Category Archives: Looking back

Every Martin Luther King Day, “06880” remembers the famed civil rights leader’s visit to Westport’s Temple Israel.

But 3 years earlier — on April 12, 1961 — another iconic activist spoke at the same synagogue.

During Black History Month, we recall James Baldwin’s lecture. This information comes from a story on the writer’s Connecticut decade (1954-63) by Andrew Lopez, a research support Librarian at Connecticut College.  He writes:

The public lecture on the “Negro mood” was organized by Marjorie Koster Beinfield and other members of the synagogue’s social action committee.

James Baldwin, in his Connecticut days.

Marjorie and her husband, Malcolm Beinfield, were involved in many causes promoting equal rights and social justice in the early 1960s.

Their daughter, Harriet Beinfield, was 14 years old at the time and remembers Baldwin’s talk, and asking him how he tolerated white people.

She recalls with admiration his generosity in responding to her.

Malcolm Beinfield, a longtime Westport physician and surgeon, had done his medical residency at Harlem Hospital in the 1940s – the same hospital where Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924.

Lopez also notes that Baldwin wrote much of his historic essays “The Fire Next Time” at the home of his agent, Robert Park Mills, in Norwalk.

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The Beinfield family, not long before James Baldwin’s Westport visit.