---

• Born the first of nine children of a clergyman and a factory worker, David and mother, Berdis (Jones) Baldwin in Harlem.
  

• 1938-1942 - Was a store front preacher from age fourteen to age seventeen. He started writing primarily as a way to be loved. He attended Frederick Douglass Junior High School and DeWitt Clinton High School (co-edited the Magpie.)
  

• 1942 - Graduated from high school and moved to New Jersey to begin working as a railroad hand.
  

• 1944 - Moved to Greenwich Village where he met Richard Wright and began his first novel, In My Father's House.
  

• 1948 - Began receiving awards and fellowships for his writings and published his first essay, The Harlem Ghetto. Became disgusted with race relations in the United States and made his home in Paris for nearly ten years.
  

• 1953 - Finished his important novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain which stands as a partially autobiographical account of his youth.
  

• 1954 - Completed the play, The Amen Corner and won the Guggenheim Fellowship.
  

• 1955 - Wrote the novel, Giovanni's Room and received fellowships rewards.
  

• 1960 - Returned to the United States and became politically active in support of civil rights.
  

• 1961 - His best-selling essay collection, Nobody Knows My Name won numerous recognitions to include one of the outstanding books of the year.
  

• 1964 - Published the plays The Amen Corner and Blues for Mr. Charlie. The Amen Corner opened first at Howard University under the direction of Owen Dodson.
  

• 1968 - Published the novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone as a bitterly incisive account of American racism.
  

• 1985 - Wrote The Evidence of Things Not Seen which was an analysis of the Atlanta child murders of 1979 and 1980.
  

• Baldwin wrote novels, poetry, essays and a screenplay in the later years of his life. He died of stomach cancer in December 1987 at his home in St. Paul de Vence, France.
  

  ---

• Produced by the Actor's Studio and opened at the ANTA Theatre on Broadway on April 23, 1964. The play simultaneously called the black man to battle and sang the blues for the white man.
  

• The story is loosely based on the murder of the black youth, Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. The murderer, who was white, was acquitted.
  

• The play deals with the murder of a young black man, Richard, by a white shop owner, Lyle Britten. Richard is a bitter busted musician returning home. His expression of hatred for whites, we learn, leads to his death.
  

• Later, the pastor, Meridian, Richard's father and civil rights leader, expresses his faith in Parnell, a friend and white liberal, to help.
  

• The style of the production was impressionistic through the use of special lighting and a skeletal set. The dome of the courthouse and the American flag dominate the first and second acts, and the steeple and cross dominate the last act. Baldwin has written a morality play on the racial conflict and contrast in the American twentieth-century.
  

• Baldwin says in the introduction, "The play takes place in Plaguetown, U.S.A., now. The plague is race, the plague is our concept of Christianity: and this raging plague has the power to destroy every human relationship."
  

• Meridian is a kind of Martin Luther King, Jr. figure who is forced to wonder if his urging his people to nonviolence is wrong. The conclusion combines confrontations in the courtroom scene with the flashback of the actual murder.
  

• The conflict exists between the bitterly divided Whitetown and Blacktown. In the third act, the courtroom, whites and blacks move across the dividing aisle, suggesting hope for integration. Whites are also seen as victims of racism. Lyle is seen as an ignorant white, Parnell as a tortured white walking the color line. Critics attacked the "stereotypical" white characters.
  

  ---

  CRITICS
  

• Received mixed reviews from critics. Many thought of it as a flawed work in terms of structure. Walter Meserve wrote in The Black American Writer: Poetry and Drama, Vol. II, "Baldwin tries to use theatre as a pulpit for his ideas. Mainly his plays are thesis plays-- talky, over-written and cliché dialogue and some stereotypes, preachy and argumentative. Essentially, Baldwin is not particularly dramatic, but he can be extremely eloquent, compelling, and sometimes irritating as a playwright committed to his approach to life."
  

• Baldwin claimed, "I'm not concerned with the success or failure of the play. I want to shock people; I want to wake them up; I want to make them think; I want to trick them into an experience which I think is important.
  

• Some critics accused Baldwin of advocating hatred of all whites. But in the end of the play, hope for integration is expressed. That is probably more accurately his point of view. In another work, Baldwin wrote, "Integration means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality, and begin to change it." But black anger is certainly a part of Blues for Mr. Charlie.
  

• The play's overall significance not only relates to race relations in the South, but in the entire country. The contemporary significance may be evident in the O.J. Simpson outcome and the Million Man March.
  

  ---

Hatch, James V. Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans, 1847 to Today, Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: The Free Press, 1974, 1996.

Metzger, Linda. Black Writers. Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1989.

Nossiter, Adam. "Civil Rights Slaying Raises Speedy-Trial Issue." New York Times, (May 27, 1994): B, 18:1.

Oliver, Clinton F. Contemporary Black Drama. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons., 1971.

Pratt, Louis H. James Baldwin. Boston: G. K. Hall & Company, 1978.

Woll, Allen. Dictionary of the Black Theatre. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983.

_____ . "Justice at Last in Mississippi." St. Louis Post-Dispatch, (February 10, 1994): B, 6:1.