Summary:
James Baldwin was a black homosexual who wrote some of the most indifferent yet sensitive works on the crippling effects of racism and homophobia on victims and perpetrators alike. Baldwin saw value in social and sexual relationships between black and white, and was watched by the FBI for his growing black militancy. His books deserved the enthusiastic reception they received in the dark days of southern vigilantes and northern liberal faint-hearts in the racist United States.
James Baldwin was a black homosexual who wrote some of the most indifferent yet sensitive works on the crippling effects of racism and homophobia on victims and perpetrators alike. Baldwin saw value in social and sexual relationships between black and white, and was watched by the FBI for his growing black militancy.
Born in 1924 in New York's Harlem, Baldwin became a preacher at age 14 but soon left the church to take up writing as his life's work. He left for Paris in 1948 after one too many "we don't serve Negroes here" in one too many restaurants. In 1956, the growing civil rights struggle in the U.S. South drew him back. The bombing of integrationist schools, murdering of blacks and rampant discrimination appalled Baldwin.
He threw in his lot with Martin Luther King, although Baldwin became dissatisfied with King's non-violence and Christian middle class values. The black pride of the Nation of Islam attracted him, but he was more in tune with one of that movement's one-time sons - Malcolm X - and he liked the defiance, if not the Marxist politics, of George Jackson and Angela Davis.
In the end, however, Baldwin occupied his own individual space in the black civil rights movement. He rejected self-government, always seeing in even the most disgusting racist a "complex and redeemable humanity." Many a critic attacked Baldwin for his "shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic, love of the whites." Baldwin warned against the gun as a strategy for liberation, arguing that love was the only antidote to hatred and bigotry. This drew the ire of some young black militants in the Black Panthers who saw him as passe and an "Uncle Tom."
Baldwin's real limitation, however, was his rejection of politics. Although briefly a member of a Trotskyite group in Greenwich Village in 1943, Baldwin was suspicious of all ideologies, preferring to write on the African-American condition from the "human" rather than the "political" perspective, divorcing two perspectives that should be complementary. Baldwin despaired at the apparent inability of white US workers to fight even for themselves, let alone for black rights. His one foray into union issues was to protest the Longshoremen's (wharfies) union's complicity in discriminatory, anti-black hiring practices. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin wrote, "Consider the history of labour in a country in which, spiritually speaking, there are no workers, only candidates for the hand of the boss's daughter." This pessimism blunted the edge of Baldwin's anti-racist activism and writing.
Nevertheless, his books deserved the enthusiastic reception they received in the dark days of southern vigilantes and northern liberal faint-hearts in the racist United States. Although most of his work hangs politically aimless from his "human" perspective, James Baldwin's works gave, and still give, an unsurpassed personal voice to the social and political struggles of black people the world over.
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