On James Baldwin’s Dispatches from the Heart of the Civil Rights Movement / Ed Pavlić. In: Lit Hub Dec 10, 2018

In part one of “Beyond Simplicity,” (which originally appeared in Brick 101), Ed Pavlić explored the complex motivations that brought James Baldwin back from France to the US and sent him on a tour of the Deep His South to witness the nascent—but also ages-old—Freedom Movement. At age 33, Baldwin had never been to the American South. His reasons for going were deeply personal and fiercely political, a combination he lacked a vocabulary to describe. Part two, below, traces Baldwin’s historic journey through essays published soon after he returned from the trip, accounts from memory later on, and letters he wrote to friends and family while he was there.

V. “Nothing, sir” Baldwin in Charlotte, North Carolina

James Baldwin began his trip to the South by flying from New York to Washington, D.C., on September 9, 1957. On assignment for Partisan Review, Baldwin made stops over the next six weeks in Charlotte, Atlanta, Montgomery, Tuskegee, Birmingham, Nashville, Little Rock, and Arlington, Virginia. As he told his brother, the plan was to be back by October 22. Flying between the major stops, Baldwin moved through a territory at once startlingly strange and terrifyingly familiar. He returned to New York, he reports in No Name in the Street, lugging a suitcase stuffed full of “contraband” and “underground secrets.” He collapsed in the apartment of an acquaintance named Furneau in the East Village. As Baldwin recalls, “for five days,” while worried friends and family searched the city for him, he couldn’t move:

While in the South I had suppressed my terror well enough, in any case, to function; but when the pressure came off, a kind of wonder of terror overcame me, making me as useless as a snapped rubber band.

Baldwin pulled himself together and went back to the MacDowell Colony to work on his next novel and a version of Giovanni’s Room to be performed at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio in New York that spring. Struggling with chronic medical symptoms resulting from stress and strain, he would also work through 70-odd pages of handwritten notes from his Southern tour, which he’d turn into two short essays: “The Hard Kind of Courage,” rejected by Look magazine and published by Harper’s in October 1958; and “A Letter from the South: Nobody Knows My Name,” which Partisan Review published a few months after that. Both would be part of Baldwin’s second book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son, in 1961. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/on-james-baldwins-dispatches-from-the-heart-of-the-civil-rights-movement/