James Baldwin, 1964 (UCLA Library Special Collections/CC BY 4.0)
In 1948, when the noted American novelist, essayist, and playwright James Baldwin was 24 years old, he left New York for Paris to escape the racism that hindered his growth as an artist. In France, Baldwin created an extended family that included the American painter Beauford Delaney and the musician Nina Simone—artists who, not unlike Baldwin, had survived poverty, segregation, and homophobia to become significant figures on the world stage.
After nearly a decade, Baldwin felt compelled to return to the United States in 1957 after seeing a photo of teenager Dorothy Counts facing a hostile white crowd as she made her way to integrate a high school in North Carolina. “Everybody else was paying their dues,” a furious Baldwin recalled, “and it was time I went home and paid mine.”
Baldwin wrote, marched, and made speeches while supporting the work of activist friends and associates such as Lorraine Hansberry and Bayard Rustin—queer thinkers who, despite their exceptional rhetoric, were not out during the civil rights movement: The general feeling was that their difference would undermine the cause.
Toward the end of his life, Baldwin talked about his sexuality more openly, but it was his strong desire to always bear witness during troubled times that helped inspire the late Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, poets Essex Hemphill and Marlon Riggs, and many other intellectuals.
An exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance offers an homage to Black queer force as it continues to live and feed the nation’s activist spirit. Rhea Combs, co-curator and the gallery’s director of curatorial affairs, provides an overview of the exhibition.
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