Anti-racism: James Baldwin: Entirely of this world

If you open the text of “Blues for Mr. Charlie” and look at the list of characters in this piece at the beginning, you will be amazed. Does one find here the theatrical reflection of the real racial separation in the real capitalism in the United States of America in the 1960s? All characters appearing are neatly separated in “black” and “white”. Above the residents of “Blacktown”, below those of “Whitetown”.

Is this a provocation? Only insofar as the reflection of real conditions provokes and should provoke us all. The discomfort that arises from this impression continues immediately with the first sentence spoken on stage: “So that all niggers die like this nigger – with his face in the dust.”

The author of these lines is James Baldwin, who did not gain fame for his two plays, but as an outstanding novelist, an essayist and a public figure who was prepared to clearly and loudly express the indictment of the prevailing conditions.

Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924 in the Harlem district of New York to a single mother, and soon grew up with eight siblings with her husband, a worker and preacher. His youth was marked by the constant discrimination that he faced from outside as a black man and by restrictions from within that determined his growing up in a fundamentalist religious household. The break with Christianity was followed by a precarious existence as a casual worker and his first attempts at writing.

To escape American racism, his path took him to post-war Paris, where he was forced to continue his life in poverty. In 1953, back home, Baldwin published his autobiographical debut novel “Go tell it on the mountain” (published in German under the titles “Go and announce it from the mountain” and “From this world”). The book marked his breakthrough. This was followed by further novels that have been filmed several times (“Another World” and “Beale Street Blues,” for example), aggressive essays, decisive involvement in the civil rights movement and a lifelong movement between France and the USA until his death from cancer in December 1987.

But what about Baldwin’s plays and the aforementioned Mister Charlie? Mister Charlie – that is the name of every white gentleman in the USA in the late 50s and early 60s, when the piece was written before it premiered in 1964. And these white masters only put up with black people’s music. Even that seems like enough of a concession to them.

The three-act play was inspired by the case of Emmet Till, who was murdered at the age of 14 for reasons of the most primitive racial hatred. The perpetrator was acquitted; His brother, who was guilty of accessory to murder even though he was not found guilty, had a career in the police service ahead of him. The worst excesses of omnipresent racism, which are not exceptional, but rather exemplary in nature. We continue to live with the progression and consequences of this inhumanity to this day.

In “Blues for Mr. Charlie,” Baldwin painted a complex social panorama in short scenes. We see these people before us: the black man filled with hatred by ongoing discrimination; the black woman who dreams of a modest improvement in her situation within what seems possible; the black preacher who tries to face racism with equanimity and fails. But also the white racists who pride themselves on their supposed open-mindedness. Almost all of them are members of an impoverished or impoverished class in the American middle ground, the very people who we know make up a large part of the Trump electorate today. The oppression of “ordinary” working southerners seems to inflame their hatred of blacks.

There is something incredibly cinematic about the piece; it may lack the virtuosity of Baldwin’s later novels, but it is a thought-provoking contemporary document. And it already contains all the themes, more or less central, that also characterize his prose: the white slaveholder mentality, which continued in the 20th century, misogyny, anti-communism, social contradictions and – quite unusual at this time – homosexuality . The clear and precise depiction of the undignified real conditions has an enlightening effect in the best sense of the word.

Baldwin’s debut drama “Amen Corner” was written in 1954. 75 US dollars, which Marlon Brando lent him, served as a loan for work on this play, the content of which corresponds closely to “Go tell it on the mountain” and almost 30 years after his The publication became the basis for a Broadway musical of the same name. At the center is a preacher who seeks an escape from her precarious existence through faith. However, she cannot escape social reality, nor can she escape her own feelings of inferiority. “Margaret lives in the church because the social order has left her no other place,” Baldwin wrote in a note accompanying the three-act play.

No, these are not stirring pieces that are available in a, perhaps somewhat ponderous, German translation by Kai Molvig (“Blues for Mr. Charlie”) and Joachim Seyppel (“Amen Corner”). It is questionable whether they can still be played today, especially on a German stage. However, Baldwin shows the social wounds mercilessly, but it doesn’t stop there: he also shows us their causes, describes their course – and only in this way, one would think, can healing be possible. There are good reasons why these wounds still concern us today.