In an effusive letter addressed to James Baldwin in September of 1961, Martin Luther King, Jr. praises Baldwin for his voice and a monumental essay collection. “I have just finished reading Nobody Knows My Name, and I simply want to thank you for it,” King writes. “Your honesty and courage in telling the truth to white Americans, even if it hurts, is most impressive. I have been tremendously helped by reading the book, and I know that it will serve to broaden my understanding on the whole meaning of our struggle.”
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By the time King sent Baldwin, his elder by five years, that letter in 1961, King had already visited India to study Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence. He had already resigned from the pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to focus on civil rights activism full-time. He had moved to Atlanta to lead the Southern Christian Leadership Conference efforts and take on the co-pastor role at the Ebenezer Baptist Church beside his father. King had been arrested for participating in a sit-in at a restaurant in Atlanta and sentenced to four months in jail before John and Robert Kennedy intervened on behalf of his release.
King knew much about the machinations of white racists when he wrote Baldwin. He practiced pushing back against the violent torrent of Jim and Jane Crow, yet an encounter with Baldwin’s daring voice and words still transformed him. What, then, can be said about the force of Baldwin’s pen and how he has much to offer any of us who seek to redress the old violence against those who exist on the edges of the margins today?
There is not much that Baldwin had not remarked upon during his sixty-three years of life. Baldwin’s words, often manifesting as piercing, prophetic Jeremiads, captured both the inner experiences of Black life and, more broadly, aspects of human existence. At the same time, his writing laid bare the material powers and principalities that restrict or extinguish Black vitality and hinder our ability to express our humanity fully.
The killing of Sonya Massey—a 36-year-old Black woman from Illinois who was fatally shot in her head by a sheriff’s deputy while in her kitchen on July 6, 2024, after having called 911 about a prowler—is just one grueling recent example of police-perpetrated violence against a Black woman. However, Baldwin, not unlike many others, had held sharp critiques of the anti-Black foundational codes of U.S. law enforcement decades ago.
“Now, what I have said about Harlem is true of Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—is true of every Northern city with a large Negro population. And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population, “Baldwin declared in his essay, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” which originally appeared in The Nation’s July 11, 1966, issue.
Baldwin went on, “They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover—even in a country that makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty.”
While I imagine if Baldwin were alive still, he would have revised his thoughts, having recognized that Northern cities with large Black populations are not the only geographies where law enforcement often prey upon Black people like Sonya Massey, who was deadened in a township in Illinois where the majority population is white, his incisive read of law enforcement as it was captured in “A Report From Occupied Territory” remains rigorous: “The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer.”
Baldwin’s use of “occupied territory” as a rhetorical framework, employed both in his article for The Nation and in an interview with Audre Lorde published initially in Essence magazine, provided readers with insight into the violent complexity of Black experiences in the U.S. and in the ghettoized areas where we live. It is not lost on me that this concept is not far from the critiques of occupied territory aimed at occupying nation-states today.
As I write, some 39,000 people have been killed, and more than 2.3 million people have been displaced from their homes in Gaza, the Palestinian enclave occupied by the state of Israel, according to reports by Palestinian health authorities by way of Reuters. Rage, directed at both Israel and those nations, like the U.S., who have sent bombs that have rained on Gaza, has been unrelenting and replete. Critiques of the state of Israel’s warmongering have been trivialized, especially on U.S. college campuses and within our legislative halls, as elected officials and donors attempt to curtail free speech and label such critiques as anti-semitic.
It is not a stretch for me to imagine what Baldwin might have to say about the plight of Palestinians at this moment because he has already offered us much to consider. In his essay, “Open Letter to the Born Again,” which was published in The Nation on September 29, 1979, Baldwin had this to say: “This is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ and Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.”
Baldwin, after placing the blame for the foul mistreatment of Jewish and Palestinian people at the feet of the Western empire, does not hold back on naming a truth that many Black Americans hold dear at this moment. According to a report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a majority of Black Americans want the U.S. to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
Moreover, many Black Americans discern a connection between the plight of Black Americans and Palestinians living under the conditions of occupation, recognizing that any chance at a redemptive end lies in the world taking seriously the needs of the marginalized Palestinians. Baldwin was prescient in that regard, stating, “Finally: there is absolutely—repeat: absolutely—no hope of establishing peace in what Europe so arrogantly calls the Middle East (how in the world would Europe know? having so dismally failed to find a passage to India) without dealing with the Palestinians.”
Whether Baldwin’s ire was directed at the evils manifested on the world stage or in the U.S., he understood that witnessing the consequences of what Bell Hooks has named “Imperialist White Supremacist Heteropatriarchy” was less potent than the actual work of speaking back in response to its workings.
This is the legacy Baldwin has challenged us to uphold. Whether we find ourselves in a convoluted state of retrenchment on the part of the conservative and far-right, which seeks to restrict women’s reproductive rights and their bodily autonomy, peel away at the civil rights aimed at protecting non-white people, women, LGBTQ+ people, and others; force feed a false history of the African American struggle for liberation by legislating book bans and public school curriculum changes; or place in the presidency a candidate who has become an avatar for white Christian nationalist fervor, Baldwin offers us an example of what it means to use the word as both buttress and balm.
Even the late writer and activist Eldridge Cleaver, who, in the same chapter in his book, Soul on Ice, where he refers to Baldwin pejoratively as “puss* Cat” and “sugar,” could not diss Baldwin without also acknowledging, “Being a Negro, I have found this to be a rare and infrequent experience, for few of my Black brothers and sisters here in America have achieved the power, which James Baldwin calls his revenge, which outlasts kingdoms: the power of doing whatever cats like Baldwin do when combining the alphabet with the volatile elements of his soul.”
There was, and remains, no denying that even those Black people among Baldwin whose embrace of him, or lack thereof, which may have had something to do with their not-so-subtle antagonism towards him because he also happened to be a gay Black man, understood and felt the dynamic verve that electrified his words.
Baldwin fought on behalf of all—even when those Baldwin included in his vision for freedom failed to return the favor. His was Black queer politics, an aperture through which we might understand that “Whoever debases others is debasing himself.”
For Baldwin, there is no winning for all if some are forced by the many to lose along the way. The sooner we learn that lesson, the sooner we may collectively build a global community of people liberated from the desire to devour one another. That’s the vision.
And Baldwin contributed much to its formulation.
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