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Sunday Reading: Celebrating James Baldwin

By The New Yorker

The work of the novelist and essayist James Baldwin demands that we resist the mythologies of history, shed our self-protective innocence, and confront the truth of our history and present condition. In 1962, Baldwin published the essay of his life, a portrait of race, class, history, and religion, in The New Yorker . “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” which was expanded into book form as part of “ The Fire Next Time ,” traces Baldwin’s early years in his father’s Harlem church and his meeting with the leader of the Nation of Islam; it is a ferocious examination of his inner life and the inner life of this country. “Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away,” he writes. “And the universe is simply a sounding drum; there is no way, no way whatever, so it seemed then and has sometimes seemed since, to get through a life.”

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This week, as we celebrate what would have been Baldwin’s ninety-seventh birthday, we’re bringing you a selection of pieces by and about him. In “The Enemy Within,” Hilton Als writes about the influence of Baldwin on his own life and work. Teju Cole revisits Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village” and explores Baldwin’s evolving perceptions of his life as an expatriate. (“ ‘People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them,’ Baldwin wrote. But it is also true that the little pieces of history move around at a tremendous speed, settling with a not-always-clear logic, and rarely settling for long.”) Finally, in “The History That James Baldwin Wanted America to See,” Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., writes about a meeting between the writer and Martin Luther King, Jr., three weeks before King’s assassination, in Memphis, in 1968. “Baldwin wanted to free us from the shackles of a particular national story, so that we might create ourselves anew,” Glaude observes. “For this to happen, white America needed to shatter the myths that secured its innocence.”

— David Remnick

American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve impressive camouflage.

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By John McPhee

By Steve Martin

July 29, 1979 If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is? By JAMES BALDWIN t. Paul de Vence, France--The argument concerning the use, or the status, or the reality, of black English is rooted in American history and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the argument supposes itself to be posing. The argument has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other--and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him. People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate. (And, if they cannot articulate it, they are submerged.) A Frenchman living in Paris speaks a subtly and crucially different language from that of the man living in Marseilles; neither sounds very much like a man living in Quebec; and they would all have great difficulty in apprehending what the man from Guadeloupe, or Martinique, is saying, to say nothing of the man from Senegal--although the "common" language of all these areas is French. But each has paid, and is paying, a different price for this "common" language, in which, as it turns out, they are not saying, and cannot be saying, the same things: They each have very different realities to articulate, or control. What joins all languages, and all men, is the necessity to confront life, in order, not inconceivably, to outwit death: The price for this is the acceptance, and achievement, of one's temporal identity. So that, for example, thought it is not taught in the schools (and this has the potential of becoming a political issue) the south of France still clings to its ancient and musical ProvenÁal, which resists being described as a "dialect." And much of the tension in the Basque countries, and in Wales, is due to the Basque and Welsh determination not to allow their languages to be destroyed. This determination also feeds the flames in Ireland for many indignities the Irish have been forced to undergo at English hands is the English contempt for their language. It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identify: It reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity. There have been, and are, times, and places, when to speak a certain language could be dangerous, even fatal. Or, one may speak the same language, but in such a way that one's antecedents are revealed, or (one hopes) hidden. This is true in France, and is absolutely true in England: The range (and reign) of accents on that damp little island make England coherent for the English and totally incomprehensible for everyone else. To open your mouth in England is (if I may use black English) to "put your business in the street": You have confessed your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your future. Now, I do not know what white Americans would sound like if there had never been any black people in the United States, but they would not sound the way they sound. Jazz , for example, is a very specific sexual term, as in jazz me, baby , but white people purified it into the Jazz Age. Sock it to me, which means, roughly, the same thing, has been adopted by Nathaniel Hawthorne's descendants with no qualms or hesitations at all, along with let it all hang out and right on! Beat to his socks which was once the black's most total and despairing image of poverty, was transformed into a thing called the Beat Generation, which phenomenon was, largely, composed of uptight , middle- class white people, imitating poverty, trying to get down , to get with it , doing their thing , doing their despairing best to be funky , which we, the blacks, never dreamed of doing--we were funky, baby, like funk was going out of style. Now, no one can eat his cake, and have it, too, and it is late in the day to attempt to penalize black people for having created a language that permits the nation its only glimpse of reality, a language without which the nation would be even more whipped than it is. I say that the present skirmish is rooted in American history, and it is. Black English is the creation of the black diaspora. Blacks came to the United States chained to each other, but from different tribes: Neither could speak the other's language. If two black people, at that bitter hour of the world's history, had been able to speak to each other, the institution of chattel slavery could never have lasted as long as it did. Subsequently, the slave was given, under the eye, and the gun, of his master, Congo Square, and the Bible--or in other words, and under these conditions, the slave began the formation of the black church, and it is within this unprecedented tabernacle that black English began to be formed. This was not, merely, as in the European example, the adoption of a foreign tongue, but an alchemy that transformed ancient elements into a new language: A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey. There was a moment, in time, and in this place, when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a speed, and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today. He cannot afford to understand it. This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself, and smash that mirror before which he has been frozen for so long. Now, if this passion, this skill, this (to quote Toni Morrison) "sheer intelligence," this incredible music, the mighty achievement of having brought a people utterly unknown to, or despised by "history"--to have brought this people to their present, troubled, troubling, and unassailable and unanswerable place--if this absolutely unprecedented journey does not indicate that black English is a language, I am curious to know what definition of language is to be trusted. A people at the center of the Western world, and in the midst of so hostile a population, has not endured and transcended by means of what is patronizingly called a "dialect." We, the blacks, are in trouble, certainly, but we are not doomed, and we are not inarticulate because we are not compelled to defend a morality that we know to be a lie. The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way. And, after all, finally, in a country with standards so untrustworthy, a country that makes heroes of so many criminal mediocrities, a country unable to face why so many of the nonwhite are in prison, or on the needle, or standing, futureless, in the streets--it may very well be that both the child, and his elder, have concluded that they have nothing whatever to learn from the people of a country that has managed to learn so little. Return to the Books Home Page

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In 'The Matter of Black Lives,' generations of Black thinkers probe American racism

Back in June 2020, during a summer of protests for racial justice, the New Yorker republished 'Letter from a Region in my Mind," a seminal James Baldwin essay calling out the ignorance of liberal white Americans. In the following months, writer Jelani Cobb put together a collection of essays from the magazine that fit a similar theme: Black writers, including Toni Morrison and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote pieces for the New Yorker about race and racism that still ring true today. In this interview, Cobb reflects on the essays and what it took for those Black writers to break into the magazine.

Want to learn more?

Find out where to buy the book here.

Read Jelani Cobb's 2016 essay "The Matter of Black Lives," which appears in the book.

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The fire this time – the legacy of James Baldwin

His work fell foul of civil-rights-era binary racial and sexual politics but, as a new film shows, now Baldwin’s ideas are used to explain everything from Trump to Black Lives Matter

I n the opening to his 1962 New Yorker essay Letter from a Region in My Mind , James Baldwin remembers walking around his neighbourhood of Harlem as a 14-year-old, wondering if his fate would trap him there. “What I saw around me that summer in Harlem was what I had always seen,” he wrote. “Nothing had changed.” More than 50 years on, Baldwin’s words and philosophy have travelled thousands of miles from 110th street. His public image has been on a journey, from literary sensation with his debut novel Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1952 to his searing non-fiction work in the 60s that saw him revered as one of America’s most prominent public intellectuals. Thirty years since he died of stomach cancer in 1987, an expat in the south of France, there is reinvigorated interest in Baldwin and his ideas. February sees the release of I Am Not Your Negro , a documentary by Haitian director Raoul Peck that takes Baldwin’s final, unfinished project – a book about the lives and murders of his friends Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers – as a starting point, before analysing Baldwin’s sometimes strained and difficult relationship with the civil rights movement. In March, Taschen will publish a special edition of The Fire Next Time with images from Life magazine photographer Steve Schapiro.

Peck’s film is the latest in a string of events and retrospectives that have put Baldwin back in the public imagination. The ball began rolling in 2014 with Columbia University’s year-long programme pegged to his 90th birthday. Since then, there have been film festivals, exhibitions dedicated to Baldwin, and musical theatre inspired by his writing. As the Black Lives Matter protests unfolded around the US, there was a collection of writing – including an entry from the Pulitzer winner Isabel Wilkerson – which took inspiration from Baldwin. His work has been used to explain everything from Trump to Dylann Roof and the Charleston church shooting . Then, in 2015, came Ta-Nehisi Coates’s bestseller turned must-read commentary on contemporary race relations in America, Between The World And Me , which was inspired by Baldwin’s own essay collection, The Fire Next Time .

For Baldwin scholar, professor of English at Yale and author Caryl Phillips, the return of Baldwin to mainstream thinking isn’t surprising at all. For him the big issues concerning American life now – the rise of crude, racially charged politics, killings of unarmed black men by the police, an apathetic public – repeat a history from which Baldwin’s critiques still offer some solace. “People are looking for someone who can articulate these issues,” says Phillips. “I think the person who has probably articulated what it means to be an American and what it means to be black, with more eloquence than anybody else in the last century, is Baldwin.”

For Peck, Baldwin’s writing has lasted because it was so ahead of its time. It looked beyond the binary racial politics of 1950s and 60s America, toward a future that could genuinely be called post-racial. “He always writes from the point of view that was not only politically right, but from a humanistic point of view – it was never just about race for him.”

Phillips agrees: “It would have pleased him greatly to see Obama in the White House. He’s a man who comes out of what Baldwin would have recognised as the true crucible of American life, which is fusion and hybridity. People coming together from different backgrounds to make a new country. That’s what he was saying, and that didn’t go over well with the clumsy racialised politics of the times.”

“He had the longer view,” says Peck. “It was about the legacy.”

That legacy is what’s at the heart of Peck’s documentary. He carefully illustrates how Baldwin is still relevant to contemporary America. By switching black and white footage of protests from the 60s into colour, and contemporary colour footage from Ferguson into black and white, Peck makes those events interchangeable. Those images, combined with Baldwin’s words read by Samuel L Jackson, affirm Baldwin’s status not only as a visionary writer, but a philosopher we can still turn to.

During a period when police shootings of unarmed black men and women are under the microscope, Baldwin’s writing about the creation of “the nigger” as a way to justify the subjugation of African-America still feels applicable. His theory that segregation of both physical and mental spaces is America’s biggest hurdle rings true with parallel, unequal systems composed along racial lines – for housing, religion and education – is still on the national agenda. Baldwin, a gay black man writing about interracial relationships in the 50s, wrestled with identity politics at a time when intersectionality was a word most people would think referred to the highway code.

Peck wanted to show how Baldwin fits perfectly into contemporary life. “[I wanted to] remind people that this man has given us all the instruments we need already, and, connecting it to Ferguson, which was happening when I was working on the film, it was like history catching up with the film. My intention was to bring his work to the forefront again. It was never intended to be a historical piece.”

But there was a time when Baldwin was savaged by his peers, publicly attacked by the more militant black leaders of the time, among them Eldridge Cleaver (whose criticism was dripping in homophobia ) and Amiri Baraka, who saw his integrationist stance as compromised and weak. Publishers and editors wouldn’t touch him, either. Time magazine turned down his offer of a conversation with Josephine Baker because he was seen as old hat, and I Am Not Your Negro’s starting point is Baldwin’s continued struggles to get his work published after years of poor reviews and dwindling sales.

That outsider status, both at the time of the civil rights struggle and in the twilight of his career are, for Phillips, what make Baldwin timeless. He took risks, and history has rewarded him for it.

“The fact that he managed to achieve what he did – to keep publishing, to keep writing, to keep speaking, to not [succumb] to the pressure to become just a vocal spokesperson and a hip echo chamber for the most popular position of the day, is a remarkable achievement.”

Unlike his peers who took a hardline position – such as Malcolm X’s by-any-means-necessary stance, and the Black Panthers militancy – and offered solutions, Phillips argues, Baldwin’s job was to bear witness. He read between the lines and attempted to make sense of the world. “He explores the ambiguities and the ironies of the situation and helps you to see the problems more personally and clearly, and then leaves it up to you to draw the conclusions.

“I think when you’re younger and you’re trying to find answers, I don’t think Baldwin is the person you go to. I think when you recognise and you become aware of the complexity of the problem, then you want to go to someone who articulates the complexity and is prepared to rest with ambiguity.” For Peck, Baldwin hasn’t been so much out of fashion as a constant, uncited influence on writers. “Ten or 12 years ago, I said it was the time to go back to him because he had become somehow forgotten,” he says. “People didn’t see how important he still is. There was a new generation that was basically using him, and the knowledge of his work, but without giving him credit.”

I Am Not Your Negro opens the Human Rights Watch film festival in London on 9 March

• James Baldwin
• Civil rights movement
• US politics
• Black Lives Matter movement

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Nonviolence, Black Power, and “the Citizens of Pompeii”: James Baldwin’s 1968

The radicalization of an unparalleled figure in american literature and african american cultural politics.

September 22, 1963: James Baldwin addresses a crowd of approximately 7,000 at Foley Square in lower Manhattan during a rally held to mourn six Black children murdered in Birmingham the previous Sunday. Notable persons seated behind Baldwin at the podium include James Farmer, James Forman, Bayard Rustin, Norman Thomas, Reverend Thomas Kilgore Jr., and James Peck. Photograph by Morris Warman, used with permission.

The following is an excerpt from an essay that appeared in  James Baldwin Review, Volume 8 (Fall, 2022).

From the early 1950s, Baldwin’s literary fame had been built on long, elaborate—at times equivocating—sentences which brilliantly emphasized the private, personal dimensions of human experience. Fame abruptly changed that phase of his life and work. Jane Howard put it this way in Life magazine’s May 24, 1963 issue: 

For ten years his novels sold well, his essays were accorded respectful criticism, and Baldwin swam around fairly anonymously in the intellectual fishbowls of New York and Paris … Then early this year a searing essay he wrote for the New Yorker was combined with a gentle letter to one of his nephews, and became a best-selling book called The Fire Next Time . So intuitively does it dissect the nation’s explosive race problem that Baldwin found himself a celebrity overnight.

Published in January 1963, The Fire Next Time marked a kind of crescendo of Baldwin’s early literary voice and its capacity to draw together disparate but nonetheless proximate corners of the American reading public. Those connections had been tough enough to forge in books and magazines. The chances of such a reconciliation in American experience were long if they existed at all. In this, as he’d long understood, and as he repeated in the often-quoted last paragraphs of The Fire Next Time , Baldwin envisioned the impossible necessity for Americans to recover from delusions of exceptionalism and come to terms with their place as part of “human history in general, and Negro history in particular.” The chances of that were, indeed, beyond long. At the time, it didn’t matter. In Baldwin’s understanding, those histories themselves testified “to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.”

Baldwin played his newly high-profile role of a politically engaged man of letters through much of 1963. He gave lectures in support of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. His “whistle-stop speaking tour” in the Deep South—New Orleans; Jackson, Mississippi; Durham, North Carolina—in January was covered by Life . In May 1963, with his portrait on the cover of Time magazine , and, yet again on tour for CORE, he made the documentary film Take This Hammer , focused on Black poverty and anger and white gentrification in San Francisco. A week later he led an acrimonious meeting with then–US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy about the dire, national implications of racism and of violence in Birmingham. Outspoken (and / or maybe just “out”) in ways that kept him off the podium of speakers at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Baldwin supported the march, nonetheless, in Paris and in a roundtable discussion with Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Charlton Heston, and others broadcast live on TV in the US on the evening of the march, August 28, 1963.

On the third Sunday after the march, September 15, 1963, six Black children were killed in three separate incidents—one of which was the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church—in Birmingham. That day marked the end of Baldwin’s brief career as a literary celebrity and the beginning of his radicalization, as such. Following the killing of Medgar Evers in Mississippi on June 12, the murder of those children changed the rhythm of Baldwin’s development as an artist and activist. It didn’t take long; part of him had been radical all along. But still the shift was clear. Less than one week after the killings in Birmingham, on September 18, Baldwin appeared with longtime pacifist activist and Deputy Director of the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin, in a press conference where they called for federal intervention in Alabama. The press conference was preparation for a “National Day of Mourning for the Children of Birmingham” to occur on September 22, the following Sunday. Baldwin would speak at a mass rally at the Federal Court in Manhattan on the 22nd.

Also that same day, as part of the National Day of Mourning, Baldwin appeared with famed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on a public television show titled Our Protestant Heritage and themed “The Meaning of the Birmingham Tragedy.” The activist-pastor at Friendship Baptist Church in Harlem, Dr. Thomas Kilgore Jr., hosted the conversation wherein Niebuhr said that the Black church constituted the most important social force among American churches. Baldwin responded:

There’s a great paradox occurring in this country, what you say about the Negro church, for example, is I think entirely true, and Martin has used the Negro church as a kind of tool, not only to liberate Negroes but to liberate the entire country. And on the basis of the evidence, and maybe overstating it a little bit, but as far as one can tell the only people in the country at the moment who believe either in Christianity, or the country, are the most despised minority in it.

Gesturing to Kilgore on his right and Niebuhr on his left, and staring out beyond the camera as if searching for the words, Baldwin continued:

Negroes have done—with a really incredible, and agonized, restraint—more it seems to me in this decade to force Americans to begin to reassess themselves, than has been done since I was born. It’s ironical, I’m trying to say, that the people who were slaves here, the most beaten and despised people here, and for so long, should be at this moment, and I mean this, absolutely the only hope this country has. It doesn’t have any other. None of the descendants of Europe seem to be able to do, or have taken on themselves to do, what Negroes are now trying to do. And this is not a chauvinistic or racial argument.

Baldwin concluded his thought: “It probably has something to do with, um, with the nature of life itself, which forces,” and reaching for Niebuhr’s arm, “ you at any extremity, any extreme , to discover what you really live by, whereas most Americans have been for so long, so safe and so sleepy, that they don’t any longer have any real sense of what they live by. I think they really think that it may be Coca-Cola.” 

If September 1963 had been the beginning, King’s assassination made Baldwin understand that his radicalization was complete. In his letter on April 12, 1968 , after describing his perilous feeling of isolation as a target in the lethal spotlight, Baldwin wrote to Cezzar, “Whatever move I make is, in the eyes of the American government (and, more seriously, in fact) a political move.” On Malcolm X’s birthday—May 19—in 1968, Baldwin participated in a panel discussion with the actor-singer, journalist, and activist Maggie Hathaway; former Nation of Islam minister Ernie Smith; and the Black Panther’s Deputy Minister of Information for Southern California, Earl Anthony. Hakim Jamal moderated the event. Addressing himself to the occasion, Baldwin searched for a way to communicate his position as a radicalized artist and person:

I’m a writer. I’m not, um … I’m a writer who is part of the revolution, it’s true. I’m not. I have another obligation, I have another responsibility. To argue with you, for example. To argue with Malcolm, as I did. I had to take the position that I’m, um, I had to take the position that you produced me. I’m the poet that you produced. And I’m responsible for something which I may not always be able to name, which has to be there for the people who produced me when I’m gone and when this particular aspect when this particular battle is over … But I have to be aware that my major role is what I do by myself in the dark, for all of us I hope, and not what I do on stage or on television in the light. I’m trying to clarify something to me, to you, and to this very dim republic.

That radical pulse moved Baldwin in ways few at the time followed across the 1970s and into the 1980s, and in ways few understand now. Baldwin fused the texture of his life and career with conundrums of American history; he knew that understanding the one meant casting aside delusions about the other. That went both ways, which is not easily done. Initiated by the Birmingham murders and completed by King’s assassination, Baldwin felt that the “perpetual achievement of the impossible” in history had been left to him as a kind of personal responsibility. As he’d come to understand and explore through the 1970s and 1980s, Black personal responsibility had always been a complexly collective and mutual reality. Personal life was social life. Privacy didn’t turn upon ownership of the space; and it was as much about intimacy as it was about solitude. As Baldwin sensed powerfully by 1968 and would explore and elaborate upon for the rest of this life, to regard personal life as a privately owned, individual matter was to be frozen. A person’s real life was a social reality, not an autonomous one. People who lived lives focused primarily on securing owned solitudes—often by producing salable things—became “immobilized,” as Baldwin put it a little later , like “the citizens of Pompeii.”

Ed Pavlić lives in Athens, GA, and is the author of numerous books across and between genres.

Ed Pavlić is an American writer whose work travels across genres: poetry, fiction and nonfiction

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Reading James Baldwin in an Election Year

T he evening James Baldwin stood in the pulpit of a New Orleans church in 1963, he carried little more than a single sheet of paper with his sporadic handwriting in blue ink on it. He began as he had always done: In silence, being engulfed by the applause of the room. A sort of expectation each one has arrived with.

In a picture taken of him that evening by photographer Mario Jorrin, Baldwin's body stood erect. He wears a dark suit. A white shirt, a black tie, and bends his chin toward the podium. The ceiling of the sanctuary seemed to climb toward the heavens as people stood crowded along the walls. There was hardly any room, a thing Baldwin had become used to since releasing The Fire Next Time earlier that year. That night, the faces of the attendees would bend toward one another—some laughed, some were stern, some were focused on the man at the pulpit, and others stared into nothing. They had all come to hear “God’s Black revolutionary mouth,” as Amiri Baraka called Baldwin.

Read More: James Baldwin Insisted We Tell the Truth About This Country. The Truth Is, We’ve Been Here Before

Baldwin’s frame was small, his clothes often hugged his skin. In most pictures that I have laying in my house, Baldwin smiles. I have chosen this for a reason. For years, it seemed that we have only known the angry Baldwin. That Baldwin’s thunderous appeal was only meant to break us down until we have nothing left. A foolish thing to believe any lover would do. There are four pictures, actually, four in which his cheeks spread far until they show his teeth. And yet, I know this too is a created thing. I have wanted to see him smile more than he cries. I have wanted to see him happy rather than sad. But I cannot deny this: that evening, Baldwin carried more than a paper and pen. He carried a broken heart.

A soul-crushing anguish that things at home—and in the years since leaving Harlem—would not change. An anguish that almost emptied him of keeping the faith. A painful feeling that also travels from the center of my chest this morning and the morning before that and the morning before that. “Four AM can be a devastating hour,” Baldwin writes. The clock reads 4:32am. I have just taken a sip of the gunpowder green tea, have just finished the last page of John Hersey’s 1946 essay “Hiroshima,” have read the last line—"They were looking for their mothers"—three times, underlined it with black ink that bleeds through the next page, and have become more determined, as Baldwin has, “to bear the light.”

If you are like me and are concerned with history, grief, failure, and goodness—and the way each is woven together when we tell the story of how things unfold in our lives and the lives of others—then you, too, have stared at that black and white image. You have studied James Baldwin’s hands and his eyes, remembering that the year 1963 crawls in his psyche like a never-ending plague that overworks the ventricles of the heart. You have turned to the chronology in your well-worn copy of Baldwin’s collected essays edited by Toni Morrison and see that the year 1963 was full of travel and meetings and reportings on lynching and dancing and trembling.

In the midst of all of this travel, you would realize that Baldwin had been hospitalized for what doctors call “exhaustion.” That he felt it impossible to stop because of the demands of the world. That he felt it impossible not to speak because of his broken heart. That “exhaustion” is but another word for love when you are deemed unloveable and invaluable and have refused to believe it. That you feel what Baldwin has felt and therefore have taken his essays with you everywhere because a well-worn copy of essays is somewhat an indicator of a mind that wrestles, a heart that moves, and a body that feels.

I, too, have wondered about the same world , some 60 years later, with the same type of dying in and around us. As I write these words, I am sitting at my desk at home while my daughter, Ava, is asleep upstairs. The news says the numbers of children, women, and men dead in Gaza has eclipsed almost 30,000. The streets in New York and Washington, D.C. have been filled with people crying for justice . In January, President Joe Biden stood at the pulpit at Mother Emmanuel AME , where a protester demanded a ceasefire, and the crowd responds “Four more years,” silencing the cries for dignity and protection. A few weeks before that, a rabbi stood in a crowd of people demanding the same and was met with, “Get out of here!” Neighborhoods have been flattened. Aid has been cut off. Hatred is growing . Politicians are in denial about whether or not this country was born out of anti-Black racism . I find it hard to feel anything wondering what would come of this next election year.

How do we grieve where we are now when so much has been lost? It’s in these moments that I think about Baldwin often—that I feel Baldwin’s heart and mind can be a creative force to give me the hope that I often don’t feel and the courage to allow my heartbreak to break me open instead of close me up. I think that if there is anyone to lead us through an election year—to help us ask the right questions, make the right demands, fight the good fight, and stay human—it is James Baldwin.

I think of 1963, a year that is everything but a normal year in American history. By January, the same month Baldwin wrote his intimate and thunderous appeal, 16,000 American military personnel were deployed to South Vietnam in an unjust war . By February, the fiery napalm and smoke incinerated both the bodies and fields along the Perfume River. By April, 90-year old Dorothy Bell waited for a table that never came and was eventually arrested. By May, police dogs were ripping into the rib cage of a 70-year-old black man in protest. By June, Medgar Ever ’s back was split open as he bled to death in front of his wife and children. By August, burnt crosses stood illuminating the doorstops of a black family who moved into an all white neighborhood. By September, some 19 sticks of dynamite shredded the ligaments of five black girls, killing them instantly, and injuring some 20, blowing out the face of the stained glass Christ that sat behind the choir’s seating.

Read More: How Liberal White America Turned Its Back on James Baldwin in the 1960s

I have studied the image that Jorrin had taken of Baldwin that same year. The image is silent. Baldwin does not smile. His hands do not move. And yet, the image is as loud as the words he wrote in his 1963 letter to his nephew, “the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.”

I have been thinking a lot about this image and the 60 years that has passed since this moment. The facts are this: the world is neither more safe or more healed than when he left it. The world is neither more loving or more honest or more healthy than when he was born in it. The same racism, hatred, death, and religious bigotry that Baldwin wanted us freed of in his time destroys us in our time. And yet, there is something about our time that feels different. (I am partly tired of hearing people say this moment is unprecedented because, you know, looking back through history, things have always been bad. But a part of me wonders if they are not the foolish ones, but me.) It feels different because the forces that want the world to stay the same are growing stronger. And at the same time, the inner willingness to believe that things can change, is growing deeper.

This image lingers because I too stand behind the sacred desk declaring the good news of God’s love and liberation. I too return to the blank page to feel, as Baldwin says, “what it is like to be alive.”

If there is anything that on my part and in these days that I have crawled back to, it is the way that Baldwin, as Morrison wrote in her eulogy to him, gave us language to articulate our perils, to deeply understand our place in the world not simply as humans but as people who come from a battered and worn and complex history. None of the villains and heroes in Baldwin’s mind seem quite black and white. Baldwin knew that villainy, especially of the American kind that is so double-minded and unstable in our ways about what matters and who counts, is not a given. It is chosen. And if it is chosen, then we can choose the better. This better, Morrison so beautifully articulates, is the way Baldwin so fearlessly and tenderly laid out of condition and the redemptive energy that lays at the center of it. “You went into that forbidden territory and decolonized it,” Morrison wrote. “and ungated it for black people, so that in your wake we could enter it, occupy it, restructure it in order to accommodate our complicated passions.” For Morrison, Baldwin was more than anything, full of that sacred wisdom, courage, and love that leaves us both to “witness the pain you had witnessed” and yet “tough enough to bear while it broke your heart.”

I have found myself being most concerned as of late with the things that broke Baldwin’s heart. It is not because I am obsessed with the dark side of the man who gave so much of his energy in 1963 to do what he must to make us more whole and honest and loving. It is because some 60 years later, it seems as if, on the one hand, we are so obsessed with running from grief that to deal with it is to almost give up hope because of the mountain of moral failure we feel we have to climb. And then on the other, we are living in a country where people seem to be addicted to the suffering of others.

They do not care whether your body or your brain is exhausted , they only desire your labor. They do not care whether you are you have rights or freedoms, they only care that they have them and have the power to take yours away. They do not care about your children or their children or this planet or the past or the present or the future. They only care about now and harming as many people now with as little accountability as possible.

There are days, I wonder if any of us can survive all of this. I wonder if seeing images of dead children, rage-filled desires to shred our common humanity, social media’s constant altering of our own self-image and love, the eroding of social trust and morality, the lying, the greed, the bigotry, the sleepless nights, all of it—I wonder if we can survive it.

American society for all its declarations of freedom and justice had become nothing more than empty promises and empty hopes and a “series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors, ” Baldwin wrote in October 1963, in a talk to teachers . The citizen who calls into question those, like the Good Samaritan story in the Christian Scriptures, who pass by people in need is not championed but silenced and erased. This was a cruelty, in Baldwin’s mind, of the highest order. Take the Black child and the Black adults fight for their freedom. “It is not really a Negro Revolution that is upsetting this country,” he wrote. “What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity.” For many in his time and even now 60 years later, the same thing is true: there is a fight to violently hold on to “American” meaning white and Christian and straight and male. For all the talk of America being a “Christian nation,” it was not just a lie, but the term “Christian nation” had become a weapon. This, too, was a deep and depressing cruelty.

Throughout his talk, Baldwin kept alluding to this idea of bad faith both as a way of being together but also bad faith as a way of living. “We understood very early that this was not a Christian nation,” he says. “It didn’t matter what you said or how often you went to church …my father and my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother knew that Christians didn’t act this way.”

When I read that line, I couldn’t help but think of what is happening right now in this country. I have thought so hard and so often about how sad it is that we live in a country where Christians have the most power, but believe they are experiencing the most pain. It’s sad that we have become so empty of not just compassion but of mercy, kindness, wisdom, and goodness. As I’ve flipped through my underlined pages of Baldwin’s text, I shook my head side to side and came to this conclusion:if anybody is making it hard to be an American and a Christian, it is Christians.

“All of these means that there are in this country tremendous reservoirs of bitterness which have never been able to find an outlet,” Baldwin posits. Sadly, that bitterness has now shown up in the most destructive and deceptive ways. And yet, that is not all Baldwin had seen. When the mind is confused, full of doubt, and discouragement, the eye must be insistent in its power to see.

After having talked about the teacher and student’s responsibility to do what we must to responsibly love one another, Baldwin turns particularly to say a word about what he would say to a black child if he were to teach them day in and day out. He would teach them that the environments that they have been forced into is not of their own doing, but that of a power that has sought to destroy them. There are no “good” kids or “bad” kids ultimately, only the conditions that mark them as such and rob the “bad” kids of their humanity and dignity.

He would teach them that their lives, their art, their history, and their story is greater than the ways this country believes them to be backward and nothing. He would teach them that the stereotypes of the world are powerful and yet not ultimate. And then the famous line: “I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger—and that it belongs to him.”

Read More: James Baldwin and the Trap Of Our History

I have read this line and thought of my own two children. I think of all children, truly. Children who are black as my own. Children who are Palestinian. Children who are Jewish. Children who are Asian. Children who are Hispanic, and gay and straight and athletic and quirky and in wealthy districts and left behind in enclaves. I think of them so much because, as one African proverb says, the health of the nation is dependent on the condition of its children.

I think of their growing minds and the fears that I have of what they will have to enter. How little do they know what actually awaits them and how furiously I have stayed up into the late hours of the night either praying or reading or writing in some way to prepare them. I think of my own upbringing. Our small plot of land. How little was expected of us and how much of this world we both endured and made. As a parent, I have found so much peace in those last six words: “and it belongs to him.”

Two nights ago, as I sat alone at my table reading over his talk for the third time, I took a sip of my chamomile tea as I listened to Hammock’s “We Watched You Disappear” in the background. The outside had darkened as the clouds from today’s rain passed over. I walked upstairs, noticing the chill bounce of the walls. I kiss both of my children on their foreheads as they sleep. I walk downstairs, walk back to my office, and stare at another picture from 1963 of Baldwin during his travels.

In the picture, his arms form in the position of a “T” as his body bounces side to side. The walls are bright. A painting which looks to depict an ancient time hangs on the wall. Baldwin’s eyes hang downward as the cracks of his lips widen. Doris Castle, an active organizer on the front lines of the Civil Right movement with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) stands in front of Baldwin with her torso forward, her arms like a bird’s wings, her right thumb toward the ceiling and her left index finger holding a cigarette. It was the same year that Castle protested a segregated New Orleans City Hall cafeteria. It was the same year that Baldwin went on a crusade to change the heart of the nation. In the photo, he smiles. She dances. It is said that both of them are doing the “Hitch Hike”—a dance popularized the year before with Marvin Gaye’s 1962 hit by the same name. The dance goes like this: thumb out, start to the right, four count, one, two, three, four, throw the shoulder back, left thumb out, start to the left, five, six, seven, eight, bend down, roll the hands, and turn to the left and turn to the right. And then again and then again until you are so lost together that you almost forget that a hitch hiker is a person in desperation, putting themselves in danger, hoping that they arrive where they desire as whole.

There is room made in the world, the burning and bleeding world of 1963, to dance and be joyful. There are times I wonder, as I look at this picture of both Baldwin and Castle, if their dancing kept them going. I wonder if it was their movement that let them know that their lives were more than just producing things and fighting things. To know that their existence is enough. To know that whatever good they did out there was a reflection of the good they protected in their hearts.

I have no answer to that question but something about these two images—Baldwin preaching his good news in the church and dancing his heart happy in a home—remind me that Baldwin left more than a broken heart. He left us a beating heart. “My ancestors counseled me to keep the faith : and I promised, I vowed, that I would,” he wrote. I, too, have made that vow. I, too, have watched my own children dance, twirl their bodies around the dying grass, laughing and holding hands. I, too, have watched people take the streets once again to say to the world: if they can’t be free, then we can’t be free. I, too, have watched the artist and poets among us move their tender fingers toward the keyboard and the page, determined to create against all hope. I, too, have watched how we have done something as simple as cried at the sight of one human being helping another, trusting that every good deed can be multiplied. A broken heart isn’t the only type of heart.

There is also a heart that with every act of courage, tenderness, vulnerability, kindness, and mercy, moves forward.

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James Baldwin

James Baldwin was an essayist, playwright, novelist and voice of the American civil rights movement known for works including 'Notes of a Native Son,' 'The Fire Next Time' and 'Go Tell It on the Mountain.'

(1924-1987)

Who Was James Baldwin?

Writer and playwright James Baldwin published the 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain , receiving acclaim for his insights on race, spirituality and humanity. Other novels included Giovanni's Room , Another Country and Just Above My Head, as well as essays like Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time .

Writer and playwright James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, in Harlem, New York. One of the 20th century's greatest writers, Baldwin broke new literary ground with the exploration of racial and social issues in his many works. He was especially known for his essays on the Black experience in America.

Baldwin was born to a young single mother, Emma Jones, at Harlem Hospital. She reportedly never told him the name of his biological father. Jones married a Baptist minister named David Baldwin when James was about three years old.

Despite their strained relationship, Baldwin followed in his stepfather's footsteps — who he always referred to as his father — during his early teen years. He served as a youth minister in a Harlem Pentecostal church from the ages of 14 to 16.

Baldwin published numerous poems, short stories and plays in the magazine, and his early work showed an understanding for sophisticated literary devices in a writer of such a young age.

After graduating from high school in 1942, he had to put his plans for college on hold to help support his family, which included seven younger children. He took whatever work he could find, including laying railroad tracks for the U.S. Army in New Jersey.

During this time, Baldwin frequently encountered discrimination, being turned away from restaurants, bars and other establishments because he was African American. After being fired from the New Jersey job, Baldwin sought other work and struggled to make ends meet.

Aspiring Writer

On July 29, 1943, Baldwin lost his father — and gained his eighth sibling the same day. He soon moved to Greenwich Village, a New York City neighborhood popular with artists and writers.

Devoting himself to writing a novel, Baldwin took odd jobs to support himself. He befriended writer Richard Wright , and through Wright, he was able to land a fellowship in 1945 to cover his expenses. Baldwin started getting essays and short stories published in such national periodicals as The Nation , Partisan Review and Commentary .

Three years later, Baldwin made a dramatic change in his life and moved to Paris on another fellowship. The shift in location freed Baldwin to write more about his personal and racial background.

"Once I found myself on the other side of the ocean, I see where I came from very clearly...I am the grandson of a slave, and I am a writer. I must deal with both," Baldwin once told The New York Times . The move marked the beginning of his life as a "transatlantic commuter," dividing his time between France and the United States.

'Go Tell It on the Mountain'

Baldwin had his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain , published in 1953. The loosely autobiographical tale focused on the life of a young man growing up in Harlem grappling with father issues and his religion.

" Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else. I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal, above all, with my father," he later said.

Gay Literature

In 1954, Baldwin received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He published his next novel, Giovanni's Room , the following year. The work told the story of an American living in Paris and broke new ground for its complex depiction of homosexuality, a then-taboo subject.

Love between men was also explored in a later Baldwin novel Just Above My Head (1978). The author would also use his work to explore interracial relationships, another controversial topic for the times, as seen in the 1962 novel Another Country .

Baldwin was open about his homosexuality and relationships with both men and women. Yet he believed that the focus on rigid categories was just a way of limiting freedom and that human sexuality is more fluid and less binary than often expressed in the U.S.

"If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy," the writer said in a 1969 interview when asked if being gay was an aberration, asserting that such views were an indication of narrowness and stagnation.

'Nobody Knows My Name'

Baldwin explored writing for the stage a well. He wrote The Amen Corner , which looked at the phenomenon of storefront Pentecostal religion. The play was produced at Howard University in 1955, and later on Broadway in the mid-1960s.

It was his essays, however, that helped establish Baldwin as one of the top writers of the times. Delving into his own life, he provided an unflinching look at the Black experience in America through such works as Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961).

Nobody Knows My Name hit the bestsellers list, selling more than a million copies. While not a marching or sit-in style activist, Baldwin emerged as one of the leading voices in the Civil Rights Movement for his compelling work on race.

'The Fire Next Time'

In 1963, there was a noted change in Baldwin's work with The Fire Next Time . This collection of essays was meant to educate white Americans on what it meant to be Black. It also offered white readers a view of themselves through the eyes of the African American community.

In the work, Baldwin offered a brutally realistic picture of race relations, but he remained hopeful about possible improvements. "If we...do not falter in our duty now, we may be able...to end the racial nightmare." His words struck a chord with the American people, and The Fire Next Time sold more than a million copies.

That same year, Baldwin was featured on the cover of Time magazine. "There is not another writer — white or Black — who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South," Time said in the feature.

Baldwin wrote another play, Blues for Mister Charlie , which debuted on Broadway in 1964. The drama was loosely based on the 1955 racially motivated murder of a young African American boy named Emmett Till .

This same year, his book with friend Avedon entitled Nothing Personal , hit bookstore shelves. The work was a tribute to slain civil rights movement leader Medgar Evers . Baldwin also published a collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man , around this time.

In his 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone , Baldwin returned to popular themes — sexuality, family and the Black experience. Some critics panned the novel, calling it a polemic rather than a novel. He was also criticized for using the first-person singular, the "I," for the book's narration.

Later Works and Death

By the early 1970s, Baldwin seemed to despair over the racial situation. He had witnessed so much violence in the previous decade — especially the assassinations of Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. — caused by racial hatred.

This disillusionment became apparent in his work, which employed a more strident tone than in earlier works. Many critics point to No Name in the Street , a 1972 collection of essays, as the beginning of the change in Baldwin's work. He also worked on a screenplay around this time, trying to adapt The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley for the big screen.

While his literary fame faded somewhat in his later years, Baldwin continued to produce new works in a variety of forms. He published a collection of poems, Jimmy's Blues: Selected Poems , in 1983 as well as the 1987 novel Harlem Quartet .

Baldwin also remained an astute observer of race and American culture. In 1985, he wrote The Evidence of Things Not Seen about the Atlanta child murders . Baldwin also spent years sharing his experiences and views as a college professor. In the years before his death, he taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Hampshire College .

Baldwin died on December 1, 1987, at his home in St. Paul de Vence, France. Never wanting to be a spokesperson or a leader, Baldwin saw his personal mission as bearing "witness to the truth." He accomplished this mission through his extensive, rapturous literary legacy.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: James Baldwin
• Birth Year: 1924
• Birth date: August 2, 1924
• Birth State: New York
• Birth City: Harlem
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: James Baldwin was an essayist, playwright, novelist and voice of the American civil rights movement known for works including 'Notes of a Native Son,' 'The Fire Next Time' and 'Go Tell It on the Mountain.'
• Politics and Government
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Writing and Publishing
• Fiction and Poetry
• Education and Academia
• Theater and Dance
• Civil Rights
• Astrological Sign: Leo
• DeWitt Clinton High School
• The New School
• Death Year: 1987
• Death date: December 1, 1987
• Death City: Saint-Paul de Vence
• Death Country: France

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James Baldwin

James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a writer and civil rights activist who is best known for his semi-autobiographical novels and plays that center on race, politics, and sexuality. 

James Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York, in 1924. He was reared by his mother and stepfather David Baldwin, a Baptist preacher, originally from New Orleans, Louisiana. During his early teen years, Baldwin attended Frederick Douglass Junior High School, where he met his French teacher and mentor Countee Cullen, who achieved prominence as a poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Baldwin went on to DeWitt Clinton High School, where he edited the school newspaper Magpie and participated in the literary club.

In 1948, feeling stifled creatively because of the racial discrimination in America, Baldwin traveled to Europe to create what were later acclaimed as masterpieces to the American literature canon. While living in Paris, Baldwin was able to separate himself from American segregated society and better write about his experience in the culture that was prevalent in America.  Baldwin took part in the Civil Rights Movement, becoming close friends with Medgar Evers, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Nina Simone, and Lorraine Hansberry. The deaths of many of these friends influenced his novels and plays and his writing about race relations in America.

BLK Vol. 1 No. 9, August 1989.

Cover of  BLK  magazine featyring an image of James Baldwin. 

Baldwin’s works helped to raise public awareness of racial and sexual oppression. His honest portrayal of his personal experiences in a national context challenged America to uphold the values it promised on equality and justice. He explored these topics in such works as Go Tell It on the Mountain , Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, Giovanni’s Room, If Beale Street Could Talk , and Another Country . Baldwin firmly believed sexuality was fluid and should not be divided into strict categories, an idea that would not be acceptable until modern day. Through his popularity and writings produced at home and abroad, Baldwin contributed as an agent of change to the artistic and intellectual traditions in American society.

Baldwin remained an outspoken observer of race relations in American culture. He would branch out into other forms of creative expression, writing poetry and screenplays, including treatments for the Autobiography of Malcolm X that later inspired Spike Lee’s feature film, Malcolm X . He also spent years as a college professor at University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Hampshire College. Baldwin died at this home in St. Paul de Vence, France, on December 1, 1987, of stomach cancer at age 63. Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House was the subject of the critically acclaimed 2016 Raoul Peck film, I Am Not Your Negro.

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Top image:  James Baldwin by His Typewriter, Istanbul 1966  by Sedat Pakay. © Sedat Pakay 1966. 2011.20.2

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8 Fascinating Facts About James Baldwin

James Baldwin , who was born in Harlem, New York City, on August 2, 1924, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Baldwin worked in a variety of genres; he was a novelist as well as an essayist and a playwright whose work largely focused on issues related to race, class, and sexuality in the mid-1900s.

In 1948, at the age of 24, a practically penniless Baldwin moved to Paris in order to distance himself from the bigotry he found and faced in America. Five years later, he published his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain , a semi-autobiographical story about a Harlem teen growing up in the 1930s and the sometimes-challenging relationships he has with both his family and the church.

Even if you’ve read all of his work, there are still some things you might not know about James Baldwin.

1. James Baldwin was a preacher in his teen years.

Baldwin’s mother, Emma Jones, never told him about his biological father. He was raised by his stepfather, a Baptist minister named David Baldwin, but their relationship was strained. One thing the two did have in common, at least for a few years, was a commitment to religion.

In his essay “ Letter From a Region in My Mind ,” Baldwin wrote about experiencing a “prolonged religious crisis” and how “I became, during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid—afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without.” He wrote:

“My youth quickly made me a much bigger drawing card than my father. I pushed this advantage ruthlessly, for it was the most effective means I had found of breaking his hold over me. That was the most frightening time of my life, and quite the most dishonest, and the resulting hysteria lent great passion to my sermons—for a while. I relished the attention and the relative immunity from punishment that my new status gave me, and I relished, above all, the sudden right to privacy. It had to be recognized, after all, that I was still a schoolboy, with my schoolwork to do, and I was also expected to prepare at least one sermon a week. During what we may call my heyday, I preached much more often than that. This meant that there were hours and even whole days when I could not be interrupted—not even by my father. I had immobilized him. It took rather more time for me to realize that I had also immobilized myself, and had escaped from nothing whatever.”

2. American Harlem Renaissance painter Beauford Delaney was Baldwin’s mentor.

When Baldwin was just 15 years old, he met American painter Beauford Delaney, whom he quickly came to consider both a great friend and mentor. Baldwin also found a sort of father figure in the artist and would often refer to Delaney as his “ spiritual father .” He described Delaney as “the first living proof, for me, that a Black man could be an artist.”

3. He published reviews before he published fiction.

Baldwin’s first piece in a national magazine wasn’t a work of fiction, but a review of the late 19th- and early 20th-century Russian writer Maxim Gorky titled “Maxim Gorki as Artist” that appeared in the April 12, 1947 issue of The Nation . Colm Tóibín writes in the literary journal Brick that Baldwin was “a reviewer with attitude, a writer with a high sense of aesthetic grandeur, an Edmund Wilson with real poison in his pen.” Take, for example, what Baldwin had to say about Gorky: “He is far from a careful writer and by no means a great one.” Or his opinion about The Postman Always Rings Twice author James M. Cain: “Not only did he have nothing to say, but he drooled, so to speak, as he said it.”

4. He preferred to write in longhand.

Though he had a typewriter, Baldwin’s preference was to write in longhand on a legal pad. “You achieve shorter declarative sentences,” he told The Paris Review in 1984 . Editing was also a key part of his process. In the same interview, Baldwin admitted that his first drafts “are overwritten. Most of the rewrite, then, is cleaning. … You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.”

5. He abandoned America after his best friend died by suicide.

In his 1984 interview with The Paris Review , Baldwin talked about his reasons for leaving America in 1948. “My luck was running out,” Baldwin said. “I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed. My best friend had [died by] suicide two years earlier.”

Why France? ”It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France,” he said. “It was a matter of getting out of America. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me in France, but I knew what was going to happen to me in New York. If I had stayed there, I would have gone under, like my friend.”

6. Baldwin played a part in getting Maya Angelou’s first novel published.

James Baldwin and Maya Angelou shared a special relationship. One night, Baldwin brought Angelou to a party at the New York City home of Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife, Judy . At some point in the evening, many of the guests began sharing stories of their childhood, and Judy was particularly moved by Angelou’s tale.

Judy shared Angelou’s story with Random House editor Robert Loomis, and urged him to ask Angelou to write a book—but Angelou declined, saying that she wrote poems and plays, not books. Loomis appealed to Angelou several more times, but each time she declined. So on his fourth attempt to get her to say yes, a now very determined Loomis employed a different approach.

“It’s just as well you don’t attempt to write autobiography, because to write an autobiography as literature is almost impossible,” Loomis said . That challenge piqued Angelou's interest: “Maybe I’ll try it,” she replied. The result was 1969’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings .

7. Baldwin worked as a film critic.

Though he is best known for his novels, Baldwin wrote criticism as well. In his book-length essay “ The Devil Finds Work ,” he wrote about American cinema in much the same way he wrote his novels, and was particularly interested in what cinema had to say about race.

In discussing The Exorcist , Baldwin wrote: “The mindless and hysterical banality of evil presented in The Exorcist is the most terrifying thing about the film. The Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any Black man, and not only Blacks—many, many others, including white children—can call them on this lie, he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet.”

8. He wrote a screenplay about Malcolm X.

Baldwin was hired by producer Marvin Worth to write a script for a movie about activist Malcolm X and moved to Los Angeles to do so in 1968. It did not go well: As David Leeming writes in James Baldwin: A Biography , “The first treatment he composed was a manuscript of more than 200 pages that read more like a novel than a screenplay. Furthermore, his presence was disruptive, his working habits deplorable, and his lifestyle expensive.”

As Baldwin continued to struggle with the script, Worth brought in writer Arnold Perl to help. The studio wasn’t happy with the finished product, however, and Baldwin eventually quit the project altogether. He published his version of the script as 1972’s One Day When I Was Lost .

Baldwin and Perl’s retooled manuscript, meanwhile, was reworked into a documentary that, according to Leeming, was “screened and soon buried ... presumably because it was thought to be inflammatory.” That version of the script eventually ended up in the hands of Spike Lee, who put his own spin on it for 1992’s Malcolm X . (Baldwin’s estate kept the author’s name out of the on-screen credits .)

A copy of one of Baldwin’s scripts, written in longhand, was acquired by the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in 2017 . The library has three of Baldwin’s solo manuscripts for the project as well as Baldwin and Perl’s screenplay.

A version of this story ran in 2020; it has been updated for 2023.

This article was originally published on mentalfloss.com as 8 Fascinating Facts About James Baldwin .