James Baldwin & No Name in the Street

It is the dawn of the post civil rights era and Baldwin has found himself stranded, tired, disenchanted and – like Nina Simone and her post civil rights era disgust with disco as a black suppressant to the fading black consciousness and collective struggle – he is lost, aloof, and desperately clinging on to the last vestiges of an errant era that both defined Baldwin and made him the most important writer of his generation. But, like most writers who find themselves cruelly supplanted in a new era of fresh ideas and perspectives, ultimately confronted with the painful and inevitable Thomasian struggle to “not go gentle into that good night,” Baldwin decided to tough it out with one more quixotic literary effort titled No Name In The Street.

In No Name, the critically acclaimed author attempts to bear witness to the tumultuous and decadent era of the Civil Rights movement. Baldwin discusses his whereabouts during the murders of 3 of the movement’s most titanic figures – Malcolm, Medgar, and Martin. He discusses his involvement, philosophizes the meaning of the movement, it’s key players, what impact as a whole it had on all Americans, and ultimately how it changed his (already cynical, detached and disenchanted) attitude on the possibility of America ever achieving racial harmony.

Baldwin anchors his story (an historical glance at an era of systemic deep racism, hatred, and oppression) in the dubious innocence of an old Harlem buddy who has fled to Germany to escape a murder rap (which is essentially and interestingly a gay-hate crime that Baldwin – an unabashed homosexual – leaves unchecked and unexplored). Eventually, the suspect is caught, extradited back to New York, and is convicted for the crime of which Baldwin is never really certain he is innocent. Or, for Baldwin, it doesn’t really matter as much as does the symbolism of the (possible) acquittal. He is much more concerned with the American judicial system, (and its evil and wicked relation to the McCarthy phenomenon), and more specifically, the infamously and criminally corrupt New York court system under which his buddy is to be tried.

For Baldwin, who has come to know firsthand just how crooked the white American cop can be – when no one is looking – he seems more interested in getting his buddy off the hook just for the purpose of sticking it to the (il)legal system – one that has victimized, murdered and destroyed more black men than anything else – whether his buddy is innocent or not. So, for Baldwin, his buddy’s innocence is predicated on the thought that, guilty or not, he deserves to be set free because he will never get a fair trail in a system which is designed to disbelieve thus imprison him by virtue of his skin color. For Baldwin, his buddy becomes a symbol of protest and rebellion against the American legal system for its unending history of injustice to the black sojourn in America.

Baldwin began writing the book at the last end of the 60s and finished it at the beginning of the 70s. Not a good point to decide to shelf an unfinished book, at the end of one of the most important eras in American history, and certainly the 20^th century. As a result, the book’s commentative intent does not even remotely compare to his “eloquent manifesto” The Fire Next Time. At times, the book lacks direction and focus, it themelessly jumps from story to story, and it is incomplete (“This book has been much delayed by trails, assassinations, funerals, and despair”). Pointedly, the book reads as though it were the kind of book that was thrown together to satisfy publisher demands, rather than a critical and concentrated effort.

In addition, none of Baldwin’s ideas are fresh, but mostly rehashed and reinvented issues that we have already heard from him. He generalizes important dates and trivializes facts: “Now, exactly like the Germans at the time of the Third Reich…the citizens [north of the Mason-Dixon line] know nothing, and wish to know nothing of what is happening around them.” Although he understandably compares white American citizens (of the civil rights era) to Nazi Germany citizens (during the Hitler era), yet, not all of white Americans can be described in such an uncritical and general way. Too many have acted, protested and died in defense if black rights. (Also, Hitler’s actions were certainly supported by the German citizenry – who were well aware of what was happening to the Jewish community.)

Then he wrongly suggests that, if not for the Rosa Park’s incident, “we would never have heard of Martin Luther King.” The truth is the anxious fires of protest and rebellion had already been stirring in King well before the Parks issue. And to suggest that King – a man who had been born and bred to fight injustice and lead the path of struggle, had only been sparked by the Rosa Parks issue (one which he at first refused to lend attention to because of other issues he considered more relevant and pressing at the time) was the impetus to the career of one of the greatest movers and shakers of the 20^th century is ludicrous and silly.

Yet, perhaps the most inexcusable defect in Baldwin’s reflection of the Civil Rights Era is his refusal to mention the importance of women – black and white – in the movement! Besides his gratuitous and patronizing mention of Parks (to which he placed the greater significance of such on King’s acknowledgement, presence and involvement – not realizing that Park’s sit-in had been well organized, rehearsed, and planned without any direction or even acknowledgement of a man named King), Baldwin makes no mention of Ella Baker, Hamer (and other poor, sharecropping women involved at the grassroots level), nor his buddies Lorraine Hansberry (whose entire literary corpus was inextricably devoted to the movement), and Nina Simone (who got so involved as to write the famous, ‘Mississippi Goddamn’), neither of these two important women – friends of Baldwin! – are mentioned. Nor does he mention – in a sustained manner – any of the women involved in the Panther movement, SNCC or the SCLC. Nor does Baldwin mention any of the good things that Eleanor Roosevelt did to better black life. There simply were too many important women involved in the movement for Baldwin to have taken a male-centered approach, ignoring even the most basic and general of the ubiquitous female activists.

By now, at this (lazy and desperate) juncture in Baldwin’s once prolific career as a prophetic witness bearer and truth-teller, he is journalistically tired, topically repetitive, and pigeon-holed in the cacophony of American race relations – which has crippled his ability to move beyond the decadent movement in order to focus on the future. With No Name, Baldwin is now presiding at his own “masturbatory delusion” while both fixed on and sustained by the tumult and decadence of a bygone era (one that has left the once lucid and mordant writer stranded at the merciless and unavoidable gates of yesteryears memory and yesterdays headlines). And, like Capote after In Cold Blood, Baldwin knows that his time as a once brilliant and critical examiner of American culture and society has come to a dreadful end, him self now desperately hanging on to weak and broken vines that once yielded sweet and succulent fruit. In this most elegiac passage Baldwin silently laments: “An old world is dying, and a new one, kicking the belly of its mother, time, announces that it is ready to be born. This birth will not be easy, and many of us are doomed to discover that we are exceedingly clumsy midwives.” With a new world come new ideas and perspectives that are borne from new beginnings and bright experiences. Baldwin’s ideas and perspectives are doomed because they are not necessarily new or fresh. Perhaps that is why “this book is not finished—can never be finished.”