Lakhasly

stick around. But as you black, you're all brown. I had at last come home. If there was in this some illusion, there was also much truth. In the years in Paris, I had never been homesick for anything American. Neither waffles, ice cream, hot dogs, baseball, majorettes, movies, nor the Empire State Building, nor Coney Island, nor the Statue of Liberty, nor the Daily News, nor Times Square. All of these things had passed out of me. They might never have existed. And it made absolutely no difference to me if I never saw them again. But I missed my brothers and sisters and my mother. They made a difference. I wanted to be able to see them and to see their children. I hoped that they wouldn't forget me. I missed Harlem Sunday mornings and fried chicken and biscuits. I missed the music. I missed the style, that style possessed by no other people in the world. I missed the way the dark face closes. the way dark eyes watch, and the way when a dark face opens, a light seems to go everywhere. I missed, in short, my connections. Missed the life which had produced me and nourished me and paid for me. Now, though I was a stranger, I was home. fascinated by the movement on and off the screen. I'm about seven. I'm with my mother or my aunt. The movie is Dance, Fools, Dance. I was aware that Joan Crawford was a white lady. Yet, I remember being sent to the store sometime later, and a colored woman who, to me, looked exactly like Joan Crawford was buying something. She was incredibly beautiful. She looked down at me with so beautiful a smile, and I was not even embarrassed, which was rare for me. By this time, I had been taken in hand by a young white school teacher named Bill Miller, a beautiful woman, very important to me. She gave me books to read and talked to me about the books and about the world, about Ethiopia and Italy and the German Third Reich. It took me to see plays and films. to which no one else would have dreamed of taking a ten year old boy. Oh It is certainly because of Bill Miller, who arrived in my terrifying life so soon, that I never really managed to hate white people. Though God knows, I have often wished to murder more than one or two. Therefore, I began to suspect that white people did not act as they did because they were white. But for some other reason. I was a child, of course, and therefore unsophisticated. I took Bill Miller as she was, or as she appeared to be to me. She, too, anyway, was treated like a nigger, especially by the cops, and she had no love for landlords. Can't get him up. Lazy rich, I can't get him. And these days, no one resembling my father has yet made an appearance on the American cinema scene. not entirely true. There were, for example, Steppenfetchit and Willie Best and Nantan Moreland, all of whom, rightly or wrongly, I loathed. It seemed to me that they lied about the world I knew and debased it, and certainly I did not know anybody like them as far as I could tell. For it is also possible that their comic bug-eyed terror contained the truth concerning a terror by which I hoped never to be engulfed. Yet, I had no reservations at all concerning the terror of the Black Janitor and they won't forget. Give me the police. Give me the police. Give me the police. I think that it was a Black actor named Clinton Rosemond who played this part. and he looked a little like my father. I didn't do it. I didn't do it. I didn't do it. I didn't do it. He is terrified because a young white girl in a small southern town has been raped and murdered and her body has been found on the premises of which he is the janitor. Come on in, dumb. The role of the janitor is small, yet the man's face bangs in my memory until today. Nobody says you have, Tom, but they might. The film's icy brutality both scared me and strengthened me. Because Uncle Tom refuses to take vengeance in his own hands, he was not a hero for me. Heroes as far as I could see were white, and not merely because of the movies, but because of the land in which I lived, of which movies were simply a reflection. I despised and feared those heroes because they did take vengeance into their own hands. They thought vengeance was theirs to take. And yes, I understood that. My countrymen were my enemy. I suspect that all these stories are designed to reassure us that no crime was committed. We've made a legend out of a massacre. Leaving aside all the physical facts that one can quote, leaving aside rape or murder, leaving aside the bloody catalog of oppression, which we are in one way too familiar with already, what this does to the subjugated is it destroys his sense of reality. This means, in the case of an American Negro, born in that glittering Republic, and in the moment you are born, since you don't know any better, Every stick and stone and every face is white, and since you have not yet seen the mirror, you suppose that you are too. It comes as a great shock around the age of five or six or seven to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover that the country, which is your birthplace, and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you. My dear Jay, you must, it is to be hoped, be as curious as I am concerning the execution of this book project. I know how to do it, technically. It is a matter of research and journeys. And with you or without you, I will do it anyway. I begin in September when I go on the road. The road means my return to the South. It means briefly, for example, seeing Merly Evers and the children, those children who are children no longer. It means going back to Atlanta to sell my... Birmingham. It means seeing Coretta Scott King and Martin's children. I know that Martin's daughter, whose name I don't remember, and Malcolm's oldest daughter, whose name is Attila, are both in the theater and apparently are friends. It means seeing Betty Shabazz, Malcolm's widow, and the five younger children. It means exposing myself as one of the witnesses to the lives and deaths of their famous fathers. And it means much, much more than that. A clod of witnesses, as old Saint Paul once put it. I first met Malcolm X. I saw Malcolm before I met him. I was giving a lecture somewhere in New York. Malcolm was sitting in the first row of the hall, bending forward at such an angle that his long arms nearly caressed the ankles of his long legs, staring up at me. I very nearly panicked. I knew Malcolm only by legend. And this legend, since I was a Harlem street boy. I was sufficiently astute to distrust. Malcolm might be the torch that white people claim he was, though in general, white America's evaluations of these matters would be laughable and even pathetic. Did not these evaluations have such wicked results? On the other hand, Malcolm had no reason to trust me either. And so I stumbled through my lecture. with Malcolm never taking his eyes from my face. There's no sun up in the sky, stormy weather Since my man and I ain't together Keeps raining all the time As a member of the NAACP, Medgar was investigating the murder of a black man, which had occurred months before. Had shown me letters from black people asking him to do this, and he had asked me to come with him. I was terribly frightened. But perhaps that field trip will help us define what I mean by the word witness. I was to discover that the line which separates a witness from an actor is a very thin line indeed. Nevertheless, the line is real. I was not, for example, a black Muslim. In the same way, though, for different reasons, that I never became a Black Panther because I did not believe that all white people were devils and I did not want young Black people. I was not a member of any Christian congregation because I knew that they had not heard and did not live by the commandment, love one another as I love you. And I was not a member of the NAACP. Because in the North where I grew up, the NAACP was fatally entangled with black class distinctions or illusions of the same, which repelled a Shushan boy like me. deal with the criminal state of Mississippi hour by hour and day by day to say nothing of night after night. I did not have to sweat cold sweat after decisions involving hundreds of thousands of lives. I was not responsible for raising money or deciding how to use it. I was not responsible for strategy controlling prayer meetings, marches, petitions, voting registration drives. I saw the sheriffs, the deputies, the storm troopers more or less in passing. I was never in town to stay. This was sometimes hard on my morale, but I had to accept as time wore on that part of my responsibility as a witness was to move as largely and as freely as possible, to write the story and to get it out. We should all be concerned with but one goal, the eradication of crime. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is as close to you as your nearest telephone. It seeks to be your protector in all matters within its jurisdiction. It belongs to you. White people are astounded by Birmingham. White people are endlessly demanding to be reassured that Birmingham is really on Mars. They don't want to believe, still, less to act on the belief that what is happening in Birmingham is happening all over the country. They don't want to realize that there is not one step morally or actually between Birmingham and Los Angeles. We've invited three men on the forefront of the Negro struggle to sit down and talk with us in front of the television camera. Each of these men, through his actions and his words, but with vastly different manner and means, is a spokesman for some segment of the Negro people today. Black people in this country have been the victims of violence at the hands of the white man for 400 years. And following the ignorant Negro preachers, we have thought that it was Godlike to turn the other cheek to the brute that was brutalizing us. Malcolm X, one of the most articulate exponents of the black Muslim philosophy, has said of your movement and your philosophy that it plays into the hands of the white oppressors. They are happy to hear you talk about love for the oppressor because this disarms the Negro and fits into the stereotype of the Negro as a neat, turning the other cheek sort of creature. Would you care to comment on Mr. X's belief? Well, I don't think of love as, in this context, as emotional body. But I think of love as something strong and that organizes itself into powerful, direct action. This is what I try to teach in the struggle in the South, that we are not engaged in a struggle that means we sit down and do nothing. That has a great deal of difference between non-resistance to evil and non-violent resistance. Martin Luther King is just the 20th century, or modern Uncle Tom. or a religious Uncle Tom who is doing the same thing today to keep Negroes defenseless in the face of attack that Uncle Tom did on the plantation to keep those Negroes defenseless in the face of the attack of the Klan in that day. I think, though, that we can be sure that the vast majority of Negroes who engage in the demonstrations and who understand the nonviolent philosophy will be able to face dogs and... all of the other brutal methods that are used without retaliating with violence, because they understand that one of the first principles of nonviolence is a willingness to be the recipient of violence while never inflicting violence upon another. As concerns Malcolm and Martin, I watched two men coming from unimaginably different backgrounds, whose positions originally were poles apart, driven closer and closer together. By the time each died, their positions had become virtually the same position. It can be said, indeed, that Martin picked up Malcolm's burden, articulated the vision which Malcolm had begun to see and for which he paid with his life, and that Malcolm was one of the people Martin saw on the mountaintop. Medgar was too young to have seen this happen, though he hoped for it and would not have been surprised. But Medgar was murdered first. I was older than Medgar, Malcolm and Martin. I was raised to believe that the eldest was supposed to be a model for the younger, and was of course expected to die first. Not one of these three lived to be forty. BOOM We need an organization that no one downtown loves. We need one that's ready and willing to take action, any kind of action, by any means necessary. When Malcolm talks, one of the mesmerizing talks, they articulate for all the Negro people who hear them, who listen to them, they articulate their suffering. The suffering which has been in this country so long denied. That's Malcolm's great authority over any of his audiences. He corroborates their reality. He tells them that they really exist, you know? And their days is one of them. When you wonder... What your role is in this country and what your future is in it. How precise are you going to reconcile? yourself to your situation here and how you are going to communicate. to the vast, heedless unthinking. cruel white majority, that you are here. I'm terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people. had rooted themselves for so long. They really don't think I'm human. I had wishes on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become themselves. More Monsters. Most of the white Americans I've ever encountered, really, had a Negro friend or a Negro maid or somebody in high school. But they never, or rarely, after school was over or whatever, came to my kitchen. We were segregated from the schoolhouse door. Therefore, he doesn't know, he really does not know what it was like for me to leave my house, leave school and go back to Harlem. He doesn't know how Negroes live. And it comes as a great surprise to the Kennedy brothers and to everybody else in the country. Again, you know, that, like, again, like most white Americans I have, you know, encountered, they have no, I'm sure they have nothing whatever against Negroes. That is, that's really not the question. You know, the question is really a kind of apathy and ignorance, which is a price to be paid for segregation. That's what segregation means. You don't know what's happening on the other side of the world because you don't want to know. I was in some way, in those years without entirely realizing it, the great black hope of the great white father. I was not a racist, or so I thought. Malcolm was a racist, or so they thought. In fact, we were simply trapped in the same situation. Well, you tell that to my boy tonight, when you put him to sleep on the living room couch. And you tell it to him in the morning when his mother goes out of here to take care of somebody else's kids, and tell it to me. when we want some curtains or some drapes and you sneak out of here and go work in somebody's kitchen. All I want is to make a future for this family. All I want is to be able to stand in front of my boy, like my father never was able to do to me. I must sketch now the famous Bobby Kennedy meeting. Lorraine Hansberry would not be very much younger than I am now if she were alive. At the time of the Bobby Kennedy meeting, she was 33. That was one of the very last times I saw her on her feet, and she died at the age of 34. I miss her so much. People forget how young everybody was. Bobby Kennedy, for another quite different example, was 38. We wanted him to tell his brother, the president, to personally escort to school on that day or the day after a small black girl already scheduled to enter Deep South school. That way, we said, it will be clear that whoever spits on that child. will be spitting on the nation. He didn't understand this either. It would be, he said, a meaningless moral gesture. We would like, said Lorraine, from you a moral commitment. He looked insulted, seemed to feel that he'd been wasting his time. Well, the rain set still, watching all the while. she looked at Bobby Kennedy, who perhaps for the first time looked at her. But I'm very worried," she said, about the state of the civilization which produced that photograph of the white cop standing on that Negro woman's neck in Birmingham. Then she smiled, and I am glad that she was not smiling at me. Goodbye, Mr. Attorney General, she said, and turned and walked out of the room. And then, we heard the The very last time I saw Medgar Evers, he stopped at his house on the way to the airport so I could autograph my books for him, his wife, and children. I remember Merly Evers standing outside, smiling, and we waved. And Medgar drove to the airport and put me on the plane. Months later, I was in Puerto Rico, working on my play. Lucienne and I had spent a day or so wandering around the island, and now we were driving home. It was a wonderful bright and sunny day. Top of the car was down. We were laughing, talking, and the radio was playing. and the music stopped. And the voice announced that Medgar Evers had been shot to death in the carport of his home and his wife and children had seen the big man fall. the king Shed a ray of sun, sits on one that fires a gun. You'll see by his grave, on the stone that remains, carved next to his name, is if the path brings only a part. blue sky seemed to descend like a blanket, and I couldn't say anything, I couldn't cry. I just remembered his face, a bright, blunt, handsome face, and his weariness, which he wore like his skin, and the way he said, road, for road. and his telling me how the tatters of clothes from a lynched body hung, flapping in the tree for days, and how he had to pass that tree every day. MedGa. was free only in battle, never free to rest. And he who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle. And a young white revolutionary remains in general far more romantic than a black one. White people have managed to get through entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky. A black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac. The truth is that this country does not know what to do with its black population, dreaming of anything like the final solution. The Negro has never been as docile as white Americans wanted to believe. That was a myth. We were not singing and dancing down the leve. We were trying to keep alive. We were trying to survive a very brutal system. The Negro has never been happy in his place. One of the most terrible things is that, in fact, whether or not I am in America. My school really was the streets of New York City. My frame of reference was George Washington and John Wayne. But I was a child, you know, and the child with his eyes in the world, he has to use what he sees. There's nothing else to use. And you are formed by what you see, the choices you have to make, and the way you discover what it means to be black in New York, and then throughout the entire country. I know how you watch as you grow older. It's not a figure of speech. The corpses of your brothers and your sisters pile up around you. And not for anything they have done. They were too young to have done anything. But what one does realize is that when you try to stand up and look the world in the face like you had a right to be here, you have attacked... the entire power structure of the Western world. Forget the Negro problem. Don't write any voting acts. We had that, it's called the 15th Amendment. You know, in the Civil Rights Bill in 1964, what you had to look at is what is happening in this country. And what is really happening is a brother has murdered brother knowing it was his brother. White men have lynched Negroes knowing them to be their sons. White women have had Negroes burned knowing them to be their lovers. It is not a racial problem. It's a problem whether or not you're willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it. That great Western house I come from is one house. And I am one of the children of that house. Simply, I'm the most despised child of that house. And it is because the American people are unable to face the fact that I am flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone. Created by them. My blood, my father's blood is in that soil. Good afternoon, ma'am. It's raining so hard, I brought robbers and coat to fetch my little girl home. I'm afraid you've made some mistake. Ain't this a 3B? Yes. Well, this is it. She can't be it. I had little colored children in my class. Oh, thank you. Thanks for that little girl. Piyola, you may go home. I didn't know she was gone. And what did I? I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. Viola. I know very well that my ancestors had no desire to come to this place. But neither did the ancestors of the people who became white, and who require of my captivity a song. They require a song of me. Let's just celebrate my captivity and to justify their own. been struck in America by an emotional poverty so bottomless and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on American public conduct and on black-white relations. If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have become so dependent on what they call the Negro problem. But they said it wasn't nice to say nigga. Nigger! Poor little nigger kids. Love the little nigger kids. Who loved me? Who loved me? This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters. And it is destroying them. This, not from anything blacks may or may not be doing, but because of the role of a guilty and constricted white imagination as a sign to the blacks. Look man, don't give me that look. You should have got what was coming to you, after spitting in that guy's face. Why you... It is impossible to accept the premise of the story. A premise based on the profound American misunderstanding of the nature of the hatred between black and white. That time is now! hatred is rage and he does not so much hate white men as simply wants them out of his way and more than that out of his children's way the root of the white man's hatred is terror a bottomless and nameless terror right which focuses on this dread figure an entity which lives only in his mind When Sydney jumps off the train, the white liberal people downtown were much relieved and joyful. But when black people saw him jump off the train, they yelled, get back on the train, you fool. The black man jumps off the train in order to reassure white people, to make them know that they're not hated. That though they have made human errors, they've done nothing for which to be hated. I'm Chiquita Benin, I'm here to say I am the top another. In spite of the fabulous myths proliferating in this country concerning the sexuality of black people, black men are still used in the popular culture as though they had no sexual equipment at all. Sidney Poitier, as a black artist and a man, is also up against the infantile, furtive sexuality of this country. Both he and Harry Belafonte, for example, are sex symbols. Though no one dares admit that, still less to use them as any of the Hollywood he-men are used. Black people have been robbed of everything in this country, and they don't want to be robbed of their artist. Black people particularly disliked Guess Who's Coming to Dinner because they felt that Sidney was, in effect, being used against them. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner may prove in some bizarre way to be a milestone because it is really quite impossible to go any further in that particular direction. If you ever plan to motor west The next time The kissing will have to start Got your ticket? Here you are. Thank you. I am aware that men do not kiss each other in American films, nor for the most part in America, nor do the black detective and the white sheriff kiss here. You take care. You hear? The obligatory fade-out kiss in the classic American film did not speak of love and still less of sex. It spoke of reconciliation. Of all things now becoming possible. I knew a blonde girl in the village a long time ago. And eventually, we never walked out of the house together. She was far safer walking the streets alone than when walking with me. A brutal and humiliating fact, which thoroughly destroyed whatever relationship this girl and I might have been able to achieve. This happens all the time in America. But Americans have yet to realize what a sinister fact this is and what it says about them. When we walked out in the evening then, she would leave ahead of me, alone. I would give her about five minutes, and then I would walk out. taking another route and meet her on the subway platform. We would not acknowledge each other. We would get into the subway car sitting at opposite ends of it and walk separately through the streets of the free and the brave to wherever we were going, the friend's house or the movies. All over the country, families such as this are enjoying new prosperity. They have new interests, new standards of living, a buying power they've never enjoyed before. They're good prospects for practically all types of goods and services. All too often though, they are overlooked prospects. Since 1940, in San Francisco alone, the Negro market has increased by 89%. Here are millions of customers for what you have to sell. Customers with $15 billion to spend. Someone once said to me that the people in general cannot bear very much reality. He meant by this that they prefer fantasy to a truthful recreation of their experience. People have quite enough reality to bear by simply getting through their lives, raising their children, dealing with the eternal conundrums of birth, taxes, and death. Negroes are continuously making progress here in this country. The progress in many areas is not as fast as it should be, but they are making progress, and we will continue to make progress. There's no reason that in the near and the foreseeable future that a Negro could also be President of the United States. I remember, for example, when the ex-Attorney General, Mr. Robert Kennedy, said that it was conceivable... that in 40 years in America we might have a Negro president. And that sounded like a very emancipated statement, I suppose, to white people. They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard. They did not hear, and possibly will never hear, the laughter and the bitterness and the scorn which the statement was greeted. From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barbershop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday. and now he's already on his way to the presidency. We've been here for 400 years, and now he tells us that maybe in 40 years, if you're good, we may let you become president. It was a dream, just a dream I had. It was a dream, just a dream I had on my mind. Nothing could I find Let me put it this way, that from a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports and the railroads are the country. The economy, especially of the southern states, could not conceivably be what it has become if they had not had, and do not still have indeed, and for so long, for many generations, cheap labor. It's a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. And until that moment, until the moment comes when we, the Americans, we, the American people, are able to accept the fact that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and black. that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other. And that I am not a ward of America. I am not an object of missionary charity. I am one of the people who built the country. Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream. Because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence... will wreck it. And if that happens, it's a very grave moment for the West. Thank you. you today with seven men who have two things in common. They're entertainers and artists, and they've all come to Washington. They're seven out of some 200,000 American citizens who came to the Capitol to march for freedom and for jobs. Will this tremendous outburst now lead to a course of action, Mr. Belafonte? The now that is being spoken about is the fact that in a hundred years, finally, through whatever the causes have been in history, and most of them have been because of oppression, the Negro people have strongly and fully taken the bit in their teeth. They're asking absolutely no quarter from anyone, but I do say that the bulk of the interpretation of whether this thing is going to end successfully and joyously or is going to end disastrously lays very heavily. with the white community, it lays very heavily with the profiteers, it lays very heavily with the vested interests, it lays very heavily with a great middle stream in this country of people who have refused to commit themselves or even have the slightest knowledge that these things have been going on. you I am speaking as a member of a certain democracy in very complex country, which insists on being very narrow-minded. Simplicity is taken to be a great American virtue along with sincerity. I'm sorry. I am deeply sorry. And I'm sorry. I am deeply sorry about that. And there are no excuses. I am solely. You've made plenty of mistakes. very sorry. You know, I'm sorry I did this to you, but you got to get used to it. It's one of those little problems in life. I take full responsibility. I'm here today to again apologize. I'm just apologizing for that to her. For any mistakes I have made, I take full responsibility. It's an honor to serve the city of Ferguson and the people who have... The result of this is that immaturity is taken to be a virtue too. So that someone like that, let's say John Wayne, who spent most of his time on screen admonishing Indians, was in no necessity to grow up. I had been in London on this particular night. We were free, and we decided to treat ourselves to a really fancy, friendly dinner. The head waiter came and said that was a phone call for me. And my sister Gloria rose to take it. She was very strange when she came back. She didn't say anything. And I began to be afraid to ask her anything. Then, nibbling at something she obviously wasn't tasting, she said, Well, I've got to tell you because the press is on its way over here. They have just killed Malcolm. There is nothing in the evidence overt by the book of the American Republic. which allows me really to argue with a cat who says to me... They needed us to pick the cotton. And now they don't need us anymore. Now that they don't need us, they're going to kill us all off. Just like they did the Indians. And I can say it's a Christian nation. Your brothers will never do that to you because the record is too long and too bloody. That's all we have done. all your buried corpses now begin to speak. But I say violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America's culture. It is as American as cherry pie. Black power, brothers. Yeah. If we were white, if we were Irish, if we were Jewish, if we were Poles, if we had, in fact, in your mind, a frame of reference, our heroes would be your heroes too. Not Turner would be a hero for you instead of a threat. Malcolm X might still be alive. And you know, everyone is very proud of brave little Israel. against which I have nothing, no, I don't want to be misinterpreted, I'm not an anti-Semite. But you know, when the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world says, give me liberty or give me death, the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal. and treated like one, and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so they won't be any more like him. Look out across this land we love. Look about you, whatever you are. There's unending scenic beauty, and there's freedom. It's an inherent American right, meaning many different things to every single city. It's a leisurely afternoon of gopher along a pleasant course. It's an amusement park, a roller coaster ride. A day at a county fair. A day of excitement, unrestricted travel across all our 50 states, unlimited enjoyment of all these jewels in the continent's crown. all of its heritage of history, all of its limitless opportunity. We've dropped too many bombs on Vietnam now. Let us save our national honor. Stop the bombing and stop the war. What I am trying to say to this country, to us, is that we must know this. We must realize this. That no other country in the world have been so fat and so sleek and so safe and so happy and so irresponsible and so dead. No other country can afford to dream of a Plymouth and a wife and a house with a fence and the children growing up safely to go to college and to become executives and then to marry and have the Plymouth and the house and so forth. A great many people do not live this way and cannot imagine it and do not know that when we talk about democracy, this is what we mean. The industry is compelled, given the way it is built, to present to the American people a self-perpetuating fantasy of American life. Their concept of entertainment is difficult to distinguish from the use of narcotics. What worries you about them having black partners? Do you think people are going to look down on them or judge them? Yes, I think people look down on them. Yeah. the TV screen for any length of time is to learn some really frightening things about the American sense of reality. We are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are and we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly. But these images are designed not to trouble, but to reassure. They also weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is, ourselves as we are. I would like to add someone to our group here. Professor Paul Weiss, a Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale. Were you able to listen to the show backstage? I heard a good deal of it, but then I was behind the last one, too. Yes. So I heard only some of it. Did you hear anything that you disagreed with? I disagreed with a great deal of it, and of course it's a good deal I agree with. But I think he's overlooking one very important matter, I think. Each one of us, I think, is terribly alone. He lives his own individual life. He has all kinds of obstacles in the way of religion or color or... size or shape or lack of ability and the problem is to become a man. Well what I was discussing was not that problem really. I was discussing the difficulties, the obstacles, the very real danger of death thrown up by the society when a Negro, when a black man attempts to become a man. All this emphasis upon black man and white does emphasize something which is here but it emphasizes or perhaps exaggerates it and therefore makes us put people together in groups. which they ought not to be in. I have more in common with a black scholar than I have with a white man who is against scholarship. And you have more in common with a white author than you have with someone who's against all literature. So why must we always concentrate on color or religion or this? There are other ways of connecting men. I'll tell you this. When I left this country in 1948, I left this country for one reason only, one reason. I didn't care where I went. I might have gone to Hong Kong. I might have gone to Timbuktu. I ended up in Paris on the streets. with $40 in my pocket on the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there that it already happened to me here. You talk about making it as a writer by yourself you had to be able then to turn off all the intent of which you live because once you turn your back on this society you may die. You may die. And it's very hard to be a typewriter and concentrate on that if you're afraid of the world around you. The years I lived in Paris did one thing for me. They released me from that particular social terror, which is not the paranoia of my own mind, but a real social danger visible in the face of every cop, every boss, everybody. I don't know. in this country feel, but I can only include what they feel from the state of their institutions. I don't know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know that we have a Christian church which is white and a Christian church which is black. I know as Malcolm X once put it, it's the most segregated hour in American life, it's high noon on Sunday. That's a great deal for me about a Christian nation. It means that I can't afford to trust most white Christians and certainly cannot trust the Christian church. I don't know whether the labor unions and their bosses I don't know if the real estate lobby is anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobbyists keep me in the ghetto. I don't know if the Board of Education hates black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools that we have to go to. Now, this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children, on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen. All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism. This means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority. Vile as I am, states one of the characters in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, I don't believe in the wagons that bring bread to humanity. For the wagons that bring bread to humanity may coldly exclude a considerable part of humanity from enjoying what is brought. For a very long time, America prospered. This prosperity cost millions of people their lives. Now, not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits. They can neither understand them, nor do without them, above all. They cannot imagine the price paid by their victims or subjects for this way of life. And so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolted. This is the formula for a nation or kingdom. For no kingdom can maintain itself by force alone. Force does not work the way its advocates think, in fact, it does. It does not, for example, reveal to the victim the strength of the adversary. It reveals the weakness, even the panic of the adversary. this revelation, invest the victim with passion. There is a day in Palm Springs that I will remember forever. A bright day. I was based in Hollywood working on the screen version of the autobiography of Malcolm X. This was a difficult assignment, since I had known Malcolm after all, crossed swords with him, worked with him, and held him in that great esteem which is not easily distinguishable, if it is distinguishable, from love. Billy Dee Williams had come to town and he was staying at the house. I very much wanted Billy Dee for the role of Malcolm. The phone had been brought out to the pool and now it rang. And I picked it up. The record player was still playing. He's not dead yet, but it's a hit wound. I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis. I hardly remember the rest of the evening at all. I remember weeping briefly, more in helpless rage than in sorrow. And Billy trying to comfort me. But I really don't remember that evening at all. Mother dear, may I go downtown instead of out to play in my... the streets of Birmingham in a freedom march today. But mother, I won't be alone. Other children will go with me. the streets of Birmingham to make my country free. The church was packed, and the pew before me sat Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis, and her I have a childhood hand over thing about not weeping in public, and I was concentrating on holding myself together. I did not want to weep for Martin. Tears seemed futile, but I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep, I would not be able to stop. I started to cry and I stumbled. Sammy grabbed my arm. The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story. What can we do? Well, I am tired. I don't know how it will come about. I know that no matter how it comes about, it will be bloody. It will be hard. I still believe that we can do with this country something that has not been done before. We are misled here because we think of numbers. You don't need numbers. You need passion. And this is proven by the history of the world. The tragedy is that most of the people who say they care about it do not care. What they care about is their safety and their profits. The American way of life has failed to make people happier or make them better. We do not want to admit this, and we do not admit it. We persist in believing that the empty and criminal among our children are the result of some miscalculation in the formula that can be corrected. That the bottomless and aimless hostility which makes our cities among the most dangerous in the world is created and felt by a handful of aberrants. But the lack, yawning everywhere in this country of passionate conviction, or personal authority, proves only our rather appealing tendency to be gregarious and democratic. To look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep. This is not the land of the free. It is only very unwillingly and sporadically the home of the dead. I sometimes feel it to be an absolute miracle that the entire black population of the United States of America has not long ago succumbed to raging paranoia. People finally say to you in an attempt to dismiss the social reality, but you're so bitter. Well, I may or may n n these two levels of experience. Should I be babe? or not Should I surrender? Yes. His pleading words so tenderly. Is this the night that love... You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves. And furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage. You never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me. Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced. History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals. I attest to this. The world is not white. It never was white. Cannot be white. White is a metaphor for power. That is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank. I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So I'm forced to be an optimist. I'm forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. But. the number one in this country. the future of the Negro in this country. is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people, and our representatives, it is entirely up to the American people whether or not they're going to face and deal with and embrace this stranger whom they've aligned so long. What white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place. Because I'm not a nigger, I'm a man. But if you think I'm a nigger... means you need it. The question you've got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South, because it's one country, and for a Negro, there is no difference in the North and the South. There's just no difference in the way they castrate you. But the fact of the castration is the American fact. If I'm not a nigger here, and you invented him, you, the white people, invented him, then you've got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it's able to ask that question. I said I'm just black as lead, copy black. Coffee block, how much I know Fuck I'm a big and sippin' critter 2015 Once I finish this witness is welcome Vagance what I mean I mean it's evident that I'm irrelevant to society That's what you're telling me Penitentiary would only hire me Curse me till I'm dead Church me with your fake prophesies And that I'ma be just another slave in my head Institutional lies, manipulation and lies Reciprocation of freedom only live in your eyes You hate me don't you? I know you hate me just as much as you hate yourself Jealous of my wisdom and cards I dose Watchin' me as I pull up, fill up my tank I'm just like pull up, show you what these big wheels pout Black and successful, is black man meant to be special? Can't scan, so my radar, bitch how can I help you? How can I tell you I'm making a killing? You made me a killer, ot. If I were, I would have good reasons for it. Chief among them, that American blindness or cowardice which allows us to pretend that life presents no reasons for being bitter. In this country, for a dangerously long time, there have been two levels of experience. One, to put it cruelly, can be summed up in the images of Gary Cooper and Doris Day, two of the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen. And the other, subterranean, indispensable, and denied, can be summed up, let us say, in the tone and in the face of Ray Charles. Oh mama don't you cheat me wrong Put me loving daddy on that lawn mower Oh yeah I know it's alright now hey When you see me in misery Come on baby say what me now And there had never been any genuine confrontation betweeemancipation of a real nigga The Black or the Bad Man, this who you be peace The Black or the Bad Man I'm the biggest hypocrite of 2015 When I finish this, if you listen, this sure you will agree This plot is bigger than me It's generational hatred It's cynicism It's grimy little justification I'm African American I'm African I'm black as the heart of a fucking area It's the name of Tyrone and Darius Excuse my French, but fuck you, no fuck y'all That's as blunt as it gets I know you hate me, don't you? You hate my people, I can tell cause there's threats when I see you I can tell cause your waist is evil No I can tell because you in love with that desert eagle Thinkin' maliciously, he get a chain then you gonna bleed him It's funny how Zulu and Thosa might go to war Two tribal armies that wanna build and destroy Remind me of these cop decrypt gangs that live next door Beefing with pyroos, only deaths settle the score So no matter how much I say I like to preach with the pan Or tell Georgia State, Marcus Garvey got all the answers Or try to celebrate February like it's my B-Day Or eat watermelon chicken and Kool-Aid on weekdays Or jump high enough to get Michael Jordan endorsements Or watch BET cause urban support is important So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street When gangbanging make me kill a nigga blacker than me? Hippocrates