Celebrating James Baldwin, on what would have been his 100th birthday

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AIN'T GONNA LET NOBODY TURN ME 'ROUND")

THE FREEDOM SINGERS: (Singing) Ain't going to let nobody, Lordy, turn me 'round, turn me 'round, turn me 'round. Ain't going to let nobody, Lordy, turn me 'round. I'm going to keep on a-walkin', keep on a-talkin', marching up to freedom land.

BIANCULLI: That's The Freedom Singers, a vocal quartet that grew out of the civil rights movement and provided inspiration for fellow protesters as they faced police, arrest or jail. We're going to remember Bernice Johnson Reagon, a founding member of the group. She died last month at the age of 81.

The Freedom Singers was affiliated with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Reagon's experience in jail formed a powerful connection for her between political protest and song. Bernice Johnson Reagon went on to become a leading scholar of protest songs. She directed the Black American Culture Program at the Smithsonian Institution, where she produced a record series called "Voices From The Civil Rights Movement." In 1973, she founded the women's a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. Later, she produced and hosted the Peabody Award-winning NPR series "Wade In The Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions." She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1989. Terry Gross spoke with her before that in 1988.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

TERRY GROSS: Bernice Reagon, welcome to FRESH AIR.

BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON: Thank you.

GROSS: We're going to hear "Guide My Feet, While I Run This Race." Now, how did you first learn this song?

JOHNSON REAGON: I don't know. I don't remember not knowing the song. Therefore, I probably learned it in church. And there is a part of my repertoire that seemed to have come to me by me growing up in a Black community in a Black church. And "Guide My Feet" is one of those songs.

GROSS: This is Bernice Johnson Reagon from her latest album, "River Of Life."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GUIDE MY FEET, WHILE I RUN THIS RACE")

JOHNSON REAGON: (Singing) Oh, Lord, now, guide my feet while I run this race. Lord, guide my feet while I run this race. Oh, Lord, now, guide my feet while I run this race. Lord, I don't want to run this race in vain. Oh, Lord, now, hold my hand while I run this race. Lord, hold my hand...

GROSS: That's from Bernice Johnson Reagon's latest album, "River Of Life." And, again, she's doing all the voices on that through overdubbing. Now, you dedicate that album to the singing tradition of the Black American Baptist Church, especially the Mount Early Baptist Church in Worth County, Ga., where you were baptized. What was the singing tradition you came up in?

JOHNSON REAGON: Well, I call it an unrehearsed congregational style. And what I mean by that is there is a way in which a song is started by a song leader, and the rest of the people in the church come in and join and actually make the song.

GROSS: That's kind of what you were doing by yourself with all of your voices...

JOHNSON REAGON: That's right.

GROSS: ...On the recording we just heard.

JOHNSON REAGON: So that's what influences me when I am creating choral music - that particular congregational tradition.

GROSS: Now, did you sing in a choir, or did the whole congregation sing together?

JOHNSON REAGON: I sang in a choir. This style is older than what is called gospel music. When I sang in a choir, I was in a gospel choir. The first difference is you call a rehearsal. You learn the songs. You learn the part. The congregational style - there is never a rehearsal call as long as you live to learn a song, either words, texts, styles, harmonies. There is no training session separate from going to church, and you learn while you are doing the singing.

GROSS: Now, your father was a Baptist preacher. Did you hear much secular music when you were growing up, or was it mostly church music?

JOHNSON REAGON: I heard secular music, but in the early years growing up, my family was fairly strict so that they did not care that much for us listening to secular music. By the time I got to teen age, my brother, who's two years older than me, would get my mother's radio and take it into the room. And he would play Randy (ph). Now, Randy out of Nashville played blues between midnight and day.

GROSS: This is a disc jockey.

JOHNSON REAGON: That's right. And I learned about Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Howlin' Wolf, Lightnin' Hopkins, all of the blues - B.B. King - between midnight and day, listening to the radio coming into my room. By the time we got into high school, things had just sort of loosened up in the family so that there was more space and more permission to hear and play rhythm and blues especially, and I actually participated in a rhythm and blues group.

GROSS: Now, you went to college at Albany College, which was a Black college in Georgia.

JOHNSON REAGON: Georgia.

GROSS: You were a music major when you went to college.

JOHNSON REAGON: Yeah.

GROSS: What kind of music were you studying?

JOHNSON REAGON: The Euro-classical tradition. I was a contralto - so studying Italian arias and German lieder.

GROSS: That's very interesting since you were so steeped in the music of the church to start singing lieder, an art song.

JOHNSON REAGON: Well, within the school system, the Black school system, when you get to high school, if you're a singer, you begin to do anthems. You learn the "Hallelujah Chorus." You learned "Alleluia." There are staples of the Euro-classical concert tradition you're trained to sing, and you get your first lesson in that bel canto style where you sort of cover the voice. And you learn that in high school so by the time you go to college, you also are operating in that tradition.

You could not, when I was in college, learn gospel in school. If you sang gospel, you learned it in church. Today, you will find on university campuses gospel choirs. But when I was going to school, the music departments actually frowned on the traditional Black vocal song style. So you never received any training in it, and you were basically told, if you were considered a good soloist, that if you sang gospel, you would ruin your voice.

GROSS: When you started to sing with The Freedom Singers, did you feel like you were turning your back on what you were supposed to be doing - learning more about the European singing tradition?

JOHNSON REAGON: That decision didn't come that hard. The first thing I decided was I was going to be in the movement.

GROSS: Right.

JOHNSON REAGON: That got me put in jail. In jail, the only logical songs were the songs that had come out of the Black church. The style I'd always sang those songs in were the Black vocal style. And therefore, it was like I chose to be in the movement, and the movement sort of named the musical content that would work. By the time I got out of jail, I never wanted to leave the relationship I found between singing and a political position. And it was in jail where I found that you could sing a song and it would say exactly what you felt. I'd never experienced that before. But once I experienced it, I made the choice that I would stay with that and have not changed.

Since that time, I have studied voice. I'm always working with a voice teacher. Most of them operate in that Euro-classical vocal tradition. And there are times in Sweet Honey when we use the coloring that is associated with it, but we don't take it seriously.

BIANCULLI: Bernice Johnson Reagon speaking to Terry Gross in 1988 - more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 1988 interview with singer and musical historian Bernice Johnson Reagon. She was the co-founder of the Freedom Singers, and the founder of the a cappella group Sweet Honey In The Rock. She also produced record album collections and radio series about the history and traditions of Black sacred music. She died last month. She was 81 years old.

GROSS: Can you describe how The Freedom Singers were founded?

JOHNSON REAGON: Albany, Ga., was a singing movement, and when the news reporters began to come down, they came down in December '62 as a result of King being arrested. I was already in jail, so I missed most of that, but what they began to write about was the singing. No matter what the article said, they talked about singing. For the first time in my life, I realized that even Black people who came to Albany from other places were hearing singing on a level they had never heard it before.

I grew up in Albany. I never knew that there was anything different about the choral congregational style in Albany, but the students who came out of Nashville to organize - Andrew Young, who came out of Louisiana, with King, to Albany to organize, Dorothy Cotton out of Petersburg, Va., came to - they all talked about the singing in Albany being like no other singing they had ever heard, and as a result of that, Cordell Reagon, who was a SNCC field secretary, and James Forman, who was executive director of SNCC, began to talk about forming a group.

Pete Seeger was somebody who suggested that a group of singers traveling might actually help to build support for those parts of movement activity that did not get on the news, and SNCC was, at that point, trying to go into what they call black belt areas. These are areas in the South where black people outnumbered whites, usually three to one, and if we could break into voter registration in those areas, it would really turn around political power - but knocking on doors and getting people to register to vote is not the same as getting 700 people arrested, and press was very difficult to get, so the Freedom Singers came out of a need to have another kind of structure to generate support about that kind of organizing activity.

GROSS: We call the songs that you sang freedom songs, but some of them were spiritual. Some of them were old slave songs, too, weren't they? I mean, how did...

JOHNSON REAGON: The freedom songs came out of the repertoire first, the standard repertoire of what you were singing, so that you would have a song like...

(Singing) Paul and Silas, bound in jail, had no money for to go their bail. Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on.

That's a spiritual, but that song just moves straight into civil rights movement activity, and you can understand it. If you're in the Black church, you learn about Paul and Silas being locked up in jail. They were really radical SNCC workers. They are the first Christian organizers into Europe, and they go into this town and they're preaching, and they throw them in jail. They start to sing and pray, and as a result, the jail let them out. Well, even though they preach about this in the Black church, if you grew up in a Black family, the best badge you can have is that you never got into trouble with the law, so at the same time you're preaching about these radical Christians organizing, going forth, you're trying to really stay cool within your society.

When you're in the civil rights movement, that's the first time you establish yourself in a relationship that's pretty close to the same relationship that used to get the Christians thrown in the lion's den, and so for the first time, those old songs you understand in a way that nobody could ever teach you, so that songs like "Hold On" - "Eyes On The Prize (Hold On)" - "Oh Freedom," "This Little Light Of Mine," "We Shall Not Be Moved," "We Shall Overcome" - all of those songs were church songs, but they got new meaning as a part of the civil rights movement. Added to that were new songs that people created.

GROSS: You know, you must have also really had to know what song to sing under which circumstances, 'cause there were times, probably, you needed to sing a song to help organize people. Other times, you needed to sing a song to help people find their courage to stand up to what was about to happen. Did you intuitively have a sense of what song to do when?

JOHNSON REAGON: The song that you're supposed to sing that suits the occasion comes up in you if you're in the occasion yourself, so you don't have to make a list if you yourself are a part of what's happening. The song will just come up, and if you're a song leader in the Black tradition, you're socialized as a song leader to know a wide range of songs, and you see people coming up with songs all of the time in church, and, actually, at football games. Everywhere in the Black community there's music, there's this selection and picking, and usually, there's never a naming, now we are going to sing. Somebody starts up a song. If they are good leaders, it's the right song for the moment, so that's something you learn.

GROSS: Was there a time when you were with the Freedom Singers - an example of a time where you sang a certain song and it really kind of changed the mood or brought the mood to the next level?

JOHNSON REAGON: The singing with the Freedom Singers is different, in a way, than singing in the movement on the scene. By the time we formed the Freedom Singers, we were transporting a microcosm experience, so we would be these four people standing in this hall, singing and talking about the movement.

But many times in the movement, one of the strongest things was a song called "This May Be The Last Time." It's a song that is a powerful mood-setter. You can't really sing the song without thinking about the statement you're making, and it says, this may be the last time, may be the last time - I don't know - may be the last time we all sing together, may be the last time we all pray together. Many times, that song would be done just before a march, and it would make you know something of the potential cost that you were going into, and taking the stand you were taking.

GROSS: When The Freedom Singers split up, and when there weren't a constant - when there weren't constant rallies to sing at, and demonstrations, did you feel lost for a while, trying to figure out what to do with your singing and, you know, what to do - what to do with your life, even?

JOHNSON REAGON: Well, Cordell and I got married, so then I left the Freedom Singers before the Freedom Singers split up.

GROSS: Oh, I see.

JOHNSON REAGON: And I had my first child in '64. I traveled with the Freedom Singers in '63. There was another group of Freedom Singers formed, but I was being a mother in Atlanta. I had a period where I had to decide if I was going to do anything, and it was a period of deciding whether I was going to be a singer, and if being a mother and a wife meant that I was not going to be a singer, or if being in the Freedom - not being in the Freedom Singers, did that mean I was not going to be a singer?

So there was a period where I had to really work at that. One wonderful thing that happened - after I had my second child, in '65, Toshi Seeger called me, and she asked - my baby was maybe two months old. She asked me to do a TV show on Woody Guthrie. It was a Camera Three show. Now, I will never forget it, because here I was, with two children, and I'm sure Toshi was understanding in some way that I wasn't clear about how I was going to manage this singing, and then it was like somebody just reached down and said, come and sing, and she got tickets. I flew to New York, did the TV show, but it was very important to me that at a time when I was trying to figure out, there were people watching me, knowing I was going through that transition, and they affirmed me every time as a singer. That was very important.

GROSS: You're in the unusual position of being a scholar of the movement that you contributed to. You know, you were one of the Freedom Singers, but now as a scholar, you have been collecting songs from the movement, and going back and documenting sound recordings from the civil rights movement. Have you learned things that you weren't aware of then that were happening around you? I mean, have you gotten a different perspective as a scholar than the perspective that you had as a participant?

JOHNSON REAGON: Absolutely. I was a SNCC worker, which means I was a radical, and I considered myself in the vanguard, and I saw everything else from that point of view. Being a scholar gives me a chance to back way up and look at a much broader picture. There were things that I didn't know about, for instance, around the March on Washington '63. I knew nothing about the mobilization happening in the labor unions with the churches, the National Council of Churches, to pull that march off. All of that knowing I have only learned as a scholar.

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you very much for sharing some of your research and your personal experiences with us. Thank you so much for being here.

JOHNSON REAGON: Thank you. I enjoyed talking with you.

BIANCULLI: Bernice Johnson Reagon speaking to Terry Gross in 1988. The musical historian and founder of Sweet Honey In The Rock died last month, at age 81. After a break, we remember Gail Lumet Buckley, who also examined race history and popular art. She wrote a book about her own family's history, from enslavement to celebrity. Her mother was singer Lena Horne. Also, we note the hundredth anniversary of the birth of writer James Baldwin, listening back to an interview with Terry Gross from 1986. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BALM IN GILEAD")

SWEET HONEY IN THE ROCK: (Singing) There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul. Sometimes, I feel discouraged.

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, professor of television Studies at Rowan University. Many of you may recognize this voice.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "STORMY WEATHER")

LENA HORNE: (As Selina Rogers, singing) Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky - stormy weather since my man and I ain't together.

BIANCULLI: That's Lena Horne from the 1943 film "Stormy Weather." She became Hollywood's first glamorous Black movie star. We're going to listen back to an interview with her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, who wrote of her family's journey from enslavement to the Black bourgeoisie. She died last month at the age of 86. Gail Lumet Buckley grew up in New York, Los Angeles and Europe and graduated from Harvard. She worked at Life magazine before marrying the celebrated film director Sidney Lumet, with whom she had two daughters. Their marriage ended in divorce after 14 years. She later remarried.

The discovery of an old family trunk filled with artifacts going back six generations led her to write her first book, "The Hornes: An American Family." She said writing the book helped her recognize her Blackness and her Americanness. She followed that book with another family history and memoir, "The Black Calhouns: From Civil War To Civil Rights." Her first family history, "The Hornes," began with matriarch Sinai Reynolds, who was enslaved in the South but eventually bought her own freedom. Buckley followed the Horne family in the North, where they were part of the Black middle class of Harlem in Brooklyn.

Lena Horne's grandmother was a friend of Paul Robeson's and helped fund his college education. She was a childhood friend of W.E.B. Du Bois. Lena Horne's Uncle Frank was a member of FDR's so-called Black cabinet. And though Lena Horne was considered Hollywood's first glamorous Black star, she was given few roles because of racial discrimination and communist blacklisting. Terry Gross spoke with Gail Lumet Buckley in 1986.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

TERRY GROSS: Welcome to FRESH AIR.

GAIL LUMET BUCKLEY: Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here.

GROSS: Why did you want to write about your family?

LUMET BUCKLEY: Well, it was the material that said, write about me, or write about it, or however material speaks to you. But I had this trunk of family papers that had been in my grandfather's trunk, which actually was - contained all the sort of the life of this family. It was amazing - through six generations, all the papers of my great-grandfather, who had been in politics and journalism in the 1870s and 1880s. And there was these wonderful newspapers where he'd written about the Civil Rights Act of 1875. There was a letter from Benjamin Harrison, president of the United States - not a very exciting president but president nonetheless - personal letter, diaries, photographs, family memorabilia. That was just - it seemed to me this is an aspect of Black life that has rarely, if ever, been portrayed, this sort of story of quiet achievement and of people who were in the mainstream, fighting the battles quietly that eventually, a hundred years later, would lead to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.

GROSS: The Horne family was a pretty prosperous family.

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes, as Black families go. Yes.

GROSS: I'm reminded - a poet once said to me that most Black people are expected to tell stories of what it was like growing up poor, and white people always want to hear that from them. And I wonder...

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yeah.

GROSS: ...If you think that's true and if you think, in the process, that the Black middle class has really been overlooked or not understood.

LUMET BUCKLEY: I think that's a very astute point. I think that's why nobody's really cared about the Black middle class - because they weren't headline-makers. They were people who lived perhaps as your family might have lived - quietly, going about their business.

GROSS: You referred to the Black bourgeoisie and use that term more than the Black middle class.

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.

GROSS: Let me ask you about the expression.

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes. Well, it comes from E. Franklin Frazier's book of the same name, "The Black Bourgeoisie." And the people I'm writing about were the Black bourgeoisie that he was writing about. The Black middle class is something else entirely - I mean, what I consider the Black middle class, which is something born in the 1960s. They were the 1% when you read the statistics, say, in 1900 who were in business, who were professional - Black professionals. They were lawyers. They were teachers. They were doctors. They were educated clergy. They didn't make a lot of money. The economic avenues open to the Black middle class today did not exist before the 1960s. They did not exist for the people I'm writing about. There were a few Black entrepreneurs, for example.

GROSS: How did the Horne family become a member of this more prosperous class?

LUMET BUCKLEY: Well, I think it started right after the Civil War. They were fortunate in their slavery, if you could call slaves fortunate. They were house slaves. They lived in Atlanta rather than in the country. My great-great-great-great-grandmother bought her freedom in 1859 for herself and for some of her children, not for all of them. My great-great-great-grandmother remained a slave. She was a household cook in the family of Andrew Bonaparte Calhoun in Atlanta, Ga. He was the nephew of John C. Calhoun, slavery's greatest apologist.

When he died after the war, he left money to my great-great-great-grandmother's daughter, who was living with my great-great-grandfather, her brother, and they had money. They were literate. They could read and write. Their mother could read and write. So after the war, my great-great-grandfather bought a grocery store, bought property, sent his two daughters to college, was able to be - this is a man who spent half his life in slavery. But he was able with emancipation and with radical reconstruction. This is the key - that radical reconstruction was the best thing that has ever happened to Black people in America until the 1960s.

GROSS: Your grandparents seemed to have been the couple that violated the traditions...

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yeah. Yeah.

GROSS: ...Of the Horne family.

LUMET BUCKLEY: Third-generation black sheep is what they were. They said, to heck with all this uplift and being do-gooders, because my great-grandparents were definitely do-gooders.

GROSS: What did your grandparents do to earn the reputation of black sheep?

LUMET BUCKLEY: Well, my grandfather theoretically - this is family history. We hope it's true. At least I hope it's true 'cause it's fun - made a killing on the Black Sox scandal of 1921, the baseball fix. He certainly suddenly had a lot of money in 1921 and had run off - he ran off to Seattle that year, ran away from his wife and his 3-year-old daughter, Lena. He was away out of her life for a long time. Shortly thereafter, her mother left her to go on the stage. And this was unheard of because her mother had also been brought up in the bosom of the bourgeoisie. And the stage - the only career that a Black bourgeois woman could accept honorably was teaching, and that's when they did work. They taught or social work. And to go on the stage was tantamount to prostitution.

GROSS: So your mother ended up getting shuttled back and forth between relatives in the South and in the North.

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes, she did. She lived - she was initially brought up by her grandmother in Brooklyn, the wonderful Cora Calhoun, feminist and suffragette. And then her mother decided, I want this child back. And she didn't really want the child. She just wanted to make her mother-in-law mad, it turns out, because she would be touring in these tent shows in the South and would leave little Lena with whoever happened to be around while she'd go off.

And so my mother created a sort of dual personality for herself - her Southern personality when she'd go to one-room schoolhouses and the kids made fun of her accent and her skin color and then the other personality that she'd have, too, which was her real personality, when she'd go back to her grandmother and to Brooklyn and her friends in Brooklyn. Finally, there was a semblance of security when her uncle Frank was dean of a college in Georgia and brought her and said, I'm taking you to live with me for a while, took her to Georgia in 1928.

GROSS: So in a way, she was really a perpetual outsider...

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.

GROSS: ...As a child.

LUMET BUCKLEY: She was. She was an outsider both in the middle class, in a way, even though those were her roots, and certainly with poorer Blacks among whom she lived but was not - did not really belong.

BIANCULLI: Gail Lumet Buckley speaking to Terry Gross in 1986 - more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 1986 interview with Gail Lumet Buckley, who wrote two books chronicling the history of her family's path from enslavement to prominence. Her mother was singer and actress Lena Horne. Gail Lumet Buckley died last month at age 86.

GROSS: How did your mother start in show business?

LUMET BUCKLEY: Well, she'd done amateur theatrics in clubs, in her various little clubs in Brooklyn. The Junior Debs, they were called, and they would do - she wanted to sing and dance. Her mother - she'd always had dancing and singing lessons, and her idol was Florence Mills, a great Black star of the '20s with a meteoric career who died young. And she'd done amateur theatrics, and when her grandmother died, her mother decided, I'm going to put this girl on the stage. She's pretty, and she's talented. Let's see what happens. So at 16, she was put into the Cotton Club.

GROSS: It's interesting. Her father provided protections...

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.

GROSS: ...That'd speak for her...

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.

GROSS: ...When she was playing in these clubs that were frequently run by the mob.

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes, absolutely. Dutch Schultz's mob protected her in the Cotton Club because he was very close to Dutch Schultz's Black numbers men.

GROSS: Your mother spent some time touring with the Charlie Barnet band, and they'd tour through the South...

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.

GROSS: ...And run into all kinds of segregation problems. Did she ever consider trying to pass for white during that period?

LUMET BUCKLEY: She never did, though people earlier in her career and later in her career - all through her career in the early stages, people would suggest it, and she always refused.

GROSS: When your mother, Lena Horne, signed her MGM contract, she was, as you describe her, the first glamorous Black star in Hollywood. So, I mean, before her...

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.

GROSS: ...What could Blacks play?

LUMET BUCKLEY: Well, you played domestics, or you played jungle extras. She was also the first long-term contract ever given a Black player in Hollywood, and she was Walter White and Paul Robeson's test case. She was a test case to the NAACP, which had decided they were going to change the image of Hollywood. It was World War II. OK, let's - you know, we're supposed to be fighting for democracy. Let's do it at home. And this was part of this program, and she was it. She was the test case.

And that made her the enemy of a lot of Black actors in Hollywood, who were very upset. And they said, you're trying to take work away from us. There'll be no more jungle movies. There'll be no more old plantation movies. What are you trying to do? And Paul Robeson said to her, these people aren't important. The people who matter are out there - the Pullman porters, those people. And they want to see a new image, and you've got to do it. She said, OK.

GROSS: So what did Paul Robeson want your mother to do?

LUMET BUCKLEY: Wanted her to refuse to play a domestic, to refuse to play any role that was demeaning to Blacks and to stick by that and not be swayed from it.

GROSS: Did she have any doubts about taking on this work?

LUMET BUCKLEY: Well, she did. She did, and she went back to New York kind of very upset. I mean, it had all been so fast. She'd...

GROSS: It's quite a responsibility.

LUMET BUCKLEY: It's an incredible responsibility, and she'd been this sort of overnight, huge success in the Hollywood nightclub. She'd auditioned for Louis B. Mayer, who'd said, yes, sign her up instantly. And, of course, the first role that they screen-tested her for was for a maid part, so they were really kind of trying to get out of it. They weren't taking it very seriously. But Robeson and Walter White were taking it seriously, and she was taking it seriously.

And her father, Teddy Horne, the gambler, came out to Hollywood - flew out, very dapper, and demanded an interview very politely with Louis B. Mayer and said, I can afford to hire a maid for my daughter. She doesn't need to play a maid. And they were bowled over by this. They'd never seen anything like Teddy Horne or heard anything like that from a Black man who was not political, anyway.

GROSS: So did she get roles? Were there roles for her?

LUMET BUCKLEY: There were no roles. There were never roles. It could not - it did not go that far. All her scenes were cut out of the South. In the South, her scenes were cut out, so she had to be filmed separately. So she never had roles. She just had moments in movies.

GROSS: Why don't you explain how that worked when they cut out parts that she was in...

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.

GROSS: ...In the South? Like, in "Words And Music," which was...

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes, they would cut out...

GROSS: ...The movie biography of Rodgers and Hart...

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.

GROSS: ...How would that be done?

LUMET BUCKLEY: They would cut out "The Lady Is A Tramp," which she sang in. They would just snip it out, take scissors and snip, snip when it got south of the Mason-Dixon line.

GROSS: So she couldn't be in anything that furthered the plot.

LUMET BUCKLEY: No, she could never be in anything that furthered the plot or was crucial to - no - that was a crucial moment in the movie - never.

GROSS: She must have been very frustrated.

LUMET BUCKLEY: She must have been.

GROSS: Did she ever talk to you about that?

LUMET BUCKLEY: She only talked about it when she did her show, funnily enough, finally. She compensated by making a very hugely successful nightclub career and a very successful career in Europe.

GROSS: You went to Harvard, and your going to Harvard coincided with the civil rights movement.

LUMET BUCKLEY: No, it didn't, actually.

GROSS: Didn't you go when you...

LUMET BUCKLEY: I graduated in 1959.

GROSS: Oh, I thought you went a little later than that.

LUMET BUCKLEY: No. I graduated before there was the civil rights movement, the woman's movement, the pill, pot. We were prehistoric. We were the Eisenhower generation. We were - when I was a senior, my roommate's fiancé, who was a wonderful - who is a wonderful white liberal - I hate the name, to say white liberal, 'cause it sounds like they're not real. But he is one of the great true liberals. I've - we have to make this word ring again with its true beauty and honesty and everything else - said, let's go picket Woolworths.

This was 1959, and I said, why are we picketing Woolworths? I mean, I knew they were picketing Woolworths in the South, but I didn't connect the Cambridge, Mass., Woolworth with the Southern Woolworth. I was really naive and silly, but there was no civil right. There was nothing going on, so I went to - I thought I was going to stay in Europe and live there.

GROSS: When the civil rights movement did grow...

LUMET BUCKLEY: Well, it was Kennedy that got me back. In 1960, I came home and immediately went out and campaigned for Kennedy and made speeches for him and voted for him - the first person I voted for. My entire class - the entire Harvard class or the people I knew - I won't say the entire, but, I mean, a huge percentage went to Washington. Then patriotism was not the last resort of whatever it is - scoundrels.

GROSS: Your mother, when she got married, made sure to keep Horne in her name. So she used that as just - she continued to use that name...

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.

GROSS: ...As her stage name...

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.

GROSS: ...Then used hyphenated names...

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.

GROSS: ...For her private life. But Horne was always in it.

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yeah.

GROSS: And Horne really meant something...

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.

GROSS: ...In...

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.

GROSS: ...New York.

LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.

GROSS: You never really had Horne...

LUMET BUCKLEY: No.

GROSS: ...In your name.

LUMET BUCKLEY: My name - I had it once. Gail Horne Jones was the name I was christened or baptized - Gail Horne Jones.

GROSS: Has writing the book made you want to, like, stick it back in? No?

LUMET BUCKLEY: No because I - well, I signed the book contract as Lumet. And then I married Kevin Buckley, and I wanted Buckley to be in there. So it was a funny - I couldn't - there was no way to be Gail Horne 'cause it wasn't really my name. I mean, it would be Gail Horne Jones Lumet Buckley. That's too many, unless I did sort of G. H. - you know, there's an M. K. P. Fisher or whatever her name is. So it was difficult.

GROSS: I want to thank you a lot for talking with us...

LUMET BUCKLEY: Thank you.

GROSS: ...About your family.

LUMET BUCKLEY: I loved doing it. It was fun.

GROSS: Thanks for being here.

LUMET BUCKLEY: You're a wonderful interviewer. Thank you.

GROSS: Oh, thank you.

BIANCULLI: Gail Lumet Buckley speaking to Terry Gross in 1986. The daughter of Lena Horne, an author of two books about her family's history tracing back to enslavement, died last month. She was 86 years old. After a break, we note the hundredth anniversary of the birth of writer James Baldwin by revisiting a 1986 interview with him. This is FRESH AIR.

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

Today, August 2, marks the centennial of the birth of James Baldwin, one of the most influential writers to emerge during the civil rights era. His essays and novels addressed racial issues head-on. Baldwin's best-known works include "Go Tell It On The Mountain," "Giovanni's Room," "Nobody Knows My Name," "The Fire Next Time" and "Another Country." For most of his adult life, Baldwin lived as an expatriate in France, where he died in 1987. He was 63 years old. Terry spoke with James Baldwin in 1986. He told her that he grew up in Harlem, where his father was a preacher in a storefront church.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

JAMES BALDWIN: Daddy was old-fashioned, fire and brimstone hellfire preacher, you know, very direct, very chilling sometimes.

TERRY GROSS: Was it pretty frightening to have him as a father? And I'm thinking if he thought that he was directly connected to God, then it really gave him a lot of power.

BALDWIN: Oh, yes, he did have the aura of the divine about him, that is to say his orders were not only coming from him but from the Almighty. So in a way, to contest him was to be contesting, you know, the Lord, to be fighting the Lord. Of course, my father was not slow, you know, to point this out.

(LAUGHTER)

BALDWIN: There was something very frightening about it.

GROSS: You became a preacher when you were 14.

BALDWIN: That's right.

GROSS: Why did you do that?

BALDWIN: Well, it was almost inevitable, you know, being raised that way. And after all, I'm not doubting anything my father said, not doubting the gospel, not doubting the church, you know? And at the time of puberty, when everybody goes through a storm, you know, the storm of self-discovery, the storm of self-contempt, the storm of - the terror of, who is this self which is suddenly evolving, you know, suddenly is distinguishing itself from other selves? And all of these things - and the sexual question, of course, you know? All of these things sort of coalesce into some kind of hurricane in a way, you know? And in that hurricane, what did I do? I reached out for the only thing I could - which I knew to cling to, and that was the Holy Ghost.

And those three years in the pulpit, it's very difficult to describe them. I probably shouldn't try. There was a kind of torment in it, but I learned an awful lot. And my faith, perhaps - I lost my faith, all the faith I'd had. But I learned something else. I learned something about myself, I think, and I learned something through dealing with those congregations. After all, I was a boy preacher, and the people I was - the congregations I addressed were grown-ups. And a boy preacher has a very special aura in the Black community. And that aura implies a certain responsibility, you know, and the responsibility above all to tell the truth.

So as I began to be more and more tormented by my crumbling faith, it began to be clearer and clearer to me that I had no right to stay in the pulpit. And I didn't know enough. I didn't - the suffering of those people, which was real, was still beyond the ken of a boy 14, 15, 16. You could respond to it, but I had not yet entered that inferno. They knew something about being a [expletive] which I was only just beginning to discover, and it frightened me. So, for those reasons and complex reasons, I left. I left home and left the church.

GROSS: What did you do to try to get your foot in the door somewhere as a writer?

BALDWIN: Well, I wrote all the time, you know? I worked all day and I wrote all night. And I was defined as a young Negro writer. And that meant that certain things were expected of a young Negro writer. And what was expected I knew I was not about to deliver. What was expected was to accept the role of victim and to write from that point of view. And from my point of view, it seemed to me that to take such a stance would simply be to corroborate all of the principles which had you enslaved in the first place.

GROSS: "Go Tell It On The Mountain" was a fairly autobiographical novel. And it really won you a lot of attention and prestige in America. Your book of essays, "The Fire Next Time," which was published in 1963, was, I think, perceived by many whites as an attack against whites, like he's threatening us with the fire next time. Did that happen? Did some white people see it that way, and did it change your reputation to becoming more of a controversial writer?

BALDWIN: Yeah, but that had begun to happen already without my quite noticing it, because long before "The Fire Next Time," which was not an attack on white people - they flatter themselves.

(LAUGHTER)

BALDWIN: Long before that, when I first got South, first went South and tried to begin to - because I went as a reporter, and I tried to get the story published, you know? The first few times, the first few magazines when I came back did not want to publish the reports because they accused me of fomenting violence. Now, I was describing violence, a violence which I was in no way responsible. And I thought that people should know what is going on and why it's going on. And "The Fire Next Time" is probably the combination of all those years. You know, it was when I was being called the angry young man on the white side of town and being called an Uncle Tom on the Black side of town.

GROSS: Some of your writing has really been, I think, very important to gay people and people in the gay movement in America. And I wonder if the gay liberation movement had any effect on you, if it was important for you to have, you know, a movement...

BALDWIN: No.

GROSS: ...About that.

BALDWIN: No, no, no. I left the church when I was 17. I have not joined anything since. You see; before I left this country, I had been afflicted with so many labels that I'd become invisible to myself.

GROSS: (Laughter).

BALDWIN: You know, I had to go away someplace and get rid of all these labels to find out not what I was, but who. You see what I mean? And the gay liberation movement is ideally an attempt precisely to find out not what one is, but who one is, and also to have no need to defend oneself, you know? So it was a very simple matter for me, in any case, to say to myself, I'm going this way, you know, and only death will stop me, you know, and I'm going to live my life, the only life I have in the sight of God.

BIANCULLI: James Baldwin speaking with Terry Gross in 1986. Today would've been his 100th birthday. He died in 1987 at age 63. On Monday's show, how brain surgery has been transformed by new technologies, new instruments and more powerful computers - and how brain surgery has contributed to a better understanding of the human mind. We'll talk with brain surgeon Theodore H. Schwartz, author of the new book "Gray Matters." He'll share some of his own experiences. Join us.

(SOUNDBITE OF RAY CHARLES' "JOY RIDE")

BIANCULLI: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman and Julian Herzfeld. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.

(SOUNDBITE OF RAY CHARLES' "JOY RIDE")

Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.