Tag: james baldwin
Centennial Of A Prophet: James Baldwin's 100th Anniversary

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

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.

Why Racists Fear Black History -- And Why We Should Thank Black America

Why Racists Fear Black History -- And Why We Should Thank Black America

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I want to tell you a story about Black History. I sublet Jack Whitten’s loft on Broome Street in Soho during the summer of 1969. I knew he was an artist, but when I first climbed the stairs and walked into his loft, I didn’t know what to expect. The door opened into his painting and sculpture studio at the front of the loft where four big windows poured light down on the paint-stained floor. The first thing I saw was a big piece of wood carved roughly from a tree trunk sitting in the middle of the floor. It was thick and dark-colored and must have been four or five feet long and three feet high, and into it, Jack had driven what looked like a thousand four-inch nails. Works of art are said by many artists to speak for themselves. Although I did not see it in this way at the time, that piece of art spoke in the unmistakable voice of Black History. It spoke of violence, but it was not about the violence of hammering nails into the wood. Jack Whitten’s sculpture told the story of having the nails hammered into him.

What happens to you when you confront a great work of art? Well, it changes you. Great art speaks to you. It teaches you. It tells you what it means.

Listen to Muddy Waters sing “I got my Mojo Working,” or Slim Harpo sing “I’m a King Bee,” or Howlin’ Wolf sing “Meet me in the Bottom.” You are listening to Black History. Listen to the right hand of Thelonious Monk picking out the discordant notes and off-chords of “Round Midnight,” or stand before Alison Saar’s life-size sculpture of a Black woman in a long dress on a plaza in Harlem and witness the power of Black History.

I was thinking last week that maybe I should write something for Black History Month, because during the last year Black History has constantly been in the news, and not in a good way. Black History has been turned into a political issue by racists who are afraid of it. Ron DeSantis in Florida and Republican legislatures around the country are attempting to censor the teaching of Black History. They want to erase the history of slavery and the oppression of Black people under Jim Crow and the struggles of the Civil Rights movement. They want to deny the contributions made by slaves, Black human beings who were not even recognized as citizens, and yet who toiled to build dams and roads and bridges and even the same U.S. Capitol building that racist insurrectionists assaulted two years ago. I thought maybe I would write about DeSantis and Republican fear of Black History and what he and the others are trying to do to erase it when this popped up in my news feed:

Stax Volt Tour 1967 feat. Otis Redding, Booker T. & The MGs, Sam & Daveyoutu.be


It’s from a film that was made of the Stax-Volt tour in 1967 that featured Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, and Booker T and the MG’s. You don’t have to watch the whole thing, although it’s worth taking the time, because it’s as good an example as there is of what DeSantis and his ilk afraid of. It’s 25 minutes of the power of Black culture – in this case soul music from the 60’s – but it could just as well be a Beyonce video, or concert footage of Kendrick Lamar, or Steve Lacy, or Lizzo, or Sister Rosetta Tharp, or Sly and the Family Stone, or Jimi Hendrix, or Muddy Waters, or Howlin’ Wolf, or Slim Harpo, or Marvin Gaye, or Ike and Tina Turner.

I could sit here all day long listing Black performers and never reach the end of what they have given us, how much they have added to the history of the United States of America. So much of what we know of the Black experience is from musicians like Thelonious Monk and Aretha Franklin and from writers like James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates and Langston Hughes, and from painters and sculptors like Jack Whitten and Vivian Browne and Kara Walker.

There is a song on the Stax-Volt video by Otis Redding called Try a Little Tenderness. It’s one of his greatest songs. It tells the story of two struggling people and how they cope with what life has dealt them.

Oh, she may be weary
Them young girls they do get weary
Wearing that same old shabby dress, yeah, yeah
But when she gets weary
Try a little tenderness, yeah, yeah

You know she's waiting
Just anticipating
The thing that you'll never, never, never, never possess, yeah, yeah
But while she's there waiting
Without them try a little tenderness
That's all you got to do

It's not just sentimental no, no, no
She has her grief and care, yeah, yeah, yeah
But the soft words they are spoke so gentle, yeah
It makes it easier, easier to bear, yeah
You won't regret it no, no
Young girls they don't forget it
Love is their whole happiness, yeah, yeah, yeah

The song itself is a piece of Black History because it’s Otis Redding and the story he is telling is coming from such a deep place within him. How much more can you tell someone about the common pain we all share as we live our lives? The power of Otis Redding’s song is right there in in front of us. He’s giving us the whole of his life and what he knows about living it. It’s everything he has.

And then look at the young people in the audience. They don’t have to listen to every lyric to know the truth of what he’s telling them. It’s right there in a single word, “tenderness,” and it’s in his voice. It washes them like babies in a sink. You can see its power in their faces.

That is what racists are so afraid of. They are afraid of the power that comes from having been Black in America and survived. Black History, as it is taught in schools and universities, tells the story of how Black Americans have survived oppression, and it is accessible by switching on your television or hitting a button on Spotify or watching the Grammy’s or walking down a street in New York City and looking at a sculpture, or going into a museum and standing before a painting. Black History and the truth of Black experience is right there in the culture, in fact it dominates the culture all of us live in. Racists can’t avoid it, nor can their children or wives or friends or brothers or sisters. They try to censor it and deny it and build walls around it because they are so frightened of its power.

Black culture is American culture. It is so politically powerful, we exported it to counter Soviet Cold War propaganda during the Cold War. In the mid 1950’s the State Department sent the Dizzy Gillespie band, with Quincy Jones as its musical director, on a 10-week tour around the world, through the Middle East, Asia, and South America. Crowds clamored to hear them everywhere. On YouTube, you can see film of tours over the years by jazz and blues and rhythm and blues greats through Europe, playing Paris and London and Brussels and Oslo and Stockholm and Madrid. With today’s Black music and culture, from contemporary jazz to hip hop, as they say, fuhgeddaboudit. It has taken over the world.

Rappers tell Black History in Atlanta and New Orleans and South L.A. and the Bronx and Brooklyn. It was on the Grammy’s last night when Beyonce received her 32nd Grammy award, when Steve Lacy sang Bad Habit, when Stevie Wonder paid tribute to Motown with Smokey Robinson singing his hit, The Way You Do the Things You Do, when Stevie joined country music singer and songwriter Chris Stapleton singing his hit, Higher Ground.

I grew up listening to these giants of Black music. One night at the midnight show at the Apollo Theater on 125th Street, I saw, on a single bill, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Solomon Burke, the Temptations, and Joe Tex. Seats in the first balcony cost $1.75. Elsewhere, in small clubs in New York City, I saw Muddy Waters, I saw Jimmy Rushing, I saw John Lee Hooker, I saw Etta James, and I’ve written here about seeing Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot and Slim Harpo at Steve Paul’s Scene. No matter what was charged at the door of those clubs, even if it was a fortune, it could never cover the debt we owe these giants who opened up their lives to us.

It was Black History. All of it. That was what was behind the music and the art and the books – history, personal and cultural and political – history as it was lived by every one of those artists and musicians and writers. Can you imagine opening up and letting others into your lives like that?

Racism and Black History cannot coexist. That is why Republicans like DeSantis are trying to censor it. But they’re fighting a losing battle, because Black History is all around us, shared by Black artists and writers and musicians. It is a powerful truth that no politician, no racist policy, no discriminatory practice, no ignorant rhetoric, no Supreme Court decision, no hateful speech can ever erase. Up against the richness and power of art and music and literature that is Black History, racists lose.

All there is to do, this Black History month and every Black History month, is to give thanks. Have a look at that 1967 film of Otis Redding and Sam and Dave and Booker T and the MG’s and tell me that’s hard to do.

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.

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Racism Pervades Our Institutions, Yet All Are ‘Innocent’

Racism Pervades Our Institutions, Yet All Are ‘Innocent’

We will get to Baltimore in a moment. First, let’s talk about innocence.

That’s the unlikely ideal two great polemicists, writing over half a century apart, both invoked to describe America’s racial dynamic. It’s a coincidence that feels significant and not particularly coincidental.

In 1963’s “The Fire Next Time,” James Baldwin writes, “… and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. … But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”

In 2015’s “Between the World and Me,” Ta-Nehisi Coates muses about the possibility of being killed under color of authority: “And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of ‘race,’ imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment.”

It simplifies only slightly to say that what both men were describing is the phenomenon sometimes called institutional, structural or systemic racism.

Which brings us to Baltimore and a scathing new Justice Department report on its police department. The government found that the city’s police have a long pattern of harassing African-Americans and that oversight and accountability have been virtually nonexistent.

Indeed, the Constitution must have been looking the other way when an officer struck in the face a restrained youth who was in a hospital awaiting mental evaluation, when police arrested people who were doing nothing more sinister than talking on a public sidewalk, when they tasered people who were handcuffed. Not to mention the time a cop strip-searched a teenager on the street as his girlfriend looked on and, after the boy filed a complaint, threw him against a wall and repeated the humiliation, this time cupping his genitals for good measure.

It’s all outrageous stuff. But to understand the deeper outrage, you must realize that this happened in a city where 63 percent of the people — and 42 percent of the police — are African-American.

You will seldom see a sharper picture, then, of systemic bias. If the term confuses you, ask yourself: Who is responsible for this? Who gave the order that let it happen?

No name suggests itself, of course, and that’s the point. The assumption that black people are less educable, loan-worthy or deserving of their constitutional rights is baked into our systems of education, banking and policing. If you’re a teacher, a banker, a cop — even a black one — you swiftly learn that there are ways this institution treats African-Americans, and that if you want to thrive, you will conform.

There is no longer a Bull Connor or Strom Thurmond preaching this, nor any need for them. Somehow, the racism just … happens. Somehow, it just … is.

Changing the way it is will require more than good intentions; it will require sustained and purposeful action. But the alternative is a world where a cop feels free to grope a bare-butt black boy on a public street. Yes, the cop is guilty of the groping, but who stands accountable for his sense of freedom to do so? On that point, many of us grow tellingly mute.

“The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed,” writes Coates.

But Baldwin was right. It is, indeed, the innocence that constitutes the crime.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

Photo: A woman talks on her cell phone as she passes a mural of the late Freddie Gray in the Sandtown neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., July 27, 2016.  REUTERS/Bryan Woolston