Today, James Baldwin’s legacy seems assured, but this wasn’t always the case. His critical reputation, already on the wane in his lifetime, declined after his death in 1987. On the publication of the Library of America’s Collected Essays and Early Novels & Stories a decade later, Michael Anderson, writing in the New York Times, complained of his “intellectual flaccidity”. He also dismissed The Fire Next Time – Baldwin’s searing 1963 essay diptych on the US’s legacy of racial injustice – as an overly emotional “period piece”. If such a verdict was out of touch then, six years after the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King, it seems, now, pitifully shortsighted.
An inflection point in the Baldwin revival arrived in the form of Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016), which juxtaposes footage of modern-day protest and racist police violence with clips of Baldwin’s civil rights-era speechmaking. It’s an effective technique, capturing Baldwin’s prescience as well as reasserting his rightful place as a key witness to that bloody era (“witness” was Baldwin’s preferred name for the writer-spokesperson-celebrity mantle he had assumed by the mid-60s; a title that captures something of its moral obligation and frustrating passivity).
