Today In Black LGBTQ+ History: JAMES BALDWIN

TODAY IN BLACK LGBTQ+ HISTORY, we celebrate James Arthur Baldwin, fiction writer, essayist, dramatist, and poet, who was born on August 2, 1924 in Harlem, New York during the Harlem Renaissance. After graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx in 1942, he began his formal career as a writer. Although James Baldwin emerged as a major American literary voice by 1953 when he published his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, his candid and militant essays found in Nobody Knows my Name (1961) and The Fire Next Time (1963) identified his writing with the emerging Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Baldwin stood with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, when the civil rights leader delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Like John Grimes, the protagonist of his autobiographical novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, Baldwin struggled with his racial, sexual, and spiritual identities. In his second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), he seeks to illustrate through his treatment and characterization of his main characters the validity of homosexual love. Baldwin also unabashedly explores the spectrum and complexity of heterosexual and homosexual love in Another Country (1962). Identifying himself as “a lover born in a loveless world,” Baldwin’s themes of race, sexual orientation, and the multifaceted power of love remained the central focus of his other novels and stories including Going to Meet the Man (1965), Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and his last novel, Just Above My Head (1979). Baldwin’s work addressed major aspects of the black experience. His themes, ranging from black church culture to the antipathy between the police and black urban male dwellers, were celebrated and critiqued in Baldwin’s collected work. James Arthur Baldwin died in France, his adopted home, in 1987, and where he had once noted that for the first time he had been called simply “an American.” Baldwin had lived in France from 1948 to 1962 when he returned to the United States to participate in the Civil Rights Movement. After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Baldwin returned permanently to Europe to escape the racism and homophobia that threatened to suffocate his life in the United States.