James Baldwin

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. His mother Emma Jones had been born on Deal Island, Maryland, in 1903, and 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, she 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 and David Baldwin had eight children in sixteen years—George, Barbara, Wilmer, David Jr. (named for James's stepfather and deceased half-brother), 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 racially mixed area of the city in the incipient days of the Great Migration.

James Baldwin did not know the exact age of his stepfather, but it was clear that David was much older than Emma, with some sources claiming 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 referred to his stepfather simply as "father" throughout his life. He learned that he was not his father's biological son through overhearing a comment to that effect during one of his parents' conversations late in 1940. He tearfully recounted this fact to Emile Capouya, with whom he went to school. David Sr. and James had an extremely difficult relationship and nearly resorted to physical fights on several occasions; according to biographer David Leeming "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 another biographer, David Baldwin 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.

Education and preaching

Baldwin wrote comparatively little about events at school. At five years of age, he was enrolled at Public School 24 (P.S. 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 (which gave him a lifelong interest in the work of Dickens). 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.

Later years in New York

Baldwin left school in 1941 in order to earn money to help support his family. He secured a job helping to build a United States Army depot in New Jersey. In the middle of 1942, Emile Capouya helped Baldwin get a job laying tracks for the military in Belle Mead, New Jersey. The two lived in Rocky Hill and commuted to Belle Mead. In Belle Mead, Baldwin experienced prejudice that deeply frustrated and angered him and that he cited as the partial cause of his later emigration out of America. Baldwin's fellow white workmen, who mostly came from the South, derided him for what they saw as his "uppity" ways, his sharp, ironic wit and his lack of "respect".

In an incident that Baldwin described in his essay "Notes of a Native Son", he went to a restaurant in Princeton called the Balt where, after a long wait, Baldwin was told that "colored boys" were not served there. Then, on his last night in New Jersey, in another incident also memorialized in "Notes of a Native Son", Baldwin and a friend went to a diner after a movie, only to be told that Black people were not served there. Infuriated, he went to another restaurant, expecting to be denied service once again. When that denial of service came, humiliation and rage overcame Baldwin and he hurled the nearest object at hand—a water mug—at the waitress, missing her and shattering the mirror behind her. Baldwin and his friend narrowly escaped.

During these years, Baldwin was torn between his desire to write and his need to provide for his family. He took a succession of menial jobs and feared that he was becoming like his stepfather, who had been unable to provide properly for his family. Fired from the track-laying job, Baldwin returned to Harlem in June 1943 to live with his family after taking a meat-packing job. He lost the meat-packing job too, after falling asleep at the plant. He became listless and unstable, drifting from one odd job to the next. Baldwin drank heavily and endured the first of his nervous breakdowns.

Beauford Delaney helped Baldwin cast off his melancholy. During the year before he left De Witt Clinton, and at Capouya's urging, Baldwin had met Delaney, a modernist painter, in Greenwich Village. Delaney would become Baldwin's long-time friend and mentor, and helped demonstrate to Baldwin that a Black man could make his living in art. Moreover, when the United States became a part of World War II during the winter after Baldwin left De Witt Clinton, the Harlem that Baldwin knew was atrophying—no longer the bastion of a Renaissance, the community grew more economically isolated, and he considered his prospects there to be bleak. This led him to move to Greenwich Village, a place that had fascinated him since at least the age of 15.

Career

Life in Paris (1948–1957)

Disillusioned by the reigning prejudice against Black people in the United States, and wanting to gain external perspectives on himself and his writing, Baldwin settled in Paris, France, at the age of 24. Baldwin did not want to be read as "merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer." He also hoped to come to terms with his sexual ambivalence and escape from the hopelessness to which many young African-American men like himself succumbed.

In 1948, Baldwin received a $1,500 grant (equivalent to $20,100 in 2025) from a Rosenwald Fellowship in order to produce a book of photographs and essays that was to be both a catalog of churches and an exploration of religiosity in Harlem. Baldwin worked with a photographer friend named Theodore Pelatowski, whom Baldwin met through Richard Avedon. Although the book (titled Unto the Dying Lamb) was never finished, the Rosenwald funding did allow Baldwin to realise his long-standing ambition of moving to France. After saying his goodbyes to his mother and his younger siblings, with forty dollars to his name, Baldwin flew from New York to Paris on November 11, 1948. He gave most of the scholarship funds to his mother. Baldwin would later give various explanations for leaving America—sex, Calvinism, an intense sense of hostility which he feared would turn inward—but, above all, was the problem of race, which, throughout his life, had exposed him to a lengthy catalog of humiliations. He hoped for a more peaceable existence in Paris.

In Paris, Baldwin was soon involved in the cultural radicalism of the Left Bank. He started to publish his work in literary anthologies, notably Zero which was edited by his friend Themistocles Hoetis and which had already published essays by Richard Wright.

Baldwin spent nine years living in Paris, mostly in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with various excursions to Switzerland, Spain, and back to the United States. Baldwin's time in Paris was itinerant: he stayed with various friends around the city and in various hotels. Most notable of these lodgings was Hôtel Verneuil, a hotel in Saint-Germain that had collected a motley crew of struggling expatriates, mostly writers. This Verneuil circle spawned numerous friendships that Baldwin relied upon in rough periods. He was also extremely poor during his time in Paris, with only momentary respites from that condition. In his early years in Saint-Germain, he met Otto Friedrich, Mason Hoffenberg, Asa Benveniste, Themistocles Hoetis, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Max Ernst, Truman Capote, and Stephen Spender, among many others. Baldwin also met Lucien Happersberger, a Swiss boy, 17 years old at the time of their first meeting, who came to France in search of excitement. Happersberger and Baldwin began to bond for the next few years, eventually becoming his intimate partner and he became Baldwin's near-obsession for some time afterward. Baldwin and Happersberger remained friends for the next thirty-nine years. Even though his time in Paris was not easy, Baldwin escaped from the aspects of American life that outraged him the most—especially the "daily indignities of racism". According to one biographer: "Baldwin seemed at ease in his Paris life; Jimmy Baldwin the aesthete and lover reveled in the Saint-Germain ambiance."

1950s

In 1953, Baldwin published his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman. He began writing it when he was 17 and first published it in Paris. His first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son appeared two years later. He continued to experiment with literary forms throughout his career, publishing poetry and plays as well as the fiction and essays for which he was known.

Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room, caused great controversy when it was first published in 1956 due to its explicit homoerotic content. Baldwin again resisted labels with the publication of this work. Despite the reading public's expectations that he would publish works dealing with African-American experiences, Giovanni's Room is predominantly about white characters.

Baldwin sent the manuscript for Go Tell It on the Mountain from Paris to New York publishing house Alfred A. Knopf on February 26, 1952, and Knopf expressed interest in the novel several months later. To settle the terms of his association with Knopf, Baldwin sailed back to the United States in April 1952 on the SS Île de France, where Themistocles Hoetis and Dizzy Gillespie were coincidentally also voyaging—his conversations with both on the ship were extensive. After his arrival in New York, Baldwin spent much of the next three months with his family, whom he had not seen in almost three years. Baldwin grew particularly close to his younger brother, David Jr., and served as best man at David's wedding on June 27. Meanwhile, Baldwin agreed to rewrite parts of Go Tell It on the Mountain in exchange for a $250 advance ($3,031 today) and a further $750 ($9,093 today) paid when the final manuscript was completed. When Knopf accepted the revision in July, they sent the remainder of the advance, and Baldwin was soon to have his first published novel. In the interim, Baldwin published excerpts of the novel in two publications: one excerpt was published as "Exodus" in American Mercury and the other as "Roy's Wound" in New World Writing. Baldwin set sail back to Europe on August 28 and Go Tell It on the Mountain was published in May 1953.

Go Tell It on the Mountain was the product of years of work and exploratory writing since his first attempt at a novel in 1938. In rejecting the ideological manacles of protest literature and the presupposition he thought inherent to such works that "in Negro life there exists no tradition, no field of manners, no possibility of ritual or intercourse", Baldwin sought in Go Tell It on the Mountain to emphasize that the core of the problem was "not that the Negro has no tradition but that there has as yet arrived no sensibility sufficiently profound and tough to make this tradition articulate." Baldwin biographer David Leeming draws parallels between Go Tell It on the Mountain and James Joyce's 1916 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: to "encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." Baldwin himself drew parallels between Joyce's flight from his native Ireland and his own run from Harlem, and Baldwin read Joyce's tome in Paris in 1950; however, in Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, it would be the Black American "uncreated conscience" at the heart of the project.

Return to New York

Even from Paris, Baldwin was able to follow the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement in his homeland. In May 1954, the United States Supreme Court ordered schools to desegregate "with all deliberate speed"; in August 1955 the racist murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, and the subsequent acquittal of his killers were etched in Baldwin's mind until he wrote Blues for Mister Charlie; in December 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus; and in February 1956 Autherine Lucy was admitted to the University of Alabama before being expelled when whites rioted. Meanwhile, Baldwin was increasingly burdened by the sense that he was wasting time in Paris. Baldwin began planning a return to the United States in hopes of writing a biography of Booker T. Washington, which he then called Talking at the Gates. Baldwin also received commissions to write a review of Daniel Guérin's Negroes on the March and J. C. Furnas's Goodbye to Uncle Tom for The Nation, as well as to write about William Faulkner and American racism for the Partisan Review.

The first project became "The Crusade of Indignation", published in July 1956. In it, Baldwin suggests that the portrait of Black life in Uncle Tom's Cabin "has set the tone for the attitude of American whites towards Negroes for the last one hundred years", and that, given the novel's popularity, this portrait has led to a unidimensional characterization of Black Americans that does not capture the full scope of Black humanity. The second project turned into the essay "William Faulkner and Desegregation". The essay was inspired by Faulkner's March 1956 comment during an interview that he was sure to enlist himself with his fellow white Mississippians in a war over desegregation "even if it meant going out into the streets and shooting Negroes". For Baldwin, Faulkner represented the "go slow" mentality on desegregation that tries to wrestle with the Southerner's peculiar dilemma: the South "clings to two entirely antithetical doctrines, two legends, two histories"; the southerner is "the proud citizen of a free society and, on the other hand, committed to a society that has not yet dared to free itself of the necessity of naked and brutal oppression." Faulkner asks for more time but "the time [...] does not exist. [...] There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation."

Baldwin initially intended to complete Another Country before returning to New York in the fall of 1957, but progress on the novel was slow, so he decided to go back to the United States sooner. Beauford Delaney was particularly upset by Baldwin's departure. Delaney had started to drink heavily and entered the incipient stages of mental deterioration, including complaining about hearing voices. Nonetheless, after a brief visit with Édith Piaf, Baldwin set sail for New York in July 1957.

1960s

Baldwin's third and fourth novels, Another Country (1962) and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), are sprawling, experimental works dealing with Black and white characters, as well as with heterosexual, gay, and bisexual characters. He briefly traveled to Israel in 1961, planning to continue on to Africa, but opting instead to travel to Turkey. Baldwin completed Another Country during his first, two-month stay in Istanbul (which ends with the note, Istanbul, December 10, 1961). This was to be the first of many stays in Istanbul during the 1960s.

In 1962, when Baldwin had already spent fourteen years as an expatriate living in France, he published his essay Letter from a Region in My Mind in The New Yorker. "Letter transitions deftly between episodic anecdotes, assessments of Baldwin’s own life-phases, and systemic analyses of the social-cultural factors behind racism."

Baldwin's lengthy essay "Down at the Cross" (frequently called The Fire Next Time after the title of the 1963 book in which it was published) similarly showed the seething discontent of the 1960s in novel form. The essay was originally published in two oversized issues of The New Yorker and landed Baldwin on the cover of Time magazine in 1963 while he was touring the South speaking about the restive Civil Rights Movement. Around the time of publication of The Fire Next Time, Baldwin became a known spokesperson for civil rights and a celebrity noted for championing the cause of Black Americans. He frequently appeared on television and delivered speeches on college campuses. The essay talked about the uneasy relationship between Christianity and the burgeoning Black Muslim movement. After publication, several Black nationalists criticized Baldwin for his conciliatory attitude. They questioned whether his message of love and understanding would do much to change race relations in America. The book was consumed by whites looking for answers to the question: What do Black Americans really want? Baldwin's essays never stopped articulating the anger and frustration felt by real-life Black Americans with more clarity and style than any other writer of his generation.

On February 18, 1965, Baldwin participated in a much publicized debate with William F. Buckley, on the topic of whether the American dream had been achieved at the expense of African Americans. The debate took place in the UK at the Cambridge Union, historic debating society of the University of Cambridge. The spectating student body voted overwhelmingly in Baldwin's favor.

1970s and 1980s

Baldwin's next book-length essay, No Name in the Street (1972), also discussed his own experience in the context of the later 1960s, specifically the assassinations of three of his personal friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Baldwin's writings of the 1970s and 1980s were largely overlooked by critics, although they have received increasing attention in recent years. Several of his essays and interviews of the 1980s discuss homosexuality and homophobia with fervor and forthrightness. Eldridge Cleaver's harsh criticism of Baldwin in Soul on Ice and elsewhere and Baldwin's return to southern France contributed to the perception by critics that he was not in touch with his readership. As he had been the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, he became an inspirational figure for the emerging gay rights movement. His two novels written in the 1970s, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979), stressed the importance of Black American families. He concluded his career by publishing a volume of poetry, Jimmy's Blues (1983), as well as another book-length essay, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), an extended reflection on race inspired by the Atlanta murders of 1979–1981.

Saint-Paul-de-Vence

Baldwin lived in France for most of his later life, using it as a base of operations for extensive international travel. Baldwin settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France in 1970, in an old Provençal house beneath the ramparts of the village. His house was always open to his friends, who frequently visited him while on trips to the French Riviera. American painter Beauford Delaney made Baldwin's house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence his second home, often setting up his easel in the garden. Delaney painted several colorful portraits of Baldwin. Fred Nall Hollis also befriended Baldwin during this time. Actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier were also regular guests. He wrote several of his last works in his house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, including Just Above My Head in 1979 and Evidence of Things Not Seen in 1985. It was also in Saint-Paul-de-Vence that Baldwin wrote his "Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis" in November 1970.

Many of Baldwin's musician friends dropped in during the Jazz à Juan and Nice Jazz Festivals. They included Nina Simone, Josephine Baker, Miles Davis, and Ray Charles. In his autobiography, Miles Davis wrote:

I'd read his books and I liked and respected what he had to say. As I got to know Jimmy we opened up to each other and became real great friends. Every time I went to southern France to play Antibes, I would always spend a day or two out at Jimmy's house in St. Paul de Vence. We'd just sit there in that great big beautiful house of his telling us all kinds of stories, lying our asses off.... He was a great man.

Baldwin learned to speak French fluently and developed friendships with French actor Yves Montand and French writer Marguerite Yourcenar, who translated Baldwin's play The Amen Corner into French. His last novel, Harlem Quartet, was published in 1987.

Personal life

Sexuality

Baldwin was a bisexual man who primarily, but not exclusively, pursued sexual and romantic relationships with men. He first realised he was bisexual while a teenager growing up in Harlem and Greenwich Village in the 1940s. Even after coming out, Baldwin generally considered sexuality a private matter and in general resisted applying the label "gay" to himself. He felt that the words "gay" and "queer" both "belittled the reality of love" and his experience as someone who "loved individuals, many of whom were men." Throughout his life, he had relationships with women and men, noting in 1985 how he "fell in love with, lived with and almost married" a woman when he was twenty-two years old, though he considered Lucien Happersberger the "one true love" of his life. According to Dwight A. McBride, Baldwin saw the world in such terms that made him not "exclusively gay, black, expatriate, activist, or the like", but rather "an intricately negotiated amalgam of all of those things, which had to be constantly tailored to fit the circumstances in which he was compelled to articulate himself".

Death

On December 1, 1987, Baldwin died from stomach cancer in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. He was buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York City.

Fred Nall Hollis took care of Baldwin on his deathbed. Nall had been friends with Baldwin since the early 1970s, when Baldwin would buy him drinks at the Café de Flore. Nall recalled talking to Baldwin shortly before his death about racism in Alabama. In one conversation, Nall told Baldwin: "Through your books you liberated me from my guilt about being so bigoted coming from Alabama and because of my homosexuality." Baldwin insisted: "No, you liberated me in revealing this to me."

A few hours after his death, his novel Harlem Quartet, published earlier in the year, won the French-American Friendship Prize (having a week earlier lost by one vote in Paris the Prix Femina, awarded to the "best foreign novel of the year").

At the time of his death, Baldwin was working on a memoir, Remember This House, focused on his recollections of personal interactions with civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Following his death, the publishing company McGraw-Hill took the unprecedented step of suing his estate to recover the $200,000 advance they had paid him for the book, but by 1990, the lawsuit had been dropped. The unfinished manuscript is the basis of Raoul Peck's 2016 documentary film I Am Not Your Negro.

Following Baldwin's death, a court battle was waged over the ownership of his home in France. Baldwin had been in the process of purchasing his house from his landlady, Jeanne Faure. At the time of his death, Baldwin did not have full ownership of the home, and it was Faure's intention that the home would stay in her family. His home, nicknamed "Chez Baldwin", has been the center of scholarly work and artistic and political activism. The National Museum of African American History and Culture has an online exhibit titled "Chez Baldwin", which uses his historic French home as a lens to explore his life and legacy. Magdalena J. Zaborowska's 2018 book, Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France, uses photographs of his home and his collections to discuss politics, race, being queer, and domesticity.

Over the years, several efforts were initiated to save the house and convert it into an artists’ residency, but none had the endorsement of the Baldwin estate. In February 2016, Le Monde published an opinion piece by Thomas Chatterton Williams, a contemporary Black American expatriate writer in France, which spurred a group of activists to come together in Paris. In June 2016, American writer and activist Shannon Cain squatted at the house for 10 days as an act of political and artistic protest. Les Amis de la Maison Baldwin, a French organization whose initial goal was to purchase the house by launching a capital campaign funded by the U.S. philanthropic sector, grew out of this effort. This campaign was unsuccessful without the support of Baldwin's estate. Attempts to engage the French government in conservation of the property were dismissed by the mayor of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Joseph Le Chapelain, whose statement to the local press, claiming "nobody's ever heard of James Baldwin", mirrored that of Henri Chambon, the owner of the corporation that razed the house. In 2019, construction was completed on an apartment complex that now stands where Chez Baldwin once stood.

Themes

Struggle for self

In all of Baldwin's works, but particularly in his novels, the main characters are twined up in a "cage of reality" that sees them fighting for their soul against the limitations of the human condition or against their place at the margins of a society consumed by various prejudices. Baldwin connects many of his main characters—John in Go Tell It On The Mountain, Rufus in Another Country, Richard in Blues for Mister Charlie, and Giovanni in Giovanni's Room—as sharing a reality of restriction: per biographer David Leeming, each is "a symbolic cadaver in the center of the world depicted in the given novel and the larger society symbolized by that world". Each reaches for an identity within their own social environment, and sometimes—as in If Beale Street Could Talk's Fonny and Tell me How Long The Train's Been Gone's Leo—they find such an identity, imperfect but sufficient to bear the world. The singular theme in the attempts of Baldwin's characters to resolve their struggle for themselves is that such resolution only comes through love. Here is Leeming at some length:

Love is at the heart of the Baldwin philosophy. Love for Baldwin cannot be safe; it involves the risk of commitment, the risk of removing the masks and taboos placed on us by society. The philosophy applies to individual relationships as well as to more general ones. It encompasses sexuality as well as politics, economics, and race relations. And it emphasizes the dire consequences, for individuals and racial groups, of the refusal to love.

Social and political activism

Baldwin returned to the United States in the summer of 1957, while the civil rights legislation of that year was being debated in Congress. He had been powerfully moved by the image of a young girl, Dorothy Counts, braving a mob in an attempt to desegregate schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv had suggested he report on what was happening in the American South. Baldwin was nervous about the trip but he made it, interviewing people in Charlotte (where he met Martin Luther King Jr.), and Montgomery, Alabama. The result was two essays, one published in Harper's magazine ("The Hard Kind of Courage"), the other in Partisan Review ("Nobody Knows My Name"). Subsequent Baldwin articles on the movement appeared in Mademoiselle, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, where in 1962 he published the essay that he called "Down at the Cross", and the New Yorker called "Letter from a Region of My Mind". Along with a shorter essay from The Progressive, the essay became The Fire Next Time.

While he wrote about the movement, Baldwin aligned himself with the ideals of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Joining CORE allowed him to travel across the South, lecturing on racial inequality. His insights into both the North and South gave him a unique perspective on the racial problems the United States was facing.

In 1963, he conducted a lecture tour of the South for CORE, traveling to Durham and Greensboro in North Carolina, and New Orleans. During the tour, he lectured to students, white liberals, and anyone else listening about his racial ideology, an ideological position between the "muscular approach" of Malcolm X and the nonviolent program of Martin Luther King Jr. Baldwin expressed the hope that socialism would take root in the United States:

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

—James Baldwin

By the spring of 1963, the mainstream press began to recognize Baldwin's incisive analysis of white racism and his eloquent descriptions of the Negro's pain and frustration. In fact, Time featured Baldwin on the cover of its May 17, 1963, issue. "There is not another writer", said Time, "who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South."

Inspiration and relationships

A great influence on Baldwin was the painter Beauford Delaney. In The Price of the Ticket (1985), Baldwin describes Delaney as:

... the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognized as my teacher and I as his pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow.

Later support came from Richard Wright, whom Baldwin called "the greatest black writer in the world". Wright and Baldwin became friends, and Wright helped Baldwin to secure the Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Foundation $500 fellowship. Baldwin's essay "Notes of a Native Son" and his collection Notes of a Native Son allude to Wright's 1940 novel Native Son. In Baldwin's 1949 essay "Everybody's Protest Novel", however, he indicated that Native Son, like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), lacked credible characters and psychological complexity, and the friendship between the two authors ended. Interviewed by Julius Lester, however, Baldwin explained: "I knew Richard and I loved him. I was not attacking him; I was trying to clarify something for myself."

In 1949, Baldwin met and fell in love with Lucien Happersberger, a boy aged 17, though Happersberger's marriage three years later left Baldwin distraught. When the marriage ended, they later reconciled, with Happersberger staying by Baldwin's deathbed at his house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Happersberger died on August 21, 2010, in Switzerland.

Baldwin was a close friend of the singer, pianist, and civil rights activist Nina Simone. Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, and Baldwin helped Simone learn about the Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin also provided her with literary references influential on her later work. Baldwin and Hansberry met with Robert F. Kennedy, along with Kenneth Clark and Lena Horne and others in an attempt to persuade Kennedy of the importance of civil rights legislation.

Baldwin influenced the work of French painter Philippe Derome, whom he met in Paris in the early 1960s. Baldwin also knew Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Billy Dee Williams, Huey P. Newton, Nikki Giovanni, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet (with whom he campaigned on behalf of the Black Panther Party), Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, Rip Torn, Alex Haley, Miles Davis, Amiri Baraka, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini, Margaret Mead, Josephine Baker, Allen Ginsberg, Chinua Achebe, and Maya Angelou. He wrote at length about his "political relationship" with Malcolm X. He collaborated with childhood friend Richard Avedon on the 1964 book Nothing Personal.

Legacy and critical response

Literary critic Harold Bloom characterized Baldwin as being "among the most considerable moral essayists in the United States". Baldwin's influence on other writers has been profound: Toni Morrison edited the Library of America's first two volumes of Baldwin's fiction and essays: Early Novels & Stories (1998) and Collected Essays (1998). A third volume, Later Novels (2015), was edited by Darryl Pinckney, who delivered a talk on Baldwin in February 2013 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of The New York Review of Books, during which Pinckney said, "No other black writer I'd read was as literary as Baldwin in his early essays, not even Ralph Ellison. There is something wild in the beauty of Baldwin's sentences and the cool of his tone, something improbable, too, this meeting of Henry James, the Bible, and Harlem." One of Baldwin's short stories, "Sonny's Blues", appears in many anthologies of short fiction used in introductory college literature classes.

A street in San Francisco, Baldwin Court in the Bayview neighborhood, is named after him. In 1987, Kevin Brown, a photojournalist from Baltimore, founded the National James Baldwin Literary Society. The group organizes free public events celebrating Baldwin's life and legacy. In 1992, Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, established the James Baldwin Scholars program, an urban outreach initiative, in honor of Baldwin, who taught at Hampshire from 1983 to 1986. The JBS Program provides talented students of color from under-served communities an opportunity to develop and improve the skills necessary for college success through coursework and tutorial support for one transitional year, after which Baldwin scholars may apply for full matriculation to Hampshire or any other four-year college program.

Spike Lee's 1996 film Get on the Bus includes a black gay character, played by Isaiah Washington, who punches a homophobic character, saying: "This is for James Baldwin and Langston Hughes." His name appears in the lyrics of the Le Tigre song "Hot Topic", released in 1999. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante included James Baldwin on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

In 2005, the United States Postal Service created a first-class postage stamp dedicated to Baldwin, which featured him on the front with a short biography on the back of the peeling paper. In 2012, Baldwin was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display that celebrates LGBT history and people. In 2014, East 128th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues was named "James Baldwin Place" to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Baldwin's birth. He lived in the neighborhood and attended P.S. 24. Readings of Baldwin's writing were held at The National Black Theatre and a month-long art exhibition featuring works by New York Live Arts and artist Maureen Kelleher. The events were attended by Council Member Inez Dickens, who led the campaign to honor Harlem native's son; also taking part were Baldwin's family, theater and film notables, and members of the community.

Honors and awards

Guggenheim Fellowship, 1954.

Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust Award

Foreign Drama Critics Award

George Polk Memorial Award, 1963

MacDowell fellowships: 1954, 1958, 1960

Honorary doctorate fom the University of Hull

Langston Hughes Medal, 1978

Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur, 1986

Media appearances

1963-06-24. "A Conversation With James Baldwin" is a television interview recorded by WGBH following the Baldwin–Kennedy meeting

1963-02-04.Take This Hammer is a television documentary made with Richard O. Moore on KQED about Blacks in San Francisco in the late 1950s.

1965-06-14. "Debate: Baldwin vs. Buckley", recorded by the BBC, is a one-hour television special program featuring a debate between Baldwin and leading American conservative William F. Buckley Jr. at the Cambridge Union, Cambridge University, England.

1971. Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris. A documentary directed by Terence Dixon

1973. James Baldwin: From Another Place. Short documentary by Sedat Pakay following the activist in Istanbul.

1974. James Baldwin talks about race, political struggle, and the human condition at the Wheeler Hall in Berkeley, California.

1975. "Assignment America; 119; Conversation with a Native Son", from WNET features a television conversation between Baldwin and Maya Angelou.

1976. "Pantechnicon; James Baldwin" is a radio program recorded by WGBH. Baldwin discusses his new book, The Devil Finds Work, which is representative of the way he takes a look at the American films and myth.