Inside the Surveillance War Between James Baldwin and the FBI

As writer William J. Maxwell notes in the introduction of his book, this BLM monitoring bears a striking resemblance to the relationship between If Beale Street Could Talk author James Baldwin and the FBI. Baldwin is something of a patron saint for the movement, though the BLM connection goes beyond the resonance of his work—honest, eloquent, and controversial representations of the black experience—and includes FBI counterintelligence. A left-leaning queer black man unafraid to speak or write his mind, Baldwin was an obvious choice for the FBI's author surveillance program. But his alleged associations with the Communist Party, and his passionate civil rights activism, set him further apart from targets like Truman Capote and Henry Miller. Between the 1950s and 1974, the Bureau prioritized Baldwin—ultimately producing a whopping 1,884-page dossier that tried to paint him as an "Independent Black Nationalist Extremist." It's a mishmash of information gleaned from stalking his movements and tapping his phone conversations—some of it true but much of it false.

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Baldwin's file wasn't available to the public until 1998, though it's now the subject of William J. Maxwell's fascinating 2017 exposé. In it, the American Book Award winner dissects the thousands of letters, transcriptions, and photographs that resulted from this decades-long period of surveillance, exposing the illegal lengths to which the government went to catch their man. But if the following excerpt is anything to go by, the FBI's efforts did little to silence Baldwin or prevent him from fighting for justice...

In late September 1963, the Bureau finally received confirmation of the criticism from Baldwin it had anticipated for months. During both a press conference and a television appearance, the writer charged out loud that the FBI was a hazard to the Civil Rights Movement and that Hoover effectively placed the awesome power of the Justice Department on the side of the segregationists. This “letterhead memo” detailing Baldwin’s accusations, likely based on the Clarence Jones phone tap rather than on a human confidential source, was originally held as highly secret, its exposure considered a threat to the “national defense.” Its contents disclose that Baldwin and Jones were livid about the decision of the United States Information Agency (USIA) to delete Baldwin’s negative comments on the FBI from the transcript of a government-sponsored television program. “[A]ny legitimate critical opinion of the FBI is apparently ‘off limits or taboo,’” Jones protested. Baldwin’s critical opinion of the Bureau came through more clearly at an uncensored New York press conference. The letterhead memo quoted Baldwin’s confession there that he “blame[d] J. Edgar Hoover in part” for the Birmingham church bombing, and that African Americans in general had “no cause to have faith in the FBI.” More than fifty years on, it is difficult to recapture just how rare—and just how courageous—such public criticisms of the Bureau were. Baldwin’s words preceded King’s risky 1964 complaint that the FBI was “completely ineffectual in resolving the continued mayhem and brutality inflicted upon the Negro in the Deep South.” They outstripped the long tradition of cat-and-mouse exchanges between black writers and the Bureau launched during the Harlem Renaissance. And they rocketed Baldwin, in the mind of Hoover’s FBI, to the status of genuine national security threat.

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Baldwin put his body as well as his words on the line in October 1963, jumping directly into the civil disobedience at the heart of the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement. After the Birmingham church bombing that September, sit-ins and voter registration efforts intensified in nearby Selma. SNCC leader James Forman (his last name often misspelled by the FBI) called on Baldwin and comedian Dick Gregory to travel to Alabama to add celebrity glitz to a “Freedom Day” on October 7, during which three hundred African American citizens of voting age would attempt to register at the Dallas County Courthouse. The FBI had advance knowledge of Baldwin’s involvement: as this October letter to the Justice Department testifies, the Bureau learned of his arrival at the Birmingham airport through both the Clarence Jones wiretap and a less secretive NBC television report. Baldwin speechified on the big day but also lined up side by side with the protestors, where he saw, at first hand, FBI agents refuse to intervene as Sheriff Jim Clark beat and arrested several would-be voters. Years later, Baldwin recalled asking an FBI representative on the scene if the sheriff—a man whose moral life seemed to be “destroyed by a plague called color”—had “any right to throw us off Federal property. No, is the answer, but we can’t do anything about it.” Baldwin was incensed by this passivity, further ammunition for his war on the FBI’s racial bias. Had Baldwin seen the indistinct black-and-white photographs of him and Forman and other protestors taken by a Bureau agent on Freedom Day, he would have been even angrier. Collecting images of those in the “voter registration line in front of the Dallas County Courthouse” appeared to take precedence over investigating their tormentors.”

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Featured photo of James Baldwin: Alchetron