In this episode, you will meet someone whose influence and impact on the story of America is monumental. He famously said, “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.” Keep that idea in mind as you listen.
This History UnErased podcast is funded by the New York City Council. It was developed by History UnErased and produced and edited by Dinah Mack; Kathleen Barker; and Deb Fowler. Special thanks to Jocardo Ralston for being the voice of James Baldwin.
CLICK HERE to learn how History UnErased is putting LGBTQ history in its rightful place - the classroom.
In this episode, you will meet someone whose influence and impact on the story of America is monumental. He famously said, “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.” Keep that idea in mind as you listen.
This History UnErased podcast is funded by the New York City Council. It was developed by History UnErased and produced and edited by Dinah Mack; Kathleen Barker; and Deb Fowler. Special thanks to Jocardo Ralston for being the voice of James Baldwin.
CLICK HERE to learn how History UnErased is putting LGBTQ history in its rightful place - the classroom.
Debra Fowler: Hello, and welcome to UnErasing LGBTQ History and Identities — A Podcast. I’m Deb Fowler, co-founder of History UnErased.
In this Deep Dive and Backstory episode, you will meet someone whose influence and impact on the story of America is monumental. He famously said, “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.” Keep that idea in mind as you listen…
Take it away, Kathleen!
Kathleen Barker: American author and civil rights activist James Arthur Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York, on August 2, 1924. Baldwin, however, spent a significant portion of his adult life traveling and living abroad. Can you guess [do you know?] which country Baldwin called home after World War II, and again beginning in the 1970s? We’ll give you a musical hint…
Did you guess France? Baldwin did indeed spend nearly 40 years of his life abroad, many of those in France. Between 1948 and 1957 he lived in France and traveled in Europe. After returning to the United States and participating in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, Baldwin returned to France in 1971, and settled in a house in the village of St Paul de Vence. There he created Chez Baldwin, his refuge. How did this talented American artist end up an expatriate? Unfortunately, it’s a not uncommon story that centers on Baldwin's identity as a queer black man. No matter where he lived though Baldwin wrote and spoke eloquently of the struggles faced by black Americans.
Before we take a deeper dive into Baldwin’s later life let's go back to his beginnings….
Baldwin grew up in New York City with his mother, Emma Burtis Jones, and his stepfather David Baldwin, who was a Baptist preacher originally from New Orleans. Baldwin attended Frederick Douglass Junior High School, where he found at least two early mentors. Baldwin’s math teacher convinced him to become editor of the school newspaper, The Douglass Pilot. He wrote his first article for the newspaper, a profile of Harlem, when he was just 13 years old. His French teacher at Douglass just so happened to be Countee Cullen, a celebrated Harlem Renaissance poet who furthered Baldwin’s interest in literary and artistic pursuits.
As a teenager, Baldwin attended Dewitt Clinton High School where he edited the school literary magazine Magpie. He also spent a significant amount of time at his stepfather’s church, Fireside Pentecostal Assembly. He attended church several nights a week, and preached once a week on Young Ministers’ Night. The three years he spent at the church would have a profound influence on Baldwin and his writings. In a 1984 interview published in The Paris Review, Baldwin credited his affiliation with the church, and his relationship with his stepfather, as critical pieces of his development as a writer:
Jocardo Ralston: “Until my father died I thought I could do something else. I had wanted to be a musician, thought of being a painter, thought of being an actor. This was all before I was nineteen. Given the conditions in this country to be a black writer was impossible. When I was young, people thought you were not so much wicked as sick, they gave up on you. My father didn’t think it was possible—he thought I’d get killed, get murdered. He said I was contesting the white man’s definitions, which was quite right. But I had also learned from my father what he thought of the white man’s definitions. He was a pious, very religious and in some ways a very beautiful man, and in some ways a terrible man. He died when his last child was born and I realized I had to make a jump—a leap. I’d been a preacher for three years, from age fourteen to seventeen. Those were three years which probably turned me to writing.”
KB: By the time Baldwin graduated from high school, he had moved to Greenwich Village, spending time at San Remo, an Italian restaurant known in the late 1940s for its artistic clientele. Baldwin met writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs; musicians like Miles Davis; and artists like Jackson Pollock. Baldwin’s father passed away in 1943, and as the oldest child, Baldwin felt an obligation to support and be a father figure to his eight brothers and sisters. Throughout this period Baldwin continued to write. He took inspiration from history, recognizing that the past continues to affect the present and the future. Some 20 years later, in1965, Balwin debated William F. Buckley at Cambridge University. He spoke about the importance of representation in history books–a message that still resonates today, not just for Black history, but for LGBTQ History as well. Here, in Baldwin’s own voice, he reflects on the lack of diversity and representation in his education:
James Baldwin:… When I was growing up, I was taught in American history books that Africa had no history and neither did I. That I was a savage about whom the less said, the better, who had been saved by Europe and brought to America and of course I believed it. I didn't have much choice. Those are the only books there were everyone else seemed to agree.
KB: In 1948, he left the United States to live in Paris because he could no longer tolerate the racial and sexual discrimination he experienced on a regular basis. When he was 22, for example, Baldwin and a friend went to see a movie in New Jersey. They decided to have dinner after the show but were refused entry at two different restaurants. A few months later, another friend of Baldwin’s committed suicide. In his interview with The Paris Review, Baldwin reflected on these events–and this general period in his life–and their contribution to his move to Paris.
JR: “I was broke. I got to Paris with forty dollars in my pocket, but I had to get out of New York. My reflexes were tormented by the plight of other people. Reading had taken me away for long periods at a time, yet I still had to deal with the streets and the authorities and the cold. I knew what it meant to be white and I knew what it meant to be a nigger, and I knew what was going to happen to me. My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed. My best friend had committed suicide two years earlier, jumping off the George Washington Bridge.”
KB: In Paris, Baldwin connected with another of his mentors, celebrated Black author Richard Wright, whom he had first met in the United States in 1944. Wright’s work on race in the United States really spoke to Baldwin, and it was Wright who helped him obtain the funds that allowed Baldwin to finish his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. The semi-autobiographical story draws from Baldwin's own experiences as a teenager in Harlem in the 1930s. Through its main character, John Grimes, the novel explores themes of family, race, and religion by delving into the character's strained relationship with his religious stepfather, as well as other relatives. Grimes also wrestles with larger themes of religion and spirituality, as he struggles with his growing attraction to other men, and how his feelings seemed to contradict traditional religious views of sexuality in general as something sinful that needed to be repressed.
Baldwin finished the book while staying with his lover, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger in Löeche-les-Bains, a village in the Swiss Alps. Away from the distractions of Paris, Baldwin also completed one of his groundbreaking essays, “Stranger in the Village,” the same year, 1953. In it, he described his experience as a Black man living in a not particularly diverse Swiss village.
JR: “Everyone in the village knows my name, though they scarcely ever use it, knows that I come from America though, this, apparently, they will never really believe-black men come from Africa-and everyone knows that I am the friend of the son of a woman who was born here, and that I am staying in their chalet. 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. It must be admitted that in the beginning I was far too shocked to have any real reaction. In so far as I reacted at all, I reacted by trying to be pleasant-it being a great part of the American Negro's education (long before he goes to school) that he must make people like him. This smile-and-the-world-smiles-with-you routine worked about as well in this situation as it had in the situation for which it was designed, which is to of phenomenon which allowed them to see my teeth-they did not, really, see my smile and I began to think that, should I take to snarling, no one would notice any difference. All of the physical characteristics of the Negro which had caused me, in America, a very different and almost forgotten pain were nothing less than miraculous-or infernal-in the eyes of the village people. Some thought my hair was the color of tar, that it had the texture of wire, or the texture of cotton. It was jocularly suggested that I might let it all grow long and make myself a winter coat. If I sat in the sun for more than five minutes some daring creature was certain to come along and gingerly put his fingers on my hair, as though he were afraid of an electric shock, or put his hand on my hand, astonished that the color did not rub off. In all of this, in which it must be conceded there was the charm of genuine wonder and in which there were certainly no element of intentional unkindness, there was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder.”
KB: Over the next few years Baldwin continued to live, love, and write in Paris. He and his friends frequented hotels, clubs like Le Montana and L’Abbaye, and restaurants like Chez Inez, a soul food restaurant run by an American. While Baldwin loved Paris he also recognized its dark side. Baldwin was confronted with discrimination in France, just as he had been in the United States. He once commented that the French maintained a stereotypical view of African Americans, imagining “that all the blacks come over from America with trumpets in hand,” a reference to the large number of American Blacks who gravitated to the burgeoning jazz scene in France after World War I. While in 1949, Baldwin was arrested and jailed for theft after being falsely accused of stealing hotel bed sheets. He spent a week in jail, but was released thanks to the fact that he was an American citizen. He wrote about this experience in an essay called “Equal in Paris,” published in Commentary magazine. He would later republish the essay in his 1955 collection, Notes on a Native Son. He wrote:
JR: “It was quite clear to me that the Frenchman and whose hands I found myself are no better or worse than their American counterparts. Certainly their uniforms frighten me quite as much, and they're in personality, and the threat, always keenly felt by the poor, of violence, was as present in that commissary yet as it had ever been for me in any police station.”
KB: While in Paris, Baldwin also visited bars known for their gay clientele. One such bar became an important setting in his 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room. The novel was groundbreaking for its exploration of sexuality, gender norms, and race. The plot revolves around David, a white, bisexual, American man living in Paris, who finds himself drawn to Giovanni, a handsome Italian bartender. As a result of his feelings for Giovanni, David is forced to confront his own internalized homophobia and his fear of being true to himself. Their relationship becomes increasingly strained as David struggles with his own feelings of guilt and shame. Giovanni’s Room, was the first major openly gay novel by a prominent African-American author. Baldwin, however, had been writing stories about identity since his youth. Here he is, in his own voice, reflecting on an earlier writing in a 1980 interview:
James Baldwin: The Negro Renaissance was going on. I was a part of that, and while I hadn't published things like Langston, Countee, and even Wally, I had written one poem that Langston had retrieved from a waste basket. It was a poem called Shadow. It created kind of a sensation at the time- it was considered to be a race poem, although I hadn't meant it to be. I intended to be a soul searching poem of another kind of lonesomeness. You see, I'm a homosexual and it never occurred to me there was anybody's business but mine.
KB: Baldwin traveled throughout France and Europe in the late 1940s and 1950s, but he also returned to the United States often and considered himself “a transatlantic commuter.“ He was active in the Civil Rights Movement, and as a journalist he attended and reported on a number of events. In 1957, he traveled throughout North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, interviewing student protestors, while on assignment for Partisan Review. In 1960, Baldwin investigated the sit-ins taking place in Tallahassee, Florida, interviewing students at Florida A&M University. He published a report of his experiences, called “History Is A Weapon: They Can’t Turn Back” in Mademoiselle magazine.
JR: Americans keep wondering what has "got into" the students. What has "got into" them is their history in this country. They are not the first Negroes to face mobs: they are merely the first Negroes to frighten the mob more than the mob frightens them. Many Americans may have forgotten, for example, the reign of terror in the 1920s that drove Negroes out of the South. Five hundred thousand moved North in one year. Some of the people who got to the North barely in time to be born are the parents of the students now going to school. This was forty years ago, and not enough has happened—not enough freedom has happened. But these young people are determined to make it happen and make it happen now. They cannot be diverted. It seems to me that they are the only people in this country now who really believe in freedom. Insofar as they can make it real for themselves, they will make it real for all of us. The question with which they present the nation is whether or not we really want to be free. It is because these students remain so closely related to their past that they are able to face with such authority a population ignorant of its history and enslaved by a myth. And by this population I do not mean merely the unhappy people who make up the southern mobs. I have in mind nearly all Americans.
KB: Baldwin interacted with a number of prominent figures from the Civil Rights Movement, including Malcolm X, whom he referred to as one of the most beautiful people he had ever met. Baldwin was honored when, in 1968, Columbia Pictures hired him to write a screenplay based on Alex Haley's book The Autobiography of Malcolm X . Unfortunately, the movie was never made because Baldwin and the studio disagreed over how to present Malcolm X on screen. Baldwin’s vision included actor Billy Dee Williams playing Malcolm X, but the studio had other ideas, including, according to rumors, using Charleston Heston in blackface to play Malcolm X.
Of course, Baldwin also crossed paths several times with Martin Luther King, Jr., after the two first met during the Montgomery Bus boycott in 1957. Baldwin was often called upon to lend his voice to events and fundraisers for the movement. Baldwin believed that the future success of the movement would come as a result of the militancy of the younger generation, a view that often put him in opposition to King. Baldwin also recognized that King was a bit suspicious of his celebrity status. King actually refused to appear on television with Baldwin at an event in 1963. In a conversation surreptitiously recorded by the FBI, King argued that Baldwin’s “poetic exaggeration” in response to “race issues,” would distract from the message. Over the course of their relationship, Baldwin also suspected that King was a bit unsettled by queerness. Some of King’s closest advisers openly expressed the view that Baldwin was “better qualified to lead a homosexual movement than a civil rights movement.”
It turns out Baldwin’s queerness was also an issue for other activists, and even the FBI. In 1962, Baldwin published Another Country, a best-selling novel that recounted the story of
Rufus Scott, a Black bisexual jazz musician, who commits suicide when he cannot reconcile his sexual desires with his experiences of racism and poverty. The book was apparently banned in New Orleans due its depictions of bisexuality and interracial sex. FBI Director J Edgar Hoover even responded to several letters from outraged Americans who wanted the book banned and removed from library shelves. Sound familiar?
In 1967, Baldwin was attacked, in writing, by Black Panther party member Eldrige Cleaver. It was a scathing attack, using homophobic language to denounce Baldwin’s writings and his very identity. Cleaver accused Baldwin of promoting a “racial death-wish” through his novels depicting same-sex relationships. Fortunately, Cleaver’s tirade prompted other members of the Black Power movement to rise to Baldwin’s defense. Black Panther leader Huey Newton even used the occasion to call for a moment of intersectionality among all liberation movements, arguing that Black revolutionaries should form a coalition with gay liberation and women’s liberation groups.
Well, by the late 1960s, Baldwin was exhausted. The assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr, and his close friend and activist Medgar Evers, left him emotionally broken. In 1971, Baldwin decided to move back to France, where he established Chez Baldwin in the village of St Paul de Vence. There he continues to write, publishing works such as If Beale Street Could Talk, in 1974. Toward the end of his life, in 1985, he advocated for gender equality and androgyny in a piece called “Here Be Dragons,” originally published in Playboy magazine under the title “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood”. While the article uses Baldwin’s own life to challenge ideas about masculinity and femininity, he encourages readers to take a more fluid view of gender and race.
JR: “But we are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other -- male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.”
KB: In 1986, French president François Mitterand awarded Baldwin France’s highest civilian recognition, the Legion of Honor Medal.Baldwin passed away the following year, on November 30, 1987. He was only 63 years old. Fortunately, his works continue to resonate with authors, artists, and audiences well into the twenty-first century. For example, the 2016 Oscar-nominated documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” explores the history of racism in the United States, and was based on Baldwin's unfinished manuscript Remember This House. In 2018, Baldwin’s novel “If Beale Street Could Talk” was also turned into an Oscar-nominated film.
We hope this very brief introduction to James Baldwin has inspired you to dive into his amazing library of novels, essays, plays, and public speeches. We’ll leave you with one last quote from Baldwin, from a speech he delivered at Berkeley in 1979. Perhaps you’ll find that it’s still relevant today, and perhaps it will encourage YOU to support our mission of bringing inclusive history to all classrooms:
James Baldwin:… There is a reason, there is a reason that no one wants our children until this day educated. When we attempt ourselves to do it, we find ourselves up against the vast machinery of the system of education in this country, which is among other things, a billion-dollar industry and the billion-dollar industry is more important than the life of the child.
DF: Kathleen Barker is History UnErased’s program director and is a library and information specialist and public historian with 20 years of experience as a museum and library educator.
This podcast is funded by the New York City Council. It was developed by History UnErased and produced and edited by Dinah Mack, our youth equity program director and podcaster. And special thanks to our colleague Jocardo Ralston for being the voice of James Baldwin.
Our theme music is “1986” by BrothaD via Tribe of Noise.
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I’m Deb Fowler. Thanks for listening. Visit UnErased.org to learn how we are putting LGBTQ history in its rightful place - the classroom.
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