James Baldwin

James Arthur Baldwin (né Jones; August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American writer and civil rights activist who garnered acclaim for his essays, novels, plays, and poems. His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain has been ranked by Time magazine as one of the top 100 English-language novels. His 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son helped establish his reputation as a voice for human equality. His 1965 debate with William Buckley is regarded as one of the most influential debates on Race. Baldwin was an influential public figure and orator, especially during the civil rights movement in the United States.

Baldwin's fiction posed fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures. Themes of masculinity, sexuality, race, and class intertwine to create intricate narratives that influenced both the civil rights movement and the gay liberation movement in mid-twentieth century America. His protagonists are often but not exclusively African-American, and gay and bisexual men feature prominently in his work (as in his 1956 novel Giovanni's Room). His characters typically face internal and external obstacles in their search for self- and social acceptance.

Baldwin's work continues to influence artists and writers. His unfinished manuscript Remember This House was expanded and adapted as the 2016 documentary film I Am Not Your Negro, winning the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary. His 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk was adapted into a 2018 film of the same name, which earned widespread praise.

Baldwin was born as James Arthur Jones to Emma Berdis Jones on August 2, 1924, at Harlem Hospital in New York City. Born on Deal Island, Maryland, in 1903, Emma Jones was one of many who fled racial segregation and discrimination in the South during the Great Migration. She arrived in Harlem, New York, when she was 19 years old. Baldwin was born out of wedlock there. Jones never revealed to him who his biological father was.

Jones originally undertook to care for her son as a single mother. However, in 1927, Jones married David Baldwin, a laborer and Baptist preacher. David Baldwin was born in Bunkie, Louisiana, and preached in New Orleans, but left the South for Harlem in 1919. How David and Emma met is uncertain, but in James Baldwin's semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain, the characters based on the two are introduced by the man's sister. Emma Baldwin and David Baldwin had eight children in sixteen years—George, Barbara, Wilmer, David Jr. (named for James's stepfather and deceased half-brother), Gloria, Ruth, Elizabeth, and Paula. James took his stepfather's last name. James rarely wrote or spoke of his mother. When he did, he made it clear that he admired and loved her, often through reference to her loving smile. James moved several times while young but always within Harlem. At the time, Harlem was still a mixed-race area of the city in the incipient days of the Great Migration.

James Baldwin did not know exactly how old his stepfather was, but it is clear that he was much older than Emma; indeed, he may have been born before the Emancipation in 1863. David's mother, Barbara, was born enslaved and lived with the Baldwins in New York before her death when James was seven years old. David also had a light-skinned half-brother fathered by his mother's white enslaver and a sister named Barbara, whom James and others in the family called "Taunty". David's father was born a slave. David had been married earlier and had a daughter, who was as old as Emma and at least two sons―David, who died while in jail, and Sam, who was eight years James's senior. Sam lived with the Baldwins for a time and once saved James from drowning.

James Baldwin referred to his stepfather simply as "father" throughout his life, but David Sr. and James had an extremely difficult relationship and nearly resorted to physical fights on several occasions. "They fought because James read books, because he liked movies, because he had white friends", all of which, David Baldwin thought, threatened James's "salvation". According to one biographer, David Baldwin also hated white people and "his devotion to God was mixed with a hope that God would take revenge on them for him." During the 1920s and 1930s, David worked at a soft-drink bottling factory, although he was eventually laid off from the job. As his anger and hatred eventually tainted his sermons, he was less in demand as a preacher. David sometimes took out his anger on his family and the children were afraid of him, though this was to some degree balanced by the love lavished on them by their mother.

David Baldwin grew paranoid near the end of his life. He was committed to a mental asylum in 1943 and died of tuberculosis on July 29 of that year, the same day Emma had their last child, Paula. James, at his mother's urging, visited his dying stepfather the day before and came to something of a posthumous reconciliation with him in his essay "Notes of a Native Son". In the essay, he wrote: "in his outrageously demanding and protective way, he loved his children, who were black like him and menaced like him." David Baldwin's funeral was held on James's 19th birthday, around the same time that the Harlem riot began.