Last fall, without knowing just how topical the subject would turn out to be, I taught a course on Richard Wright and James Baldwin at Bennington College, where I’m a member of the literature faculty. When I’d first planned the class, I imagined it as a chance to revisit the work of two writers who loomed large in African American literature of the twentieth century but who had fallen, in recent years, out of favor and off of syllabi.

I knew Wright’s work only from the bowdlerized editions that everybody read when I was in school: Black Boy, his partly fictional memoir about growing up in the Jim Crow South, had been stripped of its second half, when Wright goes north to segregated Chicago, works menial jobs, and finds his first literary audience by joining the John Reed Club; his novel Native Son had been edited to minimize Bigger Thomas’s sexuality, especially his attraction to Mary Dalton, the Chicago heiress he smothers to death in her bed and then stuffs into a furnace. (Both sets of changes were imposed by the Book-of-the-Month Club—the price Wright paid for mainstream best-sellerdom.)

I should admit, right off, that I began the class as an avowed Baldwinite. I’d read the essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” his early takedown of Native Son, before I ever cracked the book myself, and I was sympathetic to Baldwin’s claim that Wright’s pamphleteering for the cause of urban blacks robbed his characters of their essential humanity. Baldwin believed that Bigger Thomas, a young black man whose life was defined by “his hatred and his fear,” wound up serving as “a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend [Wright’s novel] was written to destroy.” Wright, it seemed to me, sought to change the United States by writing with a cudgel and a brick, while Baldwin’s tools were his prophetic intellect and an eloquence almost beyond words. I knew his novels had major flaws, particularly when he used his fiction to explore larger social issues on a broad canvas, as he did with Another Country. The characters in the novel are cultural stereotypes (Rufus the haunted jazz musician from Harlem, Vivaldo the village hipster, Cass the bohemian earth mother), and their affairs across the fault lines of race and gender read today less like the provocations of an American Jean Genet than softcore melodrama.

But there were individual essays when Baldwin was writing at his peak, like “Equal in Paris” or “Stranger in the Village,” or books like The Fire Next Time, that seemed only to grow through the years in authority, beauty, and relevance. The grace notes in Baldwin come where you least expect them, like the Scotch-and-milk in his short story “Sonny’s Blues” that passes from one brother to another in a downtown jazz club like “the very cup of trembling.”

In Wright’s work, from the early stories in Uncle Tom’s Children to later fiction like his existentialist novel The Outsider, violence is always the catalyst, both of the plot itself and the opening up of consciousness for his black protagonists. “I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em,” Bigger Thomas confesses to Mr. Max before his execution for murder at the end of Native Son. For Baldwin, the catalyst for change is always love—even if it’s imperfect and always on the verge of arriving. “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within,” he writes in The Fire Next Time, and love is the only force that has any hope of healing the original sin of slavery and the national divide. The idea behind my course, then, was to read Wright and Baldwin side-by-side for an entire term, with fresh eyes, and see what—if any—patterns emerged from it, which vision of what used to be called the Negro Problem in America (both writers scorned this term and turned it back on whites) would win out.