James Baldwin (1924-1987) was one of the best Black American writers of the 1900s. He was so good that they would not let him speak at the March on Washington in 1963. He is best known for “The Fire Next Time” (1963), one of the best things ever written about race in the US.
- Toni Morrison said his death left an intellectual void till Ta-Nehisi Coates came out with “Between the World and Me” in 2015.
- Amiri Baraka called him the “Joan of Arc of the cocktail party.”
- Ishmael Reed said he was “a hustler who comes on like Job.”
Baldwin’s thought and expression seem deeper than that of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr, but for that very reason it could not directly move the masses to effect change.
His aim, though, was not to be a reformer. He wanted “to be an honest man and a good writer.” That meant writing the truth as best he could, to bear witness.
His influences:
- King James Bible,
- storefront preaching,
- Bessie Smith’s blues songs,
- “Dickens’ love of bravura”,
- “something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech.”
His father was a Pentecostal preacher in Harlem, and so was he from age 14 to 17. After seeing what went on behind the scenes, he left the church. But the church never left him. You see that in his language and his heavily moral point of view. It is almost Jeremiah meets the New Yorker magazine.
The adviser at his high school’s literary club was Countee Cullen, a famous Black poet.
His mentor after high school was Richard Wright, an even more famous Black writer. Wright got him into the pages of the Nation magazine. Baldwin had written enough of his first (bad) novel to get a Rosenwald Fellowship. That gave him the money to leave for France in 1948. He knew no French.
In France he came to think and speak in French. Like Angela Davis, he experienced French racism. It made him see the racism and language of the US with new eyes. Like Dante and Joyce, he lived most of his life in exile, yet wrote almost obsessively about his left-behind country.
He did return to the US for a few years during the height of the civil rights movement. Many of his essays from that period are in “Nobody Knows My Name” (1961).
He also wrote novels: “Go Tell it on the Mountain” (1953), which made his name, “Giovanni’s Room” (1956) and “Another Country” (1962). The last two have gay relationships. Baldwin was himself openly gay.
The best thing about Baldwin is that he writes the truth as he knows it, fearlessly, and does it from a moral centre.
Black and White Americans he saw as profoundly damaged by racism, in different ways, in both mind and heart. They need to face their separately painful pasts.
“the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, … the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.”
– Abagond, 2015, 2016.
See also:
- Also by or about Baldwin:
- The Fire Next Time
- If Beale Street Could Talk
- I Am Not Your Negro
- James Baldwin on the police
- James Baldwin on being a writer
- James Baldwin on deluded white people
- The prison of the White American view of history
- Of dusky maidens – Baldwin v Kerouac
- The Baldwin-Kennedy meeting – Baldwin v Robert Kennedy
- James Baldwin’s record collection
- influences
- Ta-Nehisi Coates: Between the World and Me
- March on Washington, 1963
- Toni Morrison
- Malcolm X
- Martin Luther King, Jr
- Angela Davis
- Harlem
- Dante
Abagond 
In what ways did he see US racism in new eyes?
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An eloquent during the Civil Rights Era.
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..One of the top (literary) folk that I would have loved to have sat down and have lunch with.
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Abagond wrote: “After seeing what went on behind the scenes, he left the church. But the church never left him. ” Where have I read that claim before on this blog? Oh I remember: gro jo on Thu 24 Sep 2015 at 13:23:06 “Baldwin may have left the church, but the church never left him.”
“His aim, though, was not to be a reformer. He wanted “to be an honest man and a good writer.” That meant writing the truth as best he could, to bear witness.” Are you joking? How can you claim that he wasn’t a reformer, was he for the continuation of the status quo? What you probably meant to write was that he was no revolutionist, a correct assessment, but reformer he most certainly was along with every decent American of that time. Hell, LBJ, poster boy for segregationist Texas, ended up passing the Civil Rights laws that Black Americans still rely on to get a modicum of justice!
I agree with Baraka’s and Reed’s pithy put downs of Baldwin’s religiosity, opportunism and social climbing, since the people he was bearing witness for were bien pensant White Americans. I admire the man’s courage for going down South at that time because, his fame not withstanding, some a-hole might still have found him a tempting target.
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How could you write about Baldwin without saying something on his Oedipal struggle with Richard Wright? Baldwin made his name by taking down the “protest novel”,Wright’s bailiwick.
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@ gro jo
Well, you are right. I think it is pretty clear to anyone who has read Baldwin and the King James Bible. The observation and even the phrasing is hardly original with you:
Chicago Tribune, 1991:
– http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1991-05-26/entertainment/9102160884_1_james-baldwin-james-campbell-brilliant
2011:
– https://www.skidmore.edu/religious-life/religious-articles.php
2013 (attributing the idea to Baldwin himself):
– https://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/a-question-of-faith/
2013:
– http://sankofamuse.blogspot.com/2013_09_01_archive.html
2014:
– https://prezi.com/wt4jughemxhm/james-baldwin/
2015:
– http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6935&context=etd
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@ gro jo
He was FOR reform, and may have even given speeches on behalf of, say, the Civil Right Bill or the Voting Rights Act, but it was not the main aim of his writing. He makes it pretty clear that it will take more than passing a few laws to end the race problem in the US.
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Abagond, you are hilarious. My comment was meant as a joke, not an accusation. I never claimed “originality” since that statement is a cliché. My more serious point was against your strange claim that Baldwin wasn’t a reformer.
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Baldwin’s preachments about redemptive interracial love weren’t attempts to reform the mores of the nation? They sound pretty reformist to me:
“Blacks are “taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world”, and yet:
“White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this – which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never – the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”
Like the Alabama sheriff, Whites are caught in the lie of race.
“whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”
Which means Whites do not know who they are. They need Blacks to help them:
“And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.””
How about an assessment how things turned out 52 years after he wrote this stuff, and the reasons why things turned out the way they did, in the light of his philosophy?
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“”White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other””
How does that work, though? What does “accepting and loving yourself” mean when you’re part of the group which intentionally or unintentionally creates oppression, causes pain to another human?
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Gro jo quote where Baldwin make assumptions in regards to white people don’t make a lot of sense to me. He seems to be saying that if white people truly loved themselves then there wouldn’t be any more racism. That they had to understand themselves before they could understand black people. If that’s what he meant then that sounds weak.
As I see it self love is narcissism and narcissism in part defines Western civilization.
I take the “he never left the church” quote to mean that he had humanized his writing through the lens of Christianity.
Was he writing to a white audience or a black audiance?
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I just reread my previous post i meant to say an eloquent voice during the Civil Rights Era.
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Michael Barker, most of the stuff Baldwin wrote were for white audiences with college level reading comprehension. Most whites and most blacks below such reading level weren’t interested in his writing. Reed and Baraka were malicious, but not wrong about his shtick.
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“Most of the stuff Baldwin wrote were for white audiences with college level reading comprehension. Most whites and most blacks below such reading level weren;t interested in his writing.” Hmmmm…………..
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I wonder how it makes Ta-Nehisi Coates feel having Toni Morrison pay him such a high compliment?
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@Abagond
You have inspired me to re-read James Baldwin. I am reading ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’ and ‘Jimmy’s Blues’ alternating them with Steve Biko’s ‘I Write What I Like’. And from your post about Ta-Nehisi Coates, I would have to add him to my essential reading list.
Thank you!
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Reblogged this on Raimanet.
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I love James Baldwin.
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The Giant truth-teller’s truth never diminishes but enlarges and multiplies with time. Other Promethean Giants, like Malcolm X, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Lao Tsu , Toni Morrison’s Baby Suggs’ wisdom is as relevant today as it was in their time.
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I think he had envisioned a life free of limitation and super- imposed definition by probing insight, in seeing things in different wave-lengths from x-ray vision to radio-waves of the future. His writing is prophetic and deeply profound.
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I think we can project upon public figures in our memories, our own unexamined prejudices, e.g. the uninformed dismissal of the work of Marcus Garvey and James Baldwin on this blog. James Baldwin surpasses all the labels attached to him. To fully grasp their importance and genius we have to bring our full attention when reading their work.
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James Baldwin quote: “To be a negro in this country and be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
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@ Abagond: You should watch I Am Not Your Negro. It was enlightening learning he was friends with MLK and a Malcom X and Medgar Evers. And how nothing in America has really changed. How naive and apathetic Robert Kennedy was about the plight of black Americans during that time. I was surprised by that. Go to any black person’s home back in the day and on the wall was MLK and JFK next to the white Jesus. Watching the film opened my eyes about the Kennedys just like watching the LBJ documentary on HBO. LBJ was racist and was always using the n-word when he was referring to black people. I recommend viewing I Am Not Your Negro. Sam Jackson does a great job with the narration.
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@ Mary Burrell
““To be a negro in this country and be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
Truer words were never written. Thanks for sharing, Mary.
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@ Mary
Thanks for your recommendation. I would like to see that one.
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Happy birthday Mr. Baldwin. A literary treasure.
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“ I am terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves so long that they really don’t think I’m human. And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.” —James Baldwin
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This quote shared by Mary B. upthread bears repeating. Especially for those who think the assessments of conscious Black people are:
“too harsh” LOL!
“too mean”
“too paranoid”
Black rage is an appropriate reponse to Black history and lived experience in the USA.
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