BALDWIN, JAMES (2 August 1924–1 December 1987), African American writer and Civil Rights activist and one of the most influential public intellectuals of the 1960s. Notable works include the novels Giovanni’s Room and Go Tell It on the Mountain and the essay collection Notes of a Native Son. Baldwin’s work is known for its searing explorations of race, sexuality, and class.
Born in Harlem in New York City and raised by his mother and stepfather, Baldwin never learned the identity of his biological father. Biographer David Leeming has argued that this question of “illegitimacy” became an important motif in Baldwin’s life and writing, a thread running through his ruminations on love and family and his interrogation of the position of Black people in America.
Baldwin attended elementary and middle school in Harlem. At fourteen, despite his stepfather’s admonitions to get a job, Baldwin applied and was accepted to DeWitt Clinton High School, a predominantly white, Jewish school in the Bronx, where he worked on the student literary magazine.
After finishing high school, Baldwin moved to Greenwich Village and got a job waiting tables at the unsegregated Calypso Restaurant. Immersing himself in the bohemian downtown milieu, Baldwin matured as a writer and started to come to terms with his homosexuality. He began writing essays and reviews and published his first short story in 1948. With the help of his friend the novelist Richard Wright, he attempted to publish an early manuscript of Go Tell It on the Mountain with Harper’s, but the deal fell through.
In 1948 Baldwin moved to Paris, where he would spend the next decade of his life. His decision to leave America was motivated in large part by its oppressive racial dynamics; he hoped that in Paris he would be able to lead a life defined by artistic freedom rather than the color of his skin. Despite a persistent lack of funds, Baldwin was able to devote himself to writing, and he began publishing more regularly. Some of Baldwin’s essays from this period address the difference in treatment he experienced as a Black man in Europe and the United States, while others criticize the stigmatizing limitations of much African American literature, including Wright’s Native Son.
In 1953 Baldwin published his first novel, the loosely autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain. Like the author, the novel’s protagonist seeks to both embrace and escape his heritage in the form of an overbearing father and the powerful influence of the Pentecostal church. Two years later he published perhaps his most famous and influential work, Notes of a Native Son, a collection of ten essays of literary and cultural criticism, including his reflections on growing up in Harlem and the cultural experience of being an expat in Paris. It is widely regarded as his finest work.
Giovanni’s Room, a gay love story between two White men, set in Paris and charged with ambiguity, longing, and social alienation, was published in 1956 by Dial Press. Knopf, the publisher of Go Tell It on the Mountain, had refused to release it and advised Baldwin not to publish it, urging him instead to continue writing about Harlem as a “Negro writer” to avoid losing his audience. Though some were shocked by its homoerotic content, the novel’s reception was less controversial than anticipated, with many reviewers concentrating instead on its theme of alienation. And while some were critical of Baldwin’s engagement with Whiteness, others saw in it a powerful symbolic confrontation. All told, Giovanni’s Room was a success, selling six thousand copies and going into a second printing after just six weeks.
As the Civil Rights movement began to convulse America, Baldwin, plagued by a sense that he was wasting his time in Paris, returned to New York in the summer of 1957. He visited the South and made common cause with Martin Luther King Jr., the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and published essays on the movement in Harper’s and the New Yorker. In Baldwin’s view, White supremacy in the South was upheld not only by the violence of law enforcement but also by the false “innocence” of Whites who simply “do not want to know” about the extent of the repression carried out in their name. He began making frequent television appearances and quickly gained national attention, appearing on the cover of Time magazine’s May 17, 1963, issue. A week later Baldwin was part of a delegation of prominent African Americans who met with Attorney General Robert Kennedy and to discuss the urgency of the need for justice and civil rights for Black people, though he was disappointed by the meeting, as it led to nothing concrete.
Beginning in 1963, Baldwin was on the FBI’s Security Index, a compilation of thousands of individuals, including Martin Luther King Jr., who were perceived as potential threats to the state and who could be arrested without cause on an order from the president. In FBI parlance authors were known as “thought-control relay stations,” nodes of potentially subversive ideas. Baldwin may have been specially targeted because of his sexual orientation, given FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s (himself likely a closeted gay man) open hostility to homosexuality. Baldwin’s FBI file would eventually become the largest on a Black author during Hoover’s five-decade tenure as director.
Baldwin was aware that CIA and FBI agents attended many of his speaking engagements, and he pledged to write a book, speculatively titled The Blood Counters, exposing Hoover’s racism. That nothing came of the project was, according to Baldwin biographer James Campbell, “one sign of the Bureau’s responsibility for the author’s shrunken productivity after 1963, the year not just of John F. Kennedy’s traumatic slaying but of Baldwin’s outraged discovery of FBI spying on civil rights protestors in Selma, Alabama.” William J. Maxwell, the editor of the published edition of Baldwin’s FBI file, suggests that Baldwin’s planned exposé may have been a ruse intended to unsettle the Bureau.
Though Baldwin was increasingly defined by his role as a public intellectual and Civil Rights activist, he kept up his essayistic and literary production. Indeed, his close friend Beauford Delaney “constantly reminded him that his art must be his primary concern, that an artist’s love is best expressed in his work.” In addition to the novel Another Country (1962) and the two long essays in The Fire Next Time (1963), in 1964 Baldwin published his second play, Blues for Mister Charlie, loosely based on the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, and was closely involved in its Manhattan production. Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, a novel about a Black actor’s struggle with internalized homophobia and racism, came out in 1968, to largely negative reviews.
Baldwin would become increasingly pessimistic about the Civil Rights movement’s ability to effect meaningful change. He was deeply disturbed by the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X, blaming White America’s failure to accept and integrate Black people for the murder even though it was a Black man who had carried out the killing. That same year, following a demonstration in which Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested, tear gas was used, and demonstrators were beaten, Baldwin participated in a 25,000-person-strong march in Alabama in support of voter registration. He continued to write on race, give speeches and interviews, and participate in marches.
In 1966, after fellow Civil Rights activist James Meredith was shot in the leg during a one-man march to call attention to voter discrimination in the South, Baldwin spoke out for the first time in favor of Black Power. By then Baldwin had determined that nonviolent protest tactics would no longer be effective and that the future of the Civil Rights Movement lay in the hands of revolutionaries such as the Black Panthers, to whom he offered measured support in public appearances.
Baldwin’s despair over the pace of racial progress reached its nadir in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968; two years later he left America for good, settling in SaintPaul-de-Vence, a medieval town in the South of France, where he would spend the rest of his life. There he hosted a stream of friends, including Delaney, musicians Nina Simone, Miles Davis, and Ray Charles, and actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier.
Baldwin’s late work has until recently been largely overlooked. In 1972 he published No Name in the Street, a book-length essay of his views on important people and events of the 1960s, including the 1963 March on Washington; Black Panthers Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver; and the murders of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Novels such as If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979) focused more on Black homosexuality and family life. Baldwin’s last published works were a book of poetry, Jimmy’s Blues (1983), and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), an account of the Atlanta murders of 1979–81 and an interrogation of the city’s race relations.
Baldwin died from stomach cancer in 1987 and was buried in New York. His legacy is immense; he is still widely read, both for the eminently modern wrestling with identity in his fiction and for the lacerating insights of his prophetic essays.