James A. Baldwin, August 2, 1924 (Harlem, NY) – December 1, 1987 (St. Paul de Vence, France)
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only w itnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out. James A. Baldwin
You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not its idea of you.
James Baldwin
2024.
The country, the world, and writers and scholars among us celebrated the James Baldwin Centennial this year because of the work James Baldwin accomplished in his lifetime, and because of the resounding and revelatory echoes that his work continues to create. Baldwin was a dynamo, a man possessed of serious, incandescent insight, a person who was both unafraid and awed by the great power his power with words could engender. Baldwin a man of small stature evidenced huge empathy. His personality, intelligence, intensity, and productivity proved enormous, lasting and strengthening. His contributions – big and round and endless (and fractious)– like the globe.
James Baldwin was trenchant about his impoverished beginnings. Born and raised mostly in a tenement in Harlem, Baldwin discovered libraries in his youth and learned to use them. Knowledge found therein changed his trajectory in life. Baldwin has been fashioned or presented as a product of bustling, artistic New York. Based on his own commentary, artistry came after a particularly harsh childhood. His spoken and written words suggest that his childhood was gripping, miserable, bereft of comforts – tinged with angry rules and the demands of his father’s religion. When Baldwin escaped (or eloped, with his dreams) to France, he was nominally an adult. He described himself still as a poor boy, reaching – crossing the sea with $40 in his pocket.
Baldwin demonstrated an abundance of daring – sometimes he was performative; sometimes you could see real worry affecting his spirit, clouding his prominent eyes. Nonetheless, he wrote: from all the places where he stood, he refused to cower to brutal eras or to mean, unrelenting realities. He spoke up as a poor boy, he wrote up his insights even as adulthood wrapped him in its heavy cloak. He crafted whole love stories between characters who were dehumanized in real life, people whom our society crippled – by denying them humanity; by refusing them safe homes or haven; by treating them like animals or like detritus; and by withholding access to money, to succor, to ease. Baldwin showed for sure, like many before him and like many still to come, that greatness and intelligence do not believe in white superiority. We are born and live our lives, fired-up and as burning intellectuals, musically inclined and so innovative that we change sound, full of energy and bursting with love – for our siblings, for our parents and ancestors, for our visions, dreams, future.
If we meet someone who doesn’t know James Baldwin, we are sorry about the acuity, strength and intelligence that the person-who-doesn’t-know-of-Baldwin is missing. All of us want to share James Baldwin with the uninformed, the uninitiated, those who don’t know what an icon, a hero, a public intellectual he made of himself. Tenement notwithstanding. Those of us who have been bolstered by Baldwin’s work, by what he did with his time passing through our troubled world, shout out to and for him, just as he was a mouthpiece for us. Baldwin clarified the complexity that must be observed as great Black intellectuals ply their trade in this rough and tumble, sometimes vicious, and often exclusionary culture we call our country
Born in Harlem, on August 2, 1924, James Baldwin died in St. Paul de Vence, France, on December 1, 1987. Baldwin’s occupation is listed singularly as novelist, though in life, and in death, he was and is so much more. Baldwin has been represented extensively in art, in sculpture, in film, and on stage – centering works Baldwin wrote himself, and launching into the world all the many projects inspired by his life and work. James Baldwin made himself. He made himself an icon; he was unafraid of prophecy. He went from tenement to tantamount. We are all in his debt – in 2024, before, and beyond.
A.J.Verdelle
December 1, 2024
Healing Vespers / Reading Baldwin
HOWARD UNIVERSITY
Roster of Readers
1. A.J. Verdelle, Creative Writing Faculty, English. Program Organizer. Greetings from Dr. Eleanor Traylor (Every humanbeingisanunprecedentedmiracle JB.) Welcome to Baldwin Vespers. (Say yes to life. JB)
2. Carol Boyce Davies, Ph.D., Chairperson, English Department. Welcome. Reading from: The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1:44)
3. Nala Francis, Junior, English/Creative Writing, Playwriting minor. From NY. Reading from: The Fire Next Time (10:10)
4. Janelle Joyner, Senior, English/Creative Writing. Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies minor. From Colorado Springs, CO. Reading from: The Doom & Glory of Knowing Who You Are (11:29)
5. Shaun’tae Swanson, Senior, English major, Criminology minor. Reading from: The Doom & Glory of Knowing Who You Are (12:41)
6. Summer Wright Gray. Junior. Public Health. Reading from: Go Tell It on the Mountain (13:46)
7. Mandla Morris, First Year, Jazz Piano major. From Los Angeles, CA. Reading from: The Fire Next Time (15:18)
8. McKenzie Williams, First Year, Biology major. Reading from: Conversations with James Baldwin (16:24)
9. Victoria Moten, Graduate Student, English. Reading from: If Beale Street Could Talk (18:15)
10. Jayden Tatum, Senior, Film & & TV major, English/Creative Writing minor. Reading from: If Beale Street Could Talk (19:01)
11. Kai’sa Tuck, Senior, English/Creative Writing Major, Film & TV Minor. From Chicago, IL. Reading from: Giovanni’s Room (20:46)
12. January Jackson, First Year, Honors English major from Lawrence, KS. Reading from: The Fire Next Time (22:12)
13. Yasmin Degout, PhD, Faculty, English. Reading from: Giovanni’s Room (23:24)
14. Jennifer Williams, PhD, Faculty, English Reading from: Here Be Dragons (25:42)
15. Sandra Shannon, PhD, Professor Emerita, English. Reading from: Notes of a Native Son (30:30)
16. Trinity Montgomery. Sophomore, Transfer. From Chicago, IL. Reading from: The Fire Next Time (34:53)
17. Anika Simpson, PhD, Chairperson, Philosophy Department. Reading from Notes on the House of Bondage (35:45)
18. Monique Akassi, PhD, HU Director of First Year Writing, Reading from: James Baldwin’s Final Interview with Quincy Troupe (1987) & The Amen Corner (39:28)
19. Wesley Rothman, PhD, Faculty, English. Reading from White Man, Hear Me! (41:00)
20. Tony Medina, PhD, Director of Creative Writing, English. Reading from: No Name in the Street & Nobody Knows My Name (45:16)
21. Sufiya Abdur-Rahman, Creative Nonfiction Faculty, English Reading from: The Cross of Redemption (50:57)
22. Tricia Elam, Creative Writing Faculty, English. Reading from: If Beale Street Could Talk (54:34)
23. Nathalie Pierre, PhD, Faculty, History. No Name in the Street (59:16)
24. Misha Cornelius, Graduate Student, Political Science. Graduate Assistant to Ms. Stacy Abrams. Reading from: Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone (1:02:46)
25. Kyr Mack, Director, HU Writing Center. Reading from: The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (1:07:35)
26. Trudier Harris, Ph.D. Professor Emerita, University of Alabama. Reading from: No Name in the Street (1:13:49)
27. Jamila Minnicks, Novelist. Winner of Bellwether Prize for Fiction. Reading from: Sonny’s Blues (1:18:44)
28. Farah Jasmine Griffin, Ph.D. William B. Ransford Professor, English & Comparative Literature and African American and African Diaspora Studies, Columbia University. Reading from: The Fire Next Time (1:23:39)
29. Dagmawi Woubshet Baldwin Scholar, University of Pennsylvania. Reading from: Just Above My Head (1:26:17)
*Program preceded and followed by video interview of Baldwin, Meeting the Man, Paris, France, 1970. [https://youtu.be/PjGzpVTrOEw?si=4j7Q2Z]
Books by James Baldwin
Go Tell It on the Mountain•Notes of a Native Son•Giovanni’s Room•NobodyKnowsMyName•Another Country•The Fire Next Time•NothingPersonal•Blues for Mister Charlie•GoingtoMeettheMan•The Amen Corner•TellMeHowLongtheTrain’sBeenGone•OneDay,WhenIWasLost•No Name in the Street•If Beale Street Could Talk•The Devil Finds Work•LittleMan,LittleMan•JustAboveMyHead• TheEvidenceofThingsNotSeen•Jimmy’sBlues•The Price of the Ticket
James Baldwin – Centennially, Posthumously, Permanently
Als, Hilton, ed g od m ade m y f ace: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY. 2024. Book or catalog to accompany the traveling Centennial Exhibit
Peck, Raoul. I Am Not Your Negro . Film/Biopic.
Jacqueline Woodson, Author, who could not be with us, sent notification of the Baldwin Center for the Arts. Exclusively committed to the global majority, Baldwin for the Arts endeavors to cultivate artistic and professional growth for literary, visual, performing, and interdisciplinary artists. Applications accepted: baldwinforthearts.org.
Healing Vespers / Reading Baldwin – Project Team. A.J. Verdelle, Creative Writing Faculty, Organizer. Department Chairperson: Carole Boyce Davies; Director of First Year Writing: Monique Akassi; English Dept Faculty: Wesley Rothman; Graduate Student: Sabrina Bramwell; Department Administrative Assistance: Chaquita McNeil and Brenda Douglas.