J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation opened its file on James Baldwin in April 1960 when Baldwin’s name appeared among the signatories to an open letter that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee published as an advertisement in the New York Times. In one memo preserved in the file, Hoover describes Baldwin as “a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety of the United States in a time of emergency.” The three following memos respond to a 1964 Washington Post article announcing Baldwin’s plans for a book about the FBI’s activity in the American South during the civil rights movement. Its working title: The Blood Counters. In the margin of the second of these three memos, Hoover scribbled a question—“Isn’t Baldwin a well-known pervert?”—that the third memo addresses. On a wiretapped recording of a conversation with Martin Luther King Jr., someone whose name remains redacted said of Baldwin’s FBI book, “He’s going to nail them to the wall.” Baldwin never completed the book, nor is it clear that he ever intended to, but as Nicholas Boggs reports in Baldwin: A Love Story, the FBI’s interest in him lasted fourteen years. The agency would add 1,884 pages to his file before closing it, finally, in 1974. According to scholar William J. Maxwell, whose 2017 book James Baldwin: The FBI File collects and illuminates many of those pages, Baldwin’s file “stands as the longest yet extracted on an African American author active during Hoover’s five decades as a Bureau executive.”
TO: Mr. DeLoach DATE: 6-22-64
FROM: M.A. Jones
SUBJECT: JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN
INFORMATION CONCERNING
The book review section of the Washington Post for 6-21-64, contained an article concerning captioned individual. It stated he is contemplating at least four future books, among which will be one “about the FBI in the South.” These will be published by Dial Press.
The item goes on to point out that Baldwin’s recent books have attracted an enormous response, ringing up best-selling figures all over the Nation. The Fire Next Time, according to the article, sold 100,000 copies in hard-cover; its paperback version, just out, is likely to sell five to ten times that many, Another Country is nearing the two-million mark in soft cover.
INFORMATION IN BUFILES: James Arthur Baldwin is a Harlem-born Negro who resides in New York City, and who has become quite well known for his books regarding the relationship of Negroes and whites in our society.
He has been identified as a sponsor for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and is one of its prominent members.
Baldwin is also listed as one of the sponsors of the Monroe Defense Committee, a group organized as the result of a race riot in Monroe, North Carolina, on 8-27-61. This Committee has received strong support from communist publications such as the National Guardian.
The New York Herald Tribune of 6-17-61, in its “Letters to the Editor” section, contained a communication signed by Baldwin and William Styron which advocated abolishment of capital punishment. This letter said, “If there were a shred of proof that the death penalty actually served to inhibit crime, that would be sufficient reason—even from the point of view of ‘misguided do-gooders,’ as J. Edgar Hoover calls its opponents—to maintain it." It goes on to state, Mr. Hoover “is not a lawgiver, nor is there any reason to suppose him to be a particularly profound student of human nature. He is a law-enforcement officer. It is appalling that in this capacity he not only opposes the trend of history among civilized nations, but uses his enormous power and prestige to corroborate the blindest and basest instincts of the retaliatory mob.”
On the subject of homosexuality, Baldwin states, “American males are the only people I’ve ever encountered in the world who are willing to go on the needle before they’ll go to bed with each other. Because they’re afraid of this, they don’t know how to go to bed with women either. I’ve known people who literally died out of this panic. I don’t know what homosexual means any more, and Americans don’t either…If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it says about homosexuality.”
In connection with a discussion of why he felt both Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the Justice Department, and former President John F. Kennedy were ineffective in dealing with discrimination with the Negroes in the South, Baldwin said he was weary of being told desegregation is legal. He went on to say “because first of all you have to get Eastland out of Congress and get rid of the power that he wields there. You’ve got to get rid of J. Edgar Hoover and the power that he wields. If one could get rid of just those two men, or modify their power, there would be a great deal more hope.”
RECOMMENDATION: None. For information.
TO: Mr. DeLoach
DATE: 7-17-64
FROM: M.A. Jones
SUBJECT: JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN
INFORMATION CONCERNING
In my memorandum to you dated 6-22-64, I advised the book review section of the Washington Post for 6-21-64, announced captioned individual was contemplating at least four future books. Among these will be one about “the FBI in the South.” Our New York Office was advised and requested to make discreet checks among its publication sources in an attempt to verify this information. New York was also asked to remain alert to any possibility of securing galley proofs for the Bureau for review purposes.
The 7-14-64, edition of the New York Herald Tribune contained additional information concerning this matter. According to it, Baldwin’s book will be published next spring; however, it will be featured in The New Yorker magazine prior to its publication in book form.
On 7-16-64, the New York Office telephonically advised that an interview with Baldwin appears in the current issue of Playbill, the official program of the legitimate theater in that city. The article quotes Baldwin as telling the unidentified interviewer he will begin work soon on a long article about the manner in which Negroes are treated by the FBI. He referred to Bureau personnel as “The Blood Counters,” which he claimed is the Negroes’ nickname for them. New York is forwarding a copy of Playbill to the Bureau.
The New Yorker over the years has been irresponsible and unreliable with respect to references concerning the Director and the FBI. It has published articles of a satirical nature concerning FBI tours, The FBI Story (both the book and the movie), and crime statistics. Baldwin’s book, The Fire Next Time, appeared in the magazine before it was released in book form.
The matter of Baldwin’s contemplated book about the Bureau is being closely followed and you will be kept advised of pertinent developments.
RECOMMENDATION: None. For information.
TO: Mr. DeLoach
DATE: 7-20-64
FROM: M.A. Jones
SUBJECT: JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN
INFORMATION CONCERNING
My memorandum dated 7-17-64, which concerned the captioned individual’s plans for a future book about the FBI, has been returned by the Director with this question: “Isn’t Baldwin a well-known pervert?” It is not a matter of official record that he is a pervert; however, the theme of homosexuality has figured prominently in two of his three published novels. Baldwin has stated that it is also “implicit” in his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. In the past, he has not disputed the description of “autobiographical” being attached to this first book.
The New York Post published a series of six articles about Baldwin in January 1964. Written by Fern Marja Eckman, they were the result of a series of interviews by Mrs. Eckman with the novelist. She asked him why he used homosexuality in two of his novels and he corrected her by pointing out that all three novels contained this theme in one degree or another, using the term “implicit” in connection with the first book.
According to Mrs. Eckman, Baldwin explained the motivation for this recurrent theme in his fiction. He said there are two reasons for it, both of which are similar. He then launched into a diatribe about sex in America and actually never did state these so-called two reasons with any clarity. He says the situation he described in Another Country is true, only much worse than he depicted it. (Most of this novel dealt with the carnality of a group of whites and Negroes in Greenwich Village and Harlem. Included in it was one description of the homosexual deeds of a bisexual character in Paris.) Baldwin said he was exposed to all of this when he arrived in Greenwich Village as a Negro adolescent. He criticized American heterosexuality, saying it isn’t sex at all but “pure desperation.” He claims American homosexuality is primarily a waste which would cease to exist in effect if Americans were not so “frightened of it.” He goes on to claim that Americans, Englishmen, and Germans—the “Anglo-Saxons”—are the only people who talk about it. It should be noted, however, that he makes a point that it is these people, whom he calls the “Puritans” who speak of homosexuality in a “terrible way.”
He then contrasts their approach with that of the Italians, stating, “In Italy, you know, men kiss each other and boys go to bed with each other. And no one is marked for life. No one imagines that—and they grow up, you know, and they have children and raise them. And no one ends up going to a psychiatrist or turning into a junkie because he’s afraid of being touched.”
He continues by saying that is the root of the “American” thing—“it’s not a fear of men going to bed with men. It’s a fear of anybody touching anybody.” Baldwin concluded this particular discussion with Mrs. Eckman by saying that Negroes were frequent targets of homosexual approaches on the part of whites because they were always looking for somebody to act out their fantasies on, and they seem to believe that Negroes know how to do “dirty things.”
During this particular interview, Baldwin intimates that he has had experience in this type of activity, saying, “You wouldn’t believe the holocaust that opens over your head…if you are sixteen years old.” He ends by stating that they understand in Italy that people “were born to touch each other.”
These remarks are similar to others Baldwin has gone on record with regarding homosexuality. While it is not possible to state that he is a pervert, he has expressed a sympathetic viewpoint about homosexuality on several occasions, and a very definite hostility toward the revulsion of the American public regarding it.
RECOMMENDATION:
None. For information.