Very good chapter on Baldwin in a book I just read most of , "Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement, " by Carol Polsgrove. The acct. of Baldwin's meeting, along with other black intellectuals and artists like Lorraine Hansbury, w/ Bobby Kennedy was quite interesting.
The amazon.com feature, Look Inside, " allows one to read an excerpt.
Editorial Reviews
>From Publishers Weekly
In the decade after Brown v. Board of Education, "white intellectuals,
in the North and the South... having helped for so long to keep
Negroes apart and below... were faced with the challenge of racial
equality," asserts Polsgrove (It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, but Didn't We
Have Fun? Esquire in the Sixties). In this disturbing book, she shows
them to have been "fearful, cautious, distracted, or simply
indifferent." Based on interviews and archival research, she indicts
not only prominent novelists and thinkers, including William Faulkner,
Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt and even the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr
("none better exemplifies the caution that northern white
intellectuals... displayed toward desegregation"), but also their
editors (who were "more interested in southern whites' responses to
the Negro challenge than in what Negroes had to say") and the media,
which "at a time when national magazines ought to have been leading
the way to change... opened their pages to those who resisted it."
Many of the best-known African-American novelists, cowed by "the
emotional and political atmosphere of the McCarthy days," fare little
better than their white counterparts in Polsgrove's hands. Only a few
heroes emerge from her portrait: Lillian Smith, Kenneth Clark,
Lawrence Reddick, James Silver, and most importantly, James Baldwin.
Polsgrove concludes her accessible and disturbing account with a
thought-provoking broadside against contemporary American
intellectuals, who she thinks "have abandoned their responsibility
even more completely" than those in the 1950s and 1960s and whose
"publishing industry has moved farther and farther from any sense of
obligation for the social enterprise." (May) Forecast: A wide range of
periodicals (and their editors) from major weeklies and monthlies to
small journals take a thrashing here. Polsgrove could set off a
firestorm if she doesn't get the silent treatment.
-- Michael Pugliese