James Baldwin was a writer, essayist, and witness to the Black freedom struggle whose words gave the movement its moral clarity and refused America the comfort of its own myths. Born in Harlem in 1924 and raised in poverty under a stern preacher stepfather, he preached from the pulpit as a teenager before turning to literature.

He left for Paris in 1948 to escape the suffocating racism of the United States. From abroad he came to see American racism as part of a wider global order: in Paris he watched the French state's brutality toward Algerians and saw in it the same logic of domination that ruled Harlem and Birmingham. He returned again and again to stand with the movement. In The Fire Next Time and Notes of a Native Son, he argued that white supremacy was not a Black problem but a sickness at the center of the nation, rooted in the country's refusal to face its history. In novels such as Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni's Room, he wrote with rare honesty about race, faith, and sexuality, insisting that the freedom to love was bound up with every other freedom.

He mourned his murdered friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., opposed the war in Vietnam, defended the Black Panthers, and wrote an open letter in solidarity with Angela Davis while she was imprisoned. The FBI kept an extensive file on him. Baldwin believed that artists must tell the truth even when the nation does not want to hear it, and that only by facing that truth could people begin to change it. His legacy calls on us to see clearly, speak without fear, and take up the work of building a world worthy of human beings.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• Printed on acid-free, premium luster photo paper

• Paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*