Editing James Baldwin (section)

===Birth and family===
Baldwin was born as '''James Arthur Jones''' to Emma Berdis Jones on August 2, 1924, at [[Harlem Hospital]] in [[New York City]].<ref>{{cite magazine |last1=Als |first1=Hilton |title=The Enemy Within |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/02/16/the-enemy-within-hilton-als |magazine=The New Yorker |access-date=December 16, 2022 |date=February 9, 1998}}</ref> Born on [[Deal Island, Maryland]], in 1903,{{sfn|Tubbs 2021|p=122}} Emma Jones was one of many who fled [[Racial segregation in the United States|racial segregation and discrimination]] in the [[Southern United States|South]] during the [[Great Migration (African American)|Great Migration]]. She arrived in [[Harlem, New York]], when she was 19 years old.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=3}} Baldwin was born out of wedlock there. Jones never revealed to him who his biological father was.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=3}}

Jones originally undertook to care for her son as a single mother.{{sfn|Tubbs 2021|pp=243–244}} However, in 1927, Jones married David Baldwin, a laborer and Baptist preacher.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=4}} David Baldwin was born in [[Bunkie, Louisiana]], and preached in [[New Orleans]], but left the [[Southern United States|South]] for Harlem in 1919.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=4}}{{efn|In his early writing, Baldwin said his father left the South because he reviled the crude [[vaudeville]] culture in New Orleans and found it difficult to express his inner strivings. However, Baldwin later said his father departed because "lynching had become a national sport."{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=4}}}} How David and Emma met is uncertain, but in James Baldwin's semi-autobiographical ''[[Go Tell It on the Mountain (novel)|Go Tell It on the Mountain]]'', the characters based on the two are introduced by the man's sister.{{sfn|Tubbs 2021|p=248}} Emma Baldwin and David Baldwin had eight children in sixteen years—George, Barbara, Wilmer, David Jr. (named for James's stepfather and deceased half-brother), Gloria, Ruth, Elizabeth, and Paula.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=20}} James took his stepfather's last name.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=3}} James rarely wrote or spoke of his mother. When he did, he made it clear that he admired and loved her, often through reference to her loving smile.{{sfn|Leeming|1994}}{{rp|20}} James moved several times while young but always within Harlem.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|pp=5–6}} At the time, Harlem was still a mixed-race area of the city in the incipient days of the [[Great Migration (African American)|Great Migration]].{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=6}}

James Baldwin did not know exactly how old his stepfather was, but it is clear that he was much older than Emma; indeed, he may have been born before the [[Emancipation Proclamation|Emancipation]] in 1863.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=5}} David's mother, Barbara, was born enslaved and lived with the Baldwins in New York before her death when James was seven years old.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=5}} David also had a light-skinned half-brother fathered by his mother's erstwhile enslaver{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=5}} and a sister named Barbara, whom James and others in the family called "Taunty".<ref>{{harvnb|Campbell|2021|p=19}}; {{harvnb|Leeming|1994|p=23}}</ref> David's father was born a slave.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=3}} David had been married earlier and had a daughter, who was as old as Emma and at least two sons―David, who died while in jail, and Sam, who was eight years James's senior. Sam lived with the Baldwins for a time and once saved James from drowning.{{sfn|Leeming|1994}}{{rp|7}}{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=5}}

James Baldwin referred to his stepfather simply as "father" throughout his life,{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=4}} but David Sr. and James had an extremely difficult relationship and nearly resorted to physical fights on several occasions.{{sfn|Leeming|1994}}{{rp|18}}{{efn|Baldwin learned that he was not his father's biological son through overhearing a comment to that effect during one of his parents' conversations late in 1940.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=41}} He tearfully recounted this fact to [[Emile Capouya]], with whom he went to school.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=41}}}} "They fought because James read books, because he liked movies, because he had white friends", all of which, David Baldwin thought, threatened James's "salvation".{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=18}} According to one biographer, David Baldwin also hated [[white people]] and "his devotion to [[God]] was mixed with a hope that God would take revenge on them for him."{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=8}}{{efn|It is in describing his father's searing hatred of white people that comes one of Baldwin's most noted quotes: "Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law."{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=52}}}} During the 1920s and 1930s, David worked at a soft-drink bottling factory,{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=6}} although he was eventually laid off from the job. As his anger and hatred eventually tainted his sermons, he was less in demand as a preacher. David sometimes took out his anger on his family and the children were afraid of him, though this was to some degree balanced by the love lavished on them by their mother.{{sfn|Tubbs 2021|pp=351–356}}

David Baldwin grew paranoid near the end of his life.{{sfn|Campbell|2021|p=7}} He was committed to a mental asylum in 1943 and died of tuberculosis on July 29 of that year, the same day Emma had their last child, Paula.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|pp=19, 51}} James, at his mother's urging, visited his dying stepfather the day before{{sfn|Tubbs 2021|pp=457–458}} and came to something of a posthumous reconciliation with him in his essay "Notes of a Native Son". In the essay, he wrote: "in his outrageously demanding and protective way, he loved his children, who were black like him and menaced like him."{{sfn|Kenan 1994|pp=27–28}} David Baldwin's funeral was held on James's 19th birthday, around the same time that the [[Harlem riot of 1943|Harlem riot]] began.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=52}}
[[File:JamesBaldwin1964.jpg|left|thumb|Baldwin in Los Angeles, 1964]]
As the oldest child, James Baldwin worked part-time from an early age to help support his family. He was molded not only by the difficult relationships in his household but also by the impacts of the poverty and discrimination he saw all around him. As he grew up, friends he sat next to in church turned to drugs, crime, or prostitution. In what biographer Anna Malaika Tubbs found to be a commentary on not only his own life but also the entire Black experience in America, Baldwin wrote: "I never had a childhood... I did not have any human identity... I was born dead."{{sfn|Tubbs 2021|pp=512–514}}