He felt that Black men in America, as the most obvious targets of white oppression, had to love each other, to warn each other, and to communicate with each other if they were to escape being defined only in reaction to that oppression. They had to seek and find in their own tradition the human qualities that white men, through their unrelenting brutality, had lost. I do not believe James Baldwin can be wholly read without first understanding white men and their penchant for tyranny and “unrelenting brutality.”
