James Baldwin (1924 - 1987)

Sat Aug 02, 1924

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James Baldwin, born on this day in 1924, was an American novelist, essayist, poet, and civil rights activist. “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Baldwin is known for, among many other works, his first novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain” (1953), the non-fiction text “The Fire Next Time” (1963), and the unfinished manuscript “Remember This House”, later adapted into the film “I Am Not Your Negro” by Raoul Peck.

In 1963, Baldwin conducted a lecture tour of the South for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), traveling to places like Durham and Greensboro in North Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana.

During the tour, Baldwin lectured to students, white liberals, and others about his thinking on matters of race, an ideological position between the “muscular approach” of Malcolm X and the non-violent program of Martin Luther King, Jr according to Baldwin biographer David Leeming.

In 1965, Baldwin debated and defeated conservative William F. Buckley at Cambridge University on the motion of “Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?”, stating “I am stating this very seriously, and this is not an overstatement - I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads, under someone else’s whip, for nothing. For nothing.”

Baldwin was also an anti-capitalist who expressed hope that socialism would take root in the United States. In 1972, when asked “Do you think socialism will ever come to the U.S.A.?”, Baldwin replied:

"I would think so. I don’t see any other way for it to go. But then you have to be very careful what you mean by socialism. When I use the word I’m not thinking about Lenin for example…Bobby Seale talks about a Yankee Doodle-type socialism…So that a socialism achieved in America, if and when we do…will be a socialism very unlike the Chinese socialism or the Cuban socialism…

…the price of any real socialism here is the eradication of what we call the race problem…Racism is crucial to the system to keep blacks and whites at a division so both were and are a source of cheap labor."

After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Baldwin moved to Europe permanently, passing away in France on December 1st, 1987.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

- James Baldwin