Review of No Name in the Street by James Baldwin

*No Name in the Street* by James Baldwin (1972). Published by Vintage.

In the fall of 2023, I was on such a James Baldwin kick. I loved Baldwin’s work before this time, as it’s hard not to, but I was thinking long and hard about the kind of writer I wanted to be in the future. Naturally, I turned to Baldwin for advice.

When I think about what I want to do with my life as a writer and artist myself, I have a tendency to go back to those whose work I admire.

Granted, I haven’t been writing as much lately, having taken a break from my creative work to contemplate the reason why we exist, and because I’m watching way too many Asian dramas, but I’ve been letting my ideas marinate nowadays.

I checked out No Name in the Street because it’s one of Baldwin’s few nonfiction books I haven’t read already.

This one is a bit shorter than his other works, so I got through it pretty quickly.

I think it also helps that the copy I picked up was also in a pretty big font and spaced out kind of weirdly, so that meant I was flying through the pages. It took me less than two hours to get through the entirety of this one.

Anyways, I’m rambling. Let’s get into the review!

James Baldwin’s recollections of growing up in Harlem, as well as his interactions with influential Civil Rights leaders.

As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, this is a pretty brief book overall. I just looked it up while writing this, and the entire book is only about 208 pages. If you get the copy that I had, trust me, it flies by.

We begin in Baldwin’s childhood, where he grew up in Harlem. He discusses a little bit about his mother and her remarriage, and we get the hints of the beginnings of why Baldwin is the writer he is in the portion of the book. I do recommend reading more on his coming of age, as he’s such a fascinating figure to learn more about.

After that, Baldwin shifts gears. He talks a little bit about why he ended up going to Paris (the racism in America), then launches into her personal experiences with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

As we know, historically both of these men were killed, and a more striking part of the text to me was Baldwin reflecting on their untimely ends and assassinations.

He discusses how so many were killed too young, and this is a stark addition to his anger at the state of American for Black people at the time.

Granted, he’s writing this after the Civil Rights movement, but it’s not like a ton changed outside of the core fight their.

Even more than fifty years later, we’re still having some of the same debates and questions rising that Baldwin brings up in the text. A core emotion present throughout this kind of writing is anger, and it’s not hard to imagine why Baldwin is this angry.

And while I write that anger drives it, there’s also immense sadness contained within Baldwin and his writing in this book. While it’s more direct with the deaths of his friends and cultural critique, there’s this sense that he would never have a home, even after going to Paris.

Nothing changes, which creates a void within one’s self. All these marches and fights for rights, yet people still barely see you as another human being.

Eventually he returns back to the States, still brimming with a lot of the emotions and thoughts he was having when he left the country. This sadness bleeds into a certain form of disappointment, as Baldwin critiques both the South and the North for their racism, except the North tries to hide its racism.

Overall Thoughts

This is an interesting book to look upon and examine critically, as at first, I would say it comes across as very disjointed. But something as a writer and academic in training myself that I see shining within this text is showing how everything overlaps.

Baldwin discusses why he goes abroad and doesn’t go into detail outside of the Algerian War—but that’s a war started by oppression of another group, too.

Colonialism is an ugly beast. He’s kind of contextualizing the events through his lens, then, when he goes into the Civil Rights Movement, it becomes personal (albeit in a very different way, as one cannot compare these two events in such an overlapping manner sometimes). Very fascinating book to me overall, though.

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