Blog / 2025 / How James Baldwin Stood Up to the FBI

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

I’m working on a series of portraits of people from American history that the Trump administration would like to erase from historical sites, government websites, and textbooks—people like the author James Baldwin.

Each of the painted portraits will be paired with a short story from the subject’s life—something that makes you want to learn more about who these figures are. In this video, I’m showing you the making of Baldwin’s likeness, and I’m going to read to you the text about him that I’ve written.

Even when he wasn’t writing the words himself, author James Baldwin crafted stunning stories, like the drama he created in 1964. It started with an article in The Washington Post describing the writer’s upcoming books, including one about the FBI’s treatment of Black people in the South, which Baldwin would later refer to as The Blood Counters.

By this point, the bureau had been watching Baldwin for some time and the writer knew it: in his essay The Devil Finds Work, the author recounts being accosted by two agents in 1945. Almost twenty years later, the FBI’s file on Baldwin was already substantial, and The Blood Counters makes several appearances in the dossier, notably in a summary detailing mentions of the book in The Post as well as other publications. That memo concludes with a scrawled note from Director J Edgar Hoover himself: “Isn’t Baldwin a well known pervert?”

That question is the heart of this unwritten story by Baldwin. Hoover had been the director of both the FBI and its predecessor, the slightly-less-powerful Bureau of Investigation, since he was 29 years old. By the time he jotted down his huffy bit of marginalia about Baldwin, the Director had amassed forty years of influence. He routinely subverted his own bureau’s policies and violated plenty of laws that the FBI was entrusted with enforcing, illegally collecting information on individuals and using it to blackmail them. But Baldwin couldn’t be intimidated in this way, since he talked openly about his sexuality, with his writing often addressing queerness directly.

The FBI continued surveilling the author for another decade. There is no evidence Baldwin ever started work on The Blood Counters.