James Baldwin notes that he was initially inspired to write “Blues for Mr. Charlie” by the murder of Emmett Till, a 14 year old boy from Chicago who was visiting his grandfather for the summer in Money, Mississippi. Not only was he brutally murdered for a trivial encounter with a young proprietor of a country store, but the culprits were well known locally to have done it, although they were vindicated in a small town Southern court with an entirely white male jury in a proceedings that was recorded by television cameras already hot on the trail of the impending Civil Rights Movement.
The case was news for many reasons, among them that the murderers told their entire story to a journalist, William Bradford Huie, for payment of $40,000 so at least one version of little Emmett Till’s torturous death was published in a magazine and is therefore known in graphic detail. It was the kind of thing that could not help but stir the imagination. As a consequence of it, Northern blacks began to reconsider sending their children to their relatives in the South during the summers. Some people suggested that Till’s murder was part of the backlash of the South in retaliation for the unanimous Supreme Court Decision Brown versus Board of Education the year before overturning Plessys vs. Ferguson and making “separate but equal” public schools illegal.
Of course, there was a lot of action in Alabama as well as early as 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the white section on a local bus, spearheading the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the emergence of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. as a national leader of the Civil Rights Movement.
But another eight years would unfold before Baldwin finally finished Blues for Mr. Charlie. They were crucial years to the nation and to our drama, which he endowed with the distinct flavor of subsequent events--not only the many murders, beatings, arrests, church bombings of a racially integrated brigade of Civil Rights protesters and workers but also the subsequent organization of an important and substantial multiracial student wing best epitomized by the efforts of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee). In the early 60s, SNCC began significantly compete with an older more conservative, more religion based leadership of the movement as provided by SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), CORE, and the NAACP. The conflict and the tension was always over the use of nonviolence and the inevitable self-sacrifice and pain such tactics entailed.
As the pressure mounted, so did the random violence. In 1963 NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers (to whom Baldwin dedicated his play), a heroic local figure, was murdered on his own front porch in Jackson, Mississippi with a long range rifle wielded by a White Supremacist fanatic, making Evers the first in a series of major political assassinations relevant to the Civil Rights Movement. His murderer was known as well but not prosecuted until 1994, and Baldwin would not live to see it. The bitterness of these unpunished crimes haunts “Blues for Mr. Charlie.”
In that same year of 1963, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested in Alabama and wrote his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in response to the criticism of conservative clergy of his aggressive nonviolent tactics, chastising him to wait on the legal means once favored by the NAACP. Nonetheless, the historic March on Washington, which took place in late August under the organizational leadership of Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, presented the Movement as a strong United Front. Even as Bull Connor set dogs and waterhoses on student protesters and four black girls lost their lives in the Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.
Baldwin’s character Richard draws upon an intoxicating masculine brew composed of the innocence of the 14 year old Emmett Till, the ferocity of Malcolm X and the smooth seductive masculinity of a Sam Cooke, author of one of the major Civil Rights anthems, “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Richard’s father the Minister Meridian echoes the dignity and frustration of then current Civil Rights leadership: the Martin Luther Kings, the Fred Shuttleworths, the Wyatt T. Walkers, the Reverend Ralph Abernathys, the James Farmers and the Bayard Rustins.
Parnell, who is the Mr. Charlie of the title, is the Southern Liberal, who has perhaps many real life models but the one that strikes me most deeply is none other than the great Southern writer William Faulkner, who was never really able to bring himself to believe that the time for change on racial issues had finally arrived, whose confusion on such matters was aptly presented in the film version of one his most direct novels on the topic, Intruders in the Dust (1949), which can be thought of as a useful prequel to this play. The sequel then would be Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird.
It's a heady mixture, a blues for Mr. Charlie indeed. We have yet to comprehend the melodic implications of such a dilemma, much less to supercede them. Mr. Charlie, much more so than the Richards or the Meridians or even the Lyles, remains an unresolved connundrum of deceit and politesse blocking the liberation of oppressed peoples all over the world.
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