Summary
In “Journey to Atlanta” Baldwin describes his brother David’s 1948 trip to the American South to play music for the Henry A. Wallace presidential campaign under the Progressive Party. David and his bandmates were treated poorly throughout the trip and this provides Baldwin an occasion to discuss African Americans’ relationship to electoral politics in the country.
Baldwin begins the essay by stating that there is not much enthusiasm for the Progressive Party in Harlem. This third-party campaign under Roosevelt’s former vice president Henry Wallace was making campaign promises regarding civil rights, but most African Americans saw these promises as too good to be true. As a rule, Baldwin says, Americans distrust politicians. Even more than the rest, African Americans have been taught by experience not to expect anything from the political class: “they are always aware of the enormous gap between election promises and their daily lives.” Not wanting to be tricked into hoping, they look upon conventional politics with a skeptical eye.
African American distaste for politics makes the white liberal see them as “political children.” Similarly, African American liberals think that this lack of interest in electoral politics will be solved by more education. Baldwin argues that the situation is quite different: "'Our people' have functioned in this country for nearly a century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies' sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat leveled at the opposition; in the struggle for mastery the Negro is the pawn." Because black votes are bought and sold and used as a weapon, skepticism is actually a rational response to how politics works in America. Certainly, Baldwin admits, by some measures progress has been achieved: but the daily experiences of people in the country’s ghettos remain pretty much the same.
Comically, Baldwin suggests that one of the few things African Americans can get out of a political campaign is a short-term job. The Wallace campaign, in particular, was in need of entertainers. One musical group which joined the campaign purely for the promise of payment was the Harlem musical quartet The Melodeers, which included Baldwin’s brother David and another brother.
In August of 1948, Baldwin’s brothers left for Atlanta to perform music in churches for the Progressive Party. David kept a journal account of the experience, which Baldwin uses to recount what happened. The problems first began on the train, when a “Southern gentlemen and wife” objected to their presence and forced them to sit elsewhere. Then at the Wallace headquarters in Atlanta, they were promised private lodgings but were instead put in a YMCA dormitory. They were then asked to canvass even though that was not part of the initial agreement. Then they were asked to play on a sound-truck to gather crowds in the street, yet they had been promised performances in churches. Then they were kicked out of the YMCA for conducting rehearsals there.
Finally, one night they were are by an aristocratic Southern woman, Mrs. Price, who was helping to coordinate the Wallace campaign in Atlanta, to perform at a social event at her house. Pleasing the audience, they continue to play encores until they eventually refuse to continue. They know that if they kept singing, they will be hoarse the next day and unable to play. Mrs. Price threatens to kick them out, eventually saying that they will be left on the road to find their own way home—a possible death sentence for African Americans in the South of the 1940s. Then when they try to secure a private meeting to get their jobs back, they are threatened with the police. Baldwin notes that Atlanta’s African-American police officers (there were only five at this time) were certain to be called. Either way, a police encounter could also easily lead to death. Finally back home in Harlem, David notes that the whole situation was funny. Baldwin interprets this as meaning that the “five policemen were faint prophecies of that equality which is the Progressive Party’s goal.”
Analysis
This essay is one of the shortest and easiest to read in this collection. However, the humorous and light tone masks a deeper undercurrent of darkness, as in the way David laughs off the possibility of death in Atlanta. While the first part of the essay, describing African-American skepticism regarding electoral politics, and the second part detailing The Melodeers’ trip to the South, may seem disconnected, in fact the second is an illustration of the first. The same way that the average African American in Harlem is skeptical of the Progressive Party and mainstream politics as a whole, David and his bandmates’ debacle trying to make money off the campaign in Atlanta shows that all the enlightened promises of politicians regarding race come to nothing in the end. Actions and attitudes are far more revealing than promises, Baldwin seems to suggest. Similarly, if there is to be real progress it will not be piecemeal changes like the kind politicians promise when they are searching for votes, but more thoroughgoing transformation.
