In time, Wright would also become his mentor, for Baldwin appreciated Wright’s strong opinions about race in America, and he also greatly valued their intellectual exchanges. In 1944, Baldwin met Richard Wright, who was the famous African American male writer at the time, and whose work spoke to his sensibility. He could not even dream of college and, therefore, worked at menial jobs during the day and at night played guitar in Greenwich Village cafes, where he also wrote for long hours, trying to fulfill his dream of becoming a writer. After this emotional loss, Baldwin felt more than ever that it was important to play father figure to his eight brothers and sisters. In 1942, he graduated from high school, and a year later he witnessed the Harlem Race Riot of 1943 and experienced the death of his father. The 1940s marked several turning points in Baldwin’s life. By high school graduation, he had a group of close friends from DeWitt Clinton-Richard Avedon, Emile Capouya, and Sol Stein-with whom he kept in touch and even collaborated on some of his works (e.g., Avedon and Stein). Baldwin went on to DeWitt Clinton High School, where he edited the school literary magazine Magpie and participated in the literary club, just as Cullen had done when he was a student there. If God cannot do this, it is time we got rid of Him.”ĭuring his early teen years, Baldwin attended Frederick Douglass Junior High School, where he met his French teacher and mentor Countee Cullen, who achieved prominence as a poet of the Harlem Renaissance. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin proclaims, “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. His experience in the pulpit also served to inflect his overall stance on religion, and his ultimate rejection of it in the name of humanistic love.

Baldwin’s Pentecostal experience is, in fact, essential to understanding his complex views on Christianity, which he espoused in his speeches and publications. His brief experience in the church would have a sustained impact on his rhetorical style and on the themes, symbols, and biblical allusions in his writings. Between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, Baldwin became a preacher at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, where he developed a celebrated preaching style.

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