James Baldwin
James Arthur Baldwin was an American writer and civil rights activist who garnered acclaim for his essays, novels, plays, and poems. His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain has been ranked by Time magazine as one of the top 100 English-language novels. His 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son helped establish his reputation as a voice for human equality. His 1965 debate with William Buckley is regarded as one of the most influential debates on race in the United States. Baldwin was an influential public figure and orator, especially during the civil rights movement in the United States.
Baldwin's fiction posed fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures. Themes of masculinity, sexuality, race, and class intertwine to create intricate narratives that influenced both the civil rights movement and the gay liberation movement in mid-twentieth century America. His protagonists are often but not exclusively African-American, and gay and bisexual men feature prominently in his work. His characters typically face internal and external obstacles in their search for self- and social acceptance.
Baldwin's work continues to influence artists and writers. His unfinished manuscript Remember This House was expanded and adapted as the 2016 documentary film I Am Not Your Negro, winning the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary. His 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk was adapted into a 2018 film of the same name, which earned widespread praise.
Early life
Birth and family
Baldwin was born as James Arthur Jones to Emma Berdis Jones on August 2, 1924, at Harlem Hospital in New York City. Born on Deal Island, Maryland, in 1903, Emma Jones was one of many who fled racial segregation and discrimination in the South during the Great Migration. She arrived in Harlem, New York, when she was 19 years old. Baldwin was born out of wedlock there. Jones never revealed to him who his biological father was.Jones originally undertook to care for her son as a single mother. However, in 1927, Jones married David Baldwin, a laborer and Baptist preacher. David Baldwin was born in Bunkie, Louisiana, and preached in New Orleans, but left the South for Harlem in 1919. How David and Emma met is uncertain, but in James Baldwin's semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain, the characters based on the two are introduced by the man's sister. Emma Baldwin and David Baldwin had eight children in sixteen years—George, Barbara, Wilmer, David Jr., Gloria, Ruth, Elizabeth, and Paula. James took his stepfather's last name. James rarely wrote or spoke of his mother. When he did, he made it clear that he admired and loved her, often through reference to her loving smile. James moved several times while young but always within Harlem. At the time, Harlem was still a mixed-race area of the city in the incipient days of the Great Migration.
James Baldwin did not know exactly how old his stepfather was, but it is clear that he was much older than Emma; indeed, he may have been born before the Emancipation in 1863. David's mother, Barbara, was born enslaved and lived with the Baldwins in New York before her death when James was seven years old. David also had a light-skinned half-brother fathered by his mother's white enslaver and a sister named Barbara, whom James and others in the family called "Taunty". David's father was born into enslavement. David had been married earlier and had a daughter, who was as old as Emma and at least two sons―David, who died while in jail, and Sam, who was eight years James's senior. Sam lived with the Baldwins for a time and once saved James from drowning.
James Baldwin referred to his stepfather simply as "father" throughout his life, but David Sr. and James had an extremely difficult relationship and nearly resorted to physical fights on several occasions. "They fought because James read books, because he liked movies, because he had white friends", all of which, David Baldwin thought, threatened James's "salvation". According to one biographer, David Baldwin also hated white people and "his devotion to God was mixed with a hope that God would take revenge on them for him." During the 1920s and 1930s, David worked at a soft-drink bottling factory, although he was eventually laid off from the job. As his anger and hatred eventually tainted his sermons, he was less in demand as a preacher. David sometimes took out his anger on his family and the children were afraid of him, though this was to some degree balanced by the love lavished on them by their mother.
David Baldwin grew paranoid near the end of his life. He was committed to a mental asylum in 1943 and died of tuberculosis on July 29 of that year, the same day Emma had their last child, Paula. James, at his mother's urging, visited his dying stepfather the day before and came to something of a posthumous reconciliation with him in his essay "Notes of a Native Son". In the essay, he wrote: "in his outrageously demanding and protective way, he loved his children, who were black like him and menaced like him." David Baldwin's funeral was held on James's 19th birthday, around the same time that the Harlem riot began.
As the oldest child, James Baldwin worked part-time from an early age to help support his family. He was molded not only by the difficult relationships in his household but also by the impacts of the poverty and discrimination he saw all around him. As he grew up, friends he sat next to in church turned to drugs, crime, or prostitution. In what biographer Anna Malaika Tubbs found to be a commentary on not only his own life but also the entire Black experience in America, Baldwin wrote: "I never had a childhood... I did not have any human identity... I was born dead."
Education and preaching
Baldwin wrote comparatively little about events at school. At five years of age, he was enrolled at Public School 24 on 128th Street in Harlem. The principal of the school was Gertrude E. Ayer, the first Black principal in the city. She and some of Baldwin's teachers recognized his brilliance early on and encouraged his research and writing pursuits. Ayer stated that Baldwin derived his writing talent from his mother, whose notes to school were greatly admired by the teachers, and that her son also learned to write "like an angel, albeit an avenging one." By fifth grade, not yet a teenager, Baldwin had read some of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's works, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. Baldwin wrote a song that earned praise from New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in a letter that La Guardia sent to him. Baldwin also won a prize for a short story that was published in a church newspaper. His teachers recommended that he go to a public library on 135th Street in Harlem, a place that became his sanctuary. Baldwin would request on his deathbed that his papers and effects be deposited there.It was at P.S. 24 that Baldwin met Orilla "Bill" Miller, a young white schoolteacher from the Midwest whom Baldwin named as one of the reasons that he "never really managed to hate white people". Among other outings, Miller took Baldwin to see an all-Black rendition of Orson Welles's take on Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre, from which flowed Baldwin's lifelong desire to succeed as a playwright. David was reluctant to let his stepson go to the theatre, because he saw the stage as sinful and was suspicious of Miller. However, Baldwin's mother insisted, reminding his father of the importance of education. Miller later directed the first play that Baldwin ever wrote.
After P.S. 24, Baldwin entered Harlem's Frederick Douglass Junior High School. There, Baldwin met two important influences. The first was Herman W. "Bill" Porter, a Harvard graduate who was Black. Porter was the faculty advisor to the school's newspaper, the Douglass Pilot, of which Baldwin would become the editor. Porter took Baldwin to the library on 42nd Street to research a piece that would turn into Baldwin's first published essay titled "Harlem—Then and Now", which appeared in the autumn 1937 issue of the Douglass Pilot. The second of these influences from his time at Frederick Douglass Junior High School was Countee Cullen, the renowned poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Cullen taught French and was a literary advisor in the English department. Baldwin later remarked that he "adored" Cullen's poetry, and his dream to live in France was sparked by Cullen's early impression on him. Baldwin graduated from Frederick Douglass Junior High in 1938.
In 1938, Baldwin applied to and was accepted at De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx, a predominantly white and Jewish school, where he matriculated that fall. He worked on the school's magazine, the Magpie with Richard Avedon, who went on to become a noted photographer, and Emile Capouya and Sol Stein, who would both become renowned publishers. Baldwin did interviews and editing at the magazine and published a number of poems and other writing. He completed his high school diploma at De Witt Clinton in 1941. Baldwin's yearbook listed his career ambition as "novelist-playwright", and his motto in the yearbook was: "Fame is the spur and—ouch!"
Uncomfortable with his discovery during his high school years that he was attracted to men rather than women, Baldwin sought refuge in religion. He joined the later demolished Mount Calvary of the Pentecostal Faith Church on Lenox Avenue in 1937. He then followed Mount Calvary's preacher, Bishop Rose Artemis Horn when she left to preach at Fireside Pentecostal Assembly. At the age of 14, "Brother Baldwin", as he was called, first took to Fireside's altar, and it was at Fireside Pentecostal, during his mostly extemporaneous sermons, that Baldwin "learned that he had authority as a speaker and could do things with a crowd." He delivered his final sermon at Fireside Pentecostal in 1941. Baldwin wrote in the essay "Down at the Cross" that the church "was a mask for self-hatred and despair ... salvation stopped at the church door". He recalled a rare conversation with David Baldwin "in which they had really spoken to one another", during which his stepfather asked: "You'd rather write than preach, wouldn't you?"