No Name in the Street [Hardcover]

It seems strange that this crisp and concise essay is less known and less read than Baldwin's earlier collections. True, he is angrier, rawer, less forgiving here, and his earlier diplomatic hopefulness has given way to a deeply cynical and contemptuous view of American society. Yet, given the atrocities Baldwin, along with his friends and colleagues, personally witnessed and underwent during the years immediately preceding this book, his fury is, at the very least, understandable.

Baldwin's recollections of the 1950s and 60s are not presented as linear narrative. Instead, he intertwines, among other topics: the cowardice of liberals during the McCarthy era; the French-Algerian conflict; his investigations and travels in the South; the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (and his own reminiscences of them); his experiences in Hollywood with commercial filmmakers; his encounters with Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and the Black Panthers; his bemused reaction to the flower children in San Francisco; and his four-year battle to rescue his former assistant, Tony Maynard, from an arrest and conviction for a murder he didn't commit. (Maynard's conviction was overturned after this book was published.) The supporting cast of his friends and adversaries in these personal and societal struggles is a veritable who's who: Elia Kazan, William Styron, Fred Shuttlewsorth, Andrew Young, Harry Belafonte, Billy Dee Williams, Marlon Brando, Robert Kennedy.

Baldwin's self-effacing willingness to reopen old wounds and expose the evidence of his own folly is still on hand here. He opens with an anecdote about a visit with a childhood friend in the south Bronx: his humorous and humiliating arrival in a limousine, the all-too-apparent difference between his own prosperity and his friend's meager (but contented) subsistence and his shameful condescension toward his friend's "job at the post office," and their explosive argument over the war in Vietnam. He also recounts his own naivety in a chronicle of his first traumatic exposure to Jim Crow laws in Montgomery: "It is not difficult to be a marked man in the South--all you have to do, in fact, is to go there."

Baldwin admits to the impossibility of objectivity in his writing, comparing his task to Shaw's writing "Saint Joan": "he had the immense advantage of having never known her." And his account of two decades of struggle is by no means impartial. But I prefer this version of Baldwin, who no longer seems to care about kowtowing to the mostly white New Yorker readers who made up his audience for his earlier work. "No Name in the Street" is uncomfortably honest--and that bluntness lends the work a faithfulness to the spirit of the times.

In this book Baldwin 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 influential 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 (a 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 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. Baldwin 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.

"No Name In The Street" is certainly not one of Baldwin's good books. It is incomplete ("This book has been much delayed by trails, assassinations, funerals, and despair") and reads as though it were the kind of book that was thrown together to satisfy publisher demands, rather than a good critical and viable read. At times, the book lacks direction and focus, it themelessly jumps from story to story (with no links), and it doesn't have an ending. 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 20th century.

And 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.
Then he suggested that, if not for the Rosa Park's incident, "we would never have heard of Martin Luther King." 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 one of the greatest movements of the 20th century is ludicrous and silly.

Another glaring defect in Baldwin's reflection of the Civil Rights era (and the 2oth century in general) is his refusal to mention the importance of black women in the movement! Besides his gratuitous 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 participation, 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 Hansberry and Simone, nor does he mention any of the women involved in the Panther movement, SNCC, nor does he mention any of the good things that Eleanor Roosevelt did to better black life.

By now, at this (lazy and desperate) juncture in Baldwin's career as a witness bearer and truth-teller, he is journalistically tired, and topically repetitive (which is also why he could not do with "Evidence..." what Capote did with "In Cold Blood"), and is now presiding at his own "masturbatory delusion" while both fixed on and sustained by the tumult and decadence of a bygone era. And he knows that his time as a once brilliant and critical examiner of American culture and society has come to a dreadful end, himself desperately hanging on to weak and broken vines that once yielded sweet and succulent fruit: "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, by me."

No Name in the Street

His father arrived on the scene when James was two. His mother stood between the children and the father. When King died, Baldwin was working on a screen version of the Malcolm X story. James Baldwin appeared with Martin Luther King at Carnegie Hall in a newly purchased black suit, and wore the black suit to the funeral two weeks later. Then he gave the barely worn suit to a friend.

Baldwin observes that the French did not dare to think that the Algerian situation could be existentialist. When he went to France he went there to escape racism. He could live with Africans in Paris in comparative peace. Baldwin went to Paris with no money. He frequented Arab cafes. Baldwin could not undertand why Camus produced William Faulkner's REQUIEM FOR A NUN. James Baldwin claims that Faulkner is attempting to exorcise a history which is also a curse in his work. He argues that the cultural pretensions of history are nothing more than a mask for power.

He knew by 1956 when he saw a picture of a school child being jeered by a crowd while seeking to integrate her school that he would be leaving Europe to return to America to take up the cause. Returning in 19576 he saw New York in a different way and went to the South. James Baldwin relates that he has always been struck in America by an emotional poverty. He says he really didn't know much about terror until he went to the South. In large ways and small Baldwin found the people in the Civil Rights Movement, facing Southern terror, heroic. Before his trip to the South the author had never seen the horror or the poverty.

Malcolm X, unlike Frantz Fanon, operated in the Afro-American idiom. In 1968 James Baldwin was sharing a flat with is sister Paula and his brother David in London. He learned there of Malcolm's death. A former resident of Harlem, he distrusted the legend of Malcolm X until he had the opportunity to meet him.

Uncomfortably, Baldwin came to realize later that in those years, in the fifties and sixties, he was a sort of great black hope of the great white father. Malcolm X considered himself to be the spiritual property of those who produced him. He was dangerous because he apprehended the horror of the black condition. Writing an epilogue in 1971 Baldwin noted that the book had been delayed by trials, assassinations, and funerals.