James Baldwin The FBI file

Maxwell's stunning book stands as a testimony to the ubiquitous surveillance state that has spied on African Americans (and Jamaican immigrants such as poet Claude McKay, among many others) since 1919 and continues to do so in the era of Black Lives Matter. Maxwell (English and African American studies, Washington Univ., St. Louis) reproduces a sample of FBI reports on Baldwin, who was under scrutiny from 1958 to 1974 and "inspired" 1,884 pages of documentation. The FBI tracked Baldwin's interactions with figures in the Nation of Islam and the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, his foreign travel, and his writings. It even collected and reviewed his books. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover harbored a deep hostility toward Baldwin, who had publicly criticized the Bureau. Ironically, Hoover (whose own sexual proclivities have been questioned) demanded evidence to support his assertion posed as a question: "Isn't Baldwin a well-known pervert?" Baldwin was targeted with the same venom that led Hoover to seek to marginalize and attempt to destroy Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black Panthers. Maxwell shows readers that the police state is no mere myth. The damning evidence is now available for all to see. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All public and academic levels/libraries. --Wayne C. Glasker, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Camden

Maxwell, a professor at Washington University, returns to the subject of 2015's F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, this time taking readers directly to the source with facsimiles of a number of the documents from the FBI's file on writer James Baldwin. The documents collected between 1958 and 1974 include transcripts of wiretapped phone conversations, photographs, letters, speeches, newspaper and magazine clippings, and passport records. They chronicle Baldwin's interactions with the Nation of Islam, Martin Luther King Jr., the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, and other notable figures of the civil rights era. The file reveals a defiant Baldwin who openly criticized the Bureau and threatened to write an exposé on the agency entitled The Blood Counters. As Maxwell writes, "One of the ironies of questionable legal Bureau eavesdropping: it could capture and preserve history in the making with rare intimacy." This compendium offers an unquestionably unique look into the life of one of America's most esteemed thinkers, whose work has seen a resurgence as a centerpiece of the Black Lives Matter movement. B&w photos. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

An expos of the governmental surveillance of James Baldwin (1924-1987), annotated by an accomplished literary scholar.Maxwell (English and African-American Studies/Washington Univ.; F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, 2015, etc.) appreciates Baldwin's radicalism, noting that he "often looks like today's most vital and most cherished new African American author." The author argues that young black activists are particularly moved by him: "The impression that Baldwin has returned to preeminence, unbowed and unwrinkled, reflects his special ubiquity in the imagination of Black Lives Matter." Yet, Maxwell sees an absurdist cautionary tale in how J. Edgar Hoover's FBI obsessively shadowed Baldwin, with equal astuteness and incompetence, due to his political outspokenness and sexual frankness. Baldwin's FBI file, updated through 1974, was the largest compiled on any African-American author. Since it was declassified following a 1998 court challenge (though still redacted), the file is a bizarre testament to governmental overreach. Maxwell presents the actual documentation in chronological order, using brief discussions to provide valuable context. Baldwin first attracted interest following the success of The Fire Next Time, his 1963 account of the early civil rights movement; he was first photographed by the FBI during protests in Selma that fall. Baldwin's articulate discussion of the movement ironically made him a target, and he landed on Hoover's "Security Index" of potential threats. As Maxwell notes, "the Bureau turned the tools and fruits of his literary success into investigative weapons against him." Baldwin was well-aware of the scrutiny and baited the FBI with a long-promised but never-delivered book about their antagonism toward the black community. By 1968, the FBI was attempting to track Baldwin (now a reclusive expatriate) while focusing more on the black radicalism symbolized by the Malcom X murder and the Black Panthers. Maxwell adeptly curates the strange hoard of documentation, but the primary sources will be most appreciated by completists. An unsettling demonstration of how a paranoid, reactionary government can treat significant artists. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.