Writer Ended Exile To Fight For Negro Rights

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30367, 17 February 1964, Page 11

Writer Ended Exile To Fight For Negro Rights

[By

SIMON KAVANAUGH]

Deep inside him a slow fire has been smouldering for years. He tried to put it out by removing it from its fuel, and he failed. Now he has gone back to the land of his birth—to the fuel. And the fire has blazed.

For this man is James Baldwin. He is an American Negro. He is a quiet, softspoken man. But behind his soft words is a deep passion.

He is a smiling man, a man with oddly-shaped teeth, a man with a deep laugh and occasionally laughing eyes. He dresses conservatively, the only idiosynoracy being jade green poker chips worn as cufflinks. And through his books, his television appearances, his newspaper articles and his ever-ready-to-fiight personality he has become, in a few

short months, America’s leading spokesman on’ Negro rights and ciyil liberties; But it has not always been so. And James Baldwin has not always fought. Too ofteii he has run. But poty, he says, he has stopped runningHe came back from a hineyear voluntary exile in France to resume the lovehate relationship with 1 his native city pf New York—and m iyith Harlem where he was born 38 years ago. Away from Threat

“At first I didn’t intend to come back,” he says. “In New York the colour of my skin stood between pjysejfand me. But in Europe that barrier was down. But I found I had been both released from an affliction' and divested of a crutch. " ' ‘‘l discovered that the question of wfio I whs was not answered because I had removed myself from the social forces whiqh threatened me, because these forces had become interior and I took them with me so that the question of \yho I was was at last a personal one, and I could only find the answer in me.” So he returned to the United States, ieylritqd’ Harlem, found ft 6ven grimmer than he remembered as a small boy and turned to fighting for the rights of the Negroes not only there but in all parts of the country. He was born in Harlem Hospital, the oldest of nine children, and early in life took on the responsibilities fpr his younger brothers and sisters. Among his first memories are of playing on the roof of the tenements; of looking down on" to the railroad tracks; and of the huge garbage dump by the dirty grey river. " His father was degply religious and both parents were transplanted from the Deep South so he has his roofs in the harsh region where' io have a black skin is worse than having a contagious disease. ' You can recover from a disease. ' ‘ ’ Literals Siuirm” He took a job as a junior reporter oil one of Nety York’s "liberal’’ newspapers. And it was there that fie came into violent contact with white "liberals”—arid sajMsa which sometimes ’ turns to hatred. ' ''' w

“Let the liberal white bastard squirm," says ohe of the characters in Baldwin'? most talked-of novel, “Another Country.’’ And Baldwin will talk by the hour oh tjiis theme. “It’s the do-gooderS that I hate,” he says. 'The kind of people who feel they have to be nice to a Negro because he’s a Negro. They don’t" see h™ l as a person. “They’re the kind of people who think that once you’ve got a few Negroes in positions of prominence, you’ve changed something. They don’t really understand what they’re' doing—theif motives are absolutely remote from what they think they’re doing. It is a weird aspect of White supremacy.”

Colour His Shield As a black youth in a white city Baldwin was always running away from tough situations. His colour became hjs shield. He hid behind it nursing his frustrations and weaknesses. He went tp France where he could be just another man in the street not ft coloured

man, just a man. And there h? wrote, with bitterness, frustration and despair. He was likened to Richard fright, - the’ great Negro writer of a generation earlier, who also went to France. But Wright stayed there. Baldwin fptind hp Could not. His support, his crutch, the very treatment qf Negroes which he fought in his writing, was the thing which was missing there and he could not live without it. "Without my crutch, I think I felt frightened and that was why I dawdled in my European haven for so long. Yet I knew also that I should have matured beyond the fieed for havens, the need fpr illusions. “I began to see that in quitting America I had made an attempt at self-delusion, a feat of Ipoking deeper into myself. And . a writer cannot afford any self-delusion for his subject is himself and the World he is in.” Back to Arena He went back to the Ujnited States and Ke has fought for sofjal justice and equal rights ever since. Both his'novels, “Giovanni’s Room” and “Another Country,” deal with relations b e ‘ tween rpces. So do his two volumes of egsdys, “Notes of a Native Son” and “Nobody Knows My Name.” In his more recent “The Fire Next Time” he says that the Negro is tired of waiting patiently to be given an equal share of justice and Opportunity ahd Will ‘fight for it next time. His books are Ute in the raw, Harlem in the raw, sex in the raw. But at the same time, while they are intended to Shock and amaze, they are meant to portray life as if !?•

Recognised Writer And he has succeeded to a remarkable degree. For Baldwin is now without a doiibt one of the most important writers on the American literary scene. Most important' of all' to Baldwin, he has ceased to be considered a Nego writer, he is a writer. "* ’ A firm and voluble supporter Of the Negro leader, Martin Luther King, Baldwin has thrown his enormous energies behind the great ’clergyman in his integration ef-

He championed James Meredith in his struggle to be admitted to the University df Mississipi. And he has written and fought for integration. Through the medium of his articles in most of the top American magazines he has PQlired searing scorn on segtggationists. His television appearances have also caused storms when pe has pitched in against segregationists, the Ku Klux Klan, and, 'inevitably, white liberals. '

Against All Racists Hot only the white racists have suffered at his hands. The black racists, too, have been discussed, dissected and discredited. The so-called Black Muslims, who demand apartheid for the United States and demand a separate state for Negroes, have come in for thgir share of criticism. They teach the one thing which above all Baldwin believes passionately is wrong: race supremacy. “tyhgn the Black Muslin, leaders tell their people that they should be proud of being black they are right. TKgt is a very important thing to hear in a country which assures you that you should fee ashamed of it.

“Of course, in order to do this, they destroy a truth. . . . What they say is: ‘You’re better because you’re black.’ And that, of course, isn’t true. That’s the trouble.

“It’s comparatively easy to invest a population with false morale by giving them a false sense of superiority. Aqd it will always break down in a crisis. It leads to moral bankruptcy.” Not A “Nigger” What does a man like Baldwin see as the future of the American Negro in his own land- "It is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face up to and dear with and embrace the stranger they have maligned for so long. “What white people have to do is to try to find out in their own hearts why it Was necessary to have a ‘nigger’ in the first place. “I’m not a ‘nigger’. I’m a man-”

Royal Wedding Protest (N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) THE HAGUE, Feb. 16. A group of Dutch Protestants yesterday urged Queen Juljana and the Prime Minister to hold the wedding of Princess Irene and Don Carlos outside Holland “to prevent a threatened further widening of the rift between the Royal Family and large sections of the Dutch people.”