James Baldwin has long been a champion of the Person over the People. The fight against racial and other injustices, he argued as early as Notes of a Native Son (1955), begins with the heart's purification of hatred and despair. For Baldwin, the fight was with oneself: "my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart." Salvation must be personal before it can become social and political. (p. 37)
More than ever before, Baldwin fits much of his commentary [in No Name in the Street] into an ideological framework, albeit one in which the devil is more recognizable than the savior…. But the dramatic center of the book is not here; the center, in fact, is closer to the personal struggle in the earlier work than to a political thesis or to special pleading. To miss this point about No Name in the Street is to exchange its very vitality for propaganda, which can then be dismissed. The loss would be great.
The titles of the book's two sections—"Take Me to the Water," "To Be Baptized"—suggest a rite of passage. The operative order follows the titles of the sections: in the first section, we see Baldwin in Paris or New York, identifying with Algerians, or giving a friend the black suit he wore to Martin Luther King's funeral …, or going to the American South to pay dues; in the second section, we see Baldwin moving against a backdrop of racial violence, King and Malcolm X and Medgar Evers murdered, so many deaths, so many funerals, or Baldwin trying to get a friend out of jail and simultaneously struggling with a filmscript based on Malcolm X's Autobiography.
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