Editing James Baldwin (section)

==Civil Rights Activism==

Baldwin was deeply engaged in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He knew and corresponded with many of its leading figures, including [[Martin Luther King Jr.]], [[Medgar Evers]], and [[Malcolm X]]. In 1963 he organized a group of prominent Black artists and intellectuals to meet with U.S. Attorney General [[Robert F. Kennedy]] to discuss the crisis of racial inequality — a tense and widely reported meeting that illustrated the gulf between the government's understanding of race and the reality experienced by Black Americans.

Baldwin's essays and public appearances made him one of the most visible and eloquent voices of the movement, though he often resisted being reduced to a spokesman for any single cause, insisting on the full complexity of his perspective as both a Black man and a gay man.