After 1968 Baldwin stopped addressing white America and turned inward to black self-preservation

Evidence

Those same critics who rejected Baldwin’s politics were also unsettled by the shift in the audience of concern in Baldwin’s work. Through the 1960s, Baldwin turned his attention away from the gaze of white America and focused more directly on the well-being and future of black people. The nature of his “we” changed. We can begin to see the shift, at least in tone, after the killing of Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and in his 1964 play Blues for Mister Charlie, based on the murder of Emmett Till. But the substantive shift, in my view, happened after King’s assassination. Something changed in him, something one can hear in his interviews and speeches, and read in his short editorials and letters. Formulations like “We cannot be free until they are free” in The Fire Next Time give way to “we’ll share it or we’ll perish, and I don’t care” in “Black Power.” In a way, the shift in Baldwin’s work mirrors one of the central moves of the new black militancy: He turns inward and explores what we need to do to secure our freedom because no one is going to do it for us. Baldwin was no longer concerned about saving the souls of white people or warning them of the consequences of their failure to change. “We cannot awaken this sleeper, and God knows we have tried,” he declared. “We must do what we can do, and fortify and save each other.” — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 303

Categorization

• XREF: The shift of audience is central to why late Baldwin unsettles critics; supports the reader’s recanonization argument.
• DEEPTHINKING: The shift from ‘We cannot be free until they are free’ to ‘we’ll share it or we’ll perish, and I don’t care’ encapsulates the failed-reckoning turn the whole book is built on.