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February 24 - March 15, 2023
Michael Thelwell, the writer and SNCC activist, wrote, “The man became the ‘personality,’ the personality became the story, and the story became the myth.”
But, as historian Vincent Harding wrote, “the soul of America had not been redeemed.
Baldwin said in 1979. But, “the spirit of the South has not changed…. The spirit of the South is the spirit of America.”
“The horror is that America…,” Baldwin wrote, “changes all the time, without ever changing at all.”
his 1983 poem “Staggerlee Wonders.”
Lord, History is weary of her unspeakable liaison with Time, for Time and History have never seen eye to eye: Time laughs at History and time and time and time again Time traps History in a lie.
In Baldwin’s last interview in 1987, he put it this way: “Ronald Reagan represent[ed] the justification of [white America’s] history, their sense of innocence.”
late poet Amiri Baraka called, in his classic work Blues People, “the changing same”—that
The Southern Road, explored with sensitivity and sophistication the intricate contours of black southern dialect and the beauty and simplicity of the country folk of the region.
Brown’s office ends with the sound of Brown reading his haunting poem “Old Lem,”
Atlanta represented the illusion of the New South and, by extension, the lie: The changes that promised revitalization were only on the surface and not at the heart of the city, the region, or the nation.
Baldwin put it this way in his 1980 essay “Notes on the House of Bondage”:
Ronald Reagan was as notorious to proponents of Black Power as George Wallace was to those who participated in the civil rights movement.
Amiri Baraka
“I would like to indicate to the President-elect who says you can vote with your feet in this country…I dare him to go to Newark and tell the people in Newark they can vote with their feet in this country.”
“I dare him to tell all of those trumpet players, honky-tonk pianists, all those gospel singers, and
their mammas and their papas that you can vote with your feet in this country. That day in Newark.” No matter. I Heard It Through the Grapevine did not reach theater screens until 1982. By then, the Age of Reagan had begun. —
In “Notes on the House of Bondage,” he put it this way as he pondered the election that would give us President Reagan:
I wish I had learned that lesson: that voting, as much as it is a democratic duty, for black people, can also be a means to buy some time when the choice is as stark as it was between Carter and Reagan.
As Reagan had in his 1980 campaign, Trump represented a full-throated reassertion of a particular vision of the country as decidedly white and forever committed to the principles of Reagan and his inheritors.
As with Reagan in 1980, with Trump white America reached for an image—a Hollywood-generated fantasy—on which to project their hatreds and fears. In this sense, Trump is best seen as a child of Reagan.
In 1979, Baldwin could not have imagined the euphoria surrounding Barack Obama’s election or Michelle Obama’s declaration that “for the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”
He could not have imagined the “illusion of safety” Obama’s presidency provided for us. In this sense, Baldwin did not anticipate a moment of profound disappointment such as ours, because he didn’t believe—and why would he?—that we would ever trust these people again.
“We must keep the proverbial niggers and those like them in their place.” It worked.
sincerity can often be a mask for cruelty, especially the cruelty of conscious disavowal.
Baldwin has it right when he says:
we, at least, seek to be true to ourselves. But in matters regarding race, sincerity comes with the lie, for the very heart of American identity is at stake.
To maintain this illusion, Trump has to be seen as singular, aberrant. Otherwise, he reveals something terrible about us. But not to see yourself in Trump is to continue to lie.
Baldwin anticipated the impact of all of this in his unpublished draft initially titled “The Price of the
Ticket” as he assumed the voice of white people moving back to cities:
To make that decision, we will have to avoid the trap of placing the burden of our national sins on the shoulders of Donald Trump. We need to look inward. Trump is us. Or better, Trump is you.
“Memory is powerful, it is a powerful force in the way a society evolves,” Stevenson said in his documentary True Justice.
that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
Black people were no longer sources of wealth to be exploited, Baldwin argued. Now they were disposable, and their idleness posed a threat to the Republic.
Jimmy was right: “We live by lies” in this country, and
those lies can be seen and heard all around us.
I suspect the story of a movement on the precipice of failure in 1968 that Baldwin and King talked about in Los Angeles—a story that takes seriously the after times—has little to no place in the narrative of civil rights tourism.
Maya Angelou emblazoned across the side of the building: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
In the video, King questioned the demand that black people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. “It is a cruel jest,” he said, “to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
As I stood and listened, I thought of Baldwin’s view of American history. The past is not past; “history is literally present in all we do,” he wrote in “The White Man’s Guilt.”
“Thousands of African Americans are unknown victims of racial terror lynchings whose deaths cannot be documented, many whose names will never be known. They are honored here.”
In his introduction to his 1985 collection of essays, The Price of the Ticket, Baldwin noted that America had become quick to congratulate itself on the progress it had made with regards to race, and that the country’s self-congratulation came with the expectation of black gratitude.
the price of the ticket to be here in the United States was in fact to leave behind the particulars of Europe and become white.
I mentioned in the introduction that we have previously reached in our history two critical moments of moral reckoning where we faced the daunting challenge of beginning again; both times we failed.
The first was during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the second was
the black freedom struggle of the mid-twe...
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We need an America where “becoming white” is no longer the price of the ticket.
James Baldwin papers at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture were absolutely essential.
