“Finding James Baldwin”
James Baldwin was a powerful voice of a generation nurtured by the Harlem Renaissance, by segregation north and south, and a world war in the name of freedom and the elimination of fascism. Today we likely remember Baldwin most for his fiery writing in the service of the Civil Rights Movement, work that earned him international notoriety. He was a celebrity speaker and world traveler, but also tailed by the FBI at the request of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. However great Baldwin’s contribution to the movement, it was never the whole Baldwin. James Baldwin resisted being straitjacketed into any one identity. He was Black and queer. He was an American and an expatriate. He was never comfortable in his own skin, but perhaps never more incisive than when he confronted his own insecurities. In our own age of identity politics and the heavy-footed reaction to it, James Baldwin is worth rediscovering.
H. Robert Baker is Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University and is the author of Prigg v. Pennsylvania: Slavery, the Supreme Court, and the Ambivalent Constitution (2012) and The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War (2006). His scholarly articles have appeared in the Law and History Review, Common-Place, and the Journal of Supreme Court History. He holds a Ph.D. in History from UCLA, where he studied with Joyce Appleby. He has been a Fulbright Fellowship and been a fellow at the Institute for Constitutional Studies. He also writes about wine, law, and contemporary culture for the blog Tropics of Meta.