On what would have been his one-hundredth birthday, the words of James Baldwin stand stronger than ever.
The New York City-born writer and civil rights activist held a powerful presence throughout the twentieth century through his reflections on identity, sexuality, and race, with some of his most famous titles including Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, Another Country, and The Fire Next Time.
Born in Harlem on August 2, 1924, Baldwin was the first of nine children born to his mother, Emma Berdis Jones. Jones married Baptist preacher David Baldwin three years after Baldwin’s birth, and the two had eight more children together, which the writer helped raise, particularly after his step father’s death in 1943.
Baldwin, who had just graduated high school at the time, worked various jobs to support his family, all while writing and playing guitar at night to pursue his dream of being a writer. Baldwin was also experiencing in the same year the aftermath of the Harlem Race Riot, as the tensions gripping his community began deeply impacting his mental health. He would later write of his experiences that “to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. ”
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It was in 1944 that Baldwin met famous African American writer Richard Wright. Impressed by Baldwin’s intellect and analysis of race in the United States, Wright helped him earn a fellowship in 1948 to write a novel in Paris, France. Dismayed by the inequalities he faced in America, Baldwin moved to France, where he would pen the majority of his most acclaimed works, and would also connect with the revered poet Maya Angelou.
While Baldwin lived in Europe for nearly two decades, he considered himself a “transatlantic commuter” and would frequently visit the United States, staying primarily in New York City. It was there he developed deep connections with civil rights leaders such as Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Baldwin also participated in events such as the March on Washington in 1963 and the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965, writing of the movement: “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
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Evers, Malcolm X, and King were all assassinated in the span of just five years, causing Baldwin to suffer an emotional breakdown and fall ill. The writer then permanently settled in the South of France in 1971, moving to a house in the village of St. Paul de Vence, where he would stay until his death from cancer in 1987. Angelou and Toni Morrison each spoke at his funeral.
Baldwin’s life is currently being made into a film starring legendary out actor Billy Porter. Several of his works have also been adapted to television and film, with their themes of race and sexuality still holding relevant today. That, too, was an achievement that Baldwin may not have anticipated, but one he nonetheless reflected on throughout his writing.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” he said in a 1963 LIFE profile. ” 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.”
