Happy birthday to James Baldwin, the extraordinary Black queer author, poet and civil rights activist, whose life and legacy we celebrate today.
In his honor, we share this intriguing article by The Atlantic praising the brilliance of his letters. The piece begins with a correspondence in 1974 between Baldwin and Abel Meeropol, his one-time high school English teacher who wrote "Strange Fruit" and, along with his wife, adopted the sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg: