James Baldwin

• Born: August 2, 1924
• Birthplace: Harlem, New York
• Died: November 30, 1987
• Place of death: St. Paul de Vence, France

Writer

Baldwin came of age as a writer during the American Civil Rights movement. In his fiction, essays, and plays, he dealt forcefully with the racial issues of his time. In the process, Baldwin became a civil rights activist and spokesman who witnessed and chronicled many of the key events of the Civil Rights movement.

Areas of achievement: Gay and lesbian issues; Literature; Poetry; Social issues

Early Life

James Baldwin was born in Harlem Hospital in 1924. His unmarried mother never told him the name of his biological father. Three years after Baldwin’s birth, his mother, Emma Berdis Jones, married David Baldwin, a factory worker and a part-time preacher, and Emma and James took the name Baldwin. During the next fifteen years, David and Emma Baldwin had eight children and raised their family under difficult conditions during the Great Depression.

As a youth, Baldwin attended New York City public schools and tried to steer clear of the many hazards of Harlem life—drugs and alcohol, violence, and crime. His father, a strict disciplinarian, constantly warned his children of Satan’s presence on the Harlem streets. Indeed, Baldwin, as he passed through adolescence, saw many of his friends succumb to drugs and crime. To shield himself from the temptations of the streets, Baldwin found two sanctuaries: the Harlem library and the church. He read voraciously and attended the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, which was led by a dynamic female preacher called Mother Horn.

At the age of fourteen, during a church service, Baldwin experienced a dramatic religious conversion that persuaded him that God had saved his soul and destined him to lead others toward salvation. He became a junior minister, offering stirring sermons in the Harlem churches. Baldwin’s parents were certain that their teenage son was destined to become a great preacher, but Baldwin’s religious fervor was short-lived. In the fall of 1938, Baldwin began attending DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. There he met and befriended students of all faiths and no faith. His high school reading material also challenged his religious beliefs, as the novels of Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevski replaced his Bible. By age sixteen, Baldwin had decided that the ministry was not in his future.

Baldwin graduated from high school in 1942 and left home for the first time for a job laying railroad track in New Jersey. Away from Harlem, Baldwin experienced racial prejudice for the first time. He was denied service in restaurants and barred from the local bowling alley. After almost a year in New Jersey, Baldwin lost his job and returned to Harlem. A short time later, his stepfather died, and Baldwin felt compelled to remain in Harlem to help support his mother and younger siblings. He took odd jobs to bring money into the household, but he held fast to an ambition that had obsessed him from his student days: to become a writer.

In 1944, Baldwin sought career advice from the best-known African American writer of the time, Richard Wright, author of the best-selling novel Native Son (1940), who was living in Brooklyn. Baldwin found Wright’s address in the telephone book and made an unannounced visit. Wright, whom Baldwin greatly admired, received young Baldwin warmly and offered to read a section of a novel that Baldwin was composing based on his experiences in the Harlem churches. With Wright’s assistance, Baldwin secured a grant for young writers from the Eugene F. Saxton Trust to complete the novel.

Life’s Work

Encouraged by Wright’s support and the Saxton grant, Baldwin continued to write. Early in 1947, he met Randall Jarrell, an accomplished poet and an editor with The Nation magazine. Jarrell assigned Baldwin some book reviews, which became Baldwin’s first publications. Later that year, an editor at the journal Commentary invited Baldwin to write an essay on the relationship between African Americans and Jews in New York. The result, “The Harlem Ghetto,” published in February, 1948, established Baldwin as a shrewd analyst of the racial landscape.

By this time, Baldwin, at the age of twenty-four, was growing restless. He felt compelled to escape from Harlem, where he was becoming claustrophobic. In 1947, Wright had left the United States to live and write in Paris. Late in 1948, Baldwin followed his role model to France, where he continued writing essays and working on that first novel. In 1949, he composed an essay titled “Everybody’s Protest Novel” for a new literary journal, Zero. In that essay, Baldwin sharply criticized both Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), a favorite novel of his youth, and Wright’s Native Son. The friendship between Baldwin and Wright ended shortly thereafter, but Baldwin felt that the falling out with Wright was necessary to establish his own literary voice.

Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was published in 1953. The work was autobiographical, telling the story of a boy named John Grimes who grows up with a stern father in Harlem. Like Baldwin, John becomes involved with the church and undergoes a religious conversion experience that saves him from the dangers of the Harlem streets. The novel received excellent reviews and even earned praise from Wright.

Baldwin’s years in Paris after the publication of Go Tell It on the Mountain were productive. He published several short stories. He completed a play,The Amen Corner, which premiered at Howard University in 1955. That same year, he assembled several previously published essays in a collection titled Notes of a Native Son. The collection marked Baldwin’s growth as an essayist of the highest order. In 1956, Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room, was published. The groundbreaking book told the tragic story of a homosexual Paris bartender. Baldwin, a nonpublic homosexual, was advised by his editor to burn the manuscript of Giovanni’s Room rather than publish it. The novel’s reception was mixed, some reviews condemning the book’s subject matter and others praising Baldwin’s sensitive treatment of a difficult topic.

While Baldwin was writing in Paris, great changes were taking place in the United States. In 1954, in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools. The following year, Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, triggering a bus boycott that drew the nation’s attention and propelled Martin Luther King, Jr., into a leadership position in the fledgling American Civil Rights movement. Soon afterward, a court ruling and presidential action forced the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Baldwin observed these events from the safe distance of another continent.

In the fall of 1956, while school desegregation was still in the news, Baldwin picked up an American newspaper in Paris and saw a photograph of Dorothy Counts, a fifteen-year-old African American student, proudly walking into a previously all-white high school in Charlotte, North Carolina. White students lined the walkway leading to the school, jeering Counts and spitting at her. Baldwin was appalled by the image. He suddenly felt guilty about living in Paris; he believed that he should have been in Charlotte or Little Rock encouraging the courageous students who were breaking down the walls of racial segregation in his homeland. He also missed his mother and siblings in Harlem.

In 1957, Baldwin returned to the United States. After a brief stop in Harlem to visit his family, Baldwin headed to the South, where he had never before traveled. He wanted to witness and chronicle the changes that were very gradually taking place in the racially segregated South. He ventured to North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. In Mississippi, he heard the tale of Emmett Till, an African American boy who had been brutally murdered in 1955. The Till tragedy inspired Baldwin to write a play, Blues for Mr. Charlie, which premiered on Broadway in 1964.

Baldwin returned to Paris to write in 1959, and for the next several years he lived there but frequently traveled to the United States to participate in important civil rights events. He embarked on a speaking tourof the South on behalf of the Congress of Racial Equality in 1963 and attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that August. In March 1965, he marched with King and others from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest that state’s discriminatory voting practices.

The early 1960’s were also productive writing years for Baldwin. In 1961, he published another collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name. The following year, his third novel, Another Country, appeared in print. In 1963, Baldwin combined two previously published essays in book form under the title The Fire Next Time—now considered among his best nonfiction works. In 1965, he published his only collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man.

After King’s assassination in 1968, Baldwin became cynical about the possibility of racial reconciliation in the United States. He continued to write, publishing three more novels and several nonfiction works during the last twenty years of his life. Critics have generally found these later works less compelling than the first literary efforts that established Baldwin’s reputation. Between 1978 and 1986, Baldwin spent several years teaching as a visiting professor at Bowling Green University and at the Five Colleges in Amherst, Massachusetts. He died of cancer in France on December 1, 1987, and is buried in Hartsdale, New York.

Significance

Baldwin played a significant role in the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s. His best literary efforts present a sharp critique of the American racial landscape but offer the hope of racial healing. He wrote forcefully in four literary genres—novels, short stories, drama, and nonfiction—but he was at his best in personal essays that also addressed broader racial issues. He ranks among the best American essayists of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Baldwin, James. Collected Essays. New York: Library of America, 1998. A collection of Baldwin’s major nonfiction works, including The Fire Next Time, Notes of a Native Son, and Nobody Knows My Name.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Early Novels and Stories. New York: Library of America, 1998. Contains Baldwin’s first four novels and short fiction.

Bloom, Harold, ed. James Baldwin. New York: Chelsea House, 2007. A collection of critical essays on Baldwin’s works.

Field, Douglas, ed. A Historical Guide to James Baldwin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. A collection of essays on Baldwin’s life and works.

Leeming, David. James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1994. A detailed biography by one of Baldwin’s closest friends.

Standley, Fred L., and Louis H. Pratt, eds. Conversations with James Baldwin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Contains more than two dozen interviews with Baldwin on his life, work, and times.