Ep. 27 – James Baldwin’s Life, Legacy, and Influence: A Conversation with Ed Pavlic

[0:00:07 Peniel] Welcome to race and democracy, a podcast on the intersection between race, democracy, public policy, social justice and citizenship. So welcome to race and democracy, and we’re very excited to have with us today. Dr Ed Pavlik, who is distinguished research professor of English and African American studies at the University of Georgia and really one of the more foremost, um, critics and essayist, a novelist, um, about the black experience in the 19th and 20th centuries. He’s one of the world’s most important scholars of James Baldwin, and we’re gonna be talking about James Baldwin today, James Baldwin in the American South. But really, what is Baldwin mean for race and democracy in the United States and globally at this critical juncture in 2019? Ah, Professor Pavlech is the author of many books, including Who Can Afford to Improvise James Baldwin and Black Music, The Lyric and the listeners On his most recent book Is his novel another kind of madness? Um, Ed, Welcome to race in Democracy.

[0:01:23 Ed] Great to be here. Great to see you.

[0:01:25 Peniel] Um, I want to talk about James Baldwin. Um, you know, born in 1924 and Harlem really becomes the Stratus, stratospheric public intellectual with the 1963 publication of The Fire. Next time the meeting with Bobby Kennedy. Um, he is friends with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr But then, when we think about Baldwin in the 19 seventies and eighties, um, let less of, ah, as visible figure as he had been. Hey, passes away really premature death when we think 63. 63 in 1987. But now there’s been a renaissance of Baldwin studies. You’ve got the documentary I am not your Negro. You’ve got Ta Nehisi. Coates writes the best seller, which is really an homage, at least the framing of between the world and me, which is sold maybe two million copies. Uhm uhm isn’t homage a letter to his son where fire next time was a letter to his nephew, right? At least one of them. So I want you to talk about James Baldwin. Your work with Baldwin, the inspiration. What Baldwin means

[0:02:33 Ed] Well, well is a lot, man. Uh, yeah. Just thank you so much for for for doing this, it’s it’s great to be here and always happy to talk about Baldwin. Any lens you know. Ah, but as far as how you’re approaching things, there’s a lot there that you already said, you know, he came from a background that wouldn’t have, you know, you wouldn’t have predicted he would become a kind of literary superstar and public intellectual. But he made his way and it’s, Ah, it really is an incredible story that I hate to say. Even with all the attention over all these decades that he’s had, I still feel like we know kind of very little about was still kind of circling around it somehow of

[0:03:16 Peniel] Why do you think that is?

[0:03:17 Ed] Well, I think I think that Baldwin was a rare person in that he became very, very popular, pretty much as popular as anybody else at the time. You hear about hell, Harry Belafonte or somebody like that? You know, he was kind of a celebrity like Miles Davis or Ability Williams or one of these people. But at the same time, he wasn’t really an entertainer. He was a It was an artist that he was a kind of prophetic figure, you know. He was a person who lived his life kind of in this obsessive and very intense quest to produce a way to be looked almost to become away, that in looking at him, people could see things about themselves that they weren’t really prepared to see. So there’s always there’s got to be in anyone’s reckoning. We’re dealing with ball when there should be a ah kind of, you know, just disturbance of a kind attention And, you know, as as far as you want to take it, who knows how, how extreme that comes. But I think therefore, you know, his question of celebrity is usually a question of pleasure. And entertainment. In Baldwin’s was was a complex variety of very complex variety of that for all kinds of reasons

[0:04:29 Peniel] I want you really got us through one of these disturbances in a particular in the in the field of race relations. And what is Baldwin mean to us in that particular field?

[0:04:40 Ed] Yeah, well, you know, that’s one of those things where, like all great artists or all great intellectuals, as you’re saying, there, there what they say to people changes over the eras, You know, the way Baldwin spoke to the United States, who was paying attention to the 19 fifties very different from the sixties, early sixties late sixties and, as you said, also different the seventies and eighties with the kind of I want a decline in his popularity, at least. But I don’t think of his importance.

[0:05:12 Peniel] Why the transformation of the Baldwin from, say, the late 19 forties and fifties to the Baldwin of Not even Just the Fire next time but we think about 1961. And he writes the essay in The New York Times and Negro Assays. The Negro Mood in the aftermath of the Anti the protest at the U. N. After Patrice Lumumba, Prime minister of the Congo, his assassination. You have black American protests involved Was supposed to be there. Got held up at a cocktail party, of course. Right? Yes. Um, really this stinging denunciation of American imperialism in 1961. Why does Baldwin become such this prophetic figure? Especially when he starts out being courted by sort of, Ah, a neo liberal? Yeah, um, literary community that that is really

[0:06:02 Ed] 19 fifties. Yes, is very, very kind of inward looking. A private individual is, um, you know, as the basis for all human reality.

[0:06:10 Peniel] He’s got the big critique of Richard Wright

[0:06:12 Ed] and Richard Wright in the protest movement. You know, he balding was, Ah, covered the first conference of black and African writers in Paris and 50 56 you know, looking around at a Mrs Air and Sangoro and Richard Wright, many others, and that they’re kind of very political aesthetics as writers. And he’s just kind of thinking, as doesn’t work for me, you know, this isn’t literature as such. I would be a writer, you know? I don’t want to be a commentator. I want to be a pamphleteer. Is he called protests writers. And so for him, it was It was kind of a prolonged and twisted and very complex transition into that kind of political, overtly political role. Um,

[0:06:59 Peniel] and what leads to that?

[0:07:00 Ed] What leads to that? Well, I want to talk about that little bit today. Ah, part of what leads to it is, you know, growing up in the ghetto like he did. He had his own fantasies. About what success and what being an American might be like, You know, And he made it so he could experience that kind of success early in his career. his first novel did well. First book of essays did very well. Early fifties. Giovanni’s Room, you know about about homoerotic life in Paris came out of 56. Everyone told him not to do it. He did it anyway, and it was a big hit. So he was. He was actually becoming quite a literary success in the image in a certain kind of image of the day. Meanwhile, he was becoming more and more miserable the whole time, and he could figure out why and got to be so bad that, you know, he had a couple suicide attempts. He was really coming apart, literally, um, in a lethal kind of struggle with basically the experience of having been converted into an American. But the time, you know, I don’t think there was a very persuasive vocabulary for what all that meant. It certainly it wasn’t is persuaded to him and, um, in a crazy leap of I don’t know what he in 1937 leaves Corsica, where he had been living for some months and goes United States, and immediately goes to visit the nascent sites of the freedom movement in the South Charlotte, where integration was happening in the schools. This is September of 1957. This is exactly the moment when those schools are being integrated, a little rock Charlotte, other places and he visits the people. It is the families. He talks with students he talks with, the activist, talked with principles, talks with, you know, opponent. So for freedom movement. And and I don’t think, you know, he doesn’t really understand. Much as he’d never been in the American self before. He was a native New Yorker that he went to France. So he’s just, you know, taking all this in down there. And I think, what he’s what he’s kind of absorbing. There is an alternative to, like American individual success in any color, that people down there are banded together in collective ways in principled ways, which have results, you know. And there’s a power coming out of black people in the South in this movement that in one way kind of had always been there and rituals in churches and so forth, but had now kind of entered a new phase.

[0:09:27 Peniel] Well, there’s a performative aspect. It becomes sort of spectacular through these media images, and people want to come and see and bear witness, which is one of the things that James Baldwin talks about. And even now we think about black lives matter and people like Deray McKesson going to events in Ferguson and sort of live tweeting. It becomes a social movements. When you want to go to Selma, you want to go to friend, you want to go well,

[0:09:50 Ed] today involves first trip down. There was pretty early on all that, you know. This was this was not national news. This is something people thought kind of stay wherever it was going to stay, you know, But for him, it was a kind of life changing, in a way, a kind of life saving event. It started in motion this transformation that finally becomes the Baldwin that became so famous in the in the early sixties as a spokesman, as an overtly political thinker, an actor and also as a writer, so so very difficult.

[0:10:20 Peniel] I want to stay in the 19 fifties. I want you to talk to us about Baldwin and Dr Martin Luther King Jr. And Baldwin writes to King. I think it’s 1959. He wants to spend days with them. They eventually essay and Harper’s. But I want to talk about and what’s interesting about Baldwin. There’s always a sense of skepticism, but there’s also a sense of faith in sort of the greater possibility of citizenship and racial justice, but also skepticism that, you know, he talks about America and achieving our country, that we could achieve this sort of multiracial democracy that confronts racial slavery and structural racism and violence and lynching and rape and all these different things. So why does he seek out Martin Luther King Jr. What kind of relationship do they have?

[0:11:05 Ed] You know, But we met King for the first time in 57 in September, I think maybe late September early October 1987. On that first trip, King was in Atlanta, staying in a motel his family was still in. Montgomery was still at Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, but he was in Atlanta working on his book, you know, stride toward freedom. And Baldwin had a meeting with him and immediately liked him very much immediately struck him as a kind of younger brother of his. You like to say that a lot, but they you know, they were both preacher’s sons. In a way, they had a certain thing in common with the church, but, of course, very different churches, but on being a kind of a black Pentecostal family in the ghetto in Harlem and and Kings by then middle class family in Atlanta. But you know, but Baldwin sees in King immediately, although I don’t think it took him a couple of years like you say. It wasn’t until a few years later that you wrote about it in Harper’s. But he felt immediately that King was a man who had found found a way to attach his own personal destiny to a collective vision of people’s empowerment. And this was something that that building was, you know, tragically and almost lethal e lacking at the time. And so we saw that happening totally had suspicions of preachers and clergy and how they manipulate people is spectacle and go home with the money and, you know, in their Cadillacs. And you know, he had seen all that stuff. He was in no way a person to be predisposed to enamored a clergy, you know? But he sends something coming up coming around with King that was there was distinct from the other preaches they had known most. Of course, we’re northerners. You know, um and, uh, he met with him several times early on and he said at some point, he said and that Harper Specie says he writes that, you know, King was a kind of reluctant participant in this movement. He didn’t come to Montgomery to lida freedom movement. He came there to be a professional Baptist preacher, you know, But the people there had already kind of prepared a movement. It was already happening. The structures were there, the basis was there. And he kind of found himself in the middle of it. And for whatever reason, whatever mix of talent and spirit he had, he became a kind of magnetic part of that thing and accepted the role that they had prepared for him to take. So he was, in a way kind of answering a call that people had made. And that was something that resonated very deeply with Baldwin. And I think from then on he saw his life as a writer, as artist, exactly. In that way, artist doesn’t doesn’t isn’t an introspective genius who is in charge of their own brilliant worldview. Artist is a person who puts his body in the midst of people in need and uses his talents to clarify that need to address that need to amplify that need and to, you know, do what what he can in that space. And again, that’s something that was in pretty direct conflict with what literary career is supposed to be and the literary, the machinery of literary success then and now is something that doesn’t tolerate that kind of agenda very well on DSO. Yeah, that was That was a big deal. And I think if you look at his initial descriptions of King and like I was just describing, you could find his descriptions later on of Baldwin talking about an artist does, and they’re they’re damn near verbatim, but almost identical. So that was big.

[0:14:27 Peniel] I want to talk about Baldwin and Malcolm X in the nation Islam because one of the things that makes Baldwin really stand out, I think when people look upon him in retrospect, even as the iconography of Malcolm and Martin has just grown in the last 50 years, really, almost to the point where it’s an industry, and they’re both brands, and Baldwin’s is sort of catching up lagging behind. But the fact that Baldwin new and considered both of them friends and I think both of them would have considered him a friend um, I want to talk about Baldwin in Malcolm X in the nation Islam. Certainly there are debates with Malcolm friendly debates in fire. Next time he talks about having dinner with the honorable Elijah Mohammed. Um, which is extraordinary. Yeah. Um and

[0:15:12 Ed] that was in the summer of 61. And that didn’t happen in July of

[0:15:14 Peniel] Summer of 61. And he’s debating Malcolm in 61 62 63. There have been places, debates What? What? Um, what draws James Baldwin Teoh to Malcolm X in the Nation of Islam? Because when you when you listen to the when you read the writing, you sense both skepticism, but also the real attraction, especially to sort of the clarifying truth sometimes bone, um, rattling truths that they are articulating.

[0:15:46 Ed] Yeah. Yeah, well, these relationship is so fast dating complex, but Bolden was was very talented in in avoiding kind of writing people off for simplistic reasons here and later on, You know, when King was dead and Baldwin kind of had this Malcolm X film on his mind and kind of in his hands, he was working with Betty Shabbas pretty closely. And he was also built trying to build bridges to the younger radical Stokely Carmichael among them. Ah, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Baraka. Um and, you know, they weren’t treating Baldwin very nicely in the late sixties at all, but And he knew that, and he presented it. But he also refused to kind of be split apart from them. George Jackson, Angela Davis to you. He did work in relation to all these people at the time. So? So the same is true with King, King and Malcolm. You know, these were very different men from James Baldwin. He was obviously, his life was unthinkably different from either of those guys. But he could see, you know, things that they were doing, that they were very powerful, you know, and from very attractive to him. Frankly, for Malcolm, you know, bold. Who could see that? Malcolm? I could talk to people in the street in Harlem where he had grown up in an urban American black America in ways that were the people responded to very powerful E, but also that didn’t that weren’t manipulating people’s pain in the way that he thought a lot off, you know, kind of ghetto celebrity activists were, and certainly the preachers were. And so, um at the same so he could see that very clearly. And I think Bob one could see that Malcolm was able to do this in a very rare way. And he certainly wasn’t alone and seeing that. But I think he had a certain kind of perspective on it, which pretty unique because all those all those stuff about him, what he you know, what bubbling couldn’t tolerate, of course, was was the whole framing the Nation of Islam imposed on Malcolm and Malcolm embraced, obviously, that had saved him in many ways that he he went a long way along with before he before he decided to break from it. So Bob would couldn’t tell it that for a minute, you know, that was the worst off the kind of believers fervor that it was too much in the church and in the east of Islam was just as bad or worse. You know the racial theology was something else that Baldwin didn’t really believe, obviously. And he didn’t live that way, and he didn’t. He thought it was a kind of disaster in 63 in a life magazine piece, Um, there’s a great photo of Baldwin outside the mosque and Durham, North Carolina, with these signee on there. And he’s where he is. Writing a note and underneath is a caption and where he says, Ah, you know, the Nation of Islam is good. For one thing, it’s great to scare away people other. That is just another racist organization, and the only place could go is to disaster. That’s what he said, and I think that’s that’s pretty close to what he felt about The Nation of Islam is a theological and kind of commercial enterprise in so far as he knew about the details of its commerce. But what Malcolm was something very dear, and I think he knew that right away.

[0:18:58 Peniel] Exactly because I was going to say one of things I wanted to discuss was in the aftermath of Malcolm and Martin’s death. Um, he writes a terrific essay in Harper’s magazine, making the argument that by the time of their death, there was really virtually no difference between them. And so in some ways, Baldwin, I think, is very prophetic in looking at Malcolm and Martin. It’s too, um, radicals and revolutionaries who are constantly evolving over time and really leading us away from that American dream versus nightmare polarity that has really set in popular culture. You know, like you think of them is two different, not necessarily scholars and those people who are in, in in in our field, right? But the public, the American popular and political culture sets up. Malcolm is violence and sort of black rage. And Malcolm is this Martin. Is this non violence and peace? A little? She I use that metaphor. But what do we think about What do you think about Baldwin? Sort of distilling the importance of Malcolm and Martin.

[0:20:06 Ed] Well, I think there’s a lot there, and there’s a lot there that will last after the cliches. Stereotypes of who those men were fall away because the errors were in. Now I don’t need them anymore. I think Bob was. Insights is toe into what the importance of each and both of those men were well will still be there, you know, and be very meaningful. And I think you know, part of Baldwin’s hesitation, part of the ways that he was critical of both King and Malcolm X had to do as much with the institutions they were a part of, as with their own visions on voices. And Baldwin again, you know, is is so important because he was not institutionalized, he was able to somehow throw this career together in a way that, you know, he avoided allegiances to institutional orthodoxies. And so he was positioned in a way to see all this from a from a place kind of beyond the polarities which created a lot of this tension between and within those those movements themselves. So his perspective is his vantage point is very unique. And I think is perspective, for that reason is, is very valuable.

[0:21:19 Peniel] When you think about Baldwin between, uh, note between the fire next time and no name in the street, I want to ask what, what what happens? Why does his popularity diminish? You think, and not necessarily popularity within the black community or among radicals, because I think when you look at the fire next time it is, you know, this huge best seller. And it’s, you know, this is the year that Bobby Kennedy, that then attorney general meets with Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry and Jerome Smith and some civil rights activists at Joseph Kennedy’s apartment in New York. May 24th 1963. And there’s this big Saturday there’s a Saturday. There’s this big, sort of sort of confrontation argument that

[0:22:00 Ed] Bill A here,

[0:22:01 Peniel] Millais that Baldwin sort of leaks to The New York Times next two days. And it’s sort of saying that Bobby tried to use Baldwin as a conduit to really gauge the Negro mood. And that’s one of the things I argue. That’s as close as the Kennedys ever get to being in a room with Malcolm X when they’re in that room. Because all those folks are influenced by Malcolm is probably none more so than James Walls with at that time at that. In that meeting, Baldwin might have been Malcolm, and it was channeling it away. Yeah, absolutely. When we think just about six months later, after the march on Washington Baldwin, it was supposed to have been a speaker. They tried to censor speech. He refused to speak, and Malcolm publicly really praises Baldwin and says that you know, Baldwin was supposed to speak, but they didn’t let him speak his Baldwin is liable to say

[0:22:50 Ed] any libel suit.

[0:22:51 Peniel] And so that’s the That’s the highest mark of respect from Malcolm X s O. But from that high point of 63 but we see by no name in the street, 71 on and and he’s talking about his experiences in both in the fifties, but also 68. Stalking by Angela Davis. He’s talking about Eldridge Cleaver. He’s talking about a young black man who he knew gurus who was in trouble with the law. Um, Tony Maynard. Tony Main, huh? So So what? What? Because when I look at Baldwin by no name in ST one of my favorite books, I really think about is his best book. Baldwin is a full blown black political revolutionary by that point, you know, and he’s he’s, you know, he’s no longer a very young man. He’s born in 1924

[0:23:36 Ed] coming up on 50 but

[0:23:37 Peniel] coming up on 50. So what? What what happens?

[0:23:41 Ed] Well, gosh, you know that such a fascinating decade and part of what makes no name to ST the great great book that it is. It’s basically Baldwin’s memoir of his participation in the Freedom movement from 63. In Casting Back, you know, he remembers back to the fifties when he first went to the South. Little bit, No name of ST, even back to when he was a childhood. A little bit, you know, Bob was always going all over the place. For the most part, it’s about what happened since 63. And first of all, what happened in 63 was the bottle wrote The Fire Next Time published almost the whole thing in The New Yorker in late 60 to November. It was a huge sensation, a huge hit. He got a contract immediately from all. He made $7000 for the Peace of the New Yorker, which was like twice what he ever made in a year before in his life

[0:24:25 Peniel] letter from a region in my mind

[0:24:26 Ed] because they the New York I had a column that was called a letter from yeah, and then it was a person or is that like that? And so they put it in there like that? Yeah, so that became the fire next time and it launched him into. He was already a famous writer in a successful writer and politically engaged writers, you said from the early sixties and in a pretty public way. But in a way that’s almost impossible to imagine today. The way that The New Yorker magazine was a concentrated kind of shop window for what literary culture and to a certain extent, kind of highbrow thinking American culture was kind of one stop Shoppers guide for what is really important and what is really you know what it’s all about and bottom like, you know, the thing was like half the magazine it was. It was really long and huge and so that the book contract came was a lot more money and the hardback copy of Fire next time. So lots of shells went to multiple printings in a couple months. And so he was just in a whole nother orbit that he had been before. And, you know, he kind of they basically American popular literary culture, political culture kind of set up a podium for him to come speak at thinking maybe that in order to retain his success now that he made it, he would, you know, be amenable to kind of telling the story they wanted. Told when they didn’t realize he pretty much kind of engineered the whole thing. Maybe not quite consciously, but nonetheless, the signs are there. They’re very clear that he engineered the whole thing in order to Once I get this podium, I’ll be free to say you can do what Malcolm was saying I would do you say kind of what needs to be said and so nonetheless for for about a you know, 89 months of 1963 all the way through the march through his time with Kennedy. The thing that was in May March on Washington is in August. It wasn’t until September middle September 15th 1953 when the bombing ham, the Birmingham church bombing armored those whose girls were killed on Sunday, Sunday school in that church and two young men were shot that same day in Birmingham. Abide by white mobs. So six kids kids killed in Birmingham that day, and that was kind of the end of Baldwin’s, you know, honeymoon you as an American public intellectual. Um, something turned in a lot of people. Um, and and he among them to say no. No, you know, the fire is coming. This is we’re not gonna turn this ship around.

[0:26:56 Peniel] And certainly he becomes very publicly supportive of Stokely Carmichael. Angela Davis,

[0:27:02 Ed] Any radical voice with any integrity he’s willing to at least listen to and work with.

[0:27:06 Peniel] And and And he in a way, he becomes punished by that same mainstream,

[0:27:10 Ed] absolutely punished by the same literary kind of liberal elite that that that he had kind of romanced. Yet he turns and he starts telling them, Look, you’re not doing your saying one thing with your mouth saying nothing with your feet and they’re sort of

[0:27:24 Peniel] publicly castigating each other because you think about Baldwin and whether it’s people like The Dick Cavett Show, William F. Buckley just just, you know, he becomes sort of somebody who’s castigating them and who they sort of enjoy trying to refute.

[0:27:42 Ed] Yeah, it becomes a theater of

[0:27:43 Peniel] it becomes something, you know. So it becomes James Baldwin, sort of versus the world.

[0:27:49 Ed] But there’s no mawr fire. Next. You know anybody who reads the last few pages of the fire next time. It’s this beautiful kind of Aria Lake oratory of possibility and brotherhood and love, and he’s saying this is pretty much impossible, but we gotta we gotta try it anyway. You know we’re gonna go for it. But if you read closely saying, like, you know what happened, okay? But it’s it’s a beautiful vision. It’s a magnificent vision. And, um, after after September 63 you know, he pretty much put that vision in those terms in the trash can and said, We’ve got to talk about what is happening and what people are about. And he turned right around on that podium has started talking to the people had put him there in unmistakable terms. You know, gnome or high Henry James and rhetoric. No more flights of soaring oratory. It was kind of brass tacks, and the people felt betrayed. You know what? What are you doing?

[0:28:47 Peniel] Well, white people felt that’s what I mean. People have really embraced him, I think. One of reasons why we’re having this ball when renaissance now is that a new generation is being introduced, especially when we think about Raul Pecs. I am not your Negro, which came out a couple of years ago. And you see those Those documentary film highlights whether it’s James Baldwin in 63 with the Negro in American Promise. And Kenneth Clarke is interviewing him and they’ll come

[0:29:13 Ed] right after that meeting with kids.

[0:29:14 Peniel] It was right. Our after I absolutely

[0:29:17 Ed] after, like, three scotches. Yeah, way we’re on camera interviews.

[0:29:21 Peniel] Malcolm X. I want us to, um and we’re coming, Teoh to a close. I want us to, you know, what is Baldwin say to us to this generation about the prospects and possibilities of racial justice? Black citizenship? Really? The black citizenship that King wanted. The struggle for black dignity that Malcolm wanted, but also the struggle that people like Medgar Evers were waging as well. You know, Baldwin wanted to write a book about Medgar and Malcolm and

[0:29:53 Ed] what he was trying to do, what he did

[0:29:54 Peniel] when he died. Eso What does he tell us? What is he tell us about the struggle? The quest for racial justice, racial equality?

[0:30:06 Ed] Well, you know, uh, in

[0:30:08 Peniel] America and you really, really globally

[0:30:10 Ed] globally. Um, you know hey said freedom is the furnace that burns away illusion and that Freebo’s said famously, that if we can like in, you know, if you said if we can like in life for a moment to a furnace that freedom is the fire that burns away illusion And you know, I think that’s a great line. The ball was a great quote box author, man. He could give you a quote. He could give you a sample part of what he’s so popular for doing now because he anybody can tweet a Baldwin thing and there are thousands off so at that. So that was one of them. But But the idea that you know your freedom is it once in the lives of other people and also in your hands. And none of it is, you know, a peaceful kind of happy thing. You’re going to struggle, and freedom is a dangerous possibility. Um, a really lived human life is a turbulent and risky endeavor. And so because too many times globally and in domestic terms, United States, you know, people are are encouraged to gauge their level of freedom by the proximity of their lives. To some fantasy about how some mythical white people were probably living at some point. The happy, clean and safe life in America and Baldwin is just, you know, his vision is irreconcilable. With that you will not be a human being and be happy, clean and safe. The people who try their hardest to be that way become the worst monsters there are. You know, that’s where you get the Robinson in the fall wells and these people who betray themselves. In these saintly ways, these people are always involved with vision. The most monstrous

[0:31:56 Peniel] thing disjuncture between sort of the Leave it to Beaver America of the 19 fifties And what’s happened.

[0:32:01 Ed] Yeah, yeah, you know. And so he’s trying to say at all times, Look, don’t be fooled into trying to live like the beaver for the Cleaver families. The Beaver Cleaver family, not the other clean family. Uh, that was a lie, and those people weren’t living that life either. And the people who are most trapped are those that really think they were living that life and that life was scripted in their image there for white folks and have no other inkling of any other way to live. You know, everybody else is trying to get into that box. But at least they have some experience living in actual life outside of that box load, you know? Whoa, oh, to those born inside that thing who have no other idea. So you know, But nonetheless, everybody’s trying to make it, and the terms of making it are kind of predicated on that happy, clean and safe image. And so everyone’s kind of at war with the discrepancy between our need to survive and succeed, but also our need to live in ways that are aren’t reconcilable with the terms of that’s of that success and survival. And, you know, most writers and most cultural actors and personalities in our in our world they make a certain bargain with that dichotomy or whatever. Um, and Bottom’s best work is just unwilling to do it and irreducible to those terms, it makes it hard to talk about frankly, you know,

[0:33:31 Peniel] and we think about Baldwin way before we had terms like white fragility. Baldwin is investigating and interrogating that in terms of one of the most acute, um, interlocutors about whiteness and white supremacy. And he’s constantly saying that those Americans who believe they are white are those who are bringing the whole country down because this is a myth. It’s an illusion, um, catastrophe. It’s a catastrophe

[0:33:58 Ed] because it’s it’s a lie, you know? No way you here by the late sixties when it’s funny. When Baldwin was gonna do the Malcolm X film with Columbia Studios in 68 he wanted Elia Kazan to be the director. Okay, is Greek immigrants, United States and, you know, quote unquote white man. But Ball was lying for the you know, he knew Everyone’s gonna come at him about this 1968 film about Malcolm X. You have this, you know, white dude directing. And he’s like, Well, I’ll challenge anyone to prove to me he’s white And ball was saying Don’t approve their white causholli. Yeah, you know, there’s nothing there other than a kind of missed myth and wish. Um, but you can’t produce the evidence and so you know that that’s that’s a hard thing, though, for this country and people, us all to kind of really swallow. Because if you think about whiteness cast in the image of the happy, clean and safe life, well, you know, we all want that you know, we all want to be feeling good. We all want at least our Children not to be in peril. You know, um, and you don’t know Wants to walk around with dirty socks. Ah, so So ball was very, very clear. The fact that is white business in the black business. It had a dimension of reality. But it was fantastic, as he called a fantastic invention in it. And a lot of it was myth mythological. You know, everybody in the United States wants to be white. No, we and there was a time, of course, when people shockingly would admit this stuff, you know, and there was all kinds of crazy pathologies to do with that. And James Brown and I’m black and I’m proud and black Pride solved a lot of those questions which were important. But I also have faced the reality that’s still true. You know, people want success. The success is offered in certain terms, and those terms code and chart very, very accurately onto, like, the structure of whiteness itself. And so, you know, you can’t get too serious with Baldwin before the terms of success, the terms of happiness, the terms of cleanliness become ambiguous, and they kind of fall to each of us to communicate with each other about what those terms could mean. And that’s what freedom is. And that’s why it’s the fire that burns away illusion because you can’t you can’t he construct ah functional collective movement without that grounding in some passable human reality. Otherwise, you end up like you said, you know, like the nation on organization, of its way to disaster. And Lord, he’s pretty much right about that month, you know?

[0:36:33 Peniel] All right, we’re gonna leave it right there, gonna end it right there. Professor Ed Pavlech talking about James Baldwin. Not just the American South, but James Baldwin. What he means for all of us who are interested in struggles for social justice and racial justice in our own time. Thank you, Ed, For being here. It publishes Distinguish, Research Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Georgia. He is the author of many books, including Who Can Afford to Improvise, James Baldwin and Black Music, The Lyric and the Listeners in the recent novel Another kind of madness. Um, thank you. Stimulating conversation about James Baldwin.

Thanks for listening to this episode and you can check out related content on Twitter at Peniel Joseph. That’s P-e-n-i-e-l  J-o-s-e-p-h and our Web site, CSRD.LBJ.utexas.edu and the Center for Study of Race and Democracy is on Facebook as well. This podcast was recorded at the Liberal Arts Development Studio at the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you.

 

 

[0:00:07 Peniel] Welcome to race and democracy, a podcast on the intersection between race, democracy, public policy, social justice and citizenship. So welcome to race and democracy, and we’re very excited to have with us today. Dr Ed Pavlik, who is distinguished research professor of English and African American studies at the University of Georgia and really one of the more foremost, um, critics and essayist, a novelist, um, about the black experience in the 19th and 20th centuries. He’s one of the world’s most important scholars of James Baldwin, and we’re gonna be talking about James Baldwin today, James Baldwin in the American South. But really, what is Baldwin mean for race and democracy in the United States and globally at this critical juncture in 2019? Ah, Professor Pavlech is the author of many books, including Who Can Afford to Improvise James Baldwin and Black Music, The Lyric and the listeners On his most recent book Is his novel another kind of madness? Um, Ed, Welcome to race in Democracy.

[0:01:23 Ed] Great to be here. Great to see you.

[0:01:25 Peniel] Um, I want to talk about James Baldwin. Um, you know, born in 1924 and Harlem really becomes the Stratus, stratospheric public intellectual with the 1963 publication of The Fire. Next time the meeting with Bobby Kennedy. Um, he is friends with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr But then, when we think about Baldwin in the 19 seventies and eighties, um, let less of, ah, as visible figure as he had been. Hey, passes away really premature death when we think 63. 63 in 1987. But now there’s been a renaissance of Baldwin studies. You’ve got the documentary I am not your Negro. You’ve got Ta Nehisi. Coates writes the best seller, which is really an homage, at least the framing of between the world and me, which is sold maybe two million copies. Uhm uhm isn’t homage a letter to his son where fire next time was a letter to his nephew, right? At least one of them. So I want you to talk about James Baldwin. Your work with Baldwin, the inspiration. What Baldwin means

[0:02:33 Ed] Well, well is a lot, man. Uh, yeah. Just thank you so much for for for doing this, it’s it’s great to be here and always happy to talk about Baldwin. Any lens you know. Ah, but as far as how you’re approaching things, there’s a lot there that you already said, you know, he came from a background that wouldn’t have, you know, you wouldn’t have predicted he would become a kind of literary superstar and public intellectual. But he made his way and it’s, Ah, it really is an incredible story that I hate to say. Even with all the attention over all these decades that he’s had, I still feel like we know kind of very little about was still kind of circling around it somehow of

[0:03:16 Peniel] Why do you think that is?

[0:03:17 Ed] Well, I think I think that Baldwin was a rare person in that he became very, very popular, pretty much as popular as anybody else at the time. You hear about hell, Harry Belafonte or somebody like that? You know, he was kind of a celebrity like Miles Davis or Ability Williams or one of these people. But at the same time, he wasn’t really an entertainer. He was a It was an artist that he was a kind of prophetic figure, you know. He was a person who lived his life kind of in this obsessive and very intense quest to produce a way to be looked almost to become away, that in looking at him, people could see things about themselves that they weren’t really prepared to see. So there’s always there’s got to be in anyone’s reckoning. We’re dealing with ball when there should be a ah kind of, you know, just disturbance of a kind attention And, you know, as as far as you want to take it, who knows how, how extreme that comes. But I think therefore, you know, his question of celebrity is usually a question of pleasure. And entertainment. In Baldwin’s was was a complex variety of very complex variety of that for all kinds of reasons

[0:04:29 Peniel] I want you really got us through one of these disturbances in a particular in the in the field of race relations. And what is Baldwin mean to us in that particular field?

[0:04:40 Ed] Yeah, well, you know, that’s one of those things where, like all great artists or all great intellectuals, as you’re saying, there, there what they say to people changes over the eras, You know, the way Baldwin spoke to the United States, who was paying attention to the 19 fifties very different from the sixties, early sixties late sixties and, as you said, also different the seventies and eighties with the kind of I want a decline in his popularity, at least. But I don’t think of his importance.

[0:05:12 Peniel] Why the transformation of the Baldwin from, say, the late 19 forties and fifties to the Baldwin of Not even Just the Fire next time but we think about 1961. And he writes the essay in The New York Times and Negro Assays. The Negro Mood in the aftermath of the Anti the protest at the U. N. After Patrice Lumumba, Prime minister of the Congo, his assassination. You have black American protests involved Was supposed to be there. Got held up at a cocktail party, of course. Right? Yes. Um, really this stinging denunciation of American imperialism in 1961. Why does Baldwin become such this prophetic figure? Especially when he starts out being courted by sort of, Ah, a neo liberal? Yeah, um, literary community that that is really

[0:06:02 Ed] 19 fifties. Yes, is very, very kind of inward looking. A private individual is, um, you know, as the basis for all human reality.

[0:06:10 Peniel] He’s got the big critique of Richard Wright

[0:06:12 Ed] and Richard Wright in the protest movement. You know, he balding was, Ah, covered the first conference of black and African writers in Paris and 50 56 you know, looking around at a Mrs Air and Sangoro and Richard Wright, many others, and that they’re kind of very political aesthetics as writers. And he’s just kind of thinking, as doesn’t work for me, you know, this isn’t literature as such. I would be a writer, you know? I don’t want to be a commentator. I want to be a pamphleteer. Is he called protests writers. And so for him, it was It was kind of a prolonged and twisted and very complex transition into that kind of political, overtly political role. Um,

[0:06:59 Peniel] and what leads to that?

[0:07:00 Ed] What leads to that? Well, I want to talk about that little bit today. Ah, part of what leads to it is, you know, growing up in the ghetto like he did. He had his own fantasies. About what success and what being an American might be like, You know, And he made it so he could experience that kind of success early in his career. his first novel did well. First book of essays did very well. Early fifties. Giovanni’s Room, you know about about homoerotic life in Paris came out of 56. Everyone told him not to do it. He did it anyway, and it was a big hit. So he was. He was actually becoming quite a literary success in the image in a certain kind of image of the day. Meanwhile, he was becoming more and more miserable the whole time, and he could figure out why and got to be so bad that, you know, he had a couple suicide attempts. He was really coming apart, literally, um, in a lethal kind of struggle with basically the experience of having been converted into an American. But the time, you know, I don’t think there was a very persuasive vocabulary for what all that meant. It certainly it wasn’t is persuaded to him and, um, in a crazy leap of I don’t know what he in 1937 leaves Corsica, where he had been living for some months and goes United States, and immediately goes to visit the nascent sites of the freedom movement in the South Charlotte, where integration was happening in the schools. This is September of 1957. This is exactly the moment when those schools are being integrated, a little rock Charlotte, other places and he visits the people. It is the families. He talks with students he talks with, the activist, talked with principles, talks with, you know, opponent. So for freedom movement. And and I don’t think, you know, he doesn’t really understand. Much as he’d never been in the American self before. He was a native New Yorker that he went to France. So he’s just, you know, taking all this in down there. And I think, what he’s what he’s kind of absorbing. There is an alternative to, like American individual success in any color, that people down there are banded together in collective ways in principled ways, which have results, you know. And there’s a power coming out of black people in the South in this movement that in one way kind of had always been there and rituals in churches and so forth, but had now kind of entered a new phase.

[0:09:27 Peniel] Well, there’s a performative aspect. It becomes sort of spectacular through these media images, and people want to come and see and bear witness, which is one of the things that James Baldwin talks about. And even now we think about black lives matter and people like Deray McKesson going to events in Ferguson and sort of live tweeting. It becomes a social movements. When you want to go to Selma, you want to go to friend, you want to go well,

[0:09:50 Ed] today involves first trip down. There was pretty early on all that, you know. This was this was not national news. This is something people thought kind of stay wherever it was going to stay, you know, But for him, it was a kind of life changing, in a way, a kind of life saving event. It started in motion this transformation that finally becomes the Baldwin that became so famous in the in the early sixties as a spokesman, as an overtly political thinker, an actor and also as a writer, so so very difficult.

[0:10:20 Peniel] I want to stay in the 19 fifties. I want you to talk to us about Baldwin and Dr Martin Luther King Jr. And Baldwin writes to King. I think it’s 1959. He wants to spend days with them. They eventually essay and Harper’s. But I want to talk about and what’s interesting about Baldwin. There’s always a sense of skepticism, but there’s also a sense of faith in sort of the greater possibility of citizenship and racial justice, but also skepticism that, you know, he talks about America and achieving our country, that we could achieve this sort of multiracial democracy that confronts racial slavery and structural racism and violence and lynching and rape and all these different things. So why does he seek out Martin Luther King Jr. What kind of relationship do they have?

[0:11:05 Ed] You know, But we met King for the first time in 57 in September, I think maybe late September early October 1987. On that first trip, King was in Atlanta, staying in a motel his family was still in. Montgomery was still at Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, but he was in Atlanta working on his book, you know, stride toward freedom. And Baldwin had a meeting with him and immediately liked him very much immediately struck him as a kind of younger brother of his. You like to say that a lot, but they you know, they were both preacher’s sons. In a way, they had a certain thing in common with the church, but, of course, very different churches, but on being a kind of a black Pentecostal family in the ghetto in Harlem and and Kings by then middle class family in Atlanta. But you know, but Baldwin sees in King immediately, although I don’t think it took him a couple of years like you say. It wasn’t until a few years later that you wrote about it in Harper’s. But he felt immediately that King was a man who had found found a way to attach his own personal destiny to a collective vision of people’s empowerment. And this was something that that building was, you know, tragically and almost lethal e lacking at the time. And so we saw that happening totally had suspicions of preachers and clergy and how they manipulate people is spectacle and go home with the money and, you know, in their Cadillacs. And you know, he had seen all that stuff. He was in no way a person to be predisposed to enamored a clergy, you know? But he sends something coming up coming around with King that was there was distinct from the other preaches they had known most. Of course, we’re northerners. You know, um and, uh, he met with him several times early on and he said at some point, he said and that Harper Specie says he writes that, you know, King was a kind of reluctant participant in this movement. He didn’t come to Montgomery to lida freedom movement. He came there to be a professional Baptist preacher, you know, But the people there had already kind of prepared a movement. It was already happening. The structures were there, the basis was there. And he kind of found himself in the middle of it. And for whatever reason, whatever mix of talent and spirit he had, he became a kind of magnetic part of that thing and accepted the role that they had prepared for him to take. So he was, in a way kind of answering a call that people had made. And that was something that resonated very deeply with Baldwin. And I think from then on he saw his life as a writer, as artist, exactly. In that way, artist doesn’t doesn’t isn’t an introspective genius who is in charge of their own brilliant worldview. Artist is a person who puts his body in the midst of people in need and uses his talents to clarify that need to address that need to amplify that need and to, you know, do what what he can in that space. And again, that’s something that was in pretty direct conflict with what literary career is supposed to be and the literary, the machinery of literary success then and now is something that doesn’t tolerate that kind of agenda very well on DSO. Yeah, that was That was a big deal. And I think if you look at his initial descriptions of King and like I was just describing, you could find his descriptions later on of Baldwin talking about an artist does, and they’re they’re damn near verbatim, but almost identical. So that was big.

[0:14:27 Peniel] I want to talk about Baldwin and Malcolm X in the nation Islam because one of the things that makes Baldwin really stand out, I think when people look upon him in retrospect, even as the iconography of Malcolm and Martin has just grown in the last 50 years, really, almost to the point where it’s an industry, and they’re both brands, and Baldwin’s is sort of catching up lagging behind. But the fact that Baldwin new and considered both of them friends and I think both of them would have considered him a friend um, I want to talk about Baldwin in Malcolm X in the nation Islam. Certainly there are debates with Malcolm friendly debates in fire. Next time he talks about having dinner with the honorable Elijah Mohammed. Um, which is extraordinary. Yeah. Um and

[0:15:12 Ed] that was in the summer of 61. And that didn’t happen in July of

[0:15:14 Peniel] Summer of 61. And he’s debating Malcolm in 61 62 63. There have been places, debates What? What? Um, what draws James Baldwin Teoh to Malcolm X in the Nation of Islam? Because when you when you listen to the when you read the writing, you sense both skepticism, but also the real attraction, especially to sort of the clarifying truth sometimes bone, um, rattling truths that they are articulating.

[0:15:46 Ed] Yeah. Yeah, well, these relationship is so fast dating complex, but Bolden was was very talented in in avoiding kind of writing people off for simplistic reasons here and later on, You know, when King was dead and Baldwin kind of had this Malcolm X film on his mind and kind of in his hands, he was working with Betty Shabbas pretty closely. And he was also built trying to build bridges to the younger radical Stokely Carmichael among them. Ah, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Baraka. Um and, you know, they weren’t treating Baldwin very nicely in the late sixties at all, but And he knew that, and he presented it. But he also refused to kind of be split apart from them. George Jackson, Angela Davis to you. He did work in relation to all these people at the time. So? So the same is true with King, King and Malcolm. You know, these were very different men from James Baldwin. He was obviously, his life was unthinkably different from either of those guys. But he could see, you know, things that they were doing, that they were very powerful, you know, and from very attractive to him. Frankly, for Malcolm, you know, bold. Who could see that? Malcolm? I could talk to people in the street in Harlem where he had grown up in an urban American black America in ways that were the people responded to very powerful E, but also that didn’t that weren’t manipulating people’s pain in the way that he thought a lot off, you know, kind of ghetto celebrity activists were, and certainly the preachers were. And so, um at the same so he could see that very clearly. And I think Bob one could see that Malcolm was able to do this in a very rare way. And he certainly wasn’t alone and seeing that. But I think he had a certain kind of perspective on it, which pretty unique because all those all those stuff about him, what he you know, what bubbling couldn’t tolerate, of course, was was the whole framing the Nation of Islam imposed on Malcolm and Malcolm embraced, obviously, that had saved him in many ways that he he went a long way along with before he before he decided to break from it. So Bob would couldn’t tell it that for a minute, you know, that was the worst off the kind of believers fervor that it was too much in the church and in the east of Islam was just as bad or worse. You know the racial theology was something else that Baldwin didn’t really believe, obviously. And he didn’t live that way, and he didn’t. He thought it was a kind of disaster in 63 in a life magazine piece, Um, there’s a great photo of Baldwin outside the mosque and Durham, North Carolina, with these signee on there. And he’s where he is. Writing a note and underneath is a caption and where he says, Ah, you know, the Nation of Islam is good. For one thing, it’s great to scare away people other. That is just another racist organization, and the only place could go is to disaster. That’s what he said, and I think that’s that’s pretty close to what he felt about The Nation of Islam is a theological and kind of commercial enterprise in so far as he knew about the details of its commerce. But what Malcolm was something very dear, and I think he knew that right away.

[0:18:58 Peniel] Exactly because I was going to say one of things I wanted to discuss was in the aftermath of Malcolm and Martin’s death. Um, he writes a terrific essay in Harper’s magazine, making the argument that by the time of their death, there was really virtually no difference between them. And so in some ways, Baldwin, I think, is very prophetic in looking at Malcolm and Martin. It’s too, um, radicals and revolutionaries who are constantly evolving over time and really leading us away from that American dream versus nightmare polarity that has really set in popular culture. You know, like you think of them is two different, not necessarily scholars and those people who are in, in in in our field, right? But the public, the American popular and political culture sets up. Malcolm is violence and sort of black rage. And Malcolm is this Martin. Is this non violence and peace? A little? She I use that metaphor. But what do we think about What do you think about Baldwin? Sort of distilling the importance of Malcolm and Martin.

[0:20:06 Ed] Well, I think there’s a lot there, and there’s a lot there that will last after the cliches. Stereotypes of who those men were fall away because the errors were in. Now I don’t need them anymore. I think Bob was. Insights is toe into what the importance of each and both of those men were well will still be there, you know, and be very meaningful. And I think you know, part of Baldwin’s hesitation, part of the ways that he was critical of both King and Malcolm X had to do as much with the institutions they were a part of, as with their own visions on voices. And Baldwin again, you know, is is so important because he was not institutionalized, he was able to somehow throw this career together in a way that, you know, he avoided allegiances to institutional orthodoxies. And so he was positioned in a way to see all this from a from a place kind of beyond the polarities which created a lot of this tension between and within those those movements themselves. So his perspective is his vantage point is very unique. And I think is perspective, for that reason is, is very valuable.

[0:21:19 Peniel] When you think about Baldwin between, uh, note between the fire next time and no name in the street, I want to ask what, what what happens? Why does his popularity diminish? You think, and not necessarily popularity within the black community or among radicals, because I think when you look at the fire next time it is, you know, this huge best seller. And it’s, you know, this is the year that Bobby Kennedy, that then attorney general meets with Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry and Jerome Smith and some civil rights activists at Joseph Kennedy’s apartment in New York. May 24th 1963. And there’s this big Saturday there’s a Saturday. There’s this big, sort of sort of confrontation argument that

[0:22:00 Ed] Bill A here,

[0:22:01 Peniel] Millais that Baldwin sort of leaks to The New York Times next two days. And it’s sort of saying that Bobby tried to use Baldwin as a conduit to really gauge the Negro mood. And that’s one of the things I argue. That’s as close as the Kennedys ever get to being in a room with Malcolm X when they’re in that room. Because all those folks are influenced by Malcolm is probably none more so than James Walls with at that time at that. In that meeting, Baldwin might have been Malcolm, and it was channeling it away. Yeah, absolutely. When we think just about six months later, after the march on Washington Baldwin, it was supposed to have been a speaker. They tried to censor speech. He refused to speak, and Malcolm publicly really praises Baldwin and says that you know, Baldwin was supposed to speak, but they didn’t let him speak his Baldwin is liable to say

[0:22:50 Ed] any libel suit.

[0:22:51 Peniel] And so that’s the That’s the highest mark of respect from Malcolm X s O. But from that high point of 63 but we see by no name in the street, 71 on and and he’s talking about his experiences in both in the fifties, but also 68. Stalking by Angela Davis. He’s talking about Eldridge Cleaver. He’s talking about a young black man who he knew gurus who was in trouble with the law. Um, Tony Maynard. Tony Main, huh? So So what? What? Because when I look at Baldwin by no name in ST one of my favorite books, I really think about is his best book. Baldwin is a full blown black political revolutionary by that point, you know, and he’s he’s, you know, he’s no longer a very young man. He’s born in 1924

[0:23:36 Ed] coming up on 50 but

[0:23:37 Peniel] coming up on 50. So what? What what happens?

[0:23:41 Ed] Well, gosh, you know that such a fascinating decade and part of what makes no name to ST the great great book that it is. It’s basically Baldwin’s memoir of his participation in the Freedom movement from 63. In Casting Back, you know, he remembers back to the fifties when he first went to the South. Little bit, No name of ST, even back to when he was a childhood. A little bit, you know, Bob was always going all over the place. For the most part, it’s about what happened since 63. And first of all, what happened in 63 was the bottle wrote The Fire Next Time published almost the whole thing in The New Yorker in late 60 to November. It was a huge sensation, a huge hit. He got a contract immediately from all. He made $7000 for the Peace of the New Yorker, which was like twice what he ever made in a year before in his life

[0:24:25 Peniel] letter from a region in my mind

[0:24:26 Ed] because they the New York I had a column that was called a letter from yeah, and then it was a person or is that like that? And so they put it in there like that? Yeah, so that became the fire next time and it launched him into. He was already a famous writer in a successful writer and politically engaged writers, you said from the early sixties and in a pretty public way. But in a way that’s almost impossible to imagine today. The way that The New Yorker magazine was a concentrated kind of shop window for what literary culture and to a certain extent, kind of highbrow thinking American culture was kind of one stop Shoppers guide for what is really important and what is really you know what it’s all about and bottom like, you know, the thing was like half the magazine it was. It was really long and huge and so that the book contract came was a lot more money and the hardback copy of Fire next time. So lots of shells went to multiple printings in a couple months. And so he was just in a whole nother orbit that he had been before. And, you know, he kind of they basically American popular literary culture, political culture kind of set up a podium for him to come speak at thinking maybe that in order to retain his success now that he made it, he would, you know, be amenable to kind of telling the story they wanted. Told when they didn’t realize he pretty much kind of engineered the whole thing. Maybe not quite consciously, but nonetheless, the signs are there. They’re very clear that he engineered the whole thing in order to Once I get this podium, I’ll be free to say you can do what Malcolm was saying I would do you say kind of what needs to be said and so nonetheless for for about a you know, 89 months of 1963 all the way through the march through his time with Kennedy. The thing that was in May March on Washington is in August. It wasn’t until September middle September 15th 1953 when the bombing ham, the Birmingham church bombing armored those whose girls were killed on Sunday, Sunday school in that church and two young men were shot that same day in Birmingham. Abide by white mobs. So six kids kids killed in Birmingham that day, and that was kind of the end of Baldwin’s, you know, honeymoon you as an American public intellectual. Um, something turned in a lot of people. Um, and and he among them to say no. No, you know, the fire is coming. This is we’re not gonna turn this ship around.

[0:26:56 Peniel] And certainly he becomes very publicly supportive of Stokely Carmichael. Angela Davis,

[0:27:02 Ed] Any radical voice with any integrity he’s willing to at least listen to and work with.

[0:27:06 Peniel] And and And he in a way, he becomes punished by that same mainstream,

[0:27:10 Ed] absolutely punished by the same literary kind of liberal elite that that that he had kind of romanced. Yet he turns and he starts telling them, Look, you’re not doing your saying one thing with your mouth saying nothing with your feet and they’re sort of

[0:27:24 Peniel] publicly castigating each other because you think about Baldwin and whether it’s people like The Dick Cavett Show, William F. Buckley just just, you know, he becomes sort of somebody who’s castigating them and who they sort of enjoy trying to refute.

[0:27:42 Ed] Yeah, it becomes a theater of

[0:27:43 Peniel] it becomes something, you know. So it becomes James Baldwin, sort of versus the world.

[0:27:49 Ed] But there’s no mawr fire. Next. You know anybody who reads the last few pages of the fire next time. It’s this beautiful kind of Aria Lake oratory of possibility and brotherhood and love, and he’s saying this is pretty much impossible, but we gotta we gotta try it anyway. You know we’re gonna go for it. But if you read closely saying, like, you know what happened, okay? But it’s it’s a beautiful vision. It’s a magnificent vision. And, um, after after September 63 you know, he pretty much put that vision in those terms in the trash can and said, We’ve got to talk about what is happening and what people are about. And he turned right around on that podium has started talking to the people had put him there in unmistakable terms. You know, gnome or high Henry James and rhetoric. No more flights of soaring oratory. It was kind of brass tacks, and the people felt betrayed. You know what? What are you doing?

[0:28:47 Peniel] Well, white people felt that’s what I mean. People have really embraced him, I think. One of reasons why we’re having this ball when renaissance now is that a new generation is being introduced, especially when we think about Raul Pecs. I am not your Negro, which came out a couple of years ago. And you see those Those documentary film highlights whether it’s James Baldwin in 63 with the Negro in American Promise. And Kenneth Clarke is interviewing him and they’ll come

[0:29:13 Ed] right after that meeting with kids.

[0:29:14 Peniel] It was right. Our after I absolutely

[0:29:17 Ed] after, like, three scotches. Yeah, way we’re on camera interviews.

[0:29:21 Peniel] Malcolm X. I want us to, um and we’re coming, Teoh to a close. I want us to, you know, what is Baldwin say to us to this generation about the prospects and possibilities of racial justice? Black citizenship? Really? The black citizenship that King wanted. The struggle for black dignity that Malcolm wanted, but also the struggle that people like Medgar Evers were waging as well. You know, Baldwin wanted to write a book about Medgar and Malcolm and

[0:29:53 Ed] what he was trying to do, what he did

[0:29:54 Peniel] when he died. Eso What does he tell us? What is he tell us about the struggle? The quest for racial justice, racial equality?

[0:30:06 Ed] Well, you know, uh, in

[0:30:08 Peniel] America and you really, really globally

[0:30:10 Ed] globally. Um, you know hey said freedom is the furnace that burns away illusion and that Freebo’s said famously, that if we can like in, you know, if you said if we can like in life for a moment to a furnace that freedom is the fire that burns away illusion And you know, I think that’s a great line. The ball was a great quote box author, man. He could give you a quote. He could give you a sample part of what he’s so popular for doing now because he anybody can tweet a Baldwin thing and there are thousands off so at that. So that was one of them. But But the idea that you know your freedom is it once in the lives of other people and also in your hands. And none of it is, you know, a peaceful kind of happy thing. You’re going to struggle, and freedom is a dangerous possibility. Um, a really lived human life is a turbulent and risky endeavor. And so because too many times globally and in domestic terms, United States, you know, people are are encouraged to gauge their level of freedom by the proximity of their lives. To some fantasy about how some mythical white people were probably living at some point. The happy, clean and safe life in America and Baldwin is just, you know, his vision is irreconcilable. With that you will not be a human being and be happy, clean and safe. The people who try their hardest to be that way become the worst monsters there are. You know, that’s where you get the Robinson in the fall wells and these people who betray themselves. In these saintly ways, these people are always involved with vision. The most monstrous

[0:31:56 Peniel] thing disjuncture between sort of the Leave it to Beaver America of the 19 fifties And what’s happened.

[0:32:01 Ed] Yeah, yeah, you know. And so he’s trying to say at all times, Look, don’t be fooled into trying to live like the beaver for the Cleaver families. The Beaver Cleaver family, not the other clean family. Uh, that was a lie, and those people weren’t living that life either. And the people who are most trapped are those that really think they were living that life and that life was scripted in their image there for white folks and have no other inkling of any other way to live. You know, everybody else is trying to get into that box. But at least they have some experience living in actual life outside of that box load, you know? Whoa, oh, to those born inside that thing who have no other idea. So you know, But nonetheless, everybody’s trying to make it, and the terms of making it are kind of predicated on that happy, clean and safe image. And so everyone’s kind of at war with the discrepancy between our need to survive and succeed, but also our need to live in ways that are aren’t reconcilable with the terms of that’s of that success and survival. And, you know, most writers and most cultural actors and personalities in our in our world they make a certain bargain with that dichotomy or whatever. Um, and Bottom’s best work is just unwilling to do it and irreducible to those terms, it makes it hard to talk about frankly, you know,

[0:33:31 Peniel] and we think about Baldwin way before we had terms like white fragility. Baldwin is investigating and interrogating that in terms of one of the most acute, um, interlocutors about whiteness and white supremacy. And he’s constantly saying that those Americans who believe they are white are those who are bringing the whole country down because this is a myth. It’s an illusion, um, catastrophe. It’s a catastrophe

[0:33:58 Ed] because it’s it’s a lie, you know? No way you here by the late sixties when it’s funny. When Baldwin was gonna do the Malcolm X film with Columbia Studios in 68 he wanted Elia Kazan to be the director. Okay, is Greek immigrants, United States and, you know, quote unquote white man. But Ball was lying for the you know, he knew Everyone’s gonna come at him about this 1968 film about Malcolm X. You have this, you know, white dude directing. And he’s like, Well, I’ll challenge anyone to prove to me he’s white And ball was saying Don’t approve their white causholli. Yeah, you know, there’s nothing there other than a kind of missed myth and wish. Um, but you can’t produce the evidence and so you know that that’s that’s a hard thing, though, for this country and people, us all to kind of really swallow. Because if you think about whiteness cast in the image of the happy, clean and safe life, well, you know, we all want that you know, we all want to be feeling good. We all want at least our Children not to be in peril. You know, um, and you don’t know Wants to walk around with dirty socks. Ah, so So ball was very, very clear. The fact that is white business in the black business. It had a dimension of reality. But it was fantastic, as he called a fantastic invention in it. And a lot of it was myth mythological. You know, everybody in the United States wants to be white. No, we and there was a time, of course, when people shockingly would admit this stuff, you know, and there was all kinds of crazy pathologies to do with that. And James Brown and I’m black and I’m proud and black Pride solved a lot of those questions which were important. But I also have faced the reality that’s still true. You know, people want success. The success is offered in certain terms, and those terms code and chart very, very accurately onto, like, the structure of whiteness itself. And so, you know, you can’t get too serious with Baldwin before the terms of success, the terms of happiness, the terms of cleanliness become ambiguous, and they kind of fall to each of us to communicate with each other about what those terms could mean. And that’s what freedom is. And that’s why it’s the fire that burns away illusion because you can’t you can’t he construct ah functional collective movement without that grounding in some passable human reality. Otherwise, you end up like you said, you know, like the nation on organization, of its way to disaster. And Lord, he’s pretty much right about that month, you know?

[0:36:33 Peniel] All right, we’re gonna leave it right there, gonna end it right there. Professor Ed Pavlech talking about James Baldwin. Not just the American South, but James Baldwin. What he means for all of us who are interested in struggles for social justice and racial justice in our own time. Thank you, Ed, For being here. It publishes Distinguish, Research Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Georgia. He is the author of many books, including Who Can Afford to Improvise, James Baldwin and Black Music, The Lyric and the Listeners in the recent novel Another kind of madness. Um, thank you. Stimulating conversation about James Baldwin.

Thanks for listening to this episode and you can check out related content on Twitter at Peniel Joseph. That’s P-e-n-i-e-l  J-o-s-e-p-h and our Web site, CSRD.LBJ.utexas.edu and the Center for Study of Race and Democracy is on Facebook as well. This podcast was recorded at the Liberal Arts Development Studio at the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you.