Can I Get a Witness?

 “No Name in the Street” by James Baldwin, 1972

This is an intense personal memoir about Baldwin's nomadic life during the 1950s and 1960s trying to escape racism, then returning to confront it. He lived in New York, Paris, London and Istanbul, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Palm Springs. He visits Jim Crow Montgomery, Birmingham, Tuskegee, Little Rock and Atlanta in the U.S. South. The book is penetrating in its feelings and anger, treating its emotional knowledge as the source for its political positions. For some, especially light-skinned folks, this might be hard to read. The time was soaked in the bloodshed of assassinations, riots, war and civil rights' struggle so it figures that it is dramatic.

There is no mention of homosexuality, though Baldwin was gay. He once mentions that he was partly schooled in Trotskyism and comes out for a 'genuine socialism.' He exposes the guilty liberalism of middle-class 'white' people, undermines the radicalism of some young 'white' leftists and casts everyone else as a racist, especially police and Southerners. So it's personal slant is mostly literary and black nationalist, rarely mentioning class though that is also quietly embedded in the text. After all, Baldwin began as a poor street boy from Lenox Avenue in Harlem. As a writer and also a 'witness' he meets famous civil rights leaders like King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Rev. Shuttlesworth and Huey Newton, along with Marlon Brando and a group of mixed skin color leftie Hollywood types including Jim Brown, Eartha Kitt, Sidney Poitier and Sammy Davis. He's quite impressed by Brando. Yes, there is name-dropping.

While living in Paris Baldwin is affected by the Algerian 'issue' of independence from France – gradually understanding it's relation to U.S. racism. Algerians in Paris were treated brutally, losing their jobs and rooms, disappearing from sight. Camus came out in support of the French occupation, justifying Sartre's contempt. As Baldwin notes, “...humanism appeared to expire at the European gates.” He returned in 1952 to be confronted by McCarthyism and the betrayal of many liberals. He engages with Faulkner's turgid book “Requiem for a Nun,” as a light-skinned, cliche'd writer looking for forgiveness. Faulkner, after all, had declared he would 'shoot Negroes in the streets to save Mississippi.' Baldwin at one time worked for the CIA publication Encounter in Paris, though unaware of its backing. The CIA fooled many writers for awhile.

Huey P. Newton and Baldwin

Baldwin is involved in a legal case involving the racist frame-up of one of his former bodyguards, who is arrested in Hamburg Germany, then deported to the Tombs prison in New York accused of murder. He is also involved in writing a Hollywood movie script for a film on Malcolm X but walked out after being at loggerheads with the studio. Baldwin points out that Malcolm was personally kind and considerate, not a raving angerholic or 'reverse racist.' Baldwin takes time to defend him in the book, though they only met a few times. He also defends the Panthers as “the native Viet Cong” defending their community and has kind words to say about Newton and tougher words for Eldridge Cleaver.

MLK's funeral, the news of Evers being shot to death in Mississippi, the killing of Malcolm, the killing or jailing of prominent Black Panthers – all color this memoir red in its later stages. Baldwin exposes the lie that the police-Panther Oakland 'shootout' leading to the wounding and arrest of Bobby Seale and death of Bobby Hutton was actually a 'shootout' as the police claimed. The bullets only went in one direction, much like the later assassination of Mark Clark and Fred Hampton in Chicago. He also points out that black pleas for 'police' are really for more police protection. In reality cops mostly ignore black on black crime. He says of cops at the time: “The white cop in the ghetto is as ignorant as he is frightened; and his entire concept of police work is to cow the natives.”

Baldwin comments on the earnest white students he first met in San Francisco, then the hippies who followed. He finishes this meditation on blackness about one world dying and another trying to be born. As he says, this story doesn't end.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “I Am Not Your Negro” and “Go Tell It On the Mountain” (both by Baldwin); “Finks – How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers,” “Red Hook Summer” (S. Lee); “The South – Jim Crow and It's Afterlives” (A. Reed); “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander); “Caste” (Wilkerson); “Selma,” “Slavs and Tartars,” “Rustin” or 'civil rights.'

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

December 10, 2023