By Stuart Mitchner

After the outbreak of war in April of 1861, students at Princeton (then the College of New Jersey) raised the Union flag over Nassau Hall. According to the Mudd Manuscript Library blog, two-fifths of the class of 1862 left campus for the South within a three-week period. Students had begun leaving as early as January 1861 due to what college President John Maclean called “the unhappy condition of the country.” Although the administration took the flag down, it would be raised again and remain there for the duration of the war.

Of the 70 Princeton students who died in the conflict and are remembered on a plaque in Nassau Hall, 34 fought under the Union flag and 36 under the Confederate. The plaque does not divide them accordingly, however. They’re honored together as Princeton students.

Baldwin in Princeton

Writing in the November 1955 issue of Harper’s, African American essayist and novelist James Baldwin (1924-1987) recalls visiting a Nassau Street restaurant in 1942: “I knew about jim-crow but I had never experienced it. I went to the same self-service restaurant three times and stood with all the Princeton boys before the counter, waiting for a hamburger and coffee…Negroes were not served there, I was told…Once I was told this, I determined to go there all the time. But now they were ready for me and, though some dreadful scenes were subsequently enacted in that restaurant, I never ate there again.”

True enough, although Baldwin’s friend and biographer David Leeming describes a 1965 visit to Princeton during which Baldwin suggested that they stop at a local restaurant: “He seemed angry, as standing in front of the counter with the usual crowd of Princeton students, he ordered a hamburger, left it on the counter when it was delivered to him, and announced that we were leaving.”

The fact that Baldwin felt compelled to return to the scene more than a decade later bears out his claim in the same essay, “Notes of a Native Son,” that the year he lived in New Jersey (working in a Belle Mead defense plant) “had made a great change” in his life. Having grown up in Harlem, a recent graduate of DeWitt Clinton High School, with white mentors and friends, he “knew about the south, of course, and about how southerners treated Negroes and how they expected them to behave.” But “it had never entered my mind that anyone would look at me and expect me to behave that way. I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people.”

According to Leeming, Baldwin’s anger after reliving the scene in the restaurant was such that he subsequently became “argumentative, even abusive” at a faculty dinner party.

“Informed Conversation”

Media commentary about race and racism in the aftermath of the Charleston shootings and the debate over the Confederate flag inspired Brandeis Professor Chad Williams and colleagues at Wayne State and the University of Iowa to create a hashtag, #CharlestonSyllabus, to crowdsource books, films, and educational materials as a basis for an “informed conversation.” BBC Trending’s report (“Charleston Syllabus Builds Book List of Tolerance”) is accompanied by an image showing a dozen recommended books, three of which are by James Baldwin: The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), and the first and most influential collection, titled after that seminal essay with its Princeton epiphany, Notes of a Native Son (1955).

Meanwhile Baldwin’s 90th birthday has inspired Harlem Stage’s The Year of James Baldwin, a 14-month, citywide celebration presented in partnership with Columbia University School of the Arts and New York Live Arts, and numerous other collaborators. Singer songwriter Stew, leader of a rock group called The Negro Problem, paid homage last month in “Notes of a Native Song,” a song cycle in which he presents Baldwin as a bluesinging literary rock star who, like Stew, ultimately came into his own as an artist in Europe.

The phrase that inspired the name of Stew’s band occurs five times in the five page preface to Notes of a Native Son, where Baldwin observes that “one of the difficulties about being a Negro writer… is that the Negro problem is written about so widely. The bookshelves groan under the weight of information, and everyone therefore considers himself informed. And this information, furthermore, operates usually (generally, popularly) to reinforce traditional attitudes.”

Baldwin’s life as a professional writer began when he was  “writing book reviews—mostly, it turned out, about the Negro problem, concerning which the color of my skin made me automatically an expert.” Referring back to “traditional attitudes,” he notes that the “change from ill will to good will” is “better than no change at all….But it is part of the business of the writer—as I see it—to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source.”

Fiction’s Special Appeal

Although Baldwin’s essays are generally considered to be superior to his fiction, there’s no doubt that his first novel Go Tell It On the Mountain (1952) “taps the source” and belongs in the Charleston syllabus. However commendable the desire to get people reading and talking about race, if the great underlying dream objective is to reach supposed lost causes like accused killer Dylann Roof, strongly plotted and written fiction would make a more potent weapon than expository prose. In Go Tell It On the Mountain Baldwin is exploring his own history with a sense of personal and aesthetic purpose that gives the story a compelling universality. The opening pages describe a situation in which the protagonist feels like an outsider in his own family, alienated, in particular, from his father. That it’s a black family struggling to get by is secondary to the universal theme of embattled families.

When he left Paris for Switzerland, “armed with two Bessie Smith records and a typewriter,” Baldwin’s goal was “to try to create the life” that he had “first known as a child” and from which he had “spent so many years in flight.” Even after reading Balzac, Henry James, Dostoevsky, Henry Miller, and Walt Whitman, among others, his true mentor in the “absolutely alabaster landscape” of Switzerland was the Empress of the Blues: “It was Bessie Smith, through her tone and her cadence, who helped me to dig back to the way I myself must have spoken” and “to remember the things I had heard and seen and felt. I had buried them very deep. I had never listened to Bessie Smith in America.”

Personal History

Watching President Obama lead the singing of “Amazing Grace” during his eulogy for the shooting victims in Charleston, I found myself focusing on the words African Methodist Episcopal on the purple banner draped over the podium. I was remembering two quite different race-and religion-based experiences. In the first incident I was 15, on a train somewhere between Tottenville and St. George on Staten Island. It was a Sunday and at one stop a number of black women in their Sunday best came aboard. The tambourine-bearing lady who sat down beside me was the oldest and most diminutive of the group. Right away she began asking me questions about my religion. Was I believer? Was I a sinner? Uh, well, er, what to say? Brandishing the tambourine in the direction of my hemming and hawing, she asked what my church was. Though it had been some years since I last dutifully attended Trinity Episcopal, where my father played the organ, I felt within my rights to say “ Episcopal,” but as soon as the word was out of my mouth, the old lady yelled “Episcopals is Catholics!” and began banging her tambourine and shouting “Save this sinner! Help this poor sinner!” The tambourine banging and the shouting continued until the next stop, where she got off with the others. One of the women came over, patted my shoulder, and said, “She’s old and cranky. Don’t pay her no mind. You believe whatever you want to believe.”

The second incident occured in the fall of the same year when I went with a friend to a black church in Indianapolis. We were two white boys who had come to the capital city to find blues and jazz records and to see if what an older friend had told us about this church was true—that people had “the time of their lives” there. What a thought. To have the time of your life in a place that, for me, was associated with squirming through endless dull sermons and being bored, literally, to tears. The atmosphere of friendly, unforced good feeling we found ourselves in could be seen again in the faces and attitudes of the people sitting behind President Obama and, in effect, cheering him on at the Emanuel A.M.E. in Charleston. At the church in Indianapolis we were not only made to feel at home, we were treated as if we were children of the congregation. It was something better than what I thought of as “having the time of your life.” When all the males were called to stand in front of the altar and join hands to sing a hymn, a woman like the one who patted my shoulder that day on the train urged us to go up and join in and we did. We sang a hymn. It was called “Somebody Touched Me” and the tears in my eyes were not from boredom.