James Baldwin (politician)

James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American writer. He garnered acclaim across various media, including essays, novels, plays, and poems. His first novel, '' Go Tell It on the Mountain'', was published in 1953; decades later, ''Time'' magazine included the novel on its list of the 100 best English-language novels released from 1923 to 2005. His first essay collection, ''Notes of a Native Son'', was published in 1955.

Baldwin's work fictionalizes fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures. Themes of masculinity, sexuality, race, and class intertwine to create intricate narratives that run parallel with some of the major political movements toward social change in mid-twentieth century America, such as the civil rights movement and the gay liberation movement. Baldwin's protagonists are often but not exclusively African American, and gay and bisexual men frequently feature prominently in his literature. These characters often face internal and external obstacles in their search for social and self-acceptance. Such dynamics are prominent in Baldwin's second novel, ''Giovanni's Room'', which was written in 1956, well before the gay liberation movement.

His reputation has endured since his death and his work has been adapted for the screen to great acclaim. An unfinished manuscript, ''Remember This House'', was expanded and adapted for cinema as the documentary film ''I Am Not Your Negro'' (2016), which was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 89th Academy Awards. One of his novels, ''If Beale Street Could Talk'', was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film of the same name in 2018, directed and produced by Barry Jenkins.

In addition to writing, Baldwin was also a well-known, and controversial, public figure and orator, especially during the civil rights movement in the United States.

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. Baldwin was born out of wedlock. Jones never revealed to Baldwin who his biological father was. According to Anna Malaika Tubbs in her account of the mothers of prominent civil rights figures, some rumors stated that James Baldwin's father suffered from drug addiction or that he died, but that in any case, Jones undertook to care for her son as a single mother. A native of Deal Island, Maryland, where she was born in 1903, Emma Jones was one of the many who fled racial segregation in the South during the Great Migration. She arrived in Harlem at 19 years old.

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, who is a friend of the woman. Emma Baldwin would bear eight children with her husband—George, Barbara, Wilmer, David Jr. (named for James's father and deceased half-brother), Gloria, Ruth, Elizabeth, and Paula—and raise them with her eldest James, who took his stepfather's last name. James rarely wrote or spoke of his mother. When he did, he made clear that he admired and loved her, often through reference to her loving smile. Baldwin moved several times in his early life but always to different addresses in Harlem. Harlem was still a mixed-race area of the city in the incipient days of the Great Migration, tenements and penury featured equally throughout the urban landscape.

David Baldwin was many years Emma's senior; he may have been born before Emancipation in 1863, although James did not know exactly how old his stepfather was. David's mother, Barbara, was born enslaved and lived with the Baldwins in New York before her death when James was seven. David also had a light-skinned half-brother that his mother's erstwhile enslaver had fathered on her, and a sister named Barbara, whom James and others in the family called "Taunty". David's father and James's paternal grandfather had also been born enslaved. David had been married earlier, begetting a daughter, who was as old as Emma when the two were wed, and at least two sons―David, who would die in jail, and Sam, who was eight years James's senior, lived with the Baldwins in New York for a time, and once saved James from drowning.

James referred to his stepfather simply as his "father" throughout his life, but David Sr. and James shared an extremely difficult relationship, nearly rising to physical fights on several occasions. "They fought because amesread books, because he liked movies, because he had white friends", all of which, David Baldwin thought, threatened James's "salvation", Baldwin biographer David Adams Leeming wrote. 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", wrote another Baldwin biographer James Campbell. During the 1920s and 1930s, David worked at a soft-drinks bottling factory, though he was eventually laid off from this job, and, as his anger entered his sermons, he became less in demand as a preacher. David Baldwin sometimes took out his anger on his family, and the children became fearful of him, tensions 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 gave birth to their last child, Paula. James Baldwin, at his mother's urging, had 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 which 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 broke out.

As the oldest child, James worked part-time from an early age to help support his family. He was molded not only by the difficult relationships in his own household but by the results of poverty and discrimination he saw all around him. As he grew up, friends he sat next to in church would turn away to drugs, crime, or prostitution. In what Tubbs found not only a commentary on his own life but on the Black experience in America, Baldwin once 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 old, Baldwin began school 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, who recognized Baldwin's precocity and encouraged him in his research and writing pursuits,; as did some of his teachers, who recognized he had a brilliant mind. Ayer stated that James Baldwin got 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'', beginning a lifelong interest in Dickens' work. Baldwin wrote a song that earned New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's praise in a letter that La Guardia sent to Baldwin. Baldwin also won a prize for a short story that was published in a church newspaper. Baldwin's teachers recommended that he go to a public library on 135th Street in Harlem, a place that would become a sanctuary for Baldwin and where he would make a deathbed request for his papers and effects to be deposited.

It was at P.S. 24 that Baldwin met Orilla "Bill" Miller, a young white schoolteacher from the Midwest whom Baldwin named as partially the reason 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'' in Lafayette Theatre, from which flowed a lifelong desire to succeed as a playwright. David was reluctant to let his stepson go to the theatre—he saw stage works as sinful and was suspicious of Miller—but his wife insisted, reminding him of the importance of Baldwin's education. Miller later directed the first play that Baldwin ever wrote.

After P.S. 24, Baldwin entered Harlem's Frederick Douglass Junior High School. At Douglass Junior High, Baldwin met two important influences. The first was Herman W. "Bill" Porter, a Black Harvard graduate. Porter was the faculty advisor to the school's newspaper, the ''Douglass Pilot'', where Baldwin would later be 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 ''Douglass Pilot''. The second of these influences from his time at Douglass was the renowned poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Countee Cullen. Cullen taught French and was a literary advisor in the English department. Baldwin later remarked that he "adored" Cullen's poetry, and said he found the spark of his dream to live in France in 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, predominantly Jewish school, matriculating there that fall. At De Witt Clinton, Baldwin 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 writings. Baldwin finished at De Witt Clinton in 1941. His yearbook listed his ambition as "novelist-playwright". Baldwin's motto in his yearbook was: "Fame is the spur and—ouch!"

During his high school years, uncomfortable with the fact that, unlike many of his peers, he was becoming more sexually interested in males than in females, Baldwin sought refuge in religion. He first joined the now-demolished Mount Calvary of the Pentecostal Faith Church on Lenox Avenue in 1937, but followed the preacher there, Bishop Rose Artemis Horn, who was affectionately called Mother Horn, when she left to preach at Fireside Pentecostal Assembly. At 14, "Brother Baldwin", as Baldwin was called, first took to Fireside's altar. 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", says biographer Campbell. Baldwin delivered his final sermon at Fireside Pentecostal in 1941. Baldwin later 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 related that he had a rare conversation with David Baldwin "in which they had really spoken to one another", with his stepfather asking, "You'd rather write than preach, wouldn't you?"

Later years in New York

Baldwin left school in 1941 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 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. Documentary. Directed by Terence Dixon.
* 1974. James Baldwin talks about race, political struggle, and the human condition at the Wheeler Hall, Berkeley, CA.
* 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 called "The Devil Finds Work" which is also representative of the way Baldwin takes a look at the American films and myth.

See also

*LGBT culture in New York City
* List of civil rights leaders
* List of American novelists
* List of LGBT writers
* List of LGBT people from New York City

Notes

References

Sources

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Further reading

Archival resources

James Baldwin early manuscripts and papers, 1941–1945
(2.7 linear feet) are housed at Yale University Beinecke Library

James Baldwin Papers
Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library (30.4 linear feet).
* Gerstner, David A.
Queer Pollen: White Seduction, Black Male Homosexuality, and the Cinematic
'. University of Illinois Press, 2011. Chapter 2.

Letters to David Moses
at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library

James Baldwin Playboy Interview
archival materials held b
Princeton University Library Special Collections

External links

"A Conversation With James Baldwin"
1963-06-24, WGBH

Transcript of interview with Dr. Kenneth Clark
*
*
*
* Altman, Elias
"Watered Whiskey: James Baldwin's Uncollected Writings"
''The Nation'', April 13, 2011.
*
* Gwin, Minrose.
Southernspaces.org
March 11, 2008. ''Southern Spaces''.

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


selected manuscripts, correspondence, and photographic portraits from th
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
at Yale University
*

''James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket''
distributed by California Newsreel

Baldwin's ''American Masters'' page

"Writings of James Baldwin"
from C-SPAN's '' American Writers: A Journey Through History''
* Zaborowska, Magdalena J.
"James Baldwin"
''The Literary Encyclopedia'', October 25, 2002.

Audio files of speeches and interviews
at UC Berkeley

See Baldwin's 1963 film
''Take This Hammer'', made with Richard O. Moore, about Blacks in San Francisco in the late 1950s.

Video: Baldwin debate with William F. Buckley
(via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center)
*
* ''Guardian'' Book
"Author Page"
with profile and links to further articles

The James Baldwin Collective
in Paris, France
* FBI files on James Baldwin

FBI Docs
contains information about James Baldwin's destroyed FBI files and FBI files about him held by the National Archives

A Look Inside James Baldwin's 1,884 Page FBI File

James Baldwin
at Biography.com

Portrait of James Baldwin, 1964
''Los Angeles Times'' Photographic Archive (Collection 1429). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Portrait of James Baldwin, 1985
''Los Angeles Times'' Photographic Archive (Collection 1429). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

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