James Baldwin, Author And Intellectual

In 1975, I took a 15-week magazine writing course at Hunter College's Midtown Branch, located on Lexington Avenue in the East 50s, in Manhattan. The instructor was an elderly woman named Camille Davied (pronounced Dah-vee-ay), whose late husband had been an editor at Reader's Digest. (I was the only person of color in the class.) My memory is a bit hazy about how James Baldwin's name got mentioned. Perhaps I wrote a class assignment that referenced him. Anyway, I do remember saying to her that Baldwin was an intellectual. She immediately and emphatically denied that he was. It was probably hard for her, a white person, to acknowledge that a black man could be that cerebral. Maybe the things that he wrote and said about American race relations touched a nerve, making her uncomfortable and self-conscious.

Had I known as much about Baldwin then as I do now, I would have pointed out to her that if Baldwin had not been an intellectual, his essays would never have appeared in Partisan Review, Commentary, and other intellectual journals in the 1950s.