Baldwin urged armed resistance without hatred for the sake of one’s soul.

Evidence

And yet Baldwin ends the interview in a way that brings the problem back to its moral underpinnings, the way he always saw it. When asked how he would talk to someone who was ready “to tear up the town,” Baldwin revealed what truly mattered to him: … All I can tell him, is that I’m with you, whatever that means. I’ll tell you what I can’t tell him. I can’t tell him to submit and allow himself to be slaughtered. I can’t tell him that he should not arm, because the white people are armed….what I try to tell him, too, is if you’re ready to blow the cat’s head off—because it could come to that—try not to hate him; for the sake of your soul’s salvation and for no other reason. But let’s try to be better, let’s try—no matter what it costs us—to be better than they are. You haven’t got to hate them, though we have to be free. It’s a waste of time to hate them. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 344

Categorization

• XREF: This is the counterexample to the common dismissal of late Baldwin as merely bitter — his post-1968 rage never surrendered the moral core, which the reader must defend.
• SEED: The essay’s central corrective: even in his angriest No Name period, Baldwin insisted ‘be better than they are’ — refuting the ‘bitter Baldwin’ caricature by quoting the rage itself.