How David and Emma met is uncertain, but in James Baldwin's semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain, the characters based on the two are introduced by the man's sister, who is a friend of the woman. David Baldwin was born in Bunkie, Louisiana and preached in New Orleans but left the South for Harlem in 1919. In 1927, Jones married David Baldwin, a laborer and Baptist preacher. A native of Deal Island, Maryland, where she was born in 1903, Emma Jones was one of the many who fled racial segregation in the South during the Great Migration. According to Anna Malaika Tubbs in her account of the mothers of prominent civil rights figures, some rumors stated that James Baldwin's father suffered from drug addiction or that he died, but that in any case, Jones undertook to care for her son as a single mother. Jones never revealed to Baldwin who his biological father was. James Arthur Baldwin was born to Emma Berdis Jones on August 2, 1924, at Harlem Hospital in New York City.
His first essay collection, Notes of a Native Son, was published in 1955.
His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was published in 1953 decades later, Time magazine included the novel on its list of the 100 best English-language novels released from 1923 to 2005. As a writer, he garnered acclaim across various mediums, including essays, novels, plays, and poems. James Arthur Baldwin (Aug– December 1, 1987) was an American writer and activist.