The Evidence of Things Not Seen

In this searing and moving essay, James Baldwin explores the Atlanta child murders that took place over a period of twenty-two months in 1979 and 1980. Examining this incident with a reporter's skill and an essayist's insight, he notes the significance of Atlanta as the site of these brutal killings - a city that claimed to be "too busy to hate" - and the permeation of race throughout the case: the Black administration in Atlanta; the murdered Black children; and Wayne Williams, the Black man tried for the crimes. Rummaging through the ruins of American race relations, Baldwin addresses all the hard-to-face issues that have brought us to this moment in history where it is terrifying to be a Black child in a White country, and where, too often, public officials fail to ask real questions about "justice for all." Baldwin takes a time-specific event and makes it timeless, he takes preconceived universal truths and shakes them, but most of all, he takes our fears and turns them into hope.