According to Baldwin, the subject matter for the play was first suggested to him by novelist and filmmaker Elia Kazan at the end of 1958. The decision to complete the play was made only after Medgar Evers, a prominent civil rights activist and one of Baldwin’s friends, had been killed in June, 1963. Baldwin saw the murders of Evers and Emmett Till as signs of “terrible darkness,” and he stated that Blues for Mister Charlie was “one man’s attempt to bear witness to the reality and the power of light.”

The reality of which the author speaks is oppressive racism, and until Blues for Mister Charlie, no playwright had confronted racism in America in this manner. Before the play was performed, some readers (primarily white friends and acquaintances of Baldwin) believed that the work was too radical, too extreme. Its unconventional structure bothered some as well. Precisely these two elements—radical content and unconventional form—in Blues for Mister Charlie helped usher in the Black Nationalist theater, anticipating the work of such writers as Amiri Baraka, Ron Milner, Woodie King, and Ed Bullins. At the time, Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones) thought that Blues for Mister Charlie “marked the point at which White America gave up on Baldwin.”

The reception of Blues for Mister Charlie, however, was generally good. Baldwin’s biographer William Weatherby has noted that Kenneth Tynan, the British drama critic who also wrote for The New Yorker, spoke of the play as having created shock waves that were felt across the Atlantic. Critic Howard Taubman of The New York Times, whose reviews could make or break plays, praised the play for bringing “eloquence and conviction to one of the momentous themes of our era.”

Even though Taubman criticized Blues for Mister Charlie’s loose structure and use of clichés, his review was enthusiastic enough to ensure a run. Other critics also focused on what they saw as the play’s problematic structure while praising its energy, passion, relevance, and authenticity. Time magazine, however, reported that Blues for Mister Charlie was “a hard play for a white man to take.” In time, the audience became predominantly black, and the Broadway production was forced to close at the end of the summer after incurring several months of losses. The play fared much worse when it was taken to England.

Baldwin answered many of his critics by declaring that the play was not about civil rights but rather about “a state of mind and the relationship of people to each other, helplessly corrupted and destroyed by this insanity you call color.” Produced as the play was in the midst of the civil rights struggle, it is little wonder that many saw the work simply as an antiwhite protest. When next Baldwin turned his gaze upon Broadway, it would be in 1965 with the revival of his 1954 work Amen Corner, a less controversial production that marked the end of his experimentation with the theater.