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Board of Education of Prince Edward County

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Fight for black civil rights 1955 1960 1970 1950 1965 Brown vs. Board of Education 1955-1956 In 1955-56 the Montgomery Bus Boycott occurred. This was a protest against segregated public facilities in Alabama led by Martin Luther King and lasted for 381 days. The U.S.

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23. Black Civil Rights (Valentine & Alix)

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23. Black Civil Rights (Valentine & Alix)

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Black Civil rights 1619 The first African slaves arrive in Virginia. Slavery is made illegal in the Northwest Territory. The U.S Constitution states that Congress may not ban the trade of slaves until 1808. 1808 1787 Congress banned the importation of slaves from Africa.

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22. Black Civil Rights (By Matilda and Agathe)

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22. Black Civil Rights (By Matilda and Agathe)

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CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT (1954-1968) TIMELINE BROWN VS. BOARD OF EDUCATION US Supreme Court strikes down school segregation 1954 1955 1957 January/February: SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) is created. It will be a major organization in Civil Rights Movement based on non-violence and civil disobedience PRESIDENT EISENHOWER SENDS THE NATIONAL GUARDS to Little Rock's central High School to protect nine black students as they desegregate the school.

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By Juliette and Clémence

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James Baldwin Born: August 1924 Died: December 1987 Harlem, NY African American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. 1 of the 20th century greatest writers New literary grounds while discussing the racial and social issues Essays about black inferiority in society in the US His works were influenced by his childhood.

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By Agathe, Matilda and Juliane

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James Baldwin: Who was he? What does it add to the text? Why the use of stylistic devices? >Indeed, the anaphora, gradation, and alliterations give rhythm to the text. They also insist on what Baldwin wants to express ("civilization") >Yet the chiasmus, metaphors or allusions are present to make the story more real and to help the reader picture exactly what the author was trying to say.

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By Asalis and Amy

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By Suzanne and Emma

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MAJOR QUOTES
from Stranger in the Village
"From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came."
" The landscape is absolutely forbidding, mountains towering on all four sides, ice and snow as far as the eye can reach."
"Yet people remain people, on crutches or indeed on deathbeds; and wherever I passed, the first summer I was here, among the native villagers or among the lame, a wind passed with me-of astonishment, curiosity, amusement and outrage"
"But I remain as much a stranger today as I was the first day I arrived, and the children shout Neger! Neger! as I walk along the streets. "
"Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them."
"No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger"
"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. "
"This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again."

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MAJOR QUOTES from Stranger in the Village "From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came."" The landscape is absolutely forbidding, mountains towering on all four sides, ice and snow as far as the eye can reach."

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By Aymie and Lucas

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The Harlem Renaissance
Born in Harlem
Novelist, poet, essayist, playwright.
Moved to France when he was 2O.
Preacher from 14 to 17 years old
defender of black and homosexual's rights
Died of stomach cancer
James Baldwin
Note of a Native son
Book composed of 10 essays
Autobiographical note about his difficult relationship with his step-father
His essays can be split into two categories :
criticism of American society
about his incapacity to fit in white society.
Always linked to the discrimination of black people and his own life.
Theme and tone
Alienation
Discrimination
religion
Politics
Human rights
Human nature
Stranger in the Village
Starts in a small Swiss village
Explains Baldwin's incapacity to fit in
Felt discriminated against
Enlarges to the rest of Europe and of the world
Explains the difference between Black-Europeans and black-Americans
Explains the reason of the differences between black and white people
Thanks for listening !
Bibliography :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baldwin
http://www.biography.com/people/james-baldwin-9196635#legacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_of_a_Native_Son
http://www.enotes.com/topics/notes-native
https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/gjay/www/Whiteness/STRANGER%20IN%20THE%20VILLAGE.pdf
Notes of a Native son
, by James Baldwin
Started in 1919.
Cultural revolution including every form of art.
Depicting the reality of life in the ghettos.
Great names: Langston Hughues, Jean Toomer, Rudolf Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston.
Ended with the great depression in 1929.
Inspired many afterward.
Themes
Tone
Criticizing
Sharing personal experience

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The Harlem RenaissanceBorn in HarlemNovelist, poet, essayist, playwright.Moved to France when he was 2O.Preacher from 14 to 17 years olddefender of black and homosexual's rightsDied of stomach cancerJames BaldwinNote of a Native sonBook composed of 10 essaysAutobiographical note about his difficult relationship with his step-fatherHis essays can be split into

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By Christel and Alix

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Stranger in the Village, by James Baldwin
III- An implicitly argumentative text
Use of polished terms to quantify:
A gradual intrusion of the author:
Affirmative last sentence:
"This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again."
- didactic tone (explaining facts)
- line 6: "I"
- Signs of patriotism: "us-very", "our will", "our moral"
- "looking on me", "I am not, really, a stranger"
Intrusion of the Author
"very slowly, and very much"
"some means"
"faintly"
"not merely shameful"
Quantifying terms
I- Populations opposed yet united
II- Being American: not only a way of life, but also a way of thinking
Opposition between white and black people:
"white men [..] looking on me as a stranger"
Use of the term
"interracial"
Metaphor: "to paint moral issues in glaring black and white owes."
Personification:
United as Americans

"Interracial
drama
"
"The
American continent
has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man"
Same creator, same origins.
created by the American Continent: shared history and values
"Drama"
-Negative connotation
-Seemingly superficial
-Also assimilated to children's tantrums
-Acting Fake, pretend, manipulative.
To unite them:
Africa
Europe
White Americans
Afro americans
Estrangement from
their past
European Innocence
Same vision of the world
Paradox: too much innocence
"turns himself into a monster"
Irony:
"this European village where white men still have the
luxury
of looking on me as a stranger"
Opposition between African-Americans and Africans
opposition between European whites and American white people
American vision
Oxymoron: "perfectly useless"
Utopian ideas that harm mankind

emphasis on the "unrealistic" aspect of this vision
Text proposing a quite optimistic view on racism and segregation.
Even if the black American community suffered a lot, he keeps an optimistic point of view. Nevertheless, he maintains that the battle is not yet won, it is a "perpetual challenge" that must be met. He also asserts that white supremacy is over and that things will never be the same again.
CONCLUSION
Thank you for your attention!
"This world is white no longer and it will never be white again."

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Copy of Stranger in the Village, by James Baldwin

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Stranger in the Village, by James Baldwin III- An implicitly argumentative textUse of polished terms to quantify:A gradual intrusion of the author: Affirmative last sentence: "This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again."- didactic tone (explaining facts)- line 6: "I" - Signs of patriotism: "us-very",

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by Raphael, Estelle and Julie

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History
Segregation

"But in the situation in which Americans found themselves, these beliefs threatened an idea which, whether or not one lies to think so, is the very warp and woof if the heritage of the West, the idea of white supremacy."
White supremacy
"Perhaps they are struck by the power of the spires, the glory of the windows; but they have known God, after all, longer than I have known him, and in a different way, and I am terrified by the slippery bottomless well to be found in the crypt, down which heretics were hurled to death"
Religion
"I have said, for example, that I am as much a stranger in the village today as I was the first summer I arrived"
Non-acceptance
"Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous-dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say."
Ideologies
"I was told before arriving that I would probably be a "sight" for the village; I took this to mean that people of my complexion were rarely seen in Switzerland, and also that city people are always something of a "sight" outside of the city"
Reclusion VS Civilisation
Stranger In The Village
Ignorance
"no black man had ever set
foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came"

"Neger Neger"
"the white man prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplicity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his forefathers, or his neighbors. "
Racism
"But some of the men have accused le sale negre-behind my back-of stealing wood"
"I am told that there are Haitians able to trace their ancestry back to African kings, but any American Negro wishing to go back so far will find his journey through time abruptly arrested by the signature on the bill of sale"
Identity
"It is true that the necessity on the part of the settlers of the New World of reconciling their moral assumptions with the fact - and the necessity - of slavery enhanced immensely the charm of this idea, and it is also true that this idea expresses with a truly American bluntness, the attitude which to varying extents all masters have had toward all slaves."
Slavery
"these create for them a frame of reference and necessary hope the hope being that when life has done its worst they will be enabled to rise above themselves and to triumph over life."
Hope & Beliefs
Two general categories of themes
Culture
By Julie, Raphaël & Estelle

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HistorySegregation "But in the situation in which Americans found themselves, these beliefs threatened an idea which, whether or not one lies to think so, is the very warp and woof if the heritage of the West, the idea of white supremacy."White supremacy"Perhaps they are struck by the power of the

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By Elea, Charlotte and Lucie

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Jessie Redmon Fauset Arna Bontemps Rudolph Fisher Claude McKay George Schuyler Wallace Thurman Jean Toomer Carl Van Vechten Walter White

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Louis Amstrong Edith Piaf Elvis Presley Johnny Cash Gainsbourg

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Audrey Hepburn Brigitte Bardot Marylyn Monroe Marlon Brando

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Stranger in the village Context of composition The village James Baldwin's lover Lucien Happersberger's family had a chalet in a village up in the mountains in Switezerland. Baldwin went there, and the village (Loèche-les-Bains) proved to be a refuge for him. His first trip was in the summer, and lasted two weeks.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Although he spent a great deal of his life abroad, James Baldwin always remained a quintessentially American writer. Whether he was working in Paris or Istanbul, he never ceased to reflect on his experience as a black man in white America. In numerous essays, novels, plays and public speeches, the eloquent voice of James Baldwin spoke of the pain and struggle of black Americans and the saving power of brotherhood.

James Baldwin - the grandson of a slave - was born in Harlem in 1924. The oldest of nine children, he grew up in poverty, developing a troubled relationship with his strict, religious stepfather. As a child, he cast about for a way to escape his circumstances. As he recalls, "I knew I was black, of course, but I also knew I was smart. I didn't know how I would use my mind, or even if I could, but that was the only thing I had to use." By the time he was fourteen, Baldwin was spending much of his time in libraries and had found his passion for writing.

During this early part of his life, he followed in his stepfather's footsteps and became a preacher. Of those teen years, Baldwin recalled, "Those three years in the pulpit - I didn't realize it then - that is what turned me into a writer, really, dealing with all that anguish and that despair and that beauty." Many have noted the strong influence of the language of the church, the language of the Bible, on Baldwin's style: its cadences and tone. Eager to move on, Baldwin knew that if he left the pulpit he must also leave home, so at eighteen he took a job working for the New Jersey railroad.

After working for a short while with the railroad, Baldwin moved to Greenwich Village, where he worked for a number of years as a freelance writer, working primarily on book reviews. He caught the attention of the well-known novelist, Richard Wright - and though Baldwin had not yet finished a novel, Wright helped him secure a grant with which he could support himself as a writer. In 1948, at age 24, Baldwin left for Paris, where he hoped to find enough distance from the American society he grew up in to write about it.

After writing a number of pieces for various magazines, Baldwin went to a small village in Switzerland to finish his first novel. Go Tell It on the Mountain, published in 1953, was an autobiographical work about growing up in Harlem. The passion and depth with which he described the struggles of black Americans were unlike anything that had been written. Though not instantly recognized as such, Go Tell It on the Mountain has long been considered an American classic.

Over the next ten years, Baldwin moved from Paris to New York to Istanbul, writing two books of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), as well as two novels, Giovanni's Room (1956) and Another Country (1962). The essays explored racial tension with eloquence and unprecedented honesty; the novels dealt with taboo themes (homosexuality and interracial relationships). By describing life as he knew it, Baldwin created socially relevant, psychologically penetrating literature ... and readers responded. Both Nobody Knows My Name and Another Country became immediate bestsellers.

Being abroad gave Baldwin a perspective on the life he'd left behind and a solitary freedom to pursue his craft. "Once you find yourself in another civilization," he notes, "you're forced to examine your own." In a sense, Baldwin's travels brought him even closer to the social concerns of contemporary America. In the early 1960s, overwhelmed by a sense of responsibility to the times, Baldwin returned to take part in the civil rights movement. Traveling throughout the South, he began work on an explosive work about black identity and the state of racial struggle, The Fire Next Time (1963). This, too, was a bestseller: so incendiary that it put Baldwin on the cover of TIME Magazine. For many, Baldwin's clarion call for human equality - in the essays of Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time - became an early and essential voice in the civil rights movement. Though at times criticized for his pacifist stance, Baldwin remained an important figure in that struggle throughout the 1960s.

After the assassinations of his friends Medgar Evers, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, Baldwin returned to St. Paul de Vence, France, where he worked on a book about the disillusionment of the times, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). Many responded to the harsh tone of If Beale Street Could Talk with accusations of bitterness - but even though Baldwin had encapsulated much of the anger of the times in his book, he always remained a constant advocate for universal love and brotherhood. During the last ten years of his life, he produced a number of important works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. He also turned to teaching as a new way of connecting with the young.

By 1987, when he died of stomach cancer at age 63, James Baldwin had become one of the most important and vocal advocates for equality. From Go Tell It on the Mountain to The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), James Baldwin created works of literary beauty and depth that will remain essential parts of the American canon.

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James Baldwin | About the Author | American Masters | PBS

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Although he spent a great deal of his life abroad, James Baldwin always remained a quintessentially American writer. Whether he was working in Paris or Istanbul, he never ceased to reflect on his experience as a black man in white America.

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25 Powerful Quotes From James Baldwin To Feed Your Soul

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In honor of the author's birthday, a few quotes from his expansive oeuvre.

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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 among the best English-language novels. His 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son helped establish his reputation as a voice for human equality. Baldwin was a well-known 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 run parallel with some of the major political movements toward social change in mid-twentieth century America, such as the civil rights movement and the gay liberation movement. Baldwin's protagonists are typically but not exclusively African American, with gay and bisexual men featured prominently in his work. His characters often face internal and external obstacles in their search for self- and social acceptance: dynamics prominent in his 1956 novel Giovanni's Room.

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. Baldwin was born out of wedlock. Jones never revealed to Baldwin who his biological father was. According to Anna Malaika Tubbs in her account of the mothers of prominent civil rights figures, some rumors stated that James Baldwin's father suffered from drug addiction or that he died, but that in any case, Jones undertook to care for her son as a single mother. A native of Deal Island, Maryland, where she was born in 1903, Emma Jones was one of the many who fled racial segregation in the South during the Great Migration. She arrived in Harlem at 19 years old.

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, who is a friend of the woman. Emma Baldwin would bear eight children with her husband-George, Barbara, Wilmer, David Jr. (named for James's father and deceased half-brother), Gloria, Ruth, Elizabeth, and Paula-and raise them with her eldest James, who took his stepfather's last name. James rarely wrote or spoke of his mother. When he did, he made clear that he admired and loved her, often through reference to her loving smile. Baldwin moved several times in his early life but always to different addresses in Harlem. Harlem was still a mixed-race area of the city in the incipient days of the Great Migration; tenements and penury featured equally throughout the urban landscape.

David Baldwin was many years Emma's senior; he may have been born before Emancipation in 1863, although James did not know exactly how old his stepfather was. David's mother, Barbara, was born enslaved and lived with the Baldwins in New York before her death when James was seven. David also had a light-skinned half-brother that his mother's erstwhile enslaver had fathered on her, and a sister named Barbara, whom James and others in the family called "Taunty". David's father and James's paternal grandfather had also been born enslaved. David had been married earlier, begetting a daughter, who was as old as Emma when the two were wed, and at least two sons―David, who would die in jail, and Sam, who was eight years James's senior, lived with the Baldwins in New York for a time, and once saved James from drowning.

James referred to his stepfather simply as his "father" throughout his life, but David Sr. and James shared an extremely difficult relationship, nearly rising 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", Baldwin biographer David Adams Leeming wrote. 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", wrote another Baldwin biographer James Campbell. During the 1920s and 1930s, David worked at a soft-drinks bottling factory, though he was eventually laid off from this job, and, as his anger entered his sermons, he became less in demand as a preacher. David Baldwin sometimes took out his anger on his family, and the children became fearful of him, tensions 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 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 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 Harlem riot broke out.

Baldwin in Los Angeles, California, 1964

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 results of poverty and discrimination he saw all around him. As he grew up, friends he sat next to in church would turn away to drugs, crime, or prostitution. In what Tubbs found not only a commentary on his own life but on the Black experience in America, Baldwin once wrote, "I never had a childhood ... I did not have any human identity ... I was born dead."

Baldwin wrote comparatively little about events at school. At five years old, Baldwin began school at Public School 24 on 128th Street in Harlem. The principal of the school was Gertrude E. Ayer, the first Black principal in the city, who recognized Baldwin's precocity and encouraged him in his research and writing pursuits, as did some of his teachers, who recognized he had a brilliant mind. Ayer stated that James Baldwin got his writing talent from his mother, whose notes to school were greatly admired by the teachers, and that her son also learned to write like an angel, albeit an avenging one. By fifth grade, not yet a teenager, Baldwin had read some of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's works, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, beginning a lifelong interest in Dickens' work. Baldwin wrote a song that earned New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's praise in a letter that La Guardia sent to Baldwin. Baldwin also won a prize for a short story that was published in a church newspaper. Baldwin's teachers recommended that he go to a public library on 135th Street in Harlem, a place that would become a sanctuary for Baldwin and where he would make a deathbed request for his papers and effects to be deposited.

It was at P.S. 24 that Baldwin met Orilla "Bill" Miller, a young white schoolteacher from the Midwest whom Baldwin named as partially the reason that he "never really managed to hate white people". Among other outings, Miller took Baldwin to see an all-Black rendition of Orson Welles's take on in Lafayette Theatre, from which flowed a lifelong desire to succeed as a playwright. David was reluctant to let his stepson go to the theatre-he saw stage works as sinful and was suspicious of Miller-but his wife insisted, reminding him of the importance of Baldwin's education. Miller later directed the first play that Baldwin ever wrote.

After P.S. 24, Baldwin entered Harlem's Frederick Douglass Junior High School. At Douglass Junior High, Baldwin met two important influences. The first was Herman W. "Bill" Porter, a Black Harvard graduate. Porter was the faculty advisor to the school's newspaper, the Douglass Pilot, where Baldwin would later be the editor. Porter took Baldwin to the library on 42nd Street to research a piece that would turn into Baldwin's first published essay titled "Harlem-Then and Now", which appeared in the autumn 1937 issue of Douglass Pilot. The second of these influences from his time at Douglass was the renowned poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Countee Cullen. Cullen taught French and was a literary advisor in the English department. Baldwin later remarked that he "adored" Cullen's poetry, and said he found the spark of his dream to live in France in Cullen's early impression on him. Baldwin graduated from Frederick Douglass Junior High in 1938.

In 1938, Baldwin applied to and was accepted at De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx, a predominantly white and Jewish school, matriculating there that fall. At De Witt Clinton, Baldwin worked on the school's magazine, the Magpie with Richard Avedon, who went on to become a noted photographer, and Emile Capouya and Sol Stein, who would both become renowned publishers. Baldwin did interviews and editing at the magazine and published a number of poems and other writings. Baldwin finished at De Witt Clinton in 1941. His yearbook listed his ambition as "novelist-playwright". Baldwin's motto in his yearbook was: "Fame is the spur and-ouch!"

During his high school years, uncomfortable with the fact that, unlike many of his peers, he was attracted to men rather than women, Baldwin sought refuge in religion. He first joined the now-demolished Mount Calvary of the Pentecostal Faith Church on Lenox Avenue in 1937, but followed the preacher there, Bishop Rose Artemis Horn, who was affectionately called Mother Horn, when she left to preach at Fireside Pentecostal Assembly. At 14, "Brother Baldwin", as Baldwin was called, first took to Fireside's altar. It was at Fireside Pentecostal, during his mostly extemporaneous sermons, that Baldwin "learned that he had authority as a speaker and could do things with a crowd", says biographer Campbell. Baldwin delivered his final sermon at Fireside Pentecostal in 1941. Baldwin later wrote in the essay "Down at the Cross" that the church "was a mask for self-hatred and despair ... salvation stopped at the church door". He related that he had a rare conversation with David Baldwin "in which they had really spoken to one another", with his stepfather asking, "You'd rather write than preach, wouldn't you?"

Baldwin left school in 1941 to earn money to help support his family. He secured a job helping to build a United States Army depot in New Jersey. In the middle of 1942 Emile Capouya helped Baldwin get a job laying tracks for the military in Belle Mead, New Jersey. The two lived in Rocky Hill and commuted to Belle Mead. In Belle Mead, Baldwin came to know the face of a prejudice that deeply frustrated and angered him and that he named the partial cause of his later emigration out of America. Baldwin's fellow white workmen, who mostly came from the South, derided him for what they saw as his "uppity" ways and his lack of "respect". Baldwin's sharp, ironic wit particularly upset the white Southerners he met in Belle Mead.

In an incident that Baldwin described in " Notes of a Native Son", Baldwin went to a restaurant in Princeton called the Balt where, after a long wait, Baldwin was told that "colored boys" weren't served there. Then, on his last night in New Jersey, in another incident also memorialized in "Notes of a Native Son", Baldwin and a friend went to a diner after a movie only to be told that Black people were not served there. Infuriated, he went to another restaurant, expecting to be denied service once again. When that denial of service came, humiliation and rage heaved up to the surface and Baldwin hurled the nearest object at hand-a water mug-at the waiter, missing her and shattering the mirror behind her. Baldwin and his friend narrowly escaped.

During these years, Baldwin was torn between his desire to write and his need to provide for his family. He took a succession of menial jobs, and feared becoming like his stepfather, who had been unable to properly provide for his family. Fired from the track-laying job, he returned to Harlem in June 1943 to live with his family after taking a meat-packing job. Baldwin would lose the meat-packing job too after falling asleep at the plant. He became listless and unstable, drifting from this odd job to that. Baldwin drank heavily and endured the first of his nervous breakdowns.

Beauford Delaney helped Baldwin cast off his melancholy. In the year before he left De Witt Clinton and at Capuoya's urging, Baldwin had met Delaney, a modernist painter, in Greenwich Village. Delaney would become Baldwin's long-time friend and mentor, and helped demonstrate to Baldwin that a Black man could make his living in art. Moreover, when World War II bore down on the United States the winter after Baldwin left De Witt Clinton, the Harlem that Baldwin knew was atrophying-no longer the bastion of a Renaissance, the community grew more economically isolated, and Baldwin considered his prospects there to be bleak. This led Baldwin to move to Greenwich Village, where Beauford Delaney lived and a place by which he had been fascinated since at least fifteen.

Baldwin lived in several locations in Greenwich Village, first with Delaney, then with a scattering of other friends in the area. He took a job at the Calypso Restaurant, an unsegregated eatery famous for the parade of prominent Black people who dined there. At Calypso, Baldwin worked under Trinidadian restaurateur Connie Williams, whom Delaney had introduced him to. While working at Calypso, Baldwin continued to explore his sexuality, came out to Capouya and another friend, and frequent Calypso guest, Stan Weir. He also had numerous one-night stands with various men, and several relationships with women. Baldwin's major love during these years in the Village was an ostensibly straight Black man named Eugene Worth. Worth introduced Baldwin to the Young People's Socialist League and Baldwin became a Trotskyist for a brief period. Baldwin never expressed his desire for Worth, and Worth died by suicide after jumping from the George Washington Bridge in 1946. In 1944 Baldwin met Marlon Brando, whom he was also attracted to, at a theater class in The New School. The two became fast friends, maintaining a closeness that endured through the Civil Rights Movement and long after. Later, in 1945, Baldwin started a literary magazine called The Generation with Claire Burch, who was married to Brad Burch, Baldwin's classmate from De Witt Clinton. Baldwin's relationship with the Burches soured in the 1950s but was resurrected near the end of his life.

Near the end of 1945 Baldwin met Richard Wright, who had published several years earlier. Baldwin's main designs for that initial meeting were trained on convincing Wright of the quality of an early manuscript for what would become Go Tell It On The Mountain, then called "Crying Holy". Wright liked the manuscript and encouraged his editors to consider Baldwin's work, but an initial $500 advance from Harper & Brothers dissipated with no book to show for the trouble. Harper eventually declined to publish the book at all. Nonetheless, Baldwin sent letters to Wright regularly in the subsequent years and would reunite with Wright in Paris in 1948, though their relationship turned for the worse soon after the Paris reunion.

In these years in the Village, Baldwin made a number of connections in the liberal New York literary establishment, primarily through Worth: Sol Levitas at The New Leader, Randall Jarrell at , Elliot Cohen and Robert Warshow at Commentary, and Philip Rahv at Partisan Review. Baldwin wrote many reviews for The New Leader, but was published for the first time in The Nation in a 1947 review of Maxim Gorki's Best Short Stories. Only one of Baldwin's reviews from this era made it into his later essay collection The Price of the Ticket: a sharply ironic assay of Ross Lockridge's Raintree Countree that Baldwin wrote for The New Leader. Baldwin's first essay, "The Harlem Ghetto", was published a year later in Commentary and explored anti-Semitism among Black Americans. His conclusion in "Harlem Ghetto" was that Harlem was a parody of white America, with white American anti-Semitism included. Jewish people were also the main group of white people that Black Harlem dwellers met, so Jews became a kind of synecdoche for all that the Black people in Harlem thought of white people. Baldwin published his second essay in The New Leader, riding a mild wave of excitement over "Harlem Ghetto": in "Journey to Atlanta", Baldwin uses the diary recollections of his younger brother David, who had gone to Atlanta as part of a singing group, to unleash a lashing of irony and scorn on the South, white radicals, and ideology itself. This essay, too, was well received.

Baldwin tried to write another novel, Ignorant Armies, plotted in the vein of Native Son with a focus on a scandalous murder, but no final product materialized and his strivings toward a novel remained unsated. Baldwin spent two months out of summer 1948 at Shanks Village, a writer's colony in Woodstock, New York. He then published his first work of fiction, a short story called "Previous Condition", in the October 1948 issue of Commentary, about a 20-something Black man who is evicted from his apartment, the apartment a metaphor for white society.

Life in Paris (1948-1957)

Disillusioned by American prejudice against Black people, and wanting to see himself and his writing outside an African-American context, he left the United States and settled in Paris at the age of 24. Baldwin did not want to be read as "merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer." He also hoped to come to terms with his sexual ambivalence and escape from the hopelessness that many young African American men like himself succumbed to in New York.

In 1948, with $1,500 (equivalent to $19,022 in 2023) in funding from a Rosenwald Fellowship, Baldwin attempted a photography and essay book titled Unto the Dying Lamb with a photographer friend named Theodore Pelatowski, whom Baldwin met through Richard Avedon. The book was intended as both a catalog of churches and an exploration of religiosity in Harlem, but it was never finished. The Rosenwald money did, however, grant Baldwin the prospect of consummating a desire he held for several years running: moving to France. This he did: after saying his goodbyes to his mother and his younger siblings, with forty dollars to his name, Baldwin flew from New York to Paris on November 11, 1948, after he gave most of the scholarship funds to his mother. Baldwin would give various explanations for leaving America-sex, Calvinism, an intense sense of hostility which he feared would turn inward-but most of all, his race: the feature of his existence that had theretofore exposed him to a lengthy catalog of humiliations. He hoped for a more peaceable existence in Paris.

In Paris, Baldwin was soon involved in the cultural radicalism of the Left Bank. He started to publish his work in literary anthologies, notably Zero which was edited by his friend Themistocles Hoetis and which had already published essays by Richard Wright.

Baldwin spent nine years living in Paris, mostly in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with various excursions to Switzerland, Spain, and back to the United States. Baldwin's time in Paris was itinerant: he stayed with various friends around the city and in various hotels. Most notable of these lodgings was Hôtel Verneuil, a hotel in Saint-Germain that had collected a motley crew of struggling expatriates, mostly writers. This Verneuil circle spawned numerous friendships that Baldwin relied upon in rough periods. Baldwin was also continuously poor during his time in Paris, with only momentary respites from that condition. In his early years in Saint-Germain, Baldwin acquainted himself with Otto Friedrich, Mason Hoffenberg, Asa Benveniste, Themistocles Hoetis, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Max Ernst, Truman Capote, and Stephen Spender, among many others. Baldwin also met Lucien Happersberger, a Swiss boy, seventeen years old at the time of their first meeting, who came to France in search of excitement. Happersberger became Baldwin's lover, especially during Baldwin's first two years in France, and he became Baldwin's near-obsession for some time afterward. Baldwin and Happersberger remained friends for the next thirty-nine years. Even though his time in Paris was not easy, Baldwin escaped from the aspects of American life that terrified him the most-especially the "daily indignities of racism", according to biographer James Campbell. According to Baldwin's friend and biographer David Leeming: "Baldwin seemed at ease in his Paris life; Jimmy Baldwin the aesthete and lover reveled in the Saint-Germain ambiance."

During his early years in Paris, prior to the publication of Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin wrote several notable works. "The Negro in Paris", first published in The Reporter, explored Baldwin's perception of an incompatibility between Black Americans and Black Africans in Paris, because Black Americans had faced a "depthless alienation from oneself and one's people" that was mostly unknown to Parisian Africans. He also wrote "The Preservation of Innocence", which traced the violence against homosexuals in American life back to the protracted adolescence of America as a society. In the magazine Commentary, he published "Too Little, Too Late", an essay about Black American literature, and he also published "The Death of the Prophet", a short story that grew out of Baldwin's earlier writings of Go Tell It on The Mountain. In the latter work, Baldwin employs a character named Johnnie to trace his bouts of depression back to his inability to resolve the questions of filial intimacy which emanated from Baldwin's relationship with his stepfather. In December 1949, Baldwin was arrested and jailed for receiving stolen goods after an American friend brought him bedsheets that the friend had taken from another Paris hotel. When the charges were dismissed several days later, to the laughter of the courtroom, Baldwin wrote of the experience in his essay "Equal in Paris", also published in Commentary in 1950. In the essay, he expressed his surprise and his bewilderment at how he was no longer a "despised black man", instead, he was simply an American, no different from the white American friend who stole the sheet and was arrested with him.

During these years in Paris, Baldwin also published two of his three scathing critiques of Richard Wright-"Everybody's Protest Novel" in 1949 and "Many Thousands Gone" in 1951. Baldwin's critique of Wright is an extension of his disapprobation toward protest literature. Per biographer David Leeming, Baldwin despised protest literature because it is "concerned with theories and with the categorization of human beings, and however brilliant the theories or accurate the categorizations, they fail because they deny life." Protest writing cages humanity, but, according to Baldwin, "only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves." Baldwin took Wright's Native Son and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, both erstwhile favorites of Baldwin's, as paradigmatic analysis examples of the protest novel's problem. The treatment of Wright's Bigger Thomas by socially earnest white people near the end of Native Son was, for Baldwin, emblematic of white Americans' presumption that for Black people "to become truly human and acceptable, [they] must first become like us. This assumption once accepted, the Negro in America can only acquiesce in the obliteration of his own personality." In these two essays, Baldwin came to articulate what would become a theme of his work: that white racism toward Black Americans was refracted through self-hatred and self-denial-"One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of [white] minds. [...] Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves." Baldwin's relationship with Wright was tense but cordial after the essays, although Baldwin eventually ceased to regard Wright as a mentor. Meanwhile, "Everybody's Protest Novel" had earned Baldwin the label "the most promising young Negro writer since Richard Wright."

Beginning in the winter of 1951, Baldwin and Happersberger took several trips to Loèches-les-Bains in Switzerland, where Happersberger's family owned a small chateau. By the time of the first trip, Happersberger had then entered a heterosexual relationship but grew worried for his friend Baldwin and offered to take Baldwin to the Swiss village. Baldwin's time in the village gave form to his essay " Stranger in the Village", published in Harper's Magazine in October 1953. In that essay, Baldwin described some unintentional mistreatment and offputting experiences at the hands of Swiss villagers who possessed a racial innocence which few Americans could attest to. Baldwin explored how the bitter history which was shared by Black and white Americans had formed an indissoluble web of relations that changed the members of both races: "No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger."

Beauford Delaney's arrival in France in 1953 marked "the most important personal event in Baldwin's life" that year, according to biographer David Leeming. Around the same time, Baldwin's circle of friends shifted away from primarily white bohemians toward a coterie of Black American expatriates: Baldwin grew close to dancer Bernard Hassell; spent significant amounts of time at Gordon Heath's club in Paris; regularly listened to Bobby Short and Inez Cavanaugh's performances at their respective haunts around the city; met Maya Angelou for the first time in these years as she partook in various European renditions of Porgy and Bess; and occasionally met with writers Richard Gibson and Chester Himes, composer Howard Swanson, and even Richard Wright. In 1954, Baldwin took a fellowship at the MacDowell writer's colony in New Hampshire to help the process of writing a new novel and he also won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Also in 1954, Baldwin published the three-act play The Amen Corner which features the preacher Sister Margaret-a fictionalized Mother Horn from Baldwin's time at Fireside Pentecostal-struggling with a difficult inheritance and struggling with alienation from herself and her loved ones on account of her religious fervor. Baldwin spent several weeks in Washington, D.C., and particularly around Howard University while he collaborated with Owen Dodson for the premiere of The Amen Corner, returning to Paris in October 1955.

Baldwin committed himself to a return to the United States in 1957, so in early 1956, he decided to enjoy what would be his last year in France. He became friends with Norman and Adele Mailer, was recognized by the National Institute of Arts and Letters with a grant, and he was set to publish Giovanni's Room. Nevertheless, Baldwin sank deeper into an emotional wreckage. In the summer of 1956-after a seemingly failed affair with a Black musician named Arnold, Baldwin's first serious relationship since Happersberger-Baldwin overdosed on sleeping pills during a suicide attempt. He regretted the attempt almost instantly and he called a friend who had him regurgitate the pills before the doctor arrived. Baldwin went on to attend the Congress of Black Writers and Artists in September 1956, a conference which he found disappointing in its perverse reliance on European themes while nonetheless purporting to extol African originality.

Literary career

Baldwin's first published work, a review of the writer Maxim Gorky, appeared in in 1947. He continued to publish in that magazine at various times in his career and was serving on its editorial board at his death in 1987.

Café de Flore, boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris, May 2019 - Here in the large upstairs heated room (SALLE AU 1er - CLIMATISÉE) in 1952 Baldwin worked on his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953).

In 1953, Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman was published. He began writing it when he was only seventeen and first published it in Paris. His first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son appeared two years later. He continued to experiment with literary forms throughout his career, publishing poetry and plays as well as the fiction and essays for which he was known.

Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room, caused great controversy when it was first published in 1956 due to its explicit homoerotic content. Baldwin again resisted labels with the publication of this work. Despite the reading public's expectations that he would publish works dealing with African American experiences, Giovanni's Room is predominantly about white characters.

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

Baldwin sent the manuscript for Go Tell It on the Mountain from Paris to New York publishing house Alfred A. Knopf on February 26, 1952, and Knopf expressed interest in the novel several months later. To settle the terms of his association with Knopf, Baldwin sailed back to the United States on the SS Île de France in April, where Themistocles Hoetis and Dizzy Gillespie were coincidentally also voyaging-his conversations with both on the ship were extensive. After his arrival in New York, Baldwin spent much of the next three months with his family, whom he had not seen in almost three years. Baldwin grew particularly close to his younger brother, David Jr., and served as best man at David's wedding on June 27. Meanwhile, Baldwin agreed to rewrite parts of Go Tell It on the Mountain in exchange for a $250 advance ($2,868 today) and a further $750 ($8,605 today) paid when the final manuscript was completed. When Knopf accepted the revision in July, they sent the remainder of the advance, and Baldwin was soon to have his first published novel. In the interim, Baldwin published excerpts of the novel in two publications: one excerpt was published as "Exodus" in American Mercury and the other as "Roy's Wound" in New World Writing. Baldwin set sail back to Europe on August 28 and Go Tell It on the Mountain was published in May 1953.

Go Tell It on the Mountain was the product of Baldwin's years of work and exploration since his first attempt at a novel in 1938. In rejecting the ideological manacles of protest literature and the presupposition he thought inherent to such works that "in Negro life there exists no tradition, no field of manners, no possibility of ritual or intercourse", Baldwin sought in Go Tell It on the Mountain to emphasize that the core of the problem was "not that the Negro has no tradition but that there has as yet arrived no sensibility sufficiently profound and tough to make this tradition articulate." Baldwin biographer David Leeming draws parallels between Baldwin's undertaking in Go Tell It on the Mountain and James Joyce's endeavor in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: to "encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." Baldwin himself drew parallels between Joyce's flight from his native Ireland and his own run from Harlem, and Baldwin read Joyce's tome in Paris in 1950, but in Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, it would be the Black American "uncreated conscience" at the heart of the project.

The novel is a bildungsroman which explores the inward struggles of protagonist John Grimes, the illegitimate son of Elizabeth Grimes, to claim his own soul as it lies on the " threshing floor"-a clear allusion to another John, the Baptist born of another Elizabeth. John's struggle is a metaphor for Baldwin's own struggle between escaping the history and heritage that made him, awful though it may be, and plunging deeper into that heritage, to the bottom of his people's sorrows, before he can shuffle off his psychic chains, "climb the mountain", and free himself. John's family members and most of the characters in the novel are blown north in the winds of the Great Migration in search of the American Dream and all are stifled. Florence, Elizabeth, and Gabriel are denied love's reach because racism assured that they could not muster the kind of self-respect that love requires. Racism drives Elizabeth's lover, Richard, to suicide-Richard will not be the last Baldwin character to die thus for that same reason. Florence's lover Frank is destroyed by searing self-hatred of his own Blackness. Gabriel's abuse of the women in his life is downstream from his society's emasculation of him, with mealy-mouthed religiosity only a hypocritical cover.

The phrase "in my father's house" and various similar formulations appear throughout Go Tell It on the Mountain and was even an early title for the novel. The house is a metaphor at several levels of generality: for his own family's apartment in Harlem, for Harlem taken as a whole, for America and its history, and for the "deep heart's core". John's departure from the agony that reigned in his father's house, particularly the historical sources of the family's privations, came through a conversion experience. "Who are these? Who are they" John cries out when he sees a mass of faces as he descends to the threshing floor: "They were the despised and rejected, the wretched and the spat upon, the earth's offscouring; and he was in their company, and they would swallow up his soul." John wants desperately to escape the threshing floor, but "[t]hen John saw the Lord" and "a sweetness" filled him. The midwife of John's conversion is Elisha, the voice of love that had followed him throughout the experience, and whose body filled John with "a wild delight". Thus comes the wisdom that would define Baldwin's philosophy: per biographer David Leeming: "salvation from the chains and fetters-the self-hatred and the other effects-of historical racism could come only from love."

Notes of a Native Son (1955)

It was Baldwin's friend from high school, Sol Stein, who encouraged Baldwin to publish an essay collection reflecting on his work thus far. Baldwin was reluctant, saying he was "too young to publish my memoirs." Stein persisted in his exhortations to his friend Baldwin, and Notes of a Native Son was published in 1955. The book contained practically all the major themes that would continue to run through Baldwin's work: searching for self when racial myths cloud reality; accepting an inheritance ("the conundrum of color is the inheritance of every American"); claiming a birthright ("my birthright was vast, connecting me to all that lives, and to everyone, forever"); the artist's loneliness; love's urgency. All the essays in Notes were published between 1948 and 1955 in Commentary, The New Leader, Partisan Review, The Reporter, and Harper's Magazine. The essays rely on autobiographical detail to convey Baldwin's arguments, as all of Baldwin's work does. Notes was Baldwin's first introduction to many white Americans and became their reference point for his work: Baldwin often got asked, "Why don't you write more essays like the ones in Notes of a Native Son?". The collection's title alludes to both Richard Wright's Native Son and the work of one of Baldwin's favorite writers, Henry James's Notes of a Son and Brother.

Notes of a Native Son is divided into three parts: the first part deals with Black identity as artist and human; the second part negotiates with Black life in America, including what is sometimes considered Baldwin's best essay, the titular "Notes of a Native Son"; the final part takes the expatriate's perspective, looking at American society from beyond its shores. Part One of Notes features "Everybody's Protest Novel" and "Many Thousands Gone", along with "Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough", a 1955 review of Carmen Jones written for Commentary where Baldwin at once extols the sight of an all-Black cast on the silver screen and laments the film's myths about Black sexuality. Part Two reprints "The Harlem Ghetto" and "Journey to Atlanta" as prefaces for "Notes of a Native Son". In "Notes of a Native Son", Baldwin attempts to come to terms with his racial and filial inheritances. Part Three contains "Equal in Paris", "Stranger in the Village", "Encounter on the Seine", and "A Question of Identity". Writing from the expatriate's perspective, Part Three is the sector of Baldwin's corpus that most closely mirrors Henry James's methods: hewing out of one's distance and detachment from the homeland a coherent idea of what it means to be American.

Throughout Notes, when Baldwin is not speaking in first-person, Baldwin takes the view of white Americans. For example, in "The Harlem Ghetto", Baldwin writes: "what it means to be a Negro in America can perhaps be suggested by the myths we perpetuate about him." This earned some quantity of scorn from reviewers: in a review for The New York Times Book Review, Langston Hughes lamented that "Baldwin's viewpoints are half American, half Afro-American, incompletely fused." Some others were nonplussed by the handholding of white audiences, which Baldwin himself would criticize in later works. Nonetheless, most acutely in this stage in his career, Baldwin wanted to escape the rigid categories of protest literature and he viewed adopting a white point-of-view as a good method of doing so.

Shortly after returning to Paris, Baldwin got word from Dial Press that Giovanni's Room had been accepted for publication. Baldwin sent the final manuscript for the book to his editor, James Silberman, on April 8, 1956, and the book was published that autumn.

In the novel, the protagonist David is in Paris while his fiancée Hella is in Spain. David meets the titular Giovanni at the bar that Guillaume owns; the two grow increasingly intimate and David eventually finds his way to Giovanni's room.

David is confused by his intense feelings for Giovanni and has sex with a woman in the spur of the moment to reaffirm his sexuality. Meanwhile, Giovanni begins to prostitute himself and finally commits a murder for which he is guillotined.

David's tale is one of love's inhibition: he cannot "face love when he finds it", writes biographer James Campbell. The novel features a traditional theme: the clash between the restraints of puritanism and the impulse for adventure, emphasizing the loss of innocence that results.

The inspiration for the murder part of the novel's plot is an event dating from 1943 to 1944. A Columbia University undergraduate named Lucien Carr murdered an older, homosexual man, David Kammerer, who made sexual advances on Carr. The two were walking near the banks of the Hudson River when Kammerrer made a pass at Carr, leading Carr to stab Kammerer and dump Kammerer's body in the river.

To Baldwin's relief, the reviews of Giovanni's Room were positive, and his family did not criticize the subject matter.

Even from Paris, Baldwin heard the whispers of a rising Civil Rights Movement in his homeland: in May 1954, the United States Supreme Court ordered schools to desegregate "with all deliberate speed"; in August 1955 the racist murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, and the subsequent acquittal of his killers would burn in Baldwin's mind until he wrote Blues for Mister Charlie; in December Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus; and in February 1956 Autherine Lucy was admitted to the University of Alabama before being expelled when whites rioted. Meanwhile, Baldwin was increasingly burdened by the sense that he was wasting time in Paris. Baldwin began planning a return to the United States in hopes of writing a biography of Booker T. Washington, which he then called Talking at the Gates. Baldwin also received commissions to write a review of Daniel Guérin's Negroes on the March and J. C. Furnas's Goodbye to Uncle Tom for The Nation, as well as to write about William Faulkner and American racism for Partisan Review.

The first project became "The Crusade of Indignation", published in July 1956. Baldwin suggests that the portrait of Black life in Uncle Tom's Cabin "has set the tone for the attitude of American whites towards Negroes for the last one hundred years", and that, given the novel's popularity, this portrait has led to a unidimensional characterization of Black Americans that does not capture the full scope of Black humanity. The second project turned into the essay "William Faulkner and Desegregation". The essay was inspired by Faulkner's March 1956 comment during an interview that he was sure to enlist himself with his fellow white Mississippians in a war over desegregation "even if it meant going out into the streets and shooting Negroes". For Baldwin, Faulkner represented the "go slow" mentality on desegregation that tries to wrestle with the Southerner's peculiar dilemma: the South "clings to two entirely antithetical doctrines, two legends, two histories"; the southerner is "the proud citizen of a free society and, on the other hand, committed to a society that has not yet dared to free itself of the necessity of naked and brutal oppression." Faulkner asks for more time but "the time [...] does not exist. [...] There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation."

Baldwin initially intended to complete Another Country before returning to New York in the fall of 1957 but progress on the novel was trudging along, so he ultimately decided to go back to the United States sooner. Beauford Delaney was particularly upset about Baldwin's departure. Delaney had started to drink a lot and was in the incipient stages of mental deterioration, now complaining about hearing voices. Nonetheless, after a brief visit with Édith Piaf, Baldwin set sail for New York in July 1957.

Baldwin's third and fourth novels, Another Country (1962) and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), are sprawling, experimental works dealing with Black and white characters, as well as with heterosexual, gay, and bisexual characters.

Baldwin's lengthy essay "Down at the Cross" (frequently called The Fire Next Time after the title of the 1963 book in which it was published) similarly showed the seething discontent of the 1960s in novel form. The essay was originally published in two oversized issues of The New Yorker and landed Baldwin on the cover of Time magazine in 1963 while he was touring the South speaking about the restive Civil Rights Movement. Around the time of publication of The Fire Next Time, Baldwin became a known spokesperson for civil rights and a celebrity noted for championing the cause of Black Americans. He frequently appeared on television and delivered speeches on college campuses. The essay talked about the uneasy relationship between Christianity and the burgeoning Black Muslim movement. After publication, several Black nationalists criticized Baldwin for his conciliatory attitude. They questioned whether his message of love and understanding would do much to change race relations in America. The book was consumed by whites looking for answers to the question: What do Black Americans really want? Baldwin's essays never stopped articulating the anger and frustration felt by real-life Black Americans with more clarity and style than any other writer of his generation.

In 1965, Baldwin participated in a much publicised debate with William F. Buckley, on the topic of whether the American dream had been achieved at the expense of African Americans. The debate took place at Cambridge Union in the UK. The spectating student body voted overwhelmingly in Baldwin's favor.

Baldwin's next book-length essay, No Name in the Street (1972), also discussed his own experience in the context of the later 1960s, specifically the assassinations of three of his personal friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Baldwin's writings of the 1970s and 1980s were largely overlooked by critics, although they have received increasing attention in recent years. Several of his essays and interviews of the 1980s discuss homosexuality and homophobia with fervor and forthrightness. Eldridge Cleaver's harsh criticism of Baldwin in and elsewhere and Baldwin's return to southern France contributed to the perception by critics that he was not in touch with his readership. As he had been the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, he became an inspirational figure for the emerging gay rights movement. His two novels written in the 1970s, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979), placed a strong emphasis on the importance of Black American families. He concluded his career by publishing a volume of poetry, Jimmy's Blues (1983), as well as another book-length essay, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), an extended reflection on race inspired by the Atlanta murders of 1979-1981.

The house where James Baldwin lived and died in Saint Paul de Vence, France

Baldwin lived in France for most of his later life. He also spent some time in Switzerland and Turkey. Baldwin settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France in 1970, in an old Provençal house beneath the ramparts of the famous village. His house was always open to his friends who frequently visited him while on trips to the French Riviera. American painter Beauford Delaney made Baldwin's house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence his second home, often setting up his easel in the garden. Delaney painted several colorful portraits of Baldwin. Fred Nall Hollis also befriended Baldwin during this time. Actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier were also regular house guests.

Many of Baldwin's musician friends dropped in during the Jazz à Juan and Nice Jazz Festivals. They included Nina Simone, Josephine Baker (whose sister lived in Nice), Miles Davis, and Ray Charles. In his autobiography, Miles Davis wrote:

I'd read his books and I liked and respected what he had to say. As I got to know Jimmy we opened up to each other and became real great friends. Every time I went to southern France to play Antibes, I would always spend a day or two out at Jimmy's house in St. Paul de Vence. We'd just sit there in that great big beautiful house of his telling us all kinds of stories, lying our asses off.... He was a great man.

Baldwin learned to speak French fluently and developed friendships with French actor Yves Montand and French writer Marguerite Yourcenar who translated Baldwin's play The Amen Corner into French.

The years Baldwin spent in Saint-Paul-de-Vence were also years of work. He spent 17 years, until his death in 1987, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in the south-east between Nice and Cannes. Sitting in front of his sturdy typewriter, he devoted his days to writing and to answering the huge amount of mail he received from all over the world. He wrote several of his last works in his house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, including Just Above My Head in 1979 and Evidence of Things Not Seen in 1985. It was also in his Saint-Paul-de-Vence house that Baldwin wrote his famous "Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis" in November 1970.

Fred Nall Hollis took care of Baldwin on his deathbed. Nall had been friends with Baldwin from the early 1970s when Baldwin would buy him drinks at the Café de Flore. Nall recalled talking to Baldwin shortly before his death about racism in Alabama. In one conversation, Nall told Baldwin "Through your books you liberated me from my guilt about being so bigoted coming from Alabama and because of my homosexuality." Baldwin insisted: "No, you liberated me in revealing this to me."

At the time of Baldwin's death, he was working on an unfinished manuscript called Remember This House, a memoir of his personal recollections of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Following his death, publishing company McGraw-Hill took the unprecedented step of suing his estate to recover the $200,000 advance they had paid him for the book, although the lawsuit was dropped by 1990. The manuscript forms the basis for Raoul Peck's 2016 documentary film I Am Not Your Negro.

Following Baldwin's death, a court battle began over the ownership of his home in France. Baldwin had been in the process of purchasing his house from his landlady, Mlle. Jeanne Faure. At the time of his death, Baldwin did not have full ownership of the home, although it was still Mlle. Faure's intention that the home would stay in the family. His home, nicknamed "Chez Baldwin", has been the center of scholarly work and artistic and political activism. The National Museum of African American History and Culture has an online exhibit titled "Chez Baldwin" which uses his historic French home as a lens to explore his life and legacy. Magdalena J. Zaborowska's 2018 book, Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France, uses photographs of his home and his collections to discuss themes of politics, race, queerness, and domesticity.

Over the years, several efforts were initiated to save the house and convert it into an artist residency. None had the endorsement of the Baldwin estate. In February 2016, Le Monde published an opinion piece by Thomas Chatterton Williams, a contemporary Black American expatriate writer in France, which spurred a group of activists to come together in Paris. In June 2016, American writer and activist Shannon Cain squatted at the house for 10 days in an act of political and artistic protest. Les Amis de la Maison Baldwin Archived September 12, 2020, at the Wayback Machine, a French organization whose initial goal was to purchase the house by launching a capital campaign funded by the U.S. philanthropic sector, grew out of this effort. This campaign was unsuccessful without the support of the Baldwin Estate. Attempts to engage the French government in conservation of the property were dismissed by the mayor of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Joseph Le Chapelain whose statement to the local press claiming "nobody's ever heard of James Baldwin" mirrored those of Henri Chambon, the owner of the corporation that razed his home. Construction was completed in 2019 on the apartment complex that now stands where Chez Baldwin once stood.

In all of Baldwin's works, but particularly in his novels, the main characters are twined up in a "cage of reality" that sees them fighting for their soul against the limitations of the human condition or against their place at the margins of a society consumed by various prejudices. Baldwin connects many of his main characters-John in Go Tell It On The Mountain, Rufus in Another Country, Richard in Blues for Mister Charlie, and Giovanni in Giovanni's Room-as sharing a reality of restriction: per biographer David Leeming, each is "a symbolic cadaver in the center of the world depicted in the given novel and the larger society symbolized by that world". Each reaches for an identity within their own social environment, and sometimes-as in If Beale Street Could Talk's Fonny and Tell me How Long The Train's Been Gone's Leo-they find such an identity, imperfect but sufficient to bear the world. The singular theme in the attempts of Baldwin's characters to resolve their struggle for themselves is that such resolution only comes through love. Here is Leeming at some length:

Love is at the heart of the Baldwin philosophy. Love for Baldwin cannot be safe; it involves the risk of commitment, the risk of removing the masks and taboos placed on us by society. The philosophy applies to individual relationships as well as to more general ones. It encompasses sexuality as well as politics, economics, and race relations. And it emphasizes the dire consequences, for individuals and racial groups, of the refusal to love.

Baldwin (right of center) with Hollywood actors Charlton Heston (left) and Marlon Brando (right) at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Sidney Poitier (rear) and Harry Belafonte (right of Brando) can also be seen in the crowd.

Baldwin returned to the United States in the summer of 1957 while the civil rights legislation of that year was being debated in Congress. He had been powerfully moved by the image of a young girl, Dorothy Counts, braving a mob in an attempt to desegregate schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv had suggested he report on what was happening in the American South. Baldwin was nervous about the trip but he made it, interviewing people in Charlotte (where he met Martin Luther King Jr.), and Montgomery, Alabama. The result was two essays, one published in Harper's magazine ("The Hard Kind of Courage"), the other in Partisan Review ("Nobody Knows My Name"). Subsequent Baldwin articles on the movement appeared in Mademoiselle, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, where in 1962 he published the essay that he called "Down at the Cross", and the New Yorker called "Letter from a Region of My Mind". Along with a shorter essay from The Progressive, the essay became The Fire Next Time.: 94-99, 155-56

While he wrote about the movement, Baldwin aligned himself with the ideals of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Joining CORE gave him the opportunity to travel across the American South lecturing on his views of racial inequality. His insights into both the North and South gave him a unique perspective on the racial problems the United States was facing.

In 1963 he conducted a lecture tour of the South for CORE, traveling to Durham and Greensboro in North Carolina, and New Orleans. During the tour, he lectured to students, white liberals, and anyone else listening about his racial ideology, an ideological position between the "muscular approach" of Malcolm X and the nonviolent program of Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin expressed the hope that socialism would take root in the United States:

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

-James Baldwin

By the spring of 1963, the mainstream press began to recognize Baldwin's incisive analysis of white racism and his eloquent descriptions of the Negro's pain and frustration. In fact, Time featured Baldwin on the cover of its May 17, 1963, issue. "There is not another writer", said Time, "who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South."

In a cable Baldwin sent to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy during the Birmingham, Alabama ( Birmingham riot of 1963) Baldwin blamed the violence in Birmingham on the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, Mississippi Senator James Eastland, and President Kennedy for failing to use "the great prestige of his office as the moral forum which it can be." Attorney General Kennedy invited Baldwin to meet with him over breakfast, and that meeting was followed up with a second, when Kennedy met with Baldwin and others Baldwin had invited to Kennedy's Manhattan apartment. This meeting is discussed in Howard Simon's 1999 play, James Baldwin: A Soul on Fire. The delegation included Kenneth B. Clark, a psychologist who had played a key role in the Brown v. Board of Education decision; actor Harry Belafonte, singer Lena Horne, writer Lorraine Hansberry, and activists from civil rights organizations. Although most of the attendees of this meeting left feeling "devastated", the meeting was an important one in voicing the concerns of the civil rights movement, and it provided exposure of the civil rights issue not just as a political issue but also as a moral issue.

James Baldwin's FBI file contains 1,884 pages of documents, collected from 1960 until the early 1970s. During that era of surveillance of American writers, the FBI accumulated 276 pages on Richard Wright, 110 pages on Truman Capote, and just nine pages on Henry Miller.

Baldwin also made a prominent appearance at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, with Belafonte and long-time friends Sidney Poitier and Marlon Brando.

Baldwin's sexuality clashed with his activism. The civil rights movement was hostile to homosexuals. The only out gay men in the movement were Baldwin and Bayard Rustin. Rustin and King were very close, as Rustin received credit for the success of the March on Washington. Many were bothered by Rustin's sexual orientation. King himself spoke on the topic of sexual orientation in a school editorial column during his college years, and in reply to a letter during the 1950s, where he treated it as a mental illness which an individual could overcome. King's key advisor, Stanley Levison, also stated that Baldwin and Rustin were "better qualified to lead a homo-sexual movement than a civil rights movement". The pressure later resulted in King distancing himself from both men. Despite his enormous efforts within the movement, due to his sexuality, Baldwin was excluded from the inner circles of the civil rights movement and was conspicuously uninvited to speak at the end of the March on Washington.

At the time, Baldwin was neither in the closet nor open to the public about his sexual orientation. Although his novels, specifically Giovanni's Room and Just Above My Head, had openly gay characters and relationships, Baldwin himself never openly stated his sexuality. In his book, Kevin Mumford points out how Baldwin went his life "passing as straight rather than confronting homophobes with whom he mobilized against racism".

When the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing happened in Birmingham three weeks after the March on Washington, Baldwin called for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience in response to this "terrifying crisis". He traveled to Selma, Alabama, where SNCC had organized a voter registration drive; he watched mothers with babies and elderly men and women standing in long lines for hours, as armed deputies and state troopers stood by-or intervened to smash a reporter's camera or use cattle prods on SNCC workers. After his day of watching, he spoke in a crowded church, blaming Washington-"the good white people on the hill". Returning to Washington, he told a New York Post reporter the federal government could protect Negroes-it could send federal troops into the South. He blamed the Kennedys for not acting.: 191, 195-98  In March 1965, Baldwin joined marchers who walked 50 miles from Selma, Alabama ( Selma to Montgomery Marches), to the capitol in Montgomery under the protection of federal troops.

Nonetheless, he rejected the label "civil rights activist", or that he had participated in a civil rights movement, instead agreeing with Malcolm X's assertion that if one is a citizen, one should not have to fight for one's civil rights. In a 1964 interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Baldwin rejected the idea that the civil rights movement was an outright revolution, instead calling it "a very peculiar revolution because it has to... have its aims the establishment of a union, and a... radical shift in the American mores, the American way of life... not only as it applies to the Negro obviously, but as it applies to every citizen of the country." In a 1979 speech at UC Berkeley, Baldwin called it, instead, "the latest slave rebellion".

In 1968, Baldwin signed the " Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse to make income tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

A great influence on Baldwin was the painter Beauford Delaney. In The Price of the Ticket (1985), Baldwin describes Delaney as:

... the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognized as my teacher and I as his pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow.

Later support came from Richard Wright, whom Baldwin called "the greatest black writer in the world". Wright and Baldwin became friends, and Wright helped Baldwin secure the Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Award. Baldwin's essay "Notes of a Native Son" and his collection Notes of a Native Son allude to Wright's novel . In Baldwin's 1949 essay "Everybody's Protest Novel", however, he indicated that Native Son, like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, lacked credible characters and psychological complexity, and the friendship between the two authors ended. Interviewed by Julius Lester, however, Baldwin explained: "I knew Richard and I loved him. I was not attacking him; I was trying to clarify something for myself."

In 1949 Baldwin met and fell in love with Lucien Happersberger, a boy aged 17, though Happersberger's marriage three years later left Baldwin distraught. When the marriage ended, they later reconciled with Happersberger staying by Baldwin's deathbed at his house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Happersberger died on August 21, 2010, in Switzerland.

Baldwin was a close friend of the singer, pianist, and civil rights activist Nina Simone. Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, and Baldwin helped Simone learn about the Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin also provided her with literary references influential on her later work. Baldwin and Hansberry met with Robert F. Kennedy, along with Kenneth Clark and Lena Horne and others in an attempt to persuade Kennedy of the importance of civil rights legislation.

Baldwin influenced the work of French painter Philippe Derome, whom he met in Paris in the early 1960s. Baldwin also knew Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Billy Dee Williams, Huey P. Newton, Nikki Giovanni, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet (with whom he campaigned on behalf of the Black Panther Party), Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, Rip Torn, Alex Haley, Miles Davis, Amiri Baraka, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini, Margaret Mead, Josephine Baker, Allen Ginsberg, Chinua Achebe, and Maya Angelou. He wrote at length about his "political relationship" with Malcolm X. He collaborated with childhood friend Richard Avedon on the 1964 book Nothing Personal.

Baldwin was fictionalized as the character Marion Dawes in the 1967 novel The Man Who Cried I Am by John A. Williams.

Maya Angelou called Baldwin her "friend and brother" and credited him for "setting the stage" for her 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Baldwin was made a Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur by the French government in 1986.

Baldwin was also a close friend of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison. Upon his death, Morrison wrote a eulogy for Baldwin that appeared in The New York Times. In the eulogy, entitled "Life in His Language", Morrison credits Baldwin as being her literary inspiration and the person who showed her the true potential of writing. She writes:

You knew, didn't you, how I needed your language and the mind that formed it? How I relied on your fierce courage to tame wildernesses for me? How strengthened I was by the certainty that came from knowing you would never hurt me? You knew, didn't you, how I loved your love? You knew. This then is no calamity. No. This is jubilee. "Our crown," you said, "has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do," you said, "is wear it"

Literary critic Harold Bloom characterized Baldwin as "among the most considerable moral essayists in the United States".

Baldwin's influence on other writers has been profound: Toni Morrison edited the Library of America's first two volumes of Baldwin's fiction and essays: Early Novels & Stories (1998) and Collected Essays (1998). A third volume, Later Novels (2015), was edited by Darryl Pinckney, who had delivered a talk on Baldwin in February 2013 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of The New York Review of Books, during which he stated: "No other black writer I'd read was as literary as Baldwin in his early essays, not even Ralph Ellison. There is something wild in the beauty of Baldwin's sentences and the cool of his tone, something improbable, too, this meeting of Henry James, the Bible, and Harlem."

One of Baldwin's richest short stories, " Sonny's Blues", appears in many anthologies of short fiction used in introductory college literature classes.

A street in San Francisco, Baldwin Court in the Bayview neighborhood is named after Baldwin.

In 1987, Kevin Brown, a photojournalist from Baltimore founded the National James Baldwin Literary Society. The group organizes free public events celebrating Baldwin's life and legacy.

In 1992, Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, established the James Baldwin Scholars program, an urban outreach initiative, in honor of Baldwin, who taught at Hampshire in the early 1980s. The JBS Program provides talented students of color from under-served communities an opportunity to develop and improve the skills necessary for college success through coursework and tutorial support for one transitional year, after which Baldwin scholars may apply for full matriculation to Hampshire or any other four-year college program.

Spike Lee's 1996 film Get on the Bus includes a Black gay character, played by Isaiah Washington, who punches a homophobic character, saying: "This is for James Baldwin and Langston Hughes."

His name appears in the lyrics of the Le Tigre song " Hot Topic", released in 1999.

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante included James Baldwin on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

Baldwin commemorated on a votive candle, 2022

In 2005, the United States Postal Service created a first-class postage stamp dedicated to Baldwin, which featured him on the front with a short biography on the back of the peeling paper.

In 2012, Baldwin was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display that celebrates LGBT history and people.

In 2014, East 128th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues was named "James Baldwin Place" to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Baldwin's birth. He lived in the neighborhood and attended P.S. 24. Readings of Baldwin's writing were held at The National Black Theatre and a month-long art exhibition featuring works by New York Live Arts and artist Maureen Kelleher. The events were attended by Council Member Inez Dickens, who led the campaign to honor Harlem native's son; also taking part were Baldwin's family, theatre and film notables, and members of the community.

Also in 2014, Baldwin was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood celebrating LGBTQ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields."

Also in 2014, The Social Justice Hub at The New School's newly opened University Center was named the Baldwin Rivera Boggs Center after activists Baldwin, Sylvia Rivera, and Grace Lee Boggs.

In 2016, Raoul Peck released his documentary film I Am Not Your Negro. It is based on James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript, Remember This House. It is a 93-minute journey into Black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights Movement to the present of Black Lives Matter. It is a film that questions Black representation in Hollywood and beyond.

In 2017, Scott Timberg wrote an essay for the Los Angeles Times ("30 years after his death, James Baldwin is having a new pop culture moment") in which he noted existing cultural references to Baldwin, 30 years after his death, and concluded: "So Baldwin is not just a writer for the ages, but a scribe whose work-as squarely as George Orwell's-speaks directly to ours."

In June 2019 Baldwin's residence on the Upper West Side was given landmark designation by New York City's Landmarks Preservation Commission.

In June 2019, Baldwin was one of the inaugural fifty American "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument (SNM) in New York City's Stonewall Inn. The SNM is the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history, and the wall's unveiling was timed to take place during the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

At the Paris Council of June 2019, the city of Paris voted unanimously by all political groups to name a place in the capital in the name of James Baldwin. The project was confirmed on June 19, 2019, and announced for the year 2020. In 2021, Paris City Hall announced that the writer would give his name to the very first media library in the 19th arrondissement, which is scheduled to open in 2023.

On February 1, 2024, Google celebrated James Baldwin with a Google Doodle.

In 2024 Baldwin appeared as a character in Feud: Capote vs. The Swans played by Chris Chalk.

Guggenheim Fellowship, 1954.

Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust Award

Foreign Drama Critics Award

George Polk Memorial Award, 1963

MacDowell fellowships: 1954, 1958, 1960[233]

Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur, 1986

Notes of a Native Son (British edition) cover

1998. Early Novels & Stories: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, Going to Meet the Man, edited by Toni Morrison.[234]

2015. Later Novels: Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, If Beale Street Could Talk, Just Above My Head, edited by Darryl Pinckney.[235]

Baldwin published six short stories in various magazines between 1948 and 1960:

Five of these stories were collected in his 1965 collection, Going to Meet the Man, along with three other stories:

An uncollected story, "The Death of the Prophet," was eventually collected in The Cross of Redemption.

Many essays by Baldwin were published for the first time as part of collections, which also included older, individually-published works (such as above) of Baldwin's as well. These collections include:

1955. Notes of a Native Son

"Autobiographical Notes"

1949. "Everybody's Protest Novel". Partisan Review (June issue)

1952. "Many Thousands Gone". Partisan Review

1955. "Life Straight in De Eye." (Later retitled "Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough") Commentary.

1948. "The Harlem Ghetto". Commentary

1948. "Journey to Atlanta." New Leader

1955. "Me and My House." (Later retitled "Notes of a Native Son") Harper's.

1950. "The Negro in Paris." (Later retitled "Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown") Reporter.

1954. "A Question of Identity." PR.

1949. "Equal in Paris." PR

1961. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son

1959. "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American". The New York Times Book Review.

1957. "Princes and Powers". Encounter.

1960. "Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem". Esquire.

1961. "A Negro Assays the Negro Mood". New York Times Magazine.

1958. "The Hard Kind of Courage". Harper's Magazine.

1959. "Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South". Partisan Review.

1956. "Faulkner and Desegregation". Partisan Review.

"In Search of a Majority" (based on a 1960 address delivered at Kalamazoo College)

1954. "Gide as Husband and Homosexual". (Later retitled "The Male Prison") The New Leader.

1960. "Notes for a Hypothetical Novel." (based on a 1960 address delivered at an Esquire Magazine symposium)

1960. "The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman". (Later retitled "The Northern Protestant") Esquire.

"Alas, Poor Richard" (two of the three parts appeared in earlier form"

1961. "The Survival of Richard Wright". (Later retitled "Eight Men") Reporter.

1961. "Richard Wright". (Later retitled "The Exile") .

1961. "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy Norman Mailer." Esquire

1963. The Fire Next Time

1972. No Name in the Street

1976. The Devil Finds Work - a book-length essay published by Dial Press.

1985. The Evidence of Things Not Seen

1985. The Price of the Ticket (This book is a collection of Baldwin's writings on race. Many of the items included are reprinted from Baldwin's first five books of nonfiction, but several are collected here for the first time:

"The Price of the Ticket"

1948. "Lockridge: The American Myth." New Leader.

1956. "The Crusade of Indignation." The Nation

1959. "On Catfish Row: Porgy and Bess in the Movies." Commentary.

1960. "They Can't Turn Back." Mademoiselle.

1961. "The Dangerous Road before Martin Luther King." Harper's.

1961. "The New Lost Generation." Esquire.

1962. "The Creative Process." Creative America.

1962. "Color." Esquire.

1963. "A Talk to Teachers"

1964. "Nothing Personal." (originally text for a book of photographs by Richard Avedon)

1964. "Words of a Native Son." Playboy.

1965. "The American Dream and the American Negro." (Based on remarks by Baldwin made in his debate with William F. Buckley)

1965. "The White Man's Guilt." Ebony.

1966. "A Report from Occupied Territory." The Nation.

1967. "Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White". New York Times Magazine.

1968. "White Racism or World Community?" Ecumenical Review.

1969. "Sweet Lorraine." Esquire.

1976. "How One Black Man Came To Be an American: A Review of Roots." The New York Times Book Review.

1977. "An Open Letter to Mr. Carter." The New York Times.

1977. "Every Good-Bye Ain't Gone." New York.

1979. "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?" The New York Times.

1979. "An Open Letter to the Born Again." The Nation.

1980. "Dark Days." Esquire.

1980. "Notes on the House of Bondage." The Nation.

1985. "Here Be Dragons." (also titled "Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood") Playboy.

1998. Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, The Devil Finds Work, Other Essays, edited by Toni Morrison.

1947. "Smaller than Life." The Nation.

1947. "History as Nightmare." New Leader.

1948. "The Image of the Negro." Commentary.

1949. "Preservation of Innocence." Zero.

1951. "The Negro at Home and Abroad." Reporter.

1959. "Sermons and Blues." The New York Times Book Review.

1964. "This Nettle, Danger..." Show.

1965. "On the Painter Beauford Delaney." Transition

1977. "Last of the Great masters." The New York Times Book Review.

1984. "Introduction to Notes of a Native Son."

2010. The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings.

1959. "Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Personal Notes." Culture for the Millions.1961

1959. "A Word from Writer Directly to Reader." Fiction of the Fifties.

1961. From Nationalism, Colonialism, and The United States: One Minte to Twelve - A Forum.

1966. "Theatre: The Negro In and Out." Negro Digest.

1961. "Is A Raisin in the Sun a Lemon in the Dark?" Tone.

1962. "As Much Truth as One Can Bear." The New York Times Book Review

1962. "Geraldine Page: Bird of Light." Show

1962. "From What's the Reason Why?: A Symposium by Best-Selling Authors." The New York Times Book Review.

1963. "The Artist's Struggle for Integrity." Liberation.

1963. "We Can Change the Country." Liberation.

1964. Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare." The Observer.

1964. "The Uses of the Blues." Playboy.

1964. "What Price Freedom?" Freedomways.

1966. "The White Problem in America." 100 Years of Emancipation.

1968. "Black Power" The Guardian.

1969. "The Price May Be Too High." The New York Times.

1969. "The Nigger We Invent." Integrated Education.

1974. "Speech from the Soledad Rally."

1976. "A Challenge to Bicentennial Candidates." Los Angeles Times.

1978. The News from All the Northern Cities Is, to Understate It, Grim; the State of the Union Is Catastrophic." The New York Times.

1979. "Lorraine Hansberry at the Summit." Freedomways.

1979. "Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption." The Edinburgh Review.

1980. "Black English: A Dishonest Argument." Black English and the Education of Black Children and Youth.

1983. "This Far and No Further." Time Capsule.

1984. "On Being 'White'... and Other Lies." Essence.

1988. "Blacks and Jews." Black Scholar.

1987. "To Crush a Serpent." Playboy.

1963. "The Fight: Patterson vs. Liston." Nugget.

1968. "Sidney Poitier." Look.

1963. "Letters from a Journey." Harper's.

1967. "The International War Crimes Tribunal." Freedomways.

1967. "Anti-Semitism and Black Power." Freedomways.

1971. "An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis. The New York Review of Books.

1982. "A Letter to Prisoners." Inside/Out.

1985. "The Fire This Time: Letter to the Bishop." The New Statesman.

1963. "envoi to A Quarter Century of Unamericana 1938-1963; A Tragico-Comical Memorabilia of HUAC.

1965. "preface to Memoirs of a Bastard Angel by Harold Norse.

1967. "preface to The Negro in New York: An Informal Social history, 1626-1940."

1970. "preface to Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether."

1978. "preface to A Lonely Rage by Bobby Seale."

1947. "Maxim Gorki as Artist." The Nation.

1947. "Battle Hymn." New Leader.

1947. "When the War Hit Brownsville." New Leader.

1947. "Dead Hand of Caldwell." New Leader

1947. "Without Grisly Gaiety." New Leader.

1948. "Bright World Darkened." New Leader.

1948. "Charge within a Channel." New Leader.

1948. "Modern Rover Boys." New Leader.

1948. "Literary Grab bag." New Leader.

1948. "Present and Future." New Leader.

1949. "Too Late, Too Late." Commentary.

1959. "War Lord of the Crocodiles." New York Times Book World.

1961. "Views of a Near-Sighted Cannoneer." The Village Voice.

1967. "God's Country." The New York Review of Books.

1982. "Roger Wilkins: A Black Man's Odyssey in White America." The Washington Post Book World.

Contributions to anthologies

1961. "James Baldwin on the Negro Actor." Urbanite. Reprinted in Anthology of the American Negro in the Theatre.

1969. "From Dreams of Love to Dreams of Terror." The Los Angeles Free Press. Reprinted in Natural Enemies? Youth and the Clash of Generations.

1971. "A Talk to Harlem Teachers" in Harlem, U.S.A.

1973. "Compressions: L'Homme et La Machine" in Cesar: Compressions d'or by Cesar Baldaccini.

1977. "In Search of a Basis for Mutual Understanding and Racial Harmony" in The Nature of a Humane Society.

Uncollected Essays

1953. "On an Author: Excerpts from Letters." New York Herald Tribune Book Review.

1953. "Two Protests against Protest." Perspectives USA.

1954. "Paris Letter: A Question of Identity." PR.

1961. "They Will Wait No More." Negro Digest.

1962. "The Negro's Role in American Culture: A Symposium." Negro Digest.

1963. "The Negro Writer in America: A Symposium." Negro Digest.

1963. "At the Root of the Negro Problem." Time Magazine

1963. "There's a Bill Due That Has to Be Paid." Life.

1963. "'Pour Liberer les Blancs...' (Propos Recueillis par François Bondy." Prevues.

1964. "The Creative Dilemma: The War of an Artist with His Society Is a Lover's War." Sat R.

1965. "What Kind of Men Cry?" Ebony. (written with Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and others)

1968. "A Letter to Americans." Freedomways.

1968. "Baldwin Excoriates Church for Hypocritical Stance." Afro-American

1969. "Our Divided Society: A Challenge to Religious Education." Religious Education.

1970. "Dear Sister..." The Guardian.

1954. The Amen Corner (play)

1964. Blues for Mister Charlie (play)

1972. One Day When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" (screenplay)

1983. Jimmy's Blues (poems)

1990. A Lover's Question (album based on poems by Baldwin). Les Disques Du Crépuscule - TWI 928-2.

2014. Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems. (poems)

2016. Baldwin for Our Times: Writings from James Baldwin for an Age of Sorrow and Struggle, with notes and introduction by Rich Blint. (poems and essays)

1963-06-24. "A Conversation With James Baldwin", is a television interview recorded by WGBH following the Baldwin-Kennedy meeting.

1963-02-04. Take This Hammer is a television documentary made with Richard O. Moore on KQED about Blacks in San Francisco in the late 1950s.

1965-06-14. "Debate: Baldwin vs. Buckley", recorded by the BBC is a one-hour television special program featuring a debate between Baldwin and leading American conservative William F. Buckley, Jr., at the Cambridge Union, Cambridge University, England.

1971. Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris. Documentary. Directed by Terence Dixon.

1974. James Baldwin talks about race, political struggle, and the human condition at the Wheeler Hall, Berkeley, CA.

1975. "Assignment America; 119; Conversation with a Native Son", from WNET features a television conversation between Baldwin and Maya Angelou.

1976. "Pantechnicon; James Baldwin", is a radio program recorded by WGBH. Baldwin discusses his new book called The Devil Finds Work which is representative of the way Baldwin takes a look at the American films and myth.

1. ^ MonkEL (August 19, 2011). "James Baldwin: The Writer and the Witness". npg.si.edu.

2. ^ Gounardoo, Jean-François; Rodgers, Joseph J. (1992). The Racial Problem in the Works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Greenwood Press. pp. 158, 148-200.

3. Baldwin, James. 1985. "The Discovery of What it Means to be an American." Ch. 18 in ^ The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985. New York: St. Martin's Press. p. 171.

4. 1634-1699: ^ McCusker, J. J. (1997). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States: Addenda et Corrigenda (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1700-1799: McCusker, J. J. (1992). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1800-present: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "Consumer Price Index (estimate) 1800-".

5. ^ Field, Douglas (2005). "Passing as a Cold War novel: anxiety and assimilation in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room". In Field, Douglas (ed.). American Cold War Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 88-106.

6. Balfour, Lawrie (2001). The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy. Cornell University Press. p. 51. ISBN 978-0-8014-8698-2.

7. ^ Goodman, Paul (June 24, 1962). "Not Enough of a World to Grow In (review of Another Country)". The New York Times.

8. James Baldwin Debates William F. Buckley (1965) on YouTube

9. Baldwin, James. November 19, 1970. "^ An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis." via History is a Weapon.

10. ^ Baldwin, James (January 7, 1971). "An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis". New York Review of Books. ISSN 0028-7504.

11. ^ Liukkonen, Petri. "James Baldwin". Books and Writers. Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on November 24, 2010.

12. ^ Out, vol. 14, Here, February 2006, p. 32, ISSN 1062-7928, Baldwin died of stomach cancer in St. Paul de Vence, France, on December 1, 1987.

13. Daniels, Lee A. (December 2, 1987), ^ "James Baldwin, Eloquent Writer In Behalf of Civil Rights, Is Dead", The New York Times.

14. "McGraw-Hill Drops Baldwin Suit". The New York Times, May 19, 1990.

15. Young, Deborah, ^ "'I Am Not Your Negro': Film Review | TIFF 2016". The Hollywood Reporter, September 20, 2016.

16. ^ Zaborowska, Magdalena J. (2018). ""You have to get where you are before you can see where you've been": Searching for Black Queer Domesticity at Chez Baldwin". James Baldwin Review. 4: 72-91. doi:10.7227/JBR.4.6 - via ResearchGate.

17. ^ "National Press Club Luncheon Speakers, James Baldwin, December 10, 1986". National Press Club via Library of Congress.

18. ^ "The Negro's Push for Equality (cover title); Races: Freedom-Now (page title)". The Nation. Time. Vol. 81, no. 20. May 17, 1963. pp. 23-27. [American] history, as Baldwin sees it, is an unending story of man's inhumanity to man, of the white's refusal to see the Black simply as another human being, of the white man's delusions and the Negro's demoralization.

19. ^ Baldwin FBI File, 1225, 104; Reider, Word of the Lord Is upon Me, 92.

20. ^ Brustein, Robert (December 17, 1964). "Everybody Knows My Name". New York Review of Books. Nothing Personal pretends to be a ruthless indictment of contemporary America, but the people likely to buy this extravagant volume are the subscribers to fashion magazines, while the moralistic authors of the work are themselves pretty fashionable, affluent, and chic.

21. Tucker, Jeffrey Allen (2018). ^ Conversations with John A. Williams. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-4968-1817-1, p 129.

22. Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). ^ 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.

23. ^ "THE YEAR OF JAMES BALDWIN: A 90TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION | NAMING OF "JAMES BALDWIN PLACE" IN HARLEM". Columbia University School of Fine Arts. July 24, 2014. Archived from the original on June 4, 2016.

24. ^ "Six historical New York City LGBTQ sites given landmark designation". NBC News. June 19, 2019.

25. ^ Morrison, Toni, ed. 1998. Early Novels & Stories: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, Going to Meet the Man. Library of America. ISBN 978-1-883011-51-2.

26. ^ Pinckney, Darryl, ed. 2015. Later Novels: Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, If Beale Street Could Talk, Just Above My Head. Library of America. ISBN 978-1-59853-454-2.

27. Baldwin, James. October 1953. "^ Stranger in the Village (subscription required)." Harper's Magazine.

28. Baldwin, James. April 9, 1967. "^ Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White." New York Times Magazine. Retrieved June 22, 2020.

29. ^ Morrison, Toni, ed.1998. Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, The Devil Finds Work, Other Essays. Library of America. ISBN 978-1-883011-52-9.

30. Baldwin, James. [2010] 2011. ^ The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited by R. Kenan. US: Vintage International. ISBN 978-0307275967. ASIN 0307275965.

31. ^ "'Assignment America; 119; Conversation with a Native Son,' from WNET features a television conversation between Baldwin and Maya Angelou".

James Baldwin early manuscripts and papers, 1941-1945 Archived May 21, 2013, at the Wayback Machine (2.7 linear feet) are housed at Yale University Beinecke Library

James Baldwin Photographs and Papers, selected manuscripts, correspondence, and photographic portraits from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University

James Baldwin Papers, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library (30.4 linear feet).

Gerstner, David A. Queer Pollen: White Seduction, Black Male Homosexuality, and the Cinematic. University of Illinois Press, 2011. Chapter 2.

Letters to David Moses at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library

James Baldwin Playboy Interview, archival materials held by Princeton University Library Special Collections

Audio files of speeches and interviews at UC Berkeley

"A Conversation With James Baldwin", 1963-06-24, WGBH

Transcript of interview with Dr. Kenneth Clark

Works by James Baldwin at Open Library

James Baldwin at IMDb

Appearances on C-SPAN

Altman, Elias, "Watered Whiskey: James Baldwin's Uncollected Writings", The Nation, April 13, 2011.

Elgrably, Jordan (Spring 1984). "James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78". Paris Review. Spring 1984 (91).

Gwin, Minrose. "Southernspaces.org" March 11, 2008. Southern Spaces.

James Baldwin talks about race, political struggle and the human condition Archived April 25, 2016, at the Wayback Machine at the Wheeler Hall, Berkeley, CA, in 1974

Comprehensive Resource of James Baldwin Information at the Wayback Machine (archived April 20, 2008)

James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, distributed by California Newsreel

Baldwin's American Masters page

"Writings of James Baldwin" from C-SPAN's American Writers: A Journey Through History

Zaborowska, Magdalena J., "James Baldwin", The Literary Encyclopedia, October 25, 2002.

See Baldwin's 1963 film Take This Hammer, made with Richard O. Moore, about Blacks in San Francisco in the late 1950s.

Video: Baldwin debate with William F. Buckley (via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center)

Discussion with Afro-American Studies Dept. at UC Berkeley on YouTube

Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles

The James Baldwin Collective Archived August 30, 2018, at the Wayback Machine in Paris, France

FBI files on James Baldwin

FBI Docs, contains information about James Baldwin's destroyed FBI files and FBI files about him held by the National Archives

A Look Inside James Baldwin's 1,884 Page FBI File

James Baldwin at Biography.com

Portrait of James Baldwin, 1964. Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive (Collection 1429). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Portrait of James Baldwin, 1985. Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive (Collection 1429). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

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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 among the best English-language novels.

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Center for Civic Reflection - Community, Leadership, Dialog

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Published in 1955, Baldwin's powerful essay recounts his stay in a tiny Swiss village in which "from all available evidence no black man had ever set foot." He contrasts his experience as a black man in this village with his experience as a black man in the United States, and from this point of view offers an insightful critique of the history of American race relations.

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James Baldwin titled his last chapter of Notes of a Native Son as "Stranger in the Village". I think that is this chapter Baldwin was trying to express how he felt and wanted to share his experiences in the Swiss village in which he stayed during the winter and summer months.

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Hi All! You have the honor of reading my very first blog post as an admin. If you see something that should be fixed to enable discussion, please let me know. Because believe me, if you're thinking "surely she can't be that technologically clueless," I assure you I am indeed just that clueless.

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This detailed study guide includes chapter summaries and analysis, important themes, significant quotes, and more - everything you need to ace your essay or test on Notes of a Native Son!

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Then the bus began driving into clouds, and between one cloud and the next we caught glimpses of the town below. It was suppertime and the town was a constellation of yellow points. We arrived thirty minutes after leaving that town, which was called Leuk. The train to Leuk had come in from Visp, the train from Visp had come from Bern, and the train before that was from Zurich, from which I had started out in the afternoon. Three trains, a bus, and a short stroll, all of it through beautiful country, and then we reached Leukerbad in darkness. So Leukerbad, not far in terms of absolute distance, was not all that easy to get to. August 2, 2014: it was James Baldwin's birthday. Were he alive, he would be turning ninety. He is one of those people just on the cusp of escaping the contemporary and slipping into the historical-John Coltrane would have turned eighty-eight this year; Martin Luther King, Jr., would have turned eighty-five-people who could still be with us but who feel, at times, very far away, as though they lived centuries ago.

James Baldwin left Paris and came to Leukerbad for the first time in 1951. His lover Lucien Happersberger's family had a chalet in a village up in the mountains. And so Baldwin, who was depressed and distracted at the time, went, and the village (which is also called Loèche-les-Bains) proved to be a refuge for him. His first trip was in the summer, and lasted two weeks. Then he returned, to his own surprise, for two more winters. His first novel, "Go Tell It on the Mountain," found its final form here. He had struggled with the book for eight years, and he finally finished it in this unlikely retreat. He wrote something else, too, an essay called "Stranger in the Village"; it was this essay, even more than the novel, that brought me to Leukerbad.

"Stranger in the Village" first appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1953, and then in the essay collection "Notes of a Native Son," in 1955. It recounts the experience of being black in an all-white village. It begins with a sense of an extreme journey, like Charles Darwin's in the Galápagos or Tété-Michel Kpomassie's in Greenland. But then it opens out into other concerns and into a different voice, swivelling to look at the American racial situation in the nineteen-fifties. The part of the essay that focusses on the Swiss village is both bemused and sorrowful. Baldwin is alert to the absurdity of being a writer from New York who is considered in some way inferior by Swiss villagers, many of whom have never travelled. But, later in the essay, when he writes about race in America, he is not at all bemused. He is angry and prophetic, writing with a hard clarity and carried along by a precipitous eloquence.

I took a room at the Hotel Mercure Bristol the night I arrived. I opened the windows to a dark view, but I knew that in the darkness loomed the Daubenhorn mountain. I ran a hot bath and lay neck-deep in the water with my old paperback copy of "Notes of a Native Son." The tinny sound from my laptop was Bessie Smith singing "I'm Wild About That Thing," a filthy blues number and a masterpiece of plausible deniability: "Don't hold it baby when I cry / Give me every bit of it, else I'd die / I'm wild about that thing." She could be singing about a trombone. And it was there in the bath, with his words and her voice, that I had my body-double moment: here I was in Leukerbad, with Bessie Smith singing across the years from 1929; and I am black like him; and I am slender; and have a gap in my front teeth; and am not especially tall (no, write it: short); and am cool on the page and animated in person, except when it is the other way around; and I was once a fervid teen-age preacher (Baldwin: "Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, 'the Word'-when the church and I were one"); and I, too, left the church; and I call New York home even when not living there; and feel myself in all places, from New York City to rural Switzerland, the custodian of a black body, and have to find the language for all of what that means to me and to the people who look at me. The ancestor had briefly taken possession of the descendant. It was a moment of identification, and in the days that followed that moment was a guide.

"From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came," Baldwin wrote. But the village has grown considerably since his visits, more than sixty years ago. They've seen blacks now; I wasn't a remarkable sight. There were a few glances at the hotel when I was checking in, and in the fine restaurant just up the road, but there are always glances. There are glances in Zurich, where I am spending the summer, and there are glances in New York City, which has been my home for fourteen years. There are glances all over Europe and in India, and anywhere I go outside Africa. The test is how long the glances last, whether they become stares, with what intent they occur, whether they contain any degree of hostility or mockery, and to what extent connections, money, or mode of dress shield me in these situations. To be a stranger is to be looked at, but to be black is to be looked at especially. ("The children shout Neger! Neger! as I walk along the streets.") Leukerbad has changed, but in which way? There were, in fact, no bands of children on the street, and few children anywhere at all. Presumably the children of Leukerbad, like children the world over, were indoors, frowning over computer games, checking Facebook, or watching music videos. Perhaps some of the older folks I saw in the streets were once the very children who had been so surprised by the sight of Baldwin, and about whom, in the essay, he struggles to take a reasonable tone: "In all of this, in which it must be conceded that there was the charm of genuine wonder and in which there was certainly no element of intentional unkindness, there was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder." But now the children or grandchildren of those children are connected to the world in a different way. Maybe some xenophobia or racism are part of their lives, but part of their lives, too, are Beyoncé, Drake, and Meek Mill, the music I hear pulsing from Swiss clubs on Friday nights.

Baldwin had to bring his records with him in the fifties, like a secret stash of medicine, and he had to haul his phonograph up to Leukerbad, so that the sound of the American blues could keep him connected to a Harlem of the spirit. I listened to some of the same music while I was there, as a way of being with him: Bessie Smith singing "I Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl" ("I need a little sugar in my bowl / I need a little hot dog on my roll"), Fats Waller singing "Your Feet's Too Big." I listened to my own playlist as well: Bettye Swann, Billie Holiday, Jean Wells, "Coltrane Plays the Blues," the Physics, Childish Gambino. The music you travel with helps you to create your own internal weather. But the world participates, too: when I sat down to lunch at the Römerhof restaurant one afternoon-that day, all the customers and staff were white-the music playing overhead was Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody." History is now and black America.

At dinner, at a pizzeria, there were glances. A table of British tourists stared at me. But the waitress was part black, and at the hotel one of the staff members at the spa was an older black man. "People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them," Baldwin wrote. But it is also true that the little pieces of history move around at a tremendous speed, settling with a not-always-clear logic, and rarely settling for long. And perhaps more interesting than my not being the only black person in the village is the plain fact that many of the other people I saw were also foreigners. This was the biggest change of all. If, back then, the village had a pious and convalescent air about it, the feel of "a lesser Lourdes," it is much busier now, packed with visitors from other parts of Switzerland, Germany, France, Italy, and all over Europe, Asia, and the Americas. It has become the most popular thermal resort in the Alps. The municipal baths were full. There are hotels on every street, at every price point, and there are restaurants and luxury-goods shops. If you wish to buy an eye-wateringly costly watch at forty-six hundred feet above sea level, it is now possible to do so.

The better hotels have their own thermal pools. At the Hotel Mercure Bristol, I took an elevator down to the spa and sat in the dry sauna. A few minutes later, I slipped into the pool and floated outside in the warm water. Others were there, but not many. A light rain fell. We were ringed by mountains and held in the immortal blue.

* * *

In her brilliant "Harlem Is Nowhere," Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts writes, "In almost every essay James Baldwin wrote about Harlem, there is a moment when he commits a literary sleight-of-hand so particular that, if he'd been an athlete, sportscasters would have codified the maneuver and named it 'the Jimmy.' I think of it in cinematic terms, because its effect reminds me of a technique wherein camera operators pan out by starting with a tight shot and then zoom out to a wide view while the lens remains focused on a point in the distance." This move, this sudden widening of focus, is present even in his essays that are not about Harlem. In "Stranger in the Village," there's a passage about seven pages in where one can feel the rhetoric revving up, as Baldwin prepares to leave behind the calm, fabular atmosphere of the opening section. Of the villagers, he writes:

These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York's Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory-but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.

What is this list about? Does it truly bother Baldwin that the people of Leukerbad are related, through some faint familiarity, to Chartres? That some distant genetic thread links them to the Beethoven string quartets? After all, as he argues later in the essay, no one can deny the impact "the presence of the Negro has had on the American character." He understands the truth and the art in Bessie Smith's work. He does not, and cannot-I want to believe-rate the blues below Bach. But there was a certain narrowness in received ideas of black culture in the nineteen-fifties. In the time since then, there has been enough black cultural achievement from which to compile an all-star team: there's been Coltrane and Monk and Miles, and Ella and Billie and Aretha. Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott happened, as have Audre Lorde, and Chinua Achebe, and Bob Marley. The body was not abandoned for the mind's sake: Alvin Ailey, Arthur Ashe, and Michael Jordan happened, too. The source of jazz and the blues also gave the world hip-hop, Afrobeat, dancehall, and house. And, yes, when James Baldwin died in 1987, he, too, was recognized as an all-star.

Thinking further about the cathedral at Chartres, about the greatness of that achievement and about how, in his view, it included blacks only in the negative, as devils, Baldwin writes that "the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past." But the distant African past has also become much more available than it was in 1953. It would not occur to me to think that, centuries ago, I was "in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive." But I suspect that for Baldwin it is, in part, a rhetorical move, a grim cadence on which to end a paragraph. In "A Question of Identity" (another essay collected in "Notes of a Native Son"), he writes, "The truth about that past is not that it is too brief, or too superficial, but only that we, having turned our faces so resolutely away from it, have never demanded from it what it has to give." The fourteenth-century court artists of Ife made bronze sculptures using a complicated casting process lost to Europe since antiquity, and which was not rediscovered there until the Renaissance. Ife sculptures are equal to the works of Ghiberti or Donatello. From their precision and formal sumptuousness we can extrapolate the contours of a great monarchy, a network of sophisticated ateliers, and a cosmopolitan world of trade and knowledge. And it was not only Ife. All of West Africa was a cultural ferment. From the egalitarian government of the Igbo to the goldwork of the Ashanti courts, the brass sculpture of Benin, the military achievement of the Mandinka Empire and the musical virtuosi who praised those war heroes, this was a region of the world too deeply invested in art and life to simply be reduced to a caricature of "watching the conquerors arrive." We know better now. We know it with a stack of corroborating scholarship and we know it implicitly, so that even making a list of the accomplishments feels faintly tedious, and is helpful mainly as a counter to Eurocentrism.

There's no world in which I would surrender the intimidating beauty of Yoruba-language poetry for, say, Shakespeare's sonnets, nor one in which I'd prefer the chamber orchestras of Brandenburg to the koras of Mali. I'm happy to own all of it. This carefree confidence is, in part, the gift of time. It is a dividend of the struggle of people from earlier generations. I feel no alienation in museums. But this question of filiation tormented Baldwin considerably. He was sensitive to what was great in world art, and sensitive to his own sense of exclusion from it. He made a similar list in the title essay of "Notes of a Native Son" (one begins to feel that lists like this had been flung at him during arguments): "In some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the Stones of Paris, to the Cathedral at Chartres, and the Empire State Building a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage." The lines throb with sadness. What he loves does not love him in return.

This is where I part ways with Baldwin. I disagree not with his particular sorrow but with the self-abnegation that pinned him to it. Bach, so profoundly human, is my heritage. I am not an interloper when I look at a Rembrandt portrait. I care for them more than some white people do, just as some white people care more for aspects of African art than I do. I can oppose white supremacy and still rejoice in Gothic architecture. In this, I stand with Ralph Ellison: "The values of my own people are neither 'white' nor 'black,' they are American. Nor can I see how they could be anything else, since we are people who are involved in the texture of the American experience." And yet I (born in the United States more than half a century after Baldwin) continue to understand, because I have experienced in my own body the undimmed fury he felt about pervasive, limiting racism. In his writing there is a hunger for life, for all of it, and a strong wish to not be accounted nothing (a mere nigger, a mere neger) when he knows himself to be so much. And this "so much" is neither a matter of ego about his writing nor an anxiety about his fame in New York or in Paris. It is about the incontestable fundamentals of a person: pleasure, sorrow, love, humor, and grief, and the complexity of the interior landscape that sustains those feelings. Baldwin was astonished that anyone anywhere should question these fundamentals, thereby burdening him with the supreme waste of time that is racism, let alone so many people in so many places. This unflagging ability to be shocked rises like steam off his written pages. "The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless," he writes, "but it is also absolutely inevitable."

Leukerbad gave Baldwin a way to think about white supremacy from its first principles. It was as though he found it in its simplest form there. The men who suggested that he learn to ski so that they might mock him, the villagers who accused him behind his back of being a firewood thief, the ones who wished to touch his hair and suggested that he grow it out and make himself a winter coat, and the children who "having been taught that the devil is a black man, scream in genuine anguish" as he approached: Baldwin saw these as prototypes (preserved like coelacanths) of attitudes that had evolved into the more intimate, intricate, familiar, and obscene American forms of white supremacy that he already knew so well.

* * *

It is a beautiful village. I liked the mountain air. But when I returned to my room from the thermal baths, or from strolling in the streets with my camera, I read the news online. There I found an unending sequence of crises: in the Middle East, in Africa, in Russia, and everywhere else, really. Pain was general. But within that larger distress was a set of linked stories, and thinking about "Stranger in the Village," thinking with its help, was like injecting a contrast dye into my encounter with the news. The American police continued shooting unarmed black men, or killing them in other ways. The protests that followed, in black communities, were countered with violence by a police force that is becoming indistinguishable from an invading army. People began to see a connection between the various events: the shootings, the fatal choke hold, the stories of who was not given life-saving medication. And black communities were flooded with outrage and grief.

In all of this, a smaller, less significant story (but one that nevertheless signified), caught my attention. The Mayor of New York and his police chief have a public-policy obsession with cleaning, with cleansing, and they decided that arresting members of the dance troupes that perform in moving subway cars is one of the ways to clean up the city. I read the excuses for this becoming a priority: some people fear being seriously injured by an errant kick (it has not happened, but they sure fear it), some people consider it a nuisance, some policymakers believe that going after misdemeanors is a way of preëmpting major crimes. And so, to combat this menace of dancers, the police moved in. They began chasing, and harassing, and handcuffing. The "problem" was dancers, and the dancers were, for the most part, black boys. The newspapers took the same tone as the government: a sniffy dismissal of the performers. And yet these same dancers are a bright spark in the day, a moment of unregulated beauty, artists with talents unimaginable to their audience. What kind of thinking would consider their abolition an improvement in city life? No one considers Halloween trick-or-treaters a public menace. There's no law enforcement against people selling Girl Scout cookies or against Jehovah's Witnesses. But the black body comes pre-judged, and as a result it is placed in needless jeopardy. To be black is to bear the brunt of selective enforcement of the law, and to inhabit a psychic unsteadiness in which there is no guarantee of personal safety. You are a black body first, before you are a kid walking down the street or a Harvard professor who has misplaced his keys.

William Hazlitt, in an 1821 essay entitled "The Indian Jugglers," wrote words that I think of when I see a great athlete or dancer: "Man, thou art a wonderful animal, and thy ways past finding out! Thou canst do strange things, but thou turnest them to little account!-To conceive of this effort of extraordinary dexterity distracts the imagination and makes admiration breathless." In the presence of the admirable, some are breathless not with admiration but with rage. They object to the presence of the black body (an unarmed boy in a street, a man buying a toy, a dancer in the subway, a bystander) as much as they object to the presence of the black mind. And simultaneous with these erasures is the unending collection of profit from black labor. Throughout the culture, there are imitations of the gait, bearing, and dress of the black body, a vampiric "everything but the burden" co-option of black life.

* * *

Leukerbad is ringed by mountains: the Daubenhorn, the Torrenthorn, the Rinderhorn. A high mountain pass called the Gemmi, another twenty-eight hundred feet above the village, connects the canton of Valais with the Bernese Oberland. Through this landscape-craggy, bare in places and verdant elsewhere, a textbook instance of the sublime-one moves as though through a dream. The Gemmipass is famous for good reason, and Goethe was there, as were Byron, Twain, and Picasso. The pass is mentioned in a Sherlock Holmes adventure, when Holmes crosses it on his way to the fateful meeting with Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. There was bad weather the day I went up, rain and fog, but it was good luck, as it meant I was alone on the trails. While there, I remembered a story that Lucien Happersberger told about Baldwin going out on a hike in these mountains. Baldwin had lost his footing during the ascent, and the situation was precarious for a moment. But Happersberger, who was an experienced climber, reached out a hand, and Baldwin was saved. It was out of this frightening moment, this appealingly biblical moment, that Baldwin got the title for the book he had been struggling to write: "Go Tell It On the Mountain."

If Leukerbad was his mountain pulpit, the United States was his audience. The remote village gave him a sharper view of what things looked like back home. He was a stranger in Leukerbad, Baldwin wrote, but there was no possibility for blacks to be strangers in the United States, nor for whites to achieve the fantasy of an all-white America purged of blacks. This fantasy about the disposability of black life is a constant in American history. It takes a while to understand that this disposability continues. It takes whites a while to understand it; it takes non-black people of color a while to understand it; and it takes some blacks, whether they've always lived in the U.S. or are latecomers like myself, weaned elsewhere on other struggles, a while to understand it. American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve an impressive camouflage. It can hoard its malice in great stillness for a long time, all the while pretending to look the other way. Like misogyny, it is atmospheric. You don't see it at first. But understanding comes.

"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster." The news of the day (old news, but raw as a fresh wound) is that black American life is disposable from the point of view of policing, sentencing, economic policy, and countless terrifying forms of disregard. There is a vivid performance of innocence, but there's no actual innocence left. The moral ledger remains so far in the negative that we can't even get started on the question of reparations. Baldwin wrote "Stranger in the Village" more than sixty years ago. Now what?

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Black Body: Rereading James Baldwin's "Stranger in the Village"

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Then the bus began driving into clouds, and between one cloud and the next we caught glimpses of the town below. It was suppertime and the town was a constellation of yellow points. We arrived thirty minutes after leaving that town, which was called Leuk.

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In "Stranger in the Village," James Baldwin quotes the insight of an anonymous observer of American race relations: "the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men." On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Baldwin's passing, that observation still has salience. It is important to be reminded of this insight now, as a frustrated naïveté takes firmer hold of the media and its narrative of social progress, especially surrounding the historic 2008 and 2012 elections that brought and returned President Barack Obama to office.

Racism is neither simple nor rational. Why, then, do we so often seek to treat it as if it were? Naïvely, we talk about racism and its eventual overcoming, as if this overcoming could be effected via a simple, linear progression: a shift, however painful, from old ways to new; an evolution from unenlightened views to enlightened ones. But the history of racism in America will never unfold linearly; it will never move through the understandable narrative stages-beginning to climax, denouement to glorious, redemptive conclusion.

This is because the space of racism, and indeed all prejudice, is the elliptical, terrifyingly discursive space of madness. The "racist," like the "patient," is ever-resistant, ever-multiple, and ever-ready to attach himself to new fetishes, if only to ensure his own insistence (an insistence which, in its aggressive parade, denies potential observers view of his "real," vulnerable "core"-that which must, at all costs, be protected).

After the 2008 election, we could not escape from the haranguing naïveté, the disturbing must-be-feigned innocence of our talking heads. The bizarre, overreaching claims to post-racial utopianism that attended President Obama's first victory were not only insipid, but dangerously out of touch. To cast the 2008 turnout as a moment where America awoke from a stupor of racism was also to claim that what Baldwin describes as the "foolish and dreadful spectacle" of American race relations could be considered simply that: a stupor, a dream, a nightmare, from which we might, one fine November morning, suddenly awake.

On the contrary, 2008 was not a moment where we as a country woke up to the real utopia within ourselves, or even took a pause to dream of the possibility of such a utopia-it was instead a moment, like many such moments in our history, where we were allowed out on the asylum grounds, as it were, and returned to our caretakers without incident. To suggest that this moment signified much more than this is tantamount to suggesting a schizophrenic might possibly be completely cured simply because she had "a good day."

On October 27, 2012, the Associated Press released a poll which found that over half of Americans have negative attitudes towards African Americans (an even greater percentage of Americans harbored negative attitudes towards Hispanics). The findings were cast as a sober reckoning for a country whose media was committed to a different storyline. A week and a half later, the narrative surrounding these findings would change: sobering sure, but perhaps also irrelevant. President Obama had won, and he had done so with nowhere near the majority of the white vote. "Changing Face of America Helps Assure Obama Victory," reported the Pew Research Center. Did the white vote even matter anymore?

But when David W. Moore of imediaethics.org probed further into the Associated Press findings, the results were illuminating and far more complex: he found that 43% of blacks are anti-black, 30% of whites are anti-white, and almost 9 in 10, or 88%, of Americans harbor racial prejudice of some stripe. In fact, if a good deal of blacks are anti-black, and whites anti-white, then we may indeed have moved further towards that fine post-racial utopia we've laid claim to. Yes, tweaks would be required: not a place where no one was judged on the basis of race, color, creed or gender, but rather one where every person, no matter their race, color, creed, or gender, could one day feel free to delight in his or her own bias-fetish, no matter how contradictory, irrational, weird, or self-defeating...

Contradictory, irrational, weird...these are the appropriate adjectives to assign to the phenomenon of racism we too often, and to our detriment, regard as something rational, to be dealt with linearly, bluntly. When it comes to race in America, the story is, as Mr. Moore himself discovered, always more complex. The most peculiar, most fantastic story I heard during the 2008 election prepared me for what would take place in America over the next few years-not a sudden awakening from a history of racism, but a mere recess from it; not a lunacy cured, but a madman's revelatory wink: he knows this is madness, but he is committed to it, nevertheless...

A friend was campaigning for then-candidate Obama in North Carolina. They had organized a town-hall meeting, where people could come to get their questions answered. The situation had grown heated and yet tired-the conversation was going around in circles. And finally one white man, in utter exasperation, rose and threw on his cap. "Fuck it," he hollered, "I'm voting for the nigger!"

Here is the cry of a confused and yet not-at-all-confused man-in short, here is the cry of a lunatic. And he is our lunatic. He is our beguiling, bewitching, deeply American lunatic.

In the essay that follows, Baldwin not only elucidates this specifically American strain of historical madness, he also draws an essential parallel between madness and feigned innocence. This is just one of the many exhilarating ideas he explores, and it opens the reader onto verdant new ground: perhaps history, like racism, is not simply a nightmare from which we are trying to awake, but a madness to which we pledge allegiance. Can we not take the words of Baldwin's anonymous observer and make them yet more general? It is not only the Negro-in-America that is a form of madness, but all of history. The stories we tell ourselves, the narratives we weave about ourselves-in the media, in our living rooms-mere alibis to avoid responsibility for a reality we regard, often justifiably, as a crime.

Yet if this is the case, Baldwin gives us a chilling reminder of the danger of maintaining our innocence-and our alibis: "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."
["A STRANGER IN THE VILLAGE">>]

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"Stranger in the Village" & Editor's Introduction

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In "Stranger in the Village," James Baldwin quotes the insight of an anonymous observer of American race relations: "the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men." On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Baldwin's passing, that observation still has salience.