James Baldwin

• You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.     J. Baldwin 
  
  

I discovered James Baldwin in the late nineteen sixties. He was an extremely complexed black writers, a man who shared little in common with many of his black contemporaries, whether it was the intelligentsia of the Harlem Renaissance (i.e. Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Hurston, etc.) or the likes of Hughy Newton and the radical Black Panthers. Baldwin, a gifted intellectual, was a homosexual with an embittered, fire-and-brimstone preacher for a step-father. He never felt comfortable as a gay/black writer living in poverty and spent his formative years living abroad, an expatriate in France.

• Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.    J. Baldwin

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•  James referred to his stepfather simply as "father" throughout his life. He learned that he was not his father's biological son through overhearing a comment during one of his parents' conversations late in 1940. He tearfully recounted this fact to Emile Capouya, with whom he went to school. David Sr. and James had an extremely difficult relationship and nearly resorted to physical fights on several occasions; according to biographer David Leeming  "They fought because James read books, because he liked movies, because he had white friends", all of which, David Baldwin thought, threatened James's "salvation". (Wikipedia)

• One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own.   J. Baldwin
  
  

• According to another biographer, David Baldwin hated white people, 

and "his devotion to God was mixed with a hope that God would take

 revenge on them for him." During the 1920s and 1930s, Jame’s step-father 

worked at a soft-drink bottling factory although he was eventually 

laid off from the job. As his anger and hatred eventually tainted his 

sermons, he was less in demand as a preacher. David sometimes 

took out his anger on his family and the children were afraid of 

him, though this was to some degree balanced by the love lavished 

on them by their mother. (Wikipedia)

• I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.      J. Baldwin

His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain has been ranked by Time magazine as one of the top 100 English-language novels, while his 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son helped establish his reputation as a voice for human equality. His 1965 debate with William Buckley is regarded as one of the most influential debates on race in the United States. Baldwin was an influential public figure and orator, especially during the civil rights movement in the United States.

• People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.
                                                                                                                        J. Baldwin

Baldwin wrote quite poignantly about several instances where restaurants refused to serve him a meal as a black person. The experiences proved extremely traumatic and only deepened his sense of personal despair and alienation. 

In an incident that Baldwin described in his essay "Notes 

of a Native Son", he went to a restaurant in Princeton 

called the Balt where, after a long wait, Baldwin was told 

that "colored boys" were not served there. Then, on his 

last night in New Jersey, in another incident also 

memorialized in "Notes of a Native Son", Baldwin and 

a friend went to a diner after a movie, only to be told

that Black people were not welcomed. 

Infuriated, he went to another restaurant, expecting to be 

denied service once again. When that denial of service 

came, humiliation and rage overcame Baldwin and he 

hurled the nearest object at hand—a water mug—at the 

waitress, missing her and shattering the mirror behind 

him. Baldwin and his friend narrowly escaped. (Wikipedia)

• You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.     J. Baldwin
  
  

When travelling in Europe, France and Switzerland in particular, he was amazed at being treated exclusively as an American rather than a person of color. In one remote village in the Swiss countryside his black heritage proved a non-issue. He was routinely treated with kindness, common decency and respect.

Even though his time in Paris was not easy, Baldwin escaped 

from the aspects of American life that outraged him the 

most—especially the "daily indignities of racism." According

to one biographer: "Baldwin seemed at ease in his Paris life;

Jimmy Baldwin the aesthete and lover reveled in the 

Saint-Germain ambiance.” (Wikipedia)

During his early years in Paris, prior to the publication of Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1953, Baldwin wrote several notable works. "The Negro in Paris", first published in The Reporter, explored Baldwin's perception of an incompatibility between Black Americans and Black Africans in Paris, because Black Americans had faced a "depthless alienation from oneself and one's people" that was mostly unknown to Parisian Africans. (Wikipedia)

Unlike many of the black activists of his day, James Baldwinn did not resent white people, only those who were small minded, bigoted and discriminatory. When comparing him to another contemporary black writer such as Toni Morrison, who was transparently unapologetic about her disdain and vitriolic hatred of white people, he appears the superior literary figure.

• Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person - ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.     J. Baldwin  

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• To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.  

•                                                                                                                          J. Baldwin  

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  Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
                                                                                                                     J. Baldwin  

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• We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.   J. Baldwin 
    

• People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
                                                                                                                          J. Baldwin