Message from James Baldwin to the House Committee on Un-American Activities
8/25/1964
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Author and activist James Baldwin sent this message, along with the enclosed addendum, to the House Un-American Activities Committee. The committee was originally tasked with investigating communist and subversive activities. By the 1960s, however, it was targeting civil rights activists. Baldwin's letter was added to the file that the committee kept on him.
In 1964, Baldwin sought to raise both consciousness and needed funds for the Freedom Summer project seeking to register African American Voters in Mississippi. Organized by a coalition of the civil rights organizations SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), and SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), the Freedom Summer project brought together local and out-of-state volunteers in Mississippi to establish schools, provide legal services, and register African American voters.
The volunteers were met with resistance – and in many places, violence – organized by the Ku Klux Klan and other local groups. That summer James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, activists associated with CORE working with the Freedom Summer campaign, were brutally abducted and murdered by local KKK members and local officials in Neshoba County, Mississippi.
When Baldwin initially wrote his message, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were still missing. The enclosed addendum included the unfortunate news of their death.
This letter uses the term "negro" to refer to Black people, which was commonly accepted in that era, but is outdated and inappropriate today.
This primary source comes from the Records of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Full Citation: Message from James Baldwin to the House Committee on Un-American Activities; 8/25/1964; Investigative Name Files, 1945 - 1974; Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233; National Archives Building, Washington, DC. [Online Version, https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/baldwin-huac, March 29, 2024]