James baldwin biography harlem

Baldwin reminisced in an interview that the first house he remembered was located on Uptown Park Avenue, where the railroad tracks were. There he played on the roof of the building, near the river and garbage dump. At the time of his parent’s migration, Harlem resembled southern communities in many ways. Adults on the block knew each other and their children, which helped to create a shared responsibility for one’s neighbor. When Baldwin was growing up, Harlem was multi-racial, and among many other aspects of life that brought its dwellers close, a sense of shared poverty created a community rather than fostering hopeless isolation that later became the staple of suburbia. The Harlem of Baldwin’s early memory reflected a place where people clung to the possibility of a normal life. There was a grocery store run by the old Jewish couple, a soda pop joint, a shoe shine parlor, and the candy shop run by his father’s sister, Taunty, on rd Street between Lenox and Fifth.

However, as James Baldwin grew older, he became increasingly aware of the racial and economic struggles around him that pushed more and more people to despair and suicide. The problem, for example, of police brutality against African Americans in Harlem was pervasive, and Baldwin experienced harassment by police for being both black and gay. Years later in “A Report from Occupied Territory” published in in The Nation, Baldwin would write about the treatment of Harlem’s black community by law enforcement. He reports on a specific case in which a man and several youth had been beaten and jailed:

My report is based on what I myself know, for I was born in Harlem and raised there. This means that I know the thunder and fire of the billy club, the paralyzing shock of spittle in the face, and I know what it is to find oneself at the bottom of the flight of steps down which one has just been hurled People are destroyed very easily. Where is the civilization and where, indeed, is the morality which can afford to destroy so many? What I have said about Harlem is true of every Northern city with a large Negro population. And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function.

In , Baldwin began school, soon developed a passion for reading, and demonstrated a gift for writing during his early years. At his first public school, his teachers and principal encouraged him to engage with the collections of African and African Diaspora materials of the black Puerto Rican scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. The collections had been acquired by the nearby th Street Branch of the New York Public Library in Located in Harlem, this library became Baldwin’s second home, where he spent three or four days a week.

Many of Baldwin’s public school teachers were noted educators and held high standards of achievement for their students. At Frederick Douglass Junior High School in Harlem, Baldwin received encouragement in his studies from two African American teachers, the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen and Herman W. Porter, a Harvard-educated math teacher, who introduced Baldwin to New York’s great 42nd Street Public Library, called “an important sanctuary during the rest of his school years” by Baldwin biographer David Leeming.

In the s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, the social gospel movement as well as individual, evangelical Christianity were integral to the religious experience of Harlemites. Churches both large and small rested on Harlem street corners. During his high school years, Baldwin served as a youth minister in the Harlem Pentecostal church from the age of fourteen to seventeen. He preached at a church located in a former business that, like many others in Harlem, occupied a storefront. One of his early, unrealized projects as a writer was to compile photographs of such storefront churches and discuss their role in the community. While he never finished the project, he channeled some of the energy from it into his first play, The Amen Corner (), which takes place in such a storefront place of worship. By the time high school ended, Baldwin decided on a secular direction in life, or as his Clinton yearbook indicates, his goal was to become a “Novelist-Playwright.” He received no encouragement from his stepfather, a stern and embittered preacher. In Notes of a Native Son he describes a brief interaction with his father: “My father asked me abruptly, ‘You’d rather write than preach, wouldn’t you?’ I was astonished at his question - because it was a real question. I answered, ‘Yes.’ That was all we said. It was awful to remember that was all we had ever said.”

Shortly after graduating high school, Baldwin left for New Jersey to find work, and after the death of his father, he moved to Greenwich Village around The Harlem that Baldwin left behind imprinted memories of intense racial tension, discrimination, race riots, poverty-stricken communities, hyperawareness of police presence, and the unrelenting crime and violence that defined the experiences of African American city dwellers.