MenuThe Poetry & Writings ofChristopher F. Brown“No Name in The Street” by James Baldwin: A reviewnonameinthestreet“No Name in The Street” is the title given to a work of art James Baldwin penned in 1972. This production of a master wordsmith chronicles certain events of his life up until that point. It’s poignant that the words he forged 42 years ago are still razor sharp and piercing in regards to the times and issues of today. His words then, as they are now, are glowing red hot concerning the issues of today. It is a great failing of American society and culture that these words, this wisdom titled “No Name in The Street” has been meat in the pot of American sub consciousness for nearly half a century, and the same words are still said and still, fall on deaf ears and dead hearts. The same passionate reactions and same pin point accuracy that “No Name in The Street” voiced about race relations, police brutality, and the injustice of the American system labeled justice, has not changed. The attitudes that birth and nurse these demons of society have only evolved and added technological ways of camouflaging themselves, but the same bitter and rotten blood that Baldwin wrote of still pumps vigorously through America’s veins.I would not say that is an autobiography in the traditional, or what a publisher would ask for sense. “No name in The Street” does not follow the liner path that has become the rule-of-law prescribed to modern and most autobiographies. The book does open with him writing about his childhood but what he does write about circles the relationship between his older brother and father. The book then jumps about twenty years or so to his time in France, witnessing the brutality that Algerians were suffering. Baldwin, like Langston Hughes, marveled at how well the French treated him as a Blackman from America, shellshockingly different from the treatment he had received in America. Baldwin, like Langston, soon came to see that was only spared the tragedy of American style hate in this society because at that time in France it was already in use and they focused it upon North Africans. Baldwin, like Langston, eventually had enough and could not idle hemisphere away while witnessing a people not his own suffer like his people whom were being brutalized in America and eventually left.In “No Name in The Street” Baldwin gives praise to the Black Panthers, something that very few black public figures did at all at that time and rarely ever did openly. He addresses how the police were constantly on guard and the instigators with the panthers. How the media painted the panthers as violet gun totters but never spoke of the community programs that were started by the panthers. Baldwin even wrote about how it frustrated the police that the panthers were not in possession, even in the smallest amount, of the fear that the they attempted to instill. Baldwin also speaks of his depression having spoken with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King face to face weeks and even days before they both were assassinated. He wrote that the new suit he brought to meet Martin and then for an event with Malcolm also became the suit he wore to their funerals and how he could never bring himself to ever wear that suit again. The suit also became an entry way back into the neighborhood he grew up in and showed him how much he had transitioned from what people thought they knew about him to what was actually the truth about him.By Christopher F. Brown
Probably the most difficult of Baldwin's books, a mixture of eloquence, rage, and insights that are tangled up in the immense confusions of the late 60s and early 70s. For the previous decade, Baldwin had been immersed in public life: as a participant in and witness to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; as media presence; as advocate for a friend accused of a murder he almost certainly didn't commit; as screenwriter for a move based on the life of Malcolm X which was never made. He was constantly on the move, growing more and more disillusioned with the U.S. There was an apocalyptic tone to The Fire Next Time, published a decade previously, but No Name in the Street is much bleaker. At times I'm impatient with what feels like overblown rhetoric, but then I remind myself that Baldwin had survived a decade many of his friends and peers didn't. For anyone who wasn't there, it's almost impossible to register the stunned feeling that came with assassination after assassination, not just the Kennedys, Martin and Malcolm, but the Panthers in Chicago, George Jackson, Medgar Evers, not to mention those who were shot, exiled or incarcerated. And when I reflect on what's changed, the answer is very little except for the absence of the type of visible resistance represented by the Black Panthers. The voice here is Amos or Ezra, one of the angriest Old Testament prophets. One final note. A few years before Baldwin published No Name, he'd been attacked by Eldridge Cleaver, who basically called him a faggot in love wit the white master. It was a bullshit attack--not the only one Cleaver unleashed in the midst of his many eloquent and accurate passages. Near the end of No Name, Baldwin responds in a way I find painful. He cuts Cleaver much more slack than he deserves; I understand why he did it--reconciling the artistic and revolutionary impulses in the interest of unity. But I wish Baldwin had chose to level him the way he did Norman Mailer in the early 60s. Black Power was most certainly destroyed by government attacks, but it also contributed to its own demise; I wonder if it would have made any difference if Baldwin had gone public with some of the criticisms he expressed in private. The only time in his career when he backed away from telling the clearest truth he knew.Anyway, No Name in the Street is a necessary part of the Baldwin canon.
What do You think about No Name In The Street (2007)?
i really appreciated and connected with baldwin's point of view about the country's issues, and see how things got to be the way they are. i wish he were around now, and wonder what he would say :(the only problem i encountered when reading this book, was my limited vocab and attention span (both defects i hadn't seen in myself until now!). most of the sentences were so long that by the time i got to the end of it, i forgot what it was about! i must have re-read at least a third of the sentences, honestly. i'm glad i stuck it out!
—Trice
While being literally shorter than other collections, Baldwin hear demands much more of the reader. A lesser thinker would have fallen into a mess of assuming the reader can follow his thoughts; but Baldwin's slides and pivots are never confusing. This is, oddly enough, a very UN-American kind of essay; it is ruminations, exhortations, and devotion, but not some simplistic political how-to or sociological analysis of the black experience in America. It is a profoundly personal doublet of essays that do not hide their authority behind anything else except that Baldwin is a witness, and this is his testimony.
—Brandon
James Baldwin was never exactly shy about his feelings regarding race in America, and his non-fiction book, No Name in the Street is no exception. He was angry upon writing this. Starting with his own childhood and his non-existent relationship with his father he moves on to discuss the Algerian War, with a short hop to the Civil Rights Movement in America (he was primarily in Paris by this point). He talks about his relationship with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. and shows his appreciation for their work and the tragedies of their assassinations.Good and interesting as far as the topic goes, but did not grasp my attention the same way some of his other works of essays have (The Fire Next Time or The Devil Finds Work as just two examples). I adore Baldwin, however, so I'm glad I read this. And now I can picture him hanging out beside the pool with his buddy, Billy Dee Williams.
—El
