Fresh Air - Remembering Freedom Singer Bernice Johnson Reagon

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

We go into the Fresh Air archive to remember two remarkable women: Bernice Johnson Reagon was one of the powerful singers who helped galvanize the civil rights movement in the 1960s, as a member of the Freedom Singers quartet. She died July 16 at the age of 81. Also, we remember writer Gail Lumet Buckley, the daughter of singer Lena Horne, who chronicled her family's history from enslavement to becoming a part of the Black bourgeoisie. She died this week at age 86. August 2nd is the 100th anniversary of the birth of James Baldwin, so we listen back to Terry Gross's 1986 interview with him.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. This is Fresh Air. I'm David Biegun Cooley. That's the Freedom Singers, a vocal quartet that grew out of the civil rights movement and provided inspiration for fellow protesters as they faced police, arrest, or jail. We're going to remember Bernice Johnson Reagan, a founding member of the group. She died last month at the age of 81. The Freedom Singers was affiliated with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Reagan's experience in jail formed a powerful connection for her between political protest and song. Bernice Johnson Reagan went on

to become a leading scholar of protest songs. She directed the Black American Culture Program at the Smithsonian Institution, where she produced a record series called Voices from the Civil Rights Movement. In 1973, she founded the women's a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. Later, she produced and hosted the Peabody Award-winning NPR series Wade in the Water, African American Sacred Music Traditions. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1989. Terry Gross spoke with her before that in 1988. Bernice Reagan, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you.

We're going to hear Guide My Feet While I Run This Race. Now, how did you first learn this song? I don't know. I don't remember not knowing the song. Therefore, I probably learned it in church. And there is a part of my repertoire that seemed to have come to me by me growing up in a black community, in a black church, and Guide My Feet is one of those songs. This is Bernice Johnson Reagan from her latest album, River of Life. Oh Lord, now guide my feet while I run this race. Lord, guide my feet while I run this race Lord, I'll guide my feet

While I run this race Lord, I don't to run this race in vain. For now, hold my hand. While I run this race. For now, hold my hand. And it raised the world on high It's from Bernice Johnson Reagan's latest album, River of Life, and again she's doing all the voices on that through overdubbing. Now you dedicate that album to the singing tradition of the Black American Baptist Church,

especially the Mount Early Baptist Church in Worth County, Georgia, where you were baptized. What was the singing tradition you came up in? Well, I call it an unrehearsed congregational style. And what I mean by that is there is a way in which a song is started by a song leader and the rest of the people in the church come in and join and actually make the song. That's kind of what you were doing by yourself with all of your voices on the recording we just heard. That's what influences me most when I am creating choral music, that particular congregational tradition. Now, did you sing in a choir or did the whole congregation sing together?

I sang in a choir. This style is older than what is called gospel music. When I sang in a choir, I was in a gospel choir. The first difference is you call a rehearsal, you learn the songs, you learn the part. The congregational style, there is never a rehearsal call as long as you live to learn a song, either words, text, styles, harmonies. There is no training session separate from going to church, and you learn while you are doing the singing. Now, your father was a Baptist preacher. Did you hear much secular music when you were growing up, or was it mostly church music? I heard secular music, but in the early years growing up, my family was fairly strict, so that they did not care that much for us listening to secular music. By the time I got to teenage, my brother, who's two years older than me would get my mother's radio and take it into the room

and he would play Randy. Now Randy out of Nashville played blues between midnight and day. This is a distroccy. That's right and I learned about Screaming Jay Hawkins, Howlin' Wolf, Lightning Hopkins, all of the blues, B.B. King, between midnight and day, listening to the radio coming into my room. By the time we got into high school, things had just sort of loosened up in the family so that there was more space and more permission to hear and play rhythm and blues especially, and I actually participated in a rhythm and blues group. Now, you went to college at Albany College, which was a black college in Georgia. You were a music major when you went to college. What kind of music were you studying?

The Euro-classical tradition. I was in trial toll, so studying Italian arias and German Lieder. That's very interesting, since you were so steeped in the music of the church to start singing Lieder, an art song. Well, within the school system, the black school system, when you get to high school, if you're a singer, you begin to do anthems. You learn the Hallelujah Chorus. You learn Alleluia.

There are staples of the Euro classical concert tradition. You're trained to sing, and you get your first lesson in that Bel Cante style where you sort of cover the voice. And you learn that in high school, so by the time you go to college, you also are operating in that tradition. You could not, when I was in college, learn gospel in school. If you sang gospel, you learned it in church. Today, you will find on university campuses, gospel choirs. But when I was going to school, the music departments actually frowned on the traditional black vocal song style. So you never received any training in it,

and you were basically told, if you were considered a good soloist, that if you sang gospel, you would ruin your voice. When you started to sing with the Freedom Singers, did you feel like you were turning your back on what you were supposed to be doing, learning more about the European singing tradition? That decision didn't come that hard. The first thing I decided was I was going to be in the movement. Right. That got me put in jail. In jail, the only logical songs were the songs that had come out of the black church. The style I'd always sang those songs in were the black vocal style. And the movement sort of named the musical content that would work. By the time I got out of jail, I never wanted to leave the relationship I found between singing and a political position.

And it was in jail where I found that you could sing a song and it would say exactly what you felt. I'd never experienced that before. But once I experienced it, I made the choice that I would stay with that and have not changed. Since that time, I have studied voice. I'm always working with a voice teacher. Most of them operate in that Euro-classical vocal tradition. And there are times in Sweet Honey when we use the coloring that is associated with it, but we don't take it seriously. Can you describe how the Freedom Singers were founded?

Albany, Georgia was a singing movement. And when the news reporters began to come down, they came down in December of 62 as a result of King being arrested. I was already in jail, so I missed most of that. But what they began to write about was the singing. No matter what the article said, they talked about singing. No matter what the article said, they talked about singing. For the first time in my life, I realized that even black people who came to Albany from other places were hearing singing on a level they'd never heard it before. I grew up in Albany. I never knew that there was anything different about the choral congregational style in Albany. But the students who came out of Nashville to organize, Andrew Young, who came out of Louisiana with King to Albany to organize, Dorothy Cotton out of Petersburg, Virginia, came to, they all talked about the singing in Albany being like no other singing they'd ever heard. And as a result of that, Cordell Regan, who was a SNCC field

secretary, and James Foreman, who was executive director of SNCC, began to talk about forming a group. Pete Seeger was somebody who suggested that a group of singers traveling might actually help to build support for those parts of movement activity that did not get on the news. And SNCC was at that point trying to go into what they call black belt areas. These are areas in the South where black people outnumbered whites, usually three to one. And if we could break into voter registration in those areas, it would really turn around political power. But knocking on doors and getting people to register to vote is not the same as getting 700 people arrested. And press was very difficult to get. So the Freedom Singers came out of a need to have another kind of structure to generate support about that kind

of organizing activity. We call the songs that you sang Freedom Songs, but some of them were spiritual, some of them were old slave songs, too, weren't they? The freedom songs came out of the repertoire first, the standard repertoire of what you were singing, so that you would have a song like, Paul and Silas bound in jail, had no money for the golden bell. Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on. That's a spiritual. But that song just moves straight into civil rights movement activity, and you can understand it. If you're in the black church, you learn about Paul and Silas being locked up in jail. They were really radical snake workers.

They are the first Christian organizers into Europe, and they go into this town and they're preaching, and they throw them in jail. They start to sing and pray. And as a result, the jail let them out. Well, even though they preach about this in the black church, if you grew up in a black family, the best badge you can have is that you never got into trouble with the law. So at the same time you're preaching about these radical Christians organizing going forth, you're trying to really stay cool within

your society. When you're in the civil rights movement, that's the first time you establish yourself in a relationship that's pretty close to the same relationship that used to get the Christians thrown in the lion's den. And so for the first time, those old songs, you understand in a way that nobody could ever teach you. So that songs like Hold On, Eyes on the Prize, Hold On, Old Freedom, This Little Light of Mine, We Shall Not Be Moved, We Shall Overcome. All of those songs were church songs, but they got new meaning as a part of the civil rights movement. Added to that were new songs that people created. You know, you must have also really had to know

what song to sing under which circumstances, because there were times probably you needed to sing a song to help organize people. Other times you needed to sing a song to help organize people. Other times you needed to sing a song to help people find their courage to stand up to what was about to happen. Did you intuitively have a sense of what song to do when? The song that you're supposed to sing that suits the occasion comes up in you if you're in the occasion yourself.

So you don't have to make a list if you yourself are a part of what's happening. The song will just come up. And if you're a song leader in the black tradition, you're socialized as a song leader to know a wide range of songs. And you see people coming up with songs all of the time in church and actually at football games. Everywhere in the black community there's music. There's this selection and picking. And usually there's never a naming. Now we are going to sing. Somebody starts up a song,

if they are good leaders, it's the right song for the moment. So that's something you learn. Was there a time when you were with the Freedom Singers, an example of a time where you sang a certain song and it really kind of changed the mood or brought the mood to the next level? The singing with the freedom singers is different in a way than singing in the movement on the scene. By the time we formed the freedom singers, we were transporting a microcosm experience. So we would be these four people standing in this hall singing and talking about the movement. But many times in the movement, one of the strongest things was a song called This May Be the Last Time. It's a song that is a powerful mood setter. You can't really sing the song without thinking about the statement you're making. And it says, this may be the last time. Maybe the last time, I don't know.

Maybe the last time we all sing together. Maybe the last time we all pray together. Many times, that song would be done just before a march, and it would make you know something of the potential cost that you were going into and taking the stand you were taking. When the Freedom Singers split up and when there weren't a constant, when there weren't constant rallies to sing at and demonstrations, did you feel lost for a while trying to figure out what to do with your singing and what to do with your life even? Cordell and I got married so that I left the Freedom Singers before the Freedom Singers split up. Oh, I see.

And I had my first child in 64. I traveled with the Freedom Singers in 63. There was another group of Freedom Singers formed, but I was being a mother in Atlanta. I had a period where I had to decide if I was going to do anything. And it was a period of deciding whether I was going to be a singer and if being a mother and a wife meant that I was not going to be a singer. Or being in the freedoms, not being in the freedom singers, did that mean I was not going to be a singer?

So there was a period where I had to really work at that. One wonderful thing that happened after I had my second child in 65, Toshi Seeger called me and she asked, my baby was two, maybe two months old. She asked me to do a TV show on Woody Guthrie. It was a camera three show. Now, I will never forget it because here I was with two children, and I'm sure Toshi was understanding in some way that I wasn't clear about how I was going to manage this singing. And then it was like somebody just reached down and said, come and sing. And she got tickets. I flew to New York, did the TV show And then it was like somebody just reached down and said, come and sing. And she got tickets. I flew to New York, did the TV show. But it was very important to me that at a time when I was trying to figure out, there were people watching me knowing I was going through that transition. And they affirmed me every time as a singer. That was very important.

You're in the unusual position of being a scholar of the movement that you contributed to. You know, you were one of the freedom singers, but now as a scholar, you have been collecting songs from the movement and going back and documenting sound recordings from the civil rights movement. Have you learned things that you weren't aware of then that were happening around you? And have you gotten a different perspective as a scholar than the perspective that you had as a participant? Absolutely. I was a SNCC worker, which means I was a radical. And I considered myself in the vanguard. And I saw everything else from that point of view. Being a scholar gives me a chance to back way up and look at a much broader picture. There were things that I didn't know about, for instance, around the March of Washington in 63. I knew nothing about the mobilization happening in the

labor unions with the churches, National Council of Churches, to pull that march off. All of that knowing I have only learned as a scholar. Well, I want to thank you very much for sharing some of your research and your personal experiences with us. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. I enjoyed talking with you. Bernice Johnson Reagan speaking to Terry Gross in 1988. The musical historian and founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock died last month at age 81.

After a break, we remember Gail Lumet Buckley, who also examined race history and popular art. She wrote a book about her own family's history from enslavement to celebrity. Her mother was singer Lena Horne. Also, we note the 100th anniversary of the birth of writer James Baldwin, listening back to an interview with Terry Gross from 1986. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air. There is a balm

In Gilead To make the wounded whole There is a balm in Gilead To heal the sin-sick soul So, sometimes I feel discouraged. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation

of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bean Cooley, professor of television studies at Rowan University. Many of you may recognize this voice. Don't know why There's no sun up in the sky Stormy weather Since my man and I ain't together. That's Lena Horne from the 1943 film Stormy Weather.

She became Hollywood's first glamorous black movie star. We're going to listen back to an interview with her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, who wrote of her family's journey from enslavement to the black bourgeoisie. She died last month at the age of 86. Gail Lumet Buckley grew up in New York, Los Angeles, and Europe and graduated from Harvard. She worked at Life magazine before marrying the celebrated film director Sidney Lumet, with whom she had two daughters. Their marriage ended in divorce after 14 years. She later remarried.

The discovery of an old family trunk filled with artifacts going back six generations led her to write her first book, The Horns, An American Family. She said writing the book helped her recognize her blackness and her Americanness. She followed that book with another family history and memoir, The Black Calhouns, From Civil War to Civil Rights.

Her first family history, The Horns, began with matriarch Sinai Reynolds, who was enslaved in the South but eventually bought her own freedom. Buckley followed the Horn family in the North, where they were part of the black middle class of Harlem in Brooklyn. Lena Horn's grandmother was a friend of Paul Robeson's and helped fund his college education. She was a childhood friend of W.E.B. Du Bois. Lena Horn's Uncle Frank was a member of FDR's so-called black cabinet. And though Lena Horne was considered Hollywood's first glamorous black star, she was given few roles because of racial discrimination and communist blacklisting.

Terry Gross spoke with Gayle Lumet Buckley in 1986. Welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. Why did you want to write about your family? Well, it was the material that said, write about me, or write about it, or however material speaks to you. But I had this trunk of family papers that had been my grandfather's trunk, which actually contained all the life of this family. It was amazing through six generations, all the papers of my great-grandfather, who had been in politics and journalism

in the 1870s and 1880s. And there was these wonderful newspapers where he'd written about the Civil Rights Act of 1875. There was a letter from Benjamin Harrison, President of the United States, not very exciting president, but president nonetheless, personal letter, diaries, photographs, family memorabilia. It was just, it seemed to me me this is an aspect of black life that has rarely if ever been portrayed.

This sort of story of quiet achievement and of people who were in the mainstream fighting the battles quietly that eventually, a hundred years later, would lead to the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s. The Horne family was a pretty prosperous family. Yes, as black families go, yes. I'm reminded, a poet once said to me that most black people are expected to tell stories of what it was like growing up poor, and white people always want to hear that from them. And I wonder if you think that's true, and if you think in the process that the black middle class has really been overlooked or not understood.

I think that's a very astute point. I think that's why nobody's really cared about the black middle class, because they weren't headline makers. They were people who lived perhaps as your family might have lived, quietly, going about their business. You referred to the black bourgeoisie and used that term more than the black middle class. Yes. Let me ask you about the choice of that expression. Yes, well, it comes from E. Franklin Frazier's book

for the same name, The Black Bourgeoisie. And the people I'm writing about were the black bourgeoisie that he was writing about. The black middle class is something else entirely. I mean, what I consider the black middle class, which is something born in the 1960s. They were the 1%, when you read statistics, say in 1900, who were in business, who were professional, black professionals. They were lawyers, they were teachers, they were doctors, they were educated clergy. They didn't make a lot of money. The economic avenues open to the black middle class today did not exist before the 1960s. They did

not exist for the people I'm writing about. There were a few black entrepreneurs, for example. How did the Horne family become a member of this more prosperous class? Well, I think it started right after the Civil War. They were fortunate in their slavery, if you could call slaves fortunate. They were house slaves. They lived in Atlanta rather than in the country. My great-great-great-great-grandmother bought her freedom in 1859 for herself and for some of her children, not for all of them. My great-great-great-grandmother remained a slave. She was a household cook in the family of Andrew Bonaparte Calhoun in Atlanta, Georgia. He was the nephew of John C. Calhoun, slavery's greatest apologist.

When he died, after the war, he left money to my great-great-great-grandmother's daughter, who was living with my great-great-grandfather, her brother. And they had money. They were literate. They could read and write. Their mother could read and write. So after the war, my great-great-grandfather bought a grocery store, bought property, sent his two daughters to college, was able to be—this is a man who spent half his life in slavery—but he was able, with emancipation and with radical reconstruction—this is the key, that radical reconstruction was the best thing that has ever happened to black people in America until the 1960s. Your grandparents seem to have been in the couple that violated the traditions of the Horn family.

Third generation black sheep is what they were. They said, to heck with all this uplift and being do-gooders, because my great-grandparents were definitely do-gooders. What did your grandparents do to earn the reputation of black sheep? Well, my grandfather, theoretically, this is family history, we hope it's true, or at least I hope it's true because it's fun, made a killing in the Black Sox scandal of 1921, the baseball fix. He certainly suddenly had a lot of money in 1921 and had run

off. He ran off to Seattle that year, ran away from his wife and his three-year-old daughter, Lena. He was away, out of her life for a long time. Shortly thereafter, her mother left her to go on the stage. And this was unheard of because her mother had also been brought up in the bosom of the bourgeoisie and the stage. The only career that a black bourgeois woman could accept honorably was teaching. And that's when they did work they taught or social work. And to go on the stage was tantamount to prostitution. So your mother ended up getting shuttled back and forth between relatives in the South and in the North. Yes, she did. She was initially brought up by her grandmother in

Brooklyn, the wonderful Cora Calhoun, feminist and suffragette. And then her mother decided, I want this child back. And she didn't really want the child. She just wanted to make her mother-in-law mad, it turns out, because she would be touring in these tent shows in the South and would leave little Lena with whoever happened to be around while she'd go off. And so my mother created a sort of dual personality for herself, her Southern personality when she'd go to one-room schoolhouses and the kids made fun of her accent and her skin color. And then the other personality that she'd have to, which was her real personality when she'd go back to her grandmother and to Brooklyn and her friends in Brooklyn. Finally, there was a semblance of security when her Uncle Frank was dean of a college in Georgia and brought her and said, I'm taking you to live with me for a while.

Took her to Georgia in 1928. So in a way, she was really a perpetual outsider as a child. Yes, she was. She was an outsider, both in the middle class and away, even though those were her roots, and certainly with poorer blacks among whom she lived, but did not really belong. Gail Lumet Buckley speaking to Terry Gross in 1986.

More after a break. This is Fresh Air. How did your mother start in show business? Well, she'd done amateur theatrics in clubs, in her various little clubs in Brooklyn, the Junior Debs, they were called, and they would do. She wanted to sing and dance. Her mother, she'd always had dancing and singing lessons, and her idol was Florence Mills, a great black star of the 20s

with a meteoric career who died young. And she'd done amateur theatrics, and when her grandmother died, her mother decided, I'm going to put this girl on the stage. She's pretty and she's talented. Let's see what happens. So at 16, she was put into the Cotton Club. She's pretty and she's talented. Let's see what happens. So at 16, she was put into the Cotton Club. It's interesting. Your father provided protection, so to speak, for her when she was playing in these clubs that were frequently run by the mob. Yes, absolutely.

Dutch Schultz's mob protected her in the Cotton Club because he was very close to Dutch Schultz's black numbers men. Your mother spent some time touring with the Charlie Barnett band, and they'd tour through the South and run into all kinds of segregation problems. Did she ever consider trying to pass for white during that period? She never did, though people earlier in her career and later in her career, all through her career in the early stages, people had suggested, and she always refused. When your mother, Lena Horne, signed her MGM contract, she was, as you describe her, the first glamorous black star in Hollywood. So, I mean, before her, what could black stars do in Hollywood?

Domestics or you play jungle extras. She was also the first long-term contract ever given a black player in Hollywood. And she was Walter White and Paul Robeson's test case. She was a test case to the NAACP, which had decided they were going to change the image of Hollywood. It was World War II. Okay, we're supposed to be fighting for democracy. Let's do it at home. And this was part of this program.

And she was it. She was the test case. And that made her the enemy of a lot of black actors in Hollywood who were very upset. And they said, you're trying to take work away from us. There'll be no more jungle movies. There'll be no more old plantation movies. What are you trying to do? And Paul Robeson said to her, these people aren't important.

The people who matter are out there, the Pullman porters, those people. And they want to see a new image. And you've got to do it. She said, okay. So what did Paul Robeson want your mother to do? Wanted her to refuse to play a domestic, to refuse to play any role that was demeaning to blacks, and to stick by that and not be swayed from it. Did she have any doubts about taking on this? Well, she did. She did. And she went back to New York and kind of very upset. I mean, it had all been so fast. It's quite a responsibility. It's an incredible responsibility, and she'd been this sort of overnight huge success in the Hollywood nightclub.

She'd auditioned for Louis B. Mayer, who'd said, yes, sign her up instantly. And, of course, the first role that they screen-tested her for was for a maid part, so they were really kind of trying to get out of it. They weren't taking it very seriously. But Robeson and Walter White were taking it seriously, and she was taking it seriously. And her father, Teddy Horn the Gambler, came out to Hollywood, flew out very dapper, and demanded an interview

very politely with Louis B. Mayer, and said, I can afford to hire a maid for my daughter. She doesn't need to play a maid. And they were bowled over by this. They'd never seen anything like Teddy Horn or heard anything like that from a black man who was not political anyway. So did she get roles? Were there roles for her? There were no roles. There were never roles.

It did not go that far. All her scenes were cut out of the South. In the South, her scenes were cut out. So she had to be filmed separately. So she never had roles. She just had moments in movies. Why don't you explain how that worked, when they cut out parts that she was in in the South,

like in Words and Music, which is the movie biography of Rodgers and Hart. Yes, they would cut out The Lady is a Tramp, which she sang in it. They would just snip it out, take scissors and snip, snip, when it got south of the Mason-Dixon line. So she couldn't be in anything that furthered the plot. No, she could never be in anything that furthered the plot or was crucial to a... No, it was a crucial moment in the movie, never.

She must have been very frustrated. She must have been. Did. She must have been. Did she ever talk to you about that? She only talked about it when she did her show, funnily enough. Finally. She compensated by making a very hugely successful nightclub career and a very successful career in Europe. You went to Harvard, and your going to Harvard coincided with the Civil Rights Movement.

No, it didn't actually. I graduated in 1959. Oh, I thought you went a little later than that. No. I graduated before there was the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Movement, the pill, pop. We were prehistoric. We were the Eisenhower generation. When I was a senior, my roommate's fiancé, who is a wonderful white liberal, I hate the name to say white liberal because it sounds like they're not real,

but he is one of the great true liberals. We have to make this word ring again with its true beauty and honesty and everything else, said, let's go picket Woolworths. This was 1959. I said, why are we picketing Woolworths? I mean, I knew they were picketing Woolworths in the South, but I didn't connect the Cambridge, Massachusetts Woolworth with the Southern Woolworth.

I was really naive and silly. But there was no civil rights. There was nothing going on. That's why I went to you. I thought I was going to stay in Europe and live there. When the civil rights movement... Well, it was Kennedy that got me back. In 1960, I came home and immediately went out and campaigned for Kennedy and made speeches for him and voted for him, the first person I voted for. My entire class, the entire Harvard class, were the people I knew. I won't say the entire, but I mean a huge percentage, went to Washington.

Then patriotism was not the last resort of whatever it is, scoundrels. Your mother, when she got married, made sure to keep Horn in her name. So she used that as a, she continued to use that name as her stage name, then used hyphenated names for her private life. But Horn was always in it. And Horn really meant something in New York. You never really had Horn in your name. No. My name, I had it once. Gail Horn-Jones was the name I was christened or baptized, Gail Horn-Jones.

Has writing the book made you want to stick it back in? No, because I signed the book contract as Lumet, and then I married Kevin Buckley, and I wanted Buckley to be in there. So it was a funny, I couldn't, there was no way to be Gail Horn, because it wasn't really my name. I mean, it would be Gail Horn, Jones, Lumet, Buckley, that's too many, unless I did sort of G8. You know, there's an MKP Fisher or whatever her name is. So it was difficult. I want to thank you a lot for talking with us about your family. Thank you. I loved doing it. It was fun.

Thanks for being here. You're a wonderful interviewer. Thank you. Well, thank you. Gail Lamette Buckley, speaking to Terry Gross in 1986. The daughter of Lena Horne, an author of two books about her family's history tracing back to enslavement, died last month. She was 86 years old.

After a break, we note the 100th anniversary of the birth of writer James Baldwin by revisiting a 1986 interview with him. This is Fresh Air. Today, August 2nd, marks the centennial of the birth of James Baldwin, one of the most influential writers to emerge during the Civil Rights era. His essays and novels addressed racial issues head-on. Baldwin's best-known works include Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, and Another Country. For most of his adult life, Baldwin lived as an expatriate in France, where he died in 1987. He was 63 years old. Terry spoke with

James Baldwin in 1986. He told her that he grew up in Harlem, where his father was a preacher in a storefront church. Daddy was an old-fashioned fire and brimstone, hellfire preacher, very direct, very chilling sometimes. Was it pretty frightening to have him as a father? And I'm thinking if you thought that he was directly connected to God, then it really gave him a lot of power. Oh, yes, he did have the aura of the divine about him. His orders were not only coming from him

but from the Almighty. So in a way to contest him was to be contesting the Lord, to be fighting the Lord. Of course, my father was not slow to point this out. There was something very frightening about it. You became a preacher when you were 14. That's right.

Why did you do that? Well, it was almost inevitable, you know, being raised that way. And after all, not doubting anything my father said, not doubting the gospel, not doubting the church, you know. And at the time of puberty, when everybody goes through a storm, you know, the storm of self-discovery, the storm of self-contempt, the storm of the terror of who is this self, which is suddenly evolving, suddenly is distinguishing itself from other selves. And all of these things, and the sexual question, of course, all of these things sort of coalesce

into some kind of hurricane, in a way. And in that hurricane, what did I do? I reached out for the only thing which I knew to cling to, and that was the Holy Ghost. In those three years in the pulpit, it's very difficult to describe them. I probably shouldn't try.

There was a kind of torment in it, but I learned an awful lot. My faith, perhaps, I lost my faith, not the faith I'd had, but I learned something else. I learned something about myself, I think, and I learned something through dealing with those congregations. After all, I was a boy preacher, and the people I was, the congregations I addressed were grown-ups. A boy preacher is a very special aura in the black community, and that aura implies a certain responsibility, and the responsibility above all to tell the truth.

So as I began to be more and more tormented by my crumbling faith, it began to be clearer and clearer to me that I had no right to stay in the pulpit. And I didn't know enough. I didn't... The suffering of those people, which was real, was still beyond the can of a boy, 14, 15, 16. You could respond to it, but I had not yet entered that inferno.

They knew something about being a n***a, which I was only just beginning to it, but I had not yet entered that inferno. They knew something about being a n***a, which I was only just beginning to discover, and it frightened me. So for those reasons and complex reasons, I left. I left home and left the church. What did you do to try to get your foot in the door somewhere as a writer?

Well, I wrote all the time. I worked all day and I wrote all the time, you know. I worked all day and I wrote all night. And I was defined as a young Negro writer. And that meant that certain things were expected of a young Negro writer. And what was expected, I knew I was not about to deliver. What was expected was to accept the role of victim and to write from that

point of view. And from my point of view, it seemed to me that to take such a stance would simply be to corroborate all of the principles which had you enslaved in the first place. Go Tell It on the Mountain was a fairly autobiographical novel, and it really won you a lot of attention and prestige in America. Your book of essays, The Fire Next Time, which was published in 1963, was, I think, perceived by many whites as an attack against whites, like he's threatening us with the fire next time. Did that happen? Did some white people see it that way,

and did it change your reputation to becoming more of a controversial writer? Yeah, but that had happened. That had begun to happen already without my quite noticing it, because long before The Fire Next Time, which was not an attack on white people, but that had happened. That had begun to happen already without my quite noticing it. Because long before the violence time, which was not when there was an attack on white people, they flattered themselves. Long before that, when I first got south, first went

south and tried to begin to, because I went as a reporter, and I tried to get the story published. The first few times, the first few magazines, when I came back, did not want to publish the reports because they accused me of fomenting violence. Now, I was describing violence,

which is not a violence which I was in no way responsible, and I thought that people should know what is going on and why it's going on. And the fire next time is probably the culmination of all those years. You know, it was when I was being called the angry young man on the white side of town and being called Uncle Tom on the black side of town.

Some of your writing has really been, I think, very important to gay people and people in the gay movement in America. And I wonder if the gay liberation movement had any effect on you, if it was important for you to have a movement about that. No, no, no. I left the church when I was 17 and have not joined anything since. You see, before I left this country, I had been afflicted with so many labels that I had become invisible to myself. I had to go away someplace and get rid of all these labels to find out not what I was, but who.

Do you see what I mean? And the gay liberation movement is ideally an attempt precisely to find out not what one is, but who one is, and also to have no need to defend oneself, you know. So it was a very simple matter for me, in any case, to say to myself, I'm going this way, you know, and only death will stop me, you know, and I'm going to live my life, the only life I have, in the sight of God. James Baldwin speaking with Terry Gross in 1986. Today would have been his 100th birthday.

He died in 1987 at age 63. On Monday's show, how brain surgery has been transformed by new technologies, new instruments, and more powerful computers. And how brain surgery has contributed to a better understanding of the human mind. We'll talk with brain surgeon Theodore H. Schwartz, author of the new book, Gray Matter. He'll share some of his own experiences. Join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Roberta Schirach. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham,

with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman and Julian Hertzfeld. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bean Cooley. Who's claiming power this election? What's happening in battleground states? And why do we still have the Electoral College? All this month, the ThruLine podcast is asking big questions about our democracy and going back in time to answer them. Listen now to the ThruLine podcast from NPR. from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography.

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