James Baldwin

Early life

James Arthur Baldwin was born in Harlem on August 2, 1924, to Emma Berdis Jones. He grew up the eldest of nine children in a poor household headed by his stepfather, David Baldwin, a strict Baptist preacher, and the two had a difficult relationship. At Frederick Douglass Junior High the poet Countee Cullen encouraged his writing. He later edited the newspaper at DeWitt Clinton High School and graduated in 1942.

As a teenager Baldwin preached at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly. The rhythms of the pulpit and the Bible stayed in his prose long after he left the church.

Paris and early work

After high school Baldwin worked odd jobs and wrote book reviews in Greenwich Village. Novelist Richard Wright, whom he met in 1944, helped him win a fellowship. In 1948, at 24, Baldwin left for Paris to escape the racial and sexual discrimination he faced at home. He later broke with Wright over how literature should treat race.

His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), drew on his Harlem youth and the church. It was followed by the essays of Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Giovanni's Room (1956), a novel of love between two men. Like Another Country (1962), it took on homosexuality and interracial relationships at a time when both were taboo in American publishing.

Witness to the movement

In the early 1960s Baldwin returned to the United States, traveled through the South and wrote The Fire Next Time (1963). His essays made him one of the most widely read voices of the civil rights era. He attended the 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march, and he registered voters in Alabama with SNCC. His play Blues for Mister Charlie followed in 1964.

His standing was not uncontested. PBS notes that some activists criticized his commitment to nonviolence, and some critics found later work such as If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) bitter. Baldwin himself continued to argue for universal love and brotherhood.

Later life and legacy

Shaken by the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Baldwin spent most of his later years in France, calling himself a "transatlantic commuter." He settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1970. Later works include the novel Just Above My Head and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985). In his last decade he wrote fiction, nonfiction and poetry, and he taught.

He died of cancer at Saint-Paul-de-Vence at the turn of November and December 1987. After a service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, where Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka spoke, he was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery. In 2017 the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture acquired a collection of his correspondence, manuscripts and photographs from his sister Paula Baldwin Whaley. In 1968 he had testified in support of a commission to create such a museum.