Baldwin’s America Today: Hope or Despair?

First Unitarian Universalist Church, South Bend, IN, May 16, 2021

Alfred J. Guillaume, Jr., Ph.D.

Good morning friends.  When Florence first asked me to do this sermon on James Baldwin, I was both honored and surprised.  I had already had a lively Baldwin discussion with several of you about Baldwin’s masterful essay, The Fire Next Time, as part of the UU Auction.  And although, I’ve spent the last year reading Baldwin in preparation for a one-credit hour graduate seminar that I taught this spring, I struggled deciding on an appropriate title for today’s service.  As I reflected on current events, I began thinking about what Baldwin would say about his America today.  It is without question Baldwin’s lasting impact on the literary canon, but is his writing still relevant? If so, what can we learn in our nation’s continuing struggles to achieve racial, social and economic justice?

Unlike many of his contemporaries who risked bodily harm by putting themselves physically in the battle for social justice, Baldwin used the power of the pen and the force of his writing to awaken the unconscious to the evils of racism.  For those among his fellow Americans, fully aware of injustice, his searing words pricked their consciousness from lethargy to active movement in the cause of justice and equality.  As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King so eloquently expressed in his Letter from Birmingham Jail to his fellow clergymen who wanted him to “wait,” “…justice delayed is justice denied.”  And unlike Stokely Carmichael, Baldwin did not spend tiring hours and days in the sweltering heat of Alabama and Mississippi in Negro voter registration efforts that often proved naught.  Nor did he spout the angry rhetoric of Malcom X in urging change either through the “Ballot or the Bullet.”  And he did not risk his life as a Freedom Rider as did John Lewis and countless others, black and white, and from every faith. No, Baldwin pierced the consciousness and soul of America through the eloquence of his pen.  He was brutally honest, yet gracious and caring.  No matter how much rage he carried within him, he remained an apostle of love.  No matter how harshly America treated the Negro, no matter how painful the sting of hatred toward the Negro, he remained resolute in dignity.   

Baldwin grew up in poverty in a world far removed from mainstream America.  He learned at an early age the horrors of being considered less than the other, white Americans.  His part of town, Harlem, was left to fester in crime, drugs and pimps and prostitutes.  Bars and churches proliferated.  Both shields from an unkind and uncaring world.   Like his stepfather, with whom he had a difficult relationship, he sought refuge in the church as a preacher.  At the age of thirteen, Baldwin was renowned as an eloquent preacher, gifted by the Holy Spirit.  But unlike his father, he was not torn between Christian love and hatred for and fear of white people.  Baldwin had white friends in school and a white teacher, to whom he was forever devoted, who nurtured his brilliance by taking him to movies, to the theaters and to concerts.

Baldwin eventually left the church, but the church never left him—the evidence is deeply interwoven in his writing style–quick bold statements, punctuated in a staccato rhythmic call and response. Baldwin also left America.  Like so many artists, writers and musicians before him who sought refuge from the oppressive walls of racism and deep-rooted feelings of being unwanted and isolated in America, he exiled himself in France.  He left America to be himself.  Had he remained, he felt he could not be free to become a writer, and as a Negro he was not allowed to participate fully in the grand experiment of democracy.  In Notes of a Native Son, he remarks: “The American Commonwealth chooses to overlook what Negroes are never able to forget: they are not really considered a part of it.”   He faced this rejection in a New Jersey restaurant by a waitress who reminded him that Negroes were not welcomed there.  Angered and hurt, he threw a glass of water in her face.  He fled in fear, fully aware of the unspeakable retribution that he faced as a black man for this dastardly deed.  Baldwin recalls this experience in Notes of a Native Son: “I lived it over and over again, the way one relives an automobile accident after it has happened and one finds oneself alone and safe.  I could not get over two facts, both equally difficult for the imagination to grasp, and one was that I could have been murdered.  But the other was that I was ready to commit murder. I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.”  And it is precisely that hatred that Baldwin refuses to harbor in his heart.  And that is why, after several years in exile, he felt compelled to return to America to participate in the Civil Rights Movement, particularly when on the front pages of the American and French newspapers he saw the images of Dorothy Counts being jeered and spat upon by angry crowds of whites as she entered what was previously an all-white school.

Through his pen, Baldwin became the voice of the Civil Rights Movement.  He issued the clarion call for justice. Through his popularity as a writer, he gained access to Hollywood and raised monies to support the Movement.  He courted the rich, the famous and those with influence and power. Marlon Brando became a personal friend.  Robert Kennedy invited him to his office. He was at the center among other prominent dignitaries at the 1963 March on Washington but was denied a turn at the podium for fear that his homosexuality would be a distraction.  Nevertheless,  his most enduring contribution to the cause of freedom and justice was, and still is, the clarity and precision of his words that pierced the consciousness of a nation. He told brutal truths about America.  He castigated America for its failure to fulfill its promise of justice and equality for all.  He chided white America for clinging to a myth of greatness, for its belief in the supremacy of whiteness, for its behemoth lie about itself. Baldwin’s writing is a searing indictment of America. In the heartwarming letter to his nephew in (My Dungeon Shook)The Fire Next Time, he reminds him that.. “(T)his country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.  Let me spell it out precisely what I mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root cause of my dispute with my country.  You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever.  You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.”

In his essay, “The White Man’s Guilt,” Baldwin’s concludes that white America’s biggest failure is to accept their “appallingly oppressive and bloody history,” a history “which menaces, and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility. But since in the main, they seem to lack the energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it.”  But he goes on to say that Americans “are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world.”  Baldwin bemoans that whites have fed themselves a lie (a lie about what America is) and do not know how to release themselves from it.  Further along in the essay, Baldwin opines in a reference to the Iron Curtain: “The American curtain is color.  Color…  One can measure very neatly the white American’s distance from his conscience—from himself—by observing the distance between White America and Black America.  One has only to ask oneself who established this distance. Who is this distance designed to protect, and from what is this difference designed to offer protection?”

So that was Baldwin’s America? What is ours today?  Let’s examine it.  I dare say that the myths about America persist.  We refuse to acknowledge the bloody history of genocide of our nation’s indigenous people; we gloss over the brutality of 400 years of slavery; Mitch McConnell and his ilk do not want the history of the 1619 Project taught in our schools; we prefer to focus on the land of freedom and justice for all, ignoring that many of our forefathers owned slaves and that the promises of the Constitution discounted blacks, and limited the freedoms of women; we want to forget Jim Crow, lynching and forced subjugation of blacks; we honor MLK, yet systemic and institutional racism is pervasive; our economic systems continue to prey on and exploit blacks; we actively push sub-prime loans with high interest, we redline neighborhoods, businesses routinely abandon minority communities; educational parity is non-existent; vouchers and inequities in taxation decimate inner-city schools; we incarcerate black men disproportionally to their population; black males are three times as likely to encounter death by a police officer; inequities in healthcare decrease the lifespan of blacks.  

What then would Baldwin say about America today? Surely, he would be disappointed.  He would feel betrayed by legislation in many states at voter suppression.  He would be appalled by the Big Lie that is polarizing our country politically; he would use the power of his pen to malign efforts to diminish the sanctity of our democratic principles.  He would decry those who stoke the flames of racial, and ethnic hatred. In his essay, “Many Thousands Gone,” he reminds us: “The story of the Negro in America is the story of America—or more precisely, it is the story of Americans.”  In his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel: “It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society….” Baldwin’s rage about the injustices of his time was real.  He fought against racism.  He rejected the characterization of blacks by whites.  He refused to think of himself as less than human.  His anger was tempered by knowing that he shared a common humanity with whites.   He understood that whites in their willful victimization of Negroes, were victimizing themselves.  And in his encounter with Elijah Muhammed that he so beautifully described in The Fire Next Time, he rejects Elijah’s description of whites as devils, saying to himself, but not to Elijah: “I love a few people and they love me and some of them are white, and isn’t love more important than color?” 

Until his death in 1987, Baldwin remained a provocateur, pushing America to accept its past and thus free itself toward racial healing.  He wanted America to be what it can be. To co-opt the title of an article that recently appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Baldwin was right all along.  He exposed this country for what it is.  In his famed debate with William Buckley at Oxford in 1965, he said, “It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you.” On the last day of my graduate seminar, I posed these questions to my students, and I now pose them to you. What has Baldwin taught us?  What have we learned?  What is he asking us to do to make America what it says it is? How do we help America fulfill its promise of liberty and justice for all?  Ultimately, Baldwin is asking white American to admit its historical complicity in the systemic and institutional racism that continues to plague this country.  Unless that is done through honest and sincere self-examination, there is no path forward.  He asks black Americans, though justified in their anger, not to despair, not to hate white Americans, but to join in fellowship with those of goodwill in the fight for justice.  Baldwin did not yield to defeatism; he did not abandon America.  Nor should we.

I close with Baldwin’s admonishing words to his nephew in The Fire Next Time:

“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, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water; the fire next time!” 

Summary statements at end of the service:

American Dream and American Negro

“Unless we can establish some kind of dialogue between those who enjoy the American dream and those people who have not achieved it, we will be in terrible trouble.  This is what concerns me most.”

We Can Change the Country

“We have already paid a tremendous price for what we have done to the Negro people.  We have denied, and we are paying for the denial of the energy of twenty million people. No society can sustain that.  The future is going to be worse than the past if we do not let the people who represent us know that this is our country.  A government and a nation are synonymous.  We can change the government and we will.”