Baldwin's complete fiction and collected nonfiction—the writings that transformed the way we think about race in America—in a deluxe three-volume Library of America boxed set.
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James baldwin.
James Baldwin (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic, and one of America's foremost writers. His essays, such as "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-twentieth-century America. A Harlem, New York, native, he primarily made his home in the south of France.
His novels include Giovanni's Room (1956), about a white American expatriate who must come to terms with his homosexuality, and Another Country (1962), about racial and gay sexual tensions among New York intellectuals. His inclusion of gay themes resulted in much savage criticism from the black community. Going to Meet the Man (1965) and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968) provided powerful descriptions of American racism. As an openly gay man, he became increasingly outspoken in condemning discrimination against lesbian and gay people.
Photo by Allan warren (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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CHAPTER ONE Collected Essays By JAMES BALDWIN The Library of America Read the Review Autobiographical Notes I was born in Harlem thirty-one years ago. I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again. In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies. As they were born, I took them over with one hand and held a book with the other. The children probably suffered, though they have since been kind enough to deny it, and in this way I read Uncle Tom's Cabin and A Tale of Two Cities over and over and over again; in this way, in fact, I read just about everything I could get my hands on--except the Bible, probably because it was the only book I was encouraged to read. I must also confess that I wrote--a great deal--and my first professional triumph, in any case, the first effort of mine to be seen in print, occurred at the age of twelve or thereabouts, when a short story I had written about the Spanish revolution won some sort of prize in an extremely short-lived church newspaper. I remember the story was censored by the lady editor, though I don't remember why, and I was outraged. Also wrote plays, and songs, for one of which I received a letter of congratulations from Mayor La Guardia, and poetry, about which the less said, the better. My mother was delighted by all these goings-on, but my father wasn't; he wanted me to be a preacher. When I was fourteen I became a preacher, and when I was seventeen I stopped. Very shortly thereafter I left home. For God knows how long I struggled with the world of commerce and industry--I guess they would say they struggled with me--and when I was about twenty-one I had enough done of a novel to get a Saxton Fellowship. When I was twenty-two the fellowship was over, the novel turned out to be unsalable, and I started waiting on tables in a Village restaurant and writing book reviews--mostly, as it turned out, about the Negro problem, concerning which the color of my skin made me automatically an expert. Did another book, in company with photographer Theodore Pelatowski, about the store-front churches in Harlem. This book met exactly the same fate as my first--fellowship, but no sale. (It was a Rosenwald Fellowship.) By the time I was twenty-four I had decided to stop reviewing books about the Negro problem--which, by this time, was only slightly less horrible in print than it was in life--and I packed my bags and went to France, where I finished, God knows how, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next--one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next. When one begins looking for influences one finds them by the score. I haven't thought much about my own, not enough anyway; I hazard that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech--and something of Dickens' love for bravura--have something to do with me today; but I wouldn't stake my life on it. Likewise, innumerable people have helped me in many ways; but finally, I suppose, the most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality. (Truce, by the way, is the best one can hope for.) One of the difficulties about being a Negro writer (and this is not special pleading, since I don't mean to suggest that he has it worse than anybody else) is that the Negro problem is written about so widely. The bookshelves groan under the weight of information, and everyone therefore considers himself informed. And this information, furthermore, operates usually (generally, popularly) to reinforce traditional attitudes. Of traditional attitudes there are only two--For or Against--and I, personally, find it difficult to say which attitude has caused me the most pain. I am speaking as a writer; from a social point of view I am perfectly aware that the change from ill-will to good-will, however motivated, however imperfect, however expressed, is better than no change at all. But it is part of the business of the writer--as I see it--to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source. From this point of view the Negro problem is nearly inaccessible. It is not only written about so widely; it is written about so badly. It is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about. ("You taught me language," says Caliban to Prospero, "and my profit on't is I know how to curse.") Consider: the tremendous social activity that this problem generates imposes on whites and Negroes alike the necessity of looking forward, of working to bring about a better day. This is fine, it keeps the waters troubled; it is all, indeed, that has made possible the Negro's progress. Nevertheless, social affairs are not generally speaking the writer's prime concern, whether they ought to be or not; it is absolutely necessary that he establish between himself and these affairs a distance which will allow, at least, for clarity, so that before he can look forward in any meaningful sense, he must first be allowed to take a long look back. In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly. I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use--I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine--I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme--otherwise I would have no place in any scheme. What was the most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of his public progress; that I hated and feared white people. This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt. In effect, I hated and feared the world. And this meant, not only that I thus gave the world an altogether murderous power over me, but also that in such a self-destroying limbo I could never hope to write. One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. The difficulty then, for me, of being a Negro writer was the fact that I was, in effect, prohibited from examining my own experience too closely by the tremendous demands and the very real dangers of my social situation. I don't think the dilemma outlined above is uncommon. I do think, since writers work in the disastrously explicit medium of language, that it goes a little way towards explaining why, out of the enormous resources of Negro speech and life, and despite the example of Negro music, prose written by Negroes has been generally speaking so pallid and so harsh. I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else. I don't think that the Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it. I believe this the more firmly because it is the overwhelming tendency to speak of this problem as though it were a thing apart. But in the work of Faulkner, in the general attitude and certain specific passages in Robert Penn Warren, and, most significantly, in the advent of Ralph Ellison, one sees the beginnings--at least--of a more genuinely penetrating search. Mr. Ellison, by the way, is the first Negro novelist I have ever read to utilize in language, and brilliantly, some of the ambiguity and irony of Negro life. About my interests: I don't know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified. Otherwise, I love to eat and drink---it's my melancholy conviction that I've scarcely ever had enough to eat (this is because it's impossible to eat enough if you're worried about the next meal)--and I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh. I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything. I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. 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. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer. (C) 1998 Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. All rights reserved. ISBN: 1-883011-52-3 Return to the Books Home Page Return to the Books Home Page
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Major works: Go Tell It on the Mountain • Notes of a Native Son • Giovanni’s Room • The Fire Next Time • No Name in the Street • The Devil Finds Work
With the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a distillation of his own experiences as a preacher’s son in 1930s Harlem, and the essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955), James Baldwin established himself as a prophetic voice of his era. Some such voices may grow fainter with the passage of time, but Baldwin remains an inescapable presence, not only a chronicler of his epoch but a thinker who helped shape it. One of the great modern prose stylists, he applied his passion, wit, and relentlessly probing intelligence to the fault lines and false fronts of American society while remaining true to his early credo: “One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.”
“I fell under the spell of Baldwin’s voice. No other black writer I’d read was as literary as Baldwin in his early essays, not even Ralph Ellison. There is something wild in the beauty of Baldwin’s sentences and the cool of his tone, something improbable, too, this meeting of Henry James, the Bible, and Harlem. I can see the scratches in the desk in my room where I was reading ‘Notes of a Native Son,’ Baldwin’s memoir of his hated father’s death the day his father’s last child was born in 1943, one day before Harlem erupted into the deadliest race riot in its history. I can feel the effects of this essay within me still.” —Darryl Pinckney, The New York Review of Books , April 4, 2014
What it comes to, finally, is that the nation has spent a large part of its time and energy looking away from one of the principal facts of its life. This failure to look reality in the face diminishes a nation as it diminishes a person, and it can only be described as unmanly. And in exactly the same way that the South imagines that it “knows” the Negro, the North imagines that it has set him free. Both camps are deluded. Human freedom is a complex, difficult—and private—thing. If we can liken life, for a moment, to a furnace, then freedom is the fire which burns away illusion. Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.
A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.
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A novelist and essayist of considerable renown, James Baldwin bore witness to the unhappy consequences of American racial strife. Baldwin’s writing career began in the last years of legislated segregation; his fame as a social observer grew in tandem with the civil rights movement as he mirrored Black people’s aspirations, disappointments, and coping strategies in a hostile society. Tri-Quarterly contributor Robert A. Bone declared that Baldwin’s publications “have had a stunning impact on our cultural life” because the author “... succeeded in transposing the entire discussion of American race relations to the interior plane; it is a major breakthrough for the American imagination.” In his novels, plays, and essays alike, Baldwin explored the psychological implications of racism for both the oppressed and the oppressor. Best-sellers such as Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time acquainted wide audiences with his highly personal observations and his sense of urgency in the face of rising Black bitterness. As Juan Williams noted in the Washington Post, long before Baldwin’s death, his writings “became a standard of literary realism. ... Given the messy nature of racial hatred, of the half-truths, blasphemies and lies that make up American life, Baldwin’s accuracy in reproducing that world stands as a remarkable achievement. ... Black people reading Baldwin knew he wrote the truth. White people reading Baldwin sensed his truth about the lives of black people and the sins of a racist nation.” 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 the College Language Association Journal, Therman B. O’Daniel called Baldwin “the gifted professor of that primary element, genuine talent. ... Secondly he is a very intelligent and deeply perceptive observer of our multifarious contemporary society. ... In the third place, Baldwin is a bold and courageous writer who is not afraid to search into the dark corners of our social consciences, and to force out into public view many of the hidden, sordid skeletons of our society. ... Then, of course, there is Baldwin’s literary style which is a fourth major reason for his success as a writer. His prose ... possesses a crystal clearness and a passionately poetic rhythm that makes it most appealing.” Saturday Review correspondent Benjamin De Mott concluded that Baldwin “retains a place in an extremely select group: That composed of the few genuinely indispensable American writers. He owes his rank partly to the qualities of responsiveness that have marked his work from the beginning. ... Time and time over in fiction as in reportage, Baldwin tears himself free of his rhetorical fastenings and stands forth on the page utterly absorbed in the reality of the person before him, strung with his nerves, riveted to his feelings, breathing his breath.” Baldwin’s central preoccupation as a writer lay in “his insistence on removing, layer by layer, the hardened skin with which Americans shield themselves from their country,” according to Orde Coombs in the New York Times Book Review. The author saw himself as a “disturber of the peace”—one who revealed uncomfortable truths to a society mired in complacency. Pratt found Baldwin “engaged in a perpetual battle to overrule our objections and continue his probe into the very depths of our past. His constant concern is the catastrophic failure of the American Dream and the devastating inability of the American people to deal with that calamity.” Pratt uncovered a further assumption in Baldwin’s work; namely, that all of mankind is united by virtue of common humanity. “Consequently,” Pratt stated, “the ultimate purpose of the writer, from Baldwin’s perspective, is to discover that sphere of commonality where, although differences exist, those dissimilarities are stripped of their power to block communication and stifle human intercourse.” The major impediment in this search for commonality, according to Baldwin, is white society’s entrenched moral cowardice, a condition that through longstanding tradition equates Blackness with dark impulses, carnality and chaos. By denying Black people's essential humanity so simplistically, the author argued, whites inflict psychic damage on blacks and suffer self-estrangement—a “fatal bewilderment,” to quote Bone. Baldwin’s essays exposed the dangerous implications of this destructive way of thinking; his fictional characters occasionally achieve interracial harmony after having made the bold leap of understanding he advocated. In the British Journal of Sociology, Beau Fly Jones claimed that Baldwin was one of the first Black writers “to discuss with such insight the psychological handicaps that most Negroes must face; and to realize the complexities of Negro-white relations in so many different contexts. In redefining what has been called the Negro problem as white, he has forced the majority race to look at the damage it has done, and its own role in that destruction.” Essayist John W. Roberts felt that Baldwin’s “evolution as a writer of the first order constitutes a narrative as dramatic and compelling as his best story.” Baldwin was born and raised in Harlem under very trying circumstances. His stepfather, an evangelical preacher, struggled to support a large family and demanded the most rigorous religious behavior from his nine children. Roberts wrote: “Baldwin’s ambivalent relationship with his stepfather served as a constant source of tension during his formative years and informs some of his best mature writings. ... The demands of caring for younger siblings and his stepfather’s religious convictions in large part shielded the boy from the harsh realities of Harlem street life during the 1930s.” As a youth Baldwin read constantly and even tried writing; he was an excellent student who sought escape from his environment through literature, movies, and theatre. During the summer of his 14th birthday he underwent a dramatic religious conversion, partly in response to his nascent sexuality and partly as a further buffer against the ever-present temptations of drugs and crime. He served as a junior minister for three years at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, but gradually he lost his desire to preach as he began to question Black people's acceptance of Christian tenets that had, in essence, been used to enslave them. Shortly after he graduated from high school in 1942, Baldwin was compelled to find work in order to help support his brothers and sisters; mental instability had incapacitated his stepfather. Baldwin took a job in the defense industry in Belle Meade, New Jersey, and there, not for the first time, he was confronted with racism, discrimination, and the debilitating regulations of segregation. The experiences in New Jersey were closely followed by his stepfather’s death, after which Baldwin determined to make writing his sole profession. He moved to Greenwich Village and began to write a novel, supporting himself by performing a variety of odd jobs. In 1944 he met author Richard Wright, who helped him to land the 1945 Eugene F. Saxton fellowship. Despite the financial freedom the fellowship provided, Baldwin was unable to complete his novel that year. He found the social tenor of the United States increasingly stifling even though such prestigious periodicals as the Nation, New Leader, and Commentary began to accept his essays and short stories for publication. Eventually, in 1948, he moved to Paris, using funds from a Rosenwald Foundation fellowship to pay his passage. Most critics feel that this journey abroad was fundamental to Baldwin’s development as an author. “Once I found myself on the other side of the ocean,” Baldwin told the New York Times, “I could see where I came from very clearly, and I could see that I carried myself, which is my home, with me. You can never escape that. I am the grandson of a slave, and I am a writer. I must deal with both.” Through some difficult financial and emotional periods, Baldwin undertook a process of self-realization that included both an acceptance of his heritage and an admittance of his bisexuality. Bone noted that Europe gave the young author many things: “It gave him a world perspective from which to approach the question of his own identity. It gave him a tender love affair which would dominate the pages of his later fiction. But above all, Europe gave him back himself. The immediate fruit of self-recovery was a great creative outburst. First came two [works] of reconciliation with his racial heritage. Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Amen Corner represent a search for roots, a surrender to tradition, an acceptance of the Negro past. Then came a series of essays which probe, deeper than anyone has dared, the psychic history of this nation. They are a moving record of a man’s struggle to define the forces that have shaped him, in order that he may accept himself.” Many critics view Baldwin’s essays as his most significant contribution to American literature. Works such as Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen “serve to illuminate the condition of the black man in twentieth-century America,” according to Pratt. Highly personal and analytical, the essays probe deeper than the mere provincial problems of white versus black to uncover the essential issues of self-determination, identity, and reality. “An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian,” Baldwin told Life magazine. “His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive.” South Atlantic Quarterly contributor Fred L. Standley asserted that this quest for personal identity “is indispensable in Baldwin’s opinion and the failure to experience such is indicative of a fatal weakness in human life.” C.W.E. Bigsby elaborated in The Fifties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama: “Baldwin’s central theme is the need to accept reality as a necessary foundation for individual identity and thus a logical prerequisite for the kind of saving love in which he places his whole faith. For some this reality is one’s racial or sexual nature, for others it is the ineluctable fact of death. ... Baldwin sees this simple progression as an urgent formula not only for the redemption of individual men but for the survival of mankind. In this at least black and white are as one and the Negro’s much-vaunted search for identity can be seen as part and parcel of the American’s long-standing need for self-definition.” Inevitably, however, Baldwin’s assessments of the “sweet” and “bitter” experiences in his own life led him to describe “the exact place where private chaos and social outrage meet,” according to Alfred Kazin in Contemporaries. Eugenia Collier described this confrontation in Black World: “On all levels personal and political ... life is a wild chaos of paradox, hidden meanings, and dilemmas. This chaos arises from man’s inability—or reluctance to face the truth about his own nature. As a result of this self-imposed blindness, men erect an elaborate facade of myth, tradition, and ritual behind which crouch, invisible, their true selves. It is this blindness on the part of Euro-Americans which has created and perpetuated the vicious racism which threatens to destroy this nation.” In his essays on the 1950s and early 1960s, Baldwin sought to explain Black experiences to a white readership as he warned whites about the potential destruction their psychic blindness might wreak. Massachusetts Review contributor David Levin noted that the author came to represent “for ‘white’ Americans, the eloquent, indignant prophet of an oppressed people, a voice speaking ... in an all but desperate, final effort to bring us out of what he calls our innocence before it is (if it is not already) too late. This voice calls us to our immediate duty for the sake of our own humanity as well as our own safety. It demands that we stop regarding the Negro as an abstraction, an invisible man; that we begin to recognize each Negro in his ‘full weight and complexity’ as a human being; that we face the horrible reality of our past and present treatment of Negroes—a reality we do not know and do not want to know.” In Ebony magazine, Allan Morrison observed that Baldwin evinced an awareness “that the audience for most of his nonfictional writings is white and he uses every forum at his disposal to drive home the basic truths of Negro-white relations in America as he sees them. His function here is to interpret whites to themselves and at the same time voice the Negro’s protest against his role in a Jim Crow society.” Because Baldwin sought to inform and confront whites, 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 a literature exclusively by and for Blacks. 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. Eldridge Cleaver, in his book Soul on Ice, accused Baldwin of a hatred of Blacks and “a shameful, fanatical fawning” love of whites. What Cleaver saw as complicity with whites, Baldwin saw rather as an attempt to alter the real daily environment with which American Blacks have been faced all their lives. Pratt noted, however, that Baldwin’s efforts to “shake up” his white readers put him “at odds with current white literary trends” as well as with the Black Arts Movement. Pratt explained that Baldwin labored under the belief “that mainstream art is directed toward a complacent and apathetic audience, and it is designed to confirm and reinforce that sense of well-being. ... Baldwin’s writings are, by their very nature, iconoclastic. While Black Arts focuses on a Black-oriented artistry, Baldwin is concerned with the destruction of the fantasies and delusions of a contented audience which is determined to avoid reality.” As the civil rights movement gained momentum, Baldwin escalated his attacks on white complacency from the speaking platform as well as from the pages of books and magazines. Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time both sold more than a million copies; both were cited for their predictions of Black violence in desperate response to white oppression. In Encounter, Colin MacInnes concluded that the reason “why Baldwin speaks to us of another race is that he still believes us worthy of a warning: he has not yet despaired of making us feel the dilemma we all chat about so glibly, ... and of trying to save us from the agonies that we too will suffer if the Negro people are driven beyond the ultimate point of desperation.” Retrospective analyses of Baldwin’s essays highlight the characteristic prose style that gives his works literary merit beyond the mere dissemination of ideas. In A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics, Irving Howe placed the author among “the two or three greatest essayists this country has ever produced.” Howe claimed that Baldwin “has brought a new luster to the essay as an art form, a form with possibilities for discursive reflection and concrete drama. ... The style of these essays is a remarkable instance of the way in which a grave and sustained eloquence—the rhythm of oratory, ... held firm and hard—can be employed in an age deeply suspicious of rhetorical prowess.” “Baldwin has shown more concern for the painful exactness of prose style than any other modern American writer,” noted David Littlejohn in Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes. “He picks up words with heavy care, then sets them, one by one, with a cool and loving precision that one can feel in the reading. ... The exhilarating exhaustion of reading his best essays—which in itself may be a proof of their honesty and value—demands that the reader measure up, and forces him to learn.” Baldwin’s fiction expanded his exploration of the “full weight and complexity” of the individual in a society prone to callousness and categorization. His loosely autobiographical works probed the milieus with which he was most familiar—Black evangelical churches, jazz clubs, stifling Southern towns, and the Harlem ghetto. In The Black American Writer: Fiction, Brian Lee maintained that Baldwin’s “essays explore the ambiguities and ironies of a life lived on two levels—that of the Negro and that of the man—and they have spoken eloquently to and for a whole generation. But Baldwin’s feelings about the condition— alternating moods of sadness and bitterness—are best expressed in the paradoxes confronting the haunted heroes of his novels and stories. The possible modes of existence for anyone seeking refuge from a society which refuses to acknowledge one’s humanity are necessarily limited, and Baldwin has explored with some thoroughness the various emotional and spiritual alternatives available to his retreating protagonists.” Pratt felt that Baldwin’s fictive artistry “not only documents the dilemma of the Black man in American society, but it also bears witness to the struggle of the artist against the overwhelming forces of oppression. Almost invariably, his protagonists are artists. ... Each character is engaged in the pursuit of artistic fulfillment which, for Baldwin, becomes symbolic of the quest for identity.” Love, both sexual and spiritual, was an essential component of Baldwin’s characters’ quests for self-realization. John W. Aldridge observed in the Saturday Review that sexual love “emerges in his novels as a kind of universal anodyne for the disease of racial separatism, as a means not only of achieving personal identity but also of transcending false categories of color and gender.” Homosexual encounters emerged as the principal means to achieve important revelations; as Bigsby explained, Baldwin felt that “it is the homosexual, virtually alone, who can offer a selfless and genuine love because he alone has a real sense of himself, having accepted his own nature.” Baldwin did not see love as a “saving grace,” however; his vision, given the circumstances of the lives he encountered, was more cynical than optimistic. In his introduction to James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays, Kenneth Kinnamon wrote: “If the search for love has its origin in the desire of a child for emotional security, its arena is an adult world which involves it in struggle and pain. Stasis must yield to motion, innocence to experience, security to risk. This is the lesson that ... saves Baldwin’s central fictional theme from sentimentality. ... Similarly, love as an agent of racial reconciliation and national survival is not for Baldwin a vague yearning for an innocuous brotherhood, but an agonized confrontation with reality, leading to the struggle to transform it. It is a quest for truth through a recognition of the primacy of suffering and injustice in the American past.” Pratt also concluded that in Baldwin’s novels, “love is often extended, frequently denied, seldom fulfilled. As reflections of our contemporary American society, the novels stand as forthright indictments of the intolerable conditions that we have accepted unquestioningly as a way of life.” Black family life—the charged emotional atmosphere between parents and children, brothers and sisters—provided another major theme in Baldwin’s fiction. This was especially apparent in his first and best-known novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, the story of a Harlem teenager’s struggles with a repressive father and with religious conversion. According to Roberts, Go Tell It on the Mountain “proved that James Baldwin had become a writer of enormous power and skill. [It] was an essential book for Baldwin. Although clearly a fictional work, it chronicles two of the most problematic aspects of his existence as a young man: a son’s relationship to his stepfather and the impact of fundamentalist religion on the consciousness of a young boy.” In her work entitled James Baldwin, Carolyn Wedin Sylvander praised Baldwin’s family chronicle particularly because the author “is dealing comprehensively and emotionally with the hot issue of race relations in the United States at a time ... when neither white ignorance and prejudice nor black powerlessness is conducive to holistic depictions of black experience.” Indeed, the overt confrontation between the races that characterizes Baldwin’s later work was here portrayed as a peripheral threat, a danger greater than, but less immediate than, the potential damage inflicted by parents on children. Sylvander wrote: “It is painfully, dramatically, structurally clear throughout Go Tell It on the Mountain that the struggles every individual faces—with sexuality, with guilt, with pain, with love—are passed on, generation to generation.” Littlejohn described Baldwin’s treatment of this essential American theme as “autobiography-as-exorcism, ... a lyrical, painful, ritual exercise whose necessity and intensity the reader feels.” Pratt likewise stated that Go Tell It on the Mountain “stands as an honest, intensive, self-analysis, functioning simultaneously to illuminate self, society, and mankind as a whole.” In addition to his numerous books, Baldwin was one of the few Black authors to have had more than one of his plays produced on Broadway. Both The Amen Corner, another treatment of storefront pentecostal religion, and Blues for Mister Charlie, a drama based on the racially-motivated murder of Emmett Till in 1955, had successful Broadway runs and numerous revivals. Standley commented in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that in both plays, “as in his other literary works, Baldwin explores a variety of thematic concerns: the historical significance and the potential explosiveness in black-white relations; the necessity for developing a sexual and psychological consciousness and identity; the intertwining of love and power in the universal scheme of existence as well as in the structures of society; the misplaced priorities in the value systems in America; and the responsibility of the artist to promote the evolution of the individual and the society.” In The Black American Writer: Poetry and Drama, Walter Meserve offered remarks on Baldwin’s abilities as a playwright. “Baldwin tries to use the theatre as a pulpit for his ideas,” Meserve stated. “Mainly his plays are thesis plays—talky, over-written, and cliche dialogue and some stereotypes, preachy, and argumentative. Essentially, Baldwin is not particularly dramatic, but he can be extremely eloquent, compelling, and sometimes irritating as a playwright committed to his approach to life.” Meserve added, however, that although the author was criticized for creating stereotypes, “his major characters are the most successful and memorable aspects of his plays. People are important to Baldwin, and their problems, generally embedded in their agonizing souls, stimulate him to write. ... A humanitarian, sensitive to the needs and struggles of man, he writes of inner turmoil, spiritual disruption, the consequence upon people of the burdens of the world, both White and Black.” Baldwin’s oratorical prowess—honed in the pulpit as a youth—brought him into great demand as a speaker during the civil rights era. Sylvander observed that national attention “began to turn toward him as a spokesperson for Blacks, not as much because of his novels as his essays, debates, interviews, panel discussions.” Baldwin embraced his role as racial spokesman reluctantly and grew increasingly disillusioned as the American public “disarmed him with celebrity, [fell] in love with his eccentricities, and institutionalized his outrage ... into prime- time entertainment,” to quote Aldridge. Nor was Baldwin able to feel that his speeches and essays were producing social change—the assassinations of three of his associates, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, shattered his remaining hopes for racial reconciliation. Kinnamon remarked that by 1972, the year Baldwin published No Name in the Street, “the redemptive possibilities of love seemed exhausted in that terrible decade of assassination, riot, and repression. ... Social love had now become for Baldwin more a rueful memory than an alternative to disaster.” London Magazine contributor James Campbell also noted that by 1972 “Baldwin the saviour had turned into Baldwin the soldier. What [observers] failed to notice was that he was still the preacher and the prophet, that his passion and rage were mingled with detachment, and that his gloomy prognostications were based on powerful observation and an understanding of the past which compelled their pessimism.” Many critics took Baldwin to task for the stridency and gloom that overtook his writings. “To function as a voice of outrage month after month for a decade and more strains heart and mind, and rhetoric as well,” declared Benjamin De Mott in the Saturday Review. “The consequence is a writing style ever on the edge of being winded by too many summonses to intensity.” New Republic correspondent Nathan Glazer likewise stated that Baldwin had become “an accusing voice, but the accusation is so broad, so general, so all-embracing, that the rhetoric disappears into the wind.” Stephen Donadio offered a similar opinion in the Partisan Review: “As his notoriety increased, his personality was oversimplified, appropriated, and consumed. ... Mr. Baldwin created a situation in which the eye of the audience was fixed on the author as a performer, and the urgency of the race problem in America became a backdrop for elaborate rhetorical assaults which could be dutifully acknowledged but forgotten with a sigh.” Baldwin’s passionate detractors were offset by equally passionate defenders, however. Sylvander wrote: “Wading through vehement and sometimes shallow reactions to the deep water of the statements and works themselves, one is struck repeatedly by the power of Baldwin’s prose, and by our continuing need, as readers and as citizens, for his steadying apocalyptic vision. Finally, in his fantastic, experientially various, wide-ranging, searching, and committed life, one can find a vigorous model for venturing beyond charted areas.” Charles Newman made two points in James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. First, Newman noted that Baldwin’s experience is “unique among our artists in that his artistic achievements mesh so precisely with his historical circumstances. He is that nostalgic type—an artist speaking for a genuinely visible revolution.” Second, Newman maintained that as an observer of this painful revolution, “almost alone [Baldwin] continued to confront the unmanageable questions of modern society, rather than creating a nuclear family in which semantic fantasies may be enacted with no reference to the larger world except that it stinks.” Kinnamon concluded: “James Baldwin has always been concerned with the most personal and intimate areas of experience and also with the broadest questions of national and global destiny—and with the intricate interrelationships between the two. Whatever the final assessment of his literary achievement, it is clear that his voice—simultaneously that of victim, witness, and prophet—has been among the most urgent of our time.” At the time of his death from cancer late in 1987, Baldwin was still working on two projects—a play, The Welcome Table, and a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Although he lived primarily in France, he had never relinquished his United States citizenship and preferred to think of himself as a “commuter” rather than as an expatriate. The publication of his collected essays, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948- 1985, and his subsequent death sparked reassessments of his career and comments on the quality of his lasting legacy. “Mr. Baldwin has become a kind of prophet, a man who has been able to give a public issue all its deeper moral, historical, and personal significance,” remarked Robert F. Sayre in Contemporary American Novelists. “Certainly one mark of his achievement, ... is that whatever deeper comprehension of the race issue Americans now possess has been in some way shaped by him. And this is to have shaped their comprehension of themselves as well.” Sylvander asserted that what emerges from the whole of Baldwin’s work is “a kind of absolute conviction and passion and honesty that is nothing less than courageous. ... Baldwin has shared his struggle with his readers for a purpose—to demonstrate that our suffering is our bridge to one another.” Perhaps the most telling demonstration of the results of Baldwin’s achievement came from other Black writers. Orde Coombs, for instance, concluded: “Because he existed we felt that the racial miasma that swirled around us would not consume us, and it is not too much to say that this man saved our lives, or at least, gave us the necessary ammunition to face what we knew would continue to be a hostile and condescending world.” Playwright Amiri Baraka phrased a similar assessment even more eloquently in his funeral eulogy to Baldwin. “This man traveled the earth like its history and its biographer,” Baraka said. “He reported, criticized, made beautiful, analyzed, cajoled, lyricized, attacked, sang, made us think, made us better, made us consciously human. ... He made us feel ... that we could defend ourselves or define ourselves, that we were in the world not merely as animate slaves, but as terrifyingly sensitive measurers of what is good or evil, beautiful or ugly. This is the power of his spirit. This is the bond which created our love for him.” In a posthumous profile for the Washington Post, Juan Williams wrote: “The success of Baldwin’s effort as the witness is evidenced time and again by the people, black and white, gay and straight, famous and anonymous, whose humanity he unveiled in his writings. America and the literary world are far richer for his witness. The proof of a shared humanity across the divides of race, class and more is the testament that the preacher’s son, James Arthur Baldwin, has left us.”
Le sporting-club de monte carlo (for lena horne), munich, winter 1973 (for y.s.).
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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.'
(1924-1987)
Writer and playwright James Baldwin published the 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain , receiving acclaim for his insights on race, spirituality and humanity. Other novels included Giovanni's Room , Another Country and Just Above My Head, as well as essays like Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time .
Writer and playwright James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, in Harlem, New York. One of the 20th century's greatest writers, Baldwin 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.
Baldwin was born to a young single mother, Emma Jones, at Harlem Hospital. She reportedly never told him the name of his biological father. Jones married a Baptist minister named David Baldwin when James was about three years old.
Despite their strained relationship, Baldwin followed in his stepfather's footsteps — who he always referred to as his father — during his early teen years. He served as a youth minister in a Harlem Pentecostal church from the ages of 14 to 16.
Baldwin published numerous poems, short stories and plays in the magazine, and his early work showed an understanding for sophisticated literary devices in a writer of such a young age.
After graduating from high school in 1942, he had to put his plans for college on hold to help support his family, which included seven younger children. He took whatever work he could find, including laying railroad tracks for the U.S. Army in New Jersey.
During this time, Baldwin frequently encountered discrimination, being turned away from restaurants, bars and other establishments because he was African American. After being fired from the New Jersey job, Baldwin sought other work and struggled to make ends meet.
On July 29, 1943, Baldwin lost his father — and gained his eighth sibling the same day. He soon moved to Greenwich Village, a New York City neighborhood popular with artists and writers.
Devoting himself to writing a novel, Baldwin took odd jobs to support himself. He befriended writer Richard Wright , and through Wright, he was able to land a fellowship in 1945 to cover his expenses. Baldwin started getting essays and short stories published in such national periodicals as The Nation , Partisan Review and Commentary .
Three years later, Baldwin made a dramatic change in his life and moved to Paris on another fellowship. The shift in location freed Baldwin to write more about his personal and racial background.
"Once I found myself on the other side of the ocean, I see where I came from very clearly...I am the grandson of a slave, and I am a writer. I must deal with both," Baldwin once told The New York Times . The move marked the beginning of his life as a "transatlantic commuter," dividing his time between France and the United States.
Baldwin had his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain , published in 1953. The loosely autobiographical tale focused on the life of a young man growing up in Harlem grappling with father issues and his religion.
" Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else. I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal, above all, with my father," he later said.
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.
Baldwin explored writing for the stage a well. He wrote The Amen Corner , which looked at the phenomenon of storefront Pentecostal religion. The play was produced at Howard University in 1955, and later on Broadway in the mid-1960s.
It was his essays, however, that helped establish Baldwin as one of the top writers of the times. Delving into his own life, he provided an unflinching look at the Black experience in America through such works as Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961).
Nobody Knows My Name hit the bestsellers list, selling more than a million copies. While not a marching or sit-in style activist, Baldwin emerged as one of the leading voices in the Civil Rights Movement for his compelling work on race.
In 1963, there was a noted change in Baldwin's work with The Fire Next Time . This collection of essays was meant to educate white Americans on what it meant to be Black. It also offered white readers a view of themselves through the eyes of the African American community.
In the work, Baldwin offered a brutally realistic picture of race relations, but he remained hopeful about possible improvements. "If we...do not falter in our duty now, we may be able...to end the racial nightmare." His words struck a chord with the American people, and The Fire Next Time sold more than a million copies.
That same year, Baldwin was featured on the cover of Time magazine. "There is not another writer — white or Black — who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South," Time said in the feature.
Baldwin wrote another play, Blues for Mister Charlie , which debuted on Broadway in 1964. The drama was loosely based on the 1955 racially motivated murder of a young African American boy named Emmett Till .
This same year, his book with friend Avedon entitled Nothing Personal , hit bookstore shelves. The work was a tribute to slain civil rights movement leader Medgar Evers . Baldwin also published a collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man , around this time.
In his 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone , Baldwin returned to popular themes — sexuality, family and the Black experience. Some critics panned the novel, calling it a polemic rather than a novel. He was also criticized for using the first-person singular, the "I," for the book's narration.
By the early 1970s, Baldwin seemed to despair over the racial situation. He had witnessed so much violence in the previous decade — especially the assassinations of Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. — caused by racial hatred.
This disillusionment became apparent in his work, which employed a more strident tone than in earlier works. Many critics point to No Name in the Street , a 1972 collection of essays, as the beginning of the change in Baldwin's work. He also worked on a screenplay around this time, trying to adapt The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley for the big screen.
While his literary fame faded somewhat in his later years, Baldwin continued to produce new works in a variety of forms. He published a collection of poems, Jimmy's Blues: Selected Poems , in 1983 as well as the 1987 novel Harlem Quartet .
Baldwin also remained an astute observer of race and American culture. In 1985, he wrote The Evidence of Things Not Seen about the Atlanta child murders . Baldwin also spent years sharing his experiences and views as a college professor. In the years before his death, he taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Hampshire College .
Baldwin died on December 1, 1987, at his home in St. Paul de Vence, France. Never wanting to be a spokesperson or a leader, Baldwin saw his personal mission as bearing "witness to the truth." He accomplished this mission through his extensive, rapturous literary legacy.
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15 great articles and essays by james baldwin, stranger in the village, notes of a native son, how to cool it by james baldwin, letter from a region in my mind, a talk to teachers, the american dream is at the expense of the american negro by james baldwin, autobiographical notes by james baldwin, a report from occupied territory by james baldwin, if black english isn’t a language, then tell me, what is, many thousands gone, a letter to my nephew, sonny’s blues, the creative process, 150 great articles and essays.
Everybody’s protest novel, why i stopped hating shakespeare by james baldwin, collected essays : notes of a native son / nobody knows my name / the fire next time / no name in the street / the devil finds work / other essays.
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National portrait gallery announces “this morning, this evening, so soon: james baldwin and the voices of queer resistance”.
“James Baldwin” by Beauford Delaney, pastel on paper, 1963. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Copyright Estate of Beauford Delaney by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator; courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York.
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has announced “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance,” celebrating the 100th anniversary of the writer, essayist, playwright and activist. Through portraiture and biography, the one-room exhibition will explore Baldwin’s legacy alongside his contemporaries in art, music, film, literature and activism. The exhibition is curated by the National Portrait Gallery’s Director of Curatorial Affairs, Rhea L. Combs, in consultation with Hilton Als, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and New Yorker staff writer. It will be on view July 12 through April 20, 2025.
“On the centennial of Baldwin’s birth, it is important to look at this prolific thinker and writer, not only for his visionary insights but his influence that still resonates,” Combs said. “Baldwin was bolstered by a community of like-minded creatives, including Lorraine Hansberry, Nina Simone and Bayard Rustin, and his influence remains steadfast in the next generation of activists and artists. This exhibition seeks to highlight Baldwin’s significance through a collective portrait that not only offers a portrait of him, but also honors those who helped him become the man known for holding a mirror up to America and her promise.”
Born in Harlem, New York, Baldwin (1924–1987) considered himself “a witness” and used his writings and his work to talk about America and its history. Attempting to ensure the United States “kept the faith,” Baldwin was often recognized for speaking out against injustice when other like-minded artists, collaborators and organizers were overshadowed. Baldwin’s formative years—growing up poor in New York City, serving in the ministry during his teen years, his personal essays and novels and working closely with civil rights activists of his time—greatly influenced who the artist would become and how he carefully negotiated what were considered acceptable ideas of race, gender and sexuality.
“This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance,” presents portraits in a range of media and ephemera to reveal how Baldwin’s sexuality and faith, artistic curiosities and notions of masculinity—coupled with his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement—helped to shape this formidable figure. Images feature Baldwin alongside other gay civil rights activists who affected his life, notably Rustin—the political activist and principal organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom—and writer and playwright Hansberry. Portraits of fellow creatives in Baldwin’s circle will also be on view, including Beauford Delaney, Essex Hemphill, filmmaker Marlon Riggs and singer Simone. The exhibition will feature works by artists Lyle Ashton Harris, Richard Avedon, Beauford Delaney and Bernard Gotfryd, along with contemporary art by Glenn Ligon, Donald Moffett, Sedat Pakay, Faith Ringgold, Lorna Simpson and Jack Whitten.
“This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance” is the first exhibition presented by the Portrait Gallery dedicated to Baldwin and inspired by the 2019 exhibition “God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin,” curated by Als. The richly illustrated companion publication, published by the National Portrait Gallery and DelMonico Books • D.A.P., will feature select writings by Baldwin on themes of gender politics and religion.
“This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance” is presented with the support of the Ford Foundation and Tommie L. Pegues and Donald A. Capoccia. Additional support has been provided by the Portrait of a Nation Gala.
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery tells the multifaceted story of the United States through the individuals who have shaped American culture. Spanning the visual arts, performing arts and new media, the Portrait Gallery portrays poets and presidents, visionaries and villains, actors and activists whose lives tell the nation’s story.
The National Portrait Gallery is located at Eighth and G streets N.W., Washington, D.C. Smithsonian Information: 202-633-1000. Connect with the museum at npg.si.edu and on Facebook , Instagram , X and YouTube .
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Billy Porter is receiving backlash for greeting U.S. President Joe Biden with a kiss on the hand at the White House’s early Juneteenth Holiday celebration and concert on Monday. The holiday celebration, hosted by Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, included singers Gladys Knight, Patti LaBelle and rapper Doug E. Fresh.
Porter, a Tony, Grammy and Emmy nominee, sat in the front row, beside Harris’ husband, Douglas Emhoff. The Pose star reached over Harris and Emhoff to kiss Biden’s hand.
The moment has caught the attention of social media, particularly since he is set to co-write, co-produce, and lead act in a forthcoming biopic about the famed writer, James Baldwin.
With books like Notes of a Native Son, and many open letters and essays addressing American politics and ideals, Baldwin was deeply connected to the civil rights movement, arguing that in order for white Americans to celebrate freedom, they must also reckon with their history of slavery and racism.
In a 1963 letter to his nephew, Baldwin wrote of the United States: “the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.”
Baldwin was also notably critical of Israel, and found much solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people.
james baldwin better haunt every moment of billy porter’s life pic.twitter.com/hLsrBiVXjz — ghost beef 🍉🇵🇸 (@tortillablanket) June 11, 2024
For much of the concert, Porter danced beside the President and vice president, swaying to the variety of musical acts performed on the White House’s South Lawn.
In 2021, President Biden named Juneteenth an official holiday, which commemorates the emancipation of America’s enslaved people, and in particular when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their emancipation.
One tweet about the incident with Porter said, “James Baldwin challenged white supremacy at every turn. Billy Porter kneels and kisses it at every turn. They are not the same!”
The more you learn about Billy Porter, the more offensive it becomes that he’s playing James Baldwin https://t.co/M7tlX89ESn — Siddhant Adlakha (@SiddhantAdlakha) June 11, 2024
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Clark honors college menu, clark honors college, senior spotlight: miriam yousaf.
Miriam Yousaf remembers sitting in front of the whiteboard in the common room during her freshman year. It was in Global Scholars Hall on the fourth floor of the center tower. She was part of the Clark Honors College Academic Residential Community. She and two of her best friends stayed up until 3 a.m., talking through global problems with Expo markers in hand. “We have this dialogue of three people from very different backgrounds trying to talk through logic and religion and climate change and politics,” she recalls. “And we would work through it.”
Major: Global studies Minors: Spanish, global gealth and environmental studies Thesis: “ Ask, Don’t Tell: Postcoloniality in Development Theory and Practice” Describe your experience at the CHC: inspirational, wonderful faculty, front desk. One moment that made all the difference: I think deciding to take an “Inside-Out Prison Exchange” class. Advice on the thesis project: Pick a topic that will force you to read things that you actually want to read. Advice for incoming first-year students: I think keep asking questions and get out of your comfort zone. This summer, I can’t wait to: Jump in the river. I’m going to the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights through UO, so I’m excited about that too. And to see my grandma. What I’ll miss most about the CHC: My friends, my mentors, and my community. I’m grateful for: All the time I’ve gotten from faculty and mentors. I’m headed to: Columbia University and New York City.
Yousaf incorporates empathy and conversations into all aspects of her life. As a global studies major with minors in Spanish, global health, and environmental studies, seeing things from multiple points of view is a key aspect of her education. Her time at the University of Oregon and the Clark Honors College has helped her hone her interests in global health initiatives and human rights documentation, along with providing her with avenues to express her passion for these subjects.
Although Yousaf has always seen things from a worldly perspective, her academic pool hasn't been as deep as it is at the UO. She grew up in St. Louis, attending a small Christian high school with eight people in her graduating class. Her high school curriculum did not include subjects like the climate crisis or the Big Bang theory, so she felt like there were gaps in her education.“
My parents wanted something that mirrored their traditional schools in England but was also religious,” Yousaf said. When Yousaf was growing up her parents practiced Christianity and wanted religion to be a part of her formal schooling.
Although she didn’t love the way she was educated, she did learn some unique things from her high school. “I took one year of Spanish and six years of Latin,” she said with a laugh. She might have been sheltered at her high school, but Yousaf always had dance as an outlet. “That was something that allowed me to have a sense of reality and community outside my very conservative school,” she says. She remembers starting to dance at a contemporary company in downtown St. Louis, where her classes were filled with other people of color and her instructors were openly gay men. “Getting to be in that community as a 16 and 17-year-old was a peek at what life could be like, what I would want it to look like, 30 minutes from my house but not what I’m growing up in,” she says. Yousaf knew that she wanted to move out of the Midwest for college. Her parents grew up in the UK, and wanted her and her siblings to have a similar finishing school experience to them. She was the only non-white person in her class in high school and wanted to exist in a space where she didn’t feel passively unsafe for speaking her mind. Moving to Eugene was like a shock to the system. Yousaf was thrilled to see people unafraid to express themselves in their fashion choices and political opinions learning alongside her.
She remembers starting to dance at a contemporary company in downtown St. Louis, where her classes were filled with other people of color and her instructors were openly gay men. “Getting to be in that community as a 16 and 17 year old was a peek at what life could be like, what I would want it to look like, 30 minutes from my house but not what I’m growing up in,” she says. Yousaf knew that she wanted to move out of the Midwest for college. She was the only non-white person in her class in high school and wanted to exist in a space where she didn’t feel passively unsafe for speaking her mind. Moving to Eugene was like a shock to the system. Yousaf was thrilled to see people unafraid to express themselves in their fashion choices and political opinions learning alongside her.
Her freshman year, she relished that her peers at UO didn’t only believe in climate change, but also wanted to brainstorm ways to combat it. She continued being a part of the dance community, although classes were sometimes on Zoom due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The most satisfying part of her first year at UO was finding out what global studies were about. “In the winter of 2021, I took my first global studies class over Zoom,” she remembers. “It fit so neatly on my brain as a way of thinking and looking at the world.” The class, “Global 240: Perspectives on International Development,” was partially a role-play simulation similar to the United Nations. Yousaf played an ethnic minority religious leader and relished working her way through a coup d’état during the class final. “Thinking about world problems on that scale, with all these different actors and ideologies, including religion and geography and politics, totally made sense to me and was new to me,” she says.
The course inspired her to declare her degree in global studies, something she has loved studying throughout college. “One of the things that I love a lot about global studies is that it’s a study in differences,” she says. “You have to teach yourself to be curious beyond your first thought. You can’t work in diplomacy or in global health initiatives if you’re stuck with your first thought.”
Yousaf found ways to apply these study methods in the Honors College, as well. She hit her stride in the CHC, taking an “Inside-Out Prison Exchange” course with Associate Professor Anita Chari, where she got to learn alongside incarcerated students. The course that she took, “Autobiography as Political Agency,” focused on reading works by authors like James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates and writing personal reflections on them. “They’ve taken notes on the readings, they’ve written the essays, they’re much more prepared than any other classmates I’ve ever had,” Yousaf says about her classmates inside the prison.
She loved developing personal connections with the incarcerated students and bonding with them over reading and writing. During her senior year, she went on to intern with the Inside-Out program.
One term, Yousaf got to work as a teacher’s assistant with the program and give handwritten feedback throughout the course. “Part of my weekly routine was reading papers from these beautiful thinkers and writers and getting to respond to it. That’s something I’ll cherish forever,” she says.“It was great to work with Miriam throughout the program,” says Shaul Cohen, the director of the UO Prison Education Program.
“She navigated the complicated environment of working within the prison really well. She gave wonderful guidance to students, really deep and thoughtful feedback on their papers.”
Yousaf recalls sharing cheesecake recipes with incarcerated students and talking with people about what Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr celebrations look like inside of prison. She enjoyed getting to know her students inside the prison and inside the Honors College.
She has also gotten to know the Honors College through her work at the front desk. Yousaf spent many a shift at the front of the first floor of Chapman, answering questions and directing students to classrooms. “Working at the front desk for two years, I get to see the Honors College breathe in and breathe out on a day-to-day,” she says. Her close relationships with the faculty and mentors that she met through the University of Oregon and the Clark Honors College have influenced her to continue her education at Columbia University.
Ian McNeely, a Clark Honors College history professor, worked with Yousaf on her study abroad in Berlin. “She showed a maturity of intellect and always elevated class conversations,” he recalls.
He and Yousaf have kept in touch throughout the year, with her dropping by office hours to say hello. “She kept me in the loop, and we would chat about her future plans,” he says. “I’m really excited to see how she does at Columbia.”
Next year, she will be working toward a master’s in international affairs, economic and political development, and conflict resolution. “I’m grateful for the faculty who invested their time in me and their energy,” Yousaf says. “People who I didn’t even have their classes, I would go to their office hours and talk about grad school and they would want to get to know me.” She hopes she can put the work she did on her thesis – “Ask, Don’t Tell: Postcoloniality in Development Theory and Practice” – in play at Columbia. Yousaf recalls struggling to fit the complexities of her paper into the 30- to 40-minute presentation. But she enjoyed engaging with her advisors and mentors during the question-and-answer session afterward. And by the time it was over, she had won their praise. “(My advisors) started debating each other during the defense, which I think maybe means it’s a good presentation,” Yousaf says. She will always be grateful for the opportunities that she’s had when it comes to her schooling. “My whole life, I’ve had the perspective that my grandma didn’t get to go to school,” she says. “Me as a nonwhite, female-presenting person, me going to school and going to college and going to grad school is crazy,” she says. “It shouldn’t be that crazy, but I’m always aware that the things I get to do are a privilege.”
Read more about the class of 2024
Order of Lenin Moscow Air Defence District
Ордена Ленина Московский округ ПВО
Military Unit: 64178
Commanders:
Activated 1948 in Moscow, Moscow Oblast, as the Moscow Air Defence Region , from the North-Western Air Defence District.
1950 renamed Moscow Air Defence District .
Organisation 1955:
Organisation 1962:
Awarded the Order of Lenin 22.6.68.
Organisation 1970:
Organisation 1980:
Organisation 1988:
1998 renamed Moscow Air Force and Air Defence District.
2002 renamed Special Purpose Troop Command.
Subordination:
IMAGES
COMMENTS
James Baldwin (born August 2, 1924, New York, New York, U.S.—died December 1, 1987, Saint-Paul de Vence, France) was an essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him one of the most important voices of the 20th century. A writer of exceptionally clear and psychologically penetrating ...
James Baldwin, a novelist, essayist, poet, and playwright, died in 1987. His many works include " Go Tell It on the Mountain " and " Giovanni's Room ."
Collected essays of James Baldwin. Addeddate 2019-06-07 17:43:38 Identifier JamesBaldwinCollectedEssaysLibraryOfAmerica1998
James Arthur Baldwin (né Jones; August 2, 1924 - December 1, 1987) was an American writer and civil rights activist who garnered acclaim for his essays, novels, plays, and poems.His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain has been ranked among the best English-language novels. His 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son helped establish his reputation as a voice for human equality.
Notes of a Native Son. Notes of a Native Son is a collection of ten essays by James Baldwin, published in 1955, mostly tackling issues of race in America and Europe. The volume, as his first non-fiction book, compiles essays of Baldwin that had previously appeared in such magazines as Harper's Magazine, Partisan Review, and The New Leader.
SALE: Buy all three Baldwin volumes and save 33% James Baldwin was a uniquely prophetic voice in American letters. His brilliant and provocative essays made him the literary voice of the Civil Rights Era, and they continue to speak with powerful urgency to us today, whether in the swirling debate over the Black Lives Matter movement or in the words of Raoul Peck's documentary "I Am Not ...
Contains all the major essays collections in their entirety, plus 36 uncollected essays. James Baldwin was a uniquely prophetic voice in American letters. His brilliant and provocative essays made him the literary voice of the Civil Rights Era, and they continue to speak with powerful urgency to us today, whether in the swirling debate over the ...
Collected Essays. By JAMES BALDWIN. The Library of America. Read the Review. Autobiographical Notes. I was born in Harlem thirty-one years ago. I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not ...
Collected essays Bookreader Item Preview remove-circle Share or Embed This Item. Share to Twitter. Share to Facebook. Share to Reddit. Share to Tumblr. Share to Pinterest ... Collected essays by Baldwin, James, 1924-Publication date 1998 Publisher New York : Library of America Collection
Toni Morrison's definitive edition of James Baldwin's incomparable nonfiction.Contains all the major essays collections in their entirety, plus 36 uncollected essays.James Baldwin was a uniquely prophetic voice in American letters. His brilliant and provocative essays made him the literary voice of the Civil Rights Era, and they continue to speak with powerful urgency to us today, whether in ...
In 1948 James Baldwin left Harlem and New York for Paris, following in a long line of talented African Americans who hoped to experience life free of racial injustice. ... In the great 1962 essay ...
With the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a distillation of his own experiences as a preacher's son in 1930s Harlem, and the essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955), James Baldwin established himself as a prophetic voice of his era. Some such voices may grow fainter with the passage of time, but Baldwin remains an inescapable presence, not only a chronicler of his epoch but a ...
A novelist and essayist of considerable renown, James Baldwin bore witness to the unhappy consequences of American racial strife. Baldwin's writing career began in the last years of legislated segregation; his fame as a social observer grew in tandem with the civil rights movement as he mirrored Black people's aspirations, disappointments, and coping strategies in a hostile society.
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 ...
James Baldwin was a uniquely prophetic voice in American letters. His brilliant and provocative essays made him the literary voice of the Civil Rights Era, and they continue to speak with powerful urgency to us today, whether in the swirling debate over the Black Lives Matter movement or in the words of Raoul Peck's documentary "I Am Not Your Negro."
James Baldwin would have turned 100 on Aug. 2 this year. ... But he wrote with grace and aplomb across genre: essay, novel, short story, song, children's literature, drama, poetry and ...
A Report from Occupied Territory by James Baldwin. I know, in my own flesh, and know, which is worse, in the scars borne by many of those dearest to me, the thunder and fire of the billy club, the paralyzing shock of spittle in the face.
Essays and criticism on James Baldwin - Critical Essays. to be used as meaningful modes for the expression of uniquely personal identity, and not simplistic ways of limiting or pigeonholing character.
The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery has announced "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance," celebrating the 100th anniversary of the writer, essayist, playwright and activist. Through portraiture and biography, the one-room exhibition will explore Baldwin's legacy alongside his contemporaries in art, music, film, literature and ...
The James Arthur Baldwin Africologic Institute (JABAI) Few American authors have written and spoken as unreservedly, presciently - and prophetically, even - about race in America, as did the incomparable James Arthur Baldwin. ... poet, and playwright. From his earliest and most seminal essays, to the poignant poetry volume, Jimmy's Blues ...
Porter received backlash for kissing President Biden's hand at the White House Juneteenth Celebration, especially as he gears up to create a new James Baldwin biopic.
Collected essays Bookreader Item Preview ... Collected essays by Baldwin, James, 1924-1987. Publication date 1998 Publisher New York : Library of America Collection internetarchivebooks; inlibrary; printdisabled Contributor Internet Archive Language English. 869 p. ; 21 cm
James Baldwin, who was born in Harlem, New York City, on August 2, 1924, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.Baldwin worked in a variety of genres; he was a novelist as well as an ...
Miriam Yousaf remembers sitting in front of the whiteboard in the common room during her freshman year. It was in Global Scholars Hall on the fourth floor of the center tower. She was part of the Clark Honors College Academic Residential Community. She and two of her best friends stayed up until 3 a.m., talking through global problems with Expo ...
Local security forces brought 15 men to a military enlistment office after a mass brawl at a warehouse of the Russian Wildberries company in Elektrostal, Moscow Oblast on Feb. 8, Russian Telegram channel Shot reported.
Art MuseumsHistory Museums. Write a review. Full view. All photos (22) Suggest edits to improve what we show. Improve this listing. The area. Nikolaeva ul., d. 30A, Elektrostal 144003 Russia. Reach out directly.
During Pride Month, it can seem as if their faces are everywhere: Madonna, James Baldwin, Elton John, Judy Garland, Grace Jones, Bea Arthur. The well of queer icons is as deep as it is colorful.
Moscow Air Defence District. Order of Lenin Moscow Air Defence District. Ордена Ленина Московский округ ПВО. Military Unit: 64178. Commanders: Marshal of the Soviet Union Kirill Semenovich Moskalenko, 1948 - 1953. Colonel-General Nikolay Nikiforovich Nagornyy, 1953 - 1954. Marshal of the Soviet Union Pavel ...
Elektrostal. Elektrostal ( Russian: Электроста́ль) is a city in Moscow Oblast, Russia. It is 58 kilometers (36 mi) east of Moscow. As of 2010, 155,196 people lived there.