James Baldwin was born one hundred years ago, in August 1924. He was a beacon in dark times.
James Baldwin was the conscience of the United States. He took a cold, hard look at his nation and called out its injustices in writing that was cadenced, even-handed, and true. He was a great novelist and, arguably, an even greater essayist; he simply knew things about the human soul that others didn’t know, and he expressed those things with stunning clarity.
Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, in Harlem, New York, the oldest of nine. At an early age, he became a prodigious reader and thinker, transcending the poverty and despair all around him. By fourteen, he was preaching in his local church, ad-libbing sermons and discovering for himself the power of language.
After a number of menial jobs and several devastating encounters that left him in no doubt about racism in the United States, he went to live in Paris. He was twenty-four years old, with forty dollars in his pocket.
In Paris, he found respite from white supremacy. He stayed, on and off, for nine years, fueled by ambition and talent and the generosity of friends. While there, he socialized with the likes of Richard Wright, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maya Angelou, and wrote his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. For the rest of his life, he shuttled between Europe and the United States, returning to his homeland for long enough to become a major figure in the Civil Rights Movement. He died of stomach cancer on December 1, 1987, in Saint-Paul de Vence, France.
Some of Baldwin’s best work is studded with observations that read like epigrams capturing eternal truths, as if he knew he was writing for posterity. Here’s a line from his 1972 essay No Name in the Street: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” From The Devil Finds Work (1976): “The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.”
His seminal book The Fire Next Time contains this sobering observation: “A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other.”
The unfortunate consequence of such condensed brilliance is that Baldwin’s writing can be reduced to slogans on X or Facebook memes. But his genius requires that we swallow him whole and read the longer works—for both pleasure and instruction—in their full context.
The novels Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953) and Another Country (1962), in which the Harlem of Baldwin’s youth features heavily, illustrate superbly the times in which they were written, but also hold perennial truths about the human condition. Desire, alienation, guilt – these will always be with us.
His non-fiction, particularly Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963), explore ideas of justice, identity, and freedom. As with Baldwin’s fiction, these books tell us everything we need to know about race relations in the United States.
What would he have made of today’s world? When Baldwin died, Barack Obama was a twenty-something community organizer in Chicago. Mandela was still locked up. George Floyd was a 14-year-old budding basketball and football player. What would Baldwin have written about the horror show of U.S. politics and the rise of the Far Right and the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act? We can only speculate. But in a way his voice lives on. Baldwin’s body of work inspired numerous African American authors: Michelle Alexander, Colson Whitehead, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Angela Davis, to name but a few. All of them write in his considerable shadow.
