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The Evidence of Things Not Seen is an essay written by James Baldwin about the Atlanta Murders of 1979-1981, popularly referred to as the Atlanta Child Murders. The full essay was subsequently published in book form with a preface by Baldwin in 1985. A new edition with a foreword written by Derrick Bell and his wife Janet Dewart Bell was released in 1995.

Background
Baldwin’s essay was commissioned by Walter Lowe Jr., the first black editor of Playboy magazine. Lowe wrote a letter to Baldwin in Saint-Paul de Vence, suggesting Baldwin fly to Atlanta to write about the ongoing disappearances of black children going on there. Baldwin, who at 14 became a successful junior minister at Fireside Pentacostal Assembly, frequently quotes the Bible in his work and this essay, despite leaving the pulpit at age 17 being disillusioned with the church. The title for this essay is one such reference, quoting a letter to the Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  According to the forward of the 1995 edition, written by Harvard Law’s first tenured black professor and champion of critical race theory, Derrick Bell, the essay “eschews a search for clues and, instead, undertakes an exploration for truths.”

Content
The essay describes the history of violations of the social contract committed by the heirs of Europe and how these repeated transgressions not only poison the victims of this violation, but also the transgressors. Baldwin postulates that these social contract transgressions created the environment that was responsible for Wayne Williams, as well as the vulnerable position the murder victims found themselves in. Baldwin contends that racial progress can only be achieved once the implications of violating the social contract are thoroughly acknowledged and examined by the European transgressors, and that the multitude of ways this transgression has been codified into the legal system must be reversed, though Baldwin remains skeptical of this ever happening.

Critical Reception
In the 1985 New York Times review, John Flemming mentions that this short book won’t satisfy the reader, and likely didn’t satisfy Baldwin himself, drawing this idea from Baldwin’s quote “I have never, in all my journeys, felt more an interloper, a stranger, than I felt in Atlanta, in connection with this case.” Flemming believes there to be too much sermonizing about race relations in general rather than investigating specific details about the murders, though Flemming does contend that Baldwin can bring “passionate intensity to reportage” so long as he “steps down from the pulpit.”

A Kirkus Review published in October 1985 states that Baldwin “delivers his judgement in cranky, idiosyncratic exposition that links the state of race relations with the prosecution of Williams.” The review also acknowledges that “Baldwin has penetrated a sensational crime with his considerable novelist’s skill for seeing things the rest of us don’t.”