James Baldwin too, in his time was called ‘a darky’, an ‘n’, a ‘m-fng coon’, ‘ouighter be ‘taken out.’ Strong and loud attempts were made to bar his words, his works, for no reason other than some hated down to their bony bones that anyone black would dare to walk as a human being with ideas and hopes and insights and preferences, that anyone black would rise to power and be listened to, read, influence others of all races.
This, from an old black man who made it through, who had the whip scars on psyche to show for it from those who hated him… and yet he still spoke in calm:
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
James A. Baldwin
From a review at AMZ on Baldwin’s THE FIRE NEXT TIME…
Baldwin focuses on two important anecdotes. The first deals with his seduction by the church, his brief career as a child minister, and his subsequent rejection of Christianity. The second deals with an encounter with Elijah Muhammad, then leader of the Nation of Islam. Both show religion as an escape mechanism, and both are told with a convincing immediacy and a sense of candor.
Baldwin’s rejection of Christianity appears to be a crucial step in his awakening, and in his rejection of the beliefs that 60’s White society expected Black people to hold. The church for Baldwin was an escape mechanism, but having been consoled he soon fled the church, overwhelmed by its hypocrisy and abuses, both historical and current. He concludes “…whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being…Baldwin turns the same critical eye on the Nation of Islam. He’s sympathetic to the emotions and suffering that have pushed Black people into internalizing the NOI’s separatist rhetoric, but he recognizes that this will not be the salvation of the Black community. Baldwin writes \”…the Negro has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other – not to Africa, and certainly not to Islam. The paradox…is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past.”Despite his cutting commentary on 60’s White society, Baldwin in his heart is an integrationist. His rejection of the Nation of Islam and their philosophy is his rejection of the idea of adopting the very tactics that Whites have used against Blacks; \”Whoever debases other is debasing himself\”, he states emphatically. Baldwin understands imitation and aggression as a tactic, but he finds awe not in an eye-for-an-eye, but in a community who’s dignity has produced children of kindergarten age capable of walking through a mob to get to their schoolhouse.