Black Man in America

Although this interview, carried originally over Chicago radio station WFMT, represents the views of a talented and thoughtful novelist on a variety of matters, it essentially is a personal revelation by a sensitive American Negro, and as such should command the attention of sensitive American whites. Mr. Baldwin, the author of Nobody Knows My Name and the much-discussed The Fire Next Time, tells quietly but chillingly what it is to live in a society whose standards and symbols are designed for others; he describes the promises and perils of such movements as the Freedom Riders and the Black Muslims; he explains, with biting logic, why many Negro families have a matriarchal set-up (because the wife can find employment more readily as a housemaid than the husband can as a working man). He speaks at times with bitterness, and some of his reasoning is extreme, as when he ascribes the American educational lag to the schools’ failure to face the Negro question. But there is insight as well as impact in much of what he has to say, especially when he reminds us that it is not his people but the United States as a whole which is paying the moral price of “keeping the Negro in his place.”