SYMHC Classics: James Baldwin

This 2020 episode covers James Baldwin, who was a brilliant essayist, one of the chroniclers of the Civil Rights Movement, and a powerful voice against racism. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Holly Frey?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argentix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:35Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 1:08Holly Frey?

  We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Veeve Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune into Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  Happy Saturday. James Baldwin was born August 2nd, 1924, or 101 years ago today, on the day this episode is coming out. So he is today's Saturday classic.

• 2:21Holly Frey?

  This episode originally came out on June 17th, 2020. So we recorded it in the immediate aftermath of the murder of George Floyd that May. Baldwin's writing and work felt deeply relevant in that moment, and that continues to be true today.

• 2:38Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:53Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  The last thing we recorded before I got to work on today's episode was our June 5th behind the scenes. And if you've listened to that, I was clearly having a hard time figuring out what to do next. And when I remembered that I'd had James Baldwin on my list for a while, my inward response was like, yes, obviously, James Baldwin, of course. Why didn't you even think of this before? This description by Juan Williams in a piece called Baldwin: The Witness's Testament, which was published in The Washington Post the day after Baldwin's death in 1987, illustrates why I had that response. Quote, "Given the messy nature of racial hatred,

• 3:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  of the half-truths, blasphemies, and lies that make up American life, Baldwin's accuracy in reproducing that world stands as a remarkable achievement. His accuracy was key. In his works, the reader could resonate to the sounds of the street corner, as drawn by Baldwin, could feel the anger of Black Americans so long denied a role in American life, as Baldwin wrote about that anger. Black people reading Baldwin knew he wrote the truth. White people reading Baldwin sensed his truth about the lives of Black people and the sins of a racist nation." Interest in James Baldwin's work has just really grown in the United States over the last several years in conjunction with the Black Lives Matter movement. His

• 4:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  1963 book, The Fire Next Time, is frequently on anti-racism reading lists. Sometimes it's paired up with Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, which was inspired by it, or with The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race. That's a book that came out in 2016. Basically, James Baldwin was a brilliant essayist and one of the chroniclers of the civil rights movement and a really powerful voice against racism. And that is why we are talking about him today.

• 4:46Holly Frey?

  So we're going to start with his background. James Baldwin was born James Arthur Jones in Harlem, New York on August 2, 1924. His mother was Emma Burdis Jones, and she was a domestic worker. When James was born, Emma was not married, and she never told him who his biological father was.

• 5:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  When James was three, his mother married David Baldwin, who was a factory worker and an evangelical minister. And they went on to have eight children together. The family was really poor. They were living in a part of Harlem that Baldwin later called Junkies Hollow. And part of James's early years also took place during the Great Depression.

• 5:23Holly Frey?

  David Baldwin was strict, unyielding, authoritarian, and cruel, including telling James that he was ugly and reminding him of the circumstances of his birth. And of course, that was heavily stigmatized at the time. As an adult, Baldwin described the whole household constantly working to appease his stepfather. James also said David taught him to fight because he had to continually fight back with patience and a kind of ruthless determination, because I had to endure it, to go under and come back up, to wait.

• 5:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  James Baldwin attributed his stepfather's treatment of him and his mother and siblings as being the product of living as a proud man in a racist society, where he just could not make enough money to really support his family. And Baldwin also credited his younger siblings as being a big part of what kept him off the streets and largely out of trouble in his youth. As the oldest, James was always helping to look after the younger ones. And that was something he described doing with a book in one hand, because reading became one of his biggest means of escape. He liked to tell people that he read every volume in Harlem's library branches and that he had to go to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street to find any books that he hadn't read yet.

• 6:39Holly Frey?

  He also credited religion with helping to keep him out of trouble. He had a religious conversion experience at the age of 14 and became a youth minister at Fireside Pentecostal Assembly. He was a youth minister for three years, and during that time, he crafted his use of language and his speaking style.

• 6:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  Throughout all this, James had been attending New York public schools, first at PS24, whose principal was Gertrude Ayers. That was the first black principal in New York City. From there, he moved to Frederick Douglass Jr. High School, where Harlem Renaissance poet County Cullen was his French teacher and the director of the school's literary club. While at Frederick Douglass Jr. High, James was editor of the school's newspaper, The Douglas Pilot, and also tried to make money to help the family buy shining shoes and selling shopping bags.

• 7:27Holly Frey?

  For high school, James was selected to attend DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. This was one of New York's more elite schools with a predominantly Jewish student body. There, James again worked on the school newspaper, The Magpie, and he excelled in his English and history courses. He also met painter Buford Delaney, who became a friend and something of a mentor as he demonstrated for Baldwin that a black man could become an artist.

• 7:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  James didn't do nearly as well in his other courses as he did in English and history, and his high school years were personally very turbulent. In addition to all the stresses of his home life, he had started to question his sexuality. He'd also started questioning the church as he began to learn about the ways that Christianity had been used as a weapon during slavery. And as he heard people within his church and his stepfather make anti-Semitic comments, he ultimately left the church in 1941.

• 8:23Holly Frey?

  James Baldwin graduated from high school in 1942, six months after the rest of his class. The internal turmoil connected to his faith and his sexuality contributed to a mental health crisis that derailed his studies. He had hoped to go to the City College of New York, but he couldn't afford a tuition. Instead, he got a defense industry job in Belmead, New Jersey, to try to help support his family financially. By this point, James's stepfather was struggling with his own mental health, with symptoms that included depression and paranoia.

• 8:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  Baldwin's job in Belmead involved building a new Army Quartermaster Depot, and it was Baldwin's first real experience with overt racism on the job. The US Army was still segregated, and Baldwin continued to act the way he had acted back in Harlem when he was around white Southern servicemembers. And they, of course, expected him to be totally differential to them and to stay out of their way.

• 9:19Holly Frey?

  Of course, racism had existed in Harlem as well, but this was a whole different set of social expectations and consequences. Baldwin described this experience as "learning what it meant to be a Negro." He refused to back down in the face of racism and harassment on the job, and he was fired. A friend helped him get his job back, and when the harassment resumed, he again pushed back against it and was once again fired.

• 9:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  On his last night in Belmead, Baldwin and some friends were refused service at a diner because of their race. And Baldwin really reached a breaking point. He threw a water pitcher, and that shattered the mirror behind the bar. He described this moment as revelatory, realizing that he had been angry enough to kill someone and that his own life was in danger, in his words, quote, "from the hatred I carried in my own heart."

• 10:10Holly Frey?

  David Baldwin, Sr., died on July 29, 1943, which was also the day James's youngest sibling, Polymaria, was born. Two days later, on August 1, an uprising swept through Harlem. It was sparked when a black soldier tried to intervene as a white police officer was trying to arrest a black woman. The officer shot the soldier, and rumors spread that he had been killed. This was one of a series of similar riots that took place in cities around the United States in 1943. And in Harlem, six black people were killed as thousands of police were dispatched in response to the violence.

• 10:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  Baldwin really felt like living in Harlem had become untenable, and he moved to Greenwich Village to try to make a living as a writer while also waiting tables and doing other work, just to try to make ends meet and to send what money he could back to his family. He had relationships with men and with women, and at one point became engaged to a woman, but ultimately broke off that engagement.

• 11:07Holly Frey?

  He also became friends with a man named Eugene Wirth, who encouraged Baldwin to join the Young People Socialist League, although it's not entirely clear how long Baldwin was involved, or exactly what his involvement even was. In the years just after World War II, he spent at least some time with various political groups that were connected to things like socialism, communism, and labor rights, but he didn't become exclusively focused on any of them, or in some cases, ever officially become a member.

• 11:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, one of the biographies that I read of him characterizes period as kind of bouncing around from one group to another, getting a sense of what different ideas were, but not really committing to any of them at that point. In 1944, Baldwin met Richard Wright, who helped him get Harper's Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship, and that fellowship provided some of the funding to help him launch a literary career. He started getting published in established magazines, but then in 1946 Eugene Wirth died by suicide. That was something that traumatized and haunted Baldwin for the rest of his life.

• 12:09Holly Frey?

  Two years later, Baldwin had become certain that he could not live in the United States anymore. It circled back to what he had realized that last night in Belle Meade. He had a clear-minded certainty that if he didn't leave the US and its systematic racism and oppression, he would be killed, or he would kill someone. He finally decided to go to France at the age of 24.

• 12:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  We'll get to that after a quick sponsor break.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 12:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  It was going to rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.

• 13:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.

• 13:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.

• 13:24Speaker 03

  To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing is a beautiful thing.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.

• 13:32Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 14:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  Some life decisions are hard, but thanks to ADT Blue, you can DIY trusted ADT home security in a snap. Head to ADT.com/BLU to build your system today. And to hear more about home protection and other grown-up topics, check out new episodes of Grown Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 14:44Holly Frey?

  We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health Versus Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.

• 15:27Holly Frey?

  Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health Versus Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 16:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 16:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  James Baldwin left for Paris on November 11th, 1948, using the last of the money from a fellowship to pay for a one-way ticket by sea. Beyond that, he had almost no money, virtually no connections, and nowhere to stay. He also did not speak French. In his words, quote, "I had no idea what might happen to me in France, but I was very clear what would happen if I remained in New York."

• 17:17Holly Frey?

  Baldwin faced some criticism for leaving the US, with people arguing that he was abandoning a country that he should have stayed in and tried to help fix. But this first stretch of time in Paris was critically important to his work and identity as a writer. Unlike many of the other writers and artists who left the US for Paris, he didn't think of himself as an expatriate, but more as a commuter. He still felt a deep connection to the United States, and he made frequent trips back. And he spent long stretches of time in other parts of the world, including Istanbul.

• 17:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  Shortly after arriving in Paris, Baldwin met Swiss artist Lucien Happersberger, who was white, bisexual, and at one point married to a woman. When they met, Baldwin was 24, and Happersberger was 17. They eventually started a relationship that went on for almost 40 years. Baldwin described Happersberger as "the love of his life", and he became godfather to Happersberger's children. Along with other relationships in his life, Happersberger was one of the inspirations for Baldwin's novel, Giovanni's Room.

• 18:19Holly Frey?

  While in France, Baldwin wrote everybody's protest novel, which argued that political novels, like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Richard Wright's Native Son, were reinforcing stereotypes about black people, and in particular, dehumanizing black men. Although Wright had helped Baldwin secure his first writing fellowship, the two men did not see eye to eye on a number of issues, and they frequently criticized one another.

• 18:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  On December 19th, 1949, Baldwin was arrested for being in receipt of stolen property after he borrowed a bed sheet that a friend had stolen from a hotel. This whole experience led him to think about identity and policing in the United States versus in France. The police in France saw him as an American, while police in New York would have seen him as an inherently criminal problem. But he also became aware that most of the people who were in jail with him in Paris were from northern Africa, and that French colonialism had its own part to play in racism in France.

• 19:20Holly Frey?

  This first stretch of time in France let Baldwin look back on the US from a distance, seeing things from angles that just were not possible for him while he was living in it. He started coming to terms with both his own history and with his sexuality. While living in France and Switzerland, he finished his semi-autobiographical novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, which he had actually started writing in high school, as well as a play called The Amen Corner and a series of essays.

• 19:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1952, Baldwin made a trip back to the US with financial help from Marlon Brando. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in June of 1954, and other fellowships followed. In 1959, he was awarded a Ford Foundation grant to work on the novel Another Country, when this novel included a fictionalized depiction of his friendship with Eugene Worth, including Worth's suicide. Professor and literary critic Fred Stanley later wrote of Another Country, quote, "Baldwin has been audacious enough prior to most other artists to grapple candidly with the usually taboo subjects of American society and culture, interracial sexual intercourse, homosexuality as a normative mode of experience, and bisexuality as a real phenomenon."

• 20:33Holly Frey?

  After some more back-and-forth travel, Baldwin returned to the US for a longer stretch, starting in July of 1957. A lot of his written work during this time documents or reflects on the civil rights movement, a movement that he wasn't really sure how he fit into. He had become well-known and well-established as a writer by this point, and while he did not want to describe himself as the movement's spokesperson, there were definitely people who thought of him that way.

• 21:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  As the civil rights movement grew and evolved, Baldwin found himself aligned in some ways with Martin Luther King Jr.'s approach through nonviolent action, but in other ways with Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Power Movement. For example, as time went on, Baldwin increasingly favored the Black Power Movement's focus on immediate radical change instead of nonviolent incremental progress. But he really did not agree with the Black Power Movement's focus on Black separatism.

• 21:29Holly Frey?

  One hallmark of Baldwin's writing during the civil rights movement was that it was accessible to and sometimes written specifically for a white audience. Much of this written work carried an implicit or explicit warning that racism was not just harming Black people, that it was also destroying white people as well. Some of it has also been described as prophetic, foreseeing that the movement would become more militant if nonviolent activism did not meet its goals, and foreseeing that white activism would turn away from that militancy.

• 22:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Baldwin's work in the movement was not just about writing, though. He also made speeches. He donated money, wrote letters, signed petitions, organized. During the lunch counter sit-ins that we talked about on the show earlier this year, James Baldwin traveled to Tallahassee to interview student demonstrators. In 1961, he became a sponsor for the National Committee for Asane Nuclear Policy, and he also helped sponsor a rally to disband the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1963, he took a speaking tour through the South in conjunction with the Congress of Racial Equality. During this tour, he met and started working with civil rights activist and NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers.

• 22:43Holly Frey?

  Baldwin's book, The Fire Next Time, came out during this tour as well. It contains two essays, My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the 100th Anniversary of the Emancipation, and Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind. The latter essay dwells on Baldwin's experiences with religion, including both Christianity and the Nation of Islam, relating them to race and racism, and reflecting on his own beliefs. The Fire Next Time spent more than 40 weeks in the top five of the New York Times Bestseller list.

• 23:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  On May 17, 1963, during Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birmingham campaign, Baldwin was on the cover of Time Magazine under a banner that read Birmingham and Beyond: The Negro Push for Equality. A few days before that Time magazine cover, Baldwin had sent a telegram to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy criticizing the United States' lack of response to the civil rights movement, especially in the face of it increasing violence and brutality against the people who were participating in that movement. Baldwin framed this inaction and the failure of the nation to make black liberation a priority as a moral treason.

• 23:53Holly Frey?

  The result was that Kennedy met with Baldwin for breakfast on May 23rd, asking him to gather writers and activists to meet with him the next day. They met in Kennedy's apartment in New York, where Kennedy was joined by Department of Justice lawyer Burke Marshall. Baldwin had brought his brother David, as well as Harry Belafonte, Lorraine Hansberry, Lena Horne, and Rip Torn, along with representatives from the Chicago Urban League, Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, the NAACP, and core. Clarence Benjamin Jones, who is one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s advisers, was also there.

• 24:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  But Kennedy's goal for this meeting was not so much to get a sense of what black Americans needed, or what the civil rights movement's goals were, or how the government might incorporate those goals. He was more focused on figuring out who among them might serve as sort of a mouthpiece for the government, promoting the government's policies to the black community to improve race relations, and also on outlining what the government had done already so far to the assembled group, while basically asking for their patience.

• 24:56Holly Frey?

  Uh, this meeting consequently did not go well. Baldwin and the other assembled activists were trying to describe the systemic racism that went well beyond what was encoded in law, while Kennedy was talking about how his own family had been oppressed for being Irish. Kennedy came off as deeply naive and unwilling to listen. Eventually, Lorraine Hansberry walked out and several others followed. Afterward, the FBI started monitoring Baldwin, placing him on its security index of potentially dangerous people and amassing a file on him that was more than 1,700 pages long.

• 25:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  This meeting, though, while not immediately successful, is often credited with starting to shift Robert Kennedy's perspectives, leading him to encourage his brother, President John F. Kennedy, to address the nation on the subject of civil rights. Kennedy gave his civil rights address on June 11, 1963.

• 25:52Holly Frey?

  In the early morning hours of June 12, Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway in front of his children. The culprit was Byron Dela Beckwith, who was found guilty of the crime more than 30 years later.

• 26:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  Baldwin continued his writing and work during the 1960s, but the assassination of Medgar Evers was the first of a series of events that sort of shifted his work and his outlook. Others included the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963, as well as the assassinations of two other men that he had known and worked with, Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

• 26:28Holly Frey?

  And we're going to get to more on that after we first have a sponsor break.

• 26:35Holly Frey?

  We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends. Not to cancel them, not to hype them more,

• 27:20Holly Frey?

  but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 27:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 28:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:37Speaker 04

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• 29:33Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 30:17Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 30:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  As we noted earlier, James Baldwin never seemed really sure where he fit within the civil rights movement. Although he participated in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, he wasn't a big part of its public presence or its planning. There's been some speculation that this was because of his sexual orientation, but as we've noted on earlier episodes of the show, one of the major planners of the march was Bayard Rustin, who was also gay.

• 31:16Holly Frey?

  It's more likely that Baldwin's views were becoming less and less aligned with Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent arm of the movement. As time went on, Baldwin became increasingly radical. When the Black Panther Party was established in 1966, Baldwin supported many of its efforts, including school breakfast and lunch programs, community healthcare programs, schools, and armed self-defense programs meant to protect Black communities from violence, including violence at the hands of police.

• 31:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Baldwin's written work had always been focused on both racism and homophobia, and he had been both critically acclaimed and a bestseller through this work. But in the late 60s and early 70s, reviewers increasingly criticized him for becoming more pessimistic, accusatory, and vehement, and too directly focused on civil rights. This included the three-act play Blues for Mr. Charlie, which was based on the murder of Emmett Till.

• 32:11Holly Frey?

  And it wasn't just white literary reviewers who were criticizing his work. His advocacy for Palestinian liberation was criticized as anti-Semitic, although he also criticized antisemitism within Black activism. Members of the Black Arts Movement criticized his work because it was intended, at least in part, for white audiences, rather than being written for other Black people. The nonviolent arm of the Civil Rights Movement criticized his more radical and confrontational views, while the Black Power Movement criticized his sexual orientation and his integrationist stances. His sexual orientation was also criticized from outside the movement, the Kennedys nicknamed him Martin Luther Queen.

• 32:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  He basically was criticized from every conceivable direction. In 1970, Baldwin returned to France, where he bought a farmhouse in the medieval village of Saint Paul de Vence. Although he still did a lot of traveling, this became his permanent home for the rest of his life. Locals named it Shea Baldwin.

• 33:11Holly Frey?

  Baldwin's writing and political views had always been anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, Pan-African, pro-Palestinian liberation, and against mass incarceration. He also made connections between black liberation in the US and United States foreign policy, noting that a nation that truly supported black liberation would be supporting black freedom fighters elsewhere in the world and supporting people who were fighting for independence from colonial powers.

• 33:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  All this work had also been primarily focused on men. In the 1970s and 80s, that started to change, in part through televised conversations with poets Nikki Giovanni and past podcast subject Audre Lorde. Both women really pushed Baldwin on issues of gender, gender roles, and sexuality, ultimately leading him to criticize the whiteness of the mainstream feminist movement, as well as its homophobia and anti lesbianism.

• 34:09Holly Frey?

  But like Bayard Rustin, James Baldwin never took a leadership role within the gay rights movement as it became more public and widespread in the 1970s and 80s. He also expressed some ambivalence about exactly how to describe himself and his own identity. In one 1965 interview, he said, quote, "Those terms homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual, are 20th century terms, which for me, really have very little meaning. I've never, myself, in watching myself and watching other people, been able to discern exactly where the barriers were."

• 34:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  I read one piece, as I was working on this, that noted that this has some similarities to conversations happening today about all of these ideas being socially constructed and what they mean.

• 34:55Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 34:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  Baldwin continued to travel and teach and write and work until late in his life, but by the late 1980s, he was having serious issues with his health. He had developed hepatitis and experienced liver damage back in the 1970s, followed by two heart attacks. Then in 1987, he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. I actually also found references that it was stomach cancer or pancreatic cancer, and I don't know which of those is correct. Regardless, though, the cancer progressed really quickly. He gave his last interview to journalist Quincy Troop just days before his death.

• 35:30Holly Frey?

  James Baldwin died on December 1st, 1987, at the age of 63. Lucy in Happersberger was there with him, as well as a household attendant. His funeral was held at the Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan with 5,000 people in attendance. Amiri Baraka delivered the eulogy with tributes from others, including Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison.

• 35:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the words of Amiri Baraka's eulogy, quote, "This man traveled the earth like its history and its biographer. He reported, criticized, made beautiful, analyzed, cajoled, lyricized, attacked, sang, made us think, made us better, made us consciously human, or perhaps more acidly prehuman." And also, in the words of Toni Morrison, addressing the late Baldwin as Jimmy, quote, "In your hands, language was handsome again. In your hands, we saw how it was meant to be, neither bloodless nor bloody, and yet alive." It should surprise no one who knows anything about Toni Morrison. That tribute to Baldwin from the funeral is beautiful, and I highly encourage reading it.

• 36:36Holly Frey?

  During his lifetime, James Baldwin wrote 22 books, including six novels. He was a member of the National Advisory Board of the Congress on Racial Equality, as well as being a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Authors' League, the International Pen, the Dramatist Guild, the Actors Studio, and the National Committee for Asane Nuclear Policy.

• 36:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  He also hoped that his home in France would be turned into a writer's colony after his death, but it was eventually sold to developers and torn down.

• 37:06Holly Frey?

  Baldwin had been a bestseller during his career, especially during the prolific 1960s. But by the end of his life, he was not as widely read. That started to change, as we said at the top of the show, with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the many connections between the movement and Baldwin's ideas and writings decades earlier. In the last few years, there's also been a film adaptation of his novel If Beale Street Could Talk, which came out in 2018, as well as the award-winning 2016 documentary called I Am Not Your Negro. As we said at the top of the show, Baldwin's work is frequently part of anti-racism courses and reading lists.

• 37:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  So we thought we would end with just a couple of quotes quickly from that work. One is from "The Fire Next Time." Quote, "Everything now we must assume is in our hands. We have no right to assume otherwise. If we," and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, "who must, like lovers, insist on or create the consciousness of the others, do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy recreated from the Bible in a song by a slave is upon us. God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time."

• 38:28Holly Frey?

  The other quote is from an interview that he gave in 1970, where he said, "I'm optimistic about the future, but not about the future of this civilization. I'm optimistic about the civilization which will replace this one."

• 38:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  And that is James Baldwin. I talked to various friends as I was trying to figure out what I needed to work on next. And in every case, when I said, "I think James Baldwin," the answer was like, obviously, yes. So yeah, I, I hope I have done his life and work justice today.

• 39:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 39:29Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 39:59Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 40:37Speaker 05

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• 41:35Tracy V. Wilson?

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