What made Baldwin’s essays effective is that they were testimonial. This was the context into which Baldwin’s essays were first published. At the time, the Civil Rights Movement was beginning to recognize the need for publicity, in particular “story-telling that would generate public support for the movement’s people and goals”. Looking at the time period in which Baldwin’s essays were published shows how purposefully each essay was constructed. In his essays, Baldwin’s purpose was to reach a mass white audience and help them to better understand Black Americans' struggle for equal rights. The book includes two essays that were written in the 1960s during a time of segregation between White and Black Americans. It was released in an audiobook format in 2008, narrated by Jesse L. Critics greeted the book enthusiastically it is considered, by some, as one of the most influential books about race relations in the 1960s. They were then combined and published in book form in 1963 by Dial Press, and in 1964 in Britain by Penguin Books.

The two essays were first respectively published in American magazines in late 1962: 'Letter from a Region of My Mind' in The New Yorker, and 'My Dungeon Shook' in The Progressive. The second essay, which takes up the majority of the book, deals with the relations between race and religion, focusing in particular on Baldwin's experiences with the Christian church as a youth, as well as the Islamic ideas of others in Harlem. The first essay, written in the form of a letter to Baldwin's 14-year-old nephew, discusses the central role of race in American history.

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