James Baldwin: 10 insightful quotes on his birthday

Novelist and playwright James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, in Harlem, N.Y., to single mother Emma Jones. Emma married Baptist minister David Baldwin when Baldwin was three years old. Although the two had a strained relationship, as a teenager, Baldwin seemed to be following after his stepfather, serving as a minister in Harlem Pentecostal church. In high school Baldwin developed a love for reading and writing. He published a number of poems and short stories in his high school magazine. However, when he graduated in 1942, Baldwin was not able to continue on to college because he needed to work to support his family of eight younger siblings. It was in the working world where Baldwin came across a great amount of discrimination because he was black, and, as a result, he struggled to support himself for many years. After his stepfather died, Baldwin relocated to Greenwich Village where he became part of a budding art scene in order to start his own writing. A few years later, Baldwin moved to Paris, and this new location finally allowed him to write about his own personal experiences as they related to race. Baldwin published his first novel, "Go Tell It in the Mountain," in 1953, which dealt with the most difficult issues he had faced in his life from his race to his relationship with his stepfather. Baldwin is perhaps most recognized for his essays, “Notes of a Native Son” (1955) and “Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son” (1961). Baldwin saw his writing as a bearing “witness to the truth;” many would agree that the body of his work does indeed share truths not many others would dare to speak, much less put into writing.  

1. Hatred's self-destruction

Photo: public domain

"Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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