Baldwin’s letter to Angela Davis built an international movement that helped free her.

Evidence

In one of the few pieces written during the period before No Name was published, Baldwin penned a powerful open letter to Angela Davis, later published in The New York Review of Books. He famously wrote: “We must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.” Baldwin’s letter, Davis told me as we sat in the Yankee Doodle Tap Room in Princeton, New Jersey, helped build an international movement to free her. “I don’t know where I would be today if that letter hadn’t circulated,” she said. They could have locked her up and thrown away the key or put her to death. “His letter was so impactful at the time,” she told me, “they decided to title the edited collection of prison letters If They Come in the Morning, after the last line of the essay.” — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 383

Categorization

• SHARE: The detail that the collected prison letters were titled after Baldwin’s closing line is a sharp, specific tidbit for anyone interested in Baldwin or Davis.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what exactly did the international campaign organized around that letter do — who mobilized and how?