Baldwin believed Birmingham’s brutality made legislation unable to cure the country.

Evidence

Baldwin worried about the young men and women like an older brother who did not know exactly how to protect them from the dangers he already glimpsed ahead. For him, the brutality of “Bull” Connor’s dogs and firehoses in Birmingham had already foreshadowed what was to come, revealing a depth to the country’s depravity that no single piece of legislation could cure. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 76

Categorization

• XREF: Directly seeds the ‘after times’ — the early insight that legislation can’t cure the depth of the depravity.
• SEED: Angle for the essay defending late Baldwin: he saw in 1963 what the ‘change’ narrative would fail to fix.