Contact sheet of photographs from the National Day of Mourning for the Children of Birmingham

RICH BLINT: Baldwin is angry in 1963, in September of that year. He’s angry and bitter at the moral failure of the Kennedy administration, that the country had failed to live up to its moral responsibility. 

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR: Dr. Rich Blint is a professor, writer, critic, and Baldwin scholar. His forthcoming book is titled A Radical Interiority: James Baldwin and the Personified Self in Modern American Culture.

BLINT: What we’re looking at here are images of James Baldwin speaking in lower Manhattan at Foley Square on September 22, 1963. He was speaking before several thousand people on what was called then a National Day of Mourning. 

GATES: One week earlier, four little girls were murdered when white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Civil rights leaders urged President Kennedy to use the full force of his office to intervene, to provide Black people in Birmingham with protection and give them a sense of hope. Instead, President Kennedy supported a local solution. 

BLINT: What we’re witnessing is a sober James Baldwin, a Baldwin who’s had enough. A James Baldwin who is turning more and more to his radical activist posture. This reluctant spokesperson for Black America has decided that the American Revolution is really about to be achieved through people standing up very directly against violence against Black lives.

GATES: Baldwin told the crowd that the only way to get the country’s attention would be to stage a nationwide campaign of economic-based civil disobedience.

BLINT: He’s telling them that it was time to not do business as usual. To stop paying your rent, to stop buying TVs, to kind of make the country confront itself, and the only way he knew how at the time was to hit it in its pockets. He was also imploring the country to confront the distance that yawned between its public stances and their private innermost feelings towards this thing that they’ve invented called “the Black man.” 

What he’s really after, all of this life, for four decades, in all of his writing, it seems to me, is trying to render clearly that race is a man-made thing. What he always said is that: “You’re only white because you think I’m Black.”

It’s not a “Negro Problem.” It’s a problem of the fact that you’re pointing at something that you’ve actually invented. And I think on a day like this, he wants to give that problem back.