“Activism” Black Southerners Could Do Without: James Baldwin’s Problematic Imaginings of the South

I am a southerner.More specifically, I am a Black southern woman.I was born and bred in that part of the United States -the South and Alabama -that famed novelist and essayist James Baldwin, a son of the North (Harlem, New York), considered anathema.It is a fascinating feature of Baldwin's biography that, though Baldwin may have been motivated by an activist impulse, it was a magazine assignment, combined perhaps with a desire to test his manhood, which led him to embark upon journeys to various parts of the South in 1957, when racism and racial violence were having a heyday.He set out initially for Charlotte, North Carolina.While in France in 1956, he had read about Dorothy Counts, a Black teenager who was trying to integrate a local white high school in Charlotte.Whites spat on her so much, Baldwin read, that spit dripped from her dresses.He could not remain in France and just read about such incidents, he avowed; he had to return home (though he delayed his return to New York for more than a year) and "pay his dues" by going south, into the mouth of the racist monster that the South would become to him.He mentions this trip in Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and discusses it in more detail in No Name in the Street (1972). 1 He extended that trip to Charlotte by traveling on to Atlanta, Birmingham, Montgomery, and Little Rock, where he met with famed civil rights activist Daisy Bates and her husband.While Baldwin might be applauded for venturing into the South, what he considered activism comes with problematic connotations and raises questions about his financial, political, and personal motives.The trips to these flashpoints of racism and racist activity in the South had such an impact upon Baldwin that he was emotionally and physically paralyzed by what he witnessed and the conversations he had with political figures, civil rights activists, and ministers, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.He recalls that, upon his return to New York and Harlem, he was unable to leave the cold-water flat of a friend for 1 James Baldwin, No Name in the Street: