12 James Baldwin quotes that are still painfully true today

Hailed as a gifted pupil at an early age, James Baldwin discovered a particular passion for writing during his teens. At the age of 13, he wrote his first article, Harlem – Then and Now, for a school magazine. He went on to be one of the most significant writers of American literature, famous for novels including Giovanni's Room (1965) and If Beale Street Could Talk (1974).

Baldwin was also a leading voice in the Civil Rights Movement, known for his insightful work that gave voice to the African American experience and sought to educate white Americans on what it meant to be Black.

In the decades following his death in 1987, the rise of movements like Black Lives Matter and ongoing discourse on race, social inequality and sexuality show that there is still a long way to go on the march to equality – and Baldwin's words are often to be found at the centre of these conversations.

Read on for some of his most prescient, and often still painfully true, musings on literature, race, self-belief, prejudice and more.

“The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.”

— The Devil Finds Work

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”

— Baldwin, speaking in a 1961 radio interview

“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”

— The Fire Next Time

— Conversations with James Baldwin

“If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected – those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most! – and listens to their testimony.”

— No Name in the Street

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

— Baldwin speaking to LIFE magazine in 1963