James Baldwin's Notes Of A Native Son

James Baldwin

James Baldwin was an African-American poet, playwright, novelist, social critic, and essayist. One of his books, Notes of a Native Son, features his collected essays that deal with the understood, but unsaid, 20th century rules and distinctions between different classes and races in the United States. James Baldwin’s many books of essays and poems addressed the complicated social pressure on blacks and homosexual men.

==Youth and Education==

James Arthur Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, in Harlem, New York. Emma Berdis Jones, his mother, bore him alone after leaving his biological, drug-abusing father and moving to Harlem to escape. She soon married David Baldwin, a local preacher and the family struggled in severe poverty. James Baldwin cared for his nine younger siblings growing up and suffered racial harassment from the police. His step-father treated him unkindly and abused him throughout his childhood as well. David worked as a factory worker and Baptist preacher, thought white people evil, and forbid his children from watching movies or listening to jazz.Baldwin, 2012 Baldwin first attended P.S. 24 Elementary School with the first African-American New York public school principal, Gertrude Ayer, and Orilla Miller, a white theater intern, who encouraged his interest in writing and the theater. He

south after seeing a photograph of a girl in Charlotte, North Carolina fighting a mob of protestors to enter a desegregated school. He interviewed people in Montgomery, Alabama and in Charlotte, N.C., where he met Martin Luther King, Jr. He published several essays and articles about his experience for the Partisan Review, Harper’s, the New Yorker, and others. James Baldwin’s essay, The Fire Next Time, first appeared in The Progressive.Polsgrove, 2001James Baldwin fought for civil rights by writing, walking, and addressing political