Mr. Baldwin is a preacher and a rhapsodist. "Blues for Mister Charlie" is an angry sermon and a pain-wracked lament. It draws together the humiliation, degradation, frustration and resentment felt by millions relegated to second-class citizenship and transmutes the accumulated bitterness into a roar of fury. Listen attentively to Mr. Baldwin if you want to know the Negro who now is emerging from behind the noncommittal mask.

Mr. Baldwin is not quite so good with the white man. His fearful, unreconstructed white Southerners are close to caricature. His account of their ignorant, superstitious, malevolent opinions is probably well-founded. One can hear similar obscenities in the North.

But a dramatist makes his point most forcefully when his antagonist is drawn from strength. Mr. Baldwin's most effective white character is Parnell, the one decent white man. Parnell fails the Negro, and this failure not only is pitiful but also intensifies...