"Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go."
— James Baldwin
“I don’t try to be prophetic, as I don’t sit down to write literature. It is simply this: a writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, ‘I don’t look like that.’ And Picasso replied, ‘You will.’ And he was right.”
—James Baldwin, who was born today, August 2, 1924.
If I’d been born in Mississippi, I might have come to New York. But, being born in New York, there’s no place you can go. You have to go out. Out of the country. And I went out of the country and I never intended to come back here. Ever. Ever.
—James Baldwin
Baldwin lived in Paris for eight years. Away from America, he was free to explore, through his experiences and his writing, what it meant to be American.
Photo: portrait of James Baldwin as he delivered an address during a West coast tour to benefit of CORE, May, 13, 1963. Photo by Jeff Goldwater, Los Angeles Public Library, Hollywood Citizen News/Valley Times Collection
Photo: Itinerant photographer in Columbus, Ohio. Photographed by Ben Shahn, August 1938.
Every negro boy and every negro girl, born in this country until this present moment, undergoes the agony of trying to find in the body politic, in the body social, outside himself, herself, some image of himself or herself, which is not demeaning. ~JAMES BALDWIN
Starting tomorrow, a series on black photographers.
"A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled."
— James A. Baldwin
"People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you’re dead, when they’ve killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn’t have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they’ve lost their toy."
— James Baldwin (Another Country)
"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."
— James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
