James Baldwin: Wake the Children Sleeping

Amidst surging racism in what he ruefully called our "glittering republic," we mark the 100th birthday of James Baldwin, the incandescent writer, orator, and "disturber of the peace" fiercely committed to telling the truth about race in America. As a black, queer man who channeled his rage into his work, he called on his countrymen "trapped in a history (they) do not understand (to) make America what America must become," insisting, "You can't swear to the freedom of all mankind, and put me in chains."

A fiery "prophet teacher" present at seminal moments of the Civil Rights Movement from Selma to Washington, Baldwin grew up poor in Harlem, the oldest of nine children to Emma Jones, who at 19 fled the segregated South during the Great Migration. He never knew his biological father; Jones later married David Baldwin, an unstable fire-and-brimstone preacher with whom she had James' eight half-siblings. He had a fraught relationship with his angry, often abusive stepfather, but after he died came to accept that the elder Baldwin "loved his children, who were black (and) menaced like him." James once described a "terrifying" life - people lost to suicide, prison, racism - that sometimes "narrow(ed) to a red circle of rage," but he encountered liberal white teachers who encouraged him to write; as a result, "I never really managed to hate white people."

His masterworks ranged from novels to essays to plays. They included Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), The Fire Next Time (1963), Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), “A Report From Occupied Territory” (1966), Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone(1968). He spent years self-exiled in Istanbul, Paris and the south of France, where he died of cancer in 1987 at age 63; after multiple relationships with both men and women, he was cared for at the end by his brother David. At his funeral, he was eulogized by literary giants Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, who mourned him as one of the "great black Americans who have lived for us, loved for us and died for us." Now, she wondered, "Who will dare to confront a racist nation (and) sing the song of the voiceless?"

Even as a "small boy with big eyes" who described winter houses "in their little white overcoats,” Baldwin was known for a singular eloquence, for writing that was "unadorned, searing, and unequivocal." "He was fearless," said his youngest sister Paula. "He would say, ‘You have to walk straight into it.'" That clarity extended to his letters to four nephews to whom, when he came home - "It was always great joy to have him home, because he brought all of us together" - he was "Uncle Jimmy," with his "infectious laughter," stentorian preacher's voice, "curiosity about everything." He break-danced with them, taught them chess - "one of the most valuable philosophical lessons of my life" - and as adults endured prison with help from Baldwin's The Cross of Redemption: "My Uncle Jimmy civilized white America for me." They also learned from classmates, "Your uncle is a faggot."

In 1962, Baldwin wrote “A Letter to My Nephew” to his 15-year-old namesake James, his brother Wilmer’s son. First published in Progressive magazine, he included it, slightly edited, in The Fire Next Time as “Letter to My Nephew on the 100^th Anniversary of Emancipation.” Six decades later, it still resonates in its harrowing depiction of the "almost casual injustice" of America's persistent racism, past, present and likely future; it also served as inspiration for Ta-Nehisi Coates' 2015 Letter to My Son, and rapper Common read it at an event after George Floyd's murder. "You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early," he wrote to James. He later added, "You can only be destroyed by believing you really are what the white world calls a nigger. I tell you this because I love you, and please don’t ever forget it."

Always aware of history, Baldwin wrote, "I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. And behind your father's face are all those other faces which were his." On their behalf, he cites "the crime of which I accuse (my) countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it...It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime." Despite that dark history, "You were born; here you came. Here you were to be loved (to) strengthen you against the loveless world." Though his family had "every reason to be heavy-hearted," they were not: "I know how black it looks today for you. It looked black that day too. Yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet... If we had not loved each other, none of us would have survived."

"This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish," he argues. "You were born where you were born and faced the future you faced because you were black and for no other reason." On a society that spells out "with brutal clarity and in as many ways as possible" Black limits and worthlessness, he writes, "Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity and fear" as Pyrrhic victors in "a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it." "Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality," he asserts. "Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar, and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundation."

"These men are your lost younger brothers. You must accept them and accept them with love," he insists. "With love we shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it." Even then, Baldwin had already lived too long in a racist world not to temper his hopefulness with his unflinching honesty. "It will be hard, James, but you come (from) men who in the teeth of the most terrifying odds achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer." He then now-famously quotes one, Richard Allen, or "Negro Richard," 1760–1831, a former slave who, once freed, became a traveling Methodist preacher and later helped found the African Methodist Episcopal Church: "I cried to the Lord both day and night...The very time I thought I was lost, all of a sudden my dungeon shook, and my chains fell off. "

Baldwin-Buckley race debate still resonates 55 years onwww.youtube.com

Baldwin's decades-long focus on the spiritual darkness of an America unwilling or unable to confront its racist past - and thus, logically, present - was at the heart of his legendary U.K. debate "over the soul of the nation" with right-wing ideologue William F. Buckley in 1965, just months before passage of the Voting Rights Act. The motion of the debate, televised before an over-capacity crowd of more than 700 packed into the Cambridge Union: "Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?" During perhaps the most historic intellectual debate on race in America - full transcript here - Baldwin electrified the crowd with his blistering oratory, disrobing said "American Dream" in what was praised as a "moral victory on behalf of Black America." In the end, Baldwin won with 544 to 164 votes; in an unprecedented move, most of the audience rose in a thunderous standing ovation for him as a stunned Baldwin looked on.

In The Fire is Upon Us, his 2020 bookabout the debate, Nicholas Buccola argues Baldwin's scrutiny of those who feel "their whiteness is the only thing that gives them value in the world" - and their "extraordinarily sad moral life" - reflects the core of an American white supremacy in which "we are all in some sense complicit. And we all have a responsibility to fight back against this plague called color. Baldwin's patriotism requires a constant criticism (of) the ways we are falling short of our ideals, and to do that together." In 1965, Baldwin noted, "What is dangerous here is the (Black) turning away from anything any white American says," having been betrayed by too many whites in power for too long, "and one can't blame them: "From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barber shop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday, and he’s already on his way to the presidency. We’ve been here for 400 years, and now he tells us maybe in 40 years, if you’re good, we may let you become president."

In the debate, Baldwin was at pains to evoke to a mostly white crowd how personally, enduringly painful his country's racism feels to him, regardless of his fame or stature or the passage of time. "I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads, under someone else's whip, for nothing. For nothing," he declared of his people's 400-year wait for their rights. "If you walk out of Harlem, downtown, the world agrees what you see is much bigger, cleaner, whiter, richer, safer than where you are. They collect the garbage. People can pay their life insurance. Their children look happy, safe. You’re not. And you go back home, and it would seem (it’s) an act of God, that this is true! That you belong where white people have put you...The government says we can’t do anything about it, but if those were white people being murdered in Mississippi (or) being carried off to jail, if those were white children running up and down the streets, the government would find a way of doing something about it."

Finally, masterfully, he wonders if this country "blessed with what we call prosperity, (with) a certain kind of social coherence" can call itself a civilized nation, and whether "one’s civilization has the right to overtake and subjugate, and, in fact, destroy another...to destroy his sense of reality" in a land that is "your birthplace (and) identity, but which has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you." Leaving aside "the physical facts, rape or murder, (the) bloody catalog of oppression," he asserts, "This means, in the case of an American Negro, that from the moment you are born, since you don’t know any better, every stick and stone and every face is white. And since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose that you are, too. It comes as a great shock, then, around the age of 5, or 6, or 7, to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover (when) Gary Cooper is killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you."

ABC Tried to Bury This James Baldwin Interview. Four Decades Later, It's Blisteringly Relevant.www.youtube.com

Of course Baldwin's sense of displacement, distrust, unwelcomeness still echoes today. After his fame subsided in the 1970s and 1980s, Baldwin has in recent years "been getting his flowers," with his prescient, resurgent truths reflected in the Black Lives Mattermovement and its signs quoting him: "Dear America, I Can't Believe What You Say Because I See What You Do." "Like many writers of color I know," says Jacqueline Woodson, "I believe that we’re writing because Baldwin wrote, that history repeats itself and continues to need its witnesses." For his centennial, the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery has a new exhibit, This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance that explores his legacy along with his contemporaries in art, film, literature and activism. "He was a torch-bearer for so many things that still hold true today,” says the museum’s Rhea Combs. "(He) was able to speak truth to power, to do that creatively, unapologetically."

Also for the 100th birthday, Michael Moore held a watch party for the searing documentaryI Am Not Your Negro by Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck. "Baldwin always spoke directly to his audiences, then and even now, and his words were frank and direct without being cruel," says Peck. "He helped me understand the world I was in." At the time of his death, Baldwin was working on Remember This House, a book about his friendships with Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers and Malcom X; it became the basis for the film. "I want these three lives to bang against and reveal each other as in truth they did," Baldwin wrote, "and use their dreadful journey as a means of instructing the people (for) whom they gave their lives." Peck weaves archival footage - Baldwin: "I have seen the corpses of your brothers and sisters pile up around you" - with images of Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin to portray a largely unchanged "American dream that was always the dream of a minority."

Peck worked to highlight systemic racism, putting the onus for change, as Baldwin always did, on those in power who for too long upheld it. "What white people have to do," Baldwin once said, "is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a nigger in the first place. Because I am not a nigger. I'm a man. If I'm not the nigger here, and if (you) the white people invented him, you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends (on) whether or not it is able to ask that question." Baldwin also proposed that "one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain." For those fervently turning a blind eye to the devastation wrought by America's racism, he suggested, "The crimes we have committed are so great and so unspeakable, the acceptance of this knowledge would lead, literally, to madness."

And so to a raving, flailing, name-calling, "savage-foreign-gangs"-obsessed Trump, clinging to his hate in his latest, nakedly racist meltdown of a rally - Kamala Harris is "a really low IQ individual" and "lunatic" who "just became a Black person" - and even more spectacularly in a surly implosion before Black journalists that even Fox News called "a complete, absolute dumpster fire." His petulant fury at three female black journalists who had the audacity to call out his bullshit and ask "rude," "nasty," "horrible," aka substantive questions like, "What exactly is a black job?" served as "a mirror" of "the haunting and unsettling history" of both his longstanding racism - Klan father, Central Park 5, birther attacks on Obama, questioning a Black woman's blackness etc etc - and America's. "The very serious function of racism is distraction," Toni Morrison once said. "It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being."

Baldwin likewise grew weary of the white fragility that demanded he explain himself, that refused to accept their own history even as he kept passionately recounting and decrying it to them. "You've told the people of this nation a lot of what they don't want to hear," noted the late ABC reporter Sylvia Chase in an unaired interview from 1979. "I've tried," Baldwin smiles, both bitter and bemused. "The Mahalia song says, 'Wake the children sleeping"...One must be a disturber of the peace." The "blisteringly relevant" segment, produced by TV documentarian Joseph Lovett, was scrapped by ABC higher-ups who argued, "Who wants to listen to a Black gay has-been?” (In a perfect coda, the piece earlier showed Baldwin telling a student reporter at the Police Athletic League’s Harlem Center, “Nobody wants a writer until he’s dead.”) Over 40 years later, Lovett unearthed the interview, a glimpse into a warm, lively, trenchant luminary who never stopped fighting for what he believed was his due, no matter the cost.

"There's a price this republic exacts from every black man or woman walking, and that is a crime," he told Chase as he sat with his large, close family in the New York apartment building he bought them years before. He turned to a toddler nephew sitting next to him, and hugged him. "They will not do to him what they failed to do to me." He went on, "White people go around, it seems to me, with a very carefully suppressed terror of black people. They don't know who or what the black face hides, but they're sure it's hiding something. What it's hiding is American history. What it’s hiding is what white people know what they have done, and what they like doing." Still, he says, "No matter how terrible their lives may be, and their lives have often been quite terrible, they have one enormous consolation, like a heavenly revelation...White people know very well one thing; it's the only thing they have to know... They know they would not like to be Black here."