What Really Happened Inside That Meeting Between James Baldwin and RFK

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Early Friday afternoon of May 24, 1963, presumably following at least a few hours of much-needed sleep after the late night before, James Baldwin showed up for a previously scheduled interview with Lewis Funke of the New York Times at Sardi’s, the midtown restaurant famous for the caricatures of Broadway stars adorning its walls. He was there to discuss Baldwin’s play Blues for Mister Charlie, which would end up as the lead story for Funke’s weekly column in the drama section of the paper on June 2—further proof that anything Baldwin did was now newsworthy. Even more newsworthy, however, was what happened as the interview approached its conclusion. “I’m going to a secret meeting with Bobby Kennedy this afternoon,” Baldwin said, according to Funke. “Right from here, in fact.” He also informed him that he’d met with Kennedy, then serving as his brother John F. Kennedy’s United States attorney general, and Burke Marshall, chief of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, the previous day. “Baldwin told me that Lena Horne was flying in for the conference, and he named a few others who would be present,” Funke later elaborated. “I said, ‘This is a hell of a story. Do you mind if I tell my paper?’ Baldwin said, ‘Not at all.’ And I scooted back to the Times and passed the story on to the national desk.”

By the time Baldwin made his way to the apartment of his agent, Robert Mills, Layhmond Robinson, one of the Times’ first Black reporters, had already called Mills asking where the meeting with Kennedy was going to be held, information that Mills would not disclose. It seems unlikely that Baldwin’s comments to Funke were a slip of the tongue. Rather, they may well have been a carefully plotted effort to ensure that the meeting would not be confidential, as Kennedy had planned, but would instead make guaranteed headlines, no matter what the outcome, and thus pressure the attorney general to step up his efforts to meet the demands of the civil rights moment. This would certainly help explain the celebrity-heavy nature of the group Baldwin put together for the “summit,” as he later called it, which soon enough was assembling itself for the meeting at the Kennedy apartment at 24 Central Park West that was scheduled to begin at 4:00 that afternoon.

Nicholas Boggs. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Waiting there in the lobby upon Baldwin’s arrival was the flying-averse actress, singer, and activist Lena Horne, “wearing a beige suit,” as he recalled, and “complaining that she had a ‘hole’ in her shoe from guiding [her] plane across the continent,” which was her way of saying she was so nervous during her flight that she had been digging in her heels the whole way. She joined the group of “many more people than I can name here,” Baldwin later wrote. “Let’s just say that I simply called black or white people whom I trusted, who would not feel themselves compelled to be spokesmen for any organization or responsible for espousing any specific point of view. I called the people who had, I knew, paid some dues and who knew it.” In addition to Baldwin, Mills, actor Rip Torn, Horne, Harry Belafonte, James’ brother David Baldwin, and civil rights activist Jerome Smith, the group, which was so large it required two elevator trips to get everyone up to Kennedy’s apartment, also included the playwright Lorraine Hansberry of Raisin in the Sun fame; David Baldwin’s girlfriend, Thais Aubry; Dr. Kenneth Clark, considered to be one of the most influential psychologists of the 20^th century, who was scheduled to do an interview with Baldwin later that afternoon, along with Henry Morgenthau, the producer of the public television show they would both be appearing on; Baldwin’s lawyer, Clarence B. Jones; and Edwin Berry of the Chicago Urban League. Somewhat inexplicably, Eddie Fales, Baldwin’s ex-lover, was also there as his putative “secretary,” while his current lover, Lucien Happersberger, presumably because he was not American, was not.

The meeting, which the usually even-keeled Clark would later call “the most dramatic experience I’ve ever had,” began “quietly enough,” as Baldwin put it, with everyone sitting in a large circle in the apartment’s drawing room, where footstools had been brought in to accommodate all the members of the larger-than-expected delegation. Kennedy, with Marshall and his press aide, Ed Guthman, by his side, took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and began to provide an overview of the administration’s commitment to civil rights that the delegation found thoroughly underwhelming. While accounts of exactly what took place in the room that day vary, they all agree that the major shift took place once Smith was called upon by Baldwin to voice his opinions. (Smith, a 25-year-old member of CORE, had been viciously beaten and jailed while participating in the nonviolent Freedom Riders efforts to integrate buses in Mississippi.) “Jimmy was very quiet, very reserved,” according to Torn, because “the point was we were really there for Jerome Smith. … We were hoping to convey to Kennedy that not even the supporters of Gandhian nonviolence were going to continue being victims, and there were other people arising out there who wanted to retaliate and would rather stand and die.”

The decision to have Smith serve as the delegation’s central voice, since he was the only one there on the front lines of the fight for integration, was either a stroke of strategic genius or uncannily good luck, or perhaps a bit of both. It completely threw Kennedy off, piercing the meeting’s bureaucratic veneer. He was not prepared for the mix of personal truth, raw feeling, and, finally, the volatility of Smith’s words. They “set the tone of the meeting,” Baldwin later explained, “because he stammers when he’s upset and he stammered when he talked to Bobby and said that he was nauseated by the necessity of being in that room,” by which he meant it shouldn’t be necessary for Black Americans to beg their government for equal protection under the law. “I knew what he meant,” Baldwin continued. “It was not personal at all [but] Bobby took it personally and turned away from him. That was a mistake because he turned towards us.”

It was at this point, according to Baldwin, that Hansberry spoke up and said to Kennedy, “You have a great many very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General, but the only man you should be listening to is the man over there. That is the voice,” she added, pointing to Smith, “of 22 million people.” But the story Smith was telling of his work with the voter registration drive in the South, how he had been beaten up by white racists both inside and outside of jail, how his wife and children had to be moved for their safety, registered to Kennedy and Marshall, as the latter put it, as “very emotional but very inarticulate.” And it only confused and offended Kennedy further when Smith tried to warn him that sometime in the not-too-distant future even those who preached nonviolence, like himself, would become fed up. “When I pull the trigger,” he apparently said in an oft-quoted line, “kiss it goodbye.” Kennedy, now even more dumbstruck and insulted, tried to steer the conversation elsewhere, and to engage other members of the delegation. But Baldwin countered by bringing the focus back to Smith by asking him “if, feeling the way he did, he would fight for the country,” by which he meant in the armed forces. To which Smith replied, “Never! Never!”

The meeting had descended into such chaos that over the years it has acquired almost mythic status, making it next to impossible to discern the exact sequence of events from the multiple accounts, or their relative validity. At some point David Baldwin might have stood up and shook a fist at Kennedy. At another, Horne may have responded to Kennedy’s disbelief at the suggestion that the FBI in the South was in cahoots with racists by drawling, “But, Mister Attorney General, you’ve never been a Negro being questioned by the FBI in the deep South … have you?” And according to Marshall, there was a moment when “even Lorraine Hansberry was talking about getting guns out of her basement.” In any case, an increasingly flabbergasted Kennedy was said to have been reduced to responses such as “There is no need to use such language,” or “I’m not going to sit here and listen to that kind of talk,” his arms folded across his chest in frustration.

What is certain is that at some juncture, as Clark later recalled, Kennedy told the group that they needed to be more patient, “it would just be another few years … before an American black will be running for national office … and Baldwin looked at him and said, ‘You know, I have to tell you—your grandfather came over here from Ireland, just a generation or so ago, and your brother is president. My ancestors came over here a couple of hundred years ago on a slave ship, and you have the right, only through race and color, to tell me when I can participate in the government.” At that point, Clark went on, “Bobby got red, and he was closer to losing his control in that interchange than in any other time during the three or four hours of that highly traumatic meeting.”

What is also certain, as Baldwin later wrote, is that he made a point to ask Kennedy to “tell his brother the President to personally escort to school, on the following day or the day after, a small black girl already scheduled to enter a Deep South school. ‘That way,’ we said, ‘it will be clear that whoever spits on that child will be spitting on the nation.’ ” When Kennedy said something to the effect that this would just be an act, by which he meant a publicity stunt, he didn’t seem to fully appreciate that what the delegation was asking for was a moral commitment on the part of the attorney general and the president to the Black people of the nation. Or as Clark later summarized the complex politics of it all, “The seeming inability to communicate the passionate insistence of Mr. Baldwin that the Attorney General had to understand the sense of urgency of the Negro people, and the need for the Attorney General to protect the image of liberal concern within the context of political realism, had contributed to an excruciating sense of impasse.”

Yet what Kennedy also didn’t seem to realize was that at that very moment he was already stuck smack in the middle of an elaborate publicity stunt himself. Not that the emotions expressed weren’t real. When Smith reiterated his points, as Baldwin told it, about “the perpetual demolition faced every hour of every day by black men, who pay a price literally unspeakable for attempting to protect their women, their children, their homes, or their lives,” he was speaking from the heart. Just as Hansberry was when she effectively ended the meeting by saying to Smith, according to Baldwin: “This is all true, but I am not worried about black men—who have done splendidly, it seems to me, all things considered. But I am worried,” she continued, looking directly at Kennedy, “about the state of the civilization which produced that photograph of the white cop standing on that Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham.” Not only was she speaking the truth, but by uttering these words and then proceeding to smile at the attorney general in a way that made Baldwin “glad she was not smiling at me,” extending her hand to him, and saying, “Goodbye, Mr. Attorney General,” and then walking out of the room, she was also doing so with the kind of dramatic flair that was ready-made for the kind of headline that would in fact appear on the front page of the New York Times the next day in an article written by none other than Layhmond Robinson: “Robert Kennedy Consults Negroes Here About North: James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and Lena Horne Among Those Who Warn Him of ‘Explosive Situation.’ ”

The language used in the article, along with the selection of smiling rather than austere-looking faces of the photogenic Horne, Hansberry, and Baldwin to accompany it, suggests that Layhmond Robinson may well have been in cahoots with Mills’ publicity-seeking spin on the meeting, in spirit if not necessarily through covert coordination. Indeed, the information provided seems to have come from Baldwin’s side, which only makes sense since on his way out of the rancorous meeting Mills had apparently asked Marshall how to respond to the call from the Times. Marshall, in a decision he probably came to regret, had simply said, “It doesn’t make any difference. Tell them anything you want to.” When Mills got back to his office, Robinson called him again, and this time Mills supplied him with the names of the rest of those in attendance at the meeting but took care to omit the white participants who were part of Baldwin’s contingent that day, which he must have felt might dilute the message.

“Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy held a secret meeting here yesterday with a group of prominent Negroes to obtain their views on methods of combating segregation and discrimination in the North,” Robinson’s article began. “The meeting was held at an undisclosed location in Manhattan. The group reportedly told him that an ‘explosive situation’ had developed in race relations in the North that, potentially, was at least equal to the growing racial strife in the South.” The article, which makes no mention of Jerome Smith but does quote from Baldwin’s telegram to the attorney general from earlier in the month—“Mr. Baldwin has been sharply critical of President Kennedy for not moving more forcefully in civil rights crises in the South. He has charged that the President has ‘not used the great prestige of his office as the moral forum it can be’ ”—contrasts starkly with a follow-up piece that appeared in the Times a week and a half later, after Marshall was able to do some damage control with a leak of his own. It was written by leading Washington correspondent James Reston, whom the Times itself in his obituary decades later admitted “was forgiving of the frailties of soldiers, statesmen, and party hacks—too forgiving, some of his critics later said, because he was too close to them.” In language that is all too revealing of Reston’s own journalistic biases, the article reports that “the Negro leaders in the New York meeting gave Attorney General Kennedy and Burke Marshall, one of his aides, a hard time. The meeting started with a savage comment by one of the Negroes against ‘The Kennedys,’ ” before going on to defend the ways in which, “as a matter of fact, the Attorney General and Burke Marshall had been deeply involved behind the scenes in trying to settle the Birmingham crisis.”

The administration’s spin on the meeting was surely a response to Robinson’s earlier report but also to Baldwin’s television appearance that was taped immediately after the controversial meeting. If Kennedy had seemed “shaken” at the meeting’s end, as Mills described it, in the taxi to the studio with Clark, Baldwin said he might be too exhausted and emotional to go through with the show. “All I need is a drink,” he pleaded. “Can’t we stop at the nearest bar? I must decompress.” But there was no time for that, as the meeting had run well over, and they needed to make their way directly to the same studio rental where Clark had already interviewed Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in previous weeks and where Baldwin was scheduled to be the final segment for the three-part show to be aired the next month on WGBH, The Negro and the American Promise. The space was just large enough for two-person interviews, with a pair of chairs and sufficient backlight to make the participants distinct against the black curtain used as the backdrop. As the director of the show, Fred Barzyk, later recalled, Baldwin and Clark “arrived very, very late for the interview. I knew something was really wrong. Baldwin looked terrible and Dr. Clark used every ‘psychiatric’ tool to calm him down. Finally he was able to get Baldwin to sit in our set. Baldwin lit up a cigarette and stared out into space, obviously angry and upset.”

Initially looking downtrodden but nevertheless still dapper in the black suit and tie he was still wearing from the Kennedy meeting that day and waving his hands through the clouds of his own cigarette smoke as he spoke, Baldwin was electrifying in the 25-minute interview that followed. He was coaxed out of his despondent state by Clark’s surprising opening questions not about the meeting they had just come from, but about his childhood in Harlem. Both men had attended PS 139 for junior high school, and Baldwin spoke of his mother asking him whether his teacher there “was colored or white, and I said she was a little bit colored and a little bit white.” Now he cracked a smile. “As a matter of fact, I was right.” Then he segued to where his mind had been all day, providing one of the soliloquies that would be included in the footage that Morgenthau released immediately after they finished taping it to a local television station in New York City, portions of which would be aired that very evening on the news: “That’s part of the dilemma of being an American Negro,” Baldwin said, “that one is a little bit colored and a little bit white, and not only in physical terms but in the head and heart.” He continued, his eyes widening, and the traces of a vaguely British accent that he would come to cultivate during his television appearances, in particular, gaining traction as he went on: “There are days when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. How precisely are you going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how are you going to communicate to the vast, headless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here, and to be here means that you can’t go anywhere else. I could, my own person, leave this country and go to Africa, I could go to China, I could go to Russia, I could go to Cuba, but I’m an American. That is a fact.”

It wasn’t long before Baldwin was recalling Hansberry’s comments from earlier that day about the horror of a society that could produce the policemen who “stood on the Negro woman’s neck,” then confessing that he was “terrified at the moral apathy—the death of the heart which is happening to my country. These people have deluded themselves so long they don’t think I’m human. I base this on their conduct and not on what they say, and this means they have become themselves moral monsters. It’s a terrible indictment—I mean every word I say.” And when Clark asked him after that what he thought could be done to change the “moral fiber” of the country, Baldwin responded, “I think one has got to find some way of putting the present administration of this country on the spot.” Which, of course, was exactly what he was doing at that very moment. “It was a great shock to me—I want to say this on the air,” he added, looking directly at the camera, “that the Attorney General did not know … Mr. Robert Kennedy—that I would have trouble convincing my nephew to go to Cuba, for example, to liberate the Cubans in the name of a government which now says it is doing everything it can do but cannot liberate me.”

The fact that Baldwin was proving to be as rhetorically skilled a speaker as he was an essayist comes as little surprise, given his past as a child preacher and the many lectures he’d been giving over the last few months. But that unusual combination along with the obvious magnetism of his gaze on-screen gave the impression that he was tailor-made to become a spokesman in the new era of mass media, and eventually a veritable television icon. If it seemed as if he was born for the role, this interview might as well have been the first big step towards his coronation. Indeed, the full Baldwin segment was aired a few days later, pushed ahead of the King and Malcolm X episodes because of its sudden timeliness, which the lede from a New York Times article written by the television critic Jack Gould already recognized as a historic event: “A television experience that seared the conscience of the white set owner was offered over Channel 13 in an unforgettable half-hour interview with James Baldwin, the author. … Moral equivocation and legalistic humbug on the issue of segregation were shattered in the eloquence, passion and perspective of Mr. Baldwin’s plea that liberation of subjugated people begins in the United States, that time had run out on whites who thought fellow citizens would everlastingly negotiate on the size of their cage.” As Baldwin had powerfully proclaimed as the interview came to an end: “What white people have to do is to try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a n—r in the first place, because I’m not a n—r, I’m a man, but if you think I’m a n—r, it means you need it. Why? That’s the question you’ve got to ask yourself—what the white population has got to ask itself—North and South, because it’s one country for a Negro.”

The clips from this interview in the news that night along with the front-page story in the Times the next day, especially on the heels of the coverage in Time and Life magazines, catapulted Baldwin into the middle of what became a media frenzy. Mills capitalized on this by organizing an informal press conference in the afternoon on the day after the meeting, where Baldwin announced that Kennedy “now knows more about the Negro situation than he did before.” When asked whether the meeting had been a failure, Baldwin replied: “It has to be looked at as the beginning of a dialogue. No one can expect that dialogue to be polite.” For his part, Kennedy may have left the meeting in a “cold fury” after being “knocked off balance,” as Taylor Branch suggested in his landmark study, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963. But the experience had an enduring and transformative impact on him, and it wouldn’t be too much to say that it helped change the course of modern American history—as Branch proclaims, as “an authentic disaster, the Baldwin meeting made Robert Kennedy a pioneer in the raw, interracial encounters of the 1960s” that would transform the nation. Indeed, Kennedy immediately began hiring more African Americans in the federal government, and it wouldn’t be long before one could hear clear echoes of Baldwin in his own rhetoric on the national stage, and then in the administration’s legislative decisions, most notably in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year. Although Baldwin didn’t know it yet, for all the drama and stress of the past 48 hours and the continued uncertainty moving forward, the grand publicity stunt, if that’s what it had actually been, would ultimately prove to have been a resounding success.

Excerpted from Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Aug. 19, 2025. Copyright ©2025 by Nicholas Boggs. All rights reserved.

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