I was curious to the sources of these quotes, so I went digging. Apologies for the long post.
The one by Eugene Victor Debs was his statement in court in 1918, as stated above. You can find the whole thing here, it's worth a read.
He was convicted and went to prison, and ran for president in 1920 from prison. Campaign pins read, "For President: Convict No. 9653". From prison, he also wrote several columns that were critical of the prison system and were eventually published in a book, Walls and Bars.
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The James Baldwin quote is said to be from an essay that he started writing after Kwame Ture, then still known as Stokely Carmichael, had his passport confiscated by the US government in 1967. According to this blog The London Times and The New York Times both refused to publish it, but it found a home in 1968 in The Manchester Guardian and in The Los Angeles Free Press, the latter of which you can see here. You can read it here republished for the internet.
Here is the full quote (my emphasis):
I need scarcely state to what extent the Western self-interest and the black self-interest find themselves at war, but it is precisely this message which the Western nations, and this one above all, will have to accept, if they expect to survive.
Nothing is more unlikely than that the Western nations, and this one above all, will be able to welcome so vital a metamorphosis.
(...)
One should listen to what’s being said, and reflect on it: for many, many millions of people long for our downfall, and it is not because they are communists. It is because ignorance is in the saddle here, and we ride mankind.
Let us attempt to face the fact that we are a racist society, racist to the very marrow, and we are fighting a racist war.
No black man in chains in his own country, and watching the many deaths occurring around him every day, believes for a moment that America cares anything at all about the freedom of Asia. My own condition, as a black man in America, tells me what Americans really feel and really want, and tells me who they really are. And therefore, every bombed village is my hometown.
In 2024, Nikita Gill (@meanwhilepoetry) used this quote as inspiration for a poem about Gaza.
"Every bombed village is my hometown" - James Baldwin
And every dead child is my child.
Every grieving mother is my mother.
Every crying father is my father.
Every home turned to rubble
is the home I grew up in.
Every brother carrying the remains
of his brother across borders
is my brother.
Every sister waiting for a sister
who will never come home
is my sister.
Every one of these people are ours,
Juist like we are theirs.
We belong to them
and they belong to us.
This other quote from Baldwin's essay is very relevant to the current situation in the USA (my emphasis):
And I contest the government’s right to lift the passports of these people who hold views of which the government — and especially this government — disapproves.
The government has the duty to warn me of the dangers I may encounter if I travel to hostile territory, though they never said anything about the probable results of my leaving Harlem to go downtown and never said anything about my travels to Alabama, but it does not have the right to use my passport as a political weapon against me, as a means of bringing me to heel. These are terror tactics.
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