This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance

In 1948, when the great American writer James Baldwin (1924–1987) was twenty-four years old, he left New York for Paris. He knew no French and had only forty dollars to his name. But the burgeoning novelist, essayist, and playwright felt he had to leave America to free himself from the racism that conspired to hinder his growth as an artist. In France, Baldwin created a kind of extended family that included the American painter Beauford Delaney and the musician Nina Simone—artists who, not unlike Baldwin, had survived poverty, segregation, and homophobia to become significant figures on the world stage.

After nearly a decade in Paris, Baldwin felt compelled to return to the United States. In 1957, he caught a glimpse of a picture of Dorothy Counts facing a hostile white crowd as she made her way to integrate a high school in North Carolina. “The photo made me furious,” Baldwin recalled. “Everybody else was paying their dues, and it was time I went home and paid mine.”

Back home, Baldwin wrote, marched, and made speeches while supporting the work of activist friends and associates, such as Lorraine Hansberry and Bayard Rustin—queer thinkers who, despite their exceptional rhetoric, were not out during the civil rights movement; the general feeling was that their difference would undermine the cause.

Toward the end of his life, Baldwin talked about his sexuality more openly, but it was his strong desire to always “bear witness” during troubled times, in troubled lands, that helped inspire the late Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, poets Essex Hemphill and Marlon Riggs, and many other intellectuals.

This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance, which takes part of its title from a short story Baldwin published in The Atlantic in 1960, is a reckoning of sorts—an homage to Black queer force as it continues to live and feed this nation’s activist spirit.

Curated by the National Portrait Gallery’s Director of Curatorial Affairs, Rhea Combs, in consultation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hilton Als

One Life Gallery | Second floor

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This Morning, This Evening, So Soon:
James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance

Edited with text by Hilton Als, Rhea L. Combs. Foreword by Rhea L. Combs.
Pub: Delmonico Books/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Hardcover, 9 x 12.5 in. / 112 pgs / 60 color / Retail: $39.95

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