Making Black Queer History: James Baldwin
James Baldwin was born James Arthur Jones on August 2, 1924 in New York City and raised in the Harlem area. His mother, Emma Jones, fled from racial segregation and discrimination in the South during the Great Migration, giving birth to him out of wedlock. In 1927, she married older laborer and Baptist preacher David Baldwin, and the two went on to have eight children together. Baldwin and his stepfather had a difficult relationship due to both religious differences and Baldwin's white friends, who were, in David's eyes, irredeemable. Their family held his funeral on Baldwin's 19th birthday, close to when the Harlem riots began. In his youth, Baldwin worked part time to help out his family, taking note of the poverty and discrimination around him as some of his friends began to turn to drugs, sex work, and crime for survival.
Gertrude E. Ayer, principal of the public school Baldwin attended starting at five years of age (Public School 24/P.S. 24 on 128th Street in Harlem), and several English teachers praised his affinity for writing, a piece of his mother that would continue to live on in him as well. New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia sent him a letter praising him for a song he wrote, became the editor of Frederick Douglass Junior High School's newspaper, the Douglass Pilot, and he even won a prize for a short story published in a church newspaper. In 1938, he began attending De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx, a predominantly white and Jewish educational institution where he worked on Magpie, the school's magazine, and completed his secondary education in 1941.
In the workforce, Baldwin faced a plethora of institutionalized discrimination from not only business owners but also his fellow workers, many of whom were white and disliked his "uppity" ways, such as his wit and refusal to give them respect they hadn't earned. With the encouragement of modernist painter Beaufort Delaney, a fellow black queer man, he left his military track-laying job and moved to Greenwich Village. In 1948, he moved again, this time to Paris, France, where he spent nine years honing his craft in relative peace compared to America, and went on to publish his first novel, "Go Tell It on the Mountain", in 1953.
Baldwin returned to the United States in hopes of writing Talking at the Gates, a biography of Booker T. Washington, and became a strong voice advocating for civil rights in the 1960s through multiple avenues of activism, writing and debate. In the 1980s, he broadened his focus to homosexuality and homophobia, discussing both in several interviews and essays. He spent most of his later life in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, dying of stomach cancer on December 1, 1987.
Baldwin first noticed his attraction to men - and lack of attraction to women - during his high school years. Uncomfortable with this aspect of his identity, he sought refuge in the Mount Calvary of the Pentecostal Faith Church on Lenox Avenue. He ultimately grew more comfortable with his sexuality, deciding not to label it as he found most labels "too limiting," but maintained connections with the queer community throughout his life.
You might not know that he...
Published his first ever essay, "Harlem—Then and Now", in the Douglass Pilot's 1937 issue in autumn
Enjoyed living in Paris, where he says he was treated as an American first and foremost
Met Martin Luther King Jr. in Charlotte, North Carolina while interviewing people
Was invited to meet with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy regarding the Birmingham riot of 1963
Has an FBI file that contains 1,884 pages collected over the 1960s and 70s
Rejected the label "civil rights activist", seeing himself as a citizen advocating for his rights first and foremost
Centered love in all shapes and forms at the heart of his own personal philosophy
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin
Encyclopedia Britannica page
James Baldwin's Radical Politics of Love (Elias Rodriguez, The Nation)
10 Questions About the Life of James Baldwin (Professor Magdalena J. Zaborowska and Kaylee Skweres, University of Michigan; National Museum of African American History and Culture)
A new James Baldwin biography explores how his lovers influenced his work (Michel Martin, Adriana Gallardo and Mansee Khurana, NPR)
This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance (Hilton Als and Rhea L. Combs, Smithsonian Institution)
Famous Bi People: James Baldwin (bi.org)
Remembering trailblazing LGBTQ+ civil rights activist James Baldwin this Black History Month (Michele Theil, PinkNews)
‘Am I making James Baldwin proud of me?’ Two Black queer authors reflect on his legacy and words (Denny, Reckon South)
