From Harlem to Selma to Paris, James Baldwin’s Life in Pictures

The New York Times

August 2, 2024

by Elizabeth A. Harris

 

From Harlem to Selma to Paris, James Baldwin’s Life in Pictures

An exploration of the long arc of Baldwin’s career, on what would have been the 100th birthday of the author of “Giovanni’s Room” and “The Fire Next Time.”

Friday marks what would have been the 100th birthday of James Baldwin, the author of incandescent masterpieces including “The Fire Next Time,” “Go Tell It on the Mountain" and “Giovanni’s Room.”

Life took him from a boyhood as the eldest son of a preacher in Harlem to the American South during the Civil Rights Movement. He also spent years in Istanbul, Paris and the South of France, where he died in 1987 at age 63.

A man who wrote fiercely about racial discrimination in the United States and openly about gay people, he became a profoundly influential figure, widely known for his novels, plays and essays, and as a spokesman for the civil rights movement. But to friends and family, he was Jimmy.

“He was fearless,” Paula Whaley, one of his sisters, said in an interview. “He would say, ‘You have to walk straight into it.’”

Here is a look at his life through photographs.

This photograph of Baldwin as a young man appeared on the cover of the first edition of “Notes of a Native Son,” his debut essay collection, published in 1955.

A snapshot Baldwin sent to his family from France, signed Jamie.

Baldwin with his youngest sibling, Paula. In an interview, Paula — who is now Paula Whaley — said: “The world, they own James Baldwin. But to me, my sisters and his nieces and nephews, he will always just be Jimmy.”

An excerpt from an essay called “Notes on Beauford Delaney.”

Delaney, a gay, Black painter, was an influential figure in Baldwin’s life — a man he said taught him how to see and to trust what he saw. “Beauford was the first walking, living proof, for me, that a Black man could be an artist,” he wrote in the essay “The Price of the Ticket.”

In his time abroad, Baldwin found a respite from the particular racism of the United States.

In 1956, Baldwin published “Giovanni’s Room,” a novel about a white American who falls in love with an Italian bartender. David Leeming, his biographer and longtime friend, said the novel was a “thinly veiled way of dealing with his own homosexuality — at first with his discomfort with that, and eventually, his acceptance of it.”

A telegram Baldwin sent to his mother, Berdis Baldwin, in 1962. Whaley, his sister, said that while their mother was always thrilled to see him, she worried when he came home to the United States, afraid that his Civil Rights activism would make him a target for violence.

Baldwin in Harlem, where he grew up in poverty as the eldest of nine children.

Baldwin, on the left in the picture above, wrote about Harlem in both his fiction and nonfiction. His first novel, “Go Tell It On the Mountain,” published in 1953, was set there, as was his play “Amen Corner,” about a Pentecostal church. In 1966 The Nation published “A Report From Occupied Territory,” his essay about how law enforcement treated Harlem’s Black community.

Baldwin with the actor Marlon Brando at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in 1963. Harry Belafonte and Charlton Heston stand behind them.

Nicholas Buccola, the author of “The Fire is Upon Us,” a book about a debate between Baldwin and William F. Buckley, said that Baldwin went to the Southern United States both as a journalist and as an activist. He channeled his time there into “Nobody Knows My Name,” a collection of essays that touched on topics like school segregation “and trying to understand the southern mind,” Buccola said.

Baldwin dancing in New Orleans in 1963 with Doris Jean Castle. Castle was a civil rights activist and a member of the Congress of Racial Equality.

With the civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi in 1963. Evers, a close friend of Baldwin’s and the N.A.A.C.P.’s first field secretary in the state, was assassinated later that year.

Baldwin at a rehearsal for his play “Blues for Mister Charlie” in New York City in 1964. The play was based “very distantly,” he wrote, by the murder of Emmett Till, a Black boy who was killed in Mississippi in 1955.

At a televised debate at The Cambridge Union, in England, in 1965, Baldwin and William F. Buckley debated whether “the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” Baldwin — who argued that the answer was yes — won the debate.

Baldwin after participating in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, in Alabama, in support of voting rights.

Baldwin traveled widely and spent a significant part of his life abroad.

Baldwin in Paris in 1972.

At home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in southeastern France, surrounded by his papers.

He first went to Saint-Paul-de-Vence, a village on the Côte d’Azur, in the early 1970s after a mental health crisis, looking for distance from the United States so he could write. He kept a house there for the rest of his life.

Baldwin spent many years, on and off, living in Turkey. Here he is in 1969 at a house he rented on the Black Sea for the summer.

Baldwin spent many years splitting his time between living abroad and in the United States, where he taught. Here he is at Hampshire College in 1983.

With Leonard Bernstein, after they were awarded the French Legion of Honor at the Élysée Palace in Paris in 1986.

Baldwin died of cancer in 1987, at his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. He was 63 years old.

The writers Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka and Toni Morrison eulogized him at his funeral.

“In the early part of his life, he was a writer,” said Leeming, his biographer and friend. “In the second part, he became an activist writer. He needed to speak to the world about his understanding of its problems. He became a prophet teacher.”