He would show that the true “horror is that America … changes all the time, without ever changing at all.” Baldwin, however, never wrote the essay. One goes to the unprotected … and listens to their testimony.”Īs Baldwin imagined it, this essay would take up these themes once again and extend the account through the decade of the ’70s. “If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country,” he writes, “one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. He anticipates the beginnings of mass incarceration and offers a scathing criticism of the way the criminal-justice system crushed Black people with intention. At the level of form, the book mirrors the fragmenting of memory by trauma. It was his answer to how we might respond to the collapse of the Black-freedom movement and to the country’s failures. If The Fire Next Time, Baldwin’s powerful polemic published in 1963, was prophetic, No Name was his own reckoning. No Name in the Street is an extraordinary achievement. No Name represented his effort to make sense of what had happened and to announce his survival. He attempted suicide in 1969 and for a period found himself flailing. Then, Baldwin had sought to pick up the pieces after the assassination of King in 1968, which threw him into a deep depression. It would be an essay about fractured memories, the trauma of loss (of the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and King) and America’s betrayal–an extension of what he had explored seven years earlier in his powerful book No Name in the Street.
He would retrace his footsteps from his 1957 trip and tell the story of what had happened since those fateful days. In 1979, Baldwin wanted to write an essay about the South for the New Yorker. As the nation today faces yet another moral reckoning, it would do us well to listen to Jimmy tell the story of how we failed when faced with a similar choice, and how we can still muster the faith to begin again. As he said in his last ever interview, with Quincy Troupe, in 1987, “Ronald Reagan represent the justification of their history, their sense of innocence … the justification, in short, of being white.” With cancer ravaging his body in his last years, Baldwin was a despairing witness desperate to tell the story of how the country had arrived at such a moment. He experienced the rage caused by betrayal and clenched his teeth as the country doubled down on its ugly commitments. He traveled the South as early as 1957 and saw the promise of the movement’s early days. James Baldwin, the great American writer and critic, witnessed it all. In that moment of reckoning, the country made its choice and sealed Black America’s fate for two more generations. More than a decade after King’s murder, Reagan’s election represented a stark reassertion of the value gap–the idea that white lives matter more than others’.
White politicians stoked white resentments as the “silent” majority shouted that they were the true victims rioted in hard hats against anti–Vietnam War protesters violently resisted forced busing and eventually elected Ronald Reagan, a man as notorious among Black activists as the segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace. And they witnessed King’s dream shattered to pieces like windowpanes facing hurricane-force winds.Īmerica’s betrayal of the civil rights movement gave way to urban explosions across the country, declarations of Black Power and interminable debates about the slogan’s meaning. They watched as friends and fellow travelers ended up at the bottom of the Mississippi River. They suffered the billy stick, fire hoses and police dogs. and countless others risked everything to persuade the country to live up to its stated ideals and to rid itself of the insidious view that white people mattered more than others.
We now face a moral reckoning: Americans have to decide whether this country will truly be a multiracial democracy or whether to merely tinker around the edges of our problems once again and remain decidedly racist and unequal.
An odd admixture, but an understandable consequence of our troubled times. The videos of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks dying have combined with the vulnerability caused by COVID-19 and the feeling that the country is broken to bring us all to the brink of madness and, apparently, to the precipice of significant change.
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