Love & Revolution: James Baldwin Speaks to Our Time

In August 2024, an art exhibit titled, “LOVE & REVOLUTION: James Baldwin Speaks to Our Time,” was unveiled at the Parkway Central Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, as part of a three-day celebration of James Baldwin’s 100th birth anniversary. We are republishing the curatorial statement for the exhibit, which was organized by the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation in partnership with the Education, Philosophy, and Religion Department of the Free Library. The exhibit is partially digitized here.

James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) turns one hundred this year. Baldwin was America’s greatest writer and arguably the greatest essayist in the history of the English language. Loved and honored by the people, especially his people, Baldwin speaks to us and our time. Our nation and Philadelphia face a crisis of violence, mental illness, poverty, homelessness, and meaning. It is up to the people to heal society and determine our human future. Baldwin, the thinker and revolutionary, illuminates how we can do so.

Baldwin is often seen as a cultural icon but not as a revolutionary. Yet to understand Baldwin as such—how and why he was able to do what he did—we must know the history of struggle and of the great people who produced him. Further, if he is the greatest essayist in the English language, it is because of his great love for humanity and especially the world’s children, which made him an optimist and a revolutionary.

For Baldwin, freedom could only be found in taking up responsibility, which placed him on the battleground of struggle. The defining moment for Baldwin was when he made the moral choice to leave Paris, where he was finishing writing his second novel, to return to the United States in 1957. America was on the threshold of the Civil Rights Movement, the nation’s Third Revolution, led by Black men and women living under Jim Crow laws and white supremacist terror. Baldwin chose to go South to join the movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., driven by people determined to transform the American people and country. Conscious of his role as a revolutionary artist, he saw himself as a witness of this movement and responsible for writing this story.

He wrote, “Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it.” He followed the footsteps of Black artists, writers, and freedom fighters such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, and others, who knew there could be no such thing as freedom in America for anyone without the freedom of Black folk. Baldwin believed that there was no America yet and that it could only be achieved through all people taking up the Black Freedom Struggle as their own.

The Black Freedom Movement drew out human capacities long-suppressed in American society, through its practice of nonviolence and agape, selfless love. Countless people achieved great inner, private conviction, and brought their communion with truth directly to the public sphere. Many of their names are unknown to us today, but their love laid the path to the revolutionary remaking of America. From the South to the North, and back again, Americans were compelled and forced to meet, face, and know each other in ways they never had. Here was the forging of a new identity and nation, which produced new men and women.

Love and truth were the most essential criteria for Baldwin’s work. Describing his mentor, the artist Beauford Delaney, Baldwin wrote, “I do know that great art can only be created out of love, and that no greater lover has ever held a brush.” Baldwin declared in 1955 in the early days of his career, “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.” Baldwin wrote about reality and refused to lie. He creatively reshaped the English language, stretching its horizons to write about real possibilities. Because he had no interest in escapism, he described the real moral choices, real responsibilities, and real consequences of living as a human being. He worked with love as his overriding purpose; for if there is no love, what will happen to the children?

As we mark a century since Baldwin’s birth, America is gripped by crisis and ever-greater wars. We are in dire need today of new creative energy and passion, those requisites for renewal. We are in need of revolutionary love. Love is the antidote for a loveless, dehumanizing, exhausted society that is incapable of recognizing and valuing our most human qualities. The vestiges of white supremacy and Western arrogance blind us to reality—for the world is changing—and nurture deficiencies of the human spirit and the social order. Such are the consequences of investing our personalities and our institutions in delusions and lies. These lies lead to a serious misassessment of our true strengths and weaknesses as a people.

Baldwin wrote, “We are the strongest nation in the western world, but this is not for the reasons that we think. It is because we have an opportunity which no other nation has of moving beyond the Old World concepts of race and class and caste, and create, finally, what we must have had in mind when we first began speaking of the New World. But the price for this is a long look backward whence we came and an unflinching assessment of the record. For an artist, the record of that journey is most clearly revealed in the personalities of the people the journey produced. Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself, and with that revelation, make freedom real.”

In America, revolutionaries have lived and prophets have spoken. They did so for us: we, who must now take responsibility for the children being born, and who are yet to be born. Our revolutionary task is to recognize that this narrative about James Baldwin, a native son of this country and its Black proletariat, is about us—and that it is up to us to make something of this inheritance. His writing is the autobiography of a new American people. To the extent that we see ourselves in his words, we recognize that we must fulfill the unfulfilled task of completing the democratic, revolutionary, and emancipatory struggle; and, in Baldwin’s words, achieve our country.