James Baldwin wrote, “When the South has trouble with its Negroes — when the Negroes refuse to remain in their ‘place’ — it blames ‘outside agitators’ and ‘Northern interference.’ When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.”
On April 30, 2024, a post on X (archived) purported to cite U.S. author James Baldwin writing about outside parties leading Black Americans to protest. The quote read:
When the South has trouble with its Negroes — when the Negroes refuse to remain in their “place” — it blames “outside” agitators and “Northern interference.” When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
The X post reshared another post that commented on the ongoing pro-Palestinian demonstrations on U.S. university campuses. The suggestion in both posts was that for those in power, it has always been easy to dismiss loud discontent by claiming that external actors manipulated protesters.
The X user correctly attributed the quote, we found. A search on Google Books confirmed that it was taken from Baldwin’s book “Nobody Knows My Name,” published in 1961. In the paragraph in which the quote appeared, Baldwin recognized that external actors do join movements for less-than-noble reasons, but he argued that instead of creating discontent, they in fact exploit existing grievances:
Now, I do not doubt that, among the people at the U.N. that day, there were Stalinist and professional revolutionists acting out of the most cynical motives. Wherever there is great social discontent, these people are, sooner or later, to be found. Their presence is not as frightening as the discontent which creates their opportunity. What I find appalling — and really dangerous — is the American assumption that the Negro is so contented with his lot here that only the cynical agents of a foreign power can rouse him to protest. It is a notion which contains a gratuitous insult, implying, as it does, that Negroes can make no move unless they are manipulated. It forcibly suggests that the Southern attitude toward the Negro is also, essentially, the national attitude. When the South has trouble with its Negroes — when the Negroes refuse to remain in their “place” — it blames “outside” agitators and “Northern interference.” When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin. And this, by no means incidentally, is a very dangerous thing to do. We thus give credit to the Communists for attitudes and victories which are not theirs. We make of them the champions of the oppressed, and they could not, of course, be more delighted.
We confirmed another quote by James Baldwin in April 2024, in which he discusses education.
Anna Rascouët-Paz
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