Transcription
Now we're all here tonight, and for many nights to come, and for many nights previous. I mean, no matter what I say, we're all here in the context of a terrifying, a terrible disturbance—Revolution, earthquake, trouble—which menaces us all. We're really all here tonight because, in one way or another, we all realize that we all of us are in terrible jeopardy. We all of us, as individuals, one by one, and the country which is called America, that great undefined proper noun, is now beginning to undergo a metamorphosis which may allow us and those who come after us to know what that word means. No American, until today, really has any idea of it. That's why we have something called “I am an American Day,” and on that day people who should know better get together and make out an extraordinary catalog of all the virtues mankind has ever had since we've heard of man. And that's what it means, as far as I can tell so far, to be an American.
Now, of course, this extraordinary effort—how can I put this?—this extraordinary effort to do two things at once, to be defined, to define oneself, and on the other hand, to reject all the terms, the human terms by which one is actually defined, creates a kind of schizophrenia, which is again about all I know or can really testify to about what it means to be an American. Briefly, some things happened on this continent; they actually happened. For example, we killed the Indians; we really did. And those who survived are now in reservations, but you wouldn't discover this fact, this fact, by looking at a TV program or by reading most of the textbooks, which is much more sinister. That's just for example. But again, for another example, we needed cheap labor for all that cotton, and we really did, and so we got it and decided it was happy—all that cotton. Now I never believed it, but the country did.
What I really want to talk about tonight, speculate with you about tonight, is not so much the past, though I must say there's probably the leap motif of what I'm trying to say. Is that the people who do not know what their past is, don't know what their present is, and are people of whom this is true probably have no future. I want to talk tonight, speculate tonight, about something which I arbitrarily called demoralization, which is the effect in a person of being robbed of his sense of his human value. We all have heard of those experiments carried on in laboratories with animals such as rabbits and mice. We've all heard of Pavlov's dog, and as I understand this principle, this experiment, this series of experiments, you have a rat or mouse or a rabbit under certain circumstances, usually in a cage, and you flash a light or you ring a bell, and the animal learns to expect—you ring a bell, the animal expects food. And then you begin to switch the signals; you ring the bell, and instead of food it gets a live cold. You ring the bell and nothing happens. You ring the bell and he's killed. You ring the bell and somebody resembling this is your life—come down. After a certain number of times that one rings this bell, the animal begins not to know how to react, no longer trust his reflexes, and he becomes, in our quaint phrase, neurotic, which simply means that the reflex which has been established has now been betrayed. He's been led to expect certain things at certain moments; he's been led to expect a certain gift or a certain—have a certain need met when a certain thing happens, and then the thing happens and the need isn't met, and then you don't know where you are. And this is what I mean essentially; it seems to me this is probably the root of what I want to describe tonight as demoralization.
Now, in the case of the person, the people who are known now as the American Negro, this principle operates—I think I know—it has operated in my own life with terrible force. If one divests oneself for a moment of all the things we've had to learn since we were five, if one remembers that a child coming out of the womb is neither white nor black, but simply another human being who has arrived on earth—now if you're a Negro child and you're born in this country, a very brutal rupture occurs around the time of five or six or eight, but it has certainly occurred by the time you are fourteen. And the rupture is this: the rupture occurs at the moment you open your eyes on what I have to call now the Big World, by which I mean, in this case, the American Republic. And the child is forced to realize, without knowing that he realizes it because he is still a child, that his mother and his father, who until this terrible moment, which as I say is mainly an unremembered moment, had held up the world for him—him who were his protection and his right to be in the world—are under certain limits themselves, and some things they cannot protect him from. The child understands this and has to begin to adjust himself around it. But that's not all, because on one level, one way or another, this probably happens to all children born anywhere in the world at any time; it is a beginning, as we like to say, of consciousness. But in the case of a black child born in this country, when he opens his eyes on what we call the big world, he discovers two terrifying things. First of all, he discovers that he does not exist in it, no matter where he looks—by which I mean books, magazines, movies; there is no reflection of himself anywhere. Or if there is something in the book—and I mean by now also textbooks which are used in all our schools—if he looks for himself and he finds anything which looks like him, he is authoritatively assured that this is a savage or a comedian who has never contributed anything to civilization. And that's not all; then he begins to wonder how he—who is, as somebody else put it, half the size of the rest of the world, that are nickel to his name—is going to survive this brutality. And again, according to me, that is the root, the beginning of this demoralization.
Thereafter, of course, another battle begins, and the battle is involved with wresting, somehow stealing from, creating out of so entirely hostile environment some sense of yourself. I don't want to be rude to anybody, you know, but for example, there is, on the face of it, no real reason that any black can't comb his hair. And when it's done, and everybody has the right to do whatever they want to do—I'm not really, you know, um, attacking um, how people dress—but when it's done, it's a reflection; it has to be a reflection of the civilization in which he was born and the values of that civilization, because he was born into a civilization which said arbitrarily, and had the force to prove it, that Robert Taylor, by definition, and Gary Cooper, by definition, and Eisenhower, by definition, are better men than you. And you do your best to somehow deal with this. And we all know Negroes who have done everything in their power to turn white. I don't mean people who pass; that's another story, you know, but I mean people who look like me, you know, who never eat watermelon, you know, never go anywhere near fried chicken, are always impeccable, who cannot be seen at 4:00 in the morning baby without a tie on, because they are respectable, and they're going to prove it. They're going to prove it to whom? This is only one of the terrible things which one has got to deal with, and use, and transcend in order to become a man in this country. And there are two lines from a very great American poet, Marianne Moore, which have rung in my mind for years. And what she says—her poem begins, she says: “The weak overcomes its menace, the strong overcomes itself.” And it goes on with three more lines, which is very short, so I'll finish it. She says: “What is there like fortitude? What is there like fortitude? What went through, through that little thread to make the cherry red?” That's a great metaphor for me. And in our great trouble now, when it's got to say very reckless and even sometimes very wounding things, as for example, I don't really blame John F. Kennedy or Robert Kennedy for being the sons of their father, or for not knowing—as most white Americans do not know—what it's like to be a Negro, you know, what it is like to be, in fact, then, an American. But it is a very sinister matter, a very serious matter, that one has got to—how can I put it?—keep the pressure on those boys to get the revolution achieved. There is innocence, as with all other white Americans; there was innocent Eisenhower, and a good deal better, you know, but they don't know anything about Negroes either. I think they had a Negro maid, perhaps I'm inventing out of my long history with white liberals, but they always had a Negro maid, and they loved Billie Holiday, and they knew somebody in high school who was a runner, and uh, and that was that. I spent a long time in their kitchens, and as we know, they never came to mine, and that is part—that may be indeed the root of the terrible crisis.
Now go back to where I was for a moment, talking about this demoralization and the ways in which one, because time passes, tries to deal with it. What happened to me when I was fired, for example, whatever it was, is still one of the reasons I have nightmares when I do, and it is certainly, you know, responsible for a great many reactions which I don't really understand. If this is so, and if one carries within oneself for all these years, for all one's life really, the seeds of one's beginnings, then the final and terrible thing about being an American Negro is the terrible way in which your objective reality corroborates your private fantasy—to overstate it a little bit. For example, I'm not certain it is possible to be black in America and really be paranoid, because they really are after you. You're not dreamy; they're after you, because this is what we must know, and most of them do not know: they're after you because you were, and you are—I mean when I say you, I mean us, all black men in this country—you got here because you needed cheap labor, and you still are. We all are a source of cheap labor. Well, let's say that's all right. What happened to white Americans was that, in order to justify the need for cheap labor, they had to invent, for their own peace of mind, they had to say two things at once, and you can check me out, I'm not inventing this: they said two things at once. They said: A, you were cheap labor because you were inferior; and B, you were inferior because you were cheap labor. And it's a pretty unanswerable argument; it's what they call a closed circle. And that's not the worst. The white Americans had all our ancestors under their heel, and any man who's ever walked the earth for more than sixteen years has some sense of what it is like. In fact, I'm sure that every man has walked the earth longer than sixteen years has dreamed of absolute power, and since, contrary to the American legend, people are really private and operate on a private level, absolute power for all men has meant, among other things, what they could do with no uh, penalties to women. And we have managed to create in this country—and everyone says, “How did it happen, Mr. Baldwin?”—a whole race of people who are not African. I'm very dark, but I'm not dark when I'm an African. And if somebody put it, as I keep saying, it is not because my grandmother raped anybody. And let us say even that that's all right, you know. Bloodshed, kidnapping, slavery, and rape are old human endeavors. But what is not all right, if the person or the nation intends to survive, is that you do these things and pretend you didn't, and invent a system, a legal system called segregation, designed, according to the white Americans, to keep the Negro in his place, but designed really to allow the white American to disown his sister and his daughter and his son, to make out of the things which really drive all people a travesty. And that is another kind of demoralization. That is the kind of demoralization which produces, for example, Bull Connor, who in a more enlightened age, or perhaps in another country, would be called a sadist. It produces such a man as the chief of police in Birmingham, whose name when I was there is Bull Connor, and I guess it still is, who told me without batting an eye that there was no racial problem in Birmingham, boy.
Now I don't object to the existence under Heaven of people like Bull Connor and Senator Eastland and Jed Cukor and Senator Russell and Senator Byrd; they have a right to live, but they have no right to their power, and the system which gives them this power is a system in great, great danger. There is no reason that such people, capable of turning hoses on children and dogs on children, should not be allowed to live, you know, to lead anonymous, everyday, just home folks lives. Now this has had—this effort, the American effort, which is essentially an effort to deny its past—to deny its past, I mean two things by that. I mean that, for example, we're talking about Miss—a little while ago I said we made a mess out of our history. And for example, most white Americans still seem to believe—in fact, as far as I know, do believe—that they all sprang from a race of freedom-loving heroes and martyrs and pilgrims, and everybody came here because they had—they had an unquenchable thirst for freedom. And we say this very seriously, though we never heard of the history of Europe. I never heard, for example, of the potato famine in Ireland, which drove the Irish here. They wanted potatoes, not freedom. The only person who ever came here who never meant to do it is me. The European assumption was that these people were inferior, and that depends, I think, on a very simple principle: they had to be inferior. If they were not inferior, it was a crime; but as long as they didn't deserve any better, it was all right. And that is the whole basis of the whole legend of Negro inferiority. That is why there's really no reason, you know, to try to defend oneself against someone who says, “But you—you—you all—civilized, and you didn't steal fire, you didn't invent the wheel.” First of all, nobody knows who stole the fire or who got the wheel; that's another lie, and that's not the point. I don't have to steal the fire or have invented the wheel to have the right to walk around in my lifetime like a man. One can't defend oneself against somebody who's determined to prove to himself—not to you, but to himself—that you are inferior and want you to corroborate it. One's got to walk out of that nightmare. But the demoralization which is now overtaken, or is about to overtake, can overtake the Western world, is seen in great relief. The end of that journey is seen in the face of Bull Connor, for example, in Birmingham; it is seen in the faces of all the Alabama sheriffs, and in most of the New York cops. They really don't know—they even—they're not even really wicked; that would be—that would be all right—even you can deal with a wicked man—but they really don't know. They've deluded themselves that I was happy on the levee, that all that singing and dancing, all that singing of the blues, all that—no, they thought I was happy. Now they knew that if they had been in my place they wouldn't have been happy, and I know they knew that. There's one thing every man—everybody—every human being knows about another human being—every man of a born, no matter what he does about it—no, he recognizes—cannot help but recognize—another man. He knows he's not a monkey, for example. This is a man, and men strike echoes in each other. Human beings like echo in each other, on which they depend in order to live at all. Now if you find yourself in a position where you must deny and make a system out of denying the manhood of another, you have simply emasculated yourself. That is one aspect of what I mean by demoralization. And I confess it is sometimes very hard to remember when you're in the precinct basement, or when you're dealing with all these people—and not only the precinct basement, when you're at a literary cocktail party and somebody says to you, for example, if I may ramble on just a few more minutes—somebody you've known for years, you know, and someone who is, let us say, in your profession—by which I mean one of your peers—and someone who is not a racist even at all, has invited you for dinner at his house on certain place at um, eight o'clock, dinner and cocktails and a few friends. And if you're me, you know, you're always a little late, but in any case you got to get a taxi to get there, and I'm sure that I'm not the only person who is aware that it is sometimes very difficult when the sun goes down to get a taxi. So you evolve all kinds of systems to beat this system, and there's always one taxi driver who has the presence of mind to lock his door from the inside, who has to stop for the light, and you get in, and as it turns out you are not going tonight to 125th Street, which you don't tell him for a while, you know. All you tell him is, “Drive me where I'm going,” or “To the police station,” all right. And he finally takes you to where you're going—he turns out to be certain place—whereupon he, of course, is having something resembling a stroke—like, “What are you doing there without a page?” This is in 1963, so you arrive at your host, your liberal host's home, understandably a little afraid, a little tired, you know, and you're still trying to be a gentleman, you know, you and you ask the cat to give you a double scotch, and he says, “What's the matter, Jimmy?” And you say—well, you say one of several things—a buy and bye—come down. And then what you're told is, “My God, Jimmy, you're so bitter.” And then, of course, you like to kill him, you know; you really do feel for a minute, “With friends like these, and you know the rest of the phrase, I hope, who needs enemies?” But he's not being wicked; he really doesn't know. And what he doesn't understand about the assumptions he betrays are that he really thinks—he really, somewhere at the very bottom of his heart, stomach, must believe that because you can call a taxi and come to certain place, everything's all right, that was what you wanted. And it always occurs to me that must be what he wanted because when I was a little boy I never heard of certain place. They don't understand where reality is. When someone says, “What does the Negro want?” I'm always thrown because I know that I know what he wants. I know what anybody I'm dealing with wants, you know, more or less. I know that they don't want to be in jail; they don't want to be tortured; they want to raise their children; they want what everybody else wants. And someone says, “What about intermarriage? What about miscegenation?” You had to look at him again; he's not talking about miscegenation at all; he's talking about black men; he's talking about black men. It's not miscegenation if it's a white man doing it; it's miscegenation if I'm doing it. And that, if I may say so, says vastly more about the man who asked the question than it does about me.
Now I went to school here—I mean when I say here now, I mean America—and it was impossible for me when I was a school child to understand anything about my own history, about my own past, because it wasn't in the textbooks. This means—this really means—that if my history wasn't in the textbooks, nobody else's was either. And I mean that, until today, Americans don't know their history. And history is not something you study; history is—history is something you achieve. You've got to know what happened if you intend to make another move. And Americans don't know what happened—not yet. I beg them to think in the same context of an extraordinary movie called *The Chain*, two chain gang convicts, one black, one white, chained together so long that they begin—that they begin to love each other, which is a weird and unhistorical idea. And as you remember the end of the movie, Sidney finally jumps off the train—Sidney can't make it—which is another weird and not quite—some unhistorical idea. But there's a very important moment in that movie in which they get to a farmhouse and they meet this improbable farm wife who, of course, falls in love with Tony. Now they've both been on the road for a long time, you know, dodging CPIs and things, you know, and as far as you can tell from looking at the screen, they're both men, you know, but Sidney doesn't seem to need a woman. Tony goes into the bedroom—if I remember this movie correctly, I think I remember the music—and Sidney stays in the kitchen 'cause he's too tired. Well, you know, luckily I didn't write that movie, but I suppose to console the man who wrote it and all the white people who saw it, there's only one terrible flaw: it isn't true in any way whatever. It isn't true about people, and it isn't true about history. Blacks and whites have been chained together in Mississippi for a very long time, and so far as I can tell, they haven't yet learned to love each other. What I want—they want to do two things at once: that one recognize and rejoice in and utilize the fact that one is black or beige or brown or whatever that one is—legally in this country a Negro—okay, crazy—that one understand—profoundly understand—that I, speaking now as a Negro, did not invent the—I never needed him. It was not my trauma. I didn't suddenly wake up and say, “Oh, my God, I'm black.” I never cared until I realized how many other people cared that my nose was flat, my mouth was big, and my hair was stringy, my skin was dark. That didn't bother me, baby, until somebody called me a nigger. And then, of course, since I was born in America, I had to take—I had to watch those people very carefully, and it cost me something, and it has cost us all something. And for a very long time to step out of that standard of judgment and realize that it's their problem; they invented it. I never needed it. I always knew that I was a man; the country never did. And the cries of anguish when he is now are involved mainly with the fact that now, for the first time in our history, they are beginning to suspect that fact that they invented the Negro because they needed him, and now they're beginning uncertainly to wonder why and what can they do about it. And of course there ain't much time to do anything. One—I said before that every man born knows when he meets another man—every man born knows that. Now if that's so—if that's so—and all these crimes have been committed because you said he wasn't a man, and now, by 1963, these crimes are being committed in the name of the bulk of the white population, it's a terrible crisis. Have to go back and think about it and recognize that what you were accusing this man of—like, “He's a rapist, he carries a knife, you know, you can't trust him, he's lazy, all con”—he's a saint, so don't worry about him—all these things were inventions. White people invented this creation because they needed it. I—I'm not going to keep you much longer, but I want to spell this out a little bit, just—just one more time. William Faulkner, who was a very important American writer and, in some—and in six novels, a very great novelist, was yet unable to recognize that the Negroes he wrote about with such love and such affection and such—want—like Dilsey in *The Sound and the Fury*, did not exist for him. And he spelled that out in *The Sound and the Fury*. To put it very roughly, the decaying Southern family is saved by the stoical black maid who was called Dilsey. And what Faulkner knew about Negroes was that they existed to save him. Later on, in a novel much less important than *The Sound and the Fury*, in *Requiem for a Nun*, he has Temple Drake. And remember, I'm speaking as a writer, so I know a little bit about—
What a writer is doing from the inside, he has Temple Drake and whoever her husband is, and I forget the whole terrible, um, ghastly family. But they have a negro maid named Nancy, who is also a dope addict and, naturally, you know, and she, understanding Temple is going bad—Temple is the wife—Temple has a, Temple is, I gather, an imp. Maniac. It's kind of impenetrable. Look, Nancy, in order to save this family, murders a baby, which, according to the peculiar logic of this book, brings Temple to her senses. And when Nancy's about to be hanged, the judge says to her something—I forget this extraordinary exchange—anyway, she's going to go to heaven. And the judge wants to know why she's going to go to heaven; how does she know what you're going to do there? I think it's a line, and Nancy says, “I can work.” Well, no negro domestic that I have ever met dreamed of going to heaven in order to [Applause] work. But Faulkner believed it. He was unable to understand that those black people he loved so much had no descendants, and furthermore, unable to understand that Dilsey—in *Sound and the Fury*—whoever, whoever the model for this woman was, also had a husband who couldn't get a job, probably had too many children, one of whom was certainly led, two of whom probably died, and the others were ruined.
Negroes have always existed in the popular imagination; it's something white folks had to have, according to Faulkner, and until today, according to most of the reports I read. My role here is to assure Mr. Charlie not only that he's, you know, God's gift to the universe, but that I like it that way. And now that part is over. And now, and the panic's on. Now, since the panic's on, and since when is forced to try, all of us must try to think of ourselves as responsible human beings. When it's got to invest, I think, try to invest our children and anyone else we talk to with a kind of morale which the country has always denied. When it's got to make it clear to your child, to your niece, to your nephew, to your brother, and to your sister, and speaking now as a negro, that contrary to what the Republic says and has always said, in fact, and the record bears me out, that in order to become a man in this country, the Negroes had to do and endure and transcend incredible things. And that if you manage—you get to be a man, a black man in America—you really are a man. Man. This is not true for most white men, I hate to say it, but that's true. Again, this spell it out a little bit. During that celebrated meeting with the Attorney General, the question of negro manhood came up, and Lorraine Hansberry said that she wasn't worried about negro manhood on the whole, really, you know. She knew where they were, and they didn't know, and she knew what she knew, the story, but, and she said, “They’ve, they have, they have done beautifully on the whole; they have done beautifully.” But I’m very worried about the civilization which can reduce those five cats standing on that negro woman's neck in Birmingham, and I’m very worried about that civilization, too. And we can't allow it. As long as we lie, to become academic, we can do all kinds of things, you know. But here we are now. What I’m pleading for tonight is this: that one never teach one’s child one thing, just one thing, make him proud that he’s black, but [Applause] don’t, but don’t tell him that he’s better because he’s [Applause] black.
I know my mother worked for white women all her life. I know her mother did. I know her grandmother was a slave. My father’s mother was a slave. And when the chips are down, as I was trying to say before, when one’s in trouble, you go back to that. I’m trying to say there is no reason under heaven to be ashamed of that. The Auction Block, the Middle Passage, the lash, the knife, the rope, the cotton—all the anguish, all the blood, all the terror—is what we have to get us through. I did not come from Islam; perhaps I wish I did, but I didn’t. I come from a long line of people who were kidnapped out of Africa 400 years ago. It’s up to me to do with it whatever I can do. But if I lie about it, if I pretend that I am something else, that I will have embarked on the same nightmare which was—praise is ending now in our country. The sun never set 20 years ago on the British Empire, and now it has set forever. And the English, who took their identity from all these conquests, no longer know who they are. And England is only one example; it is true in another way in France; it is true all over Europe. This is what it means when a doctrine crumbles, and white supremacy was only a doctrine; it was never the truth. Now, my point: here we are at the threshold of a long, hot, and very dangerous summer, and what I want us to try to do is to be clearheaded about it, to really be clearheaded about it. And I mean—but I say that to recognize that, for example, though the Kennedy administration, for example, was a record, and has, in fact, indeed, you know, done more than any other administration, it, in fact, has done very little, and really, you know, far from enough, far from enough. And the reason for that is they have yet really to understand how serious the problem is. This, I think, is a fact. They see its gravity in another way; I think they see how dangerous it is in terms of, um, internal chaos. But I don’t have any sense, as far as I can tell, of the great depth of anguish and despair and frustration and bitterness and rage in the Negro people. They really do not know, as I said before, as most white Americans do not know, what is happening on the streets of Harlem. And the whole institution called segregation has been designed to protect white people from that fact—in fact, that’s what segregation means—and it has worked so well that Americans don’t know now what the Negro wants; that’s what they keep saying. Now, this imposes on anyone, I think, who wants to be responsible; one must then begin, I think, to, to try to—I walk through the streets of Harlem; I know, I think I know what a terrible force, what a tremendous force is here—a tremendous force. And since I have the habits of an old brother, or since I consider myself your poet and do not want to see any more black lives ruined in any way whatever, and although I know I will—one would like to channel it, to channel it so that one can minimize the damage, the human damage. We are living through a revolution; we really are, and there’s no way for that to be pretty. But I would much rather that one did concrete things, like—to be reckless, if I were, you know, um, really a politician, is to distinguish with someone who finds himself in politics. If I had that kind of capacity, that kind of capability, what I would do in Harlem, for example, would be to organize a massive rent strike and have nobody pay the rent. I mean, have nobody pay the [Applause] rent. This is a ghetto; I don’t care how much rent you’re paying or how pretty your apartment is; this is a ghetto because you can’t get out. It’s important to remember this: that so far, everything’s been done in this country, we did for ourselves. The administration boasts of its record in Birmingham and overlooks the fact that it was, in fact, the Negro people of Birmingham who forced the crisis, and then the department moved in with too little, much too late. There are things one has got to be not confused about: one is attacking not the white face; one is attacking a power structure—a very complex power structure in which a great many Negroes make money, too. One’s got to keep the pressure on all those people in power; one’s got to make somebody tell somebody. One day, for example, one’s going to make somebody tell me exactly why no one ever talks about Senator Eastland. Why? I would like to know why no politician, as far as I know, said a word about Eastland’s telegram to Medgar Evers’ widow. Which, if you know anything about Mississippi, he sent a telegram to Mrs. Evers, Mrs. Evers, deploring the death of Medgar, and I accuse him of being responsible for [Applause] it. And I don’t mean he hired the assassin, and he probably doesn’t own a gun at all, but I accuse him of being responsible for it because of his, his entire career, his entire political career made that death inevitable. All the good white people on the Hill are never in the, in the streets when, when the mob arrives, when they burn; they don’t know nothing about it. But you know what I talked to about, talked to you about before, about cheap labor, and you think of the Southern oligarch and the poor, poor white who has always been assured by his masters that though he didn’t have a dime, couldn’t raise his children, made one any more than me, he could never be that bad off because he wasn’t black. And the poor white believed it, and the other cats got rich. When such a man as Senator Eastland sends a telegram to this widow saying, “I deplore it,” in a more moral nation that action would have been condemned as obscene. I think we have the right to know why he is sacrosanct. This is still—one has got to operate on the theory that it is a free country until they prove differently, in which case, of course, well, that’s another story.
There followed a question period. The first question concerned the effect of the Black Muslims in America. I was speaking only personally; there’s no way for me not to have a certain emotional, visceral response to the Muslim movement and to, uh, what Malcolm X says. It’s not possible. This is because the only catalog of what I know about the Harlem streets, what I know about not only the Harlem streets but about a negro anywhere in this country, most of—if I may be well, most of the largest segment of what we will call here the Negro masses—pretends it doesn’t exist, and all liberals essentially pretend it doesn’t exist. And I know, for example, what it’s like to try to get theft insurance in Harlem, a fire insurance; I, I know, I know the bit; I know the bill. Malcolm details it, and with that, you know, God bless him, and it is great power over his audience that he corroborates the agony, the despair, the demoralization, again, which the entire country denies. When the country begins even to suspect it exists, it says, “Oh, wait, tomorrow will be better.” And I can’t tell my nephew or anybody, I, I know that tomorrow will be better. No, maybe tomorrow will be better, but that’s academic. And I must also say that because of the curious—not curious at all—because of, because of the fact that the bulk of the white press is really concerned, ultimately concerned with protecting the power interests they’ve created, a situation in which it is very frequently necessary to read the Muslim newspaper to find out what’s happening among Negroes, and the white society doesn’t seem to realize how serious this is, either. Now, and also, finally, to tell—to give the whole bit—it is also true that the Muslim movement operates, in effect, and quite unconsciously, I think—I mean, I’m sure this isn’t part of any conscious policy—but their presence operates to protect some Negroes, by which I mean the Negro cat and negro boy and girl in Harlem, because the cops are afraid of Malcolm. Now, all that having been said, you know, if that were all there was to it, then I would obviously have to become a Muslim myself. And the only reason, at bottom, that I am not is because although he’s added up all the figures, the sum, the figure he comes out with is wrong. I.e., it is true that the American Negro situation is intolerable, dangerous, and disastrous, and it is true that we’ve been murdered here for a very long time. But it is not true that all white men are by nature evil and all black men are by nature good; that is not true, and I can’t agree to that because I can’t teach my child that.
The next question asked Mr. Baldwin’s feelings toward America and his guess as to where the country would be in 10 or 20 years. Actually, the answer to that question is not, isn’t up to me, you know. It’s [Applause] um, it, I’m not, but I’m not trying to, you know, to ignore your question, you know. I was born here, so I’m very involved with it, you know. So one has to say, “I love it,” and anyway, I do. Yes, my forefathers will pay for it, you know; it’s my country. Now, Americans are ever able to recognize that it’s my country, too, which means that it is not a white country, then we have some hope. As long as Americans imagine that it is a white country, then there is no hope. So it’s up to [Applause] you. What role of any—ask the next questioner. Can the Christian church have in settling the racial problem? Well, I’m sorry that, um, I can’t be very encouraging. That question should not have been asked of me; it should have been asked of the people who lead the church; it should have been asked of all the church members in this country who have made of the Christian Church the most segregated institution of all. That’s a very large statement [Applause]. You don’t believe my answer? I, and I don’t want to, I, what I don’t want to, I don’t want this to send into, um, but I want, I want to assure you that I’m not trying to be cynical; I’m asking you to examine the record of the church you say you represent [Applause]. Mr. Baldwin was finally asked if racism were perhaps too deeply ingrained in white Americans for Negroes ever to gain full equality. That’s a loaded question. The only way I can begin to answer is to say, “I hope not.” I don’t want to be a part—I don’t want to be accepted into this society the way it is; I refuse it [Applause]. The only hope we have is not that Americans arrive at what we call before the Eisenhower level, you know, but that in order for this country to be liberated, they’ve got to give up—economically, they’ve got to let them out of the ghetto, and emotionally, they’ve got to accept them in themselves. Now, I’m not anxious to marry nobody, you know, and I’m, I’m not talking about that, but I’m not afraid of the man; the man’s afraid of me. And until that ends, there isn’t any hope, you know. But I’m not trying to—I wouldn’t tell anybody I know to go to Madison Avenue and get a job in advertising. I reject the standards of this Republic; the point of the revolution is to change those standards [Applause].