Civil-rights-era writers appeared moderate only retrospectively, not to contemporaries.

Evidence

I agree with Hakutani about the progression in Baldwin’s views reflecting the progression toward radicalism in the course of the sixties, but I would argue that it is only in retrospect that Baldwin’s views can seem to ”reflect public sentiment.” Baldwin’s views were by no means held by a majority of the population, even in the early sixties, when Martin Luther King Jr. was still a troubling, fearsome figure to most whites, in the North as well as the South, and Civil Rights activism appeared for the most part dangerous and threatening. Baldwin was, of course, considered insufficiently militant and too middle-of-the-road, even accommodationist, by many black radicals—see, particularly, Cleaver’s attack in Soul on Ice. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 1004

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how ‘the moderate of its time’ is a retrospective construction — figures attacked as dangerously radical or insufficiently militant from opposite flanks get flattened to consensus heroes.