James Baldwin's Early Life
James Baldwin was born in 2nd of August 1924 in New York City (Meyer 1). He was the first born in a family of nine, and his father was a preacher in small churches in Harlem but had been born in New Orleans among the first generation of free black men as his mother had been born a slave (Jones 588). He was an author and civil rights activist during the mid-twentieth century in America whose works informs a lot of the black population struggles and freedoms enjoyed today.
Early Life
James was influenced greatly by his father. He depicted the father in his book, Notes of a Native Son, to be a bitter man who did not know how to make social relations with anyone including his children (Jones 588). This fact also affected his career as a preacher as he was often losing his jobs in the big churches for rubbing shoulders the wrong way both with his colleagues and church members. As a result, he could only get jobs from smaller churches and later laid off from his job that led to poverty looming over this family (Jones 589).
James further mentions that he did not know his father well as they shared different views at the time which made them not interact freely with each other without a quarrel breaking out (Jones 587). His siblings as well demonstrated both fear and hatred towards their father who was unable to relate with them without punishing them. This was because the father was full of paranoia and he would interpret an act of betrayal from his children who freely mingled with the world that despised him (Jones 590). At the time, he was also very wary of the white population and the lifestyle of the black population in Harlem (Jones 589). He was not shy of rebuking their behaviors openly, and James found himself not following in his father’s footsteps. James rather had experienced a very supportive white teacher who noticed his talent in writing when he around ten years old. He had written a play that got to direct. She then took a keen interest in him and gave him books to play and even took him to watch actual plays in theaters. Furthermore, when his father got laid off, she helped them get through some bad days (Jones 591).
Career Life
James Baldwin started being vocal by singing in the church. He notes to have had a beautiful voice, and his father would always wear a beam of pride whenever he was done singing one of his solos (Jones 600). He then worked briefly as a preacher but preferred writing to preaching. Silence had dominated between James and his father, and he notes in the book that one of the last and few conversations he had with his father before his father’s death was about this choice which did not have more than ten words (Jones 600). As mentioned earlier, the father was wary of people of white color basically because of the horrors he had experienced while growing up as a child of a slave. The situation was a bit different when James existed as the blacks were free from slavery. However, there was a distinction between white people and black. The black population was treated as inferior by the majority white population where opportunities to work were very limited, and the freedom to enjoy living was constricted.
James had never experienced this distinction before he completed high school as he would freely mingle with other white colored boys of his schools. Once he completed high school, at the age of eighteen, he went away to New Jersey to work in defense plans. While in New Jersey he experienced how the white people were determined to overpower the black people (Jones 592). He got fired thrice, two times over a friend had reinstated him back, but by the third time, it was impossible to get the job back. His experience in New Jersey opened his eyes to see the bitterness that had been growing inside him. He recalls how he was denied services at restaurants since he was a black person.
Additionally, he underwent several injustices at work for the apparent mode of behavior of the black people to avoid being troubled by the white population. He notes how he was alarmed by the strong desire to commit murder after being denied serves in a restaurant. In this same place, he might have also been murdered by the white people he had offended by causing a scene in their territory. He narrowly escaped through the help of his white friend (Jones 594).
James Baldwin's Career and Activism
James early life experiences and the death of his father marked the genesis of his writings and civil rights activism. He wrote many essays, six novels, one bool on short stories and two plays. His writings explored intricate issues of race, sex and class distinctions that were not easily spoken about in the society. The following are some of the books written by James including “Notes of a Native Son, Go tell it on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, Tell me how long the Trains been gone, If Beale Street Could Talk, Just Above My Head, The Fire Next Time, No Name In The Street, The Evidence of Things Not Seen and Jimmy’s Blues, a collection of poetry” (Bigsby 325).
Baldwin pursued his writing career in France and New York. He left for France to be discreet about himself little did he know that he was the most notable black writer in his time (Bigsby 325). Baldwin’s career grew during the period of the Civil Rights Movement. The themes of hope and rebellion were characteristics of his writings (Bigsby 326). Hope was demonstrated through the self that he also referred to as consciousness. The self is spontaneous and has a moral constant that gets operational once they are exposed. He was clear in showing that despite social determinants there was great confidence in the possibility of action and recovery of ethical purposes within the self as it contained resources necessary to receive meaning from social chaos. Thus, the self is unable to take a peripheral role because of the power of imagination. Imagination can project a different world from the current one and invoke the society to break off from the shackles of its current myths and taboos (Bigsby 327).
Secondly, he demonstrated rebellion by displaying the power of an autonomous self that comes about by rejecting authority. This was depicted through his rejection of his father’s authority, rejecting white supremacy and rejecting God as he dismissed two major Christian beliefs. One was grace that was seen to alleviate suffering and two, love that has the power to eradicate rivalry between two contradicting selves, people and groups. White supremacy was rejected due to the racial discourse depicted in the conflicting conversations between black and white characters in the play, Blues for Mister Charlie published in 1964 (Kokkinen 13).
Moreover, the concern he had with Christian beliefs was that they called for Christian converts to learn how to turn away from their past rather than to reconcile with it (Henderson and Thomas 9). According to him, ignoring the past rather than resolving the past does nothing but haunt the present. The challenge was directed towards unfair judgments that were made despite the atrocities they faced as black population. To him, they first needed to be corrected rather than just ignored so that the wounds may heal for a better future. Reason being, there were endless wars between the whites and the black population caused by bitterness. The novels Go Tell it on The Mountain published in 1953, and No Name in the Street in 1972 demonstrate this phenomenon (Henderson and Thomas 9).
The characters he used were mainly artists such as musicians and actors who demonstrated the ideal, desirable social interaction. They are also extremely self-conscious looking into both their social experiences and the nature of their state of mind (Bigsby 328). Looking into the state of one’s consciousness emerges from the questioning of their identity as their history and beliefs clash making it difficult to form their realities. However, they do seek to define their path regardless of their history.
Works Cited
Bigsby, C. W. E. The Divided Mind of James Baldwing. Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Henderson, A. Scott and P. L. Thomas. James Baldwin Challenging Authors. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2014.
Jones, Edward P. Notes of a Native Son James Balwing With a New Introduction.
Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.
Kokkinen, Jari K. Racial Discourse in James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie (1964): Drama and the hegemonic sturggle. Jyväskylä: Jyväskylä University Printing House, 2012.
Meyer, Gerald. James Baldwin’s Harlem: The Key to His Politics. New York: Research Gate, 2011.
Works Cited
