If King was the preacher, Baldwin was the poet, and he sought to account for his confusion by gathering up the pieces—of himself, of black folk—buried beneath the disaster that was the country. That work kept his despair at arm’s length. To be sure, King’s death, just like those of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and all the others, did not stop time. White people did not stop being white people. Two days after King’s murder, the Black Panther Bobby Hutton was killed by Oakland police officers. Later, police rioted in Chicago, during the Democratic National Convention. The nastiness of the white world kept coming, and it gave black politics—and Baldwin’s voice—an edge. King’s death had revealed the bitterness at the bottom of the cup. What Baldwin saw on that dangerous road that led to King’s death, in Memphis, was the difficult question of whether or not the country had the courage to confront its demons. Could America tell itself the truth about how it had arrived at this moment? And did it have the moral stamina to surrender the comfort of its lies?
In July of 1968, just a few months after King’s assassination and against the backdrop of American cities burning, Baldwin gave an interview to Esquire. He set the tone of the exchange from the very start:
Q. How can we get the black people to cool it?
A. It is not for us to cool it.
Q. But aren’t you the ones who are getting hurt the most?
A. No, we are only the ones who are dying fastest.
The editors did not seem to grasp how the moral burden of America’s nightmare rested not on the black people rioting in the streets but on the white people who held tightly to the belief that they were somehow, because of the color of their skin, better than others. These people, Baldwin argued, had to see themselves otherwise. New laws, gestures of sympathy, and acts of racial charity would never suffice to change the course of the country. Something more radical had to be done; a different history had to be told. “All that can save you now is your confrontation with your own history . . . which is not your past, but your present,” Baldwin said. “Your history has led you to this moment, and you can only begin to change yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history.”