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James Baldwin’s First Journey South
- Vanderbilt University Press
- Chapter
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186 In September 1957, several southern cities took their first halting steps to ward the desegregation of their public schools. Little Rock, Arkansas, was the most famous, for it was the place where federal troops were sent in to protect nine African American students assigned to previously allwhite Central High School. That same week, four students in Charlotte, North Carolina, also broke the color barrier, and one of the unnoticed implica tions of that story was that it attracted the attention of the great American writer James Baldwin. Baldwin, at the time, was living in Paris and had never been to the American South. That would soon change, for when he saw photographs of a white mob taunting a black student in Charlotte, he vowed to go to North Carolina and assess the situation for himself. Some of his finest writing would follow, as well as his own civil rights activism. This is the story of how that happened. James Baldwin’s First Journey South The picture took the writer by surprise when he saw it that afternoon in Paris. There was a dignity about it that you might not have expected as the young girl made her way through the mob. She seemed so serene in the midst of her defiance. Her dress, he would learn, had been sewn by her grandmother, and it was somehow perfect for a girl of fifteen—prim and handsome with a bow at the collar, completed in time for her first day at school. This was no ordinary school year. The date was September 1957, and Dorothy Counts—which James Baldwin would learn was the girl’s name—was a racial pioneer in the American South. She had been hand-picked by the African American leaders of her city, carefully chosen for her intelligence and poise. She was one of four black students in Charlotte, North Carolina, who would cross the color barrier that fall, inflaming passions all over town. The mob she confronted on September 4 consisted mostly of her future classmates, but there were adults also on the fringes of the crowd, screaming their ugly instructions to the students: “Spit on her, people! Spit on her!” Characters 187 Don Sturkey, a photographer for the Charlotte Observer, captured the moment in a photograph that was soon distributed all over the world. When James Baldwin saw it in a paper in Paris, his initial revulsion grew stronger by the hour, then slowly, inexorably turned into guilt. “It made me furious,” he wrote, “it filled me with both hatred and pity, and it made me ashamed. Some one of us should have been there with her!” Baldwin had lived in Europe for nearly ten years, a refugee of sorts, having fled from the agony of his Harlem boyhood. Part of it was personal. He had never known his biological father, but his stepfather proved to be unforgettable—a cruel, bombastic tyrant of a man who wrapped his terrible temper in piety. David Baldwin was a factory worker and part-time preacher who presided bitterly over the poverty around him and terrified the nine children he was raising with his violent and unpredictable moods. On the day he died, August 2, 1943, a race riot broke out in Harlem, and on the following morning, as James Baldwin remembered , “We drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass. . . . He had lived and died in intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that it was now mine.” A few years earlier, as a teenaged boy, Baldwin had sought relief from his own disillusionment in the sanctuary of a Pentecostal pulpit. He became a preacher at the age of fourteen and loved the imagery and language of the church. But even in the grip of the Holy Spirit, he could never quite escape that undertow of pain that came with being a black man in America. At the age of twenty-four, he left. A writer now, he sought a new sanctuary in the streets of Paris—the place where other men of letters had gone, from Hemingway to Fitzgerald to Baldwin’s own mentor and friend, Richard Wright. He wrote his first three books in Europe—his ground-breaking novels, Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, and his collection of essays, Notes of a...