August 2, 2024, 9:00am
James Baldwin would have turned a hundred years old today. There are far more than a hundred reasons to celebrate the man. A brilliant, complicated author and one of our most fearsome public intellectuals, he left cultural fingerprints everywhere. And not for nothing, his shadow seems to loom larger all the time.
It’s hard to know where to start with a tribute, given the man’s output. So I may as well begin with abject praise. Here are ten reasons to keep celebrating a “Black, poor, gay, and gifted…activist, humanist.”
1.
Baldwin on the page is one kind of pyrotechnics. Baldwin in space is another. He speaks with a natural preacher’s intuition. Sentences fall with bombast and brimstone, fire and scope. You can fall in love watching him sermonize—especially when it’s at the expense of someone like William F. Buckley.
Actress Rhetta Hughes and company in a scene from the Broadway musical Amen Corner.
2.
Though his plays don’t always get pride of place in his “voluminous oeuvre,” Baldwin was a precise and feted dramatist. In works like Blues for Mr. Charlie and Amen Corner (pictured above), he celebrated and explored Black life in the face of structural racism.
Toni Morrison and Baldwin in 1986, at the Schomburg Library Founders Day Celebration.
3.
His many proud descendants. Baldwin’s literature launched a thousand writers on a tide of inspiration. There’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, famously. But some, like the novelist Robert Jones Jr., go so far as to claim kinship. And notably, the grateful tent stretches across genre. The genre-bending jazz artist Meshell Ndegeocello is releasing a Baldwin homage album today.
This is to say we can love Mr. B for the hundred oeuvres he inspired in addition to his own.
4.
Baldwin was a civil rights activist. He met with CORE. He marched on Washington. And Amiri Baraka elegized him as “God’s Black revolutionary mouth.” Much of the impassioned punditry still slaps, and at its best points a path for all politically-minded artists who claim a moral investment in this country. I especially admire how Baldwin’s activism helped shape his thinking on global politics. Consider the late-in-life turn to the Palestinian freedom movement.
Baldwin has a lot to teach us, still, about how one’s art can advocate and one’s advocacy can be art. For deep-cut, deep-trouble motivation, you can comb his extensive FBI file here.
5.
His friendship with Lorraine Hansberry. Baldwin and Hansberry, two of the greatest mid-century minds, were an electric duo. Charles J. Shield reflected on their co-conspiracy, born at the Actors Studio and carried out between their respective apartments on Horatio and Bleecker Street(s). Their too-short bond was also captured in Baldwin’s 1969 remembrance for Hansberry, “Sweet Lorraine.”
Handwritten notes by James Baldwin on Sheraton Tacoma Hotel letterhead. The heading reads, “Malcolm’s question…To Be A Citizen.”
6.
His provocations. Though they’re often collapsed into memes that simplify a larger argument, the culture’s gotten a lot of mileage from Baldwin’s rhetorical gauntlets. Like this quote, on the terms of our disagreement. Or this one, on building a home in a blighted nation.
7.
His questing spirit. Baldwin captured his Paris years in novels like Giovanni’s Room and Another Country. And the time he spent in the American South famously shaped his politics. Less discussed are his subsequent travels to Istanbul and parts of Africa. Thanks to all that questing, Baldwin emphatically did not fall out of a coconut tree. He was a far-sighted thinker, able to situate the civil rights struggle in its rightful, global context.
Baldwin in 1963. Photo via Steve Schapiro/Corbis/Getty.
8.
A shallow tribute, perhaps. But we need to talk about how the man’s fashion was always on point. In a fitting (ha) ode in Mr Porter, the author Mateo Askaripour placed “Uncle Jimmy’s” empowering aesthetic in a lineage with other Black queer writers.
9.
In addition to creative descendants, his legacy includes physical sanctuaries. A wonderful New Orleans bookstore is named for the man. The residency programs at La Maison Baldwin nurture young artists in Baldwin’s shadow. And here in his hometown, New York residents can still enjoy many of his former stomping grounds. You can even take a library-sponsored walking tour tracing Baldwin’s old Harlem haunts.
10.
The poetry. Like “Staggerlee wonders,” his gut-punch of a rant at a rampant empire. This stanza always sings to me.
This flag has been planted on the moon:
it will be interesting to see
what steps the moon will take to be revenged
for this quite breathtaking presumption.
Happy birthday, you old so-and-so. We stay grateful, on the ground.