Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son

Baldwin argues that the South—the white South in particular—is experiencing a crisis of identity. He suggests that the Civil War stripped the South of the opportunity to enact widespread social change on its own. As a result, white Southerners began to idealize the past and feel nostalgic for a version of an antebellum South that never truly existed. White Southern identity is predicated upon a belief that white enslavers and Black enslaved peoples held a mutually beneficial relationship built on love. The reality of the South, however, was one of genocide and violence.

In this essay, Baldwin reacts to a letter written by author William Faulkner, published in Life magazine in 1956 called “Letter to a Northern Editor.” In the letter, Faulkner argues that the NAACP needs to slow down its efforts in the South and give white Southerners the opportunity to adjust to the onslaught of changes brought on by desegregation and the civil rights movement. In his letter, Faulkner writes, “Now I must go on record as opposing the forces outside the South which would use legal or police compulsion to eradicate that evil overnight. I was against compulsory segregation. I am just as strongly against compulsory integration.” Faulkner bases his identity as a Southerner and Mississippian above his identity as an American or human. He argues that Northerners do not know or understand the South and, therefore, have no right to impose laws or policies upon white Southerners.

Baldwin repeatedly challenges this idea. The author’s visit to the South gives him the sense that the South is as much a part of him as anyone else, and he argues that the problems in the South are identical to the problems of the North. Faulkner’s adherence to the idea that white Southerners will make their own changes in their own time perpetuates one of the many elements of White Colonialism and Racism. Faulkner believes that white Southerners need time to adjust to change, placing the needs and emotional well-being of white people above the urgent need of Black Southerners suffering in the face of discrimination and violence. Baldwin argues that waiting is never the responsible action when freedom is at risk.