A Talk to Teachers

James Baldwin was a key figure of the civil rights movement, as well as an essayist, novelist, playwright, and poet. He is known for his work’s social criticism and its role exposing truths about racism and anti-gay bias in America. He was born August 2, 1924, in New York City, the oldest of nine children. Baldwin and his siblings grew up in poverty in Harlem, an upbringing that not only heightened his observational skills but also his ability to provide honest and heartfelt commentary on social class in America. While attending Frederick Douglass Junior High School, one of his teachers and mentors was Countee Cullen, who was also a poet of the Harlem Renaissance. With this kind of tutelage, Baldwin began to write and edit for the local school literary magazine called Magpie (“An Introduction to James Baldwin.” National Museum of African American History & Culture, Smithsonian).

Though he was never a teacher in an official capacity, he spent his formative years (between age 14 and 17) as a preacher at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly. Preaching helped him develop an idiosyncratic rhetorical style that blended reflection, revitalization, and activism, and infused his writing with biblical and mythological metaphors, allusions, themes, and symbols. Despite his love for the church, Baldwin began to question several of its tenants, including its teaching on being gay. In his book The Fire Next Time, Baldwin wrote, “if the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, it is time we got rid of him” (“An Introduction to James Baldwin”). This ability to question the institutions that structured his world added a fire to Baldwin’s writings throughout his adulthood.

Baldwin did not attend college. He took his role as eldest brother seriously and helped around the house as much as possible. He worked menial jobs, trying to fulfill his dream of becoming a writer while working day jobs and playing guitar at cafes in Greenwich Village. It was at this time that he met Richard Wright, one of the most famous African American writers of the day. Wright’s work about the state of race in American informed Baldwin’s opinions and inspired him to root his activism in writing and storytelling. Unlike Wright, however, Baldwin had misgivings about the approach and eventual impact of protest art, and their friendship faltered as a result.

Baldwin moved to Paris at age 24. According to Kendall Thomas, professor of law and critical race studies at Columbia University, this move was twofold: Baldwin needed to leave his country because it was mired in racism, and he needed to leave Harlem because of its anti-gay bias (“An Introduction to James Baldwin”). When reflecting on this move in an interview with The Paris Review in 1984, Baldwin recalled, “My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed” (Baldwin, James. “James Baldwin, the Art of Fiction No. 78.” Interview by Jordan Elgrably. The Paris Review, no. 91, 1984). In Paris, Baldwin the writer was revived. There, he rekindled his connection with Richard Wright and met Maya Angelou for the first time.

For 40 years, Baldwin lived abroad with occasional returns to New York City. Despite this, he was powerfully affected by the civil rights movement in America—including the deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. The movement reinvigorated his writing and his activism about the demobilization of racism and the toll it was taking on young people. “A Talk to Teachers” is only one of many writings that evinces this.