James Arthur Baldwin (neé Jones; August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987)
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was [a Black] 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
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English-language novels. His 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son helped establish his reputation as a voice for human equality. Baldwin was an influential public figure and orator, especially during the civil rights movement in the United States.
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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
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gay liberation movement in mid-twentieth century America. Baldwin's protagonists are often, but not exclusively African American; gay and bisexual men feature prominently in his work (as in his 1956 novel Giovanni's Room). His characters typically face internal and external
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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 BAFTA Award for Best Documentary
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His 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk was adapted into a 2018 film of the same name, which earned widespread praise.
Early life
Birth and family
Baldwin was born as James Arthur Jones to Emma Berdis Jones on August 2, 1924, at Harlem Hospital in New York City.
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Born in Deal Island, Maryland in 1903, Emma Jones was one of the many who fled racial segregation and discrimination in the South during the Great Migration. She arrived in Harlem when she was 19 years old. There, Baldwin was born out of wedlock. Jones never revealed to him who
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his biological father was.
Jones originally undertook to care for her son as single mother. However, in 1927, Jones married David Baldwin, laborer and Baptist preacher. David Baldwin was born in Bunkie, Louisiana, and preached in New Orleans, but left South for Harlem in 1919...
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Emma Baldwin would bear eight children with Baldwin —George, Barbara, Wilmer, David Jr. (named for James's father 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
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made it clear that he admired and loved her, often through reference to her loving smile. Baldwin moved several times in his early life but always within Harlem. At that time, Harlem was still a mixed-race area of the city in the incipient days of the Great Migration...
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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 erstwhile enslaver and a sister named Barbara, whom James and others in the
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family called "Taunty". David's father had also been born a slave. David had been married earlier, begetting a daughter, who was as old as Emma, and at least two sons―David, who would die in jail, and Sam, who was eight years James's senior, lived with the Baldwins for a time,
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and once saved James from drowning.
James 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]
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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
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on them for him." ...David Baldwin 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
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a mental asylum in 1943 and died of tuberculosis on July 29 of that year, the same day Emma gave birth to their last child, Paula. James Baldwin, at his mother's urging, had visited his dying stepfather the day before, and came to something of a posthumous reconciliation with him
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in his essay, "Notes of a Native Son", in which 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
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Harlem [rebellion] broke out.
As the oldest child, James worked part-time from an early age to help support his family. He was molded not only by the difficult relationships in his own household but by the impacts of the poverty and discrimination he saw all around him.
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As he grew up, friends he sat next to in church would turn to drugs, crime, or prostitution. In what biographer Anna Malaika Tubbs found to be not only a commentary on his own life but on the entire Black experience in America, Baldwin once wrote,
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"I never had a childhood ... I did not have any human identity ... I was born dead."
Education and preaching
...At five years old, Baldwin began school at Public School 24 (P.S. 24) on 128th Street in Harlem. The principal of the school was Gertrude E. Ayer, the first
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Audubon Ballroon (he/him)