One key detail that tends to be left out of the history of the US civil rights movement, as told today in documentaries and classrooms, is that in the minds of many of its leaders and supporters, it failed. Despite the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act there was, in the 1960s and 1970s, a view that “the dream”, as articulated by Martin Luther King Jr, had been overwhelmed by a torrent of American nativism and racism.
By the start of the 1970s, both King Jr and Malcolm X had been assassinated and the non-violent, moral pressure strategies of civil rights had been largely abandoned by the young, in favour of the militant and militarised cult of self-reliance embodied in the Black Panther Party. The great chronicler of those years of betrayal, grief and radicalised anger was James Baldwin.
Baldwin was born as the eldest of nine children in New York City’s Harlem in 1924. Raised in relative poverty by his mother and his stepfather, a Baptist minister, Baldwin credited his school French teacher, the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, as an early literary mentor. Baldwin was 24 when he left the US for Europe, where he wrote many of his works.
No Name in the Street, published in 1972, is one of Baldwin’s lesser-known books. Two years before publication, struggling to breathe life into the early drafts, Baldwin described it as “a long essay on the life and death of what we call the civil rights movement”. Overshadowed by the brilliance of his novels Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room and If Beale Street Could Talk, it is among a number of Baldwin’s works now being republished to mark the centenary of his birth.
In his latter years, Baldwin was, at times, dismissed as yesterday’s man. The New York Times’ 1972 review of No Name in the Street concluded that the book substantiated the growing sense that Baldwin was “an anachronism”. Such reductive mischaracterisations were misguided even then; half a century later, they are demonstrably preposterous. The writer described in the 20th century as “the poet of the revolution” has, in the 21st century, become both prophet and educator to generations of black people engaged in new struggles for racial justice.
The centenary of an author’s birth is a “hook” deployed by publishers to get books on their backlists back on to the shelves and into the hands of new generations of readers. Baldwin’s centenary sees a rare convergence of events. This marketing gimmick coincides with a genuine and organic upsurge in interest in the man and his works. Here in Britain, Baldwin’s centenary arrived in a week when far-right mobs were attacking black and brown people on the streets – which hints at why his words are still relevant.
Baldwin, who died in 1987, is today a celebrated, widely read and even fashionable figure. One of his most famous quotes – “Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy of justice” – has been graffitied on to walls, printed on T-shirts and posted on social media, especially since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. And Baldwin might soon be more fashionable still. Earlier this year, the Baldwin estate struck a deal with the media production group Fremantle North America to adapt his books for television and cinema. More Baldwin films and documentaries are on their way, following Raoul Peck’s Oscar- and Bafta-nominated 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro, which was based on Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, Remember This House.
Yet even if every one of the nearly 7,000 pages of prose Baldwin published were out of print today, he might still have been rediscovered by 21st-century readers. As much as his writing, Baldwin’s oratory – the compelling power of his voice and the moral conviction of his arguments – makes him a potent figure. Infused with rhythms, phrases and references accrued during his years as a child preacher in Harlem, Baldwin’s speeches are, in their own way, as sermonic and mesmeric as those of his friend Martin Luther King Jr.
In the language of YouTube and TikTok, Baldwin is “clippable”, and it is through those platforms and others that his powerful eloquence has been rediscovered. What circulates online, far more than any learned lecture about his books, are clips of Baldwin’s many appearances on long-forgotten TV chat shows. Those short bursts of rhetorical brilliance, scraped from the archives of the once-mighty US networks, have enabled Baldwin to morph into a social media phenomenon. Clips from the BBC’s recording of his 1965 Cambridge Union debate, in which he defeated the conservative William F Buckley are also constantly shared.
But Baldwin’s growing relevance is also a reflection of the fact that the racial politics and the political instability of the 2020s are horribly redolent of the late 1960s, as many commentators have noted. The current campaign to demonise Black Lives Matter and critical race theory mirrors the rejection of the more substantive demands of the civil rights movement by Richard Nixon’s America. The ongoing ideological war against affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives is not an isolated contemporary aberration, but part of a continuum. Just as the civil rights movement forced America to confront historic truths and live injustices, the Obama presidency and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement pushed contemporary racism in America back on to the political agenda. Like the late 1960s, the mid-2020s is an era of backlash. Who better to help us navigate such a moment than Baldwin?
No Name in the Street, though not strictly an autobiography, is a strikingly personal book. Structured across two essays, it is an account of Baldwin’s journey through trauma as well as an assessment of where the traumatic events of the late 1960s left Americans, both white and black. The most vivid biographical passages reach back into Baldwin’s unhappy Harlem upbringing, and to his time as an emerging young writer in Paris in the 1950s.
Always an international figure, Baldwin recounts his exile in France in the 1940s and 1950s, which saw him seeking sanctuary from the racism he encountered in America. While romantic about his Parisian life he is distinctly unromantic about France, recognising that as an African American, he was exoticised and tolerated in ways that Algerians – the marginalised and mistrusted subjects of a French empire then in revolt – were not. He writes chillingly that the Algerians were being murdered “by my hosts”. Snapshots of other times and places end just as abruptly, as the needle of Baldwin’s prose snaps to the fraught present in which the book was written.
Baldwin’s attempts to process the violence and hopelessness of late-1960s America are set alongside his experiences with members of the younger black generation, who had marched for the civil rights movement, putting their liberty at stake and their bodies on the line. Baldwin recounts how they had been left enraged and despondent at the depth of their nation’s hostility.
In the first of his two essays, Baldwin recounts how the assassination of King Jr broke his – and the movement’s – spirit. He concludes the second essay by tracing how the death of “the dream” inevitably led to the emergence of the Black Panther Party, with all its watchful scepticism. As Baldwin was writing, the FBI was busy methodically destroying the Panthers.
As Colm Tóibín writes in his new book On James Baldwin, “Baldwin was fascinated with eloquence itself, the soaring phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the sharp and glorious ring of a sentence, as much as with the plain, declarative line.” Baldwin’s prose style is as striking in No Name in the Street as in many of his other essays. The rhythms of the black church are reinforced through ceaseless repetition of key words. He builds long sentences out of great flocks of short words, and slides between personal anecdote and broad social analysis. No Name in the Street is also, at times, an insight into the inner sanctums of the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers. Although repeatedly embarrassed by his own celebrity, Baldwin paints a picture of the rarefied world in which he circulated; populated by political giants and Hollywood royalty. He pens sketches of his encounters with King Jr, Malcolm X and Black Panthers Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver. Marlon Brando’s energetic fundraising for the civil rights cause is delivered almost as a passing detail.
On the final pages of No Name in the Street, Baldwin describes how the racism he was subjected to in America continued to operate, how it relentlessly functioned and the business models at work behind it: the insurance companies and banks that profited from the ghettoisation of African Americans. Drawing parallels with the then-ongoing Vietnam War, he explains how the police patrolled the ghetto streets as if they were a colonial gendarmerie: “the concept of policework,” he wrote, “is to cow the natives.” As Baldwin explains, No Name in the Street “was delayed by trials, assassinations, funerals, and despair”. So deep was that despair that, in 1969, Baldwin attempted suicide. The intensity of the moment in which the book was written has faded. What was social commentary then is history now, yet Baldwin’s words still burn on the page.
David Olusoga is a historian, broadcaster and author
No Name in the Street
James Baldwin
Penguin Classics, 160pp, £9.99
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This article appears in the 14 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, England Undone