The account begins like a fairytale, or a ghost story. One day in 2019, Leslie J. Freeman was cleaning out the apartment of her aunt, Fern Marja Eckman, a writer and reporter who had died recently at 103. As she went through Eckman’s desk, she happened upon a concealed drawer. Inside, Freeman found the transcript of an interview her aunt had conducted with James Baldwin. As she notes in an introduction to the transcript published Tuesday in The New Yorker, Freeman recognized some of the material from her aunt’s biography of the legendary author, The Furious Passage of James Baldwin. But significant portions of the conversation, Freeman realized, had never been published. That changed earlier this week.
Eckman, who was Baldwin’s first biographer, sat down with the author on October 9, 1963. The subject of the conversation that afternoon was Baldwin’s involvement in “Freedom Day,” an action organized by the Dallas County Voters League and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to promote the registration of Black voters in Selma, Alabama. The stakes of the intervention, a precursor to the infamous “Bloody Sunday” police riot at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, were staggering: In a county where 58% of the population was Black, just one percent of Black folks were registered to vote. And as Baldwin’s own account illustrates, these numbers were the result of violent state-sponsored actions meant to keep Black folks from participating in the American political process. Some 400 Americans lined up to register that day, though no more than 20 were permitted to do so, by the author’s estimate.
Baldwin’s brutal account of voter suppression is just one of the many subjects on which his critical perspective feels as urgent today as it did nearly 60 years ago. Read the full exchange here, and some of the most prescient selections from the interview below.
Baldwin describes the scene during the evening before the action, a night he spent with the civil rights leader James Forman his brother, David, and Prathia Hall, a sncc field secretary, among others:
“[Prathia], who was later arrested, went to the phone. We couldn’t hear what was on the other end of the phone, but we heard Prathia saying, ‘What happened there? How are your wife and children?’ And, ‘Did you know who they were?’ Which is sufficiently disturbing. It turned out that a man named Porter found two white men under his house, fiddling with his gas pipe, at two-thirty in the morning. It was his dog who barked and alerted him. The next day, we saw Porter, and we learned they had come and killed his dog. Then we went out to the [voter-registration] line.”
Once the storm troopers showed up and started instructing those waiting in line to register to “move along,” Baldwin dissects the command, noting the hollow root of the officers’ authority:
“The only word I can find for it was that it was mindless. They sounded like parrots. It was the only phrase they ever used: ‘Move along — you’re blocking the sidewalk…’ When I finally looked into their faces, they were terrified. With their guns and their helmets. And terrified in a very strange way. Terrified as the mindless are terrified. Because the only way they could react to any pressure was a rock or bullet…They don’t have any other defenses at all! This is the police force the Southern oligarchy has used and created to protect their interests.”
Baldwin frames his derision for Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark, who labeled handing out sandwiches to those waiting in line as “molest[ation]” in shockingly blunt terms:
