Lee A. Daniels on James Baldwin

"Some critics later said his language was sometimes too elliptical, his indictments sometimes too sweeping. But then, Mr. Baldwin's prose, with its apocalyptic tone - a legacy of his early exposure to religious fundamentalism - and its passionate yet distanced sense of advocacy, seemed perfect for a period in which blacks in the South lived under continual threat of racial violence and in which civil-rights workers faced brutal beatings and even death."