April 3, 2017
Maxwell, a professor at Washington University, returns to the subject of 2015’s F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, this time taking readers directly to the source with facsimiles of a number of the documents from the FBI’s file on writer James Baldwin. The documents collected between 1958 and 1974 include transcripts of wiretapped phone conversations, photographs, letters, speeches, newspaper and magazine clippings, and passport records. They chronicle Baldwin’s interactions with the Nation of Islam, Martin Luther King Jr., the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, and other notable figures of the civil rights era. The file reveals a defiant Baldwin who openly criticized the Bureau and threatened to write an exposé on the agency entitled The Blood Counters. As Maxwell writes, “One of the ironies of questionable legal Bureau eavesdropping: it could capture and preserve history in the making with rare intimacy.” This compendium offers an unquestionably unique look into the life of one of America’s most esteemed thinkers, whose work has seen a resurgence as a centerpiece of the Black Lives Matter movement. B&w photos.
February 28, 1994
James Baldwin (1924-1987), whose novels and essays aimed to liberate white America from the hypocrisy that made oppression and racism possible, was obsessed with his mission to bear witness to injustice, observes Leeming, who was Baldwin's secretary and longtime friend. Beneath the fiercely eloquent, prophetic writer was a troubled, vulnerable, lonely individual longing to be cradled and protected. Both sides of the man are probed in this highly perceptive, revealing biography, which Baldwin authorized in 1979. Leeming, who is now a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut, draws on interviews with Baldwin to illuminate the writer's difficulty in accepting his homosexuality, his attempted suicide in Paris in 1956, the strong autobiographical component in his fiction, his uneasy association with the Black Panthers and his formative relationship with his unloving stepfather, a puritanical, bitterly frustrated preacher who went mad. Photos.