No Name in the Street

The rise of the civil rights movement leads Baldwin to return to the United States. As a native of New York, his first visit to the South is eye-opening. He sees it as a place of contradiction, recognizing both the courage of the Black community and the terror of white supremacy. Under constant threat of violence and racism in the South, Baldwin learns to live with his fears.

Drawing on his experience in the South, Baldwin analyzes the state of American consciousness. For Baldwin, America is characterized by a profound “emotional poverty” and a disconnection between the people’s “public stance” and their “private life.” Americans’ impoverished inner lives and their inability to form connections has impacted social life and the relations between Black and white people. Baldwin emphasizes that racism is a result of the white imagination and white Americans’ fear of themselves. The white imagination projected these inner fears and grievances onto Black people. However, as Baldwin notes, the oppression of Black people could not “purify” white American consciousness. Ultimately, white Americans lead problematic lives with equally problematic identities, which, due to America’s international influence, are a threat to the world. Therefore, the South represents the troubling inner lives of Americans as well as America’s possibilities for social change. Baldwin considers the putative freedom of the North an illusion, observing that northerners are always “locking the South within them” (56). Thus, the South makes American reality evident. Baldwin adds that Black people in the South understand the racial problem throughout America, while in the North, “opportunities for self-delusion [are] […] much greater” (76). He stresses that when white Americans’ delusions collapse, the South can spark America’s rebirth.

The terror Black southerners live with, which Baldwin also experiences during his visit, involves its own paradox. In the face of death, Black people showed defiance, courage, and “an overwhelming pride and rage” (58). The Role of Masculinity in the Racial Struggle is evident as Baldwin describes the bravery and perseverance of Black men in the South. Mentioning his sexual harassment by a powerful southern man, Baldwin notes that white men define themselves by the oppression of Black manhood. This practice began in the time of enslavement in America, when “the black man’s right to his women, as well as to his children, was simply taken from him” (62), and it continues to impact racial relations in the present. White men remain trapped in their own illusions and depend on the subjugation of Black men. He notes that if men do not honor one another’s manhood, “chaos arrives.” The issue of manhood is central for Baldwin, and the South in the 1950s highlights the question of “what a man is, should do, or become” (65). Despite his absence from America for years, Baldwin realizes his unbreakable connection to the African American community.

Baldwin notes that activism in Montgomery, Alabama, helped the civil rights movement grow, as protests spread from there throughout the South. Black activists came from diverse backgrounds and galvanized each other, at a great cost and facing constant violence, “to move, to march, and to vote” (80). Black people resolved to fight for equality because life under racism “was no way for a man or a woman or a child to live” (81). However, Baldwin began to realize that the strategy of nonviolence was a challenging path, alluding to the movement’s shift during the Black Power era.