Interchange – From Another Country: Bill Mullen on James Baldwin’s Revolutionary Life

The title of our opening song, performed by Deacon Tom Jones, from the compilation album Mississippi Saints and Sinners, “If I Had My Way I’d Tear this Building Down,” serves as an epigraph to Baldwin’s 1972 masterpiece, the essay collection No Name in the Street, which features heavily in our program today.
Born on August 2nd, 1924 in Harlem James Baldwin would light out for the Old World in 1948 moving to Paris, France with forty dollars in his pocket. This move was, according to today’s guest, an effort to reconcile what Baldwin called the ‘mystery’ of his sexuality. He later told an interviewer of his state of mind before leaving the U.S., “I no longer felt who I really was, whether I was really black or really white, really male or really female.”
Joining us to discuss the arc of Baldwin’s witness, from Harlem and Greenwich Village, to Paris and Istanbul, is Bill Mullen, author of a new short biography from Pluto Press titled James Baldwin: Living in Fire.
And as a witness Baldwin brings us closer to understanding multiple revolutions from the 1950s through the 1980s and on to our own moment – from the Free Cuba movement and anti-colonialism, to Black Power, Feminism and Gay and Lesbian liberation, as well as the continuing struggle against the occupying force that is the police. And how much of this can be tied to White Supremacy and Christianity, two extremely oppressive forces in the world.
In his book Mullen shows how Baldwin’s life is “a bracing testimonial to being the first African-American radical to make his sexuality an integral aspect of his public attack of racism, sexism, homophobia, and more generally, the matrix of repressive American power both domestically and internationally.”
We begin with Black Lives Matter as the impetus for Mullen finding his way back into the necessary work of James Baldwin.
GUEST
Bill Mullen is Professor of American Studies at Purdue University. He is co-editor with Ashley Dawson of Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities (Haymarket, 2015). He is the author of W.E.B. Du Bois: Revolutionary Across the Color Line (Pluto Press, 2016).
RELATED
James Baldwin: A Revolutionary For Our Time by Bill V. Mullen
James Baldwin: How to Cool It (Esquire)
James Baldwin Was Right All Along by Raol Peck
Huey P. Newton on gay, women’s liberation
“Stagerlee Wonders” by James Baldwin
The Wages of Whiteness: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Color Line (Interchange with Bill Mullen)
MUSIC
“If I Had My Way I’d Tear The Building Down” – Deacon Tom Jones
“What’s Goin’ On?” – Marvin Gaye
“Sweet Lorraine” – Nat King Cole
“Go Tell it On the Mountain” – The Wailers
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young