To look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep, and, certainly, the children’s teeth are set on edge. This is not the land of the free; it is only very unwillingly and sporadically the home of the brave, and all that can be said for the bulk of our politicians is that, if they are no worse than they were, they are certainly no better.
I have a dream.
I was in Boston last year, twenty years after meeting Martin, twenty-three years after the Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools. Just before I got there, young, white patriots attempted to bayonet a black American citizen with the American flag. Someone apparently prevailed on the young patriots to apologize—it was never intended that the flag should be used for such a purpose—and that would appear, for the moment, to be the extent of change in Boston.
I was in Atlanta, which is visibly desegregated in all the downtown hotels. “But don’t let it fool you,” a black matron said to me. “This is just about the only level on which we ever meet. It’s window dressing.”
Now, as was the case twenty years ago, whatever amenities are being arranged in Atlanta, they can have no effect on the state of Georgia. In North Carolina, the frame-up of the “Wilmington Ten” has now been justified by the governor of the state. The news from all the Northern cities is, to understate it, grim; the state of the Union is catastrophic. And when this is true for white Americans, the situation of blacks is all but indescribable.
Yes, I have a dream: for Martin really knew something about this country and had discovered a lot about the world. At the point, precisely, that he could mix the American domestic morality with America’s role in the world, he became dangerous enough to be shot.
Americans refuse to perceive that theirs is not a white country; they can scarcely avoid suspecting that this is not a white world. It is no accident, for me, therefore, that the role which Andrew Young now plays on the troubled stage of the world is a role for which he was prepared, whether consciously or not, by his work with Martin. For, what Martin saw on the mountaintop was a future beyond these shores, and an identity beyond this struggle.
(1978)
Lorraine Hansberry at the Summit
The famous meeting Baldwin recounts here with then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy took place in New York City in May of 1963 at the 24 Central Park South Kennedy family residence.
· · ·
I MUST, NOW, FOR VARIOUS REASONS—some of which, I hope, will presently become apparent—do something which I have very deliberately never done before: sketch the famous Bobby Kennedy meeting. I have talked about it or around it, and a day is coming when I will be compelled to deliver my entire testimony. But, for the moment, I want merely to suggest something of Lorraine Hansberry’s beauty and power on that day; and what the incomprehension that day’s encounter was to cause the nation and, presently, and until this hour, the world.
Let us say that we all live through more than we can say or see. A life, in retrospect, can seem like the torrent of water opening or closing over one’s head and, in retrospect, is blurred, swift, kaleidoscopic like that. One does not wish to remember—one is perhaps not able to remember—the holding of one’s breath under water, the miracle of rising up far enough to breathe, and then, the going under again; or the tremendous difference between the light beneath the water and the light when one comes up to the sky.
Lorraine would not be very much younger than I am now if she were alive. She would be forty-nine, and I am fifty-five. But she was very much younger than I when we met—she being twenty-nine then, and I being thirty-four. At the time of the Bobby Kennedy meeting, she was thirty-three. That was one of the very last times I saw her on her feet, and she died at the age of thirty-four. The fact that I would not now be much older than she if she were alive is one of the reasons I miss her so much—we could have such times together now!
People forget how young everybody was. Bobby Kennedy, for another, quite different, example, was thirty-eight. His father had been ambassador at the Court of St. James’s—among other quite stunning distinctions—and it goes without saying (nor was it his fault) that he had not the remotest concept of poverty. I doubt that poverty can be imagined, and the attitudes of the American middle class, or the middle class anywhere, are proof that the memory obliterates poverty with great speed and efficiency.
In a sense, therefore, the meeting took place in that panic-stricken vacuum in which black and white, for the most part, meet in this country. I am not now speaking of conscious attitudes, but of history. White people do not wish to be reminded whence they came by the poverty which is, they hope, behind them. Neither do they wish, for the most part, to enter into black suffering—it was Bobby Kennedy, after all, who, referring to the Irish past, said that a Negro could become President in forty years. He really did not know why black people were so offended by this attempt at reassurance. But a black woman pointed out that she resented and rejected such encouragement from the son of an Irish immigrant, who had arrived on these shores long after she had been auctioned here.
It is to be remembered that, at the time of the meeting, Medgar Evers had but lately been blown away at the age of thirty-seven. Malcolm and Martin (both to be murdered at the age of thirty-nine) are still with us. Birmingham, Alabama, has already had its effect on, among others, Julian Bond, a youngster, and Jerome Smith, not much older, and Angela Davis. Angela had known the children blown away in that Birmingham Sunday school. This event invested her with a resolution which was eventually to land her on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.
Telescoping, severely now, the details, I had just come off the Southern road, and principally from Birmingham, when Bobby Kennedy asked me to throw this meeting together. I had met Bobby Kennedy once at a White House function and had told him, with some vehemence, that I wanted to talk to him about the role of the FBI in the Deep South. He had looked at me as though he was thinking that it might not be a bad idea to hand me over to the FBI but was very cordial. I suppose. Anyway, this encounter had something to do with his reason for calling me. I called, among others, Miss Lena Horne, who said that she “never” flew. She nevertheless arrived the next day. I found her wearing a beige suit, sitting in Bobby Kennedy’s lobby and complaining that she had a “hole” in her shoe from guiding this plane across the continent. She had just driven in from Idlewild—soon to be renamed Kennedy.
The meeting had been called so swiftly that I had not been able to find Lorraine or Jerome [Smith]. I think that it was my brother David who managed to find them both; but anyway, here they were: Lorraine, Jerome, and David.
And here came Burke Marshall and Bobby Kennedy, and we went on up to the suite.
There were many more people than I can name here. Let us say that I simply called black or white people whom I trusted, who would not feel themselves compelled to be spokesmen for any organization or responsible for espousing any specific point of view. I called the people who had, I knew, paid some dues and who knew it. Rip Torn, for example, a white Southerner, though that does not describe him, was here; and the black sociologist Kenneth Clark; and Harry Belafonte, a very good man on the Southern road and a very good man indeed; and Ed[win “Bill”] Berry of the Chicago Urban League; others. But I am trying to talk about Lorraine.
The meeting began quietly enough until Lorraine responded to Bobby’s failure to understand or reply to Jerome’s passionate query as to the real role of the U.S. government in, for example, Birmingham. Bobby—and here I am not telescoping but exercising restraint—had turned away from Jerome, as though to say, “I’ll talk to all of you, who are civilized. But who is he?”
Lorraine said (in memory, she is standing, but I know she was sitting—she towered, that child, from a sitting position), “You have a great many very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General, but the only man you should be listening to is that man over there. That is the voice,” she added, after a moment during which Bobby sat absolutely still staring at her,
“of twenty-two million people.”
As Mr. Kennedy did not appear to understand this, Miss Horne eventually—and as the afternoon wore on, perpetually—attempted to clarify it, saying, for example, “If you are so proud of your record, Mr. Attorney General, you go up to Harlem into those churches and barber shops and pool halls, and you tell the people. We ain’t going to do it, because we don’t want to get shot.”
I think I was watching everything. But I know I was watching Lorraine’s face. She wanted him to hear. Her face changed and changed, the way Sojourner Truth’s face must have changed and changed or, to tell the truth, the way I have watched my mother’s face change when speaking to someone who could not hear—who yet, and you know it, will be compelled to hear one day.
We wanted him to tell his brother the President to personally escort to school, on the following day or the day after, a small black girl already scheduled to enter a Deep South school.
“That way,” we said, “it will be clear that whoever spits on that child will be spitting on the nation.”
He did not understand this, either. “It would be,” he said, “a meaningless moral gesture.”
“We would like,” said Lorraine, “from you, a moral commitment.”
He did not turn from her as he had turned away from Jerome. He looked insulted—seemed to feel that he had been wasting his time.
But he reacted very strongly to Jerome’s answer to his question “Would you take up arms to defend this country?” The answer was, “Never! Never! Never!”
Bobby Kennedy was surprised that any American could feel that way. But something got through to him when this same answer was reiterated later—by a black voice shouting, “When I pull the trigger, kiss it goodbye!”
Well, Lorraine sat still, watching all the while and listening with a face as still, as beautiful, and as terrifying as her face must have been at that moment when she told us, “My Lord calls me. He calls me by the thunder. I ain’t got long to stay here.” She put that on her tape recorder in her own voice at the moment she realized that she was about to die.*
The meeting ended with Lorraine standing up. She said, in response to Jerome’s statement concerning the perpetual demolition faced every hour of every day by black men, who pay a price literally unspeakable for attempting to protect their women, their children, their homes, or their lives, “That is all true, but I am not worried about black men—who have done splendidly, it seems to me, all things considered.”
Then, she paused and looked at Bobby Kennedy, who, perhaps for the first time, looked at her.
“But I am 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. She extended her hand.
“Goodbye, Mr. Attorney General,” she said, and turned and walked out of the room.
We followed her. Perhaps I can dare to say that we were all, in our various ways, devastated, but I will have to leave it at that.
I had forgotten that I was scheduled to be interviewed by Dr. Kenneth Clark, and we were late. We were hurried into the car. We passed Lorraine, who did not see us. She was walking toward Fifth Avenue—her face twisted, her hands clasped before her belly, eyes darker than any eyes I had ever seen before—walking in an absolutely private place.
I knew I could not call her.
Our car drove on; we passed her.
And then, we heard the thunder.
(1979)
*The quoted words are heard in the documentary short film Lorraine Hansberry: The Black Experience in the Creation of Drama, 1975, directed by Ralph J. Tangney.
On Language, Race, and the Black Writer
WRITERS ARE OBLIGED, at some point, to realize that they are involved in a language which they must change. And for a black writer in this country to be born into the English language is to realize that the assumptions on which the language operates are his enemy. For example, when Othello accuses Desdemona, he says that he “threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe.” I was very young when I read that and I wondered, “Richer than his tribe?” I was forced to reconsider similes: “as black as sin,” “as black as night,” “blackhearted.”
In order to deal with that reality at a certain time in my life, I left the United States and went to France, where I was unable to speak to anybody because I spoke no French. I dropped into a silence in which I heard, for the first time, the beat of the language of the people who had produced me. For the first time, I was able to hear that music.
When I was in elementary school there were no black writers or white writers whom I could regard as models. I did not agree at all with the moral predicament of Huckleberry Finn concerning Nigger Jim. It was not, after all, a question about whether I should be sold back into slavery.
I am a witness to and a survivor of the latest slave rebellion, or what American newspapers erroneously term the civil rights movement. I put it that way because Malcolm X and I met many years ago when Malcolm was debating a very young sit-in student on a radio station which had asked me to moderate the discussion. Malcolm asked the student a question which I now present to you: “If you are a citizen, why do you have to fight for your civil rights? If you are fighting for your civil rights, then that means you are not a citizen.” Indeed, the “legalisms” of this country have never had anything to do with its former slaves. We are still governed by the slave codes.
When I say a “slave rebellion,” I mean that what is called the civil rights movement was really insurrection. It was co-opted. It is a fact that the latest slave rebellion was brutally put down. We all know what happened to Medgar Evers. We all know what happened to Malcolm X. We all know what happened to Martin Luther King. We know what happened to Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, and so many more. The list is long. That is the result of slave rebellion.
A very brutal thing must be said: The intentions of this melancholic country as concerns black people—and anyone who doubts me can ask any Indian—have always been genocidal. They needed us for labor and for sport. Now they can’t get rid of us. We cannot be exiled and we cannot be accommodated. Something’s got to give. The machinery of this country operates day in and day out, hour by hour, to keep the nigger in his place.
When I was young, I used to run an elevator—murderously, but I ran it. I am not needed to run that elevator anymore. Black people are no longer needed to do a whole lot of things we used to do. On the other hand, we are here. This coming summer is going to be a difficult one. In every city in this nation now, black fathers are standing in the streets watching black sons; they’re watching each other. Neither fathers nor sons have any place to go, and it is not their fault. It has nothing to do with their value, their merit, their capabilities.
There may be nothing worse under heaven, there may be no greater crime, than to attack a man’s integrity, to attempt to destroy that man. For I know that in spite of the American Constitution, in spite of all the born-again Christians, my father was not a mule and not a thing, that my sister was not born to be the plaything of idle white sheriffs.
Black people find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Our presence in this country terrifies every white man walking. This nation is not now, never has been, and now never will be a white country. There is not a white person in this country, including our President and all his friends, who can prove he’s white.
The people who settled this country came from many places. It was not so elsewhere in the world. In France, they were French; in England, they were English; in Italy, they were Italian; in Greece, they were Greek; in Russia, they were Russian. From this I want to point out a paradox: blacks, Indians, Chicanos, Asians, and that beleaguered handful of white people who understand their history are the only people who know who they are.
When the Europeans arrived in America, there was a moment in their lives when they had to learn to speak English,
when they became guys named Joe. Guys named Joe couldn’t speak to their fathers because their fathers couldn’t speak English. That meant a rupture, a profound rupture, with their own history, so that they could become guys named Joe. And in doing so, Joe never found out anything else about himself.
Black people in this country come out of a history which was never written down. The links between father and son, between mother and daughter, until this hour and despite all the dangers and trials to which we have been subjected, remain strong and alive. And if we could do that—and we have done that—then we can deal with what now lies before us.
Every white person in this country—and I do not care what he or she says—knows one thing. They may not know, as they put it, “what I want,” but they know they would not like to be black here. If they know that, then they know everything they need to know, and whatever else they say is a lie.
The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white. It is a trick bag, because they know perfectly well that I can never become white. I’ve drunk my share of dry martinis. I have proved myself civilized in every way I can. But there is an irreducible difficulty. Something doesn’t work. Well, I decided that I might as well act like a nigger.
The black people of this country stand in a very strange place, as do the white people of this country—and almost for the very same reason, though we approach it from different points of view. I suggest that what the rulers of this country don’t know about the world which surrounds them is the price they pay for not knowing me. If they couldn’t deal with my father, how are they going to deal with the people in the streets of Tehran? I could have told them, if they had asked.
There is a reason that no one wants our children educated. When we attempt to do it ourselves, we find ourselves up against a vast machinery of racism which infects the country’s entire system of education. I know the machinery is vast, ruthless, cunning, and thinks of nothing, in fact, but itself, which means us, because we are a threat to the machinery. We have already lived through a slave rebellion. We cannot pick up guns, because they’ve got the guns. We cannot hit those streets again, because they’re waiting for us. We have to do something else.
The Cross of Redemption Page 15