History
Centennial Of A Prophet: James Baldwin's 100th Anniversary

James Baldwin

You're born poor in Harlem, the oldest son, and hit the streets in the Depression doing errands and odd jobs. Your father gives you a dime to get kerosene. You fall on the ice, losing the dime. Your father beats you. He says you're ugly.

Your mother is your salvation. You help her with baby after baby. Your father works in a factory and as a church minister on Sunday. You're a preacher's son and preach to young people.

You love when the church rocks and sings the power and glory. You're not religious, but knowing the Bible shapes your sonorous voice for the ages.

A school principal sends you to the public library. A cop says, "Why don't you stay uptown where you belong?"

You grow up fast, a complex soul, and move to Greenwich Village. You work as a waiter and at an army depot.

You're an outsider on two counts: Black and gay. The 1950s were so rigid, you need to breathe freer air.

So you sail to Paris, once your first novel is out: the autobiographical Go Tell It On the Mountain. At 29, your life becomes a tale of two cities, New York and Paris, with friends on both shores.

But you are always American. Maybe you see your country more clearly from over the ocean. We see it more clearly thanks to you.

Your name is James Baldwin, the major 20th-century author. You were born in 1924. This is your centennial year.

Gone for years, Baldwin stays ahead of our time as a literary prophet.

A Northerner who felt the Southern sting of Jim Crow law, Baldwin foretold the racial fury and protests that spilled onto streets when George Floyd was choked by police in 2020.

Baldwin's powerful essays and novels are his main legacy.

For the novels alone, he belongs in the pantheon. "Giovanni's Room" is a self-portrait in Paris and tells of a tragic gay love. His publisher turned it down.

Baldwin's wrenching fiction paints a lynching at a village picnic; police brutality ending in suicide; a white farm boy getting his neck broken.

In the lynching story, Baldwin forces us to face the fate of thousands of African American men.

A blunt declaration underlies Baldwin's work: "The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling."

Baldwin's characters are Black and white. Race lies at the heart of his work. Following footsteps of the Harlem Renaissance writers, he surpassed almost all.

Baldwin's social criticism cuts to the bone. His rise as a writer accompanied the Civil Rights Movement.

The movement became the music to his words. Baldwin knew Martin Luther King Jr. and attended the 1963 March on Washington. He visited Selma, Montgomery, Atlanta, the places that made bloody history. Baldwin lived civil rights on the front lines.

Once Baldwin brought freedom riders to confront Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. Harry Belafonte and others demanded the Justice Department protect peaceful marchers. Kennedy was shocked at the barrage.

1963 was an inflection point, sun shadowed by a Klan church bombing that killed four girls in Alabama. Then came the November knell: President John F. Kennedy's death drove the nation into despair.

The year before, a sweeter note with the Kennedys had sounded. Baldwin was a guest at the famous White House dinner for Nobel laureates. That year he turned 38 and published Another Country.

Authors William Styron and Norman Mailer and actor Marlon Brando were among his friends.

For all Baldwin's slings and arrows, he lived in the light of genius. No starving writer, he became a posh citizen of the world seen in Istanbul and Paris cafes. He called others "baby.'

Baldwin had a home in France. Yet he was never at rest.

The classic novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, arose from Baldwin's bleak vision at 50.

His great love was a Swiss man, Lucien Happersberger, who had a cottage in the Alps. They spent a winter there when they were young — a long way from Harlem.

Baldwin became Lucien's son's godfather.

As Baldwin lay dying in France, Lucien and his brother David stayed by the writer's side. James Baldwin was 63.

The author may be reached at JamieStiehm.com To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit Creators.com.

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Imagine If Salvador Dali Painted A Surreal Supreme Court Appeal

That’s the way Donald Trump’s appeal to the Supreme Court reads, as his team of expert lawyers attempts to take on Colorado’s ban of Trump from the state’s presidential ballot based on the 14th Amendment. I mean, the word surreal will not suffice. Under Trump’s reading of the Constitution, the 14th Amendment’s ban on anyone who has violated their oath to the Constitution by committing insurrection applies only to those who already “hold” office, not to those seeking office. So, Donald Trump is telling the court that the 14th Amendment demands that a person who has committed insurrection must be elected to office before he can be disqualified.

Constitutional scholars such as Lawrence Tribe of Harvard and the distinguished conservative jurist J. Michael Luttig have argued that Section Three of the 14th Amendment is “self-executing,” that it “requires no legislation, criminal conviction, or other judicial action in order to effectuate its command.” Grounds are found for this interpretation in the amendment’s final sentence, which states that “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability,” the disability, of course being the ban against holding office if you are an insurrectionist.

Trump’s legal eagles read this provision upside down and backwards, that the Constitution is requiring that an insurrectionist achieve office before the 14th Amendment kicks in. The amendment was written after the Civil War to ban former Confederates from holding elective office, not just in the Federal government, but “under any state” in the words of the amendment. Now, I guess you could make an argument that the Constitution is overstepping its powers in that demand. Under a so-called states' rights reading of the Constitution, it should be up to the individual states to decide who gets to serve in their legislatures or be elected governor, or even be appointed to any “office.”

But there it is. Not only does the 14th Amendment ban insurrectionists from serving in federal office, it bans them from election to office in their own states. That is how seriously the writers of the 14th Amendment took the crime committed by Confederates, who fought a war against the government of the United States and in so doing violated the oaths taken by anyone who had served in federal office or who had been soldiers in the army of the United States.

You are out, the 14th Amendment in effect says. It’s a lifetime ban.

But not Trump, says his appeal. “The Constitution requires that the President qualify under section 3 only during the time that he holds office,” reads the appeal. So, at the time that the 14th Amendment was written, what Trump and his lawyers are saying is that the writers meant for former Confederates to have to run for office and be elected in order for the provision banning them from office to take effect.

Hey, Jefferson Davis! Why don’t you run for governor of Mississippi so we can ban you from office? Or maybe what we’ll do, because we’ve decided that you have adequately made amends for having been the president of the Confederacy, we’ll decide to pass a law, by a vote of two-thirds in the House and the Senate, allowing you to serve. How about that, Jeff?

Absurdist enough for you? Trump’s appeal goes on to assert that the 14th Amendment does not apply to him for two more surreal reasons: because the president is not an “officer of the United States” under the 14th Amendment, and because Trump, as president, did not take an oath to, in the words of the amendment, “support the Constitution of the United States,” but rather to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution,” in the words of the presidential oath.

Now, we could call Trump’s Supreme Court appeal hair-splitting, but that wouldn’t be fair to inadequately conditioned and treated hair, would it?

Two hundred Republican members of Congress weighed in with an amicus brief on Thursday asserting that the state of Colorado had “trampled the prerogatives of members of Congress.”

Of course they did.

Any normal Supreme Court, which is to say, any other sitting Supreme Court in the history of the United States, would throw this out of control assemblage of legal table scraps out with the garbage.

This Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on February 8. It’s too bad Dali isn’t alive to be there and sketch the proceedings, because I’m sure it would take his talents to put it across.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.