James Baldwin

1924-1987

Author, Civil Rights Activist

James Baldwin was a gay, African-American man born at a time when homosexuality was considered an illness and blacks were kept separate and unequal. He should be remembered simply for surviving, but he was an author who secured his own place in history.

Baldwin, who was born at Harlem Hospital to an unmarried, 20-year-old woman, was teased as a child because he was small and effeminate. When he was three, his mother married David Baldwin, a laborer and Baptist preacher who was often violent and abusive to his family.

At age 24, James Baldwin was scared and unhappy about the way blacks were treated in America. He had only $40 in his pocket, but he escaped to Paris where he did much of his writing.

His passion for issues involving race and sexually led him write abundantly. He published more 22 books of essays, fiction, poetry and drama, including Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1953, Notes from a Native Son in 1955 and Giovanni's Room in 1956.

One idea Baldwin explored in his 40-year career was that blacks should not hate whites for their racist attitudes. He called the idea of blacks being victims because of white oppression a "dread, chronic disease to which one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it."

"My life, my real life, was in danger and not from anything that other people might do but from the hatred that I carried in my own heart," Baldwin wrote.

Most gay and lesbian people know oppression in their lives in some way, and for many, the simplest response is hatred toward the oppressor. Baldwin wrote that blacks should not feel hatred toward bigoted whites; perhaps Baldwin also intended his message to apply to the lesbian and gay community about our heterosexual oppressors.

The lives of many gays and lesbians may be in danger.