“America: love it or leave it” was a popular slogan in the 1960s. Plastered on signs and bumper stickers, the phrase was a response to the people, most of them young college students, who loudly and angrily protested America’s involvement in Vietnam, inviting the wrath of those who believed that one’s country deserved the unconditional support of the citizenry no matter how questionable the actions of the government.

Two decades earlier, twenty-four year old James Baldwin, a black writer so enraged at the racism to which he was subjected during a visit to New Jersey that he believed he was about to commit murder, left the United States for Paris, France. Reflecting on his decision in a 1985 interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Baldwin made it clear that his relocation did not indicate agreement with the jingoistic sentiments of any catchphrase. “America is my country,” Baldwin said. “Not only am I fond of it, I love it” (265). In an earlier conversation with Chicago journalist Studs Terkel, Baldwin explained why his flight to foreign soil was important. “I began to see (America) for the first time. If I hadn’t gone away, I would never have been able to see it; and if I was unable to see it, I would never have been able to forgive it” (15).

The America that Baldwin saw is documented in Notes of a Native Son, a collection of essays written between 1948 and 1955 in which he provides a vision of America that is not dramatically at odds with the one presented in the eighteenth century writings of St. John de Crevecoeur, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, but from the perspective of a man who knew that the truths that Jefferson held to be “self- evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inherent and unalienable rights” (19), still required proving to a lot of people, perhaps even to the author of the Declaration of Independence himself.