Blues for Mister Charlie Study Guide

James Arthur Baldwin was born in 1924 to Emma Berdis Jones. As Baldwin’s mother would not reveal the identity of Baldwin’s biological father, his birthname was James Arthur Jones; he changed his name to James Baldwin when his mother married his stepfather, a Baptist preacher named David Baldwin, in 1927. Baldwin attended Fredrick Douglass Junior High School in Harlem before matriculating at De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx, a school whose student body was mostly white. As a teenager, Baldwin became a devout Pentecostal and even preached himself, but he would later suggest that he used religion to sublimate his homosexuality and that Christianity is often a form of destructive self-repression. In 1948, disgusted by repeated experiences with American racism, Baldwin moved to France, where he would live off and on for the rest of his life. He published his first novel, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story titled Go Tell It on the Mountain, in 1953. In 1955, he published an essay collection, Notes of a Native Son, which included both autobiographical essays and essays on American race relations. In 1956, he published the novel Giovanni’s Room, which was highly controversial primarily for its frank depictions of male homosexuality but also for being a novel by a Black writer whose main characters were mostly white. In 1957, Baldwin returned to the United States, and in 1963 he went on a lecturing tour of the Southern U.S. supporting the African-American Civil Rights movement. He continued writing novels, essays, short stories, plays, and poems until he died of stomach cancer in France in 1987. He is buried in New York City. 

In James Baldwin’s introduction to Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), he states that the play was loosely inspired by the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. Emmett Till was a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago who was brutally murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi after allegedly whistling at a 24-year-old white woman, Carolyn Bryant, who was married to the owner of a local grocery store. Shortly after Emmett Till interacted with Carolyn Bryant, her husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother John William Milam abducted Emmett Till from his relatives’ home, violently beat him, shot him to death, and dumped his body in a river. Once Emmett Till’s brutalized corpse was recovered, his mother Mamie Till held an open-casket funeral. Newspapers across the country ran photographs of Emmett Till’s body, sparking massive outrage and bolstering the African American Civil Rights movement. Though Roy Bryant and John William Milam were tried for Emmett Till’s murder, an exclusively white and male jury acquitted them after a very brief deliberation. Baldwin also dedicates Blues for Mister Charlie to Medgar Evars and the “dead children of Birmingham.” Medgar Evars (1925–1963) was a major civil rights activist assassinated outside his home at age 37 by a Ku Klux Klan member named Byron de la Beckwith (1920–2001). The “dead children of Birmingham” refers to the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, a Ku Klux Klan attack on a Black church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four Black girls, Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley.

Blues for Mister Charlie is James Baldwin’s second play. Like Blues for Mister Charlie, his first play, The Amen Corner (1954), interrogates the role of Christianity in Black American life. Blues for Mister Charlie, a play with social protest elements, may have been negatively inspired by two previous novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). In a 1949 essay titled “Everybody’s Protest Novel”—republished in the essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955)—Baldwin criticized these novels, both of which were nominally intended to further the cause of social justice for Black Americans, for what he argued was their one-dimensional, racist characterization of their Black characters. Thus, Baldwin may have taken special care to render all his play’s characters, including the villains, complex due to his criticism of these famous prior works. Baldwin has been a major influence on subsequent American writers. For example, Nobel Prize-winning Black American novelist Toni Morrison (1931–2019), a close friend of Baldwin’s who is perhaps most famous for her 1987 novel Beloved, wrote in his eulogy for the New York Times that his prose inspired her. Moreover, critics have repeatedly suggested that Baldwin’s essays were a major inspiration for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s nonfiction work Between the World and Me (2015).