Through the Fire With James Baldwin

On November 19, 2024, a group of faculty and students from Columbia’s English Department gathered to read and hear the words of James Baldwin. They had been invited by our Director of Undergraduate Studies, Nicholas Dames, and Department Chair, Denise Cruz, to participate in this event honoring the author’s centennial. For over 90 minutes, readers introduced and shared their favorite Baldwin passages—selections from essays, novels, short stories, poems, and public letters. There, in the Lenfest Center for the Arts, high above 125^th Street, we reveled in Baldwin’s language, his astute observations, his social critique, and most importantly, in each other’s company. 

About a month prior to this event, almost a mile away from the university’s Manhattanville campus, the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department, in collaboration with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, hosted a two-day convening at the center in Harlem. This gathering, “How to Build a Fire:  James Baldwin Centennial Convening,” invited the public to join a roster of writers, intellectuals, artists, and activists in a conversation about Baldwin’s legacy. A play on the title of Baldwin’s book, The Fire Next Time, the convening encouraged participants to “lovingly and critically [reflect] on the blackprints James Baldwin wrote for his time, toward building and making our own interventions in the present.”

In both instances, those gathered were struck by the beauty, power, and prescience of Baldwin’s words. Also, both events created occasions for a much-needed sense of community—a reminder that we not only share space, but an obligation to each other, to our fellow citizens, and to inhabitants of this planet to ensure not only our survival, but that all of us thrive. 

Events such as these, though unique, have been happening throughout New York, indeed throughout the country. Baldwin is everywhere. This makes sense because we are recognizing the centenary of a great American writer. However, James Baldwin has captured the attention of a large cross-section of the reading public for well over a decade, such that his centenary feels like a culmination of years of admiration and celebration of his output.

This was not always the case. In his lifetime, Baldwin was celebrated as a bold young writer of fiction and as a critic willing to challenge the social realism of earlier generations of Black writers. He became an expatriate novelist, writing not only about Black urban life, in his autobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), but also about gay white characters in his groundbreaking second work, Giovanni’s Room (1956). Later, he emerged as a favored public intellectual, capable of interpreting Black rage and political aspiration to a broad liberal readership, and landing on the cover of Time Magazine in 1963 as a result.

But Baldwin was never just a chronicler; he was also a witness. He didn’t just report from the front lines; he walked with, learned from, and loved those who risked their lives. Malcolm, Martin, and Medgar were his friends. And, perhaps because he had been born amongst them, he always saw the world from the vantage point of what the Bible (a book that early on shaped him) called “the least of these.” 

As he once sat atop the world of literary fame and popular acceptance, he would experience just how fickle that acceptance could be. A younger generation of Black activists hurled criticisms at his liberal politics, and, at their worst, some, like Eldridge Cleaver, admonished him for his sexuality. Critics said his fiction suffered because of his political engagement. And at times, in the academy, though he found a home teaching there, his work would fail to gain the critical attention given to his contemporary, Ralph Ellison, considered to be a more accomplished craftsman.

For his part, James Baldwin engaged his critics, learned from them when he could, continued to bear witness, to speak the truth, and, though deeply disappointed in the nation of his birth, refused to give in completely to despair. He grew more radical, but would not give up hope that human beings, through the difficult, impossible act of love, could indeed, as they had done in the past, change the world. In this way, he remained consistent, in his insistence on the power of love, as well as his ongoing commitment to the act of bearing witness, and to judging a society by the measure of the least of these. This meant the poor and the incarcerated of any nation. This would have him defend his Jewish classmates and teachers to his fundamentalist Christian father, even if later he would be critical of the state of Israel as a servant of Western interests. It is the same tendency that forced him to choose his Algerian neighbors over the French, who welcomed him because he was Black American and not a Black African from one of their colonies.

Perhaps it is this difficult honestly—with himself, with his country (which he claimed to love), with his world, his commitment to engage in struggle, even if it meant death, his belief in a human capacity for evil, but also for good, a capacity to make the world a better place—perhaps this is what makes for his continued attraction during the most difficult times. When we find ourselves facing intractable problems as we did after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and others, or the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, or what feels like an unprecedented assault on democracy, Baldwin speaks directly and courageously to us. His work tells us that the only way forward is through, even if it is through the fire.

Farah Jasmine Griffin is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies, and also served as the inaugural Chair of the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. 

This column is editorially independent of Columbia News.