James Baldwin

This author, essayist, playwright, poet, activist and wit used his work to challenge prejudice.

- Callum McKelvie

"An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian.

His role is to make you realise the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive."

As a queer Black man born in America during the 1920s, James Baldwin experienced much hatred and discrimination. A novelist, essayist, playwright and poet, from the start he used writing to explore and challenge difficult themes, both personally and socially. His first novel, 1953's Go Tell It On The Mountain, tackled both religion and his own troubled upbringing, while the second, 1956's Giovanni's Room, explored the taboo subject of homosexual romance. Perhaps most notably, time and again he used his pen as a means to confront what he called the "racial nightmare" that plagued America. Yet Baldwin's legacy is far more than just his words. He worked alongside the Civil Rights movement, participated in the 1963 March on Washington, travelled extensively, taught and lived life to the fullest. But this exceptional story begins on a very ordinary street in Harlem...

Birth of a poet

Baldwin was born on 2 August 1924 in Harlem Hospital, New York City. For three years, his mother Emma Beardis-Jones raised the young boy on her own while simultaneously working as a cleaner. She never revealed the name of his birth father and when James was around three years old she married David Baldwin, a Baptist preacher from New Orleans.

Whereas Baldwin's relationship with his mother was warm and loving, the relationship with his stepfather (who he often referred to as his father) was strained to say the least. In Notes Of A Native Son, he described him as "indescribably cruel in his personal life" and the "most bitter man I have ever met."