James Baldwin: The Fear Of A Nation
In the New York Review, Nathaniel Rich writes: ‘“On one side of town I was an Uncle Tom,†said James Baldwin in an interview with The Paris Review, “and on the other the Angry Young Man.†But the list of epithets was much longer than that. Robert Kennedy, apoplectic at Baldwin’s statement in a private meeting in 1963 that black Americans couldn’t be counted on to fight in Vietnam, called him a “nut.†Harold Cruse, who attended the same meeting with Kennedy, complained of Baldwin’s “intellectual inconsistencies,†while Richard Wright, his earliest idol and first champion, considered him an ungrateful apostate. To Eldridge Cleaver, Baldwin was a traitor, with a “grueling, agonizing, total hatred of the blacks.” J. Edgar Hoover, who kept a case file on Baldwin at the FBI that ran 1,884 pages long, declared him “a well-known pervert†and a threat to national security.’ [photo: Baldwin with Nina Simone, artist unknown]
