Jacqueline Mulhallen marks the centenary of one of the most remarkable writers of the 20th century, whose experience of race, class and gay sexuality led to a powerful body of work and a strong commitment to changing the world

James Baldwin was born to a single mother in Harlem, New York on 2 August 1924.  Three years later, his mother married David Baldwin, with whom she had a further eight children. James loved all his brothers and sisters and helped bring them up, but he had a difficult relationship with his stepfather, who was an evangelical preacher but who was eventually incarcerated in a mental hospital. James too became a preacher at the young age of 14, but as his father noticed, he preferred writing to preaching. His father died in 1943, on the day his eighth child was born.

James attended excellent schools where his talent for writing was noticed and encouraged and he won a prize for a short story when he was 12. He had remarkable teachers, many of whom were leftwing.  One, Orilla Miller, who took him to the theatre, said she was ‘appalled’ by the family’s poverty. James said his inability to ‘completely hate white people’ was because of knowing them.¹ In 1943 he joined the Young People’s Socialist League, and later said he became a ‘Trotskyite’ but subsequently an anarchist. It is not clear how long he was connected to any political organisation but he was close to many on the left and it can be assumed that he read a great deal.²

James hoped to go to college but could not afford to and went to work laying railroad tracks where his self-confidence infuriated white people. Being refused service in restaurants enraged him to such a state that one day he threw a water jug at the barmaid.³ It missed, but James was with a white friend and was lucky to escape unharmed. He later lived in Greenwich Village where he wrote reviews and began working towards his first novel Go Tell it on the Mountain, based on his involvement with the church and his experience as a young preacher. 

He felt, however, that the racism in America would prevent him from completing it, and when he was awarded a small advance, used it to go to Paris. He worked in restaurants and, while living in an Alpine village in a cottage belonging to his longtime lover, Lucien Happersberger, he completed Go Tell It on the Mountain. This was successful as was his second novel, Giovanni’s Room, with its bisexual central character. To many young white people in the early 60s, it seemed that in these very popular novels and his book of essays, The Fire Next Time, he had helped us to understand what it meant to be black and to be gay.

Civil rights movement 

Many would have said that he had done enough to make his mark as a black writer and commentator on racism in the United States. But he was to do more. Baldwin’s hatred of racism meant that he was to return to the States in 1957 to support the Civil Rights movement. He became a spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and met Martin Luther King Jr and Stokely Carmichael, both of whom he admired. Medgar Evers was a friend. and Baldwin was later to meet Malcolm X, who also became a friend. 

Baldwin’s logical, well-reasoned and passionate arguments made him much in demand when he toured the South. He gave the fees for his lectures to CORE and helped them to raise membership to 65,000. Together with other leading activists, he met Robert Kennedy to demand more support from the government to enforce the policy of equality in the southern states but Kennedy refused to do more. This disgusted Baldwin and he was inevitably grieved by the assassinations of Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

Baldwin was supportive of the Nation of Islam, although he had differences with them, and he was very supportive of the Black Panthers, especially for their community work. However, problems arose when Eldridge Cleaver, a prominent Panther, criticised Baldwin for his homosexuality, often preceding him on a lecture tour and therefore distracting the audience from the main issues. Cleaver was to write later of Baldwin’s ‘shameful, fanatical, fawning sycophantic love of the whites’.⁴ This of course was a complete misrepresentation and Baldwin fought back.

Baldwin was often interviewed on television and radio. Many of these interviews are available on YouTube, as is his brilliant, electrifying and illuminating speech at the Cambridge Union in 1965. Some form part of the recent documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016). It is worth listening to them to hear Baldwin explain to an interviewer that ‘improvements’ such as having more black mayors are really irrelevant since it does not address the question of what black people might want, and for his explanation that ‘it comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you’. 

Film script

He was commissioned to write a script for a film about the life of Malcolm X, but his ideas and Hollywood’s did not coincide and the plan was dropped. However, his script was used as the basis of the film which Spike Lee made in 1994.⁵ Baldwin became less prominent as an activist, although he continued to write essays, plays and novels. He had many well-known friends, like Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte and Yves Montand, who visited him at his home at St Paul de Vence, near Cannes in the South of France, and he spent the rest of his life there, travelling between the States and France. He died in 1984.

Recently, the Black Lives Matter movement has revived interest in his life and work. What he wrote about Israel and Palestine is particularly relevant at present:

‘…the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews, it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.

‘Finally, there is absolutely – repeat absolutely – no hope of establishing peace in what Europe so arrogantly calls the Middle East (how in the world would Europe know? having so dismally failed to find a passage to India) without dealing with the Palestinians. The collapse of the Shah of Iran not only revealed the depth of the pious Carter’s concern for “human rights” it also revealed who supplied oil to Israel, and to whom Israel supplied arms. It happened to be, to spell it out, White South Africa’.⁶

The following poem reveals Baldwin’s deep and passionate sympathy with the victims of war:

Every bombed village is my hometown
And every dead child is my child, 
every grieving mother is my mother, 
every crying father is my father, 
Every home turned to rubble
Is the home I grew up in
Every brother carrying the remains
Of his brother across borders
Is my brother
Every sister waiting for a sister
Who will never come home
Is my sister.
Every one of these people  are  ours, 
Just like we are theirs.
We belong to them and they belong to us.⁷

¹ Leeming, David, James Baldwin: A Biography (London: Michael Joseph 1994), p. 16
² Mullen, Bill, James Baldwin: Living in Fire (London, Pluto Press 2019),p. 47
³ Mullen, see Chapter 2
⁴ Leeming, p. 304
⁵ Leeming, p. 291
⁶ Open Letter to the Born Again, The Nation, September 1979. https://www.thenation.com. accessed 8 December 2024
⁷ Every Bombed Village is My Hometown, https://www.instagram.com/categoryisbooks/p/DAyEJ0zNl4V/?img_index=1