James Baldwin at 100: Here and Now

Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS) program associate Elizabeth James remembers being introduced to James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain when she was a youth. James’s librarian mother placed a lot of books in her hands in those days, but her experience of reading Baldwin, a living writer, was different. 

“With him, I became suddenly aware of the power of writers, how someone could capture what they were feeling in such a stunning, touching way. I’ve revisited this book as I grew older. And since then I've tried to read everything else he wrote.” For James, reading Baldwin’s novels, essays, magazine profiles, and watching him in conversation with Black feminist writers like Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou enlarged her perspective of the world. 

“I came of age during a time when the Black middle class was rising, and being able to look through the lenses of other people’s perspectives opened my eyes to want to read more about these really challenging issues that our country was still grappling with,” James says.

DAAS has declared the 2024-2025 academic year the Year of Baldwin to honor what would be his 100th birthday on August 2, 2024. Baldwin, author of an astounding body of literary work that includes novels and non-fiction, Go Tell It On The Mountain, Giovanni’s Room,  Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and If Beale Street Could Talk, died at his home in France in 1987, but his writing, and his presence as a social critic, are vividly relevant, studied, and celebrated—at LSA, and the world over. 

Baldwin’s literary imagination brought James to Paris and Harlem, into love stories and families, and James also remembers the power of Baldwin’s incisive social commentary. She remembers watching Baldwin’s famous appearance on the Dick Cavett Show in 1969: “He was very calm, but underneath there was a beautiful, seething rage that enabled him to offer these fierce indictments on American society and what we need to do better,” she says. “Baldwin continues to inspire and guide me.”

Recently, the Black Student Union, which James guides, chose to read If Beale Street Could Talk together. The book was published in 1974, but, as James says, “Everything we are reading is still going on today. The histories of racism and injustice were all too familiar to them.

“As someone who’s always had such a deep love for books, particularly books that speak to the human experience, I believe that anyone can pick up a Baldwin book and find their hearts in it.” 

James’s comments evoke something Baldwin himself said in a 1963 interview with LIFE Magazine: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

Baldwin, in Another Country

“Baldwin belongs to the global community,” James says. For Magdalena J. Zaborowska—James’s DAAS colleague and the chair of the Department of American Culture—Baldwin is both a public literary figure and a complex private individual vital to the United States though he lived much of his life abroad.

Baldwin didn’t have a typical author’s life story, Zaborowska explains—he didn't go to college, he was self-educated, and he moved across genres and countries. Zaborowska’s travels to Baldwin’s former homes in the United States, Turkey, and France helped her to better understand who he was as a person. She has established a digital archive documenting Chez Baldwin—his house in St. Paul-de-Vence, France—which is hosted by the U-M Library. 

Zaborowska teaches a Baldwin seminar in DAAS and American culture (AAS 498) that culminates with a student symposium. She’s also the author of three books on him: Me and My House: James Baldwin’s Last Decade in France, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile, and, forthcoming in 2025 with Yale University Press, James Baldwin: The Life Album, which explores Baldwin through a womanist/feminist lens. The Life Album remixes Baldwin’s complex philosophy of “Black queer humanism” and argues that he is more complex than he has been depicted, too often obscured by what she terms the “Baldwin brand.” 

As a Black civil rights activist, Baldwin, who was unapologetically queer, often felt diminished by the acceptable forms of Black masculinity, Zaborowska explains. Friendships with Black feminist thinkers and writers Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison helped him to shape ideas on how to combat rejection and how to think about parenthood, gender, community, and sexuality.

Zaborowksa recalls students in her first-year DAAS seminar (AAS 104) encountering Baldwin for the first time, stunned by the lyricism and ideas of his 1985 essay, “Here Be Dragons,” originally titled “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood.”

“They were asking me, ‘Why didn’t we read this in high school?’ Baldwin’s genius is what we need and can be accessed by all readers. Our young people are ready for him.”

Zaborowska adds, “I believe in art and in celebrating figures like Baldwin to bring us together here and now. He teaches us that we share much more than we think divides us.” When asked what readers can learn from Baldwin today, Zaborowska’s reply is effusive: 

“We can learn from him how to re-humanize ourselves in this age of information and rapid development of artificial intelligence. Though he matured with analog technologies—Baldwin wrote his works in longhand, on legal pads, then typed them on a typewriter—his writings are humanistic blueprints to be read deeply today. They show us how to be real in ways that reconnect us: How to be in our bodies, how to be present, how to connect with and see others. Baldwin wants individuals to have all the freedoms we desire, and to be responsible and accountable, too.”

Two LSA alumni are celebrating James Baldwin’s 100th birthday by bringing his words to audiences the world over.

DAAS alum Joy Bivins (A.B., ’98) directs the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City and she’s working with the New York Public Library to present a centennial exhibition called JIMMY! God’s Black Revolutionary Mouth, which will be on view from August 2, 2024 through February 2025. The title is taken from poet Amiri Baraka’s 1987 eulogy of Baldwin. The exhibition will include public events and performances and showcase letters, writing, and photography from the Schomburg’s archives that celebrate Baldwin’s courageous spirit and prophetic voice. 

Brit Bennett, a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program (M.F.A., ’14) and author of bestselling novels The Mothers and The Vanishing Half, has written the introduction to a new deluxe edition of If Beale Street Could Talk (Vintage International, 2024). In Bennett’s words, Beale Street is about the “necessity of community in survival. …Black survival, Baldwin suggests, requires more than romantic love; it requires a more complicated and expansive love story,” citing Baldwin’s depictions of community support in the novel’s restaurants, neighborhoods, friendships, and families. 

In the public library, on screen, and in community, Bivins and Bennett herald the power of Baldwin’s lasting, expansive, and revolutionary love stories.

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