Black Resistance against Racist Wastification in James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie

Abstract

In Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), James Baldwin revisits the lynching of Emmett Till, considered the major catalyst for the origins of the Civil Rights Movement, in a play that shapes the figure of the fourteen-year-old Black youth into its twenty-three-year-old protagonist, Richard Henry. The scene of his killing opens a story that breaks with temporal linearity and, over the course of its three acts, conscientiously resorts to several flashbacks in order to explore the antecedents, perpetration, and aftereffects of the murder. Following Zygmunt Bauman’s theorizations in Wasted Lives, this article reads the design of segregation as a racial caste system that conceived of Black southerners as human waste. This theoretical framework helps to cast light on the mechanisms that white supremacists have historically made use of in their systemic subjugation of the African American community. Yet it also contributes to elucidating the strategies that Black activism has employed to counteract racism in the fight for racial justice and equality. The article concludes that the audience’s traumatic confrontation with Till’s dead body, the embodiment of the human waste of segregation in its crudest form, spurred resistance to the white supremacist status quo in the US South, triggering changes and transformations nationwide.