James Baldwin

Adrian Lester reads from the novels and essays of the Black American writer James Baldwin, set alongside archive recordings of Baldwin and music including by Miles Davis, Florence Price, John Coltrane, George Walker and Oscar Peterson.
This programme contains some strong discriminatory language.
Writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York on August 2, 1924, the eldest of nine children.

To be a black person in America, Baldwin once said, was to be “in a state of rage almost all of the time.” The racial injustices he witnessed and endured were compounded by his experiences as a gay man, and his writing is deeply embedded in the nuances of racial and sexual identity.
Baldwin’s first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, includes a haunting memoir of the life and death of his stepfather, an evangelical preacher, with whom he had a fraught relationship. During the summer of his fourteenth birthday, Baldwin underwent a dramatic religious conversion and served as a junior minister for three years in a small Pentecostal church, a period he wrote about in his semi-autobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. His second collection of essays, The Fire Next Time, is told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', one of which is addressed to his 15-year-old nephew James.
We’ll hear an extract from Giovanni’s Room – the novel he published in 1956 which follows a young American man in Paris and explores bisexuality, power balances and social isolation. He became a public figure, taking part in debates and TV shows and publishing books which have been turned into Oscar-nominated films and documentaries, inspiring many later activists and writers.
Although Baldwin would claim that he didn't ‘know anything about music’, the prose of his novel Another Country attempts to emulate the sound of jazz musicians, and his fiction and non-fiction is punctuated with references to the blues, gospel and jazz. Today’s Words and Music includes performances by Bessie Smith, John Coltrane and Nina Simone. We also hear classical work by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Margaret Bonds and an extract from an artwork by Tavares Strachan called There Is a Light in Darkness (blue neon, yellow neon and synchronised audio art installation, courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery and the Artist, 2024.)

Producer: Cecile Wright

Readings:
Archive footage of James Baldwin
Excerpts from Giovanni’s Room
No Name in the Street
Another Country
Go Tell It on the Mountain
The Fire Next Time
Baldwin archive material
Notes of a Native Son (Permission was granted by Beacon Press, Boston, Massachusetts)
Another Country
Sonny’s Blues
Letter to my nephew