THE COVER: Esquire magazine, July 1968.  ”James Baldwin tells us all how to cool it this summer.”

“The long, hot summer.”  Americans heard a lot about that as the summer months approached in 1968, and it filled them with dread.  By 1968, just the word “summer” was conjuring not just beaches and vacations and re-runs on TV, but also what were almost universally known as “race riots,”  events that today, with more circumspection, we call “urban rebellions.”  Large swaths of Los Angeles were devastated in summer 1965; much of Newark and Detroit (and Buffalo, and Milwaukee, and Minneapolis) went up in flames in summer 1967.    Experts who might be called meteorological criminologists were coming forth with pronouncements about the “temperature-humidity crime index,” a bogus predictor of violence and lawlessness that added a layer of “science” to the accumulating lists of causes of civil disturbance.

As it turned out, by the time the summer of 1968 rolled around, urban America had already been convulsed by the serious, destructive riots that occurred in the wake of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in early April.  Still, the fears of “worse to come” were there when the editors at Esquire planned the issue that would appear at the height of the summer.  The now-legendary art director George Lois conceived this brilliant photo shoot to announce the magazine’s editorial coup of nailing an interview with no less a light than James Baldwin about what to expect in the summer of 1968.

Seven young black men–anonymous, black-jacketed, smoking, staring at the camera–are assembled in an ice warehouse.  George Lois and photographer Carl Fischer pressed these men (actors? models? guys pulled in off the street?) into a single role, one with a long history in American popular culture–the Black Man who Terrifies White People.   Cool.  Insolent.  Arrogant.  Tightly wound.  ”Powderkegs,” each of them.  Still, the photograph manages to control them:  they are inside; trapped, in a way, in a space that could pass for a prison; like animals or carcasses in a meat locker; isolated from each other, not part of a larger group.  Not part of a community at all: no women, no children.  Just black male-ness, an immense threat to white American males, overwhelmingly the readership of Esquire, “The Magazine for Men,” as it says just above the head of the black guy on the far right.

James Baldwin’s 1962 book The Fire Next Time had been widely noted for its disturbing warnings about the “cosmic vengeance” that black America was soon to wreak on white America, a prediction that seemed to come to pass a few years (summers) later.  Esquire, which had first published Baldwin in 1961, returned to him at “a time of fresh tragedy”:  his typically contentious, take-no-prisoners interview was conducted just two days after the King’s funeral, when several American cities were still burning.   Baldwin had famously said a few years earlier, when asked in general terms about “the Negro problem,” that: “It’s not the Negro problem, it’s the white problem. I’m only black because you think you’re white.”  His long interview here bears up extremely well, even 40+ years on.  Calming the waters, cooling the heated situation?  No, neither.  Baldwin’s eloquent, two-fisted answers probably left few people reassured about the summer of ‘68:  ”When you, in the person of your President, assure me that you will not tolerate any more violence, you may think that frightens me.  People don’t get frightened when they hear that, they get mad.  And whereas you’re afraid to die, I’m not.”