James Baldwin

During the weeks of unrest following the death of George Floyd while in police custody in 2020, a somber but poignant quote from writer James Baldwin was found scrawled on a wall in Indianapolis: “You cannot change what you do not face.”

While it is unknown when or under what circumstances Baldwin made the comment, it expressed the views of thousands of protesters worldwide during the tumultuous and volatile period after Floyd’s death.

For more than 50 years, Baldwin was an agent for change, and through his writings he faced his difficulties head on. He skillfully wove themes of race, class and sexuality into the narratives of his writings to often coincide with timely major topics, including the Civil Rights Movement and Gay Liberation Movement.

In the 1963 novel The Fire Next Time, Baldwin describes the difficulties and discontent blacks suffered during the Civil Rights Movements, while Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone deals with heterosexual and gay characters, topics Baldwin often explored.

The disorder of life

“One writes out of one thing only — one’s own experience,” Baldwin wrote in Notes of a Native Son. “Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”

A playwright, novelist, poet and essayist, Baldwin is revered decades after his death, while much of his literature is considered modern day classics. His works include If Beale Street Could Talk, Go Tell It On The Mountain, Notes of A Native Sun and The Evidence of Things Not Seen.

But Baldwin was also active in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and joined the Congress on Racial Equality, which enabled him to travel the country extensively to lecture on racial inequality. He was pictured on the cover of Time magazine in 1963 because of his involvement with Civil Rights.

“From my point of view — no label, no slogan, no party, no skin color, and indeed, no religion is more important than the human being,” Baldwin said. “If the word integration means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”

Born in the Harlem, New York, in 1924, Baldwin attended a public school on 128th Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues, where he wrote the school song which was used until the school closed. "I knew I was black, of course, but I also knew I was smart,” he said. “I didn't know how I would use my mind, or even if I could, but that was the only thing I had to use."

Disillusioned by prejudice against black people, Baldwin left the United States at age 24 and settled in Paris. He wanted to distance himself from American prejudice and see himself and his writing outside of an African American context. He did not want to be read as "merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer.”

Jazz musician and longtime friend Miles Davis said he often visited Baldwin in France. “As I got to know Jimmy, we opened up to each other and became real

great friends,” Davis said. “Every time I went to southern France to play Antibes, I would always spend a day or two out at Jimmy's house. We’d just sit there in that great big beautiful house of his telling us all kinds of stories, lying our asses off.

Baldwin died in 1987 of cancer while living in France. He was 64.