James Baldwin and the F.I.R.E. Next Time
Or, alternatively titled, Lessons from James Baldwin for the F.I.R.E. Sector
“I attest to this: the world is not white; it never was white, cannot be white. White is a metaphor for power, and that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank.”
James Baldwin, 1980
Finance, insurance, and real estate industries — a group represented by the acronym FIRE — have been the subject of prominent news stories over the last several months. In November 2022, The New York Times echoed decades of research[i],[ii] and reported on widespread racist discrimination in real estate.[iii] Following these reports, federal regulators held hearings on real estate appraisals and fair housing.[iv] In March 2023, climate activists, having consistently called on banks to divest from fossil fuels, held direct actions at banks’ headquarters[v] to call attention to the fact that these U.S.-based institutions account for 28% of the world’s fossil fuel financing.[vi] That same month, Silicon Valley Bank, a key lender to technology start-up companies, collapsed and was subsequently shut down by regulators.[vii],[viii]
The recent attention on finance, insurance, and real estate companies is warranted. The FIRE sector commands 30% of all corporate profits and its annual profits reached $4 trillion in 2022.[ix] And, as an indicator of its effective lobbying for increased political and economic power, the FIRE sector has doubled its share of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) during the last half century.[x]
Scholars and organizers can deepen critical insights into the contemporary FIRE sector — and the implications for surveillance vis-à-vis its concomitant technological advances — by studying the historic works and life experiences of Black writers and activists, such as those who were a part of Black Power and Civil Rights movements. For instance, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) 1960s pamphlet, The Care and Feeding of Power Structures, describes research activities into banks’ lending activities, municipal bond financing, and private companies’ stockholders.[xi]
As one example, I review James Baldwin’s writings and documentation about his life experiences. Throughout his writing, Baldwin describes banks, insurance companies, and real estate agencies as engines of capitalism and financiers of racism. For instance, in his 17-page poem Staggerlee wonders, Baldwin describes White racism in financial terms. He calculates the criminally high cost of White people’s feigned innocence, when confronted with their own racism, as a price that falls “somewhere between the airport and the safe-deposit box, the buying and selling of rising or falling stocks.”[xii] These lines read a lot like the investment advice to buy when stock prices are low and sell when they’re high: a blueprint for profiting off of someone else’s loss.
To show the potential for generative insights, I undertake a methodical review of Baldwin’s works of fiction, nonfiction, speeches, interviews, and poetry, as well as the 1,884-page dossier that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) collected on Baldwin as part of its domestic counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO. FIRE industries have embedded technology into routine practices, making it possible to deploy algorithms to automate lending decisions and use purchase histories to track a person’s whereabouts. I review FBI files and illustrate the pervasiveness and harms of modern surveillance in the context of FIRE by studying Baldwin’s experiences.
Baldwin’s works and writings demonstrate the importance of making linkages between the FIRE sector and White supremacy across multiple contexts and of applying critical power analyses for understanding injustices. This includes how entrenched technology obscures racism and the implications of quotidian surveillance of social life.
Baldwin recognized how the FIRE sector and the wealth it controlled were intimately linked to racism across multiple contexts, such as housing and education.
Baldwin delivered one of his most well-known and searing critiques of the FIRE sector at a national symposium held in Detroit, Michigan in 1980. The symposium was convened to discuss a recent lawsuit that focused on Black children’s education. Baldwin realized that the FIRE sector was implicated in racism in education. During his keynote address, titled Black English: A Dishonest Argument, Baldwin said, “I attest to this: the world is not white; it never was white, cannot be white. White is a metaphor for power, and that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank.”[xiii]
A year earlier, a federal judge had ruled on a lawsuit filed in Michigan that was consequential to the education of Black children nationwide. At the request of concerned Black mothers, Michigan Legal Services filed Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children v. Ann Arbor School District Board on behalf of their children who were not receiving adequate education. The students attending King Elementary were predominantly White and wealthy. The children represented in the lawsuit were poor, Black, and living in a public housing project. Whereas the school blamed cognitive deficits as the reason children had not learned to read, mothers suspected the reason was racism on the part of teachers and the school.
The lawsuit became known as the “Black English Case.” Baldwin wrote publicly about the case, whose thrust into the national spotlight obscured the significance of mothers’ original concerns. Baldwin argued the case was about the nation’s racism against Black children as opposed to their language. In a 1979 New York Times article, If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?, Baldwin wrote, “It is not the black child’s language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience.”
Baldwin understood the interconnecting injustices that Black children in the lawsuit had experienced, and that Black children around the country were experiencing. By wielding the FIRE sector in their favor, White people had segregated Black families into public housing and foreclosed children’s educational opportunities despite their enrollment in one of the nation’s wealthiest districts. Since racism is well-documented and widespread, we can also expect that White employers and landlords joined in blocking Black mothers from realizing better opportunities for their children by dismissing job and housing applications. And, that White bankers and lenders denied them credit.
Baldwin’s critique of the FIRE sector, which he deployed during this symposium focused on Black children’s education, is routinely quoted in opposition to wealthy and powerful financial industries.[xiv],[xv],[xvi]
Baldwin’s keen power analyses made it possible for him to identify connections between the FIRE sector and White supremacy.
One reason the FIRE sector makes regular appearances in Baldwin’s writings is because he deployed critical analyses of power. In his 1972 nonfiction book No Name in the Street, Baldwin writes, “To study the economic structure of this country, to know which hands control the wealth…is necessary, all of it is necessary, for discipline, for knowledge, and for power.”
In focusing on power, Baldwin moved adeptly between individual experiences and their attendant institutional causes. In a 1968 interview on the Dick Cavett show, Baldwin said, “I don’t know what most white people in this country feel. But I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions…I don’t know whether the real estate lobby has anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobby is keeping me in the ghetto.” Baldwin linked an individual experience of segregation to nationwide patterns held in place by the real estate lobby — metaphors for power and White supremacy.
Baldwin’s testimony often exposed the whiteness that, in the words of sociologist and literary genius Tressie McMillan Cottom, “has the power to hide in plain sight.”[xvii] White supremacy falsely asserts that White people are the superior and dominant race.[xviii] Capitalism takes advantage of this false assertion and pursues profits by relying on racial hierarchy.[xix]
As superficial yet telling indicators of the FIRE sector’s synonymy with whiteness, banks and finance companies employ Black and brown workers, frequently, in the lowest paid and most contingent positions.[xx] Eighty-one percent of bank executives are white[xxi] and 71% are men.[xxii] The numbers are the same for their boards.
Baldwin’s world-renowned success and prestige did not protect him from the FIRE sector’s racism — practices that technological advancements are helping to entrench and obscure.
Finance and real estate companies have long used racist redlining practices to maintain segregation; that is, refusing to lend to Black and brown borrowers or providing credit at exorbitant interest rates.[xxiii],[xxiv] Despite his success (or even because of it), Baldwin was not spared the FIRE sector’s racism.
The FIRE sector that segregated New York City where Baldwin lived also delivered the personal indignity of denying his application for a Diner’s Club Card despite his satisfactory credit.[xxv] The Diner’s Club Card was popularized in the 1950s and 1960s as a precursor to consumer credit cards that transact on electronic payments systems. The Diner’s Club Card enacted what surveillance scholar, Chris Gilliard, describes as a form of “digital redlining.”[xxvi] That is, digital technologies replicate in virtual spaces the racist redlining observed in physical ones. The FIRE sector flexed its power and the Diner’s Club organization denied Baldwin’s application in 1961 — over 10 years after the publication of his first book and despite his rising international reputation.
The denial of his Diner’s Club Card application was only one of the indignities related to credit that Baldwin experienced. Baldwin struggled to secure financing for his 1964 play, Blues for Mr. Charlie.[xxvii] The three-act play was about the murder of a young Black man in Mississippi by a White supremacist and loosely based on the murder of Emmett Till. As he was writing the script, Baldwin’s friend and civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated by a White supremacist.[xxviii] Baldwin, having recently traveled with Evers through Mississippi to investigate the murder of a different Black man by a different White supremacist, dedicated the play to Evers and his family.[xxix]
A month before the scheduled opening, the play’s producer changed the terms of their original agreement. The company, concerned about profits, notified Baldwin that he would need to put up $50,000 to open the play.[xxx] Not having access to that amount of cash or credit on short notice, Baldwin gave up his royalty claims and sought donations to keep the play going. Baldwin told a reporter for The New York Times, “I must work to keep the play alive because I don’t like to go down without a fight, partly because of devotion to the people in the play.”[xxxi] The play ran for four months at the August Wilson Theatre and, since its debut, has been performed nearly 150 times.[xxxii]
The FIRE sector habitually determined that Baldwin and the truths he offered was too great a credit risk. Despite being an accomplished and internationally-regarded writer, Baldwin lacked what sociologist Victor Ray describes as a necessary credential for banking and borrowing money: whiteness.[xxxiii]
The FIRE sector encodes whiteness with words like ‘identification’ and ‘risk,’ factors through which finance, insurance, and real estate companies can disguise racist practices. Banks do not routinely ask White customers for government-issued identification in the same ways they ask Black and brown customers, making whiteness the only credential that some customers need.[xxxiv],[xxxv],[xxxvi] Insurance companies price in the risk of losing out on profits depending on how long it will take policy holders to die. Life insurance companies charge lower premiums to White people whose economic and social power literally affords a comparatively longer average life span, while squeezing more money out of Black people’s premature death by charging higher premiums.[xxxvii] Premature death makes faster profits.
The FIRE sector gives White supremacy an alibi through these forms of encoding. This obfuscation is furthered by the sector’s increasing reliance on technologies with origins in enslavement. Sociologists Simone Browne,[xxxix] Tamara Nopper,[xl] and Jessie Daniels[xli] show how racism is digitized with implications for social relations. Banks maintained the financial ledgers of slavery, calculating the worth of enslaved Black peoples as wealth for White slave owners.[xlii] Today, a series of programmed decisions discreetly evaluates a potential borrower’s risk alongside their race to render a credit decision.
Baldwin, who died of cancer in 1987,[xliii] didn’t live long enough to glimpse the FIRE sector’s contemporary technologies, such as the use of artificial intelligence to underwrite loans or the invention of cryptocurrencies built on the blockchain. However, he was very familiar with the constant surveillance that these technologies require and their implications, especially for Black life.
Surveillance was a routine part of Baldwin’s life and remains quotidian for those who challenge systems of power and oppression.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, under the rule of its first director, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI spied on James Baldwin as part the domestic counterintelligence program, known as COINTELPRO. The FBI collected an 1,884-page dossier over 11 years that included transcripts from telephone wiretaps, agent field notes, letters, photographs, news articles, employment records, and speeches.[xliv] This surveillance and the data it produced infringed on his privacy and mocked his work. And, the FBI’s surveillance stretched beyond Baldwin in attempts to ensnare activists like Malcolm X, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and others with whom Baldwin communicated.
While Baldwin took great care in writing what he witnessed, the FBI haphazardly documented Baldwin’s movements. The FBI had a narrow and dishonest view that left the agency incapable of completing the task it had assigned itself. Baldwin likened Hoover to King Lear, a person who acquired illegitimate power and presided ineffectually over a divided nation.[xlv] From Hoover’s perspective, the FBI’s task was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” those whom he believed to be “radicals,” “subversives,” and, in homophobic reference to Baldwin’s queerness, “pervert[s],”[xlvi] capable of destroying the nation. Like the biased data collection of today’s technology companies whose omnipresence magnifies the consequences of their errors, the FBI was careless with their subject and filled in gaps with disinformation.
The FBI files on Baldwin contain a multitude of errors. Agents mistook the affectionate names for Baldwin bestowed upon him by friends, such as “Jim,” “Jimmy,” and “James,” as independent “aliases” that supposedly evidenced his multiple criminal identities. Director Hoover aimed investigations into Baldwin’s sexuality, considering it part of the agency’s job and a matter of national importance to catalog this information.[xlvii] Though, the files even contain errors regarding Baldwin’s sexuality — a demographic descriptor that should have been easy enough to document since he was openly gay.
Yet, the pursuit of data accuracy can dangerously expand the scale and scope of surveillance. Armed with accurate and timely knowledge of Baldwin’s whereabouts, the FBI could have disrupted his freedom of movement and those of his friends and comrades more than they already did. The life and death consequences of contemporary surveillance are clear, as some states collect the names of transgender youth to prevent their access to healthcare and force their compliance with hegemonic ideas about gender.[xlviii],[xlix] Immigrants and pregnant people are at heightened risk as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) steps up raids and arrests[l] and police imprison people seeking abortions.[li]
The FIRE sector’s use of technology expands surveillance by collecting structurally-biased data, which heightens the potential for reinforcing White supremacy and disciplining the public. With a few key strokes, a banker can track your whereabouts based on your purchase history. An insurance agent can map your travel in real time thanks to repurposing a GPS tracker in your car that evaluates your safe driving practices in exchange for a reduced rate. And both types of workers, whether requested by police or compelled by the courts, can turn your data over to the state. We are all subject to these consequences; though, the people surveilled most closely by institutions of the “American delusion,” as Baldwin called it — often poor and Black and brown women — are at greater risk of discipline and punishment.
Baldwin also linked the FIRE sector to contexts in which hyper surveillance is common, such as military and carceral systems. In This Far and No Further, a nonfiction essay written in 1983, Baldwin writes, “Without pursuing the fascinating economics of a system which permits the State to profit from the Criminal while forcing Society to pay for the Prisoner, it is interesting that Society numbly shakes the collective head when told — not asked — about the latest expensive bash at the Pentagon.” Later, Baldwin implicates the FIRE sector directly, writing, “But rarely is the Prisoner someone who has managed to embezzle, say, two or three million dollars. Rarely is it someone who has managed to bankrupt the public trust: rare and spectacular it is that the Prisoner has been dragged from the seats of power.”
Rarely is the finance or technology executive — typically a White man controlling trillions of dollars and indeterminate amounts of structurally-biased data and presiding over a sector that routinely bankrupts the public trust — threatened to be disavowed of their power.
Scholars and organizers can follow Baldwin’s example: conducting research that analyzes power, contributing to the dismantling of harmful institutions, and changing the world.
Scholars and organizers can learn from Baldwin by analyzing power and investigating how the FIRE sector reinforces racism across multiple, simultaneous contexts. In the process, scholars and organizers develop insights into the FIRE sector and technologies of surveillance. These insights can contribute to efforts for the brick-by-brick dismantling of harmful institutions. Or, in our digital age of finance, erasing the code line-by-line and scrubbing the data bit-by-bit.
In many ways, Baldwin considered dismantling the FIRE sector, which was propping up White supremacy, as vital for changing the world. In We Can Change the Country, a nonfiction essay written in 1963, Baldwin called for a “massive campaign of civil disobedience,” saying that, “We’ve got to bring the cat out of hiding. And where is he? He’s hiding in the bank. We’ve got to flush him out.”[liii] It is possible to expose and dismantle White supremacy enjoying state-sanctioned sanctuary in the vault while denying the same protections to poor and racialized others. A bank can be closed. It’s vault can be dismantled.[liv] New ways of lending money and sharing resources can be built.
In the conclusion to one of his most iconic nonfiction books, Baldwin invites us to glimpse the possibilities of ending “the racial nightmare” of White supremacy in the U.S. — a nightmare that the FIRE sector has flamed. The Fire Next Time was published in 1963 during an era when Baldwin witnessed punishing White supremacist violence. His friends and comrades including Malcolm X, Angela Y. Davis, Huey Netwon, Rev. Dr. King, Jr., Bobby Seale, and Fred Hampton were imprisoned or assassinated for telling the truth about White supremacy.[lv] As much then as now, his message implores us to change the world while invoking the consequences of failing, “If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”
References
[i] Faber, J.W. (2020). We built this: Consequences of New Deal era intervention in America’s racial geography. American Sociological Review, 85(5), 739–775. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0003122420948464
[ii] Korver-Glenn, E. (2021). Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
[iii] Kamin, D. (2022, November 2). Widespread racial bias found in home appraisals. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/realestate/racial-bias-home-appraisals.html
[iv] Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. (2023). Appraisal Subcommittee. Washington, DC: Federal Housing Finance Agency. https://www.asc.gov/node/266053
[v] Copley, M., & Moura, P. (2023, March 23). Climate activists target nation’s biggest banks, urging divestment from fossil fuels. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/22/1165127291/climate-change-activists-target-big-banks-divest-from-fossil-fuels
[vi] Rainforest Action Network. (2023). Banking on climate chaos: Fossil fuel financing report 2023. Rainforest Action Network, Banktrack, Indigenous Environmental Network, OilChange International, Reclaim Finance, Sierra Club, Urgewald. https://www.bankingonclimatechaos.org/ https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2023/04/banking-climate-chaos-report-world-s-biggest-banks-continue-pour-billions
[vii] Friedline, T. (2023, March 15). Silicon Valley Bank collapse offers a primer on how elite power preserves wealth. Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/silicon-valley-bank-collapse-offers-a-primer-on-how-elite-power-preserves-wealth/
[viii] Tankus, N. (2023, March 14) Every complex banking issue all at once: The failure of Silicon Valley Bank in one brief summary and five quick implications. Notes on the Crisis. https://www.crisesnotes.com/every-complex-banking-issue-all-at-once-the-failure-of-silicon-valley-bank-in-one-brief-summary-and-five-quick-implications/
[ix] Lin, K-H., & Neely, M.T. (2020). Divested: Inequality in the Age of Finance. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
[x] Witko, C. (2016, March 29). How Wall Street became a big chunk of the economy — and when the Democrats signed on. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/03/29/how-wall-street-became-a-big-chunk-of-the-u-s-economy-and-when-the-democrats-signed-on/
[xi] Minnis, J. (1965). The Care and Feeding of Power Structures. Boston, MA: New England Free Press. https://www.crmvet.org/docs/65_minnis_power-r.pdf
[xii] Baldwin, J. (1983). Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems (p. 17). Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
[xiii] Baldwin, J. (2010). Black English: A dishonest argument. In J. Baldwin (Ed.), The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (pp. 125–134). New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
[xiv] Carrillo, R. (2020). The deficit myth: Banking between the lines. Law & Political Economy Project. https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-deficit-myth-banking-between-the-lines/
[xv] Hoxie, J. (2017). Baldwin and the racial wealth divide. Inequality.org. https://inequality.org/great-divide/baldwin-blackwhite-wealth-divide/#:~:text=In%20Baldwin's%20words%3A%20%E2%80%9CWhite%20is,remains%20as%20relevant%20as%20ever.
[xvi] Peck, R. (2020, July 3). James Baldwin was right all along. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/raoul-peck-james-baldwin-i-am-not-your-negro/613708/
[xvii] In an essay about country music, Tressie McMillan Cottom writes about how the genre is reckoning with challenges to its mainstream whiteness. She writes that country music “is a genre so aggressively committed to ideas of white identity that it violates the №1 rule of the white fight club: Never admit you are white!”
Cottom, T.M. (2021). Why I keep returning to country music as a theme. Essaying. https://tressie.substack.com/p/why-i-keep-returning-to-country-music?s=r
[xviii] Hall, S. (2021). Race and moral panics in “Postwar Britain.” In P. Gilroy & R.W. Gilmore (Eds), Selected Writings on Race and Difference (pp. 56–70). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
[xix] Robinson, C. (1983). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.
[xx] National Employment Law Project. (2015). A $15 minimum wage for bank workers. New York, NY: NELP. https://s27147.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/NELP-Data-Brief-15-Minimum-Wage-for-Bank-Workers.pdf
[xxi] Newkirk, P. (2019, November 5). No room at the top: Why are US boardrooms still so white? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/nov/05/us-boardrooms-still-so-white-corporate-business-diversity
[xxii] U.S. House Committee on Financial Services. (2020). Diversity and inclusion: Holding America’s large banks accountable. Washington, DC: U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Financial Services. https://docs.house.gov/meetings/BA/BA13/20200212/110498/HHRG-116-BA13-20200212-SD003-U1.pdf
[xxiii] Einhorn, E., & Lewis, O. (2021, July 22). Built to keep Black from white: The story behind Detroit’s ‘Wailing Wall.’ NBC News. https://www.bridgemi.com/urban-affairs/built-keep-black-white-story-behind-detroits-wailing-wall
[xxiv] George, S., Hendley, A., Macnamara, J., Perez, J., & Vaca-Loyola, A. (2019). The plunder of Black wealth in Chicago: New findings on the lasting toll of predatory housing contracts. Durham, NC: Duke University, Samuel DuBois Cook Center on social Equity. https://socialequity.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Plunder-of-Black-Wealth-in-Chicago.pdf
[xxv] FBI files on James Baldwin including the Security Index card report include a description of the denial of Baldwin’s Diner’s Club Card application along with extensive records of his employment history that further scrutinize his creditworthiness.
[xxvi] Of digital redlining in an educational context, Chris Gilliard and Hugh Culik (2016) write, “What does this have to do with digital tools, data analytics, algorithms, and filters? It may have to do with the growing sense that digital justice isn’t only about who has access but also about what kind of access they have, how it’s regulated, and how good it is…If we emphasize the consequences of differential access, we see one facet of the digital divide; if we ask about how these consequences are produced, we are asking about digital redlining.” Tressie McMillan Cottom (2016) writes, “Like redlining, algorithms do not just give us a personal Internet. These algorithms also stratify group-based access to critical institutions like markets, financial institutions, education, and work. Further, I argue that eventually capital is reorganized to correspond with algorithmic efficiencies, reinforcing structural inequalities.”
Cottom, T.M. (2016). Black cyberfeminism: Intersectionality, institutions, and digital sociology. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2747621
Gilliard, C., & Culik, H. (2016, May 24). Digital redlining, access, and privacy: Filtering content is often done with good intent, but filtering can also create equity and privacy issues. Common Sense Education. https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/digital-redlining-access-and-privacy
[xxvii] Baldwin describes the invitation he received from Elia Kazan, a Greek American film and theater director, in the introduction to his play. It is not clear if Kazan is the director of the same theater company that changed the capitalization on the play from $125,000 to $75,000 and that required Baldwin to suddenly come up with $50,000. Though, Hollowell and McGhee write that it was this specific play that Kazan encouraged Baldwin to write: a play based on the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi. Medgar Evers was assassinated while Baldwin was finishing the play.
Baldwin, J. (1964). Blues for Mr. Charlie: A Drama in Three Acts. New York, NY: Samuel French Inc.
Hollowell, A. & McGhee, J. (2022). James Baldwin’s radical challenge. Sojourners. https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2022/james-baldwins-radical-challenge
[xxviii] Bryan de la Beckwith was convicted of Evers’ murder 30 years later, in 1994. James Baldwin died in 1987.
[xxix] An entry by Dorian Randall in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History indicates that Baldwin met Medgar Evers, a NAACP field agent, when he traveled to Mississippi in 1962. This was a year before Evers was murdered and two years before Baldwin’s play was completed.
[xxx] According to the FBI files, the FBI knew in January 1964 — nearly four months before the play’s opening — that there were issues with financing. An FBI memo with the date 04/20/1964 indicates that agents overheard the conversation between Baldwin and Jack O’Dell from The Actors Studio, where O’Dell indicates that the producer changed the amount of capitalization from $125,000 to $75,000. This forced Baldwin to make up the difference — $50,000. The memo reports that O’Dell told Baldwin not to be concerned with finances; however, other public sources such as appeals in the media for financial support suggest that Baldwin was indeed concerned with finances. Baldwin spent significant amounts of time on both artistic and financial responsibilities.
Maxwell, W.J. (2017). James Baldwin: The FBI File. New York, NY: Arcade Publishing.
[xxxi] Zolotow, S. (1964, May 27). Baldwin fights for play’s life: Author tries to avert close of ‘Blues for Mr. Charlie.’ The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1964/05/27/archives/baldwin-fights-for-plays-life-author-tries-to-avert-close-of-blues.html
[xxxii] According to Playbill, the play has been performed 148 times since opening through June 2022. https://playbill.com/production/blues-for-mister-charlie-anta-playhouse-vault-0000005303
[xxxiii] Ray, V. (2019). A theory of racialized organizations. American Sociological Review, 84(1), 26–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122418822335
[xxxiv] In a 2019 piece for Harvard Business Review, Victor Ray writes that organizations employ whiteness as a credential, “…seemingly race-neutral selection criteria can make whiteness a kind of unstated credential, particularly in light of historical processes of segregation and discrimination that have helped create racially homogenous places…white banks may syphon resources from black communities through discriminatory mortgage lending that redistributes black wealth to white banks.” https://hbr.org/2019/11/why-so-many-organizations-stay-white
[xxxv] Friedline, T., Wood, A.K., Oh, S., Wheatley, M., & Zheng, H. (2022). Doubling down on racial capitalism during COVID-19: Qualitative interviews with bank employees. The ANNALS of the Academy of Political and Social Science, 698, 163–184.
[xxxvi] Friedline, T., Morrow, S., Oh, S., Klemm, T., & Kugiya, J. (2022). Banks as racialized and gendered organizations: Interviews with frontline workers. Social Service Review, 96(3), 401–434. https://doi.org/10.1086/721145
[xxxvii] Bouk, D. (2015). How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
[xxxviii] Browne, S. (2015). Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
[xxxix] Browne, S. (2015). Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
[xl] Nopper, T. (2019). Digital Character in “The Scored Society”: FICO, Social Networks, and Competing Measurements of Creditworthiness. In Ruha Benjamin (Ed), Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (pp. 170–187). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
[xli] Daniels, J. (2013). Race and racism in Internet studies: A review and critique. New Media & Society, 15(5), 695–719. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812462849
[xlii] Cedric Robinson’s chapter The Atlantic Slave Trade and African Labour (pp. 145–172) thoroughly documents how, sometimes quietly puppeteering in the background and other times quite visibly, bankers and finance were facilitating global slave labor.
Robinson, C. (1983). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.
[xliii] Times Wire Services. (1987, December 1). Novelist James Baldwin dies in France at 63. The Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-12-01-mn-26007-story.html
[xliv] Gold, H. (2015, August 15). Why did the FBI spy on James Baldwin? The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2015/08/15/fbi-spy-james-baldwin/
[xlv] In his 1971 speech from the Soledad Rally, Baldwin says, “And if that is so, that means the machinery which put into power Mr. Nixon, Mr. Agnew, Mr. Mitchell and his charming wife, and is afraid to get rid of King Lear — otherwise known as Hoover — also hold its job illegally.” This speech is published in Baldwin’s 2010 book, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings.
[xlvi] J. Edgar Hoover returned a 1966 FBI memo (FBI file #591), which stated “It has been heard that BALDWIN may be a homosexual and he appeared as if he may be one,” with a handwritten note that asked, “Isn’t Baldwin a well-known pervert.”
Maxwell, W.J. (2017). James Baldwin: The FBI File. New York, NY: Arcade Publishing.
[xlvii] In the FBI files on Baldwin, particularly memos dated April 13, 1966 and March 31, 1967, agents write that Baldwin’s “outspoken stand on the civil rights issue, his current prominence as an author and the inflammatory nature of his writings, which show him to be a dangerous individual who would be expected to commit acts of inimical to the national defense interests of the US in the time of a national emergency.” Though, given his travels outside the country and extended time in Turkey, New York-based agents had not updated Baldwin’s file. In response, Hoover and Washington, DC-based agents instructed the New York-based agents to pursue Baldwin around the globe, pursuant to “Manual of Instructions, Section 87D, page 74” noting that “Since submission of the last annual report in this case on 4–13–66 subject has departed for Turkey where he is currently residing, reportedly preparing a book for publication…and information has been received from OSI regarding subject’s eviction from an apartment in Turkey for homosexual activities.” Regardless of whether Hoover actually received information about an eviction, or whether an eviction occurred, the FBI considered it their job to police Baldwin’s sexuality.
Maxwell, W.J. (2017). James Baldwin: The FBI File. New York, NY: Arcade Publishing.
[xlviii] Transgender Law Center. (2023). National equality map. https://transgenderlawcenter.org/equalitymap
[xlix] Haug, O. (2023, January 19). After a grueling 2022, anti-trans legislation is set to get worse in 2023. them. https://www.them.us/story/anti-trans-lgbtq-legislation-2023-new-laws
[l] U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (2021). ICE ERO immigration arrests climb nearly 40%. Washington, DC: Immigration and Customs Enforcement. https://www.ice.gov/features/100-days
[li] Ziegler, M. (2022, April 16). Lizelle Herrera’s Texas arrest is a warning. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/lizelle-herreras-texas-abortion-arrest-warning-rcna24639
[lii] This letter, an original which was apparently found and verified in the files of FBI Assistant Director Sullivan, implied suicide in the final paragraph, stating, “King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it, has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the Nation.” This letter was later verified by Assistant Director Sullivan in his testimony in the Senate.
National Archives. (2022, July 5). The President John F. Kennedy Assassination records collection: Findings on MLK assassination. Washington, DC: National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-report/part-2e.html
[liii] Baldwin, J. (2010). We can change the country. In J. Baldwin (Ed.), The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (pp. 48–52). New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
[liv] Friedline, T. (2022, August 8). The Day Wells Fargo Closed. Current Affairs. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/08/the-day-wells-fargo-closed
[lv] In a telling of Baldwin’s connections to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, Ed Pavlić writes “On April 12, three days after King’s funeral, Baldwin wrote an overdue letter to a long-time friend, Turkish actor Engin Cezzar. Citing grief, exhaustion, and the perilous political weather of the era, Baldwin wrote that, with so many of his cohort murdered, including Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and now King, he felt overcome by both a despairing silence and an ethical burden to speak.”
Pavlić, E. (2018, March 29). Baldwin’s lonely country. The Boston Review. https://bostonreview.net/articles/baldwins-lonely-country/
