James Baldwin: The FBI File

Maxwell, a professor at Washington University, returns to the subject of 2015’s F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, this time taking readers directly to the source with facsimiles of a number of the documents from the FBI’s file on writer James Baldwin. The documents collected between 1958 and 1974 include transcripts of wiretapped phone conversations, photographs, letters, speeches, newspaper and magazine clippings, and passport records. They chronicle Baldwin’s interactions with the Nation of Islam, Martin Luther King Jr., the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, and other notable figures of the civil rights era. The file reveals a defiant Baldwin who openly criticized the Bureau and threatened to write an exposé on the agency entitled The Blood Counters. As Maxwell writes, “One of the ironies of questionable legal Bureau eavesdropping: it could capture and preserve history in the making with rare intimacy.” This compendium offers an unquestionably unique look into the life of one of America’s most esteemed thinkers, whose work has seen a resurgence as a centerpiece of the Black Lives Matter movement. [em]B&w photos. (June) [/em]