “white man’s burden.” The problem is not us.
as Baldwin said, “I would rather die than see the black American become as hideously empty as the majority of white men have become.”
1970, in an interview with John Hall that appeared in the Transatlantic Review, Baldwin gave word of a new work. “For the past year I’ve been in Istanbul,” he told Hall, “writing a long essay on the life and death of what we call the civil rights movement.”
No Name was prophecy drenched in the blood of Baldwin’s wounds. It was the book that made sense of his journey from the heights of the civil rights movement to the lows of Dr. King’s murder and the uncertainty of the after times.
Bayard Rustin said of Baldwin, “People sometimes didn’t understand Jimmy’s intense identification with people in the Movement. He often came off a platform after speaking trembling with emotion. It’s a wonder to me such intensity didn’t wear out that frail body long ago.” It almost did. No Name was the book that announced his survival.
the difficulty of the times, No Name is one of his best books and, perhaps, his most important work of social criticism.
Ironically, in light of Emerson’s claims, it turned out that we were the representative Americans, because our experiences exposed the lie at the heart of the nation.
Davis told me as we sat in the Yankee Doodle Tap Room in Princeton, New Jersey, helped build an international movement to free her. “I don’t know where I would be today if that letter hadn’t circulated,” she said. They could have locked her up and thrown away the key or put her to death. “His letter was so impactful at the time,” she told me, “they decided to title the edited collection of prison letters If They Come in the Morning, after the last line of the essay.”
“The tangible thing that happened to me—and to blacks in America—during that whole terrible time was the realization that our destinies are in our hands, black hands, and no one else’s.”
But between 1968 and 1972, Istanbul helped Baldwin make sense of the collapse of the civil rights movement.
Seeking an elsewhere affords a different vantage point to assess your commitments and the depth of your loves and hatreds.
What did he mean by “a choice of exiles”? It was a way of suggesting that he, like all black people, was already exiled from birth, because the country believed that white people mattered more. We were, in a sense, natally exiled.
The fact that black people were already “in but not of” America, Baldwin believed, placed them in a state of exile, and it was from that position that he, as a black man, chose to leave the country.
“the price of being American,” what he would later refer to as “The price of the ticket,” is the brutal process of becoming white.
believe an elsewhere can and must be found here: in our efforts to refuse to accommodate and adjust to the status quo and in those very small moments
(It reminded me of the declaration of individual defiance by Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener—“I prefer not to”—but on a collective level.)
We have to find and rest in a community of love. That
community doesn’t have to take any particular shape or form; it simply has to be genuine.
The props and crutches that have supported our individual identities in this country have been knocked from under our arms and feet. We have to make of ourselves a new creation without them.
In that 1970 Ebony interview, the reporter asked him, “What then, about hope?” Baldwin’s response is instructive for us as we live through another shameful period in the life of the nation: “Hope is invented every day.” And, God be my witness, we desperately need hope today. If we are not able to summon it, we may find ourselves where Jimmy found himself only a few years later—at the end of the after times, with the vicious cycle about to begin once more.
