The James Baldwin Centennial

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was born in Harlem 100 years ago today.

The one-two punch of the films I’m Not Your Negro (2016) and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) brought Baldwin’s genius roaring back to the front of our consciousness during those horrible Trump years, to further inflame our already blazing pyres of indignation. After the latter film I fell into a rabbit hole of old TV clips on Youtube, of Baldwin in conversation with David Frost, Dick Cavett,Nikki Giovanni, and others from the ’60s and ’70s. He stood toe to toe with William F. Buckley in a 1965 debate presented by the BBC, and he was so fast, so alert, so devastating that it inspired awe. Needless to say, he won the debate.

For me, who grew up with Baldwin as part of our pop culture, it was both a rediscovery and a discovery. I’ve given up trying to recall where I first saw him, or how I first knew of him. He was the kind of figure who wound up in TV news specials recalling the ’60s and the Civil Rights Movement. My Junior High and School years were the late ’70s and early ’80s, in New England, so I’m quite certain we read him. Probably excerpted non-fiction, as I can’t imagine anything depicting explicit scenes of queerness, as you find in his novels, would have been countenanced back then. It was not uncommon to couple a reading assignment with a bit of media (reel to reel videotape), and that’s likely one of the first places I ever saw the man talking. To me, a straight, white, American high school student, I’m sure it seemed like so much edifying spinach, classwork, which is why I say it was necessary for me to rediscover him.

Like so many, Baldwin was forced by American racism to become a citizen of the world, making his home in France, and this ultimately gave him power, an apparent fearlessness. He must have seemed like a freight train at the time. In a word, he didn’t take any shit. If an interviewer gave him pushback, he ran roughshod over them and left them sputtering. This above all is what I am love with at this point in my rediscovery. He doesn’t even (as some of his contemporaries did) sweeten the onslaught with humor. Nor should he have. He was in the right, and frustrated by the slowness of so many to see it. Yet, then, as now, people found his unapologetic erudition off-putting. For the bulk of humanity, knee-jerk hatred of people who read books is stronger even than their racism, homophobia, or lookism. And a gay, pop-eyed black man who knows all kinda fancy words? People will edit what they call him in public, but you know what he must have been called in private. We have witnessed this in our own time, when certain factions have tried to turn the intellectual superiority and education of figures like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and now Kamala Harris into NEGATIVES, as though their quickness were fraudulent somehow, and as though they hadn’t just scored the debate points we just heard them score. How these leaders rise above it, how they “go high”, I don’t know. I relate more to Baldwin. I find myself exercised by the idiocy of the masses, and I want to call it out. It’s more fuel for the flamethrower.

(In related news, today is also the 100 birthday of Carol O’Connor, who played Archie Bunker).

Though Baldwin was often a speaker and a spokesman, he wasn’t an activist per se. He was a writer, one of America’s best. That was where he directed all of his blue hot energy. He inspired activists with books like Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Notes of a Native Son (1955), Giovanni’s Room (1956), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), The Fire Next Time (1963), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and dozens of others. As a theatre professional, I know his 1964 play Blues for Mister Charlie best. Working recently on my post about Frank Silvera has also acquainted me with Baldwin’s play of a decade earlier The Amen Corner, which Silvera directed and which you can read about here.

Be terrified of an America where people James Baldwin isn’t taught in schools. We’re right at the edge of the precipice.

Short term, though, the New York Public Library, is doing its part with a new exhibition and series of events honoring and exploring the life of James Baldwin. Learn about it here.