Rhino -- Words From the Front

Among the many wonderful surprises in Terry Gross's recently published collection of interviews, All I Did Was Ask, is the inclusion of a conversation with the late James Baldwin. One of the handful of towering mid-20th Century Americans in the process of disappearing into the mist of the past, Baldwin is the sort of figure we forget at the peril of the republic.

Born in Harlem in 1924, Baldwin was the illegitimate son of a domestic worker. His stepfather was a storefront preacher and a cruel man who died in a mental hospital when Baldwin was 19. Baldwin was a sensitive child who read voraciously from a young age, and he was writing by the time he was 14. At approximately the same time he became a preacher at a Pentecostal church in Harlem; although he'd left the church by the time he was 24, his time at the pulpit left an impermeable mark on him.

Baldwin spent the war years at a job in a New Jersey defense plant that left him plenty of time to write, and with the publication of his first novel in 1953, Go Tell It On the Mountain, he that laid out the themes that would occupy him for the remainder of his life: civil rights, personal and sexual identity, and social injustice of every stripe. Baldwin was inarguably a gifted writer, but more importantly, he was a brilliant speaker. He was a small man, and wasn't particularly handsome, but he was a scorching presence and an absolutely mesmerizing speaker -- not so much because of the rich timbre of his voice, or his elegant diction, but because he spoke the unvarnished truth. Sadly, public figures of Baldwin's ilk seem to be a thing of the past. During the '60s America had an abundance of statesmen -- Martin Luther King, Mario Savio, Malcolm X -- capable of galvanizing people into action using nothing more than the spoken word and a willingness to give voice to unpleasant truths. It's difficult to think of anyone in public life who's up to that task today.

Baldwin's particular genius resided in his ability to interweave political and social questions with issues of philosophy and personal ethics. At one point in his conversation with Terry Gross -- which focuses for the most part on his experience as a black man in white America -- he makes the observation that "love is like the lightning, and your maturity is signaled by the extent to which you can accept the dangers and the power and the beauty of love." Can you imagine a political figure making a public comment like this today? It's inconceivable.

In 1963 Baldwin had a bestseller with his sixth book, The Fire Next Time, an appraisal of the then-nascent Black Muslim movement. The book predicted that an explosion of violence would engulf the streets of America if it failed to change its policies towards its black population -- Baldwin was right, of course, but he was branded a rabble-rousing trouble-maker for writing the book, and became a target for the F.B.I., which compiled a 1,750 page dossier on him. Baldwin left the country in disgust and lived most of his adult life in Paris where he died of stomach cancer in 1987. America has an unfortunate tradition of treating its important prophets -- Martin Luther King, Lenny Bruce, Allen Ginsberg, to name a few -- with ridicule and scorn. We've gotten away with it so far, but we can't get away with indefinitely.

Kristine McKenna’s work as a journalist began in the late ’70s, when she covered the Los Angeles punk scene for various domestic and international publications. During the ’80s and ’90s she wrote art, film, and music criticism, and profiled directors, musicians, and visual artists for a variety of publications, including New York Rocker, Artforum, Rolling Stone, and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in Los Angeles and is presently working on a biography of the artist Wallace Berman. She wrote the liner notes to Rhino’s expanded X releases Los Angeles, Wild Gift, Under The Big Black Sun, More Fun In The New World, Ain’t Love Grand, and See How We Are. Two collections of her interviews, Book Of Changes (2001) and Talk To Her (2004), have been published by Fantagraphics. She is presently co-curating Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & his Circle, an exhibition that begins a tour of six U.S. museums in September of 2005. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by D.A.P.

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