Told in the first person and written as letters, the author thus becomes his own narrator. Additionally, he becomes the person through which the reader experiences and processes Baldwin’s emotions, logical thought processes, and his metaphysical transformative vision, which demands both compassion and action, or open conflict with authority through loving persistence and dignity, to achieve true and meaningful racial justice.

Baldwin wrote these essays as a response to his return to the United States after living abroad for 20 years. The conditions under which he grew up remained basically intact in the lives of his family and neighbors in Harlem. The nascent Civil Rights Movement remained in the future. For Baldwin, the daily, life-threatening danger for African Americans and the precariousness of African American lives drove him to speak out, in the form of these two letters.