Celebrating Black History Month: James Baldwin
James Baldwin was an essayist, playwright, novelist and voice of the American civil rights movement known for works including 'Notes of a Native Son,' 'The Fire Next Time' and 'Go Tell It on the Mountain.’
Born on August 2, 1924, in Harlem, New York Baldwin was one of the 20th century's greatest writers. He broke new literary ground with the exploration of racial and social issues in his many works. He was especially known for his essays on the Black experience in America.
In 1954, Baldwin received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He published his next novel, Giovanni's Room, the following year. The work told the story of an American living in Paris and broke new ground for its complex depiction of homosexuality, a then-taboo subject.
Love between men was also explored in a later Baldwin novel Just Above My Head (1978). The author would also use his work to explore interracial relationships, another controversial topic for the times, as seen in the 1962 novel Another Country.
Baldwin was open about his homosexuality and relationships with both men and women. Yet he believed that the focus on rigid categories was just a way of limiting freedom and that human sexuality is more fluid and less binary than often expressed in the U.S.
“If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy,” the writer said in a 1969 interview when asked if being gay was an aberration, asserting that such views were an indication of narrowness and stagnation.
Because Baldwin sought to inform and confront white people, and because his fiction contains interracial love affairs—both homosexual and heterosexual—he came under attack from the writers of the Black Arts Movement, who called for literature exclusively by and for Black people. Baldwin refused to align himself with the movement; he continued to call himself an “American writer” as opposed to a “Black writer” and continued to confront the issues facing a multi-racial society.
Critics accorded Baldwin high praise for both his style and his themes. “Baldwin has carved a literary niche through his exploration of ‘the mystery of the human being’ in his art,” observed Louis H. Pratt in James Baldwin. “His short stories, novels, and plays shed the light of reality upon the darkness of our illusions, while the essays bring a boldness, courage, and cool logic to bear on the most crucial questions of humanity with which this country has yet to be faced.”
In 2017, years after his death in 1987, Baldwin was the subject to the Oscar-nominated documentary ‘I Am Not Your Negro’, inspired by an unfinished manuscript Baldwin was working on at the time of his death in 1987 about the lives of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers.
“His sexuality was as complicated as the rest of him and did not follow strict dichotomies of love,” Michelle Gordon, a visiting assistant professor of African American studies at Emory University, said, adding that as viewers we have to have the mind of historians. “There are a lot of people who are uncomfortable about his homosexuality and his critique of his masculinity. For a long time, when he was talked about by scholars, it was not really about his sexual orientation. It has been in the past 15 or maybe 20 years that the discussion of his sexuality has begun.”
Charles Stephens, executive director of the Counter Narrative Project (CNP) pointed out Baldwin’s identity as a Black and gay man during the organisation's screening of the film in Atlanta. He said CNP held the screening because it believes Baldwin’s voice is needed now more than ever.
“Black gay men, in particular, have found in Baldwin a kind of father figure,” Stephens said. “There isn't a single Black gay writer of literary fiction or nonfiction that has not been influenced by James Baldwin on some level. As we seek to navigate our current political moment, we believe that James Baldwin offers a necessary blueprint for how we continue to fight for social justice.”
