Conversations on Race - Accessing Black Voices: James Baldwin Part I

Accessing Black Voices Through Literature: James Baldwin Part I

March 26, 2021

This month's conversation will focus on the life and work of James Baldwin.

Although he spent a great deal of his life abroad, James Baldwin always remained a quintessentially American writer. Whether he was working in Paris or Istanbul, he never ceased to reflect on his experience as a black man in white America. In numerous essays, novels, plays and public speeches, the eloquent voice of James Baldwin spoke of the pain and struggle of black Americans and the saving power of brotherhood. ...American Masters, PBS

Click on the graphic below for biographical information.

You can find a brief overview of his life and the importance of his voice in this 2017 interview with Raoul Peck, director of the film, I Am Not Your Negro (here).

In 1949 James Baldwin wrote the controversial essay below, Everybody's Protest Novel, for the Partisan Review.

Also below are articles by two contemporary Black writers -- Annette Gordon-Reed and Darryl Lorenzo Wellngton -- who reference Baldwin's essay.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Art of PersuasionStowe’s novel shifted public opinion about slavery so dramatically that it has often been credited with fuelling the war that destroyed the institution.

The New Yorker, June 6, 2011

jamesbaldwinprotestnovel.pdf

Partisan Review, June 16, 1949

Everybody's Protest Novel.

Uncle Tom's Shadow.docx

The Nation, December 7, 2006

The James Baldwin essay, The White Man's Guilt, (below) was written in 1965 for Ebony. The Library of America described the essay and its associated event with Eddie Glaude (September 24, 2020) in the following manner:

In 1965, at a critical juncture in the Civil Rights Movement, James Baldwin’s essay “The White Man’s Guilt" unmasked the myths and lies that sustain racial injustice in America. We’re at a parallel moment now, writes Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. in his book, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own. In this LOA Live webinar, Glaude, Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton, explores the contemporary resonances of Baldwin’s powerful and prophetic piece.

The-White-Mans-Guilt-James-Baldwin.pdf

For more about Eddie Glaude and his book, Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for our Own, scroll down the Our Picks page (here).

Below are two more Baldwin essays (from 1962 and 1979)

The Progressive, 1962, "A Letter to My Nephew"

If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is_.pdf

The New York Times, July 29, 1979

In 1976, James Baldwin released what is perhaps his most novel—and most often forgotten—book: Little Man, Little Man, a curious, hybrid-genre composition without precedent in his body of work. It was rediscovered in 1996 at Yale’s Beinecke Library, and republished last year. ...Gabrielle Bellot (January 3, 2019)

Read Gabrielle Bellot's New York Review of Books essay and take a close look at the trailer released when the book was republished in 2018. You'll hear a brief excerpt from the book and a few words from James Baldwin speaking to a group of students in [1979].

James Baldwin’s Harlem Through a Child’s EyesJames Baldwin's Little Man, Little Man defies conventional expectations for both children’s and adult’s literature, functioning, ultimately, as a liminal work that straddles the borders of both genres. In its lack of linear narrative, refusal to conform to standard English, and the sometimes wild, distorted art that accompanies it, Little Man, Little Man seems distinctly Modernist in sensibility for all that it still appears, at first glance, to be an ordinary children’s book. Clearer, however, is that it represents the artistic culmination of Baldwin and Cazac’s multilayered relationship, a collaboration that resulted, in Baldwin’s words, in a literary-artistic “celebration of the self-esteem of black children.” This statement doubtless resonated darkly for Baldwin, who had told a French journalist in 1974 that “I never had a childhood. I was born dead.”

More on Baldwin's writing may be found at the bottom of the Black History is American History page (here). And go to the Our Picks page (here), to discover more about the documentary, I Am Not Your Negro.

From the March 26th Conversation

Chart Comparing Black Writer Bios (left) and Brief Clip of James Baldwin, around 1980, Asking "How Much Time Do You Want?" (right)

( o.22)