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James Baldwin was born August 2, 1924, New York -
His dad was never present but his mom was and she later on married a man that was his stepfather he was the oldest child out of nine kids. -
Between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, Baldwin became a preacher at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, where he developed a celebrated preaching style.
https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/introduction-james-baldwin -
During his early teen years, Baldwin attended Frederick Douglass Junior High School, where he met his French teacher and mentor Countee Cullen, who achieved prominence as a poet of the Harlem Renaissance.
https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/introduction-james-baldwin -
His brief experience in the church would have a sustained impact on his rhetorical style and on the themes, symbols, and biblical allusions in his writings.
https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/introduction-james-baldwin -
A year after he graduated his father was killed by the Harlem Race Riot of 1943 he then had to play a father figure for his siblings and couldn’t attend college and had to work.
https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/introduction-james-baldwin -
Wright helped Baldwin to write his first novel, which helped him to leave for Paris in 1948, where the older writer had relocated a few years earlier.
https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/introduction-james-baldwin -
James Baldwin moved to paris because of the racism he faced and how people treated him because of liking the same gender -
From age 14 to 17 Baldwin was active during out-of-school hours as a preacher in a small Pentecostal church, a period he wrote about in his semiautobiographical first and finest novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and in his play about a woman evangelist, The Amen Corner.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Baldwin -
Won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Second novel, GIOVANNI’S ROOM, rejected by Knopf because of its subject: homosexuality.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/james-baldwin-biographical-timeline/2667/ -
When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Baldwin was living in California in a rented house in Los Angeles, -
After the assassination of his three friends—Medgar Evers in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968—Baldwin suffered an emotional breakdown, became ill, and eventually moved to the South of France to recuperate.
https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/introduction-james-baldwin -
was a profile of the civil rights leader that anticipated the immense challenges King faced, including criticism from both white enemies and Black constituents
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"The Fire Next Time" is a profound work by James Baldwin, consisting of two essays published in 1963 that articulate the deep-seated anger, frustration, and hope of African Americans during a pivotal time in U.S. history.
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/fire-next-time-james-baldwin -
The 1965 debate between noted author and civil rights activist James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr. this debate, received massive public attention. Those in favor maintained that it was long overdue for the 15th Amendment (1870) to be fully and consistently enforced, and this was the position taken by Baldwin. Buckley held that it was a state matter.
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/debate-in-union-hall-cambridge-university-1965 -
worked on a screenplay for a movie about Malcolm X and became an influential reviewer before achieving his fame as a novelist.
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IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK is a lyrical and moving adaptation of author James Baldwin’s 1974 novel – and a masterpiece unto itself, earning an AFI AWARD as one of the 10 outstanding films deemed culturally and artistically representative of the year’s most significant achievements in the art of the moving image.
https://www.afi.com/news/afi-movie-club-if-beale-steet-could-talk/ -
After a short battle with stomach cancer, Baldwin passed away on November 30, 1987 in his house in St. Paul de Vence.