Born 100 Years Ago, James Baldwin's Writing Still Resonates

This month marks the centenary of James Baldwin’s birth. Born in Harlem, Baldwin grew up poor, gay, and devoutly Christian. He wrote 20 books and many more essays, poems, and plays. His voice evokes Old Testament-scale suffering unleashed for being the wrong color, loving the wrong person, or making the wrong choice, even if it’s the only one. But there is also sometimes the chance for redemption in our same unholy streets, bars, and bedrooms. Whatever his subject, he inevitably empathizes with “the other.”

In The Fire Next Time (1963), white people are “the other.” His argument runs through these pages like a live wire. It’s a slim volume of just two essays: a letter to his 15-year-old nephew on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and a longer piece called “Down at the Cross,” which was first published in two oversized editions of The New Yorker in 1963. It also got Baldwin on the cover of Time magazine, which called him a major voice of the civil rights movement.

White liberals of the day embraced him as a prophet who could finally tell them ‘what Black Americans want.’ Black activists attacked him for being too understanding of what we now call systemic racism.

After the briefest preamble in the first essay, Baldwin advises his nephew on growing up Black in America: “There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. … They are trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”

https://www.postalley.org/2024/08/11/born-100-years-ago-james-baldwins-writing-still-resonates/