No Name in the Street by James Baldwin

by James Baldwin

This stunningly personal document and extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies displays James Baldwin's fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works. In vivid detail he remembers the Harlem childhood that shaped his early conciousness, the later events that scored his heart with pain—the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his retum to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Memoir, History, Race, Classics, Politics

Paperback

First published April 17, 1972

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Works of American writer James Arthur Baldwin, outspoken critic of racism, include Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a novel, and Notes of a Native Son (1955), a collection of essays.

James Arthur Baldwin authored plays and poems in society.

He came as the eldest of nine children; his stepfather served as a minister. At 14 years of age in 1938, Baldwin preached at the small fireside Pentecostal church in Harlem. From religion in the early 1940s, he transferred his faith to literature with the still evident impassioned cadences of black churches. From 1948, Baldwin made his home primarily in the south of France but often returned to the United States of America to lecture or to teach.

In his Giovanni's Room, a white American expatriate must come to terms with his homosexuality. In 1957, he began spending half of each year in city of New York.

James Baldwin offered a vital literary voice during the era of civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s.
He first partially autobiographically accounted his youth. His influential Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time informed a large white audience. Another Country talks about gay sexual tensions among intellectuals of New York. Segments of the black nationalist community savaged his gay themes. Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers stated the Baldwin displayed an "agonizing, total hatred of blacks." People produced Blues for Mister Charlie , play of Baldwin, in 1964. Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, defended Baldwin.

Going to Meet the Man and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone provided powerful descriptions. He as an openly gay man increasingly in condemned discrimination against lesbian persons.

From stomach cancer, Baldwin died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. People buried his body at the Ferncliff cemetery in Hartsdale near city of New York.

Reviews

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

BLACK LIVES MATTER



James Baldwin, questo figlio di Harlem, bassetto, senza patente, costretto spesso a girare con la guardia del corpo, ebbe il torto di nascere nero e di vivere la sua omosessualità negli Stati Uniti d’America. Probabilmente per questo finì col muoversi in continuazione (questo libro fu scritto tra New York, San Francisco, Hollywood, Londra, Istanbul, Saint-Paul-de-Vence) e trascorrere gran parte della sua vita in Francia, tra Parigi e la riviera (dove è ambientata La stanza di Giovanni), per morire in quel delizioso angolo di mondo chiamato Saint-Paul-de-Vence, regno degli attrape-couillons.



James Baldwin era figlio unico, ma aveva nove fratelli: figlio unico in quanto sua madre e suo padre biologico, peraltro mai conosciuto, generarono solo lui. Ma poi, la donna si risposò con un pastore battista (autentica figura di patrigno, e come tale temuta e combattuta) che aveva già un figlio, di nove anni maggiore di James, e insieme i due genitori sfornarono altri otto marmocchi. James era molto legato a tutti e nove, in particolare alla sorella Gloria che gli fece da assistente e segretaria per diversi anni.



Qui sono riuniti ricordi personali e pagine in stile saggio, un memoir che palpita sia nelle sue parti autobiografiche (per me le più ghiotte) sia in quelle in stile pamphlet (peraltro asciutte, e ironiche nonostante l’argomento).
I momenti di autobiografia sono appetitosi perché Baldwin, come dicevo, viaggiò parecchio, e qui regala gustosissime pagine su Parigi già a partire dai tardi anni Quaranta (1948) e Londra o Amburgo negli anni Sessanta. E oltre che viaggiare, Baldwin era curioso e dinamico e quindi conobbe tante persone passate alla storia.



Per esempio, qui racconta della sua amicizia con Martin Luther King, del momento in cui apprese della sua morte, del funerale ad Atlanta. Di Malcolm X, con cui probabilmente non condivideva vera amicizia, ma sicuramente stima e ammirazione: e la prima non si sviluppò perché forse le occasioni di incontro furono limitate, il tempo passato insieme non fu sufficiente. E poi dei fondatori delle Black Panthers, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, del McCartismo, gli anni delle Black List, l’amministrazione Nixon, Bob Kennedy, la guerra in Vietnam (geniale il parallelo negro=vietcong, ghetto=villaggio vietnamita). La Marcia della Libertà, la pacifica occupazione di Washington da parte di qualche centinaia di migliaia di dimostranti nel 1963: che nonostante promesse e speranze portò a concretizzare poco - e infatti Martin Luther King e Malcolm X furono uccisi cinque anni dopo. La guerra in Indocina e quella in Algeria, Camus che parla dell’Algeria, essere afroamericano in mezzo agli algerini a Parigi mentre le colonie cominciano a non poterne più del colonizzatore.
Il lavoro di Baldwin a Hollywood lo portò in contatto con molte personalità dello spettacolo: ma Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Marlon Brando, Jack Lemmon sono nomi che ritornano per la loro partecipazione a marce, movimenti, funerali, proteste.



Le parti più a pamphlet sul razzismo sono oro colato e, ahinoi, assolutamente attuali anche cinquant’anni dopo (questo libro fu finito di scrivere nel 1971): altrimenti che bisogno ci sarebbe adesso del Black Lives Matter?

PS
Complimenti alla Fandango Libri che sta ripubblicando l’opera omnia di Baldwin. E complimenti per questa copertina che mi piace molto (sulla quale però l’indicazione “romanzo” mi pare fuorviante).

[Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can I properly review James Baldwin? I doubt I can adequately give justice to the power and impact of this book. But I will try, and you should go read it.

Published in 1972, nearly a decade after his famous The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street seems to be an inevitable response to the degradation of American society, especially at the expense of Black people and their lives. Reading this in 2021, nearly 50 years later, it's eerie to see how Baldwin talks about the state of America, the conflict between whites and Blacks, and the corruption of many American systems, including the police force. While The Fire Next Time feels like the work of a younger, more contemplative Baldwin, No Name has all the understandable rage of a man who has seen friends assassinated, wrongfully incarcerated, and families torn apart by the white hands of racism.

I hate to simplify the book or reduce Baldwin down to such a rudimentary review. I will leave you with some quotes, however, and urge you to pick up a copy for yourself:

"For, intellectual activity, according to me, is, and must be, disinterested—the truth is a two-edged sword—and if one is not willing to be pierced by that sword, even to the extreme of dying on it, then all of one's intellectual activity is a masturbatory delusion and a wicked and dangerous fraud."

"The powerless, by definition, can never be "racists," for they can never make the world pay for what they feel or fear except by the suicidal endeavor which makes them fanatics or revolutionaries, or both; whereas, those in power can be urbane and charming and invite you to those which they know you will never own. The powerless must do their own dirty work. The powerful have it done for them."

[On MLK Jr's funeral]: "There was more than enough to weep for, if one was to weep—so many of us, cut down, so soon."

"White America remains unable to believe that black America's grievances are real; they are unable to believe this because they cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country; and the effect of this massive and hostile incomprehension is to increase the danger in which all black people live here, especially the young."

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

"People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned."
- James Baldwin, No Name in the Street



A kaleidoscopic fragmented history of the 60s and 70s where Baldwin appears to be trying to decipher all the elements and people that created the troubled world that existed. Obviously, race is the center of this book. It is a sad look at the later histories and deaths of such men as MLK, Malcom X, etc. His portrait of these men and their beauty in the struggle is worth the price of admission. It was a bit stream of conscious in its delivery; a dervish dance that spun from Hollywood to New York to Paris and Algeria. It flowed back and forth in time, back to Baldwin's own youth and up to the present (the early 70s). He looks at power, justice, history, and the dangerous fantasies of white power and history. Through out this book, as you would expect from Baldwin, there is some amazing prose. He is a ballet dancer throwing knives. And, Baldwin saves some of his best lines for himself:

"He seemed to feel that I was a dangerously odd, badly twisted, and fragile reed, of too much use to the Establishment to be trusted by blacks."

"No one knows precisely how identities are forged, but it is safe to say that identities are not invented: an identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience."

Some of this book seemed to equally apply to 2020 as it did to 1970:

"A liar always knows he is lying, and that is why liars travel in packs: in order to be reassured that the judgment day will never come for them. They need each other for the well-being, the health, the perpetuation of their lie. They have a tacit agreement to guard each other’s secrets, for they have the same secret. That is why all liars are cruel and filthy minded—one’s merely got to listen to their dirty jokes, to what they think is funny, which is also what they think is real."

"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."

It wasn't my favorite Baldwin, but might be one that moved me the most (and there is tough competition on that list).

[Sentimental Surrealist · Rating 4 out of 5]

I went into this book, my first exposure to what might, however wrongfully, be called "late Baldwin," with a question in mind: why hasn't this "late-Baldwin" work achieved the same sort of canonization as what you might call the "early Baldwin," the period beginning with Go Tell It on the Mountain (which I have to figure is one of Baldwin’s weaker books, but hey, it’s the classic) and ending roughly with what just might be his masterpiece, The Fire Next Time? It’s certainly not as though the man’s work diminished with time; “Freaks and the Ideal of American Manhood,” written toward the end of Baldwin’s life, strikes me as just as involving, insightful and introspective as the essays that made his name, and anyway this is twenty years of the guy’s career the public rather seems to have skipped out on.

Handily enough, the central thesis of this book-length essay seems to answer that question. This came out in 1972, and while I wasn’t alive in ’72 I have to imagine that was the peak of white-liberal back-patting about the end of racism. MLK had happened, the civil rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s (which we must, must, must distinguish from the broader “Civil Rights Movement” that America still hasn’t done much to address, and now by the looks of it will do even less for) had ended, and yet racism was still very much a Thing, just an Ignored Thing. Nobody Knows My Name talks in a lot of depth about the continuing racial issues in America post-movement. A lifelong friend of Baldwin’s, falsely accused of murder, endures a sham trial; Baldwin himself struggles to get an adaptation of Malcolm X’s famous autobiography through a studio that aims to sanitize it; the “Progressive North” expresses all matters of racism that it then denies, seeing itself as at least superior to the South. Baldwin has always been downright scathing on the North’s more passive racism, and here he makes a pretty strong case that the overtly racist South will come to terms with their racism more than the North. Furthermore, he talks about MLK and Malcolm, both of them slain, and the subtext hangs heavy: if the ‘50s-‘60s civil rights movement stopped racism in its tracks, why were two of its main icons shot dead?

This is all pretty heavy stuff, so why doesn’t it get hosannas equivalent to those of the Fire Next Time? Well, lemme tell you what I think, but lemme first say if you’re the kind of person who goes around crowing about “racism against white people” you might not like what I’m about to say. Not that I give a shit. Anyway, here we are in 2017, and a lot of what Baldwin wrote about forty-five years ago matches up eerily with the headlines, and a lot of white folks have it in their head that Black Lives Matter is somehow or other a racist hate group (ClickHole skewered this wonderfully with the aptly titled “If Black Lives Matter Isn’t a Racist Hate Group, Why Do I Keep Saying It Is?”), I have to figure people only want Baldwin’s comments on the ‘50s-‘60s civil rights movement because they buy into the Invented-By-White-Folks Baldwin, the Baldwin who encouraged black people to “go slow” alongside Faulkner. Of course, everyone who has read even a word of Baldwin knows [i]this isn’t fucking Baldwin[/i], the dude was not some fuckin’ hippie, he was probably more cynical in fact than someone like Richard Wright. Let’s not forget, this guy counted Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and Huey Newton among his friends. You think those guys would’ve let Baldwin through the door if his message was “turn the other cheek to racism,” which by the way wasn’t MLK’s either?

Yes, Baldwin’s writing has an idealistic tint that, say, Richard Wright’s doesn’t. But Baldwin’s writing, and this book especially, pretty much radiates with disappointment that this country so profoundly fails to live up to its ideals. Nobody can become a cynic like an idealist, you know? Baldwin here is tired: tired of the relationship between Algerians and French, tired of white America pushing off its self-loathing on the African-American population (which was the key to the Southern Strategy, which unfortunately got a LOT bigger during the States’ last election cycle), tired of what the North has been so willing to pass off on the South, and tired of how it’ll all perpetuate itself until someone owns up.

I mean, CHECK THIS SHIT OUT…

"For this reason, and I am not the only black man who will say this, I have more faith in Southerners than I will ever have in Northerners: the mighty and pious North could never, after all, have acquired its wealth without utilizing, brutally, and consciously, those “folk” ways, and locking the South within them. And when this country’s absolutely inescapable disaster levels it, it is in the South and not the North that the rebirth will begin."

You think they taught that in history class? Not in mine, and I live in Michigan, where racism is fucking everywhere. And that’s the problem, people don’t want to hear it, so people consign Baldwin to a narrative, so people only read Baldwin books that fit within the chosen chronology because it eases the narrative along.

Let’s make an effort to change that. Here's a great place to start. A book that's sick of bullshit for people who are sick of bullshit.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back with Baldwin. This marks the tenth book of his I have read (and eleven I now own). My journey with Baldwin is a singular reading affair I relish. I have always admired the elegant movement of his prose, the poignancy of his style, how he matches setting with sensory, and how he seamlessly analyzes and intellectually denounces the constructs of racism. I feel closer to his thoughts in this memoir; this could be because of when it was written and where he was in life as a literary artist, a man, a historian, a film director and critic, an activist and advocate, a commercial name and force.

No one knows how identities are forged, but it is safe to say that identities are not invented: an identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience. It is a long drawn-out and somewhat bewildering and awkward process.

Nobody Knows My Name seems to be a continuation of Notes of a Native Son and this memoir seems to complete Baldwin's thoughts in The Fire Next Time. Although it seems apt that both books would in some ways be reading companions, I see why one made it mainstream while the other did not. As usual, Baldwin is unapologetically honest. Unlike in NOTES, where he writes a letter to his kin, here, his thoughts are directed to America—and let's face facts, some will not/did not like this. This memoir also unearths some behind-the-scenes moments of the Civil Rights Movement that we do not hear about often—like how the March on Washington was supposed to be structured, for instance. His travels through the south made me understand why Just Above My Head felt so real and when he mentions the underlying reasons for his departure from America, I envision the version of the Baldwin Engin Cezzar found on his doorstep in Turkey. This memoir is raw, honest, educational, informational, heartbreaking, philosophical, brutal and beautiful:

Black is a tremendous spiritual condition, one of the greatest challenges anyone alive can face...nothing is easier, nor, for the guilt-ridden American, more inevitable, than to dismiss this as chauvinism in reverse. But in this, white Americans are being—it is a part of their fate—inaccurate. To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior agreement and collaboration with the authors of one's degradation.

He is grieving. He is melancholic. He is pensive. He is caring for his mental health. He is angry and frustrated. He fears for his life and health. He faces despair head-on and chooses words as his sword. He enjoys many successes as a writer and also experiences many doubts as a human: "What in the world was I by now but an aging, lonely, sexually dubious, politically outrageous, unspeakably erratic freak?" He has just lost friends close to him. He and Martin Luther King Jr. attend a Carnegie Hall "gig" they are scheduled to do together, and later, Baldwin learns of King's murder. He moves in shock. He wears the Carnegie Hall suit to Dr. King's funeral, sits behind Marlon Brando and Sidney Poitier, and after the funeral, when he finds that he cannot get himself to wear the suit again, he gifts it to a friend. He is also friends with Malcolm X and hired to write the screenplay for Malcolm's autobiography, when he learns of Malcolm's murder. He is good friends with Medgar Evers when he learns of Evers' murder in his driveway (in front of his wife and kids). His memory of it is so visceral:

I couldn't say anything. I couldn't cry; I just remembered his face, a bright, blunt, handsome face, and his weariness, which he wore like his skin, and the way he said ro-aad for road, and his telling me how the tatters of clothes from a lynched body hung, flapping, in the tree for days, and how he had to pass that tree every day. Medgar. Gone.

While Baldwin mourns, he also has to use his resources to help his friend, Tony Maynard, who is falsely accused of murder in another country. Baldwin seems to receive and deal with disheartening news while he is away traveling for work, and I couldn't help but wonder if Baldwin's temporary exile and writing travels saved his life. Then again, in some strange way, perhaps writing this memoir saved him.

[S. ≽^•⩊•^≼ I'm not here yet · Rating 5 out of 5]

True rebels, after all, are as rare as true lovers, and, in both cases, to mistake a fever for a passion can destroy one’s life

James Baldwin's another nonfiction book although I think the line between his fiction works and nonfiction is so thin. This time, I know, later find myself mostly remembering about people who were killed. And for sure there are other topics, the author also shares his thoughts on Albert Camus, William Faulkner, France, and Arabs.


They’ve just killed Malcolm X.
The British press said that I accused innocent people of this murder. What I tried to say then, and will try to repeat now, is that whatever hand pulled the trigger did not buy the bullet. That bullet was forged in the crucible of the West, that death was dictated by the most successful conspiracy in the history of the world, and its name is white supremacy.

“Jimmy—? Martin’s just been shot,” and I don’t think I said anything, or felt anything. I’m not sure I knew who Martin was. Yet, though I know—or I think—the record player was still playing, silence fell. David said, “He’s not dead yet”—then I knew who Martin was—“but it’s a head wound—so—”


My 2025 Black History Month list


Sonny's Blues ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Fire Next Time ⭐⭐⭐⭐✨
Go Tell It on the Mountain ⭐⭐⭐⭐


Quotes

It did not take me long, nor did the children, as they came tumbling into this world, take long to discover that our mother paid an immense price for standing between us and our father. He had ways of making her suffer quite beyond our ken, and so we soon learned to depend on each other and became a kind of wordless conspiracy to protect her.
...
I, James, in August. George, in January. Barbara, in August. Wilmer, in October, David, in December. Gloria, Ruth, Elizabeth, and (when we thought it was over!) Paula Maria, named by me, born on the day our father died, all in the summertime.

****

Nothing could be more unutterably paradoxical: to have thrown in your lap what you never dreamed of getting, and, in sober, bitter truth, could never have dreamed of having, and that at the price of an assumed betrayal of your brothers and your sisters! One is always disproving the accusation in action as futile as it is inevitable.

****

hope—the hope that we, human beings, can be better than we are—dies hard; perhaps one can no longer live if one allows that hope to die. But it is also hard to see what one sees. One sees that most human beings are wretched, and, in one way or another, become wicked: because they are so wretched. And one’s turning away, then, from what I have called the welcome table is dictated by some mysterious vow one scarcely knows one’s taken—never to allow oneself to fall so low. Lower, perhaps, much lower, to the very dregs: but never there.

****

The powerless, by definition, can never be “racists,” for they can never make the world pay for what they feel or fear except by the suicidal endeavor which makes them fanatics or revolutionaries, or both; whereas, those in power can be urbane and charming and invite you to those which they know you will never own. The powerless must do their own dirty work. The powerful have it done for them.

[Mehrsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

{Edit} I am doing a re-read of Baldwin this year and this one was just as good the second time around. The part that stood out most to me in this reading is the way he contrasts the Black experience with that of the Algerians in France.

This one may be one of my favorites--especially towards the end where he talks about the deaths of King, Malcolm, and Medgar Evers (and the imprisonment of Huey Newton). He deals with all of these men with such insight and reverence. He says his job is not to be a revolutionary, but to be a witness and he's such an astute and poignant witness. This book is also his most pessimistic. How could you not be as a black man watching your heroes die one by one?

[Daniel Chaikin · Rating 5 out of 5]

While not Baldwin‘s best essay collection (see The Fire Next Time), this is a favorite for me. It‘s melancholy, an end of an era book. Baldwin writes about the assassinated (Medgar Evers, MLK, Malcom X and others), the incarcerated (Huey Newton, etc), and about his failed attempt to make a movie on Malcolm X (his script was the basis of the 1990‘s movie). By 1971 the beaded hippie era has faded, and their failure reflects in other American failures.

To some extend Baldwin is continuing his usual themes—attacks on the the lunacy of American conservatives, the American south, the inauthenticity of American liberals (his main readers?). Add Hollywood. But he had met, spoken with, debated with all these lost heroes of the Civil Right era and sees it all as a failure and as both a national and personal loss. America is still sick and in denial. Trump would not surprise him. It‘s a slow, single essay mulling on this, with an intense and powerful conclusion that still very relevant. Glad to have read it.

-----------------------------------------------

51. No Name in the Street by James Baldwin
published: 1972
format: 123 pages inside Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays
acquired: December 2018
read: Oct 15-18
time reading: 5 hr 39 min, 2.8 min/page
rating: 5

[Traci Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really struggled with this book. Baldwin's circular writing style really got me caught up, especially in the first essay. I never found my rhythm and couldn't exactly say what that essay was about. The second one was much more my style and speed. He's no doubt a great writing and sections were so good and clear and powerful, other parts were not.

[persephone ☾ · Rating 4 out of 5]

« Nor can you get a meal anywhere in the South without being confronted with grits : a pale, lumpy, tasteless kind of porridge which the Southerner insists is a delicacy but which I believe they ingest as punishment for their sins »
i can personally attest to this fact, that’s probably something I will not miss from my trip here 😔

[leynes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh, no, I hate to say it but this one really didn't do it for me. (That's a 1.5 star-rating, btw.) Baldwin's take on the memoir, ... which is still just an essay collection (...let's be real), bored me to death, brought absolutely nothing surprising or new to the table, and was, overall, completely forgettable. I've had my gripes with Baldwin in the past (notably the evasive nature of his first essay collection Notes of a Native Son) but learned to love him through his more bold and angry works (notably The Fire Next Time and Dark Days) and his capability to write from his heart and write for his people (If Beale Street Could Talk).

No Name in the Street, unfortunately, didn't fall into any of those categories, since it was extremely repetitive and didn't serve any point whatsoever. Getting into the book, I was expecting to read a memoir, as the book was marketed as such, and whilst we did get snippets of Baldwin's time in Paris and some personal anecdotes about his relationship to famous Civil Rights leaders, No Name in the Street cannot be called a memoir. It's more of a political and analytical collection of two essays. And that was darn disappointing. I'm incredibly interested in Baldwin as a person, because I cannot quite seem to get a grasp of him by just watching his interviews, but he really didn't deliver on that front.

His time in Paris, which he practically "fled" to because he couldn't stand living in the United States any longer, is reduced to his analysis of the Algerian War and the Parisian's reaction to it. He brings Camus, Franco and McCarthyism into the mix, and left me utterly confused. This is not what I signed up for. This is not what I'm interested in ... and I bet you aren't either. Baldwin writes in an incredibly rhetorical and cold manner, that it's hard to get a hold of his emotion and what he might have felt at the time. His idealogical discourse is way too abstract and messy to impress me.

The second essay gives an account of Baldwin's involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and how figures like Malcolm X, Dr. King, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver shaped it. Interspersed with this is the story of a personal friend and former bodyguard who was accused of murder. I wish Baldwin could've made me care about anything he wrote in that section but alas! he didn't. Surprisingly, I found Baldwin to come across as quite vain (sue me!), since he couldn't stop stressing what close friends he was with all of those people, failing to give any substance to his writing. I don't care that you knew this people, Jimmy, I wanna know what you did with them, what you talked about, what they meant to you. The fact alone that you met them a couple of times is nothing to me. I don't care.

I also don't care that you could afford to travel the world and see all of those cool places in Europe, if you don't elaborate on what you did there, like???? I am so confused. Why bother writing that down if you have nothing else to add than the mere fact that you've been to these places. I get that Baldwin explored the theme of his alienation from "his people", due to his wealth and his inability to relate to his old Harlem friends, but even those passages where written with such a holier-than-thou, it just made me made.

I know I'm coming across like a toddler throwing a tamper tantrum but bear with me on this one. I really wanted to enjoy No Name in the Street, I thought it would provide an interesting look into Baldwin's life and getting a first-hand account of the 50s and 60s is always invaluable, however, not if it's done in such a lacklustre way. The only time Baldwin could even remotely make me care and actually providing a perspective that was new (and wasn't just a warm-up of his earlier essays) was the time he characterised Malcolm X: "Malcolm X," he says, "was not a racist, not even when he thought he was. His intelligence was more complex than that. . . . What made him unfamiliar and dangerous was not his hatred for white people but his love for blacks, his apprehension of the horror of the black condition, and the reasons for it, and his determination to work on their hearts and minds so that they would be enabled to see their condition and change it themselves."

James Baldwin has come a long way since the days of Notes of a Native Son, when, in 1955, he wrote: "I love America more than any other country in the world; and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." Such bittersweet affairs are bound to turn sour. I appreciate Baldwin for what he has done. His passion, honesty and persuasiveness did much to free the impasse in racial discourse and helped create what now seems the fleeting illusion that nonblack Americans could actually empathize with Blacks in America and seriously confront the racial problem. Along with Martin Luther King Jr. he helped shape the idealism upon which the sixties civil-rights protest was based. But none of his intensity or brilliance can be found in No Name in the Street.

[Kiran Dellimore · Rating 4 out of 5]

James Baldwin’s No Name In the Street is a ranting social commentary about racial discrimination and injustice in the United States. At times rambling, Baldwin nevertheless eloquently puts his finger on the crux of the racial issues plaguing America since time immemorial. In one hundred and ninety-eight compact pages, he shines a bright light on the systematic disenfranchisement of Black people in all facets of society, from the criminal justice system to the entertainment industry. No Name In the Street highlights Baldwin’s frustration and increasing exasperation at the glacial pace of change in America’s treatment of it’s Black citizens. I would even say the despairing tone of the book captures Baldwin’s ‘bitter ferment' after the assisination, in short order, of several prominent Black civil rights leaders, to whom he is personally acquainted, including Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Bobby Hutton, and Medgar Evans. By the end of this tome one is left with a feeling of vividly hearing Baldwin’s long wailing plea for change. A lament which has sadly, for so long fallen on deaf ears, which makes it’s despondency all the more poignant. Baldwin’s rhetorical style of writing makes his message in No Name In The Street all the more lyrical – literally piercing through your mind unforgetably like a banshee’s siren. This book is without a doubt a must read for anyone who is sincerely interested in informing themselves on the state of race relations between Black and White people in America.

[Malik Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

refreshing prose. timeless matter. a perfect meditation in a wakening moment of critical consciousness and movement generation. feels essential, as Baldwin reflects on his life around the deaths of Malcolm, Martin and Medgar; as we continue to witness (and continue, without end, to witness) Black death in public, legal lynchings, as well as under the slow slaughter we suffer daily; and, as we enter this new, profound moment of connection and challenge--oh, pioneers! Baldwin gives me life.

we are met with equal parts prophecy and prayer. indeed, Baldwin always reminds me of the preacher the way he carries doom and death just within vision, while holding space and demanding we remember (lest we lose everything), the redeeming power of love.

at times, i'm at at standstill with Baldwin's insistence on salvaging the American national project. though, i see we he is coming from: Black folks have built this nation and will be an integral part, he suggests, in sustaining it. where i split is in my understanding that the entire vision is corrupt, flaccid. it may come that we are better served embracing the world to come from the collapse of this one.

still, whatever to come, Baldwin shows, time and again, his words will be needed as guide. i still don't comprehend how such a forceful intelligence can exist behind such gentle, moving prose.

if only i could write half as movingly.

[Theo Logos · Rating 5 out of 5]

His remembrance shall perish from the Earth, and he shall have no name in the street. He shall be driven from light into darkness, and chased out of the world.
Job 18: 17-18

”It is certain, in any case, that ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

Ripped from the ancient and grim book of Job, No Name in the Street is a fitting title for this book that feels like an angry cry of despair. Memoir was James Baldwin’s great talent — nearly all his work, both fiction and nonfiction, is essentially memoir. In this book, he tells his own story, inextricably intertwined with the ongoing journey of injustice all peoples of color experience in the West.

”Four hundred years in the West had certainly turned me into a Westerner, there was no way around that. But four hundred years in the West had also failed to bleach me, there was no way around that either, and my history in the West, had for its daily effect, placed me in such mortal danger that I had fled all the way around the corner to France.”

”White America remains unable to believe that Black America’s grievances are real. They are unable to believe this because they cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country. And the effect of this massive and hostile incomprehension is to increase the danger in which all Black people live here, especially the young.”

Baldwin writes of his Harlem childhood, his doomed father, and his self exile in France. He exposes France’s injustice to the Algerians, and he comes home to travel in the American South as a witness to the Civil Rights movement. He writes of his friendships with Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, and of his devastation and loss of hope after the murder of each. He records the brutal extermination of the Black Panther movement by fearful authorities. He exposes not just the injustice of the American justice system toward Blacks, but the weakness, hypocrisy, and irrelevance of American liberals, so called allies. All of this comes in almost stream of consciousness, leaping backwards and forwards in time as it serves his story.

The overriding theme of No Name in the Street is a loss of hope as the Civil Rights movement withered and died along with its leaders. In one powerful passage, after writing of the fabled March on Washington, a high point of hope, Baldwin notes that it was a demonstration of people petitioning their government for redress. The March was on August 28th. Baldwin notes that the first answer came not from the government, but in the form of the Birmingham church bombing that killed four young girls on September 15th. This is how hope curdles.

No Name in the Street is more than a cry of existential despair — it is an indictment of America, of the West in general and the rotten foundations upon which its civilization is built. It is a recording of crimes. It is a cry of pain from a man, and a revelation of warning from a prophet.

”All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie — the lie of their pretended humanism. This means that their history is no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.”

[Gianni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alcuni frammenti autobiografici scritti tra il 1967 e il 1971, ma che riguardano aspetti significativi di tutta la vita di Baldwin, sono la base di questi scritti che sono a metà strada tra il memoir, il racconto e il saggio. Offrono un’interessante punto di vista sulla stagione delle lotte per i diritti civili in America, elevandole a questione universale che interessa tutte le minoranze e mettendo a nudo, contemporaneamente, non solo l’ipocrisia del potere bianco e le connessioni ideologiche, politiche ed economiche, ma anche la profonda crisi di identità della classe dominante che tocca anche il privato, ”Da sempre, questo fallimento della vita privata ha esercitato il suo effetto più devastante sulla condotta pubblica americana e sulle relazioni tra bianchi e neri. Se gli americani non avessero un terrore così profondo di se stessi nel privato, non avrebbero mai avvertito l'esigenza di creare una simile dipendenza nei confronti di quello che chiamano ancora "il problema dei negri” e nemmeno avrebbero mai potuto svilupparla. Questo problema, da loro rapporti concepito per preservare la propria purezza, non ha fatto altro che renderli dei criminali e dei mostri, e li sta portando alla distruzione; e questo non per qualcosa che i neri starebbero eventualmente facendo o meno, bensì per il ruolo che l'immaginazione colpevole e limitata dei bianchi ha assegnato ai neri."
Non so se sia voluto o meno, ma talvolta si ha l’impressione che Baldwin sia contemporaneamente dentro e fuori, presente e in fuga perenne, a metà strada tra Malcom X e M. L. King; nonostante ciò in molte parti risulta assolutamente illuminante e condivisibile anche oggi, a cinquant’anni di distanza, e certo è che non c’è proprio via d’uscita per il “maschio occidentale bianco della classe media”, a meno che non scelga la strada di Willy Crusoe in Le famose patate.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Baldwin at its potent-est. Of his non-fiction I've read, No Name in the Street is less meandering and is more graceful in how it coalesces than the still-excellent The Devil Finds Work, still vague about personal details in a classic Baldwin-ist way but less so than his other work, written with a pace more exhilarating than, say, Notes of a Native Son. The quick appearance and subsequent disappearance of autobiographical detail, meaning how he uses as a springboard right into the biggest issues if only because those details were of him being at the frontlines, is astutely executed. No Name in the Street is also affirmation of Baldwin being continually affirming and expansive within his own domain of knowledge, giving readers the gift of learning France's relations to Algeria from his vantage point, and even giving us what (very sadly, to white readers) could be considered the "alternate history" (I sigh at that phrasing) of the Black Panthers.

It is clear to me and to many other Baldwin advocates how astute and searing he is at peeling away the layers of white guilt, white supremacy, etc. It's no secret how much little has changed, and how No Name in the Street remains depressingly salient today due to its specificity handling police brutality and the criminal justice system (for example, John Oliver's public defenders segment had a nice summary-esque write-up, all done in this book that predates it considerably). Too many times had I notated "well, this is familiar" or something like that. I have made these points in other reviews of other James Baldwin books.

But may I also say that Baldwin is full of everyday life wisdom? That's the light I want to shed onto this book. Taking away his politics, you can gems to live your life by, such as these:

"I had made my decision, and once I had made it, nothing could make me waver, and nothing could make me alter it. If there were errors in my concept of the film, and if I made errors in the execution, well, then, I would have to pay for my errors. But one can learn from one's errors. What one cannot survive is allowing other people to make your errors for you, discarding your own vision, in which, at least, you believe, for someone else's vision, in which you do NOT believe."

And:

"It is just as well to remember that the people are one mystery and that the person is another. Though I know what a very bitter and delicate and dangerous conundrum this is, it yet seems to me that a failure to respect the person so dangerously limits one's perception of the people that one risks betraying them and oneself, either by sinking to the apathy of cynical disappointment, or rising to the rage of knowing, better than the people do, what the people want."

See, people? It doesn't even need to be that you read Baldwin to learn more about race relations in America. You read Baldwin to become a better human.

[Mimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whenever things around me become too set in their ways, as though they'd stay like this forever--life, work, news, politics, other current events, the same old charades--I return to James Baldwin for perspective and to rediscover my tenuous link to this world and the people around me. I get like that sometimes, detached and indifferent, when all I can see is a never ending cycle of nonsense and people being complacent (when they should be angry), and it looks like there's nothing anyone can do to break the repetitive pattern. So I turn to James Baldwin and soak in his immortal words. He wrote earnestly and honestly, and there's pain but there's also a glimmer of hope. And that's what I hang onto.

Some of the things written during those years, justifying, for example, the execution of the Rosenbergs, or the crucifixion of Alger Hiss (and the beatification of Whittaker Chambers) taught me something about the irresponsibility and cowardice of the liberal community which I will never forget. Their performance, then, yet more than the combination of ignorance and arrogance with which this community has always protected itself against the deepest implications of black suffering, persuaded me that brilliance without passion is nothing more than sterility. It must be remembered, after all, that I did not begin meeting these people at the point that they began to meet me: I had been delivering their packages and emptying their garbage and taking their tips for years. (And they don’t tip well.) And what I watched them do to each other during the McCarthy era was, in some ways, worse than anything they had ever done to me, for I, at least, had never been mad enough to depend on their devotion. It seemed very clear to me that they were lying about their motives and were being blackmailed by their guilt; were, in fact, at bottom, nothing more than the respectable issue of various immigrants, struggling to hold on to what they had acquired.

[...]

To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior argument and collaboration with the authors of one's degradation. It abruptly reduces the white enemy to a contest merely physical, which he can win only physically.

Cross-posted at https://covers2covers.wordpress.com/2...

[B. P. Rinehart · Rating 4 out of 5]

"'I, the vile Lebedev, do not believe in the carts that deliver bread to mankind! For carts that deliver bread to all mankind, without any moral foundations for their action, may quite cold-bloodedly exclude a considerable part of mankind from enjoying what they deliver, as has already happened...'" - from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"...One realizes that what is called civilization lives first of all in the mind, has the mind above all its province, and that the civilization, or its rudiments, can continue to live long after its externals have vanished--they can never entirely vanish from the mind."


This book takes us from the realm of the Civil Rights Movement towards the present-day. It was written after the wave of riots and assassinations that closed out the 1960s and in the middle of the violent suppression of the Black Panther Party and the Attica Prison Uprising. Baldwin was at a crossroads--after the publication of The Fire Next Time three of his friends who he had become acquainted with during the Civil Rights Movement (Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.) were assassinated and another personal friend named Tony Maynard was being imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. James Baldwin looked upon the world at this time and had death-shivers.

Of all of the books of essays written by Baldwin, No Name in the Street is the most relevant for today. As pretty as the prose is in The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street is the one that holds-up the best in a post-Trump world. As is usually the case, Baldwin tells us his life story, but this time he includes details that we rarely hear or read by him. We learn a lot about his life in New York City between leaving his parents' house and leaving the United States. But more importantly, we are given full details of his initial time in Paris. We were already told a little of his impression of the city in Notes of a Native Son, but this picks-up where that book left off and gives a fuller picture of the white French and the brown Algerians. This section gives me an idea of what I can look forward to when I read A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962. Baldwin's life in poverty living with the Algerians taught him much; he learned that racism could change very completely depending on the country and the needs and exploitation that exist. While black people were at the bottom of the ladder in America, it was North Africans--more than the sub-Saharan Africans--who are at the bottom of the ladder in France. Hearing him talk at how not only the generally increase in racism against Algerians, but the Latin American-esque colorism that increased against all people with beige skin (white French and Italian people from the Mediterranean were now under threat from the police for "looking too Arab" and many unfortunate Europeans were disappeared in those years for the crime of having a tan). Baldwin did not stay in France to see the end of the Algerian War of Independence because of the Civil Rights Movement; He decided to go back to the United States and to go South. But of the Algerian War, he devotes a section to criticizing the pro-colonial position of Albert Camus . Baldwin states: "I was struck by the fact that, for Camus, European humanism appeared to expire at European gates: so that Camus, who was dedicated to liberty, in the case of Europeans, could only speak of 'justice' when it came to Algerians...('A legal means,' said an African recipient, 'of administering injustice.')." He realizes that Camus reminded him of someone and of course this person was William Faulkner who made similar comments about African-Americans. No surprises here.

"White America remains unable to believe that Black America’s grievances are real. They are unable to believe this, because they cannot face what this fact says about themselves and this country. And the effect of this massive and hostile incomprehension is to increase the danger in which all black people live here, especially the young."

I was also impressed at him discussing how he came to be disillusioned with the vanguard of the American Left. I had already read his thoughts on the McCarthy-era in The Devil Finds Work, but he goes into more detail on what specifically shocked him--the cowardice of white liberals to stand-up for people being persecuted. On the contrary, they were selling each other out in order to seem more patriotic in the eyes of the government. This made Baldwin not regret his decision to be in Paris and is why he did not return state-side until the Civil Rights Movement when the integration of Little Rock High School was happening. It was during this time that he met Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. All three men worked for different organizations (though Evers and MLK were more ideologically closer) and Baldwin never formally joined any of them (though he did informally attach himself to King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference despite Baldwin being neither Southern or Christian--and he was not the only one), but became friends with all three men. He learned a lot from interacting with them and this made their deaths all the more painful. I was very much impressed at how he compared Malcolm X to Joan of Arc--and how he describes his last interactions with MLK while on a doomed-mission to write a film adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X; he describes his time being took through the Deep South by Medgar Evers and being groped by an anonymous white Southern politician. He also gives very good profiles on the leadership of the Black Panther Party including Huey Newton (who he liked) and Eldridge Cleaver (who he did not like--justifiably). We also see him giving due to the actor Marlon Brando who was the underrated hero of this book. One of the few figures of the 1960s (black or white) that had no problems transitioning from the Civil Rights-era to the Black Power-era (while most people were recovering from the assassination of MLK, Brando was in Oakland eulogizing and helping to bury Bobby Hutton--the first Black Panther to be assassinated by the police).

Besides the assassinations, another sub-plot in this book is the story of Tony Maynard. Maynard was Baldwin's bodyguard during the early Civil Rights years, but gets framed for a crime he did not commit and endures police brutality in both German and American jails (he was at Attica during the Uprising). It became apparent to me that Maynard's story served as the template of the novel Baldwin was writing during this time: If Beale Street Could Talk. Maynard's story is the most contemporary of the bunch as many of the issues Baldwin brings up about mass-incarceration are still relevant--in-fact they're worse! It is a wonder that this book is not more popular, especially in a world where the demand for people like Ta-Nehisi Coates is so high.

"To be an Afro-American, or an American black, is to be in the situation, intolerably exaggerated, of all those who have ever found themselves part of a civilization which they could in no wise way honorably defend--which they were compelled, indeed, endlessly to attack and condemn --and who yet spoke out of the most passionate love, hoping to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life. Whoever is part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspect of it, and some of the people in it. A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of the people, even their hatred, is moving because it is so blind: it is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction. I think black people have always felt this about America, and Americans, and have always seen, spinning above the thoughtless American head, the shape of the wrath to come."

[erigibbi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Come si fa a dire che la libertà si prende, non si dà, e che nessuno è libero finché tutti non sono liberi? E che il prezzo è alto.
Scritto tra il 1967 e il 1971 mentre Baldwin viaggiava parecchio, Una strada senza nome parla degli avvenimenti accaduti alla fine degli anni ’60, in particolare si concentra sugli assassinii di Evers, Malcolm X e Martin Luther King. E chiaramente lo fa per testimoniare e denunciare la violenza e l’ingiustizia scatenate dall’odio razziale.
[…] quando gli innamorati litigano, come inevitabilmente fanno, a farli litigare non è il grado di pigmentazione della loro pelle, e non possono usare, a qualsiasi livello, il colore della pelle come un’arma. Ciò significa che bisogna accettare la propria nudità. La nudità non ha colore […]
Fa sempre piuttosto male leggere un libro scritto anni fa sull’odio razziale e sulle sue conseguenze e vedere che a distanza di cinquant’anni non è cambiato praticamente niente. Ancora assistiamo alla violenza della polizia, ancora ci sono proteste per ricordare che anche le vite dei neri sono importanti, ancora ci sono assassinii ingiustificati. Bambini, donne, adulti, anziani. Non importa. Potrebbe capitare a chiunque.
Ma la speranza – la speranza che noi esseri umani possiamo essere migliori di quello che siamo – è dura a morire; forse non si può vivere se si lascia morire quella speranza. È anche dura però assistere a ciò che si vede.
Devo ammettere che all’inizio ho fatto un po’ di fatica a immergermi nel racconto, probabilmente perché Baldwin narra con una sorta di flusso di coscienza e a me sembrava di viaggiare da un luogo all’altro, incontrando prima una persona, poi un’altra, poi un’altra ancora. Mi sono sentita piuttosto disorientata. L’unica cosa sempre certa era il razzismo. Mi viene da pensare che la scelta di Baldwin sul tipo di narrazione non sia nemmeno casuale: se io mi sono sentita disorientata, come dovevano sentirsi i neri americani di quell’epoca? Da così a peggio.
[E] i ritratti dei neri compiuti da Faulkner, [che] mancano di quell’insieme di sfumature che, probabilmente, solo uno scrittore nero è in grado di cogliere nella vita dei neri – considerato che Faulkner poteva vedere i negri solamente nel modo in cui questi si relazionavano con lui, e non come si relazionavano tra di loro […]
Ci sono state tante, tantissime cose dette da Baldwin in questo libro che mi hanno colpita, che mi hanno fatto riflettere, frasi che voglio ricordare, condividere, eppure mi aspettavo un libro più “illuminante” di così. Ora, sono bianca e non mi sento molto in diritto di dire la mia su un libro scritto da un autore nero che parla di razzismo nei confronti dei neri, ma arrivata qui direi che è inutile che me ne stia zitta. Mi è piaciuto, ma mi aspettavo un libro che mi entrasse nel cuore come ha fatto, per esempio, Becoming di Michelle Obama. Mi è mancato qualcosa, che non so identificare in tutta onestà, ma sì, mi aspettavo qualcosa di più. L’ho detto. Mi sento comunque di consigliarlo perché di sicuro è un libro che merita e che deve essere letto, anche oggi, anche a distanza di cinquanta lunghi anni dove le cose non sono poi cambiate così tanto.
Il minatore di carbone in Sudafrica, o l’africano che scava nella boscaglia in cerca di radici, o il muratore algerino che lavora a Parigi, non solo non hanno motivo di inchinarsi davanti a Shakespeare, a Cartesio o all’abbazia di Westminster o alla cattedrale di Chartres: quando questi monumenti sono stati posti con la forza alla loro attenzione, a loro non è stato concesso di potervi accedere in maniera rispettabile. […] Ecco perché, in ultima analisi, fallisce ogni tentativo di dialogo tra chi sottomette e chi è sottomesso, tra coloro che si collocano all’interno della storia e coloro che ne sono posti al di fuori. […] chi sottomette e colui che viene sottomesso non parlano la stessa lingua.
Vi lascio qualche altra citazione:
[…] i ragazzini e le ragazzine di colore stavano pagando per questo olocausto. Stavano cercando di andare a scuola. Stavano cercando di conseguire un’istruzione, in un paese in cui istruzione è sinonimo di indottrinamento se sei bianco, e di sottomissione se sei nero. Era un po’ come se, nella Germania di Hitler, i ragazzini ebrei avessero insistito per ottenere un’istruzione tedesca, così da poter rovesciare il Terzo Reich.
/
[…] il mondo in cui viviamo è un riflesso dei desideri e delle attività dell’uomo. Siamo responsabili del mondo in cui ci troviamo, se non altro perché siamo l’unica forza senziente in grado di modificarlo.
/
A renderlo insolito e pericoloso non era il suo odio per i bianchi, ma il suo amore per i neri, la sua inquietudine per l’orrore della condizione dei neri, e le sue cause, e la sua determinazione a operare sui loro cuori e sulle loro menti, così da renderli capaci di osservare da sé la propria condizione e cambiarla.
/
Be’, se si vuole davvero conoscere in che modo venga amministrata la giustizia in un paese, allora non lo si deve chiedere ai poliziotti, agli avvocati, ai giudici o ai membri tutelati della classe media. Si deve andare da chi non ha tutele – da quelli, per l’appunto, che hanno più bisogno di essere tutelati dalla legge – e ascoltare le loro testimonianze. Chiedetelo a un messicano, a un portoricano, a un nero, a un povero; chiedetelo ai miserabili come se la cavano nelle aule di giustizia, e a quel punto saprete non se il paese sia o non sia giusto, ma se abbia amore per la giustizia o quantomeno per un concetto di giustizia qualsiasi. In ogni caso, è certo che l’ignoranza, alleata con il potere, costituisce il nemico più feroce che la giustizia possa incontrare.
/
[…] dai propri errori si può imparare. Ciò a cui invece non si può sopravvivere è consentire ad altri di fare i tuoi errori al posto tuo, scartando la tua visione, in cui almeno credi, per quella di qualcun altro, in cui non credi.
/
L’America bianca è tuttora incapace di credere che il malcontento dell’America nera sia reale; non è in grado di crederlo perché non può accettare ciò che questo malcontento rivela su di lei e sul suo paese; e questa massiccia e ostile incomprensione ha come effetto l’aumento del pericolo in cui vivono tutti i neri, soprattutto i giovani.

[Iona Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of Baldwin’s non-fiction works. It is the first of Baldwin’s books I have read.

In most books, it may be hard to know which of the characters are white and which are black. We are generally not told this. We assume that most are white, or at least I do.

But Baldwin is mostly occupied with black people, and always tells us who are black and who are white, if any.

He is concerned about black people, whom he feels are not really regarded as people, at least in America.

He writes about black Americans, like himself.

At the beginning of the book Baldwin writes about his childhood. He was terrified of “the man we called my father”.

He did not understand him until he was “past understanding”.

His father’s mother, Barbara, lived with them; she was born in slavery. She was so old that she never moved from her bed. She loved James and used to scold her son for the way he treated him.

He knew that she would always protect him with all her strength.

James’ mother was always in the hospital, having another baby.

All the children were “absolutely and mercilessly united against our father”.

His father was a preacher and had “unreciprocated love for the Great God Almighty”.

I don’t understand that James wrote “unreciprocated”, indicating that God did not love his father. Perhaps no-one else loved him but God surely did. After all, God is Love.

He tells us that his father went mad and ended in the “madhouse”.

Baldwin discusses Martin Luther King and his death and also mentions Malcolm X.

It is important to point out that the copyright for this book was in 1972, i.e. it was written many years ago.

Baldwin went to Paris in 1948; since he had no money he lived among “les misérables”, and in Paris these are or were the Algerians.

When in Paris a second time. B found that all the Algerians he had known had disappeared. He heard that they had been placed in camps and were being tortured and murdered there.

They were also being murdered in the streets or dropped into the Seine.

Police were on every street corner, sometimes with machine guns. Anyone in Paris suspected of being Algerian, for example, Turks, Greeks, Spaniards, American blacks and Frenchmen from Marseilles or Nice were under constant harassment.

He hadn’t purposely gone to Paris but merely went there to get away from America.

In Paris he was completely alone. He lived there for a long time without making a single French friend. This total indifference came as a great relief and even as a mark of respect.

Baldwin’s “green”, presumably American, passport proclaimed that he was “a free citizen of a free country” and was not therefore to be treated as “one of Europe’s uncivilized black possessions”.

This same passport in the USA proclaimed that he was a “domestic n-----”.

Baldwin returned home in 1957 and eventually went South.

When he went South, he felt as though he had wandered into hell. What struck him was “the unbelievable dimension” of the people’s sorrow.

He says: “I have more faith in Southerners than I would ever have in Northerners.” “It is in the South and not in the North that the rebirth will begin.”

Baldwin writes absolutely what he means/feels. He tells us that “white Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people of any color, to be found in the world today”.

I found Baldwin to be vastly intelligent and intellectual but also wonderful at expressing his emotions in detail.

I have never previously experienced such a great writer as Baldwin, with such wonderful powers of expression.

This is a stimulating book. Not being American and not having visited the U.S., I cannot say how much of what Baldwin writes is relevant today, though I would think it all is in one way or another.

I highly recommend the book, which made a strong impression on me.

[nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

“..𝘢 𝘧𝘶𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘴𝘰 𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘭𝘺 𝘭𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘯𝘦’𝘴 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘬𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧, 𝘦𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘣𝘺 𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘺𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵, 𝘰𝘳 𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘥𝘰, 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵. 𝘜𝘭𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘴𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘱𝘢𝘺 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘥𝘶𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘱𝘢𝘺 𝘣𝘦𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘣𝘰𝘵𝘩 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘺 𝘢 𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘥𝘰 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘴𝘰 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘧𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘴 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘥𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘣𝘺 𝘪𝘵. 𝘖𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘸𝘪𝘴𝘦, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘶𝘳𝘦, 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘦, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘥. 𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘐 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘸𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥 𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳, 𝘢𝘯𝘥, 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳, 𝘯𝘰𝘸.”

Did Baldwin know that America would come to terms of divided means? In all the togetherness we tried to work towards, did he know that the ego of American attitudes, beyond anything, would overpower the actual needs of the backs America itself was built off of?

For a work that came out in 1972, it’s still a timely text, one that exhibits the purity from which Baldwin writes from, a heart full of hurt and warmth and a persistence to be a person. It scares me how attitudes, or the old heart, has never shifted away from its original desire, of pure sin, of, actually, a malevolent heart.

A work with aching poignancy, especially in its initial impressions on Baldwin’s own history, a memoir trying to situate the black identity from all the time he spent in Paris to understand himself, and understand America.

[Alvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like a sequel to The Fire Next Time, this is another thoughtful, clear-eyed, and eloquent missive from a particularly ghastly period in African American history. Baldwin's pessimism and despair following the assassination of so many of his compatriots is absolutely heart-rending.

[Helena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goodreads tells me I highlighted 22 things in this book. I usually highlight 0 things. Make of that what you will.

[Nathan Shuherk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly my favorite work by Baldwin I’ve read

[kehindeslibrary · Rating 5 out of 5]

“𝘌𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘣𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘮𝘦𝘯 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘺 𝘱𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘢 𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨: 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘦𝘯 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘸𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘢 𝘮𝘢𝘯’𝘴 𝘣𝘢𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘴.” - 𝘑𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘴 𝘉𝘢𝘭𝘥𝘸𝘪𝘯, 𝘕𝘰 𝘕𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘵

This essay collection, published in 1972, discusses the hardships of living as a black person in America and the collapse of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Baldwin also touches on vital historical moments: the death of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, ‘The Little Rock Nine’ and the ‘Baptist Street Church Bombing’, along with many other events I have not mentioned.

James Baldwin had such a brilliant mind, and said the harsh truths that many people were afraid to say.

No Name in the Street is full of despair, driven by pain and anger. Baldwin appears quite pessimistic, but I think he did this deliberately to make sure his message came across as strong. Which is understandable, seeing how Baldwin was a black man watching many of his heroes die because of the colour of their skin, seeing his people die because of the colour of their skin.

I thought it was really interesting yet important how James Baldwin talks about the discrimination towards the Algerian-French population.

During his time in Paris, Baldwin talks about the Algerian community, how “Algerians were being murdered in the streets.” This is something that I did not know, and it led me to do further research which is when I found out about ‘𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐥𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐖𝐚𝐫’ between the years 1954 and 1962 which resulted in Algeria gaining independence from France.

This essay should be required reading, and there is so much that Baldwin discusses throughout this essay, but here are some quotes that have left me speechless:

“In America, I was free only in battle, never free to rest — and he who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle.”

“People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.”

“The world in which we live is, after all, a reflection of the desires and activities of men. We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.”

“They were attempting to go to school. They were attempting to get an education, in a country in which education is a synonym for indoctrination, if you are white, and subjugation, if you are black.”

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

“yet hope—the hope that we, human beings, can be better than we are—dies hard; perhaps one can no longer live if one allows that hope to die.”

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some books are so powerful and profound that they take your breath away as you read them. This is just such a book. Not long ago I read Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" and was stunned by how lucid, eloquent, and angry it was. At the same time its anger was tempered by hope that things were perhaps still not too late. "No Name in the Street" abandons any such niceties. Written after the murders of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, various Black Panthers, and the imprisonment of his friends, Baldwin has no time for understanding or working to understand the white power structure. He understands it all too well. This is a full throated condemnation of the evils he sees around him. There are no punches pulled here.
From police brutality, white people stubbornly refusing to acknowledge anything is wrong, and people being shot down in the streets it feels at times like Baldwin has jumped into a time machine and is condemning America circa 2017 rather than 1972. Were Baldwin alive today, he clearly would recognise much of the same world he lived in. That we do not have enough people like him today to eloquently chronicle this is sad, but not nearly as sad as 40+ years of little to no progress.

[Christine Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

No Name in the Street is a new contender for my favorite James Baldwin book, and I don’t say that lightly. There were so many passages in this book that made me stop and turn the words over and over again in my mind because they feel so timely and relevant even today. It’s part memoir and part history of a turbulent period that encompasses the McCarthy witch hunts in America, the Algerian War for Independence from France, and the assassinations of Civil Rights leaders who were also personal friends of Baldwin’s. His observations here about colonial legacies and the systemic challenges to dismantling white supremacy are stunningly astute. But because this is James Baldwin, this is also a work of nonfiction that is so much more than the sum of its parts. When you read his words, you understand more about the universality of our experiences and about what it means to be human.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A slim-but-full memoir, in which Baldwin writes astutely / eloquently / elegantly with force about MLK, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Medgar Evers and others in the fight for justice. As well as relating pivotal points in his childhood, Baldwin covers historical / political events (i.e., The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, leading to civil / voting rights acts) that ran through his life; a life which always seemed to have him on the go or on the road.

He writes about being an outsider in France - though still not quite the outsider that the many Algerians living there (at the time) were. And he also writes at length about his frustrating experiences in helping to get a friend (formerly in his employ) out of jail and freed from a murder charge based on mistaken identity.

He writes about Black Panthers being misunderstood and the "doomed" Flower Children - "born into a society in which nothing was harder to achieve, in which perhaps nothing was more scorned and feared than the idea of the soul's maturity." (Such maturity of the soul was too explosive for those in government and finance.)

Whatever Baldwin writes about, of course, he is writing about race, with voice-in-the-wilderness furor and clarity. In speaking of America (and an American government in the shadow of white supremacy), Baldwin appropriately adopts the "fish rots from the head down" philosophy.

Although this book is approx. 50 years old, it feels current. It reminds us of exactly how far we still have to go in becoming the country we say we want to be. I read the following words, for example, and thought of how deeply both Parties in DC government are compromised:

It demands a tremendous effort of the will and an absolute surrender of the personality to act on the lies one tells oneself. It is not true that people become liars without knowing it. A liar always knows he is lying, and that is why liars travel in packs: in order to be reassured that the judgment day will never come for them. They need each other for the well-being, the health, the perpetuation of the lie. They have a tacit agreement to guard each other's secrets, for they have the same secret.

Here as elsewhere, Baldwin's words remain potent - and are often gorgeously assembled.

[Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part memoir, part social commentary, this book, as is seemingly true of all his works, is written with elegance and passion.

Written from 1967 to 1971, Baldwin muses over various topics: Malcolm X, the death of MLK, the flower children of San Francisco, Huey Newton, and the arrest and imprisonment of his friend William “Tony” Maynard — this travesty of justice likely being the inspiration for his book, “If Beale Street Could Talk.”

Baldwin’s piercing insights and calls for justice are, sadly, still relevant today. I can’t help dropping in a couple of quotes:

“White America remains unable to believe that black America’s grievances are real; they are unable to believe this because they cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country; and the effect of this massive and hostile incomprehension is to increase the danger in which all black people live here, especially the young.”

“To be an Afro-American, or an American black, is to be in the situation, intolerably exaggerated, of all those who have ever found themselves part of a civilization which they could in no wise honorably defend— which they were compelled, indeed endlessly to attack and condemn— and who yet spoke out of the most passionate love, hoping to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life. Whoever is part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspects of it, and some of the people in it. A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one’s compatriots than be mocked and tested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of the people, even their hatred, is moving because it’s so blind: it is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction. I think black people have always felt this about America, and Americans, and have always seen, spinning above the thoughtless American head, the shape of the wrath to come.”