This year, the world celebrates what would have been James Baldwin’s 100th birthday. The author and political activist’s writings on race relations, human rights and equality still resonate to this day.

Baldwin, born in Harlem in 1924, was the grandson of an enslaved woman. He was the oldest of nine children and grew up in poverty. Baldwin would eventually become one of the most influential figures in 20th century American literature and cultural history with novels like “Giovanni’s Room,” “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “Go Tell It On The Mountain”; essay and collections like “The Fire Next Time” and “Notes of a Native Son”; and debates with conservative intellectuals including William F. Buckley.

Michael Jeffries, of Wellesley University, said Baldwin’s courage to speak out about race and white supremacy in a segregated America is one of the reasons people continue to gravitate toward him and his work.

“He wasn’t afraid to confront and debate the orthodoxies of his time or confront and debate people who disagreed with him,” Jeffries said. “He was unapologetic in talking about not only love, but also about violence. He refused to sanitize the violence in this country. And now that we have been exposed to violence that was, for many Americans, unimaginable — whether it’s the events of January 6th or some of the recorded instances of police brutality and police violence — the fact that he described all of this so unflinchingly during his times gives him a sense of legitimacy and timelessness.”

But Baldwin wasn’t just a writer and an activist, said Kim McLarin, of Emerson College.

“He was an artist,” McLarin said. “He considered himself an artist. And an artist looks at everything, and he looked at everything: masculinity, patriarchy, racism and art, the role of art. Some of the things I love most by Baldwin are his essays about what it means to be an artist in a society which devalues and ignores the warning of poets, as he says. He was ahead of his time on queerness, and he was certainly restricted and oppressed because of that, even in the civil rights movement, which he was very much a part of. He was just ahead of his time in every way.”

Although his work is now revered, Quentin Miller, of Suffolk University, said Baldwin’s work dipped in popularity in the ’80s and ’90s. But the uptick in recent years is no surprise to him, especially when looking at Baldwin’s work through a lens of radical love and authenticity and how that appeals to a new generation.

“I’ve taught virtually everything by Baldwin over the years, and they’ve all been hits. There have been no misses,” Miller said. “I think students are eager to read a writer who is intellectually challenging and also, at the same time, passionate. Baldwin was nothing if not intense. He just completely threw himself into it. He was somebody who was vulnerable and not afraid to just go deeper and deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the self. Anybody who writes with that level of truth and honesty, I think, is going to be a timeless writer. He said at the very end of the first essay in his autobiographical ‘Notes of a Native Son’ that he had two goals in life: I want to be an honest man and a good writer. And you know, those two things, of course, go hand in hand.”

Guests

  • Kim McClarin, author, professor and interim dean of graduate and professional studies at Emerson College
  • Michael Jeffries, dean of academic affairs, the Class of 1949 professor in ethics, and professor of American studies at Wellesley College
  • Quentin Miller, author and English professor at Suffolk University