James Baldwin: The FBI File

By William J. Maxwell

Available in book form for the first time, the FBI's secret dossier on the legendary and controversial writer.

Decades before Black Lives Matter returned James Baldwin to prominence, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI considered the Harlem-born author the most powerful broker between black art and black power. Baldwin’s 1,884-page FBI file, covering the period from 1958 to 1974, was the largest compiled on any African American artist of the Civil Rights era. This collection of once-secret documents, never before published in book form, captures the FBI’s anxious tracking of Baldwin’s writings, phone conversations, and sexual habitsand Baldwin’s defiant efforts to spy back at Hoover and his G-men.

James Baldwin: The FBI File reproduces over one hundred original FBI records, selected by the noted literary historian whose award-winning book, F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, brought renewed attention to bureau surveillance. William J. Maxwell also provides an introduction exploring Baldwin's enduring relevance in the time of Black Lives Matter along with running commentaries that orient the reader and offer historical context, making this book a revealing look at a crucial slice of the American pastand present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcade
• Release date: Jun 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781628727388

Book preview

Cover Page of James BaldwinHalf Title of James Baldwin

Also by William J. Maxwell

New Negro, Old Left:

African American Writing and Communism between the Wars (1999)

Claude McKay, Complete Poems (editor, 2004)

F. B. Eyes:

How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (2015)

Title Page of James Baldwin

Copyright © 2017 by William J. Maxwell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

First Edition

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Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Maxwell, William J. (College teacher), author.

Title: James Baldwin : the FBI file / William J. Maxwell.

Description: New York : Arcade Publishing, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016058378 | ISBN 9781628727371 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Baldwin, James, 1924-1987. | African American

Authors—Biography. | American literature—African American

Authors—History and criticism. | United States. Federal Bureau of

Investigation—History—20th century. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States /

20th Century. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. | SOCIAL SCIENCE /

Ethnic Studies / African American Studies.

Classification: LCC PS3552.A45 Z822 2017 | DDC 818/.5409 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058378

Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

Cover photo by Dave Pickoff: Associated Press

ISBN: 978-1-62872-737-1

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-738-8

Printed in China

CONTENTS

Introduction: Baldwin and His File after Black Lives Matter

Born-Again Baldwin

Filed-Again Baldwin

What’s in—and Not in—This Edition of the Baldwin File

Sources of Quotations in the Introduction

Permissions

Acknowledgments

James Baldwin’s FBI File, Sampled and Explained

  1   Graphic Evidence: 1963, 1964, and 1966

  2   Baldwin’s Frech Accent on African Independence: June 1961

  3   Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad Praise Brother Baldwin: July 1961

  4   Another Country as Obscene Specimen: September and October 1962

  5   What Do Our Files Show on James Baldwin?: May 1963

  6   Baldwin as Homosexual—and Public Enemy: May 1963

  7   The White House Listens In: June 1963

  8   The Bureau Prepares Its Counterattack: June 1963

  9   Buckley versus Baldwin: June 1963

10   Another Country’s Value to Students of Psychology and Social Behavior: June, August, and September 1963

11   Better Qualified to Lead a Homo-Sexual Movement than a Civil Rights Movement: September 1963

12   Baldwin Baits J. Edgar Hoover—and Bureaucratic Hell Breaks Loose: September 1963

13   Negroes Are Thinking Seriously of Assassinating Martin Luther King: September 1963

14   The Bureau Reviews The Fire Next Time: October 1963

15   Photos of Baldwin in Selma: October 1963

16   A Falling Out with Sexual Proclivities: October 1963

17   The USIA Censors Baldwin: October 1963

18   Ask J. Edgar Hoover—Is Baldwin A Known Communist?: October 1963

19   J. Edgar Hoover Asks Is Baldwin on Our Security Index?: December 1963

20   The Biography of James Arthur Baldwin, Security Matter: December 1963

21   A Dangerous Individual Who Could Be Expected to Commit Acts Inimical to the National Defense: December 1963

22   Hello, Baby, How Are You?—FBI Sexual Linguistics: January 1964

23   Baldwin Meets a Deadline: January 1964

24   Baldwin Speaks—after Robert Dillon [the] Beatnik Type Entertainer: January 1964

25   Public Shaming through Public Sources: January 1964

26   The FBI Combs Baldwin’s Passport: February 1964

27   Signifying Nothing: February 1964

28   An Attempt to Interview Him Could Prove Highly Embarrassing: March 1964

29   Baldwin as COINTELPRO Audience: April 1964

30   The Bureau Stalks Baldwin on Broadway: May 1964

31   Baldwin and His Aliases: June 1964

32   The Blood Counters and Baldwin Countersurveillance, Part 1: June and July 1964

33   The Blood Counters and Baldwin Countersurveillance, Part 2: July 1964

34   Isn’t Baldwin a Well Known Pervert?—Hoover Weighs In: July 1964

35   Baldwin the Riot-Starter: July and August 1964

36   The Blood Counters and Baldwin Countersurveillance, Part 3: August 1964

37   Trashing Baldwin: September 1964

38   Baldwin Will Quit U.S. if Goldwater Wins: October 1964

39   Citizen Literary Criticism, Part 1: Texas on Another Country: January 1965

40   Citizen Literary Criticism, Part 2: Mississippi on Blues for Mister Charlie: April and May 1965

41   Buckley on The Baldwin Syndrome: June 1965

42   Where in the World Was James Baldwin?: March, April, and October 1966

43   Baldwin Reported to the Secret Service—the Author as Assassin: April 1966

44   White House Visits and Name Checks: May 1966

45   Sharing with the State Department—and the CIA: November and December 1966

46   FBI Internationalism in Action—Baldwin Traced and Translated in Turkey: November and December 1966

47   An Airline Source and a Pretext Interview: January 1967

48   Bureaucratic Discipline and the Subject’s Eviction from an Apartment in Turkey for Homosexual Activities: March and April 1967

49   Back in the USA—with a Lookout Waiting: September 1967

50   Of London, Baldwin’s New York Wife, and Foreign Auto Sales: December 1967

51   Baldwin and Other Independent Black Nationalist Extremists: January 1968

52   The Bureau of Accurate Statistics: February 1968

53   Clippers and Informers on The Life of Malcolm X: March 1968

54   Two Separate Films on the Life of the Subject: March 1968

55   The Problem with Paraphrase: April 1968

56   Baldwin the Black Panther: May 1968

57   Truman Capote, FBI Source, and James Baldwin, Negro: May and June 1968

58   Returning on a Jet Plane: July 1968

59   Hostesses for This Party Wore Long African Style Clothes—Baldwin Speaks for SNCC: August 1968

60   Flying the Coop and Presently Checking His Baggage through Customs: February and April 1969

61   Indiscreet Book Buying: July 1969

62   Baldwin in Other FBI Files: July 1969

63   Baldwin’s Method of Working Is Strange: December 1969

64   Citizen Literary Criticism, Part 3: California on The Fire Next Time: April 1970

65   Baldwin Testifies for Sister Angela—and the Bureau Relaxes Its Vigil: January, May, June, and August 1971

66   Rapping on A Rap on Race: April and September 1971

67   From the Security to the Administrative Index: April 1972

68   The Last Book Purchase—No Name in the Street: July 1972

69   The Last Translation—"L’Express Continues with James Baldwin": August 1972

70   Baldwin off the Administrative Index—The FBI Says Goodbye: March 1974

Sources of Quotations in the Commentaries

Index to the Introduction and Commentaries

Introduction

BALDWIN AND HIS FILE AFTER BLACK LIVES MATTER

Born-Again Baldwin

James Baldwin, buried on December 8, 1987, often looks like today’s most vital and most cherished new African American author. This impression doesn’t rest on the faith in bodily resurrection that Baldwin abandoned along with his teenage ministry in Harlem. Nor does it slight Teju Cole, Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Young, and the rest of the emerging literary competition—though it’s true that one leading light in that competition, Ta-Nehisi Coates, has suffered as well as profited from Toni Morrison’s pronouncement that he fills the intellectual void opened by Baldwin’s passing. Instead, the impression that Baldwin has returned to preeminence, unbowed and unwrinkled, reflects his special ubiquity in the imagination of Black Lives Matter. As Eddie Glaude Jr. observes, "Jimmy is everywhere in the advocacy and self-scrutiny of the young activists who bravely transformed the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Natasha McKenna, and far too many others into a sweeping national movement against police brutality and campus racism. For these activists, disruptive and creative and warning of new fires next time, Jimmy himself has filled the void traced to his death. Something like the Shakespeare of Stephen Dedalus, the Baldwin of Black Lives Matter is his own true father—one who rehearsed for the role, it’s worth remembering, by raising several of his eight younger siblings and by peppering his live speech and written dialogue with the hip endearment of baby. With ironic paternalism, Baldwin habitually applied this sweet nothing to that set of permanent children proud of their whiteness. So I give you your problem back, he schooled a not especially fresh-faced interviewer in 1963, You’re the nigger, baby, it isn’t me."

It’s no state secret, of course, that Black Lives Matter, or BLM for short, is a movement fueled by electronic social media, by the graphic smartphone video followed by the mobile demonstration advertised on Facebook and choreographed in real time via Twitter. The thing about [Martin Luther] King or Ella Baker and the rest of the civil rights pantheon, explains DeRay Mckesson, the most prominent face of the movement’s techno-optimism, is that they could not just wake up and sit at breakfast and talk to a million people. The tools that we have to organize and resist are fundamentally different than what’s existed before in black struggle. Regardless of the new advantages of instant mass communication, however, BLM has also begun to reorder the slow time of the African American literary canon like the Civil Rights Movement before it. Whatever BLM’s cumulative political significance will be—the jury remains out amid white backlash, the election of backlasher-in-chief Donald Trump, the tragic assassination of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, and the slow fade of direct action as a defining BLM tactic—it has already adopted more than one literary muse and has already stamped black literary history.

Considered as a generational sensibility indebted but not confined to the #BlackLivesMatter platform launched in 2013, BLM has embraced a lyrically withering essayist, the previously mentioned Coates, and has appointed an academic poet laureate, the National Book Award finalist Claudia Rankine. It has recuperated a militant memoirist, Assata Shakur, whose 1987 autobiography, written in Cuban exile, now rivals The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) as a passport to 1960s-style Black Nationalism. The medley of poetry, radical confession, selective legal history, and anti-racist name-taking in Assata—an unexpected pre-echo of Rankine’s multigeneric collection Citizen (2014)—has also yielded BLM’s best-loved poem, a rewrite into rough ballad meter of the climax of The Communist Manifesto memorized and mass-chanted by thousands of protestors in dozens of American cities. It is our duty to fight for our freedom, Shakur’s twice-historical lines direct,

It is our duty to win.

We must love each other and support each other.

We have nothing to lose but our chains.

Yet while Shakur is the author of BLM’s If We Must Die, its