Seen in this way, the civil rights movement could easily be conscripted into a story of how Americans perfected the Union, where all of their sacrifices would become, with vicious irony, proof of America’s inherent goodness. The history they were making, in real time, could be bent in the service of the lie. For Baldwin, the movement had to challenge that lie at its root or it would consume us all, which is why, perhaps, he had dedicated his own introduction of King to telling a true story of the movement.
