But Baldwin still considered Maynard “a friend,” he wrote. Baldwin visited Maynard during his initial time in jail there, writing in the 1972 book No Name in the Street that they hadn’t talked since around the time of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963, when they grew apart over a philosophical disagreement Maynard came to see the civil rights movement as elitist. Maynard says that at the time of Kroll’s death he had been in the borough of Queens, with his wife’s side of the family.Īt the time of his arrest, Maynard was working with a group of jazz musicians touring Germany. Kroll had been killed by a suspect who was identified as black, when he intervened after an altercation, which started when a white member of the Navy claimed he had been propositioned by a different black man. “I’ve known the most august people in many realms of life,” he says, reflecting on that time.Īt the end of October 1967, Maynard was arrested for allegedly having fatally shot 21-year-old white Marine Sergeant Michael Kroll, a winner of five battle stars and the Purple Heart, with a sawed-off shotgun seven months earlier, at around 4 a.m. He occasionally helped Baldwin out, as a chauffeur, secretary and body-man. In that period, Maynard was an aspiring actor who had opened a clothing store with his wife’s brother-in-law. Their families had lived close to one another in Harlem when Maynard and Baldwin were young, and both later lived in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village neighborhood.
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