On this day in New York · August 2, 1924
James Baldwin Is Born in Harlem
A preacher's stepson born at Harlem Hospital would grow up to write some of the clearest sentences this country has ever produced about itself.
The facts
- Born
- August 2, 1924, at Harlem Hospital, New York City
- Birth name
- James Arthur Jones
- Mother
- Emma Berdis Jones, who had come to Harlem from Deal Island, Maryland
- Stepfather
- David Baldwin, a laborer and Baptist preacher, who married his mother in 1927
James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, at Harlem Hospital, the first of what would become eight children in the household of his mother, Emma Berdis Jones, and the man he grew up calling his father, David Baldwin, a laborer and Baptist preacher. The family scraped by in a Harlem hollowed out by the Depression, and Baldwin worked from an early age to help support his younger siblings. As a teenager he preached from the pulpit of a small Pentecostal church on Lenox Avenue before he had published a word, and that church rhythm never left his prose. He carried Harlem, and a complicated love for the stepfather who raised him, all the way to Paris and back into the essays that made his name.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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Baldwin was born as James Arthur Jones to Emma Berdis Jones on August 2, 1924, at Harlem Hospital in New York City.
From the biographical record of Baldwin's birth
Source: Wikipedia -
in his outrageously demanding and protective way, he loved his children, who were black like him and menaced like him.
James Baldwin, writing about his stepfather David Baldwin in the essay "Notes of a Native Son," 1955
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Baldwin turned a childhood of poverty and preaching in Harlem into essays that still shape how New Yorkers, and the whole country, talk about race and belonging.
Sources
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