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First writings and move to Europe

Civil rights activism and the fire next time, later career and honors.

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James Baldwin

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• Amercian Society of Authors and Writers - Biography of James Baldwin
• The Guardian - ‘He craved an Oscar’: James Baldwin’s long campaign to crack Hollywood
• BlackPast - Biography of James Baldwin
• Smithsonian Institution - National Museum of African American History and Culture - An Introduction to James Baldwin
• PBS - American Masters - James Baldwin Biography
• Chicago Public Library - Biography of James Baldwin
• Black History in America - James Baldwin
• BlackHistoryNow - Biography of James Baldwin
• Poetry Foundation - James Baldwin
• James Baldwin - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• James Baldwin - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

What is James Baldwin known for? 

James Baldwin wrote eloquently, thoughtfully, and passionately on the subject of race in America in novels, essays, and plays. He is perhaps best known for his books of essays, in particular Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963). 

What was James Baldwin’s education?

James Baldwin grew up in New York City ’s Harlem neighbourhood in an atmosphere of poverty and strict religious observance. He graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx in 1942 but was otherwise self-taught.

What novels and plays did James Baldwin write?

James Baldwin’s novels included Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), Another Country (1962), and If Beale Street Could Talk (1974; film 2018). He wrote the plays The Amen Corner (1955) and Blues for Mister Charlie (1964).

Where did James Baldwin live?

James Baldwin lived in New York City until 1948, when he moved to Paris . He returned to the United States in 1957, and from 1969 he lived alternately in the south of France and in New York and New England in the U.S.

James Baldwin (born August 2, 1924, New York , New York, U.S.—died December 1, 1987, Saint-Paul de Vence, France) was an essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him one of the most important voices of the 20th century. A writer of exceptionally clear and psychologically penetrating prose , Baldwin addressed race relations with deft complexity and incisive anger. He was also one of the first Black writers to include queer themes in fiction, notably in Giovanni’s Room (1956), writing with a frankness that was highly controversial at the time. His works include the novels Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Another Country (1962), the plays The Amen Corner (1954) and Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), and the essay collections Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and The Fire Next Time (1963).

The eldest of nine children, Baldwin grew up in poverty in Harlem in New York City . He was born to a single mother, Emma Berdis Jones, who had migrated to New York from Maryland . When her son was about three years old, she married David Baldwin, a Baptist minister who had moved north from New Orleans . Growing up, James Baldwin found refuge in reading books at the public library , and he began writing poems , short stories , and plays at a young age.

From age 14 to 17 Baldwin was active during out-of-school hours as a preacher in a small Pentecostal church, a period he wrote about in his semiautobiographical first and finest novel , Go Tell It on the Mountain , and in his play about a woman evangelist , The Amen Corner . Baldwin’s preaching was the influence of his strict stepfather, with whom he had a fraught relationship. Although Baldwin abandoned preaching, that period of his life was important to his development as a writer. In an interview captured in the documentary film The Price of the Ticket (released posthumously in 1989), Baldwin said: “Those three years in the pulpit …that is what turned me into a writer, really, dealing with all that anguish and that despair and that beauty.”

(Read W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)

After his graduation from high school , Baldwin began a restless period of ill-paid jobs, self-study, and literary apprenticeship in Greenwich Village , the bohemian quarter of New York City. His first publications were book reviews in journals and magazines . In 1944 he met Richard Wright , an established giant in American literature , who helped Baldwin secure a monetary grant with which Baldwin could support himself while finishing his first novel. In the meantime, Baldwin began to publish work in prestigious periodicals. Among these was the essay “The Harlem Ghetto,” published in Commentary in 1948, a piece on the socioeconomic conditions in his childhood neighborhood that garnered him much attention. That same year, wishing to escape the racism of America (and the homophobia of Harlem), he left the United States for Paris , where he lived for the next eight years. (In later years, from 1969, he became a self-styled “transatlantic commuter,” living alternatively in the south of France and in New York and New England , with frequent long stays in Turkey .)

While living in Paris, Baldwin published “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949), an essay that critiqued Wright’s celebrated work Native Son (1940), comparing it unfavorably to Harriet Beecher Stowe ’s abolitionist novel of 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin . It was the first of several harsh and controversial critiques of his former mentor’s writing that Baldwin published over the course of his career. In 1952, while living in a small village in the Swiss Alps with his lover, the painter Lucien Happersberger, Baldwin completed Go Tell It on the Mountain , which was published to positive reviews a year later. In 1955 came Baldwin’s first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son , which includes cultural commentary on literature and film , a haunting memoir of his stepfather’s life and death, and pieces on the experience of being an African American expatriate in Europe . That same year his first play, The Amen Corner , was produced for the stage at Howard University . (Its Broadway debut came in 1965.) Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room , was dedicated to Happersberger. The book deals with the white world and concerns an American in Paris who is torn between his love for a man and his love for a woman. Because of its theme of homosexuality , the book was rejected by Knopf, the publisher of Baldwin’s first novel, before being accepted by Dial Press.

In 1957 Baldwin returned to the United States and became an active participant in the civil rights struggle, touring the South and eventually befriending the movement’s leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. , and Medgar Evers . In 1961 Baldwin published another book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name , which explores topics such as Southern society in the fiction of William Faulkner , sexual identity in the work of French writer André Gide , and the films of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman . The theme of Black-white relations in the United States was central to his novel Another Country (1962), which examines sexual as well as racial issues in a storyline that involves interracial relationships and bisexuality .

(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)

The New Yorker magazine gave over almost all of its November 17, 1962, issue to a long article by Baldwin on the Black Muslim separatist movement and other aspects of the civil rights struggle. The article, along with a letter to his nephew that was published in The Progressive to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation , became a bestseller in book form as The Fire Next Time (1963). An explosive work of profound social influence, The Fire Next Time was an urgent warning to white Americans about the consequences of their oppression of African Americans . Taking its title from a Black spiritual , the essay closed in prophetic terms:

If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country , and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave , is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

Throughout 1963 Baldwin was heavily involved in the civil rights movement. With a group of other artists, he met with U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in an attempt to open a dialogue between the government and activists. (The meeting ended in rancorous disappointment.) He also led a march in Paris in support of the American civil rights movement , and he participated in the historic March on Washington on August 28, although he was not invited to speak at the latter event because, according to Black Nationalist leader Malcolm X (who was a friend of Baldwin’s), “They wouldn’t let Baldwin get up there because they know Baldwin is liable to say anything.”

The following year Baldwin published a protest play about racist oppression, Blues for Mister Charlie (“Mister Charlie” being a Black term for a white man). Loosely based on the murder in 1955 of African American teenager Emmett Till by two white men, Blues for Mister Charlie played on Broadway to mixed reviews. In 1965 Baldwin published his first collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man . In March that year, he participated in the Selma March in Alabama , a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery that was led by King in support of African Americans’ voting rights in the state.

A magnetic and passionate speaker, Baldwin was often invited to appear on television to discuss the civil rights movement. In 1965 he participated in a debate at the University of Cambridge in England with conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr. , on the topic “The American Dream : Is it at the expense of the American Negro?” One of the most memorable comments he made during the debate was on the clash between white European and American “systems of reality” and the formation of African American identity:

It comes as a great shock, around the age of five or six or seven, to discover that the flag to which you’ve pledged allegiance , along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover that [actor] Gary Cooper killing off the Indians [in movies], when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.

After speaking, Baldwin received a one-minute-long standing ovation from the audience. (Buckley’s speech was not met with the same reaction.)

In 1968 Baldwin agreed to write the screenplay for a film adaptation of Alex Haley ’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). Malcolm X had been assassinated in 1965. After the assassination of King in April 1968, however, Baldwin resigned from working on the script. (He eventually published the workings of the screenplay as a book in 1972.) Baldwin also published the novels Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979) as well as a collection of autobiographical writings, The Price of the Ticket (1985). Yet none of his later works achieved the popular and critical success of his early work, and he struggled to drum up publishers’ interest in some of his later writings. He was the subject of ostracism by more-radical Black leaders and writers of the 1960s and ’70s, such as the activist Eldridge Cleaver and the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka , who objected to Baldwin’s more- pacifist views. (Cleaver’s criticism of Baldwin also contained statements that were outright homophobic .)

In the 1970s and ’80s Baldwin taught and lectured at numerous American universities, including the University of California at Berkeley , the University of Massachusetts at Amherst , and Mount Holyoke College . During his career he was the recipient of Guggenheim (1954) and Ford Foundation (1958) fellowships and the George Polk Award for journalism (1963), and he was accepted into the Legion of Honour (1986), France’s most prestigious order. He died at age 63 of stomach cancer while at his home in the south of France.

After Baldwin’s death in 1987, his work continued to influence new writers and thinkers. His writing on racial and social issues came to the foreground in the 21st century, in particular, with the rise of activist groups such as Black Lives Matter (BLM), an international social movement that formed in the United States in 2013 to fight racism and anti-Black violence, including police brutality . Baldwin was also embraced by LGBTQ activists and writers for his pioneering exploration of sexual identity and queer relationships in his work. Numerous books and documentaries have emerged that pay homage to Baldwin and provide further context on the impact of his life and career.

In 2015 Ta-Nehisi Coates ’s National Book Award -winning Between the World and Me , which takes the form of a letter written to Coates’s son, was directly inspired by Baldwin’s letter to his nephew in The Fire Next Time . In 2016 Baldwin was the subject of an Oscar -nominated documentary by director Raoul Peck, I Am Not Your Negro . The film mixed archival footage of the civil rights movement with contemporary footage of the BLM movement and included historical interviews with Baldwin. Its script was taken from an unfinished memoir by Baldwin, Remember This House , which recounted his friendships with the assassinated civil rights leaders Medgar Evers , Malcolm X , and Martin Luther King, Jr. Also in 2016 the novelist and memoirist Jesmyn Ward edited The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race , a collection of essays and poems by prominent African American writers, including Isabel Wilkerson , Edwidge Danticat , Claudia Rankine , and Kevin Young . Baldwin’s fiction and plays were also the focus of renewed attention, including his 1974 novel of two teenage lovers in Harlem, If Beale Street Could Talk . It was made into a feature film of the same name in 2018 by acclaimed director Barry Jenkins , whose Oscar-winning LGBTQ coming-of-age film Moonlight (2016) Jenkins once described as “sort of the child of Giovanni’s Room and The Fire Next Time .”

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James baldwin: writer and activist.

Writer and activist James Baldwin played a pivotal role in championing black and queer rights in America. Born August 2, 1924, in New York City, Baldwin published essays, novels, plays, reviews, and short stories throughout his life. Many of his publications were written abroad—in 1948 he moved to France at the age of twenty-four—where he felt more freedom and comfort as a Black and queer man. Baldwin returned to the U.S. from Europe occasionally, calling himself “a transatlantic commuter,” where he championed civil rights alongside the likes of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Later in life he lived and wrote from his home in the south of France . He died there, in St. Paul de Vence, in 1987. 

A new exhibition, This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance , at the National Portrait Gallery explores the life of James Baldwin in the context of his community. See it in person from July 12, 2024 through April 20, 2025. 

Find events celebrating the 100th anniversary of James Baldwin 's birth happening across the Smithsonian.

(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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An extract from James Baldwin’s classic essay ‘Many Thousands Gone”

In this passage taken from his 1955 collection Notes of a Native Son , the iconic writer examines what it means to be Black, and the ways in which myth and history lay heavily upon it.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear. As is the inevitable result of things unsaid, we find ourselves until today oppressed with a dangerous and reverberating silence; and the story is told, compulsively, in symbols and signs, in hieroglyphics; it is revealed in Negro speech and in that of the white majority and in their different frames of reference. The ways in which the Negro has affected the American psychology are betrayed in our popular culture and in our morality; in our estrangement from him is the depth of our estrangement from ourselves. We cannot ask: what do we really feel about him — such a question merely opens the gates on chaos. What we really feel about him is involved with all that we feel about everything, about everyone, about ourselves.

The story of the Negro in America is the story of America ­— or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans.  It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty. The Negro in America, gloomily referred to as that shadow which lies athwart our national life, is far more than that. He is a series of shadows, self-created, intertwining, which now we helplessly battle. One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds.

"The story of the Negro in America is the story of America — or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story"

Today, to be sure, we know that the Negro is not biologically or mentally inferior; there is no truth in those rumors of his body odor or his incorrigible sexuality; or no more truth than can be easily explained or even defended by the social sciences. Yet, in our most recent war, his blood was segregated as was, for the most part, his person. Up to today we are set at a division, so that he may not marry our daughters or our sisters, nor may he — for the most part — eat at our table or live in our houses. Moreover, those who do, do so at the grave expense of a double alienation: from their own people, whose fabled attributes they must either deny or, worse, cheapen and bring to market; from us, for we require of them, when we accept them, that they at once cease to be Negroes and yet not fail to remember what being a Negro means — to remember, that is, what it means to us. The threshold of insult is higher or lower, according to the people involved, from the bootblack in Atlanta to the celebrity in New York. One must travel very far, among saints with nothing to gain or outcasts with nothing to lose, to find a place where it does not matter — and perhaps a word or a gesture or simply a silence will testify that it matters even there.

For it means something to be a Negro, after all, as it means something to have been born in Ireland or in China, to live where one sees space and sky or to live where one sees nothing but rubble or nothing but high buildings. We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key — could we but find it — to all that we later become. What it means to be a Negro is a good deal more than this essay can discover; what it means to be a Negro in America can perhaps be suggested by an examination of the myths we perpetuate about him.

Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom are dead, their places taken by a group of amazingly well-adjusted young men and women, almost as dark, but ferociously literate, well-dressed and scrubbed, who are never laughed at, who are not likely ever to set foot in a cotton or tobacco field or in any but the most modern of kitchens. There are others who remain, in our odd idiom, “underprivileged”; some are bitter and these come to grief; some are unhappy, but, continually presented with the evidence of a better day soon to come, are speedily becoming less so. Most of them care nothing whatever about race. They want only their proper place in the sun and the right to be left alone, like any other citizen of the republic. We may all breathe more easily. Before, however, our joy at the demise of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom approaches the indecent, we had better ask whence they sprang, how they lived? Into what limbo have they vanished?

"What it means to be a Negro can perhaps be suggested by an examination of the myths we perpetuate about him"

The making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land. This problem has been faced by all Americans throughout our history — in a way it is our history — and it baffles the immigrant and sets on edge the second generation until today. In the case of the Negro the past was taken from him whether he would or no; yet to forswear it was meaningless and availed him nothing, since his shameful history was carried, quite literally, on his brow. Shameful; for he was heathen as well as black and would never have discovered the healing blood of Christ had not we braved the jungles to bring him these glad tidings. Shameful; for, since our role as missionary had not been wholly disinterested, it was necessary to recall the shame from which we had delivered him in order more easily to escape our own. As he accepted the alabaster Christ and the bloody cross — in the bearing of which he would find his redemption, as, indeed, to our outraged astonishment, he sometimes did — he must, henceforth, accept that image we then gave him of himself: having no other and standing, moreover, in danger of death should he fail to accept the dazzling light thus brought into such darkness. It is this quite simple dilemma that must be borne in mind if we wish to comprehend his psychology.

However we shift the light which beats so fiercely on his head, or  prove , by victorious social analysis, how his lot has changed, how we have both improved, our uneasiness refuses to be exorcized. And nowhere is this more apparent than in our literature on the subject — “problem” literature when written by whites, “protest” literature when written by Negroes — and nothing is more striking than the tremendous disparity of tone between the two creations.  Kingsblood Royal  bears, for example, almost no kinship to  If He Hollers Let Him Go , though the same reviewers praised them both for what were, at bottom, very much the same reasons. These reasons may be suggested, far too briefly but not at all unjustly, by observing that the presupposition is in both novels exactly the same: black is a terrible color with which to be born into the world.

Now the most powerful and celebrated statement we have yet had of what it means to be a Negro in America is unquestionably Richard Wright’s Native Son . The feeling which prevailed at the time of its publication was that such a novel, bitter, uncompromising, shocking, gave proof, by its very existence, of what strides might be taken in a free democracy, and its indisputable success, proof that Americans were now able to look full in the face without flinching the dreadful facts. Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle. Such a book, we felt with pride, could never have been written before — which was true. Nor could it be written today.  It bears already the aspect of a landmark; for Bigger and his brothers have undergone yet another metamorphosis; they have been accepted in baseball leagues and by colleges hitherto exclusive; and they have made a most favorable appearance on the national screen. We have yet to encounter, nevertheless, a report so indisputably authentic, or one that can begin to challenge this most significant novel.

It is, in a certain American tradition, the story of an unremarkable youth in battle with the force of circumstance; that force of circumstance which plays and which has played so important a part in the national fables of success or failure. In this case the force of circumstance is not poverty merely but color, a circumstance which cannot be overcome, against which the protagonist battles for his life and loses. It is, on the surface, remarkable that this book should have enjoyed among Americans the favor it did enjoy; no more remarkable, however, than that it should have been compared, exuberantly, to Dostoevsky, though placed a shade below Dos Passos, Dreiser, and Steinbeck; and when the book is examined, its impact does not seem remarkable at all, but becomes, on the contrary, perfectly logical and inevitable.

"To forswear the past was meaningless and availed him nothing, since his shameful history was carried, quite literally, on his brow"

We cannot, to begin with, divorce this book from the specific social climate of that time; it was one of the last of all through the thirties, dealing with the inequities of the social structure of America. It was published one year before our entry into the last world war — which is to say, very few years after the dissolution of the WPA and the end of the New Deal and at time when bread lines and soup kitchens and bloody industrial battles were bright in everyone’s memory. The rigors of that unexpected time filled us not only with a genuinely bewildered and despairing idealism — so that, because there at least was something to fight for, young men went off to die in Spain — but also with a genuinely bewildered self-consciousness.  The Negro, who had been during the magnificent twenties a passionate and delightful primitive, now became, as one of the things we were most self-conscious about, our most oppressed minority. In the thirties, swallowing Marx whole, we discovered the Worker and realized — I should think with some relief — that the aims of the Worker and the aims of the Negro were one. This theorem to which we shall return — seems now to leave rather too much out of account; it became, nevertheless, one of the slogans of the “class struggle” and the gospel of the New Negro.

As for this New Negro, it was Wright who became his most eloquent spokesman; and his work, from its beginning, is most clearly committed to the social struggle.  Leaving aside the considerable question of what relationship precisely the artist bears to the revolutionary, the reality of man as a social being is not his only reality and that artist is strangled who is forced to deal with human beings solely in social terms; and who has, moreover, as Wright had, the necessity thrust on him of being the representative of some thirteen million people. It is a false responsibility (since writers are not congressmen) and impossible, by its nature, of fulfillment. The unlucky shepherd soon finds that, so far from being able to feed the hungry sheep, he has lost the wherewithal for his own nourishment; having not been allowed — so fearful was his burden, so present his audience! — to recreate his own experience. Further, the militant men and women of the thirties were not, upon examination, significantly emancipated from their antecedents, however bitterly they might consider themselves estranged or however gallantly they struggle to build a better world. However they might extol Russia, their concept of a better world. However they might extol Russia, their concept of a better world was quite helplessly American and betrayed a certain thinness of imagination, a suspect reliance on suspect and badly digested formulae, and a positively fretful romantic haste. Finally, the relationship of the Negro to the Worker cannot be summed up, nor even greatly illuminated, by saying that their aims are one.  It is true only insofar as they both desire better working conditions and useful only insofar as they unite their strength as workers to achieve these ends. Further than this we cannot in honest go.

In this climate Wright’s voice first was heard and the struggle which promised for a time to shape his work and give it purpose also fixed it in an ever more unrewarding rage. Recording his days of anger he has also nevertheless recorded, as no Negro before to, had ever done, that fantasy Americans hold in their minds when they speak of the Negro: that fantastic and fearful image which we have lived with since the first slave fell beneath the lash. 

This is an extract from 'Notes of a Native Son' by James Baldwin.

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50 Years Of NPR

The best of james baldwin: favorite pieces from the npr archive, 'tcm reframed' looks at beloved old movies through modern eyes.

James Baldwin, circa 1979. Ralph Gatti/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

James Baldwin, circa 1979.

We are marking a milestone, 50 years of NPR, with a look back at stories from the archive.

James Baldwin Examines The Role Of Film In American Mythmaking

James Baldwin discusses cinema's role in perpetuating myths about American history and culture. "History is not a matter of the past. It's a matter of the present," he warns.

From the program Voices in the Wind (May 30, 1976)

'this fight begins in the heart': reading james baldwin as ferguson seethes.

It is early August. A black man is shot by a white policeman. And the effect on the community is of "a lit match in a tin of gasoline." No, this is not Ferguson, Mo. This was Harlem in August 1943, a period that James Baldwin writes about in the essay that gives its title to his seminal collection, Notes of a Native Son .

From All Things Considered (August 19, 2014)

Director raoul peck: james baldwin was 'speaking directly to me'.

In the course of his work, James Baldwin got to know the civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. He was devastated when each man was assassinated, and planned, later in life, to write a book about all three of them. Though Baldwin died in 1987 before that book could be written, the new Oscar-nominated documentary , I Am Not Your Negro , draws on his notes for the book, as well as from other of Baldwin's writings.

From Fresh Air (February 14, 2017)

James baldwin's shadow.

James Baldwin believed that America has been lying to itself since its founding. He wrote, spoke, and thought incessantly about the societal issues that still exist today. As the United States continues to reckon with its history of systemic racism and police brutality, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. guides us through the meaning and purpose of James Baldwin's work and how his words can help us navigate the current moment.

From Throughline (April 29, 2021)

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Letter from a Region in My Mind

Take up the White Man’s burden— Ye dare not stoop to less— Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloak your weariness; By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples Shall weigh your Gods and you.

Down at the cross where my Saviour died, Down where for cleansing from sin I cried, There to my heart was the blood applied, Singing glory to His name!

I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use “religious” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls of a church—in fact, of our church—and I also supposed that God and safety were synonymous. The word “safety” brings us to the real meaning of the word “religious” as we use it. Therefore, to state it in another, more accurate way, 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. What I saw around me that summer in Harlem was what I had always seen; nothing had changed. But now, without any warning, the whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue had become a personal menace. It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances. Many of my comrades were clearly headed for the Avenue, and my father said that I was headed that way, too. My friends began to drink and smoke, and embarked—at first avid, then groaning—on their sexual careers. Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices. Like the strangers on the Avenue, they became, in the twinkling of an eye, unutterably different and fantastically present . Owing to the way I had been raised, the abrupt discomfort that all this aroused in me and the fact that I had no idea what my voice or my mind or my body was likely to do next caused me to consider myself one of the most depraved people on earth. Matters were not helped by the fact that these holy girls seemed rather to enjoy my terrified lapses, our grim, guilty, tormented experiments, which were at once as chill and joyless as the Russian steppes and hotter, by far, than all the fires of Hell.

Yet there was something deeper than these changes, and less definable, that frightened me. It was real in both the boys and the girls, but it was, somehow, more vivid in the boys. In the case of the girls, one watched them turning into matrons before they had become women. They began to manifest a curious and really rather terrifying single-mindedness. It is hard to say exactly how this was conveyed: something implacable in the set of the lips, something farseeing (seeing what?) in the eyes, some new and crushing determination in the walk, something peremptory in the voice. They did not tease us, the boys, any more; they reprimanded us sharply, saying, “You better be thinking about your soul!” For the girls also saw the evidence on the Avenue, knew what the price would be, for them, of one misstep, knew that they had to be protected and that we were the only protection there was. They understood that they must act as God’s decoys, saving the souls of the boys for Jesus and binding the bodies of the boys in marriage. For this was the beginning of our burning time, and “It is better,” said St. Paul—who elsewhere, with a most unusual and stunning exactness, described himself as a “wretched man”—“to marry than to burn.” And I began to feel in the boys a curious, wary, bewildered despair, as though they were now settling in for the long, hard winter of life. I did not know then what it was that I was reacting to; I put it to myself that they were letting themselves go. In the same way that the girls were destined to gain as much weight as their mothers, the boys, it was clear, would rise no higher than their fathers. School began to reveal itself, therefore, as a child’s game that one could not win, and boys dropped out of school and went to work. My father wanted me to do the same. I refused, even though I no longer had any illusions about what an education could do for me; I had already encountered too many college-graduate handymen. My friends were now “downtown,” busy, as they put it, “fighting the man.” They began to care less about the way they looked, the way they dressed, the things they did; presently, one found them in twos and threes and fours, in a hallway, sharing a jug of wine or a bottle of whiskey, talking, cursing, fighting, sometimes weeping: lost, and unable to say what it was that oppressed them, except that they knew it was “the man”—the white man. And there seemed to be no way whatever to remove this cloud that stood between them and the sun, between them and love and life and power, between them and whatever it was that they wanted. One did not have to be very bright to realize how little one could do to change one’s situation; one did not have to be abnormally sensitive to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and gratuitous humiliation and danger one encountered every working day, all day long. The humiliation did not apply merely to working days, or workers; I was thirteen and was crossing Fifth Avenue on my way to the Forty-second Street library, and the cop in the middle of the street muttered as I passed him, “Why don’t you niggers stay uptown where you belong?” When I was ten, and didn’t look, certainly, any older, two policemen amused themselves with me by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and probable sexual prowess, and, for good measure, leaving me flat on my back in one of Harlem’s empty lots. Just before and then during the Second World War, many of my friends fled into the service, all to be changed there, and rarely for the better, many to be ruined, and many to die. Others fled to other states and cities—that is, to other ghettos. Some went on wine or whiskey or the needle, and are still on it. And others, like me, fled into the church.

For the wages of sin were visible everywhere, in every wine-stained and urine-splashed hallway, in every clanging ambulance bell, in every scar on the faces of the pimps and their whores, in every helpless, newborn baby being brought into this danger, in every knife and pistol fight on the Avenue, and in every disastrous bulletin: a cousin, mother of six, suddenly gone mad, the children parcelled out here and there; an indestructible aunt rewarded for years of hard labor by a slow, agonizing death in a terrible small room; someone’s bright son blown into eternity by his own hand; another turned robber and carried off to jail. It was a summer of dreadful speculations and discoveries, of which these were not the worst. Crime became real, for example—for the first time—not as a possibility but as the possibility. One would never defeat one’s circumstances by working and saving one’s pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear. It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else—housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers—would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities. Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough. There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. 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.

People more advantageously placed than we in Harlem were, and are, will no doubt find the psychology and the view of human nature sketched above dismal and shocking in the extreme. But the Negro’s experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live. His own condition is overwhelming proof that white people do not live by these standards. Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people. Even the most doltish and servile Negro could scarcely fail to be impressed by the disparity between his situation and that of the people for whom he worked; Negroes who were neither doltish nor servile did not feel that they were doing anything wrong when they robbed white people. In spite of the Puritan-Yankee equation of virtue with well-being, Negroes had excellent reasons for doubting that money was made or kept by any very striking adherence to the Christian virtues; it certainly did not work that way for black Christians. In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever. And those virtues preached but not practiced by the white world were merely another means of holding Negroes in subjection.

It turned out, then, that summer, that the moral barriers that I had supposed to exist between me and the dangers of a criminal career were so tenuous as to be nearly nonexistent. I certainly could not discover any principled reason for not becoming a criminal, and it is not my poor, God-fearing parents who are to be indicted for the lack but this society. I was icily determined—more determined, really, than I then knew—never to make my peace with the ghetto but to die and go to Hell before I would let any white man spit on me, before I would accept my “place” in this republic. I did not intend to allow the white people of this country to tell me who I was, and limit me that way, and polish me off that way. And yet, of course, at the same time, I was being spat on and defined and described and limited, and could have been polished off with no effort whatever. Every Negro boy—in my situation during those years, at least—who reaches this point realizes, at once, profoundly, because he wants to live, that he stands in great peril and must find, with speed, a “thing,” a gimmick, to lift him out, to start him on his way. And it does not matter what the gimmick is. It was this last realization that terrified me and—since it revealed that the door opened on so many dangers—helped to hurl me into the church. And, by an unforeseeable paradox, it was my career in the church that turned out, precisely, to be my gimmick.

For when I tried to assess my capabilities, I realized that I had almost none. In order to achieve the life I wanted, I had been dealt, it seemed to me, the worst possible hand. I could not become a prizefighter—many of us tried but very few succeeded. I could not sing. I could not dance. I had been well conditioned by the world in which I grew up, so I did not yet dare take the idea of becoming a writer seriously. The only other possibility seemed to involve my becoming one of the sordid people on the Avenue, who were not really as sordid as I then imagined but who frightened me terribly, both because I did not want to live that life and because of what they made me feel. Everything inflamed me, and that was bad enough, but I myself had also become a source of fire and temptation. I had been far too well raised, alas, to suppose that any of the extremely explicit overtures made to me that summer, sometimes by boys and girls but also, more alarmingly, by older men and women, had anything to do with my attractiveness. On the contrary, since the Harlem idea of seduction is, to put it mildly, blunt, whatever these people saw in me merely confirmed my sense of my depravity.

It is certainly sad that the awakening of one’s senses should lead to such a merciless judgment of oneself—to say nothing of the time and anguish one spends in the effort to arrive at any other—but it is also inevitable that a literal attempt to mortify the flesh should be made among black people like those with whom I grew up. Negroes in this country—and Negroes do not, strictly or legally speaking, exist in any other—are taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world. This world is white and they are black. White people hold the power, which means that they are superior to blacks (intrinsically, that is: God decreed it so), and the world has innumerable ways of making this difference known and felt and feared. Long before the Negro child perceives this difference, and even longer before he understands it, he has begun to react to it, he has begun to be controlled by it. Every effort made by the child’s elders to prepare him for a fate from which they cannot protect him causes him secretly, in terror, to begin to await, without knowing that he is doing so, his mysterious and inexorable punishment. He must be “good” not only in order to please his parents and not only to avoid being punished by them; behind their authority stands another, nameless and impersonal, infinitely harder to please, and bottomlessly cruel. And this filters into the child’s consciousness through his parents’ tone of voice as he is being exhorted, punished, or loved; in the sudden, uncontrollable note of fear heard in his mother’s or his father’s voice when he has strayed beyond some particular boundary. He does not know what the boundary is, and he can get no explanation of it, which is frightening enough, but the fear he hears in the voices of his elders is more frightening still. The fear that I heard in my father’s voice, for example, when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction. A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other. He reacts to the fear in his parents’ voices because his parents hold up the world for him and he has no protection without them. I defended myself, as I imagined, against the fear my father made me feel by remembering that he was very old-fashioned. Also, I prided myself on the fact that I already knew how to outwit him. To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced. As for one’s wits, it is just not true that one can live by them—not, that is, if one wishes really to live. That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church.

As I look back, everything I did seems curiously deliberate, though it certainly did not seem deliberate then. For example, I did not join the church of which my father was a member and in which he preached. My best friend in school, who attended a different church, had already “surrendered his life to the Lord,” and he was very anxious about my soul’s salvation. (I wasn’t, but any human attention was better than none.) One Saturday afternoon, he took me to his church. There were no services that day, and the church was empty, except for some women cleaning and some other women praying. My friend took me into the back room to meet his pastor—a woman. There she sat, in her robes, smiling, an extremely proud and handsome woman, with Africa, Europe, and the America of the American Indian blended in her face. She was perhaps forty-five or fifty at this time, and in our world she was a very celebrated woman. My friend was about to introduce me when she looked at me and smiled and said, “Whose little boy are you? “ Now this, unbelievably, was precisely the phrase used by pimps and racketeers on the Avenue when they suggested, both humorously and intensely, that I “hang out” with them. Perhaps part of the terror they had caused me to feel came from the fact that I unquestionably wanted to be somebody’s little boy. I was so frightened, and at the mercy of so many conundrums, that inevitably, that summer, someone would have taken me over; one doesn’t, in Harlem, long remain standing on any auction block. It was my good luck—perhaps—that I found myself in the church racket instead of some other, and surrendered to a spiritual seduction long before I came to any carnal knowledge. For when the pastor asked me, with that marvellous smile, “Whose little boy are you?” my heart replied at once, “Why, yours.”

The summer wore on, and things got worse. I became more guilty and more frightened, and kept all this bottled up inside me, and naturally, inescapably, one night, when this woman had finished preaching, everything came roaring, screaming, crying out, and I fell to the ground before the altar. It was the strangest sensation I have ever had in my life—up to that time, or since. I had not known that it was going to happen, or that it could happen. One moment I was on my feet, singing and clapping and, at the same time, working out in my head the plot of a play I was working on then; the next moment, with no transition, no sensation of falling, I was on my back, with the lights beating down into my face and all the vertical saints above me. I did not know what I was doing down so low, or how I had got there. And the anguish that filled me cannot be described. It moved in me like one of those floods that devastate counties, tearing everything down, tearing children from their parents and lovers from each other, and making everything an unrecognizable waste. All I really remember is the pain, the unspeakable pain; it was as though I were yelling up to Heaven and Heaven would not hear me. And if Heaven would not hear me, if love could not descend from Heaven—to wash me, to make me clean—then utter disaster was my portion. Yes, it does indeed mean something—something unspeakable—to be born, in a white country, an Anglo-Teutonic, antisexual country, black. You very soon, without knowing it, give up all hope of communion. Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away. 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, to love your wife and children, or your friends, or your mother and father, or to be loved. The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people , has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs—as who has not?—of human love, God’s love alone is left. But God—and I felt this even then, so long ago, on that tremendous floor, unwillingly—is white. And if His love was so great, and if He loved all His children, why were we, the blacks, cast down so far? Why? In spite of all I said thereafter, I found no answer on the floor—not that answer, anyway—and I was on the floor all night. Over me, to bring me “through,” the saints sang and rejoiced and prayed. And in the morning, when they raised me, they told me that I was “save.”

Well, indeed I was, in a way, for I was utterly drained and exhausted, and released, for the first time, from all my guilty torment. I was aware then only of my relief. For many years, I could not ask myself why human relief had to be achieved in a fashion at once so pagan and so desperate—in a fashion at once so unspeakably old and so unutterably new. And by the time I was able to ask myself this question, I was also able to see that the principles governing the rites and customs of the churches in which I grew up did not differ from the principles governing the rites and customs of other churches, white. The principles were Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two others. I would love to believe that the principles were Faith, Hope, and Charity, but this is clearly not so for most Christians, or for what we call the Christian world.

I was saved. But at the same time, out of a deep, adolescent cunning I do not pretend to understand, I realized immediately that I could not remain in the church merely as another worshipper. I would have to give myself something to do, in order not to be too bored and find myself among all the wretched unsaved of the Avenue. And I don’t doubt that I also intended to best my father on his own ground. Anyway, very shortly after I joined the church, I became a preacher—a Young Minister—and I remained in the pulpit for more than three years. 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.

The church was very exciting. It took a long time for me to disengage myself from this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral level, I never really have, and never will. There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to rock. Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, “the Word”—when the church and I were one. Their pain and their joy were mine, and mine were theirs—they surrendered their pain and joy to me, I surrendered mine to them-and their cries of “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” and “Yes, Lord’ ” and “Praise His name!” and “Preach it, brother!” sustained and whipped on my solos until we all became equal, wringing wet, singing and dancing, in anguish and rejoicing, at the foot of the altar. It was, for a long time, in spite of—or, not inconceivably because of—the shabbiness of my motives, my only sustenance, my meat and drink. I rushed home from school, to the church, to the altar, to be alone there, to commune with Jesus, my dearest Friend, who would never fail me, who knew all the secrets of my heart. Perhaps He did, but I didn’t, and the bargain we struck, actually, down there at the foot of the cross, was that He would never let me find out.

He failed his bargain. He was a much better Man than I took Him for. It happened, as things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it—the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress—from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoevski. By this time, I was in a high school that was predominantly Jewish. This meant that I was surrounded by people who were, by definition, beyond any hope of salvation, who laughed at the tracts and leaflets I brought to school, and who pointed out that the Gospels had been written long after the death of Christ. This might not have been so distressing if it had not forced me to read the tracts and leaflets myself, for they were indeed, unless one believed their message already, impossible to believe. I remember feeling dimly that there was a kind of blackmail in it. People, I felt, ought to love the Lord because they loved Him, and not because they were afraid of going to Hell. I was forced, reluctantly, to realize that the Bible itself had been written by men, and translated by men out of languages I could not read, and I was already, without quite admitting it to myself, terribly involved with the effort of putting words on paper. Of course, I had the rebuttal ready: These men had all been operating under divine inspiration. Had they? All of them? And I also knew by now, alas, far more about divine inspiration than I dared admit, for I knew how I worked myself up into my own visions, and how frequently—indeed, incessantly—the visions God granted to me differed from the visions He granted to my father. I did not understand the dreams I had at night, but I knew that they were not holy. For that matter, I knew that my waking hours were far from holy. I spent most of my time in a state of repentance for things I had vividly desired to do but had not done. The fact that I was dealing with Jews brought the whole question of color, which I had been desperately avoiding, into the terrified center of my mind. I realized that the Bible had been written by white men. I knew that, according to many Christians, I was a descendant of Ham, who had been cursed, and that I was therefore predestined to be a slave. This had nothing to do with anything I was, or contained, or could become; my fate had been sealed forever, from the beginning of time. And it seemed, indeed, when one looked out over Christendom, that this was what Christendom effectively believed. It was certainly the way it behaved. I remembered the Italian priests and bishops blessing Italian boys who were on their way to Ethiopia.

Again, the Jewish boys in high school were troubling because I could find no point of connection between them and the Jewish pawnbrokers and landlords and grocery-store owners in Harlem. I knew that these people were Jews—God knows I was told it often enough—but I thought of them only as white. Jews, as such, until I got to high school, were all incarcerated in the Old Testament, and their names were Abraham, Moses, Daniel, Ezekiel, and Job, and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. It was bewildering to find them so many miles and centuries out of Egypt, and so far from the fiery furnace. My best friend in high school was a Jew. He came to our house once, and afterward my father asked, as he asked about everyone, “Is he a Christian?”—by which he meant “Is he saved?” I really do not know whether my answer came out of innocence or venom, but I said, coldly, “No. He’s Jewish.” My father slammed me across the face with his great palm, and in that moment everything flooded back—all the hatred and all the fear, and the depth of a merciless resolve to kill my father rather than allow my father to kill me—and I knew that all those sermons and tears and all that repentance and rejoicing had changed nothing. I wondered if I was expected to be glad that a friend of mine, or anyone, was to be tormented forever in Hell, and I also thought, suddenly, of the Jews in another Christian nation, Germany. They were not so far from the fiery furnace after all, and my best friend might have been one of them. I told my father, “He’s a better Christian than you are,” and walked out of the house. The battle between us was in the open, but that was all right; it was almost a relief. A more deadly struggle had begun.

Being in the pulpit was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked. I knew the other ministers and knew the quality of their lives. And I don’t mean to suggest by this the “Elmer Gantry” sort of hypocrisy concerning sensuality; it was a deeper, deadlier, and more subtle hypocrisy than that, and a little honest sensuality, or a lot, would have been like water in an extremely bitter desert. I knew how to work on a congregation until the last dime was surrendered—it was not very hard to do—and I knew where the money for “the Lord’s work” went. I knew, though I did not wish to know it, that I had no respect for the people with whom I worked. I could not have said it then, but I also knew that if I continued I would soon have no respect for myself. And the fact that I was “the young Brother Baldwin” increased my value with those same pimps and racketeers who had helped to stampede me into the church in the first place. They still saw the little boy they intended to take over. They were waiting for me to come to my senses and realize that I was in a very lucrative business. They knew that I did not yet realize this, and also that I had not yet begun to suspect where my own needs, coming up (they were very patient), could drive me. They themselves did know the score, and they knew that the odds were in their favor. And, really, I knew it, too. I was even lonelier and more vulnerable than I had been before. And the blood of the Lamb had not cleansed me in any way whatever. I was just as black as I had been the day that I was born. Therefore, when I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike. When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life. Were only Negroes to gain this crown? Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto? Perhaps I might have been able to reconcile myself even to this if I had been able to believe that there was any loving-kindness to be found in the haven I represented. But I had been in the pulpit too long and I had seen too many monstrous things. I don’t refer merely to the glaring fact that the minister eventually acquires houses and Cadillacs while the faithful continue to scrub floors and drop their dimes and quarters and dollars into the plate. I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door. When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that that meant every body . But no. It applied only to those who believed as we did, and it did not apply to white people at all. I was told by a minister, for example, that I should never, on any public conveyance, under any circumstances, rise and give my seat to a white woman. White men never rose for Negro women. Well, that was true enough, in the main—I saw his point. But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded. But what I did was my responsibility, and I would have to answer, too—unless, of course, there was also in Heaven a special dispensation for the benighted black, who was not to be judged in the same way as other human beings, or angels. It probably occurred to me around this time that the vision people hold of the world to come is but a reflection, with predictable wishful distortions, of the world in which they live. And this did not apply only to Negroes, who were no more “simple” or “spontaneous” or “Christian” than anybody else—who were merely more oppressed. In the same way that we, for white people, were the descendants of Ham, and were cursed forever, white people were, for us, the descendants of Cain. And the passion with which we loved the Lord was a measure of how deeply we feared and distrusted and, in the end, hated almost all strangers, always, and avoided and despised ourselves.

But I cannot leave it at that; there is more to it than that. In spite of everything, there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare. Perhaps we were, all of us—pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children—bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love. I remember, anyway, church suppers and outings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about “the man.” We had the liquor, the chicken, the music, and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not. This is the freedom that one hears in some gospel songs, for example, and in jazz. In all jazz, and especially in the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them—sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been “down the line,” as the song puts it, know what this music is about. I think it was Big Bill Broonzy who used to sing “I Feel So Good,” a really joyful song about a man who is on his way to the railroad station to meet his girl. She’s coming home. It is the singer’s incredibly moving exuberance that makes one realize how leaden the time must have been while she was gone. There is no guarantee that she will stay this time, either, as the singer clearly knows, and, in fact, she has not yet actually arrived. Tonight, or tomorrow, or within the next five minutes, he may very well be singing “Lonesome in My Bedroom,” or insisting, “Ain’t we, ain’t we, going to make it all right? Well, if we don’t today, we will tomorrow night.” White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality and do not any longer understand it. The word “sensual” is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

White Christians have also forgotten several elementary historical details. They have forgotten that the religion that is now identified with their virtue and their power—“God is on our side,” says Dr. Verwoerd—came out of a rocky piece of ground in what is now known as the Middle East before color was invented, and that in order for the Christian church to be established, Christ had to be put to death, by Rome, and that the real architect of the Christian church was not the disreputable, sun-baked Hebrew who gave it his name but the mercilessly fanatical and self-righteous St. Paul. The energy that was buried with the rise of the Christian nations must come back into the world; nothing can prevent it. Many of us, I think, both long to see this happen and are terrified of it, for though this transformation contains the hope of liberation, it also imposes a necessity for great change. But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reëxamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.

“The white man’s Heaven,” sings a Black Muslim minister, “is the black man’s Hell.” One may object—possibly—that this puts the matter somewhat too simply, but the song is true, and it has been true for as long as white men have ruled the world. The Africans put it another way: When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible. The struggle, therefore, that now begins in the world is extremely complex, involving the historical role of Christianity in the realm of power—that is, politics—and in the realm of morals. In the realm of power, Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty—necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels. This particular true faith, moreover, is more deeply concerned about the soul than it is about the body, to which fact the flesh (and the corpses) of countless infidels bears witness. It goes without saying, then, that whoever questions the authority of the true faith also contests the right of the nations that hold this faith to rule over him—contests, in short, their title to his land. The spreading of the Gospel, regardless of the motives or the integrity or the heroism of some of the missionaries, was an absolutely indispensable justification for the planting of the flag. Priests and nuns and schoolteachers helped to protect and sanctify the power that was so ruthlessly being used by people who were indeed seeking a city, but not one in the heavens, and one to be made, very definitely, by captive hands. The Christian church itself—again, as distinguished from some of its ministers—sanctified and rejoiced in the conquests of the flag, and encouraged, if it did not formulate, the belief that conquest, with the resulting relative well-being of the Western populations, was proof of the favor of God. God had come a long way from the desert—but then so had Allah, though in a very different direction. God, going north, and rising on the wings of power, had become white, and Allah, out of power, and on the dark side of Heaven, had become—for all practical purposes, anyway—black. Thus, in the realm of morals the role of Christianity has been, at best, ambivalent. Even leaving out of account the remarkable arrogance that assumed that the ways and morals of others were inferior to those of Christians, and that they therefore had every right, and could use any means, to change them, the collision between cultures—and the schizophrenia in the mind of Christendom—had rendered the domain of morals as chartless as the sea once was, and as treacherous as the sea still is. It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

I had heard a great deal, long before I finally met him, of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and of the Nation of Islam movement, of which he is the leader. I paid very little attention to what I heard, because the burden of his message did not strike me as being very original; I had been hearing variations of it all my life. I sometimes found myself in Harlem on Saturday nights, and I stood in the crowds, at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, and listened to the Muslim speakers. But I had heard hundreds of such speeches—or so it seemed to me at first. Anyway, I have long had a very definite tendency to tune out the moment I come anywhere near either a pulpit or a soapbox. What these men were saying about white people I had often heard before. And I dismissed the Nation of Islam’s demand for a separate black economy in America, which I had also heard before, as willful, and even mischievous, nonsense. Then two things caused me to begin to listen to the speeches, and one was the behavior of the police. After all, I had seen men dragged from their platforms on this very corner for saying less virulent things, and I had seen many crowds dispersed by policemen, with clubs or on horseback. But the policemen were doing nothing now. Obviously, this was not because they had become more human but because they were under orders and because they were afraid. And indeed they were, and I was delighted to see it. There they stood, in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club or a fist or a gun. I might have pitied them if I had not found myself in their hands so often and discovered, through ugly experience, what they were like when they held the power and what they were like when you held the power. The behavior of the crowd, its silent intensity, was the other thing that forced me to reassess the speakers and their message. I sometimes think, with despair, that Americans will swallow whole any political speech whatever—we’ve been doing very little else, these last, bad years—so it may not mean anything to say that this sense of integrity, after what Harlem, especially, has been through in the way of demagogues, was a very startling change. Still, the speakers had an air of utter dedication, and the people looked toward them with a kind of intelligence of hope on their faces—not as though they were being consoled or drugged but as though they were being jolted.

Power was the subject of the speeches I heard. We were offered, as Nation of Islam doctrine, historical and divine proof that all white people are cursed, and are devils, and are about to be brought down. This has been revealed by Allah Himself to His prophet, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. The white man’s rule will be ended forever in ten or fifteen years (and it must be conceded that all present signs would seem to bear witness to the accuracy of the prophet’s statement). The crowd seemed to swallow this theology with no effort—all crowds do swallow theology this way, I gather, in both sides of Jerusalem, in Istanbul, and in Rome—and, as theology goes, it was no more indigestible than the more familiar brand asserting that there is a curse on the sons of Ham. No more, and no less, and it had been designed for the same purpose; namely, the sanctification of power. But very little time was spent on theology, for one did not need to prove to a Harlem audience that all white men were devils. They were merely glad to have, at last, divine corroboration of their experience, to hear—and it was a tremendous thing to hear—that they had been lied to for all these years and generations, and that their captivity was ending, for God was black. Why were they hearing it now, since this was not the first time it had been said? I had heard it many times, from various prophets, during all the years that I was growing up. Elijah Muhammad himself has now been carrying the same message for more than thirty years; he is not an overnight sensation, and we owe his ministry, I am told, to the fact that when he was a child of six or so, his father was lynched before his eyes. (So much for states’ rights.) And now, suddenly, people who have never before been able to hear this message hear it, and believe it, and are changed. Elijah Muhammad has been able to do what generations of welfare workers and committees and resolutions and reports and housing projects and playgrounds have failed to do: to heal and redeem drunkards and junkies, to convert people who have come out of prison and to keep them out, to make men chaste and women virtuous, and to invest both the male and the female with a pride and a serenity that hang about them like an unfailing light. He has done all these things, which our Christian church has spectacularly failed to do. How has Elijah managed it?

Well, in a way—and I have no wish to minimize his peculiar role and his peculiar achievement—it is not he who has done it but time. Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue. In those days, not so very long ago, when the priests of that church which stands in Rome gave God’s blessing to Italian boys being sent out to ravage a defenseless black country—which until that event, incidentally, had not considered itself to be black—it was not possible to believe in a black God. To entertain such a belief would have been to entertain madness. But time has passed, and in that time the Christian world has revealed itself as morally bankrupt and politically unstable. The Tunisians were quite right in 1956—and it was a very significant moment in Western (and African) history—when they countered the French justification for remaining in North Africa with the question “Are the French ready for self-government?” Again, the terms “civilized” and “Christian” begin to have a very strange ring, particularly in the ears of those who have been judged to be neither civilized nor Christian, when a Christian nation surrenders to a foul and violent orgy, as Germany did during the Third Reich. For the crime of their ancestry, millions of people in the middle of the twentieth century, and in the heart of Europe—God’s citadel—were sent to a death so calculated, so hideous, and so prolonged that no age before this enlightened one had been able to imagine it, much less achieve and record it. Furthermore, those beneath the western heel, unlike those within the West, are aware that Germany’s current role in Europe is to act as a bulwark against the “uncivilized” hordes, and since power is what the powerless want, they understand very well what we of the West want to keep, and are not deluded by our talk of a freedom that we have never been willing to share with them. From my own point of view, the fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority, except in technological terms. White people were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But I very much doubt whether black people were astounded—at least, in the same way. For my part, the fate of the Jews, and the world’s indifference to it, frightened me very much. I could not but feel, in those sorrowful years, that this human indifference, concerning which I knew so much already, would be my portion on the day that the United States decided to murder its Negroes systematically instead of little by little and catch-as-catch-can. I was, of course, authoritatively assured that what had happened to the Jews in Germany could not happen to the Negroes in America, but I thought, bleakly, that the German Jews had probably believed similar counsellors, and, again, I could not share the white man’s vision of himself for the very good reason that white men in America do not behave toward black men the way they behave toward each other. When a white man faces a black man, especially if the black man is helpless, terrible things are revealed. I know. I have been carried into precinct basements often enough, and I have seen and heard and endured the secrets of desperate white men and women, which they knew were safe with me, because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.

The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War marks, for me, a turning point in the Negro’s relation to America. To put it briefly, and somewhat too simply, a certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded. One began to pity them, or to hate them. You must put yourself in the skin of a man who is wearing the uniform of his country, is a candidate for death in its defense, and who is called a “nigger” by his comrades-in-arms and his officers; who is almost always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to do; who knows that the white G.I. has informed the Europeans that he is subhuman (so much for the American male’s sexual security); who does not dance at the U.S.O. the night white soldiers dance there, and does not drink in the same bars white soldiers drink in; and who watches German prisoners of war being treated by Americans with more human dignity than he has ever received at their hands. And who, at the same time, as a human being, is far freer in a strange land than he has ever been at home. Home! The very word begins to have a despairing and diabolical ring. You must consider what happens to this citizen, after all he has endured, when he returns—home: starch, in his shoes, for a job, for a place to live; ride, in his skin, on segregated buses; see, with his eyes, the signs saying “White” and “Colored,” and especially the signs that say “White Ladies” and “Colored Women ;” look into the eyes of his wife; look into the eyes of his son; listen, with his ears, to political speeches, North and South; imagine yourself being told to “wait.” And all this is happening in the richest and freest country in the world, and in the middle of the twentieth century. The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless. I and two Negro acquaintances, all of us well past thirty, and looking it, were in the bar of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport several months ago, and the bartender refused to serve us, because, he said, we looked too young. It took a vast amount of patience not to strangle him, and great insistence and some luck to get the manager, who defended his bartender on the ground that he was “new” and had not yet, presumably, learned how to distinguish between a Negro boy of twenty and a Negro “boy” of thirty-seven. Well, we were served, finally, of course, but by this time no amount of Scotch would have helped us. The bar was very crowded, and our altercation had been extremely noisy; not one customer in the bar had done anything to help us. When it was over, and the three of us stood at the bar trembling with rage and frustration, and drinking—and trapped, now, in the airport, for we had deliberately come early in order to have a few drinks and to eat—a young white man standing near us asked if we were students. I suppose he thought that this was the only possible explanation for our putting up a fight. I told him that he hadn’t wanted to talk to us earlier and we didn’t want to talk to him now. The reply visibly hurt his feelings, and this, in turn, caused me to despise him. But when one of us, a Korean War veteran, told this young man that the fight we had been having in the bar had been his fight, too, the young man said, “I lost my conscience a long time ago,” and turned and walked out. I know that one would rather not think so, but this young man is typical. So, on the basis of the evidence, had everyone else in the bar lost his conscience. A few years ago, I would have hated these people with all my heart. Now I pitied them, pitied them in order not to despise them. And this is not the happiest way to feel toward one’s countrymen.

But, in the end, it is the threat of universal extinction hanging over all the world today that changes, totally and forever, the nature of reality and brings into devastating question the true meaning of man’s history. We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement. We have taken this journey and arrived at this place in God’s name. This, then, is the best that God (the white God) can do. If that is so, then it is time to replace Him—replace Him with what? And this void, this despair, this torment is felt everywhere in the West, from the streets of Stockholm to the churches of New Orleans and the sidewalks of Harlem.

God is black. All black men belong to Islam; they have been chosen And Islam shall rule the world. The dream, the sentiment is old; only the color is new. And it is this dream, this sweet possibility, that thousands of oppressed black men and women in this country now carry away with them after the Muslim minister has spoken, through the dark, noisome ghetto streets, into the hovels where so many have perished. The white God has not delivered them; perhaps the black God will.

While I was in Chicago last summer, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad invited me to have dinner at his home. This is a stately mansion on Chicago’s South Side, and it is the headquarters of the Nation of Islam movement. I had not gone to Chicago to meet Elijah Muhammad—he was not in my thoughts at all—but the moment I received the invitation, it occurred to me that I ought to have expected it. In a way, I owe the invitation to the incredible, abysmal, and really cowardly obtuseness of white liberals. Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals’ attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge—revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man. When Malcolm X, who is considered the movement’s second-in-command, and heir apparent, points out that the cry of “violence” was not raised, for example, when the Israelis fought to regain Israel, and, indeed, is raised only when black men indicate that they will fight for their rights, he is speaking the truth. The conquests of England, every single one of them bloody, are part of what Americans have in mind when they speak of England’s glory. In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks, and the only way to defeat Malcolm’s point is to concede it and then ask oneself why this is so. Malcolm’s statement is not answered by references to the triumphs of the N.A.A.C.P., the more particularly since very few liberals have any notion of how long, how costly, and how heartbreaking a task it is to gather the evidence that one can carry into court, or how long such court battles take. Neither is it answered by references to the student sit-in movement, if only because not all Negroes are students and not all of them live in the South. I, in any case, certainly refuse to be put in the position of denying the truth of Malcolm’s statements simply because I disagree with his conclusions, or in order to pacify the liberal conscience. Things are as bad as the Muslims say they are—in fact, they are worse, and the Muslims do not help matters—but there is no reason that black men should be expected to be more patient, more forbearing, more farseeing than whites; indeed, quite the contrary. The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes—I am not speaking now of its tactical value, another matter altogether—is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often. At the end of a television program on which Malcolm X and I both appeared, Malcolm was stopped by a white member of the audience who said, “I have a thousand dollars and an acre of land. What’s going to happen to me?” I admired the directness of the man’s question, but I didn’t hear Malcolm’s reply, because I was trying to explain to someone else that the situation of the Irish a hundred years ago and the situation of the Negro today cannot very usefully he compared. Negroes were brought here in chains long before the Irish ever thought of leaving Ireland; what manner of consolation is it to be told that emigrants arriving here—voluntarily—long after you did have risen far above you? In the hall, as I was waiting for the elevator, someone shook my hand and said, “Goodbye, Mr. James Baldwin. We’ll soon be addressing you as Mr. James X.” And I thought, for an awful moment, My God, if this goes on much longer, you probably will. Elijah Muhammad had seen this show, I think, or another one, and he had been told about me. Therefore, late on a hot Sunday afternoon, I presented myself at his door.

I was frightened, because I had, in effect, been summoned into a royal presence. I was frightened for another reason, too. I knew the tension in me between love and power, between pain and rage, and the curious, the grinding way I remained extended between these poles—perpetually attempting to choose the better rather than the worse. But this choice was a choice in terms of a personal, a private better (I was, after all, a writer); what was its relevance in terms of a social worse? Here was the South Side—a million in captivity—stretching from this doorstep as far as the eye could see. And they didn’t even read; depressed populations don’t have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have been their help, didn’t, as far as could be discovered, read, either—they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes. Also, I knew that once I had entered the house, I couldn’t smoke or drink, and I felt guilty about the cigarettes in my pocket, as I had felt years ago when my friend first took me into his church. I was half an hour late, having got lost on the way here, and I felt as deserving of a scolding as a schoolboy.

The young man who came to the door—he was about thirty, perhaps, with a handsome, smiling face—didn’t seem to find my lateness offensive, and led me into a large room. On one side of the room sat half a dozen women, all in white; they were much occupied with a beautiful baby, who seemed to belong to the youngest of the women. On the other side of the room sat seven or eight men, young, dressed in dark suits, very much at ease, and very imposing. The sunlight came into the room with the peacefulness one remembers from rooms in one’s early childhood—a sunlight encountered later only in one’s dreams. I remember being astounded by the quietness, the ease, the peace, the taste. I was introduced, they greeted me with a genuine cordiality and respect—and the respect increased my fright, for it meant that they expected something of me that I knew in my heart, for their sakes, I could not give—and we sat down. Elijah Muhammad was not in the room. Conversation was slow, but not as stiff as I had feared it would be. They kept it going, for I simply did not know which subjects I could acceptably bring up. They knew more about me, and had read more of what I had written, than I had expected, and I wondered what they made of it all, what they took my usefulness to be. The women were carrying on their own conversation, in low tones; I gathered that they were not expected to take part in male conversations. A few women kept coming in and out of the room, apparently making preparations for dinner. We, the men, did not plunge deeply into any subject, for, clearly, we were all waiting for the appearance of Elijah. Presently, the men, one by one, left the room and returned. Then I was asked if I would like to wash, and I, too, walked down the hall to the bathroom. Shortly after I came back, we stood up, and Elijah entered.

I do not know what I had expected to see. I had read some of his speeches, and had heard fragments of others on the radio and on television, so I associated him with ferocity. But, no—the man who came into the room was small and slender, really very delicately put together, with a thin face, large, warm eyes, and a most winning smile. Something came into the room with him—his disciples’ joy at seeing him, his joy at seeing them. It was the kind of encounter one watches with a smile simply because it is so rare that people enjoy one another. He teased the women, like a father, with no hint of that ugly and unctuous flirtatiousness I knew so well from other churches, and they responded like that, with great freedom and yet from a great and loving distance. He had seen me when he came into the room, I knew, though he had not looked my way. I had the feeling, as he talked and laughed with the others, whom I could only think of as his children, that he was sizing me up, deciding something. Now he turned toward me, to welcome me, with that marvellous smile, and carried me back nearly twenty-four years, to that moment when the pastor had smiled at me and said, “Whose little boy are you?” I did not respond now as I had responded then, because there are some things (not many, alas!) that one cannot do twice. But I knew what he made me feel, how I was drawn toward his peculiar authority, how his smile promised to take the burden of my life off my shoulders. Take your burdens to the Lord and leave them there. The central quality in Elijah’s face is pain, and his smile is a witness to it—pain so old and deep and black that it becomes personal and particular only when he smiles. One wonders what he would sound like if he could sing. He turned to me, with that smile, and said something like “I’ve got a lot to say to you , but we’ll wait until we sit down .” And I laughed. He made me think of my father and me as we might have been if we had been friends.

In the dining room, there were two long tables; the men sat at one and the women at the other. Elijah was at the head of our table, and I was seated at his left. I can scarcely remember what we ate, except that it was plentiful, sane, and simple—so sane and simple that it made me feel extremely decadent, and I think that I drank, therefore, two glasses of milk. Elijah mentioned having seen me on television and said that it seemed to him that I was not yet brainwashed and was trying to become myself. He said this in a curiously unnerving way, his eyes looking into mine and one hand half hiding his lips, as though he were trying to conceal bad teeth. But his teeth were not bad. Then I remembered hearing that he had spent time in prison. I suppose that I would like to become myself, whatever that may mean, but I knew that Elijah’s meaning and mine were not the same. I said yes, I was trying to be me, but I did not know how to say more than that, and so I waited.

Whenever Elijah spoke, a kind of chorus arose from the table, saying “Yes, that’s right.” This began to set my teeth on edge. And Elijah himself had a further, unnerving habit, which was to ricochet his questions and comments off someone else on their way to you. Now, turning to the man on his right, he began to speak of the white devils with whom I had last appeared on TV: What had they made him (me) feel? I could not answer this and was not absolutely certain that I was expected to. The people referred to had certainly made me feel exasperated and useless, but I did not think of them as devils. Elijah went on about the crimes of white people, to this endless chorus of “Yes, that’s right.” Someone at the table said, “The white man sure is a devil. He proves that by his own actions.” I looked around. It was a very young man who had said this, scarcely more than a boy—very dark and sober, very bitter. Elijah began to speak of the Christian religion, of Christians, in this same soft, joking way. I began to see that Elijah’s power came from his single-mindedness. There is nothing calculated about him; he means every word he says. The real reason, according to Elijah, that I failed to realize that the white man was a devil was that I had been too long exposed to white teaching and had never received true instruction. “The so-called American Negro” is the only reason Allah has permitted the United States to endure so long; the white man’s time was up in 1913, but it is the will of Allah that this lost black nation, the black men of this country, be redeemed from their white masters and returned to the true faith, which is Islam. Until this is done—and it will be accomplished very soon—the total destruction of the white man is being delayed. Elijah’s mission is to return “the so-called Negro” to Islam, to separate the chosen of Allah from this doomed nation. Furthermore, the white man knows his history, knows himself to be a devil, and knows that his time is running out, and all his technology, psychology, science, and “tricknology” are being expended in the effort to prevent black men from hearing the truth. This truth is that at the very beginning of time there was not one white face to be found in all the universe. Black men ruled the earth and the black man was perfect. This is the truth concerning the era that white men now refer to as prehistoric. They want black men to believe that they, like white men, once lived in caves and swung from trees and ate their meat raw and did not have the power of speech. But this is not true. Black men were never in such a condition. Allah allowed the Devil, through his scientists, to carry on infernal experiments, which resulted, finally, in the creation of the devil known as the white man, and later, even more disastrously, in the creation of the white woman. And it was decreed that these monstrous creatures should rule the earth for a certain number of years—I forget how many thousand, but, in any case, their rule now is ending, and Allah, who had never approved of the creation of the white man in the first place (who knows him, in fact, to be not a man at all but a devil), is anxious to restore the rule of peace that the rise of the white man totally destroyed. There is thus, by definition, no virtue in white people, and since they are another creation entirely and can no more, by breeding, become black than a cat, by breeding, can become a horse, there is no hope for them.

There is nothing new in this merciless formulation except the explicitness of its symbols and the candor of its hatred. Its emotional tone is as familiar to me as my own skin; it is but another way of saying that sinners shall be bound in Hell a thousand years . That sinners have always, for American Negroes, been white is a truth we needn’t labor, and every American Negro, therefore, risks having the gates of paranoia close on him. In a society that is entirely hostile, and, by its nature, seems determined to cut you down—that has cut down so many in the past and cuts down so many every day—it begins to be almost impossible to distinguish a real from a fancied injury. One can very quickly cease to attempt this distinction, and, what is worse, one usually ceases to attempt it without realizing that one has done so. All doormen, for example, and all policemen have by now, for me, become exactly the same, and my style with them is designed simply to intimidate them before they can intimidate me. No doubt I am guilty of some injustice here, but it is irreducible, since I cannot risk assuming that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms. Most Negroes cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color. And this leads, imperceptibly but inevitably, to a state of mind in which, having long ago learned to expect the worst, one finds it very easy to believe the worst. The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it. In the beginning—and neither can this be overstated—a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he does not know what he has done to merit it. And when he realizes that the treatment accorded him has nothing to do with anything he has done, that the attempt of white people to destroy him—for that is what it is—is utterly gratuitous, it is not hard for him to think of white people as devils. For the horrors of the American Negro’s life there has been almost no language. The privacy of his experience, which is only beginning to be recognized in language, and which is denied or ignored in official and popular speech—hence the Negro idiom—lends credibility to any system that pretends to clarify it. And, in fact, the truth about the black man, as a historical entity and as a human being, has been hidden from him, deliberately and cruelly; the power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions. So every attempt is made to cut that black man down—not only was made yesterday but is made today. Who, then, is to say with authority where the root of so much anguish and evil lies? Why, then, is it not possible that all things began with the black man and that he was perfect—especially since this is precisely the claim that white people have put forward for themselves all these years? Furthermore, it is now absolutely clear that white people are a minority in the world—so severe a minority that they now look rather more like an invention—and that they cannot possibly hope to rule it any longer. If this is so, why is it not also possible that they achieved their original dominance by stealth and cunning and bloodshed and in opposition to the will of Heaven, and not, as they claim, by Heaven’s will? And if this is so, then the sword they have used so long against others can now, without mercy, be used against them. Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.

I said, at last, in answer to some other ricocheted question, “I left the church twenty years ago and I haven’t joined anything since.” It was my way of saying that I did not intend to join their movement, either.

“And what are you now?” Elijah asked.

I was in something of a bind, for I really could not say—could not allow myself to be stampeded into saying—that I was a Christian. “I? Now? Nothing.” This was not enough. “I’m a writer. I like doing things alone.” I heard myself saying this. Elijah smiled at me. “I don’t, anyway,” I said, finally, “think about it a great deal.”

Elijah said, to his right, “I think he ought to think about it all the deal,” and with this the table agreed. But there was nothing malicious or condemnatory in it. I had the stifling feeling that they knew I belonged to them but knew that I did not know it yet, that I remained unready, and that they were simply waiting, patiently, and with assurance, for me to discover the truth for myself. For where else, after all, could I go? I was black, and therefore a part of Islam, and would be saved from the holocaust awaiting the white world whether I would or no. My weak, deluded scruples could avail nothing against the iron word of the prophet.

I felt that I was back in my father’s house—as, indeed, in a way, I was—and I told Elijah that I did not care if white and black people married, and that I had many white friends. I would have no choice, if it came to it, but to perish with them, for (I said to myself, but not to Elijah), “I love a few people and they love me and some of them are white, and isn’t love more important than color?”

Elijah looked at me with great kindness and affection, great pity, as though he were reading my heart, and indicated, skeptically, that I might have white friends, or think I did, and they might be trying to be decent—now—but their time was up. It was almost as though he were saying, “They had their chance, man, and they goofed!”

And I looked around the table. I certainly had no evidence to give them that would outweigh Elijah’s authority or the evidence of their own lives or the reality of the streets outside. Yes, I knew two or three people, white, whom I would trust with my life, and I knew a few others, white, who were struggling as hard as they knew how, and with great effort and sweat and risk, to make the world more human. But how could I say this? One cannot argue with anyone’s experience or decision or belief. All my evidence would be thrown out of court as irrelevant to the main body of the case, for I could cite only exceptions. The South Side proved the justice of the indictment; the state of the world proved the justice of the indictment. Everything else, stretching back throughout recorded time, was merely a history of those exceptions who had tried to change the world and had failed. Was this true? Had they failed? How much depended on the point of view! For it would seem that a certain category of exceptions never failed to make the world worse—that category, precisely, for whom power is more real than love. And yet power is real, and many things, including, very often, love, cannot be achieved without it. In the eeriest way possible, I suddenly had a glimpse of what white people must go through at a dinner table when they are trying to prove that Negroes are not subhuman. I had almost said, after all, “Well, take my friend Mary,” and very nearly descended to a catalogue of those virtues that gave Mary the right to be alive. And in what hope? That Elijah and the others would nod their heads solemnly and say, at last, “Well, she’s all right—but the others! ”

And I looked again at the young faces around the table, and looked back at Elijah, who was saying that no people in history had ever been respected who had not owned their land. And the table said, “Yes, that’s right.” I could not deny the truth of this statement. For everyone else has, is , a nation, with a specific location and a flag—even, these days, the Jew. It is only “the so-called American Negro” who remains trapped, disinherited, and despised, in a nation that has kept him in bondage for nearly four hundred years and is still unable to recognize him as a human being. And the Black Muslims, along with many people who are not Muslims, no longer wish for a recognition so grudging and (should it ever be achieved) so tardy. Again, it cannot be denied that this point of view is abundantly justified by American Negro history. It is galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them. On the other hand, how is the American Negro now to form himself into a separate nation? For this—and not only from the Muslim point of view—would seem to be his only hope of not perishing in the American backwater and being entirely and forever forgotten, as though he had never existed at all and his travail had been for nothing.

Elijah’s intensity and the bitter isolation and disaffection of these young men and the despair of the streets outside had caused me to glimpse dimly what may now seem to be a fantasy, although, in an age so fantastical, I would hesitate to say precisely what a fantasy is. Let us say that the Muslims were to achieve the possession of the six or seven states that they claim are owed to Negroes by the United States as “back payment” for slave labor. Clearly, the United States would never surrender this territory, on any terms whatever, unless it found it impossible, for whatever reason, to hold it—unless, that is, the United States were to be reduced as a world power, exactly the way, and at the same degree of speed, that England has been forced to relinquish her Empire. (It is simply not true—and the state of her ex-colonies proves this—that England “always meant to go.”) If the states were Southern states—and the Muslims seem to favor this—then the borders of a hostile Latin America would be raised, in effect, to, say, Maryland. Of the American borders on the sea, one would face toward a powerless Europe and the other toward an untrustworthy and nonwhite East, and on the North, after Canada, there would be only Alaska, which is a Russian border. The effect of this would be that the white people of the United States and Canada would find themselves marooned on a hostile continent, with the rest of the white world probably unwilling and certainly unable to come to their aid. All this is not, to my mind, the most imminent of possibilities, but if I were a Muslim, this is the possibility that I would find myself holding in the center of my mind, and driving toward. And if I were a Muslim, I would not hesitate to utilize—or, indeed, to exacerbate—the social and spiritual discontent that reigns here, for, at the very worst, I would merely have contributed to the destruction of a house I hated, and it would not matter if I perished, too. One has been perishing here so long!

And what were they thinking around the table? “I’ve come,” said Elijah, “to give you something which can never be taken away from you.” How solemn the table became then, and how great a light rose in the dark faces! This is the message that has spread through streets and tenements and prisons, through the narcotics wards, and past the filth and sadism of mental hospitals to a people from whom everything has been taken away, including, most crucially, their sense of their own worth. People cannot live without this sense; they will do anything whatever to regain it. This is why the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose. You do not need ten such men—one will do. And Elijah, I should imagine, has had nothing to lose since the day he saw his father’s blood rush out—rush down, and splash, so the legend has it, down through the leaves of a tree, on him. But neither did the other men around the table have anything to lose. “Return to your true religion,” Elijah has written. “Throw off the chains of the slavemaster, the devil, and return to the fold. Stop drinking his alcohol, using his dope—protect your women—and forsake the filthy swine.” I remembered my buddies of years ago, in the hallways, with their wine and their whiskey and their tears; in hallways still, frozen on the needle; and my brother saying to me once, “If Harlem didn’t have so many churches and junkies, there’d be blood flowing in the streets.” Protect your women : a difficult thing to do in a civilization sexually so pathetic that the white man’s masculinity depends on a denial of the masculinity of the blacks. Protect your women : in a civilization that emasculates the male and abuses the female, and in which, moreover, the male is forced to depend on the female’s breadwinning power. Protect your women : in the teeth of the white man’s boast “We figure we’re doing you folks a favor by pumping some white blood into your kids,” and while facing the Southern shotgun and the Northern billy. Years ago, we used to say, “ Yes , I’m black, goddammit, and I’m beautiful!”—in defiance, into the void. But now—now—African kings and heroes have come into the world, out of the past, the past that can now be put to the uses of power. And black has become a beautiful color—not because it is loved but because it is feared. And this urgency on the part of American Negroes is not to be forgotten! As they watch black men elsewhere rise, the promise held out, at last, that they may walk the earth with the authority with which white men walk, protected by the power that white men shall have no longer, is enough, and more than enough, to empty prisons and pull God down from Heaven. It has happened before, many times, before color was invented, and the hope of Heaven has always been a metaphor for the achievement of this particular state of grace. The song says, “I know my robe’s going to fit me well. I tried it on at the gates of Hell.”

It was time to leave, and we stood in the large living room, saying good night, with everything curiously and heavily unresolved. I could not help feeling that I had failed a test, in their eyes and in my own, or that I had failed to heed a warning. Elijah and I shook hands, and he asked me where I was going. Wherever it was, I would be driven there—“because, when we invite someone here,” he said, “we take the responsibility of protecting him from the white devils until he gets wherever it is he’s going.” I was, in fact, going to have a drink with several white devils on the other side of town. I confess that for a fraction of a second I hesitated to give the address—the kind of address that in Chicago, as in all American cities, identified itself as a white address by value of its location. But I did give it, and Elijah and I walked out onto the steps, and one of the young men vanished to get the car. It was very strange to stand with Elijah for those few moments, facing those vivid, violent, so problematical streets. I felt very close to him, and really wished to be able to love and honor him as a witness, an ally, and a father. I felt that I knew something of his pain and his fury, and, yes, even his beauty. Yet precisely because of the reality and the nature of those streets—because of what he conceived as his responsibility and what I took to be mine—we would always be strangers, and possibly, one day, enemies. The car arrived—a gleaming, metallic, grossly American blue—and Elijah and I shook hands and said good night once more. He walked into his mansion and shut the door.

The driver and I started on our way through dark, murmuring—and, at this hour, strangely beautiful—Chicago, along the lake. We returned to the discussion of the land. How were we—Negroes—to get this land? I asked this of the dark boy who had said earlier, at the table, that the white man’s actions proved him to be a devil. He spoke to me first of the Muslim temples that were being built, or were about to be built, in various parts of the United States, of the strength of the Muslim following, and of the amount of money that is annually at the disposal of Negroes—something like twenty billion dollars. “That alone shows you how strong we are,” he said. But, I persisted, cautiously, and in somewhat different terms, this twenty billion dollars, or whatever it is, depends on the total economy of the United States. What happens when the Negro is no longer a part of this economy? Leaving aside the fact that in order for this to happen the economy of the United States will itself have had to undergo radical and certainly disastrous changes, the American Negro’s spending power will obviously no longer be the same. On what, then, will the economy of this separate nation be based? The boy gave me a rather strange look. I said hurriedly, “I’m not saying it can’t be done—I just want to know how it’s to be done.” I was thinking, In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have. I didn’t feel that the things I had in mind, such as the pseudo-elegant heap of tin in which we were riding, had any very great value But life would be very different without them, and I wondered if he had thought of this.

How can one, however, dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power? The boy could see that freedom depended on the possession of land; he was persuaded that, in one way or another, Negroes must achieve this possession. In the meantime, he could walk the streets and fear nothing, because there were millions like him, coming soon, now, to power. He was held together, in short, by a dream—though it is just as well to remember that some dreams come true—and was united with his “brothers” on the basis of their color. Perhaps one cannot ask for more. People always seem to band together according to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility.

Yet I could have hoped that the Muslim movement had been able to inculcate in the demoralized Negro population a truer and more individual sense of its own worth, so that Negroes in the Northern ghettos could begin, in concrete terms, and at whatever price, to change their situation. But in order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is: in the present case, to accept the fact, whatever one does with it thereafter, that the Negro has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other-—not to Africa, and certainly not to Islam. The paradox—and a fearful paradox it is—is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. How can the American Negro’s past be used? The unprecedented price demanded—and at this embattled hour of the world’s history—is the transcendence of the realities of color, of nations, and of altars.

“Anyway,” the boy said suddenly, after a very long silence, “things won’t ever again be the way they used to be. I know that.”

And so we arrived in enemy territory, and they set me down at the enemy’s door.

No one seems to know where the Nation of Islam gets its money. A vast amount, of course, is contributed by Negroes, but there are rumors to the effect that people like the Birchites and certain Texas oil millionaires look with favor on the movement. I have no way of knowing whether there is any truth to the rumors, though since these people make such a point of keeping the races separate, I wouldn’t be surprised if for this smoke there was some fire. In any case, during a recent Muslim rally, George Lincoln Rockwell, the chief of the American Nazi party, made a point of contributing about twenty dollars to the cause, and he and Malcolm X decided that, racially speaking, anyway, they were in complete agreement. The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another—or others—always has been and always will be a recipe for murder. There is no way around this. If one is permitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to endure, and, since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch. This is precisely what the Nazis attempted. Their only originality lay in the means they used. It is scarcely worthwhile to attempt remembering how many times the sun has looked down on the slaughter of the innocents. I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. I think I know—we see it around us every day—the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads. It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself. That is not a mystical statement but a most realistic one, which is proved by the eyes of any Alabama sheriff—and I would not like to see Negroes ever arrive at so wretched a condition.

Now, it is extremely unlikely that Negroes will ever rise to power in the United States, because they are only approximately a ninth of this nation. They are not in the position of the Africans, who are attempting to reclaim their land and break the colonial yoke and recover from the colonial experience. The Negro situation is dangerous in a different way, both for the Negro qua Negro and for the country of which he forms so troubled and troubling a part. The American Negro is a unique creation; he has no counterpart anywhere, and no predecessors. The Muslims react to this fact by referring to the Negro as “the so-called American Negro” and substituting for the names inherited from slavery the letter “X.” It is a fact that every American Negro hears a name that originally belonged to the white man whose chattel he was. I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross. I am, then, both visibly and legally the descendant of slaves in a white, Protestant country, and this is what it means to be an American Negro, this is who he is—a kidnapped pagan, who was sold like an animal and treated like one, who was once defined by the American Constitution as “three-fifths” of a man, and who, according to the Dred Scott decision, had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. And today, a hundred years after his technical emancipation, he remains—with the possible exception of the American Indian—the most despised creature in his country. Now, there is simply no possibility of a real change in the Negro’s situation without the most radical and far-reaching changes in the American political and social structure. And it is clear that white Americans are not simply unwilling to effect these changes; they are, in the main, so slothful have they become, unable even to envision them. It must be added that the Negro himself no longer believes in the good faith of white Americans—if, indeed, he ever could have. What the Negro has discovered, and on an international level, is that power to intimidate which he has always had privately but hitherto could manipulate only privately—for private ends often, for limited ends always. And therefore when the country speaks of a “new” Negro, which it has been doing every hour on the hour for decades, it is not really referring to a change in the Negro, which, in any case, it is quite incapable of assessing, but only to a new difficulty in keeping him in his place, to the fact that it encounters him (again! again!) barring yet another door to its spiritual and social ease. This is probably, hard and odd as it may sound, the most important thing that one human being can do for another—it is certainly one of the most important things; hence the torment and necessity of love—and this is the enormous contribution that the Negro has made to this otherwise shapeless and undiscovered country. Consequently, white Americans are in nothing more deluded than in supposing that Negroes could ever have imagined that white people would “give” them anything. It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free. This, in the case of the Negro, the American republic has never become sufficiently mature to do. White Americans have contented themselves with gestures that are now described as “tokenism.” For hard example, white Americans congratulate themselves on the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools; they suppose, in spite of the mountain of evidence that has since accumulated to the contrary, that this was proof of a change of heart—or, as they like to say, progress. Perhaps. It all depends on how one reads the word “progress.” Most of the Negroes I know do not believe that this immense concession would ever have been made if it had not been for the competition of the Cold War, and the fact that Africa was clearly liberating herself and therefore had, for political reasons, to be wooed by the descendants of her former masters. Had it been a matter of love or justice, the 1954 decision would surely have occurred sooner; were it not for the realities of power in this difficult era, it might very well not have occurred yet. This seems an extremely harsh way of stating the case—ungrateful, as it were—but the evidence that supports this way of stating it is not easily refuted. I myself do not think that it can be refuted at all. In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity—and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top. I think this is a fact, which it serves no purpose to deny, but, whether it is a fact or not, this is what the black populations of the world, including black Americans, really believe. The word “independence” in Africa and the word “integration” here are almost equally meaningless; that is, Europe has not yet left Africa, and black men here are not yet free. And both of these last statements are undeniable facts, related facts, containing the gravest implications for us all. The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power, but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream.

This has everything to do, of course, with the nature of that dream and with the fact that we Americans, of whatever color, do not dare examine it and are far from having made it a reality. There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior. And this human truth has an especially grinding force here, where identity is almost impossible to achieve and people are perpetually attempting to find their feet on the shifting sands of status. (Consider the history of labor in a country in which, spiritually speaking, there are no workers, only candidates for the hand of the boss’s daughter.) Furthermore, I have met only a very few people—and most of these were not Americans—who had any real desire to be free. Freedom is hard to bear. It can be objected that I am speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms, but the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation. We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels. Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster. Whoever doubts this last statement has only to open his ears, his heart, his mind, to the testimony of—for example—any Cuban peasant or any Spanish poet, and ask himself what he would feel about us if he were the victim of our performance in pre-Castro Cuba or in Spain. We defend our curious role in Spain by referring to the Russian menace and the necessity of protecting the free world. It has not occurred to us that we have simply been mesmerized by Russia, and that the only real advantage Russia has in what we think of as a struggle between the East and the West is the moral history of the western world. Russia’s secret weapon is the bewilderment and despair and hunger of millions of people of whose existence we are scarcely aware. The Russian Communists are not in the least concerned about these people. But our ignorance and indecision have had the effect, if not of delivering them into Russian hands, of plunging them very deeply in the Russian shadow, for which effect—and it is hard to blame them—the most articulate among them, and the most oppressed as well, distrust us all the more. Our power and our fear of change help bind these people to their misery and bewilderment, and insofar as they find this state intolerable we are intolerably menaced. For if they find their state intolerable, but are too heavily oppressed to change it, they are simply pawns in the hands of larger powers, which, in such a context, are always unscrupulous, and when, eventually, they do change their situation—as in Cuba—we are menaced more than ever, by the vacuum that succeeds all violent upheavals. We should certainly know by now that it is one thing to overthrow a dictator or repel an invader and quite another thing really to achieve a revolution. Time and time and time again, the people discover that they have merely betrayed themselves into the hands of yet another Pharaoh, who, since he was necessary to put the broken country together, will not let them go. Perhaps, people being the conundrums that they are, and having so little desire to shoulder the burden of their lives, this is what will always happen. But at the bottom of my heart I do not believe this. I think that people can be better than that, and I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is. Anyway, the point here is that we are living in an age of revolution, whether we will or no, and that America is the only western nation with both the power and, as I hope to suggest, the experience that may help to make these revolutions real and minimize the human damage. Any attempt we make to oppose these outbursts of energy is tantamount to signing our death warrant.

Behind what we think of as the Russian menace lies what we do not wish to face, and what white Americans do not face when they regard a Negro: reality—the fact that life is tragic. Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them. And this is also why the presence of the Negro in this country can bring about its destruction. It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depth—change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears. And by destruction I mean precisely the abdication by Americans of any effort really to be free. The Negro can precipitate this abdication because white Americans have never, in all their long history, been able to look on him as a man like themselves. This point need not be labored; it is proved over and over again by the Negro’s continuing position here, and his indescribable struggle to defeat the stratagems that white Americans have used, and use, to deny him his humanity. America could have used in other ways the energy that both groups have expended in this conflict. America, of all the Western nations, has been best placed to prove the uselessness and the obsolescence of the concept of color. But it has not dared to accept this opportunity, or even to conceive of it as an opportunity. White Americans have thought of it as their shame, and have envied those more civilized and elegant European nations that were untroubled by the presence of black men on their shores. This is because white Americans have supposed “Europe” and “civilization” to be synonyms—which they are not—and have been distrustful of other standards and other sources of vitality, especially those produced in America itself, and have attempted to behave in all matters as though what was east for Europe was also east for them. What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are , we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them. The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro; it is not too much to say that he, who has been so long rejected, must now be embraced, and at no matter what psychic or social risk. He is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his. And the Negro recognizes this, in a negative way. Hence the question: Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?

White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption—which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards—is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy’s assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals. It is the Negro, of course, who is presumed to have become equal—an achievement that not only proves the comforting fact that perseverance has no color but also overwhelmingly corroborates the white man’s sense of his own value. Alas, this value can scarcely be corroborated in any other way; there is certainly little enough in the white man’s public or private life that one should desire to imitate. White men, at the bottom of their hearts, know this. Therefore, a vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man’s equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. And I submit, then, that the racial tensions that menace Americans today have little to do with real antipathy—on the contrary, indeed—and are involved only symbolically with color. These tensions are rooted in the very same depths as those from which love springs, or murder. The white man’s unadmitted—and apparently, to him, unspeakable—private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro. The only way he can be released from the Negro’s tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become a part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveller’s checks, visits surreptitiously after dark. How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should? I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of the American civilization. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now—in order to support the moral contradictions and the spiritual aridity of my life—expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse. The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power—and no one holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being. And I repeat: The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind. Why, for example—especially knowing the family as I do—I should want to marry your sister is a great mystery to me. But your sister and I have every right to marry if we wish to, and no one has the right to stop us. If she cannot raise me to her level, perhaps I can raise her to mine.

In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation—if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women. To create one nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task; there is certainly no need now to create two, one black and one white. But white men with far more political power than that possessed by the Nation of Islam movement have been advocating exactly this, in effect, for generations. If this sentiment is honored when it falls from the lips of Senator Byrd, then there is no reason it should not be honored when it falls from the lips of Malcolm X. And any Congressional committee wishing to investigate the latter must also be willing to investigate the former. They are expressing exactly the same sentiments and represent exactly the same danger. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that white people are better equipped to frame the laws by which I am to be governed than I am. It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.

This past, the Negro’s past, of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred, and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own, and made all love, and trust, all joy impossible—this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering—enough is certainly as good as a feast—but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth—and, indeed, no church—can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one’s bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry. The apprehension of life here so briefly and inadequately sketched has been the experience of generations of Negroes, and it helps to explain how they have endured and how they have been able to produce children of kindergarten age who can walk through mobs to get to school. It demands great force and great cunning continually to assault the mighty and indifferent fortress of white supremacy, as Negroes in this country have done so long. It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate. The Negro boys and girls who are facing mobs today come out of a long line of improbable aristocrats—the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced. I say “this country” because their frame of reference was totally American. They were hewing out of the mountain of white supremacy the stone of their individuality. I have great respect for that unsung army of black men and women who trudged down back lanes and entered back doors, saying “Yes, sir” and “No, Ma’am” in order to acquire a new roof for the schoolhouse, new books, a new chemistry lab, more beds for the dormitories, more dormitories. They did not like saying “Yes, sir” and “No, Ma’am,” but the country was in no hurry to educate Negroes, these black men and women knew that the job had to be done, and they put their pride in their pockets in order to do it. It is very hard to believe that they were in any way inferior to the white men and women who opened those back doors. It is very hard to believe that those men and women, raising their children, eating their greens, crying their curses, weeping their tears, singing their songs, making their love, as the sun rose, as the sun set, were in any way inferior to the white men and women who crept over to share these splendors after the sun went down. But we must avoid the European error; we must not suppose that, because the situation, the ways, the perceptions of black people so radically differed from those of whites, they were racially superior. I am proud of these people not because of their color but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty. The country should be proud of them, too, but, alas, not many people in this country even know of their existence. And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played—and play—in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know.

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing. One watched the lives they led. One could not be fooled about that; one watched the things they did and the excuses that they gave themselves, and if a white man was really in trouble, deep trouble, it was to the Negro’s door that he came. And one felt that if one had had that white man’s worldly advantages, one would never have become as bewildered and as joyless and as thoughtlessly cruel as he. The Negro came to the white man for a roof or for five dollars or for a letter to the judge; the white man came to the Negro for love. But he was not often able to give what he came seeking. The price was too high; he had too much to lose. And the Negro knew this, too. When one knows this about a man, it is impossible for one to hate him, but unless he becomes a man—becomes equal—it is also impossible for one to love him. Ultimately, one tends to avoid him, for the universal characteristic of children is to assume that they have a monopoly on trouble, and therefore a monopoly on you. (Ask any Negro what he knows about the white people with whom he works. And then ask the white people with whom he works what they know about him. )

How can the American Negro past be used? It is entirely possible that this dishonored past will rise up soon to smite all of us. There are some wars, for example (if anyone on the globe is still mad enough to go to war) that the American Negro will not support, however many of his people may be coerced—and there is a limit to the number of people any government can put in prison, and a rigid limit indeed to the practicality of such a course. A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay. “The problem of the twentieth century,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois around sixty years ago, “is the problem of the color line.” A fearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world—here, there, or anywhere. It is for this reason that everything white Americans think they believe in must now be reëxamined. What one would not like to see again is the consolidation of peoples on the basis of their color. But as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible for the great unwashed to consolidate themselves according to any other principle. Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. But this is a distinction so extremely hard to make that the West has not been able to make it yet. And at the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk—eviction, imprisonment, torture, death. For the sake of one’s children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion—and the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion. I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand—and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.

When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty? For black people, though I am aware that some of us, black and white, do not know it yet, are very beautiful. And when I sat at Elijah’s table and watched the baby, the women, and the men, and we talked about God’s—or Allah’s—vengeance, I wondered, when that vengeance was achieved, What will happen to all that beauty then? I could also see that the intransigence and ignorance of the white world might make that vengeance inevitable—a vengeance that does not really depend on, and cannot really be executed by, any person or organization, and that cannot be prevented by any police force or army: historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance, based on the law that we recognize when we say, “Whatever goes up must come down.” And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!  ♦

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CHAPTER ONE Collected Essays By JAMES BALDWIN The Library of America Read the Review Autobiographical Notes I was born in Harlem thirty-one years ago. I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again. In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies. As they were born, I took them over with one hand and held a book with the other. The children probably suffered, though they have since been kind enough to deny it, and in this way I read Uncle Tom's Cabin and A Tale of Two Cities over and over and over again; in this way, in fact, I read just about everything I could get my hands on--except the Bible, probably because it was the only book I was encouraged to read. I must also confess that I wrote--a great deal--and my first professional triumph, in any case, the first effort of mine to be seen in print, occurred at the age of twelve or thereabouts, when a short story I had written about the Spanish revolution won some sort of prize in an extremely short-lived church newspaper. I remember the story was censored by the lady editor, though I don't remember why, and I was outraged. Also wrote plays, and songs, for one of which I received a letter of congratulations from Mayor La Guardia, and poetry, about which the less said, the better. My mother was delighted by all these goings-on, but my father wasn't; he wanted me to be a preacher. When I was fourteen I became a preacher, and when I was seventeen I stopped. Very shortly thereafter I left home. For God knows how long I struggled with the world of commerce and industry--I guess they would say they struggled with me--and when I was about twenty-one I had enough done of a novel to get a Saxton Fellowship. When I was twenty-two the fellowship was over, the novel turned out to be unsalable, and I started waiting on tables in a Village restaurant and writing book reviews--mostly, as it turned out, about the Negro problem, concerning which the color of my skin made me automatically an expert. Did another book, in company with photographer Theodore Pelatowski, about the store-front churches in Harlem. This book met exactly the same fate as my first--fellowship, but no sale. (It was a Rosenwald Fellowship.) By the time I was twenty-four I had decided to stop reviewing books about the Negro problem--which, by this time, was only slightly less horrible in print than it was in life--and I packed my bags and went to France, where I finished, God knows how, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next--one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next. When one begins looking for influences one finds them by the score. I haven't thought much about my own, not enough anyway; I hazard that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech--and something of Dickens' love for bravura--have something to do with me today; but I wouldn't stake my life on it. Likewise, innumerable people have helped me in many ways; but finally, I suppose, the most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality. (Truce, by the way, is the best one can hope for.) One of the difficulties about being a Negro writer (and this is not special pleading, since I don't mean to suggest that he has it worse than anybody else) is that the Negro problem is written about so widely. The bookshelves groan under the weight of information, and everyone therefore considers himself informed. And this information, furthermore, operates usually (generally, popularly) to reinforce traditional attitudes. Of traditional attitudes there are only two--For or Against--and I, personally, find it difficult to say which attitude has caused me the most pain. I am speaking as a writer; from a social point of view I am perfectly aware that the change from ill-will to good-will, however motivated, however imperfect, however expressed, is better than no change at all. But it is part of the business of the writer--as I see it--to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source. From this point of view the Negro problem is nearly inaccessible. It is not only written about so widely; it is written about so badly. It is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about. ("You taught me language," says Caliban to Prospero, "and my profit on't is I know how to curse.") Consider: the tremendous social activity that this problem generates imposes on whites and Negroes alike the necessity of looking forward, of working to bring about a better day. This is fine, it keeps the waters troubled; it is all, indeed, that has made possible the Negro's progress. Nevertheless, social affairs are not generally speaking the writer's prime concern, whether they ought to be or not; it is absolutely necessary that he establish between himself and these affairs a distance which will allow, at least, for clarity, so that before he can look forward in any meaningful sense, he must first be allowed to take a long look back. In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly. I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use--I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine--I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme--otherwise I would have no place in any scheme. What was the most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of his public progress; that I hated and feared white people. This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt. In effect, I hated and feared the world. And this meant, not only that I thus gave the world an altogether murderous power over me, but also that in such a self-destroying limbo I could never hope to write. One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. The difficulty then, for me, of being a Negro writer was the fact that I was, in effect, prohibited from examining my own experience too closely by the tremendous demands and the very real dangers of my social situation. I don't think the dilemma outlined above is uncommon. I do think, since writers work in the disastrously explicit medium of language, that it goes a little way towards explaining why, out of the enormous resources of Negro speech and life, and despite the example of Negro music, prose written by Negroes has been generally speaking so pallid and so harsh. I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else. I don't think that the Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it. I believe this the more firmly because it is the overwhelming tendency to speak of this problem as though it were a thing apart. But in the work of Faulkner, in the general attitude and certain specific passages in Robert Penn Warren, and, most significantly, in the advent of Ralph Ellison, one sees the beginnings--at least--of a more genuinely penetrating search. Mr. Ellison, by the way, is the first Negro novelist I have ever read to utilize in language, and brilliantly, some of the ambiguity and irony of Negro life. About my interests: I don't know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified. Otherwise, I love to eat and drink---it's my melancholy conviction that I've scarcely ever had enough to eat (this is because it's impossible to eat enough if you're worried about the next meal)--and I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh. I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything. I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer. (C) 1998 Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. All rights reserved. ISBN: 1-883011-52-3 Return to the Books Home Page Return to the Books Home Page

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The lasting legacy of James Baldwin

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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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Untitled (photograph of James Baldwin in Istanbul, Turkey) [detail] / Sedat Pakay (1945 - 2016) / Reproduction of photograph from c. 1968 / © Sedat Pakay | www.sedatpakay.com

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This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance

In 1948, when the great American writer James Baldwin (1924–1987) was twenty-four years old, he left New York for Paris. He knew no French and had only forty dollars to his name. But the burgeoning novelist, essayist, and playwright felt he had to leave America to free himself from the racism that conspired to hinder his growth as an artist. In France, Baldwin created a kind of extended family that included the American painter Beauford Delaney and the musician Nina Simone—artists who, not unlike Baldwin, had survived poverty, segregation, and homophobia to become significant figures on the world stage.

After nearly a decade in Paris, Baldwin felt compelled to return to the United States. In 1957, he caught a glimpse of a picture of Dorothy Counts facing a hostile white crowd as she made her way to integrate a high school in North Carolina. “The photo made me furious,” Baldwin recalled. “Everybody else was paying their dues, and it was time I went home and paid mine.”

Back home, Baldwin wrote, marched, and made speeches while supporting the work of activist friends and associates, such as Lorraine Hansberry and Bayard Rustin—queer thinkers who, despite their exceptional rhetoric, were not out during the civil rights movement; the general feeling was that their difference would undermine the cause.

Toward the end of his life, Baldwin talked about his sexuality more openly, but it was his strong desire to always “bear witness” during troubled times, in troubled lands, that helped inspire the late Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, poets Essex Hemphill and Marlon Riggs, and many other intellectuals.

This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance , which takes part of its title from a short story Baldwin published in The Atlantic in 1960, is a reckoning of sorts—an homage to Black queer force as it continues to live and feed this nation’s activist spirit.

Curated by the National Portrait Gallery’s Director of Curatorial Affairs, Rhea Combs, in consultation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hilton Als

Edited with text by Hilton Als, Rhea L. Combs. Foreword by Rhea L. Combs. Pub: Delmonico Books/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Hardcover, 9 x 12.5 in. / 112 pgs / 60 color / Retail: $39.95 

IMAGE GALLERY

James Baldwin

Anthony Barboza (born 1944) / Reproduction of gelatin silver print from 1975 / Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; gift of the Loewentheil Family

Anthony Barboza (n. 1944) / Reproducción de impresión en gelatina de plata de 1975 / Cortesía del J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Ángeles; donación de la familia Loewentheil

Nina Simone with James Baldwin

Picket lines, school boycotts, they try to say it’s a communist plot. All I want is equality for my sister, my brother, my people, and me.

                                                                                     —Nina Simone

The musician Nina Simone (1933–2003) met James Baldwin through their mutual friend Lorraine Hansberry. Following the success of her groundbreaking play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Hansberry had committed herself to educating others she felt could contribute to raising awareness about the cause of equal rights.

By introducing Simone to Baldwin and the poet Langston Hughes, Hansberry ensured her close friend would be embraced by other queer writers who understood something about difference. Simone would feel empowered to honestly express herself in the early 1960s, when she began penning and performing more political songs. The charged song “Mississippi Goddamn” (1964), with lyrics like those seen at the top of this label, grew out of Simone’s despair and rage over the deaths of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers, and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombings in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Baldwin and Simone shared a great bond: the desire to marry anger to lyricism while refusing to separate the personal from the political.

Bernard Gotfryd (1924–2016) / Gelatin silver prints, 1965 / National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution

Nina Simone con James Baldwin

Piquetes, boicots en las escuelas, tratan de decir que es un complot comunista. Todo lo que quiero es igualdad para mi hermana, mi hermano, mi gente y yo.

                                                                                   —Nina Simone

La intérprete y compositora Nina Simone (1933–2003) conoció a James Baldwin a través de su amiga mutua Lorraine Hansberry. Tras el éxito de su revolucionaria obra Una pasa al sol (1959), Hansberry se había dedicado a educar a otros que pudieran ayudar a crear conciencia sobre la causa de la igualdad de derechos.

Poniendo en contacto a Simone con Baldwin y el poeta Langston Hughes, Hansberry se aseguró de que su amiga fuera acogida por otros escritores queer que entendían lo que es ser diferente. Ya en los años sesenta Simone se sintió empoderada para expresarse abiertamente, y empezó a componer e interpretar más canciones políticas. La impactante “Mississippi Goddamn” (1964), de donde se extrajo la cita que inicia este texto, nació de la desesperanza y la rabia de Simone no solo por la muerte Emmett Till y Medgar Evers, sino por la explosión de una bomba en la Iglesia Bautista de la Calle 16 en Birmingham, Alabama, en 1963. Baldwin y Simone compartían un gran vínculo: el deseo de fundir la indignación con el lirismo, negándose a separar lo personal de lo político.

Bernard Gotfryd (1924–2016) / Impresiones en gelatina de plata, 1965 / National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution

Bernard Gotfryd (1924–2016) / Gelatin silver prints, 1965 / Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Bernard Gotfryd (1924–2016) / Impresiones en gelatina de plata, 1965 / División de Fotografías y Grabados, Centro Schomburg de Investigación de la Cultura Negra. Biblioteca Pública de Nueva York, Fundaciones Astor, Lenox y Tilden

Bernard Gotfryd (1924–2016) / Gelatin silver print, 1965 / National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution

Letter between James Baldwin and Orilla “Bill Miller” Winfield, 1982

As an elementary school student at Harlem’s P.S. 24 (now Harlem Renaissance High School), James Baldwin was mentored by Orilla “Bill Miller” Winfield (1912– 1990), a young teacher and activist. Deeply encouraging of Baldwin’s interest in all forms of writing, Miller loaned him books and took him to the theater—activities that were forbidden in Baldwin’s strict Baptist household, particularly by his father, David, a lay minister in the church.

Baldwin lost touch with Miller at age fourteen, when he began briefly serving as a preacher. But in 1955, while on a speaking tour in California, the two reunited. Their friendship continued uninterrupted thereafter until Baldwin’s death.

Reproduction courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Carta entre James Baldwin y Orilla “Bill Miller” Winfield, 1982

Cursando el nivel elemental en la Escuela Pública 24 de Harlem (hoy Escuela Secundaria Harlem Renaissance), James Baldwin fue alumno de Orilla “Bill Miller” Winfield (1912–1990), una joven maestra y activista. Miller estimuló el interés de su alumno en todo tipo de escritura, le prestaba libros y lo llevaba al teatro, actividades prohibidas en el estricto hogar bautista de Baldwin, sobre todo por su padre, David, ministro laico de la Iglesia.

Baldwin perdió contacto con Miller a los 14 años, cuando empezó una breve temporada como predicador. Pero se rencontraron en 1955, durante una gira de conferencias de él en California. Su amistad continuó hasta la muerte de Baldwin.

Reproducciones cortesía de la Biblioteca Beinecke de Manuscritos y Libros Raros, Universidad de Yale

James Baldwin with Diana Sands and Burgess Meredith, opening night of  Blues for Mister Charlie

In 1964, James Baldwin (1924–1987) debuted his second full-length play, Blues for Mister Charlie , under the aegis of the newly formed American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA). Directed by Burgess Meredith (1907– 1997), a stage and screen veteran, the story centers on a Black minister’s son, who is shot and killed by a white man. Diana Sands (1934–1973), who would later marry Baldwin’s great love, Lucien Happersberger, was singled out for her performance. Reviewing the piece in the New York Times , the drama critic Howard Taubman wrote: “James Baldwin has written a play with fires of fury in its belly, tears of anguish in its eyes and a roar of protest in its throat.”

Unidentified photographer / Gelatin silver print, 1964 / Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

James Baldwin con Diana Sands y Burgess Meredith, estreno de Blues para Mr. Charlie

En 1964, James Baldwin (1924–1987) estrenó su segunda obra teatral, Blues para Mr. Charlie , con el patrocinio de la recién creada Academia y Teatro Nacional de Estados Unidos (ANTA). Dirigida por Burgess Meredith (1907–1997), veterano del teatro y el cine, la obra giraba en torno al asesinato del hijo de un pastor negro por un hombre blanco. Diana Sands (1934–1973), quien luego se casó con el gran amor de Baldwin, Lucien Happersberger, recibió elogios por su actuación. En el New York Times , el crítico de teatro Howard Taubman dijo: “James Baldwin ha escrito una obra con furia ardiente en las entrañas, lágrimas de angustia en los ojos y un rugido de protesta en la garganta”.

Fotógrafo desconocido / Impresión en gelatina de plata, 1964 / División de Grabados y Fotografías, Biblioteca del Congreso, Washington D.C.

Writers Toni Morrison and James Baldwin at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for the 1986 Founder’s Day celebration

Hakim Mutlaq (born 1955) / Reproduction of gelatin silver print from 1986 / Courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division

Los escritores Toni Morrison y James Baldwin en el Centro Schomburg de Investigación de la Cultura Negra durante la celebración del Día de los Fundadores en 1986

Hakim Mutlaq (n. 1955) / Reproducción de impresión en gelatina de plata de 1986 / Cortesía del Centro Schomburg de Investigación de la Cultura Negra, División de Grabados y Fotografías

Self-Portrait

Beauford Delaney (1901–1979) / Oil on canvas, 1944 / The Art Institute of Chicago; purchased with funds provided by Alexander C. and Tillie S. Speyer Foundation; Samuel A. Marx Endowment

Autorretrato

Beauford Delaney (1901–1979) / Óleo sobre lienzo, 1944 / The Art Institute of Chicago; compra con fondos provistos por la Fundación Alexander C. y Tillie S. Speyer; Dotación Samuel A. Marx

Untitled   (Hands/Stranger in the Village)

In 1996, American artist Glenn Ligon, who often incorporates text into his work, began to pull from writings by Baldwin, specifically those centering on questions of identity. For this piece, he took lines from Baldwin’s 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village” to address the Black presence in Western culture. The text rests on top of Black hands raised in protest—or benediction.

Using silkscreen ink, coal crystals, and glue, Ligon created a dense, layered image that stands as a metaphor for the fragility of Black American life. The artist considered both the coal dust’s irrefutable blackness as well as its relationship to chance. Whenever the piece is moved or shifted, even incrementally, some of the dust is dislodged, a reminder of what Baldwin explained in his essay: “There is a dreadful abyss between the streets of this village and the streets of the city in which I was born.”

Glenn Ligon (born 1960) / Silkscreen ink, coal dust, and glue on paper mounted on canvas, 1999 / Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Michener Acquisitions Fund

Sin título (Manos/Extraño en el pueblo)

En 1996, el artista estadounidense Glenn Ligon, conocido por incorporar texto a sus obras, empezó a usar fragmentos de escritos de Baldwin, sobre todo centrados en cuestiones de identidad. En esta pieza tomó frases del ensayo de 1953 “Extraño en el pueblo” para abordar la presencia negra en la cultura occidental. El texto está sobre la imagen de unas manos negras elevadas en protesta, o quizás en gesto de bendición.

Empleando tinta serigráfica, cristales de carbón y pegamento, Ligon creó una imagen densa y compleja como metáfora de la fragilidad de la vida de los afroamericanos. Para ello consideró la irrefutable negrura del polvo de carbón y su susceptibilidad al azar: cuando la pieza se mueve, aunque sea gradualmente, se desprende un poco de polvo. Es un recordatorio de lo que explicaba Baldwin en su ensayo: “Hay un abismo espantoso entre las calles de este pueblo y las calles de la ciudad donde nací”.

Glenn Ligon (n. 1960) / Tinta serigráfica, polvo de carbón y pegamento sobre papel montado en lienzo, 1999 / Blanton Museum of Art, Universidad de Texas en Austin, Fondo de Adquisiciones Michener

Untitled (Photographs of James Baldwin in and around Istanbul, Turkey)

In 1970, the Turkish-born photographer and filmmaker Sedat Pakay premiered a short black-and-white documentary about Baldwin, who spent a significant part of the 1960s in Istanbul. Titled James Baldwin: From Another Place and shot in the author’s home and in the streets and souks of the fabled city, Pakay’s documentary was shot alongside the still images that are shown here in slideshow form. Poetic and rich in detail, Pakay’s pictures offer a record of a writer living in a culture that is not his own, of someone hoping to gain perspective on his native land.

Istanbul was fertile ground for Baldwin. In 1961, he completed his third novel, Another Country (1962), there. Inspired by his life in New York’s bohemian world, Another Country openly addresses miscegenation and gay desire—a groundbreaking book that went on to become his first bestseller.

Sedat Pakay (1945–2016) / Digital slide projection of photographs from c. 1968 / Courtesy of the Estate of Sedat Pakay | Selection by Hilton Als

Sin título (Fotografías de James Baldwin en Estambul, Turquía)

En 1970, el fotógrafo y cineasta turco Sedat Pakay estrenó un documental corto en blanco y negro acerca de Baldwin, quien pasó buena parte de la década de 1960 en Estambul. Titulado James Baldwin: Desde otro lugar y filmado en la casa del autor y por las calles y zocos de la legendaria ciudad, el documental se realizó a la vez que las fotografías que se proyectan aquí en sucesión. Poéticas y ricas en detalles, las fotos ofrecen una crónica de la vida de un escritor en una cultura que no es la suya, de alguien que aspira a lograr una mejor perspectiva de su tierra natal.

Estambul fue terreno fértil para Baldwin. En 1961 completó allí su tercera novela, Otro país (1962). Inspirado en la vida del autor en el mundo bohemio de Nueva York, el libro aborda abiertamente las relaciones homosexuales e interraciales —un texto pionero que sería su primer éxito de ventas—.

Sedat Pakay (1945–2016) / Proyección digital de diapositivas de fotografías de c. 1968 / Cortesía de la sucesión de Sedat Pakay | Selección de Hilton Als

Beauford Delaney (1901–1979) / Pastel on paper, 1963 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Beauford Delaney (1901–1979) / Pastel sobre papel, 1963 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Nina Simone’s interview and performance of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,”Live at Morehouse College, Atlanta, June 1969

When the musician and activist Nina Simone (1933– 2003) performed at Morehouse College in 1969, she was earning a reputation for her protest songs and her close relationship to Lorraine Hansberry, who had died in 1965.

Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” was based on a play adapted from Hansberry’s speeches and writing. The play had been a huge success, in part because it evoked the radicalism of the times. Simone’s song, with lyrics by the brilliant composer Weldon Irvine, had a similar power. Defiant and strong, the opening chords and language are a declaration of one’s Blackness being a source of power— and possibility. In time, it not only became the official Black anthem for many but was also covered by a swath of musicians, ranging from Aretha Franklin to Meshell Ndegeocello, all of whom imbued the tune with their own meaning.

Single-channel video (color, sound), 1969 9:21 min./ Under license from the Nina Simone Charitable Trust and Rich & Famous Records, Ltd., courtesy of Steven Ames Brown

Nina Simone en entrevista e interpretando “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” en vivo en Morehouse College, Atlanta, junio de 1969

Cuando la intérprete y activista Nina Simone (1933–2003) se presentó en Morehouse College en 1969, empezaba a destacarse por sus canciones de protesta, fomentadas por la influencia de su amiga Lorraine Hansberry, fallecida en 1965.

Su canción “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” se basó en una adaptación teatral de discursos y escritos de Hansberry. La obra había tenido un éxito enorme, en parte porque reflejaba el radicalismo de la época. La canción, con letra del brillante compositor Weldon Irvine, resultó igualmente poderosa. Desafiantes y fuertes, los acordes y palabras iniciales son una afirmación de la negrura como fuente de poder y de posibilidades. La canción se convirtió en un himno para muchos afroamericanos y fue interpretada por artistas desde Aretha Franklin hasta Meshell Ndegeocello, cada uno con su enfoque particular.

Video monocanal (color, sonido), 1969 9:21 min / Bajo licencia del Fondo Caritativo Nina Simone y Rich & Famous Records, Ltd., cortesía de Steven Ames Brown

Nina Simone (1933–2003) / RCA records, 1970 / Collection of Hilton Als

Nina Simone (1933–2003) RCA Records, 1970 Colección de Hilton Als

The Ladder , established by the Daughters of Bilitis in 1956 and published monthly for nearly fifteen years, is regarded as one of the earliest lesbian serial publications in the United States. Subject to discrimination, public scrutiny, and few opportunities for lesbians to meet, contributors often signed their names using initials or a pseudonym to protect their identities. Lorraine Hansberry, who signed this letter, “L.N., New York, N.Y.,” acknowledged her then-married name Nemiroff after passionately responding to an article on heterosexually married lesbians. Hansberry’s words, while supportive of women’s causes, reveal how race intersects with feminism, and point to a new way of thinking about both.

Daughters of Bilitis, 1957 / Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender (GLBT) Historical Society

The Ladder, fundada por las Hijas de Bilitis en 1956 y publicada cada mes durante casi 15 años, se considera una de las primeras publicaciones seriales lesbianas de EE.UU. Ante la discriminación, el escrutinio público y las pocas oportunidades de encuentro para las lesbianas, las escritoras de la revista solían firmar solo con sus iniciales o un seudónimo para proteger sus identidades. Lorraine Hansberry, quien firmó esta carta “L.N., Nueva York, N.Y.”, consignó su apellido de casada en ese momento, Nemiroff, después de reaccionar con pasión a un artículo sobre las lesbianas casadas con hombres. Sus palabras a favor de las causas feministas revelan también la intersección de estas con las causas raciales, y señalan una nueva forma de pensarlas.

Daughters of Bilitis, 1957 / Sociedad Histórica Gay Lesbiana Bisexual Transgénero (GLBT)

The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality

Like her dear friend “Jimmy” Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry felt a deep commitment to justice and was unafraid to address difficult topics through her writings. The Movement, published the year before she died, was developed in collaboration with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a civil rights organization. Written during the height of the civil rights movement, Hansberry’s searing, poetic words document “the struggle for humanization of our country.” An unvarnished look at African American history and the civil rights movement, Hansberry’s texts are accompanied by more than one hundred photographs from Bob Adelman, Frank Dandridge, Roy DeCarava, Danny Lyon, and other notable photographers.

Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) / Simon and Schuster / 1964 Private collection

El Movimiento: Documento de una lucha por la igualdad

Al igual que su querido amigo “Jimmy” Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry estaba dedicada a la causa de la justicia y no temía abordar temas difíciles en sus escritos. El Movimiento, publicado el año de su muerte, fue desarrollado en conjunto con el Comité Coordinador Estudiantil No Violento (SNCC), organización defensora de los derechos civiles. Escritas en el auge del movimiento por los derechos civiles, las palabras poéticas y ardientes de Hansberry documentan “la lucha por la humanización de nuestro país”. Se trata de una mirada sin adornos a la historia afroamericana y al movimiento, acompañada de más de 100 fotografías de Bob Adelman, Frank Dandridge, Roy DeCarava, Danny Lyon y otros fotógrafos notables.

Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) Simon and Schuster, 1964 Colección privada

To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words

With an introduction by James Baldwin and original art by Lorraine Hansberry, this memoir incorporates Hansberry’s perspectives on gender and racial equality, family, and politics. Originally an off-Broadway play created and developed by Hansberry’s ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff, the book comprises interviews, letters, and journal entries that paint a layered portrait of a young artist and activist. As the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway, with A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Hansberry’s autobiography embodies her motivations and work: to be young, gifted, and Black. Hansberry’s dear friend Nina Simone, who is presented nearby, penned a song with this title.

Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) and Robert Nemiroff (1929–1991) / Prentice Hall, 1969 / Private collection

Ser joven, talentosa y negra: Lorraine Hansberry en sus palabras

Con introducción de James Baldwin y diseños originales de Lorraine Hansberry, estas memorias contienen las perspectivas de Hansberry sobre la igualdad racial y de género, la familia y la política. El libro se originó como obra teatral “off-Broadway”, creada y desarrollada por el exesposo de Hansberry, Robert Nemiroff, y comprende entrevistas, cartas y apuntes de diario que pintan el complejo retrato de una joven artista y activista. Como primera mujer negra cuya obra se presentó en Broadway ( Una pasa al sol , 1959), la autobiografía de Hansberry plasma sus motivaciones y su esencia: joven, talentosa y negra. Nina Simone, querida amiga de Hansberry presentada cerca, compuso una canción con ese título.

Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) y Robert Nemiroff (1929–1991) / Prentice Hall, 1969 / Colección privada

Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison

Unidentified photographer / Gelatin silver print, c. 1949 / Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) en la Universidad de Wisconsin–Madison

Fotógrafo desconocido / Impresión en gelatina de plata, c. 1949 / División de Grabados y Fotografías, Centro Schomburg de Investigación de la Cultura Negra Biblioteca Pública de Nueva York, Fundaciones Astor, Lenox y Tilden

Barbara Jordan (Test 2)

A single panel prototype from Donald Moffett’s What Barbara Jordan Wore is exhibited here. Typically shown as three panels, this work is about perception and how we both saw and did not see the late great Congresswoman Barbara Jordan (1936–1996). Early in her career, Jordan helped organize a get-out-the-vote program that served Houston’s forty Black precincts. Then, in 1966, she became the first Black woman elected to the Texas Senate after Reconstruction, and in 1977, she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. An advocate for the poor and for women, Jordan delivered a historic speech in 1974, supporting the impeachment of President Nixon.

Moffett’s portrait shows a close-up of Jordan, who spoke while surrounded and scrutinized by a sea of mostly white men. The Texas-born artist mixed painting and video, and also played with sound so that Jordan’s message, along with her image— including her queer history—remains legible within the haze of memory. When Jordan died, she left behind her companion of more than two decades, the educational psychologist Nancy Earl.

Donald Moffett (born 1955) / Oil and enamel on linen with video projection, 2002/2003 / 13 min. / Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen

Barbara Jordan (prueba 2)

Aquí se muestra el prototipo de un panel de What Barbara Jordan Wore, de Donald Moffett. La obra, expuesta normalmente en tres paneles, trata sobre la percepción y cómo veíamos, y no veíamos, a la fallecida congresista Barbara Jordan (1936–1996). A inicios de su carrera, Jordan organizó un programa para fomentar el voto en los 40 precintos afroamericanos de Houston. En 1966 pasó a ser la primera mujer negra elegida para el Senado de Texas tras el período de la Reconstrucción, y en 1977 fue elegida para la Cámara de Representantes de EE.UU. Defensora de los pobres y las mujeres, Jordan pronunció un discurso histórico en 1974 a favor de la destitución del presidente Nixon.

El retrato de Moffett muestra un primer plano de Jordan, quien habló en el Congreso ante la mirada escrutadora de un mar de hombres en su mayoría blancos. El artista tejano combinó pintura y video y manipuló el sonido, de modo que las palabras de Jordan y su imagen (incluida su homosexualidad) siguen siendo legibles en la niebla de la memoria. A Jordan le sobrevivió su pareja de más de dos décadas, la psicóloga educativa Nancy Earl.

Donald Moffett (n. 1955) / Óleo y esmalte sobre lino con proyección de video, 2002/2003 / 13 min / Cortesía del artista y Marianne Boesky Gallery, Nueva York y Aspen

Barbara Jordan 1936–1996

Richard Avedon (1923–2004) / Gelatin silver print, 1976 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; this acquisition was made possible by generous contributions from Jeane W. Austin and the James Smithson Society

Richard Avedon (1923–2004) / Impresión en gelatina de plata, 1976 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; adquisición posible gracias a generosas aportaciones de Jeane W. Austin y la Sociedad James Smithson

bell hooks and Marlon Riggs, New York, early 1990s

The extraordinary joy one finds in Lyle Ashton Harris’s informal portrait of the feminist writer and educator bell hooks (1952–2021) and her friend Marlon Riggs (1957–1994) speaks not only of their close relationship but also of a very fertile time in American culture. Taken in the early 1990s, Harris’s photograph reminds us of the many ways race and gender were being reconsidered by hooks and Riggs (as in hooks’s 1981 landmark study of race and feminism, ain’t i a woman ), and by their contemporaries, or near contemporaries, including the critic Greg Tate, the feminist scholar Gina Dent, and the curator Thelma Golden. Together and separately, these thinkers, all of whom were influenced by James Baldwin, have changed not only the way Blackness sees itself but also its role in the making of all Americans.

Lyle Ashton Harris (born 1965) / Chromogenic print, 2019 (from slide, early 1990s) / Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York

bell hooks y Marlon Riggs, Nueva York, principios de los años 90

El júbilo evidente en este retrato informal, tomado por Lyle Ashton Harris a la escritora y educadora feminista bell hooks (1952–2021) y su amigo Marlon Riggs (1957–1994), refleja no solo su estrecha relación, sino un momento muy fértil en la cultura de EE.UU. La foto de principios de la década de 1990 nos recuerda que hooks y Riggs estaban reconsiderando los temas de raza y género de maneras diversas (como en el histórico estudio de raza y feminismo de hooks, ain’t i a woman , de 1981), al igual que sus contemporáneos, o casi contemporáneos, como el crítico Greg Tate, la académica feminista Gina Dent y la curadora Thelma Golden. Juntos o por separado, estos pensadores, todos influenciados por James Baldwin, han cambiado la visión del pueblo negro sobre sí mismo y su papel en la conformación del pueblo estadounidense en general.

Lyle Ashton Harris (n. 1965) / Impresión cromógena, 2019 (de diapositiva, princ. déc. 1990) / Cortesía del artista y Salon 94, Nueva York

Essex, LA Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, 1992

Lyle Ashton Harris (born 1965) / Chromogenic print, 2015 (from slide, 1992) / Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the artist and Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins in honor of Thelma Golden

Essex, LA Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Ángeles, 1992

Lyle Ashton Harris (n. 1965) / Impresión cromógena, 2015 (de diapositiva, 1992) Whitney Museum of American Art, Nueva York; donación del artista y Miyoung Lee y Neil Simpkins en honor de Thelma Golden

James Baldwin (1924–1987) and Bayard Rustin (1912–1987)

In this photograph from March 25, 1965, James Baldwin sits with Bayard Rustin on the speakers’ platform in Montgomery, Alabama, on the final day of the Selma-to-Montgomery Civil Rights March, led by Martin Luther King Jr.

Stephen F. Somerstein (born 1941) / Reproduction of photograph from 1965 / Courtesy of Getty Images

James Baldwin (1924–1987) y Bayard Rustin (1912–1987)

En esta fotografía del 25 de marzo de 1965, James Baldwin aparece con Bayard Rustin en la plataforma de los oradores en Montgomery, Alabama, el último día de la Marcha de Selma a Montgomery por los Derechos Civiles, liderada por Martin Luther King Jr.

Stephen F. Somerstein (n. 1941) / Reproducción de fotografía de 1965 / Cortesía de Getty Images

Bayard Rustin (1912–1987) and Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968)

Unidentified photographer / Gelatin silver print, 1962 / Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Bayard Rustin (1912–1987) y Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968)

Fotógrafo desconocido / Impresión en gelatina de plata, 1962 / División de Grabados y Fotografías, Biblioteca del Congreso, Washington D.C.

Three Figures

Throughout her decades-long career, Lorna Simpson has addressed the ways in which gender intersects with race. In Three Figures , she draws on an archival image from a painful past. Here, we see three youths from the civil rights era being hosed down. What makes the image particularly poignant is that despite the water’s force, none of the figures are letting go—showing resilience and fortitude despite troubling circumstances.

By layering the main picture on top of other panels that replicate the same image, Simpson calls our attention to moving pictures, specifically television, where so much of the turbulent civil rights period was publicly disseminated. From France, Baldwin glimpsed scenes like this, which propelled him to return to the U.S. to support the cause. Three Figures may also evoke the imagery of Andy Warhol’s Race Riot series (1963–64). Warhol’s large-scale silkscreen paintings were among the various postwar pictures confronting violence in the United States.

Lorna Simpson (born 1960) / Ink and screenprint on Claybord, 2014 / Forman Family Collection

Tres figuras

Durante décadas, Lorna Simpson ha abordado las intersecciones entre cuestiones de género y raza. En Tres figuras recurre a una imagen de archivo que evoca un pasado doloroso. En el auge de la lucha por los derechos civiles, vemos a tres jóvenes impactados por una manguera de presión. La emotividad de la imagen surge de que, a pesar de la fuerza del agua, las figuras no se sueltan de las manos, mostrando su fuerza y resiliencia en circunstancias tan difíciles.

Al superponer la imagen principal con otros paneles que la duplican, Simpson nos hace pensar en las imágenes en movimiento, sobre todo en la televisión, donde se divulgaron tantos momentos de aquella turbulenta era. Desde Francia, Baldwin vio escenas como esta, que lo motivaron a volver a EE.UU. para apoyar la causa. Tres figuras podría evocar también la serie Race Riot de Andy Warhol (1963–64), pinturas serigráficas a gran escala que son parte de las diversas imágenes de posguerra que confrontaron la violencia en Estados Unidos.

Lorna Simpson (n. 1960) / Tinta y serigrafía sobre Claybord, 2014 / Colección Familia Forman

Bayard Rustin’s fingerprints, 1946

Being a queer man almost derailed Bayard Rustin’s (1912–1987) career. This original set of fingerprints from October 25, 1946, shows that Rustin was arrested by the New York City Police Department for allegedly violating Section 722 of the Penal Code (offering to commit a lewd or indecent act). In 1953, he would be arrested again, in California, and sentenced to sixty days in jail on suspicion of “lewd vagrancy.” Rustin’s identity troubled some civil rights activists, who encouraged Martin Luther King Jr. to distance himself from his friend and ally. Despite being outcast, Rustin was instrumental in organizing the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Huellas digitales de Bayard Rustin, 1946

El hecho de ser queer casi arruinó la carrera de Bayard Rustin (1912–1987). Esta tarjeta de huellas dactilares del 25 de octubre de 1946 evidencia que fue arrestado por la policía de Nueva York por presuntamente infringir la Sección 722 del Código Penal (ofrecerse a cometer actos lascivos o indecentes). En 1953 fue arrestado de nuevo, en California, y sentenciado a 60 días de cárcel por sospecha de “vagancia con fines obscenos”. La identidad de Rustin preocupaba a algunos activistas, quienes aconsejaron a Martin Luther King Jr. que se distanciara de su amigo y aliado. A pesar de ser marginado, Rustin fue una figura decisiva en la organización de la histórica Marcha a Washington por el Trabajo y la Libertad en 1963.

Notes by Bayard Rustin on civil rights and gay identity, c. 1986

Bayard Rustin (1912–1987), the close advisor, mentor, and principal strategist to Martin Luther King Jr. on issues of nonviolent protest, was also the architect and main organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Despite his contributions to the civil rights movement, Rustin was marginalized in large part due to his sexuality.

These handwritten musings outline Rustin’s perspectives on the civil rights of gay people. An ally of Baldwin, Rustin believed homophobia limited democracy. The profound, outspoken thinker argued that basic human rights allow for the “right of self-expression, the right to live in dignity, and the right to be oneself.”

Bayard Rustin Papers / Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C

Notas de Bayard Rustin sobre los derechos civiles y la identidad gay, c. 1986

Bayard Rustin (1912–1987), asesor, mentor y estratega principal de Martin Luther King Jr. en temas de protesta pacífica, fue el arquitecto y organizador principal de la Marcha a Washington por el Trabajo y la Libertad en 1963. Pero a pesar de sus aportes al movimiento de los derechos civiles, fue marginado por motivo sobre todo de su sexualidad.

Estas notas manuscritas esbozan opiniones de Rustin sobre los derechos civiles de las personas gay. Aliado de Baldwin, Rustin creía que la homofobia limitaba la democracia. Este pensador profundo y franco afirmaba que los derechos humanos básicos implican el “derecho a la autoexpresión, el derecho a vivir con dignidad y el derecho a ser uno mismo”.

Documentos de Bayard Rustin / División de Manuscritos, Biblioteca del Congreso, Washington D.C.

USA Oracle (Assassination of M.L. King)

American painter Jack Whitten was born into a segregated world. A native of Bessemer, Alabama, he met the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957, when King was organizing the seminal bus boycott in Montgomery. King’s teachings of nonviolence informed Whitten’s life. By 1964, the young artist had graduated from one of the most prestigious art schools in the country—the Cooper Union. (He was the only Black student in his class.) Nevertheless, Whitten rejected the popular rules of the predominant art movement, Abstract Expressionism, and instead experimented with figuration and dimensionality.

Whitten found his own style with paintings such as this one, which gives shape to grief and chaos. The sunbursts of red and yellow, and frenzied pinks, speak not only to King’s violent death but also to Whitten’s, and King’s, dream of nonviolence.

Jack Whitten (1939–2018) / Oil on canvas, 1968 / Courtesy of the Jack Whitten Estate and Hauser & Wirth

Oráculo de EE.UU. (Asesinato de M.L. King)

El pintor estadounidense Jack Whitten nació en un mundo segregado racialmente. Natural de Bessemer, Alabama,conoció al reverendo Martin Luther King Jr. en 1957, cuando este organizaba el crucial boicot a los autobuses en Montgomery. Las enseñanzas pacifistas de King guiaron la vida de Whitten. En 1964 el joven artista se graduó de una de las escuelas de arte más prestigiosas del país, Cooper Union (siendo el único estudiante negro de su clase). No obstante, rechazó las pautas del movimiento artístico predominante, el expresionismo abstracto, y decidió experimentar con la figuración y la dimensionalidad.

Whitten encontró su estilo propio con pinturas como esta, que plasma un escenario de dolor y caos. Los estallidos de rojo y amarillo, y los frenéticos rosados, no solo hablan de la violenta muerte de King, sino del sueño pacifista de él y de Whitten.

Jack Whitten (1939–2018) / Óleo sobre lienzo, 1968 / Cortesía de la Sucesión de Jack Whitten y Hauser & Wirth

has been made possible through the generous support of: ha sido posible gracias al generoso apoyo de:

The Ford Foundation

Tommie L. Pegues and Donald A. Capoccia

Additional support has been provided by the Portrait of a Nation Gala. Con el apoyo adicional de la Gala Retrato de una Nación.

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James Baldwin

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A novelist and essayist of considerable renown, James Baldwin bore witness to the unhappy consequences of American racial strife. Baldwin’s writing career began in the last years of legislated segregation; his fame as a social observer grew in tandem with the civil rights movement as he mirrored Black people’s aspirations, disappointments, and coping strategies in a hostile society. Tri-Quarterly contributor Robert A. Bone declared that Baldwin’s publications “have had a stunning impact on our cultural life” because the author “... succeeded in transposing the entire discussion of American race relations to the interior plane; it is a major breakthrough for the American imagination.” In his novels, plays, and essays alike, Baldwin explored the psychological implications of racism for both the oppressed and the oppressor. Best-sellers such as Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time acquainted wide audiences with his highly personal observations and his sense of urgency in the face of rising Black bitterness. As Juan Williams noted in the Washington Post, long before Baldwin’s death, his writings “became a standard of literary realism. ... Given the messy nature of racial hatred, of the half-truths, blasphemies and lies that make up American life, Baldwin’s accuracy in reproducing that world stands as a remarkable achievement. ... Black people reading Baldwin knew he wrote the truth. White people reading Baldwin sensed his truth about the lives of black people and the sins of a racist nation.”   Critics accorded Baldwin high praise for both his style and his themes. “Baldwin has carved a literary niche through his exploration of ‘the mystery of the human being’ in his art,” observed Louis H. Pratt in James Baldwin. “His short stories, novels, and plays shed the light of reality upon the darkness of our illusions, while the essays bring a boldness, courage, and cool logic to bear on the most crucial questions of humanity with which this country has yet to be faced.” In the College Language Association Journal, Therman B. O’Daniel called Baldwin “the gifted professor of that primary element, genuine talent. ... Secondly he is a very intelligent and deeply perceptive observer of our multifarious contemporary society. ... In the third place, Baldwin is a bold and courageous writer who is not afraid to search into the dark corners of our social consciences, and to force out into public view many of the hidden, sordid skeletons of our society. ... Then, of course, there is Baldwin’s literary style which is a fourth major reason for his success as a writer. His prose ... possesses a crystal clearness and a passionately poetic rhythm that makes it most appealing.” Saturday Review correspondent Benjamin De Mott concluded that Baldwin “retains a place in an extremely select group: That composed of the few genuinely indispensable American writers. He owes his rank partly to the qualities of responsiveness that have marked his work from the beginning. ... Time and time over in fiction as in reportage, Baldwin tears himself free of his rhetorical fastenings and stands forth on the page utterly absorbed in the reality of the person before him, strung with his nerves, riveted to his feelings, breathing his breath.”   Baldwin’s central preoccupation as a writer lay in “his insistence on removing, layer by layer, the hardened skin with which Americans shield themselves from their country,” according to Orde Coombs in the New York Times Book Review. The author saw himself as a “disturber of the peace”—one who revealed uncomfortable truths to a society mired in complacency. Pratt found Baldwin “engaged in a perpetual battle to overrule our objections and continue his probe into the very depths of our past. His constant concern is the catastrophic failure of the American Dream and the devastating inability of the American people to deal with that calamity.” Pratt uncovered a further assumption in Baldwin’s work; namely, that all of mankind is united by virtue of common humanity. “Consequently,” Pratt stated, “the ultimate purpose of the writer, from Baldwin’s perspective, is to discover that sphere of commonality where, although differences exist, those dissimilarities are stripped of their power to block communication and stifle human intercourse.” The major impediment in this search for commonality, according to Baldwin, is white society’s entrenched moral cowardice, a condition that through longstanding tradition equates Blackness with dark impulses, carnality and chaos. By denying Black people's essential humanity so simplistically, the author argued, whites inflict psychic damage on blacks and suffer self-estrangement—a “fatal bewilderment,” to quote Bone. Baldwin’s essays exposed the dangerous implications of this destructive way of thinking; his fictional characters occasionally achieve interracial harmony after having made the bold leap of understanding he advocated. In the British Journal of Sociology, Beau Fly Jones claimed that Baldwin was one of the first Black writers “to discuss with such insight the psychological handicaps that most Negroes must face; and to realize the complexities of Negro-white relations in so many different contexts. In redefining what has been called the Negro problem as white, he has forced the majority race to look at the damage it has done, and its own role in that destruction.”   Essayist John W. Roberts felt that Baldwin’s “evolution as a writer of the first order constitutes a narrative as dramatic and compelling as his best story.” Baldwin was born and raised in Harlem under very trying circumstances. His stepfather, an evangelical preacher, struggled to support a large family and demanded the most rigorous religious behavior from his nine children. Roberts wrote: “Baldwin’s ambivalent relationship with his stepfather served as a constant source of tension during his formative years and informs some of his best mature writings. ... The demands of caring for younger siblings and his stepfather’s religious convictions in large part shielded the boy from the harsh realities of Harlem street life during the 1930s.” As a youth Baldwin read constantly and even tried writing; he was an excellent student who sought escape from his environment through literature, movies, and theatre. During the summer of his 14th birthday he underwent a dramatic religious conversion, partly in response to his nascent sexuality and partly as a further buffer against the ever-present temptations of drugs and crime. He served as a junior minister for three years at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, but gradually he lost his desire to preach as he began to question Black people's acceptance of Christian tenets that had, in essence, been used to enslave them.   Shortly after he graduated from high school in 1942, Baldwin was compelled to find work in order to help support his brothers and sisters; mental instability had incapacitated his stepfather. Baldwin took a job in the defense industry in Belle Meade, New Jersey, and there, not for the first time, he was confronted with racism, discrimination, and the debilitating regulations of segregation. The experiences in New Jersey were closely followed by his stepfather’s death, after which Baldwin determined to make writing his sole profession. He moved to Greenwich Village and began to write a novel, supporting himself by performing a variety of odd jobs. In 1944 he met author Richard Wright, who helped him to land the 1945 Eugene F. Saxton fellowship. Despite the financial freedom the fellowship provided, Baldwin was unable to complete his novel that year. He found the social tenor of the United States increasingly stifling even though such prestigious periodicals as the Nation, New Leader, and Commentary began to accept his essays and short stories for publication. Eventually, in 1948, he moved to Paris, using funds from a Rosenwald Foundation fellowship to pay his passage. Most critics feel that this journey abroad was fundamental to Baldwin’s development as an author.   “Once I found myself on the other side of the ocean,” Baldwin told the New York Times, “I could see where I came from very clearly, and I could see that I carried myself, which is my home, with me. You can never escape that. I am the grandson of a slave, and I am a writer. I must deal with both.” Through some difficult financial and emotional periods, Baldwin undertook a process of self-realization that included both an acceptance of his heritage and an admittance of his bisexuality. Bone noted that Europe gave the young author many things: “It gave him a world perspective from which to approach the question of his own identity. It gave him a tender love affair which would dominate the pages of his later fiction. But above all, Europe gave him back himself. The immediate fruit of self-recovery was a great creative outburst. First came two [works] of reconciliation with his racial heritage. Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Amen Corner represent a search for roots, a surrender to tradition, an acceptance of the Negro past. Then came a series of essays which probe, deeper than anyone has dared, the psychic history of this nation. They are a moving record of a man’s struggle to define the forces that have shaped him, in order that he may accept himself.”   Many critics view Baldwin’s essays as his most significant contribution to American literature. Works such as Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen “serve to illuminate the condition of the black man in twentieth-century America,” according to Pratt. Highly personal and analytical, the essays probe deeper than the mere provincial problems of white versus black to uncover the essential issues of self-determination, identity, and reality. “An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian,” Baldwin told Life magazine. “His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive.” South Atlantic Quarterly contributor Fred L. Standley asserted that this quest for personal identity “is indispensable in Baldwin’s opinion and the failure to experience such is indicative of a fatal weakness in human life.” C.W.E. Bigsby elaborated in The Fifties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama: “Baldwin’s central theme is the need to accept reality as a necessary foundation for individual identity and thus a logical prerequisite for the kind of saving love in which he places his whole faith. For some this reality is one’s racial or sexual nature, for others it is the ineluctable fact of death. ... Baldwin sees this simple progression as an urgent formula not only for the redemption of individual men but for the survival of mankind. In this at least black and white are as one and the Negro’s much-vaunted search for identity can be seen as part and parcel of the American’s long-standing need for self-definition.”   Inevitably, however, Baldwin’s assessments of the “sweet” and “bitter” experiences in his own life led him to describe “the exact place where private chaos and social outrage meet,” according to Alfred Kazin in Contemporaries. Eugenia Collier described this confrontation in Black World: “On all levels personal and political ... life is a wild chaos of paradox, hidden meanings, and dilemmas. This chaos arises from man’s inability—or reluctance to face the truth about his own nature. As a result of this self-imposed blindness, men erect an elaborate facade of myth, tradition, and ritual behind which crouch, invisible, their true selves. It is this blindness on the part of Euro-Americans which has created and perpetuated the vicious racism which threatens to destroy this nation.” In his essays on the 1950s and early 1960s, Baldwin sought to explain Black experiences to a white readership as he warned whites about the potential destruction their psychic blindness might wreak. Massachusetts Review contributor David Levin noted that the author came to represent “for ‘white’ Americans, the eloquent, indignant prophet of an oppressed people, a voice speaking ... in an all but desperate, final effort to bring us out of what he calls our innocence before it is (if it is not already) too late. This voice calls us to our immediate duty for the sake of our own humanity as well as our own safety. It demands that we stop regarding the Negro as an abstraction, an invisible man; that we begin to recognize each Negro in his ‘full weight and complexity’ as a human being; that we face the horrible reality of our past and present treatment of Negroes—a reality we do not know and do not want to know.” In Ebony magazine, Allan Morrison observed that Baldwin evinced an awareness “that the audience for most of his nonfictional writings is white and he uses every forum at his disposal to drive home the basic truths of Negro-white relations in America as he sees them. His function here is to interpret whites to themselves and at the same time voice the Negro’s protest against his role in a Jim Crow society.”   Because Baldwin sought to inform and confront whites, and because his fiction contains interracial love affairs—both homosexual and heterosexual—he came under attack from the writers of the Black Arts Movement, who called for a literature exclusively by and for Blacks. Baldwin refused to align himself with the movement; he continued to call himself an “American writer” as opposed to a “Black writer” and continued to confront the issues facing a multi-racial society. Eldridge Cleaver, in his book Soul on Ice, accused Baldwin of a hatred of Blacks and “a shameful, fanatical fawning” love of whites. What Cleaver saw as complicity with whites, Baldwin saw rather as an attempt to alter the real daily environment with which American Blacks have been faced all their lives. Pratt noted, however, that Baldwin’s efforts to “shake up” his white readers put him “at odds with current white literary trends” as well as with the Black Arts Movement. Pratt explained that Baldwin labored under the belief “that mainstream art is directed toward a complacent and apathetic audience, and it is designed to confirm and reinforce that sense of well-being. ... Baldwin’s writings are, by their very nature, iconoclastic. While Black Arts focuses on a Black-oriented artistry, Baldwin is concerned with the destruction of the fantasies and delusions of a contented audience which is determined to avoid reality.” As the civil rights movement gained momentum, Baldwin escalated his attacks on white complacency from the speaking platform as well as from the pages of books and magazines. Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time both sold more than a million copies; both were cited for their predictions of Black violence in desperate response to white oppression. In Encounter, Colin MacInnes concluded that the reason “why Baldwin speaks to us of another race is that he still believes us worthy of a warning: he has not yet despaired of making us feel the dilemma we all chat about so glibly, ... and of trying to save us from the agonies that we too will suffer if the Negro people are driven beyond the ultimate point of desperation.”   Retrospective analyses of Baldwin’s essays highlight the characteristic prose style that gives his works literary merit beyond the mere dissemination of ideas. In A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics, Irving Howe placed the author among “the two or three greatest essayists this country has ever produced.” Howe claimed that Baldwin “has brought a new luster to the essay as an art form, a form with possibilities for discursive reflection and concrete drama. ... The style of these essays is a remarkable instance of the way in which a grave and sustained eloquence—the rhythm of oratory, ... held firm and hard—can be employed in an age deeply suspicious of rhetorical prowess.” “Baldwin has shown more concern for the painful exactness of prose style than any other modern American writer,” noted David Littlejohn in Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes. “He picks up words with heavy care, then sets them, one by one, with a cool and loving precision that one can feel in the reading. ... The exhilarating exhaustion of reading his best essays—which in itself may be a proof of their honesty and value—demands that the reader measure up, and forces him to learn.”   Baldwin’s fiction expanded his exploration of the “full weight and complexity” of the individual in a society prone to callousness and categorization. His loosely autobiographical works probed the milieus with which he was most familiar—Black evangelical churches, jazz clubs, stifling Southern towns, and the Harlem ghetto. In The Black American Writer: Fiction, Brian Lee maintained that Baldwin’s “essays explore the ambiguities and ironies of a life lived on two levels—that of the Negro and that of the man—and they have spoken eloquently to and for a whole generation. But Baldwin’s feelings about the condition— alternating moods of sadness and bitterness—are best expressed in the paradoxes confronting the haunted heroes of his novels and stories. The possible modes of existence for anyone seeking refuge from a society which refuses to acknowledge one’s humanity are necessarily limited, and Baldwin has explored with some thoroughness the various emotional and spiritual alternatives available to his retreating protagonists.” Pratt felt that Baldwin’s fictive artistry “not only documents the dilemma of the Black man in American society, but it also bears witness to the struggle of the artist against the overwhelming forces of oppression. Almost invariably, his protagonists are artists. ... Each character is engaged in the pursuit of artistic fulfillment which, for Baldwin, becomes symbolic of the quest for identity.”   Love, both sexual and spiritual, was an essential component of Baldwin’s characters’ quests for self-realization. John W. Aldridge observed in the Saturday Review that sexual love “emerges in his novels as a kind of universal anodyne for the disease of racial separatism, as a means not only of achieving personal identity but also of transcending false categories of color and gender.” Homosexual encounters emerged as the principal means to achieve important revelations; as Bigsby explained, Baldwin felt that “it is the homosexual, virtually alone, who can offer a selfless and genuine love because he alone has a real sense of himself, having accepted his own nature.” Baldwin did not see love as a “saving grace,” however; his vision, given the circumstances of the lives he encountered, was more cynical than optimistic. In his introduction to James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays, Kenneth Kinnamon wrote: “If the search for love has its origin in the desire of a child for emotional security, its arena is an adult world which involves it in struggle and pain. Stasis must yield to motion, innocence to experience, security to risk. This is the lesson that ... saves Baldwin’s central fictional theme from sentimentality. ... Similarly, love as an agent of racial reconciliation and national survival is not for Baldwin a vague yearning for an innocuous brotherhood, but an agonized confrontation with reality, leading to the struggle to transform it. It is a quest for truth through a recognition of the primacy of suffering and injustice in the American past.” Pratt also concluded that in Baldwin’s novels, “love is often extended, frequently denied, seldom fulfilled. As reflections of our contemporary American society, the novels stand as forthright indictments of the intolerable conditions that we have accepted unquestioningly as a way of life.”   Black family life—the charged emotional atmosphere between parents and children, brothers and sisters—provided another major theme in Baldwin’s fiction. This was especially apparent in his first and best-known novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, the story of a Harlem teenager’s struggles with a repressive father and with religious conversion. According to Roberts, Go Tell It on the Mountain “proved that James Baldwin had become a writer of enormous power and skill. [It] was an essential book for Baldwin. Although clearly a fictional work, it chronicles two of the most problematic aspects of his existence as a young man: a son’s relationship to his stepfather and the impact of fundamentalist religion on the consciousness of a young boy.” In her work entitled James Baldwin, Carolyn Wedin Sylvander praised Baldwin’s family chronicle particularly because the author “is dealing comprehensively and emotionally with the hot issue of race relations in the United States at a time ... when neither white ignorance and prejudice nor black powerlessness is conducive to holistic depictions of black experience.” Indeed, the overt confrontation between the races that characterizes Baldwin’s later work was here portrayed as a peripheral threat, a danger greater than, but less immediate than, the potential damage inflicted by parents on children. Sylvander wrote: “It is painfully, dramatically, structurally clear throughout Go Tell It on the Mountain that the struggles every individual faces—with sexuality, with guilt, with pain, with love—are passed on, generation to generation.” Littlejohn described Baldwin’s treatment of this essential American theme as “autobiography-as-exorcism, ... a lyrical, painful, ritual exercise whose necessity and intensity the reader feels.” Pratt likewise stated that Go Tell It on the Mountain “stands as an honest, intensive, self-analysis, functioning simultaneously to illuminate self, society, and mankind as a whole.”   In addition to his numerous books, Baldwin was one of the few Black authors to have had more than one of his plays produced on Broadway. Both The Amen Corner, another treatment of storefront pentecostal religion, and Blues for Mister Charlie, a drama based on the racially-motivated murder of Emmett Till in 1955, had successful Broadway runs and numerous revivals. Standley commented in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that in both plays, “as in his other literary works, Baldwin explores a variety of thematic concerns: the historical significance and the potential explosiveness in black-white relations; the necessity for developing a sexual and psychological consciousness and identity; the intertwining of love and power in the universal scheme of existence as well as in the structures of society; the misplaced priorities in the value systems in America; and the responsibility of the artist to promote the evolution of the individual and the society.” In The Black American Writer: Poetry and Drama, Walter Meserve offered remarks on Baldwin’s abilities as a playwright. “Baldwin tries to use the theatre as a pulpit for his ideas,” Meserve stated. “Mainly his plays are thesis plays—talky, over-written, and cliche dialogue and some stereotypes, preachy, and argumentative. Essentially, Baldwin is not particularly dramatic, but he can be extremely eloquent, compelling, and sometimes irritating as a playwright committed to his approach to life.” Meserve added, however, that although the author was criticized for creating stereotypes, “his major characters are the most successful and memorable aspects of his plays. People are important to Baldwin, and their problems, generally embedded in their agonizing souls, stimulate him to write. ... A humanitarian, sensitive to the needs and struggles of man, he writes of inner turmoil, spiritual disruption, the consequence upon people of the burdens of the world, both White and Black.”   Baldwin’s oratorical prowess—honed in the pulpit as a youth—brought him into great demand as a speaker during the civil rights era. Sylvander observed that national attention “began to turn toward him as a spokesperson for Blacks, not as much because of his novels as his essays, debates, interviews, panel discussions.” Baldwin embraced his role as racial spokesman reluctantly and grew increasingly disillusioned as the American public “disarmed him with celebrity, [fell] in love with his eccentricities, and institutionalized his outrage ... into prime- time entertainment,” to quote Aldridge. Nor was Baldwin able to feel that his speeches and essays were producing social change—the assassinations of three of his associates, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, shattered his remaining hopes for racial reconciliation. Kinnamon remarked that by 1972, the year Baldwin published No Name in the Street, “the redemptive possibilities of love seemed exhausted in that terrible decade of assassination, riot, and repression. ... Social love had now become for Baldwin more a rueful memory than an alternative to disaster.” London Magazine contributor James Campbell also noted that by 1972 “Baldwin the saviour had turned into Baldwin the soldier. What [observers] failed to notice was that he was still the preacher and the prophet, that his passion and rage were mingled with detachment, and that his gloomy prognostications were based on powerful observation and an understanding of the past which compelled their pessimism.”   Many critics took Baldwin to task for the stridency and gloom that overtook his writings. “To function as a voice of outrage month after month for a decade and more strains heart and mind, and rhetoric as well,” declared Benjamin De Mott in the Saturday Review. “The consequence is a writing style ever on the edge of being winded by too many summonses to intensity.” New Republic correspondent Nathan Glazer likewise stated that Baldwin had become “an accusing voice, but the accusation is so broad, so general, so all-embracing, that the rhetoric disappears into the wind.” Stephen Donadio offered a similar opinion in the Partisan Review: “As his notoriety increased, his personality was oversimplified, appropriated, and consumed. ... Mr. Baldwin created a situation in which the eye of the audience was fixed on the author as a performer, and the urgency of the race problem in America became a backdrop for elaborate rhetorical assaults which could be dutifully acknowledged but forgotten with a sigh.”   Baldwin’s passionate detractors were offset by equally passionate defenders, however. Sylvander wrote: “Wading through vehement and sometimes shallow reactions to the deep water of the statements and works themselves, one is struck repeatedly by the power of Baldwin’s prose, and by our continuing need, as readers and as citizens, for his steadying apocalyptic vision. Finally, in his fantastic, experientially various, wide-ranging, searching, and committed life, one can find a vigorous model for venturing beyond charted areas.” Charles Newman made two points in James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. First, Newman noted that Baldwin’s experience is “unique among our artists in that his artistic achievements mesh so precisely with his historical circumstances. He is that nostalgic type—an artist speaking for a genuinely visible revolution.” Second, Newman maintained that as an observer of this painful revolution, “almost alone [Baldwin] continued to confront the unmanageable questions of modern society, rather than creating a nuclear family in which semantic fantasies may be enacted with no reference to the larger world except that it stinks.” Kinnamon concluded: “James Baldwin has always been concerned with the most personal and intimate areas of experience and also with the broadest questions of national and global destiny—and with the intricate interrelationships between the two. Whatever the final assessment of his literary achievement, it is clear that his voice—simultaneously that of victim, witness, and prophet—has been among the most urgent of our time.”   At the time of his death from cancer late in 1987, Baldwin was still working on two projects—a play, The Welcome Table, and a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Although he lived primarily in France, he had never relinquished his United States citizenship and preferred to think of himself as a “commuter” rather than as an expatriate. The publication of his collected essays, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948- 1985, and his subsequent death sparked reassessments of his career and comments on the quality of his lasting legacy. “Mr. Baldwin has become a kind of prophet, a man who has been able to give a public issue all its deeper moral, historical, and personal significance,” remarked Robert F. Sayre in Contemporary American Novelists. “Certainly one mark of his achievement, ... is that whatever deeper comprehension of the race issue Americans now possess has been in some way shaped by him. And this is to have shaped their comprehension of themselves as well.” Sylvander asserted that what emerges from the whole of Baldwin’s work is “a kind of absolute conviction and passion and honesty that is nothing less than courageous. ... Baldwin has shared his struggle with his readers for a purpose—to demonstrate that our suffering is our bridge to one another.”   Perhaps the most telling demonstration of the results of Baldwin’s achievement came from other Black writers. Orde Coombs, for instance, concluded: “Because he existed we felt that the racial miasma that swirled around us would not consume us, and it is not too much to say that this man saved our lives, or at least, gave us the necessary ammunition to face what we knew would continue to be a hostile and condescending world.” Playwright Amiri Baraka phrased a similar assessment even more eloquently in his funeral eulogy to Baldwin. “This man traveled the earth like its history and its biographer,” Baraka said. “He reported, criticized, made beautiful, analyzed, cajoled, lyricized, attacked, sang, made us think, made us better, made us consciously human. ... He made us feel ... that we could defend ourselves or define ourselves, that we were in the world not merely as animate slaves, but as terrifyingly sensitive measurers of what is good or evil, beautiful or ugly. This is the power of his spirit. This is the bond which created our love for him.” In a posthumous profile for the Washington Post, Juan Williams wrote: “The success of Baldwin’s effort as the witness is evidenced time and again by the people, black and white, gay and straight, famous and anonymous, whose humanity he unveiled in his writings. America and the literary world are far richer for his witness. The proof of a shared humanity across the divides of race, class and more is the testament that the preacher’s son, James Arthur Baldwin, has left us.”

The giver (for Berdis)

Le sporting-club de monte carlo (for lena horne), munich, winter 1973 (for y.s.).

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At the Smithsonian | July 15, 2024

James Baldwin

The fiction writer, essayist, and activist James Baldwin (New York 1924-1987 Saint‒Paul‒de‒Vence, France), was, for part of the 20th-century, the better known of these two friends. Because Baldwin’s career was long, his writing prolific (by some reckonings, more that 6800 pages), and his status as a cultural figure iconic, the literature about him and his work is vast and includes his own nonfiction essays about his life. Scholarship on James Baldwin’s life and writing is flourishing today, with international conferences, entire journals, and books solely devoted to his life and work.

Baldwin’s reputation as a writer was augmented by his prominence as a speaker; an “out” gay man and a voice of Black radical resistance, he also became a prominent national activist during the US Civil Rights era. Many see his writing as fundamentally relevant today to Black Lives Matter, LGBTQIA, and other social justice struggles. For example, Darryl Pinckney has noted that a new book edited by the novelist and memoirist Jesmyn Ward and rehearsing the title of one of Baldwin’s texts, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race , “originated in her search for community and consolation after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012,” and quotes her as noting, “I couldn’t fully satisfy my need for kinship in this struggle. . . . In desperation, I sought James Baldwin. [. . .] Baldwin was so brutally honest.” In 2015, digital sound artists Mendi and Keith Obadike created Blues Speaker [For James Baldwin] , a 12-hour work of sound art based on Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” (1948), his most anthologized work. The digital work is modelled on “Praise Songs” after the classical African mode and digitally renders sound in an architectural surrounding—the actual walls of the New School’s University Center in New York City. These and other projects attest to an urgent return to Baldwin’s work today.

But the archive of Baldwin’s letters had been sealed by his estate for many years and was purchased and made available to scholars only recently by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in NYC. We are, as a result, right now in the midst of a renaissance concerning Baldwin’s writing. As Jennifer Schuessler notes, “James Baldwin died in 1987, but his moment is now. His books are flying off the shelves. He has inspired homages like Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir Between the World and Me . Baldwin’s prophetic essays on race read like today’s news.”

There is to date no full-length study about Baldwin and Delaney as artists and friends, but one can mine the primary and secondary sources for references. Baldwin’s short story collection Going to Meet the Man (1965) is dedicated to Delaney, and Delaney is included in the dedication to Baldwin’s No Name in the Street (1972). Baldwin found in Delaney a father figure, an artistic genius, and model of perseverance as a Southern gay man of color; he called Delaney his “principle witness.” Baldwin wrote eloquently of the older painter in his 1985 essay “The Price of the Ticket”: “Beauford was the first walking, living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognized as my Master and I as his Pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow.” Notably, in his remembrances, Baldwin aligned Delaney with both light and music: “I learned about light from Beauford Delaney, the light contained in every thing, in every surface, in every face. […] and this light held the power to illuminate, even to redeem and reconcile and heal. For Beauford’s work leads the inner and the outer eye, directly and inexorably, to a new confrontation with reality. […] he is a great painter, among the very greatest.”

Baldwin writes of the first time he walked into Delaney’s studio: “I had grown up with music, but, now, on Beauford’s small black record player, I began to hear what I had never dared or been able to hear. [… I]n his studio and because of his presence, I really began to hear Ella Fitzgerald, Ma Rainey, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Paul Robeson, Lena Horne, Fats Waller. [. . .] And these people were not meant to be looked on by me as celebrities, but as a part of Beauford’s life and as part of my inheritance.” In a 1976 interview with Esquire , Baldwin noted that “the most important person in my life [as a writer] was and is a very great but not very well-known Black painter named Botha [sic] Delaney.”

One sees glimpses of Delaney in photographs throughout the biographical film about Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket , which premiered at Sundance in 1970. And Joan Dempsey has written convincingly that the main mentor figure in Baldwin’s most famous and anthologized short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” first published in The Partisan Review in 1957 and republished in 1965 in his only short story collection, Going to Meet the Man , is Beauford Delaney. Because Baldwin’s own essays point us in this direction, the connection between Delaney and Baldwin through jazz is often mentioned in secondary studies as a passing observation—with the exception of David Leeming’s authoritative biography of Baldwin, which deals with the friendship extensively. Other Baldwin biographies usually build off Leeming’s work. Such discussions have deepened to some degree as Delaney comes back on to the arts scene and theories such as queer-of-color and critical race studies open up new platforms for considering the men’s identities and relationships. But for the most part, the Baldwin/Delaney relationship is mentioned only in passing or as a biographically important detail; no study exists that fleshes out and historicizes the important artistic re-visioning that this relationship may have had for both artists or how their relationship—a new kind of father/son relation between Black men who together produced some of the most important work of the mid-twentieth century—may revise how we understand Black masculinity or the development of postwar Black aesthetics.

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James Baldwin: ‘I Never Intended to Become an Essayist’

From a classic interview with david c. estes.

As essayist, James Baldwin has written about life in Harlem, Paris, Atlanta; about Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jimmie Carter; and about Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Norman Mailer. In examining contemporary culture, he has turned his attention to politics, literature, the movies—and most importantly to his own self. To each subject he has brought the conviction, stated in the 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village,” that “the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too.” Thus he has consistently chosen as his audience Americans, both black and white, and has offered them instruction about the failings and possibilities of their unique national society.

Several of the essays in Notes of a Native Son (1955), published two years after his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain , are regarded as contemporary classics because of their polished style and timeless insights. The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985 marks his long, productive career as an essayist. It includes over forty shorter pieces as well as three book-length essays— The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976). Baldwin’s most recent book is The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), a meditation on the Atlanta child-murder case. It is his troubled and troubling personal reencounter with “the terror of being destroyed” that dominates the inescapable memories of his own early life in America.

David C. Estes : Why did you take on the project to write about Wayne Williams and the Atlanta child murders? What did you expect to find when you began the research for The Evidence of Things Not Seen?

James Baldwin : It was thrown into my lap. I had not thought about doing it at all. My friend Walter Lowe of Playboy wrote me in the south of France to think about doing an essay concerning this case, about which I knew very little. There had not been very much in the French press. So I didn’t quite know what was there, although it bugged me. I was a little afraid to do it, to go to Atlanta. Not because of Atlanta—I’d been there before—but because I was afraid to get involved in it and I wasn’t sure I wanted to look any further.

It was an ongoing case. The boy was in jail, and there were other developments in the city and among the parents and details which I’ve blotted out completely which drove me back to Atlanta several times to make sure I got the details right. The book is not a novel nor really an essay. It involves living, actual human beings. And there you get very frightened. You don’t want to make inaccuracies. It was the first time I had ever used a tape recorder. I got hours of tape. At one moment I thought I was going crazy. I went to six or seven or eight places where the bodies had been found. After the seventh or the eighth, I realized I couldn’t do that anymore.

DCE : There is a sense in the book that you were trying to keep your distance, especially from the parents of both the victims and the murderer. In fact, you state at one point in it that you “never felt more of an interloper, a stranger” in all of your journeys than you did in Atlanta while researching this case.

JB : It wasn’t so much that I was trying to keep my distance, although that is certainly true. It was an eerie moment when you realize that you always ask, “How are the kids?” I stopped asking. When I realized that, I realized I’m nuts. What are you going to say to the parents of a murdered child? You feel like an interloper when you walk in because no matter how gently you do it you are invading something. Grief, privacy, I don’t know how to put that. I don’t mean that they treated me that way. They were beautiful. But I felt that there was something sacred about it. One had to bury that feeling in order to do the project. It was deeper than an emotional reaction; I don’t have any word for it. It wasn’t that I was keeping my distance from the parents. I was keeping a distance from my own pain. The murder of children is the most indefensible form of murder that there is. It was certainly for me the most unimaginable. I can imagine myself murdering you in a rage, or my lover, or my wife. I can understand that, but I don’t understand how anyone can murder a child.

DCE : The carefully controlled structure of your earlier essays is absent from Evidence .

JB : I had to risk that. What form or shape could I give it? It was not something that I was carrying in my imagination. It was something quite beyond my imagination. All I really hoped to do was write a fairly coherent report in which I raised important questions. But the reader was not going to believe a word I said, so I had to suggest far more than I could state. I had to raise some questions without seeming to raise them. Some questions are unavoidably forbidden.

DCE : Because you are an accomplished novelist, why didn’t you use the approach of the New Journalism and tell the story of Wayne Williams by relying on the techniques of fiction?

JB : It doesn’t interest me, and I’ve read very little of it. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is a very pretty performance, but in my mind it illustrates the ultimate pitfall of that particular approach. To put it in another way, when I write a play or a novel, I write the ending and am responsible for it. Tolstoy has every right to throw Anna Karenina under the train. She begins in his imagination, and he has to take responsibility for her until the reader does. But the life of a living human being, no one writes it. You cannot deal with another human being as though he were a fictional creation.

I couldn’t fictionalize the story of the Atlanta murders. It’s beyond my province and would be very close to blasphemy. I might be able to fictionalize it years from now when something has happened to me and I can boil down the residue of the eyes of some of the parents and some of the children. I’m sure that will turn up finally in fiction because it left such a profound mark on me. But in dealing with it directly as an event that was occurring from day to day, it did not even occur to me to turn it into fiction, which would have been beyond my power. It was an event which had been written by a much greater author than I.

Reflecting on the writing of the New Journalists, I think the great difficulty or danger is not to make the event an occasion for the exhibition of your virtuosity. You must look to the event.

DCE : In other words, style can take away from the event itself.

JB : In a way. I’m speaking only for myself, but I wouldn’t want to use the occasion of the children as an occasion to show off. I don’t think a writer ever should show off, anyway. Saul Bellow would say to me years and years ago, “Get that fancy footwork out of there.” The hardest part of developing a style is that you have to learn to trust your voice. If I thought of my style, I’d be crippled. Somebody else said to me a long time ago in France, “Find out what you can do, and then don’t do it.”

DCE : What has been the reaction to Evidence in France, where you are living?

JB : Because of some difficulty in arranging for the American publication, it appeared first there in a French version. They take it as an examination of a social crisis with racial implications, but a social crisis. The most honest of the critics are not afraid to compare it to the situation of the Algerian and African in Paris. In a way, it’s not too much to say that some of them take it as a kind of warning. There is a great upsurge on the right in France, and a great many people are disturbed by that. So the book does not translate to them as a provincial, parochial American problem.

DCE : Were you conscious of the international implications of the case while you were writing?

JB : I was thinking about it on one level, but for me to write the book was simply like putting blinders on a horse. On either side was the trap of rage or the trap of sorrow. I had never run into this problem in writing a book before.

I was doing a long interview in Lausanne, and it suddenly happened that I could see one of those wide intervals. I was asked a question, and with no warning at all, the face, body, and voice of one of the parents suddenly came back to me. I was suddenly back in that room, hearing that voice and seeing that face, and I had to stop the interview for a few minutes. Then I understood something.

DCE : What seem to be the European perceptions of contemporary American black writers in general?

JB : A kind of uneasy bewilderment. Until very lately, Europe never felt menaced by black people because they didn’t see them. Now they are beginning to see them and are very uneasy. You have to realize that just after the war when the American black GI arrived, he was a great, great wonder for Europe because he had nothing whatever to do with the Hollywood image of the Negro, which was the only image they had. They were confronted with something else, something unforeseeable, something they had not imagined. They didn’t quite know where he came from. He came from America, of course, but America had come from Europe. Now that is beginning to be clear, and the reaction is a profound uneasiness. So the voice being heard from black writers also attacks the European notion of their identity. If I’m not what you thought I was, who are you?

DCE : Now that your collected nonfiction has appeared in The Price of the Ticket , what reflections about your career as an essayist do you have as you look back over these pieces?

JB : It actually was not my idea to do that book, but there was no point in refusing it either. But there was also something frightening about it. It’s almost forty years, after all. On one level, it marks a definitive end to my youth and the beginning of something else. No writer can judge his work. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to judge mine. You just have to trust it. I’ve not been able to read the book, but I remember some of the moments when I wrote this or that. So in some ways, it’s a kind of melancholy inventory, not so much about myself as a writer (I’m not melancholy about that), but I think that what I found hard to decipher is to what extent or in what way my ostensible subject has changed. Nothing in the book could be written that way today.

My career began when I was twenty-one or twenty-two in The New Leader . That was a very important time in my life. I had never intended to become an essayist. But it came about because of Saul Levitas, who assigned me all these books to review. I will never know quite why he did that. I had to write a book review a week, and it was very good for me. You can always find turning points looking back, but there was one very long review of Raintree Country , a novel about an America I had never seen. Between the time that I turned in the review and its publication, the author, Ross Lockridge, committed suicide. It was very shocking because it was such a sunlit, optimistic book that had won every prize in sight. But he had blown his brains out. That marked me in a way. I didn’t feel guilty about it since he hadn’t read my review, but it struck me with great force. It was from that point, in hindsight, that I began to be considered an essayist by other people.

Later, at Commentary I had a marvelous relationship with one of the editors—Robert Warshow, my first real editor. He asked me to do an essay about the Harlem ghetto. When I turned it in, Robert said, “Do it over.” He didn’t say anything more. So I did. And then he said, “You know more than that.” I began to be aware of what he was doing. When he saw me come close to what I was afraid of, he circled it and said, “Tell me more about that.” What I was afraid of was the relationship between Negroes and Jews in Harlem—afraid on many levels. I’d never consciously thought about it before, but then it began to hit me on a profound and private level because many of my friends were Jews, although they had nothing to do with the Jewish landlords and pawnbrokers in the ghetto. So I had been blotting it out. It was with Robert that I began to be able to talk about it, and that was a kind of liberation for me. I’m in his debt forever because after that I was clear in my own mind. I suddenly realized that perhaps I had been afraid to talk about it because I was a closet anti-Semite myself. One always has that terror. And then I realized that I wasn’t. So something else was opened.

DCE : What major artistic problems have you had to confront in your nonfiction?

JB : I was a black kid and was expected to write from that perspective. Yet I had to realize the black perspective was dictated by the white imagination. Since I wouldn’t write from the perspective, essentially, of the victim, I had to find what my own perspective was and then use it. I couldn’t talk about “them” and “us.” So I had to use “we” and let the reader figure out who “we” is. That was the only possible choice of pronoun. It had to be “we.” And we had to figure out who “we” was, or who “we” is. That was very liberating for me.

I was going through a whole lot of shit in New York because I was black, because I was always in the wrong neighborhood, because I was small. It was dangerous, and I was in a difficult position because I couldn’t find a place to live. I was always being thrown out, fighting landlords. My best friend committed suicide when I was twenty-two, and I could see that I was with him on that road. I knew exactly what happened to him—everything that happened to me. The great battle was not to interiorize the world’s condemnation, not to see yourself as the world saw you, and also not to depend on your skill. I was very skillful—much more skillful than my friend, much more ruthless, too. In my own mind, I had my family to save. I could not go under; I could not afford to. Yet I knew that I was going under. And at the very same moment, I was writing myself up to a wall. I knew I couldn’t continue. It was too confining. I wrote my first two short stories, and then I split.

DCE : You said earlier that you never intended to become an essayist. Did you ever consider one or the other of the genres in which you worked as being more important than another?

JB : No, as a matter of fact I didn’t. I thought of myself as a writer. I didn’t want to get trapped in any particular form. I wanted to try them all. That’s why I say I remember having written myself into a wall. Significantly enough, the first thing I wrote when I got to Paris and got myself more or less together was the essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel”—a summation of all these years I was reviewing those “be kind to niggers” and “be kind to Jews” books. There was a mountain of them, and every one came across my desk. I had to get out of that, and “Everybody’s Protest Novel” was my declaration of independence. Then I began to finish my first novel and did Giovanni’s Room , which was another declaration of independence. And then I was in some sense, if not free, clear.

DCE : A striking feature of your work is the great amount of autobiographical material that finds its way into essays which are not primarily autobiographical.

JB : Well, I had to use myself as an example.

DCE : When did you realize that you should use yourself in this way?

JB : It was not so much that I realized I should. It was that I realized I couldn’t avoid it. I was the only witness I had. I had the idea that most people found me a hostile black boy; I was not that. I had to find a way to make them know it, and the only way was to use myself.

—New Orleans Review, 1986

__________________________________

From Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance . Used with permission of Bloomsbury. Copyright  ©  2019 by Mark Yakich and John Biguenet.

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15 great articles and essays by james baldwin, stranger in the village, notes of a native son, how to cool it by james baldwin, letter from a region in my mind, a talk to teachers, the american dream is at the expense of the american negro by james baldwin, autobiographical notes by james baldwin, a report from occupied territory by james baldwin, if black english isn’t a language, then tell me, what is, many thousands gone, a letter to my nephew, sonny’s blues, the creative process, 150 great articles and essays.

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5 Must-Read James Baldwin Books + Where To Start

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Last Updated on May 12, 2024 by BiblioLifestyle

James Baldwin is one of the most prolific and well-respected authors of the 20th century.  His work spanned many genres, including novels, short stories, essays, and plays. Baldwin’s writing was deeply personal and often tackled complex subjects such as race, sexuality, and religion.  If you’re new to Baldwin’s work or looking for a place to start reading, look no further.  In this article, we will discuss the five must-read James Baldwin books.  These books are some of his best work and offer a great introduction to his writing style and worldview.  If you’re interested in learning more about African American history and culture or looking for some good literature, these books are worth your time!

About James Baldwin

Why is james baldwin so important.

James Baldwin has made a lasting impression on our culture, and his work and opinions are still referenced today.  James Baldwin was an ahead-of-his-time activist and author who used literature to address the themes of racial and sexual identity, particularly in his books.  James Baldwin wasn’t willing to stay quiet about important issues of his time, such as civil rights and what it means to be a Black American in America.  His impact extended beyond just writing; James Baldwin was also a prominent speaker who addressed important social issues.  James Baldwin’s work speaks volumes about his importance, even decades after he wrote them.

About James Baldwin Books

What was baldwin’s style of writing.

James Baldwin’s writing was characterized by an honest and direct style that tackled complex social issues such as racism, poverty, and sexuality.  He often used powerful metaphors to explore these topics in his books.  Throughout his career, Baldwin wrote some of America’s most famous novels like “Go Tell it On The Mountain,” “Another Country,” and “The Fire Next Time,” which continue to touch hearts and spark concern for social issues.  No matter how complex or topical the issue was, James Baldwin always found a creative way to present it in a passionate yet straightforward manner.

What are 3 of James Baldwin’s most famous works?

Three of James Baldwin’s most famous works are ‘Go Tell It On The Mountain,’ an autobiographical narrative telling of James’ own experiences being raised by a deeply religious family; ‘The Fire Next Time,’ a combination of two essays that explore race relations in America; and ‘Notes of a Native Son,’ an exploration of what it means to be Black in the United States.  But, no matter which James Baldwin work you choose, you’re sure to be enveloped within his passionate prose and captivating storytelling as if you were there with them in person.

What is James Baldwin’s best-selling book?

James Baldwin’s best-selling book is The Fire Next Time. James Baldwin’s 1962 book The Fire Next Time is an important work published during the civil rights movement.  It consists of two “letters” in which Baldwin shares his personal experiences and advice on race relations in America. Written during a time of deep racial divide, James Baldwin speaks openly about the spiritual, political, and social issues concerning African Americans. His work is piercingly honest and quite timely, as most of James’ theories remain relevant even today. The Fire Next Time is a timeless reminder of James Baldwin’s brilliance.  It also challenges us to reflect upon our beliefs about race and continue fighting for justice and equity.

5 Must-Read James Baldwin Books

Now that we know more about James Baldwin and his writing let’s talk more about these five must-read James Baldwin books:

• Go Tell It on the Mountain
• Giovanni’s Room
• Notes of a Native Son
• The Fire Next Time
• If Beale Street Could Talk

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

The first book on our list is “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”  This novel tells the story of a young man named John Grimes, who is struggling to find his place in the world.  Baldwin draws on his experiences growing up in Harlem to create a powerful, moving, coming-of-age story.  The characters are complex and multi-dimensional, and the writing is beautiful and lyrical.  This is definitely one of Baldwin’s best novels, and it’s a great place to start if you’re new to his work.

Buy from Amazon or Bookshop

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

“Giovanni’s Room” is a novel about a young man named Giovanni, who is living in Paris and struggling with his identity, masculinity, and sexuality.  Baldwin explores the themes of love, desire, and identity in this novel, and he does so in a way that is both sensitive and thought-provoking.  This is an excellent book for anyone interested in LGBT literature or wanting to read a good novel about love and desire.

For a mini deep dive on Giovanni’s Room, check out my article: Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin: A Literary Masterpiece .

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

If you’re looking for something a little shorter, then “Notes of a Native Son” is a great choice.  This collection of essays explores race relations in America and Baldwin’s own experiences as an African American man.  The writing is sharp and incisive, and Baldwin doesn’t shy away from tackling tough topics.  This is an excellent book for anyone who wants to learn more about race relations in America or who wants to read some great essays by a master of the craft.

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

“The Fire Next Time” is another collection of essays focused on the Civil Rights Movement.  Baldwin offers a critical analysis of the movement and its successes and failures.  He also discusses the role of religion in society and how it can be used as both a force for good and evil.  This is an essential read for anyone interested in the Civil Rights Movement or American history.

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

Last but not least, we have “If Beale Street Could Talk.”  This novel tells the story of Tish and Fonny, two young African Americans who are in love.  However, their relationship is threatened when Fonny is falsely accused of a crime.  Baldwin explores the themes of love, justice, and race in America through the eyes of his characters.  This is an excellent choice for anyone who wants to read a powerful and moving love story while learning more about African American history and culture.

For a mini deep dive on If Beale Street Could Talk, check out my article Unearthing the Depths of Familial Bonds in If Beale Street Could Talk .

What do you think about these James Baldwin books?

Have you read any James Baldwin books?  Are any of these books or his other works on your TBR?   What James Baldwin book is your favorite?  What books would you add to this list?  Let us know in the comments below.

MORE READING:

• Exploring the Life and Works of James Baldwin
• Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin: A Literary Masterpiece
• Unearthing the Depths of Familial Bonds in If Beale Street Could Talk
• 30 James Baldwin Quotes That Still Resonate Today
• 5 Must-Read Books by Toni Morrison: Where to Start

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James Baldwin : Collected Essays

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Save $15 when you buy both volumes of the Richard Wright edition in a deluxe boxed set.

Native Son exploded on the American literary scene in 1940. The story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man living in the raw, noisy, crowded slums of Chicago’s South Side, captured the hopes and yearnings, the pain and rage of black Americans with an unprecedented intensity and vividness. The text printed in this volume restores the changes and cuts—including the replacement of an entire scene—that Wright was forced to make by book club editors who feared offending their readers. The unexpurgated version of Wright’s electrifying novel shows his determination to write honestly about his controversial protagonist. As he wrote in the essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” which accompanies the novel: “I became convinced that if I did not write Bigger as I saw and felt him, I’d be acting out of fear.”

This volume also contains Wright’s first novel, Lawd Today! , published posthumously in 1963, and his collection of stories, Uncle Tom’s Children , which appeared in 1938. Lawd Today! interweaves news bulletins, songs, exuberant wordplay, and scenes of confrontation and celebration into a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the events of one day—February 12—in the life of a black Chicago postal worker. The text for this edition reinstates Wright’s stylistic experiments, and the novel emerges as a far livelier work of the imagination.

Uncle Tom’s Children first brought Wright to national attention when it received the Story Prize for the best work submitted to the Federal Writers’ Project. The characters in these tales struggle to survive the cruelty of racism in the South, as Wright asks “what quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity.” All five stories Wright included in the 1940 second edition are published in this volume, along with his sardonic autobiographical essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.”

Richard Wright was “forged in injustice as a sword is forged,” wrote Ernest Hemingway. With passionate honesty and courage, he confronted the terrible effects of prejudice and intolerance and created works that explore the deepest conflicts of the human heart.

This Library of America edition presents for the first time Wright’s works in the form in which he intended them to be read. The authoritative new texts, based on Wright’s original typescripts and proofs, reveal the full range and power of his achievement as an experimental stylist and as a fiery prophet of the tragic consequences of racism in American society. The volume includes notes on significant changes in Wright’s text and a detailed chronology of his life.

Arnold Rampersad , volume editor, is Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities and a member of the Department of English at Stanford University. He has written biographies of Langston Hughes (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize), Jackie Robinson, and, most recently, Ralph Ellison.

Richard Wright: Early Works is kept in print by a gift from Charles Ackerman to the Guardians of American Letters Fund .

“With the appearance of the two-volume Richard Wright: Works , published by The Library of America and edited and annotated by Arnold Rampersad, we have a new opportunity to assess Wright’s formidable and lasting contribution to American literature. But this time we have texts intended as the author originally wished them to be read. The works that millions know are, as it turns out, expurged and abbreviated versions of what Wright submitted for publication.” — Charles Johnson, The Chicago Tribune

SALE: Buy all three Baldwin volumes and save 33%

With such landmark novels as Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room , and the essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time , James Baldwin established himself as the indispensable literary voice of the Civil Rights era, a figure whose prophetic exploration of the racial and sexual fissures in American society challenged and electrified American readers. But by the late 1960s and ’70s many regarded Baldwin as being out of sync with the political and social currents transforming America: too integrationist for the champions of “Black Power” and others on the Left, yet too “pessimistic” for many white readers. As a result his final three novels— Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979)—have yet to receive the consideration given his earlier fiction. Now, these late novels, carefully annotated to clarify Baldwin’s many musical and other cultural references, are collected for the first time in a single-volume edition, a companion volume to The Library of America’s Early Novels and Stories .

Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone , inspired in part by Baldwin’s unhappy experience collaborating with the Actors Studio for the staging of one of his plays, begins with the sudden heart attack of its thirty-nine-year-old protagonist, the celebrated actor Leo Proudhammer, whose rise to fame from impoverished beginnings in Harlem is recounted as he recuperates. Although wholly fictional, it is a profoundly personal work, as Proudhammer’s conflicted assessment of his life and career mirror Baldwin’s own struggles in the mid-1960s. If Beale Street Could Talk , the only Baldwin novel narrated by a woman, is a love story in which a young couple must weather a false accusation of rape and the predatory misconduct of the police. Baldwin’s final novel, the sprawling Just Above My Head , follows the troubled life and tumultuous times of world-famous gospel singer Arthur Montana; here Baldwin’s continued critical engagement with the African American church and with black music, begun decades earlier with Go Tell It on the Mountain , brings his career full circle.

Darryl Pinckney , editor, is the author of the novel High Cotton (1992) and the critical study Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (2002). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books , among other publications.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardians of American Letters Fund .

The stirring and provocative final three novels by the literary voice of the Civil Rights era

“If you wanted a poem,” wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, “you only had to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing.” From the life of Chicago’s South Side she made a forceful and passionate poetry that fused Modernist aesthetics with African-American cultural tradition, a poetry that registered the life of the streets and the upheavals of the 20th century. Starting with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), her epoch-making debut volume, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks traces the full arc of her career in all its ambitious scope and unexpected stylistic shifts.

“Her formal range,” writes editor Elizabeth Alexander, “is most impressive, as she experiments with sonnets, ballads, spirituals, blues, full and off-rhymes. She is nothing short of a technical virtuoso.” That technical virtuosity was matched by a restless curiosity about the life around her in all its explosive variety. By turns compassionate, angry, satiric, and psychologically penetrating, Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry retains its power to move and surprise.

Elizabeth Alexander , editor of this volume, is the author of four books of poems, most recently American Sublime , and the essay collection The Black Interior. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation as well as the George Kent Award, given by Gwendolyn Brooks. She is a professor at Yale University.

About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

“The civil rights struggle,” said The New York Times Book Review , “found eloquent expression in [Baldwin’s] novels. His historical importance is indisputable.” Here, in a Library of America volume edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, is the fiction that established James Baldwin’s reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism and rare verbal eloquence.

His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), tells the story, rooted in Baldwin’s own experience, of a preacher’s son coming of age in 1930’s Harlem. Ten years in the writing, its exploration of religious, sexual, and generational conflicts was described by Baldwin as “an attempt to exorcise something, to find out what happened to my father, what happened to all of us.”

Giovanni’s Room (1956) is a searching, and in its day controversial, treatment of the tragic self-delusions of a young American expatriate at war with his own homosexuality. Another Country (1962), a wide-ranging exploration of America’s racial and sexual boundaries, depicts the suicide of a gifted jazz musician and its ripple effect on those who knew him. Complex in structure and turbulent in mood, it is in many ways Baldwin’s most ambitious novel.

Going to Meet the Man (1965) collects Baldwin’s short fiction, including the masterful “Sonny’s Blues,” the unforgettable portrait of a jazz musician struggling with drug addiction in which Baldwin came closest to defining his goal as a writer: “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”

Toni Morrison , volume editor, was the author of numerous award–winning novels, including Love , Jazz , Song of Solomon , Sula , The Bluest Eye , and Beloved , which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. From 1989 to 2006 she was Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2012.

James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories is kept in print by a gift from Frank A. Bennack Jr. to the Guardians of American Letters Fund .

“James Baldwin’s gift to our literary tradition is that rarest of treasures, a rhetoric of fiction and the essay that is, at once, Henry Jamesian and King Jamesian.” — Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

This landmark two-volume anthology chronicles more than thirty tumultuous years in the African American struggle for freedom and equal rights. Here, in brilliant and inspiring dispatches from some of the finest reporters in the history of American journalism, is a panoramic portrait of the fight to overthrow segregation in the United States. Nearly 200 newspaper and magazine reports, book excerpts, and features by 151 writers—David Halberstam, Carl Rowan, Robert Penn Warren, Gordon Parks, Ralph Ellison, and Anne Moody among them—provide vivid firsthand accounts of all the revolutionary events: the rising activism of the 1940s; the Brown decision; the Montgomery bus boycott; Little Rock; the sit-in movement and Freedom Rides; Birmingham, the March on Washington (August 28, 1963), Freedom Summer, and Selma; and the emergence of “Black Power.”

Each volume contains a detailed chronology of the civil rights movement, biographical profiles of the journalists, notes, an index, and thirty-two pages of photographs, many never before published.

The advisory board for Reporting Civil Rights includes Clayborne Carson , senior editor, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. ; David J. Garrow , Presidential Distinguished Professor, Emory University; Bill Kovach , chairman, Committee of Concerned Journalists; and Carol Polsgrove , professor of journalism, Indiana University.

“If only civil rights were taught this way in our classrooms! Personal narratives, together with gripping newspaper accounts and essays written between 1941 and 1973, make the two-volume Reporting Civil Rights a vital national resource.”— O: The Oprah Magazine

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A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

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35 Poignant James Baldwin Quotes on Love and Justice That Are Especially Timely

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time."

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within," Baldwin wrote in his best-selling 1963 novel The Fire Next Tim e .

“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” Baldwin wrote in a 1962 essay for The New York Times .

On Black people in America

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time,” Baldwin said in a 1961 radio interview.

On education

In his 1963 Talk to Teachers speech he said , “The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”

“People can cry much easier than they can change,” Baldwin told The New York Times in 1977.

In The Fire Next Time he wrote, “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”

“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have," Baldwin wrote in his essay No Name in the Street .

On indifference

“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind," he wrote in If Beale Street Could Talk .

On being gay in America

“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all," the novelist told The Village Voice in 1984 .

In Notes of a Native Son he wrote, “Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.”

He told The Paris Review : “The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.”

“I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world,” Baldwin wrote in his novel Giovanni 's Room .

On having a career

In The Price of a Ticket , he reflected: “The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."

“The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe,” Baldwin wrote in Harper's Magazine in 1953 .

On the unknown

In 1961 he said, "Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it.”

On oppression

Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time , “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”

On law and order

In 1972's No Name on the Street he wrote: "Does the law exist for the purpose of furthering the ambitions of those who have sworn to uphold the law, or is it seriously to be considered as a moral, unifying force, the health and strength of a nation?”

On the importance of writers

In the New York Times he said : “Writers are extremely important people in a country, whether or not the country knows it.”

He told Life magazine in 1963 : “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. “

“A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven,” Baldwin wrote in his 1962 essay The Creative Process.

McKenzie Jean-Philippe is the editorial assistant at OprahMag.com covering pop culture, TV, movies, celebrity, and lifestyle. She loves a great Oprah viral moment and all things Netflix—but come summertime, Big Brother has her heart. On a day off you'll find her curled up with a new juicy romance novel.

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CRITICAL MASS | OPINION: James Baldwin at 100

July 20, 2024 at 4:00 p.m.

by Philip Martin

If love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can.

-- James Baldwin,

"Letter From a Region in My Mind," 1962

Had he not died in 1987, James Baldwin would be 100 on Aug.

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