James Baldwin_Sylvia Chase (Never Aired, ABC, 1979)

“There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood.” James Baldwin wrote in response to the brutal racism he encountered in his youth. So it’s no surprise when Baldwin tells Sylvia Chase: “I don’t personally know you but I know you historically.”
The ABC never aired this magnificent profile of the firebrand American writer, undoubtedly one of the most important writers of his generation. And, here it’s finally for all of us to have a glimpse of James Baldwin’s fearsome personality, his family and his politics. Born as the illegitimate child of Emma Berdis Jones, Baldwin never knew his biological father and yet he went on to mentor a whole generation which was looking to find their voice and identity in a diabolical American society dominated and run by the whites which Baldwin described not only as highly racist but also delusional. “The American sense of reality is dictated by what Americans are trying to avoid. And if you’re trying to avoid reality, how can you face it?” And, so he opens this interview with a strong comment about the issue of white fragility. “White people go around, it seems to me, with a very carefully suppressed terror of black people, a tremendous uneasiness. They don't know what the black face hides, they're sure it's hiding something. What it's hiding is American history. What it's hiding is what white people know they had done and are doing. White people know very well one thing. And it's the only thing they have to know. They know this, everything that's said is a lie. They know they would not alike to be black here. They know that. Now they know that, and they're telling me lies. They're telling me and my children nothing but lies.”
And, so it seems quite logical when he tells the white interviewer: “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t swear to the freedom of all mankind and put me in chains.”
Original Credits for the 1979 interview of James Baldwin, which was never aired:
Sylvia Chase: Writer, interviewer, Narrator.
Joseph Lovett: Producer, Director
Richard O’Regan: Associate Producer
Robert Leacock, Jr. : Cinematographer
Michael Lonsdale: Sound
Editor: Dina Boogaard
Supervising Producer: Karen Lerner