Though Baldwin was a self-described “disturber of the peace,” it is not immediately clear why he was placed on the Security Index, alongside other “dangerous individuals” who “posed a threat to national security,” although a memorandum in 1972 offers some clues:  “It is believed that the subject, due to his position as an author, is likely to furnish aid or other assistance to revolutionary elements because of his sympathy and/or ideology” (my emphasis, FBI Files, 1595). Here the Bureau’s emphasis on Baldwin’s role as a writer—with the corollary that an author is, by default, radical—says much about the FBI’s concerns that authors posed a significant threat to the stability of the social order during the radical period of the 1960s and early 1970s.

As Natalie Robins has documented, the Bureau’s long-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover, remained convinced that writers could become “Communist thought-control relay stations,” because “they were more susceptible to radical propaganda than ordinary people, and more adept at communicating ideas.”[6] Robins’s thorough study, Alien Ink: The FBI’s War on the Freedom of Expression, shows the extent of the Bureau’s monitoring of writers from Truman Capote (110 pages) and John Steinbeck (94 pages) to Henry Miller (9 pages) and Richard Wright (276 pages).[7] Given this range of surveillance on noted authors, Baldwin’s file seems particularly long.

Baldwin’s increasing notoriety, and even celebrity status—which included appearing on the front cover of Time magazine in 1963—no doubt contributed to his surveillance by the FBI, but it was meeting with the Attorney General that alerted Hoover to his radical potential. On May 24, 1963, Robert Kennedy met Baldwin and a diverse cohort of artists, actors and activists, including the actor and activist Harry Belafonte, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, the psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark, Martin Luther King Jr.’s lawyer Clarence Jones, and Jerome Smith, a freedom fighter who had “probably spent more months in jail and been beaten more often than any other CORE [Congress of Racial Equality] member.”[8] According to the New York Times, the meeting “was seen as evidence of growing concern over criticism voiced by Negroes across the country on its handling of the civil rights issue.”[9]

As James Campbell notes, Baldwin became a frequent critic of the FBI, accusing the Kennedy administration of “lack of action” after the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four black girls were killed.[10] One FBI report records Baldwin’s statement in the New York Times of September 19, 1963: “I blame J. Edgar Hoover in part for events in Alabama. Negroes have no cause to have faith in the FBI” (FBI Files, 106). Baldwin’s shifting rhetoric in the early to mid-1960s confused the FBI, which notes that “Baldwin is against all forms of violence and shedding of blood.” Elsewhere they make note of the author’s “dangerousness” (FBI Files, 308). His FBI observers were perhaps picking up on the shift in the writer’s register, which became increasingly embittered as the civil rights movement became more bloody. Baldwin, who had urged his nephew in The Fire Next Time to accept white people “and accept them with love,” now announced that “many people, even members of my own family…would think nothing of picking up arms tomorrow,” which no doubt led to increased monitoring of the writer.[11] For Baldwin, who declared in 1969, that “you’ve got to get rid of J. Edgar Hoover and the power that he wields,” it was the Bureau itself that needed monitoring as his experiences of harassment and violation make clear.”[12]

Voyeurism, Baldwin and the FBI

In The Devil Finds Work (1976) Baldwin recollects being accosted by two agents in 1945, although there is no corresponding record in his files. Noting that his color had already made him “conspicuous,” Baldwin concludes that the FBI “frightened me and they humiliated me—it was like being spat on, or pissed on, or gang-raped.”[13] Baldwin recollects his encounter with the Bureau as a metaphorical sexual violation, associated with his racial identity. This surveillance was orchestrated by, as Baldwin described him, “J. Edgar Hoover, history’s most highly paid (and most utterly useless) voyeur.” Baldwin’s words reduce the Bureau’s monitoring of its subjects to little more than a prurient gaze. Baldwin suggests that Hoover’s surveillance serves no purpose other than to expose his subjects’ racial or sexual identities for sinister reasons.[14] In Baldwin’s recollection from 1945, Hoover, as emblem of the FBI, is transformed from prurient voyeur to sinister perpetrator, underscoring, as Maurice Wallace has noted, “the spectacular conditions of historical black masculine identity and the chronic effort to ‘frame’ the black male body, criminally and visually, for the visual pleasures of whites.”[15] As Maria Balshaw and Liam Kennedy note, the themes of vision and power reverberate in African American literature because they operate “in the intersubjectivity of looking relations, the sexualising and racialising of vision, the sighting of the body as spectacle, the production of surveillance, and the authorisation of images.”[16]

"Homosexual Parties"

While Baldwin's description of being accosted by the FBI underscores the ways in which he felt violated and sexualized by the (presumably) white male agents, his openness about his own sexuality and his readiness to address the topic openly in his fiction seemed to disarm the FBI, which had no leverage to blackmail a writer who was already openly homosexual.[17] While information about Baldwin's "homosexual parties" in Istanbul underscores the Bureau's international monitoring of its targets--and gives credence to William Maxwell's claim that the FBI became "a pioneering archivist of black internationalism," the scant information reveals little that wasn't publicly known about the author.[18] One FBI file reports that a female informant reported that during the summer of 1966, "Baldwin rented an apartment in the Babek Section of Istanbul. She found out later that BALDWIN was evicted by the landlord for having homosexual parties." [See FBI file 651]

OutHistory is grateful to Douglas Field for volunteering this original essay, and to Matthew Brim for his assistance.

Notes

1. Baldwin’s FBI files can be requested under the United States Freedom of Information Act by writing to the Bureau. Unlike many authors, including Richard Wright, Baldwin’s files are not available online. The FBI files are paginated but are not chronological. Baldwin’s files are divided into three sections: part 1: 1-559; part 2: 560-943; part 3: 944-1884. The FBI file’s pagination of Baldwin’s files will be referenced parenthetically in the essay. For information about how to request Baldwin’s FBI files, see https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/fbi-files-on-james-baldwin-9724/.
2. James Campbell, “‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine': James Baldwin and the FBI,” in Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 78.
3. Campbell, “‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine,'” 100.
4. Baldwin originally took the surname of his mother Emma Berdis Jones, as his father’s identity was unknown. He changed his surname after his mother married David Baldwin in 1927.
5. The titles of Baldwin’s books were Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953) and Another Country (1962).
6. Natalie Robins, Alien Ink: The FBI’s War on the Freedom of Expression (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 50.
7. For a study that focuses on the FBI’s harassment of musicians, see John Potash, The FBI War on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders: US Intelligence’s Murderous Targeting of Tupac, MLK, Malcolm, Panthers, Hendrix, Rappers & Linked Ethnic Leftists (New York: Progressive Left Press, 2010; 5^th ed.). Potash argues that “evidence supports that US Intelligence murderously targeted political and cultural leftist leaders, including Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Black Panthers, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley and activist rappers,” 1. There is a brief discussion of Richard Wright (177) but no mention of Baldwin.
8. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York: Ballantine, 1978), 331.
9. Laymond Robinson, “Robert Kennedy Consults Negroes Here About North,” New York Times, 25 May 1963, 1.
10. Campbell, “‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” 77.
11. Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” in Toni Morrison, ed., James Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 294; Campbell, “‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” 77.
12. Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch, “Disturber of the Peace: James Baldwin—An Interview,” in Standley and Pratt, eds., Conversations with James Baldwin, 101.
13. Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: An Essay (New York: Dial, 1976), 90.
14. Ibid., 544.
15. Maurice Wallace, “‘I’m not Entirely What I Look Like': Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and the Hegemony of Vision; or, Jimmy’s FBEye Blues,” in Dwight A. McBride, ed., James Baldwin Now (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 300.
16. Maria Balshaw and Liam Kennedy, eds., Urban Space and Representation (London: Pluto, 2000), 8.
17. See, for example, Joseph J. Firebaugh, “The Vocabulary of ‘Time’ Magazine,” American Speech 15, 3 (October 1940): 232-242.
18. William Maxwell, “African-American Modernism and State Surveillance,” in Gene Jarrett, ed., A Companion to African American Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 255.
19. Natalie Robins, Alien Ink: The FBI’s War on Freedom of Expression (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 347.
20. See David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Johnson points out that during the Lavender Scare many homosexual men and women were targeted as security risks on account of their sexuality.
21. See, for example, Joseph J. Firebaugh, “The Vocabulary of ‘Time’ Magazine,” American Speech 153 (October 1940): 232-242.
22. “Races: Freedom—Now,” Time, 17 May 1963, 26. See also Jean François Gounard, The Racial Problem in the Works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, trans. Joseph J. Rodgers, Jr., foreword by Jean F. Béranger (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992), who notes that Baldwin’s upbringing gave him “an unpredictable temperament. It made him a sensitive and nervous person. Thus the slightest event could have surprising effects on him” (149-50); and Calvin C. Hernton, White Papers For White Americans (New York: Doubleday, 1966), who writes that it “is immensely revealing that the first Negro to get his face on a full page of the very feminine Harper’s Bazaar (April 1963) is James Baldwin” (120).
23. James Baldwin, “The Discovery of What it Means to be an American,” Collected Essays, 142.
24. Baldwin, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” Collected Essays, 828.