Progressive Party campaign (Situational Irony)
The essay "Journey to Atlanta" is filled with situational irony, in which the opposite of what one expects to happen occurs. We learn that the Progressive Party is running on a platform of civil rights, but Baldwin's brother's band encounters racism at every turn, from the train ride there to being kicked out of their hotel to fend for themselves in the South. Similarly, they come to Atlanta to play music but end up canvassing for votes, and it's when they finally play music that they get in trouble.
Great adventure (Verbal Irony)
While narrating his experiences with racism and the legal system in France, Baldwin describes it as a "Great Adventure." The literal meaning clashes with what he actually means here, which is that a series of disasters happen to him.
Funeral and birthday (Situational Irony)
In describing a strange concurrence of events in "Notes of a Native Son," Baldwin declares, "When planning a birthday celebration one naturally does not expect that it will be up against a funeral."
"Negro life" (Situational Irony)
Baldwin writes that white Americans must recognize that their fate is bound up with African Americans. Baldwin says directly that this fact is an instance of situational irony: "Only this recognition sets [the white American] in any wise free and it is this, this necessary ability to contain and even, in the most honorable sense of the word, to exploit the “nigger,” which lends to Negro life its high element of the ironic and which causes the most well meaning of their American critics to make such exhilarating errors when attempting to understand them."
The Negro problem (Verbal Irony)
In an example of verbal irony, Baldwin writes about a period in which he was asked to write articles and reviews “mostly as it turned out, about the Negro problem, concerning which the color of my skin made me automatically an expert.” He is against the idea that one's skin color makes one an automatic expert.
