Baldwin defined his role as witness and conduit, not spokesman or ideologue.

Evidence

Ever since that first journey to the American South, Baldwin understood exactly what his calling required, even when the times became dark and sullen. “I think I really understood and probably for the first time that what you are doing, as a writer, or any kind of artist, was not designed to, you know, to make you special or to even isolate you….What your role was, it seemed to me, was to bear witness. To what life is—does—and to speak for people who cannot speak. That you are simply a kind of conduit.” This isn’t the work of a spokesman, he would later clarify in a New York Times Book Review interview with Julius Lester in 1984. He wasn’t a partisan of any particular ideology or a leader of some civil rights organization. Baldwin had to capture what moved in the guts and what was desperately desired among the people, what happened in the country, and in the moment; he had to write about all of that and about what and who was lost. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 199

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is Baldwin himself defining what ‘bearing witness’ means in his own words — a ‘conduit’ rather than a ‘spokesman.’