James Baldwin (1924-1987), novelist, public speaker, and social critic, submits his first and only play.
Above is Baldwin’s “Original Script Before revisions” for The Amen Corner (1954), submitted to the William Morris Agency and personally used by Edward Parone, the agency’s talent scout, mentor, and editor, who remained Baldwin’s friend and advisor.
Baldwin illuminated the systemic racism of the the post-WWII period. An intellectual giant, his stridently flowing arguments deconstructed the world and were a driving force for the Civil Rights Movement. He publicly debated Conservative icon, William F. Buckley, Jr., on “Has the American Dream Been Achieved at the Expense of the American Negro,” in 1965 (which Baldwin won), delivered a polemic rebuttal of white racism on The Dick Cavett Show in 1968, and graced the cover of TIME Magazine in 1963.
“‘History,’ said Baldwin, ‘is not something you read about in a book, history is not even the past – it’s the present. Because everybody operates, whether or not we know it, out of assumptions which are produced and produced only by our history.”
Despite family poverty and suffering abuse by his preacher-stepfather, religious faith guided Baldwin’s formative years. Becoming a minister at 14, his sermons began attracting larger crowds than his stepfather’s. Although Christianity shaped his worldview, by age 17 he came to see that its tenets were based upon false assumptions. Despite crediting Christianity for inspiring blacks to defy their oppressors, he blamed it for mitigating slavery’s pangs with a vain hope of eternal reward.
The Amen Corner, Baldwin’s second major work and first attempt at theatre, waited over ten years to be professionally staged in 1965. It epitomizes his departure from the church as well as the reasons he emigrated from the U.S. in 1948. The three-act play concerns Margaret Alexander, a poor, single-mother and Harlem pastor whose fiery sermons sustain her Pentecostal congregation until it’s revealed that it is she, and not her husband, who has fractured the family. The play is still popular with local theatre groups.