It is not that Baldwin and his activist cohort disavowed the hard and necessary work of shaping policies that responded to black need, policies that would offer the social goods black folk deserved. It is that they saw public policy without personal witness as an insufficient spur to genuine social change. This is why Baldwin’s crew insisted that President Kennedy see race as a moral issue and not simply a political one. Legislation and public policy would surely solve many of the practical problems black folk confronted, but they could hardly address the deep investment in black inferiority,
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