James Baldwin: Brilliant Skeptic
— By James Haught (Haught is editor of West Virginia’s largest newspaper, The Charleston Gazette, and a senior editor of Free Inquiry. This article first appeared in Free Inquiry, Fall 2000.) Here’s an interesting literary footnote: James Baldwin, arguably America’s greatest black writer, was a popular Pentecostal preacher in Harlem at age 14 — but at 17 he renounced… Read more »