According to Baldwin, what did race mean in America by the 1970s? Why was it a dominant focus of his attention? Book: No name in the streets

In No Name in the Street (1972) James Baldwin takes on a number of seminal events that defined the race problem in America. In spite of the progress made in legislative terms with the introduction of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s, American society was still scarred by deep racial schisms. For Baldwin, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in the mid-60s soured the progressive elements slowly being introduced in legal terms. These events even soured his view of human nature in general.
No Name in the Street shares much in common with other classic non-fiction works about the black experience and the racial injustices deeply embedded in American life and history, such as the compelling jailhouse memoir Soul on Ice (1968) by Eldridge Cleaver. Cleaver became a leader of the Black Panthers, a radical movement which was formed to resist the perceived oppression of blacks by the American state.
At the time Baldwin wrote No Name in the Street there were still major racial problems in American life, and many large American cities witnessed race-related conflict. Baldwin was suspicious of the radicalism represented by individuals like Cleaver but also skeptical that real change was possible within established social and legal frameworks.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-street.html