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James Baldwin Review is delighted to present a special section dedicated to chronicling and demonstrating Baldwin’s direct involvement in the civil rights movement. On tours for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1962–63, Baldwin spoke at dozens of forums. We have transcribed three of his major appearances on May 7, 1963: a speech before a packed gathering of thousands of students at the University of California at Berkeley; a radio interview with John Leonard and Elsa Knight Thompson; and an evening speech before the sold-out San Francisco Masonic Temple. Ed Pavlic provides an introduction tracing some of Baldwin’s work for CORE in new detail. These details suggest that Baldwin’s activism enriched his life and work in contrast to the prevailing idea that these engagements threatened and diminished his art.

During an overloaded and intense western tour for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Baldwin spoke to an audience of over three thousand in the packed auditorium of the Masonic Temple on Mason Street in the Nob Hill section of San Francisco on May 7, 1963. The overwhelming size of the crowd at the Masonic Temple had delayed the start of Baldwin’s speech by an hour. Speaking that evening for a little over forty minutes, Baldwin delivered on his promise to script a confrontation between the worldview of his audiences and the fiercely present need for the country to change itself. To Baldwin this meant that his audiences must change themselves and, maybe even more profoundly, each other. The transcription below has been prepared by Ed Pavlić and Justin A. Joyce. Vocal emphasis has been captured with italics. Significant pauses, interruptions, and non-word interjections have been captured in editorial brackets. The recording of the speech can be found here: https://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recording/bb0838.

On May 7, 1963, Baldwin appeared at his first major event during a loaded and intense western tour for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a speech at the packed Harmon Gymnasium on the U. C. Berkeley campus. Published estimates measured the crowd to be between 7,000 and 9,000. While he had been a committed member of CORE for years and had toured and appeared on the organization’s behalf, throughout the 1963 West Coast tour Baldwin took on a role and summoned a force quite beyond anything he had been involved in before. This speech allows us to track Baldwin’s shifting sense of engagement while the civil rights movement changed rapidly in multiple directions and as Baldwin’s notoriety grew. The transcription below has been prepared by Ed Pavlic and Justin A. Joyce. Vocal emphasis has been captured with italics. Significant pauses, interruptions, and non-word interjections have been captured in editorial brackets.

This conversation was first broadcast on KPFA (Berkeley, CA) on June 6, 1963. Original transcription available online: https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpbaacip-28-8s4jm23q52. The transcription below has been lightly edited for clarity and prepared by Ed Pavlic and Justin A. Joyce. Vocal emphasis has been captured with italics. Significant pauses, interruptions, or non-word interjections have been captured in editorial brackets.

Volume 10’s From the Field section consists of provocations and talking points from roundtable discussions on the Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley film I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982) hosted by James Baldwin Review at three different conferences—the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Denver in 2023; the Modern Language Association’s 2024 conference in Philadelphia; and the American Literature Association’s 2024 conference in Chicago. These round-tables provided stimulating public conversation, bringing together scholars to provide new takes on this extraordinary but little-known film. The panelists—Simon Abramowitsch (Chabot College), Douglas Field (University of Manchester), Monika Gehlawat (University of Southern Mississippi), Melanie Hill (Rutgers University), Josslyn J. Luckett (NYU), D. Quentin Miller (Suffolk University), Jared O’Connor (University of Illinois at Chicago), Hayley O’Malley (Rice University), Robert Reid-Pharr (NYU), Karen Thorsen (independent filmmaker), Kenneth Stuckey (Bentley University)—have each agreed to share here their opening remarks from these conferences in hopes of furthering discussion on this vital film.

\"In May 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality launched the Freedom Rides as a way challenge segregation on interstate buses and bus facilities like waiting rooms and dining counters. Groups of Black and white activists, many college students, would board Greyhound or Trailways buses and travel across the segregated South to test the law. The Freedom Rides lasted for seven months.\" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) Learn more about the Freedom Riders and how people protested against segregation.

A study of the origins of CORE in 1942-1943 as an interracial, nonviolent direct-action org. It examines the tactics, strategy, & ideology, & the soc origins of the CORE founders. It shows how CORE was an outgrowth of the Christian-Pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, & the Christian student movement of the 1930's, & how its ideology & tactics were derived from the Gandhi movement in India. The study is based upon confidential interviews with 3 of the early leaders, upon the published writings of the major founders, & upon res in the archives of CORE & of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, & in the James Farmer Papers. AA.

\"James Morris Lawson's mother believed that force was never the way to solve a problem. Lawson inherited that point of view. He participated in his first sit-in in high school by ordering a meal with a classmate at an all-white restaurant. In college, he joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). These two organizations worked to fight racism through nonviolent resistance.\" (Cobblestone) Read more about James Morris Lawson and his work for African-American civil rights.