In Celebration of the One Hundredth Anniversary of His Birth

THIS year is the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987). The YEAR OF JAMES BALDWIN is a celebration of him and of his literary, philosophical, cultural, artistic, and ideological genius and his contributions to the revolutionary remaking of world humanity. Baldwin was arguably America’s greatest novelist and perhaps the greatest essayist in the history of the English language. He spoke through the language of the Old Testaments and the Gospels of the Bible, and the language of the modern world’s search for meaning. Speaking through the Book of Revelations, the last book of the New Testament, he declared as a warning to America, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time.” This unique intersection produced a creative way to explain America. He probed the complexities of the American mind—his principal concern—through the lenses of the aspirations and struggles of the African American working people. He was a teacher. For him, knowing carried with it the responsibility to teach, and teaching was a way of changing peoples’ consciousness, allowing them to become agents in the transformation of the world. Hence, in its deepest sense, his life’s work was the moral, spiritual, and political education of the people. He believed in people, and he believed in ideas. As such, he believed in human possibility. He believed that ideas when embraced by the people, are, perhaps, the most beautiful and powerful weapon of the people. Few have gone as far and deep as Baldwin in exploring human possibilities and probing the rich inner lives of people. He examined the contradictions, paradoxes, and complexities of the modern situation. Through it all, he remained an optimist, believing in the revolutionary and emancipatory potentialities of human beings.

He saw himself as a witness in the Old Testament sense—as a witness for the truth. It is this witness that inspired in him a profound empathy towards and passion for the poor and oppressed, especially children. His witness for the truth sparked a fire in him which never went out. He insisted that to know the truth is as much a question of moral striving as it is of rational and scientific thought. It was for him the truth discovered in moral striving, especially for freedom, where art meets and intersects with the revolutionary imperative. Artists and writers must, he declared, strive to be on the right side of history and on the right side of the people’s revolutionary struggles for freedom. Too often, we only know Baldwin through the narrow views of academics and elite intellectuals, and not through him as a revolutionary and freedom fighter.

James Baldwin: A Revolutionary for His Time

Baldwin’s worldview was neither tragic nor nihilistic; it was revolutionary. He avoided what he saw as farcical reinventions of worlds that only existed in the minds of their inventors, seeing them as ways to avoid the crises of the modern world. He at once saw them as anti-revolutionary. Revolution and prophecy defined Baldwin. He prophetically declared that the trajectory of American history, if not changed, would lead to the crises we now face. He believed that a new American democracy was possible, but it required the people achieving power in their own name.

Baldwin viewed the Black Freedom Movement as a revolutionary movement and Martin Luther King Jr. as a unique revolutionary. He saw whiteness as an identity that undermined the full democratic consciousness of white Americans and all Americans. He viewed imperialist and colonial wars such as in Vietnam, Algeria, and Africa as the work of anti-democratic and anti-revolutionary forces. In the end, he saw revolution as not adhering to a set of doctrines, but as a practice rooted in and coming from the people. History and the logic of historical change grounded his thinking. As a revolutionary, Baldwin lives and breathes life into those activists and movements that discover him.

Art, Literature, and the Revolutionary Imperative

Art and literature were for him the poetics of the excavation of things seen and unseen. The writer, therefore, did not exist in him or herself, as the bourgeois aesthetic might have it, but as part of the lives of ordinary working people. Art and literature shaped the moral conditions for community and struggle; they were, for Baldwin, acts of love dedicated to the truth and to the people. They were part of a revolutionary commitment. And as art and literature flow from love, in Baldwin’s hands they become forms of revolutionary love for humanity. His novels, poems, and plays capture the human essence and human striving. His characters collide with the reality of America. The paradox of human striving and the reality of oppression produced psychological and ideological pathologies. His characters struggle with their identities and tragedies in the face of historic injustice. This is a search not just for resolution, but for completeness as human beings. His artistic and literary imagination emerge from a special consciousness: a Black Proletariat Imaginary, a futuristic imagination.

This is an aesthetic anchored to the imagination of Black people, flowing from their history. Baldwin was, therefore, inspired by poetic narratives of artists like Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, and Patti Labelle; and composers such as Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Curtis Mayfield, and Marvin Gaye. While his literary works took on concrete form in the lifeworlds of Americans and Black folk, they capture the universally human and universally concrete—the real that is present throughout humanity in all its many forms. As a revolutionary force, art and literature take on civilizational consequences. This is to say art and literature become part of humanity’s striving to achieve new civilizations, anchored to a new people and new systems of economy and politics. Literature, in Baldwin’s sense, is both the present and the future, because it is part of humanity’ strivings. Baldwin asks, is it possible—out of the ashes and ruin of imperialism and racism—for a new world civilization to arise? His answer was yes, and we must fight to make it so.

For Baldwin, language and morality meet on the battlefield for a new civilization and a new American people. Literature creates new language to address new moments in history, from which new grammars and vocabularies exploring both the interior lives of modern people and the world historic situation arise. Language, in Baldwin’s work, provides ways of thinking and knowing. He is constantly working out new language, new grammars, and new and unusual ways of writing, creating revolutionary language for revolutionary times. In his work, language is not merely reflective of society, it is generative of new human beings. Language for him can be futuristic and imaginative—of what can become. Baldwin viewed this as a measure of art and literature living up to their revolutionary responsibility. 

The Black Church and the Empire of Eternity

At seventeen years old, Baldwin left the church after being a youth preacher for three years. Yet, the Black church never left him. The Black church, as he experienced it, had become too satisfied with the world as it was rather than the world as it must become. It had become confined to the colony of time, rather than striving towards the empire of eternity. It had ceased to strive for cosmic partnership. Hence for Baldwin, as for Martin Luther King Jr., it is in the struggles for freedom and truth that humans achieve immortality—the empire of eternity.

In Martin Luther King Jr., the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and the Black Freedom Movement, Baldwin found Black leaders who thought and acted within the Black Prophetic Tradition. Each in his own way saw Black folk as the people for whom the prophets of old spoke; they were the people of the Book, and the people of the Bible and the Quran. For each, prophecy inspired struggle. Each saw in prophecy the acknowledgement of a cosmic partnership between freedom fighters and the infinite—that which is beyond the individual, the personal, society, and even history.

Pan-Africa and a New America

Baldwin anchored his intellectual and literary works within the ideological history of the modern world. He saw the period after World War II as one where the peoples of the darker and colonized nations were on the move. He became an outspoken supporter of the anti-colonial movements and of Pan-Africanism. He viewed the anti-colonial and Pan-African Movements as connected to the Black Freedom Movement. At the same time, he argued for what was in essence the unity of Pan-Africa and Pan-Asia into a mighty anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movement. As he said in the essay “Princes and Powers,” the artist must be part of the world historic changes, challenging Western modernity and its colonial and white supremacist assumptions and practices. In this respect Baldwin intellectually demolished the empty assumption that Western democracy was the same as freedom. He insisted that for most of the world’s peoples, Western democracy meant slavery, colonialism, and oppression. Therefore, the path to freedom was not to imitate Western democracy, which had been appropriated by elites for whom democracy was nothing more than a hypocritical moral veil disguising their racism and exploitation. Baldwin, rather, insisted a new democracy had to be created, a new people’s democracy emerging from the histories and civilizations of the Afro-Asiatic world. Baldwin, therefore, championed the Indian independence movement, the Chinese Revolution, the African independence movements, the Cuban Revolution, and the Black Freedom Movement as part of a single garment of destiny. To be on the right side of history meant for him to stand with the liberation of Africa and Asia. In this moment in history this unity constitutes an Afro-Asiatic reconfiguration of the world—a recentering of Humanity in a new civilizational axis.

The Revolutionary Potentiality of Children and Youth

Baldwin believed that every generation must prepare those who follow to stand up for justice. In a letter to his nephew, in the book The Fire Next Time, he insisted that to make a world worthy of the young, the youth and children must fight for it. The moral, spiritual, and political education of children and youth was uppermost in his activity. He argued that children and youth had to be treated with respect and dignity, and their ideas and worldviews taken seriously. He believed that children and youth were a force for change and a force that might decide the future. Baldwin loved children and youth of every race and creed. However, he loved the children and youth in particular who bore the burdens and legacies of oppression, whose struggle for dignity and a future required the completion of the freedom struggles started by their ancestors. He demanded that white children and youth be taught to reject white identity and white supremacy, that they see themselves through the suffering and histories of the darker races. White children and youth must identify themselves with humanity, whose majority is not white. At last, Baldwin is a saint for children and youth; he is for them Saint Baldwin.

Baldwinian Love and the Revolutionary Struggle

Love is a paramount concern in Baldwin’s fiction and essays. Even when he is speaking about romantic love, he is addressing the desire for community and human solidarity. It is an irrepressible desire for wholeness. Love is for him the language of striving and wanting to be fulfilled in relationships with others. He insisted that America would only achieve what was possible if the brokenness and fragmentation of society rooted in white supremacy are overcome. Baldwin saw white supremacy as an anti-love, anti-community, and anti-human impulse. Part of the brokenness of modern capitalist society is its undermining of love in the rush to turn human relationships into commodities, serving private profit, wealth, and war.

In its many forms, love manifests the human striving to be fully human. In essence, it reflects the idea that we are all wrapped in a single garment of destiny. It is a recognition, mostly unarticulated, of a human striving to be human. Love acknowledges that we are human to the extent that we exist in community with others. In its highest expression, love is a revolutionary act. Love is a condition, in Baldwin’s work, not just for community with others but for revolutionary change. We are socialized to lie about this basic striving. Baldwin identified this with bad faith. To the degree that human beings strive for and achieve love, to that same degree are they committing to revolutionary change. Baldwin would have agreed with Martin Luther King that love is the sword that heals society. To the degree that love is the central value of society, there is a human future. 

Even when exploring his own sexuality and the multiple, varied sexual and gender identities in the modern world, Baldwin refused to reduce love into anything but a striving to create new human beings and new societies. Sexual and romantic love were the initial stage of a great quest to create and be in human communities. Harkening back to early communities and societies, Baldwin saw love as a desire for a communal form of life unfettered by capitalism. Reflecting on love and Christian salvation in his last published essay entitled “To Crush the Serpent,” he says, “Complexity is our only safety and love is the only key to our maturity.” Baldwin is saying despite the complexities and ambiguities of life, community is our safety, and love is the key to our becoming new people. It is our salvation.

The Future

We are entering a new and dynamic epoch in history. People, through their actions and voices, are deciding the future. The path through which Americans will achieve a new nation is the Black Freedom Movement and the vision it gifted the American people. As such, the American people, in a dynamic struggle, could throw off the shackles of whiteness and white supremacy and free themselves from spiritual death. In what Baldwin called achieving our nation, a new civilization and a new American man and woman could be born.

In the Year of James Arthur Baldwin: God’s Revolutionary Voice, Baldwin will speak to Philadelphia, and Philadelphia will speak back to him. In his words, to achieve our country and to make America the last white nation, we celebrate the great genius and prophet James Baldwin. Alas, in Baldwin’s name, we dedicate this Year of Baldwin to the Immortal Palestinian Children of Gaza: to their suffering, their courageousness, and their future.