The Genius of James Baldwin

Considered perhaps the greatest essayist ever

Jan 11, 2025

Author, playwright, James Baldwin (Aug. 2, 1924 - 1987), was the oldest of 10 children born in Harlem. He became a Pentecostal preacher at age 14, taking after his step-father and adopting his last name. Three years later, he left the church and occasionally fought with his father over "sinful" things like his love of reading books, going to the movies and having White friends. His step-father, much older than his mother, was born in Louisiana before Emancipation to a mother and a father who were both slaves. James Baldwin grew up with this grandmother living with the family. 

At age 21, Baldwin met the very talented Black author Richard Wright, who had recently published his novel "Native Son." They became good friends. At age 24, he moved to Paris and lived also in Switzerland and Turkey over the years, occasionally returning for stints of time to the US. When he first moved abroad, his entire family pitched in to help support him. He later bought an apartment building in which he housed many of his family members.

His first novel "Go Tell It On a Mountain" (1953) is semi-autobiographical. In it, the main character is redeemed by homosexual love. It has been banned many times including by school districts in Hudson Falls, New York (1994), Prince William County, Virginia (1988), Lemont, Illinois (2017), Nebraska (2022), and Iowa (2023) for profanity and telling the truth about the abuse of Black Americans. But far from being banned in 1953 when the book came out, the book was well received even by squeamish book critics who recognized Baldwin's enormous talent and the universal themes the novel wrestles with. This fact demonstrates just how far the US has strayed from the principle of freedom of speech on which it was founded. "Go Tell It On a Mountain" is considered his best novel. https://www.epl.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Go-Tell-It-on-the-Mountain-Overview-and-Analysis.pdf

Living abroad, it seems, greatly helped Baldwin to gain distance from the problems of race in the US, and be able to write objectively about how to best solve the problems.

Baldwin returned home to be a part of the Civil Rights movement. The book "The Fire Next Time" (1963) was the result. Its starting point was the discrimination he faced as a Black man in America. He goes on to explore the roots of racism, FEAR, and how fear lurks within the elements of authority, religion, and love. He concludes that only non-violent pacifism and embracing the fellowship of the entire human family can overcome the fear at the root of racism. Fascinatingly, he exams the negative effects of racism on both Black people AND on White people, who may suffer more persistent psychological harm than victims who can far more easily pin-point the problems and how to fix them whereas white people develop many illusions about themselves and others. After the murder of MLK, who independently reached similar conclusions about how to heal society, Baldwin returned to Europe and entered a prolific period.

In 1965, Cambridge University in the UK invited James Baldwin to debate William F. Buckley in person as part of his book tour. The theme of the debate was whether the American dream has been achieved at the expense of Black people. Baldwin was incredibly persuasive and overwhelmingly won the debate; he even got a standing ovation after laying out his argument, before Buckley spoke.  Buckley insults poor White people in the debate, indirectly clarifying that the American dream is achieved on the backs of plenty of poor Whites and others as well. 

Here is the full debate and a shorter video about it if time is an issue:

Baldwin was a best selling author and France awarded him its highest medal of honor, but I feel that his genius along with Martin Luther King's has yet to be fully recognized. Many years ago I heard the definition of genius: someone who can aim at a target no one else an see, and successfully hit it.