“This is life, new and strange; strange, because we fear it; new, because we have kept our eyes turned from it. This is life lived in cramped limits and expressing itself not in terms of our good and bad, but in terms of its own fulfilment. Men are men and life is life, and we must deal with them as they are; and if we want to change them, we must deal with them in the form in which they exist and have their being.
“Your Honor, I must still speak in general terms, for the background of this boy must be shown, a background which has acted powerfully and importantly upon his conduct. Our forefathers came to these shores and faced a harsh and wild country. They came here with a stifled dream in their hearts, from lands where their personalities had been denied, as even we have denied the personality of this boy. They came from cities of the old world where the means to sustain life were hard to get or own. They were colonists and they were faced with a difficult choice: they had either to subdue this wild land or be subdued by it. We need but turn our eyes upon the imposing sweep of streets and factories and buildings to see how completely they have conquered. But in conquering they used others, used their lives. Like a miner using a pick or a carpenter using a saw, they bent the will of others to their own. Lives to them were tools and weapons to be wielded against a hostile land and climate.
“I do not say this in terms of moral condemnation. I do not say it to rouse pity in you for the black men who were slaves for two and one-half centuries. It would be foolish now to look back upon that in the light of injustice. Let us not be naïve: men do what they must, even when they feel that they are being driven by God, even when they feel they are fulfilling the will of God. Those men were engaged in a struggle for life and their choice in the matter was small indeed. It was the imperial dream of a feudal age that made men enslave others. Exalted by the will to rule, they could not have built nations on so vast a scale had they not shut their eyes to the humanity of other men, men whose lives were necessary for their building. But the invention and widespread use of machines made the further direct enslavement of men economically impossible, and so slavery ended.
“Let me, Your Honor, dwell a moment longer upon the danger of looking upon this boy in the light of injustice. If I should say that he is a victim of injustice, then I would be asking by implication for sympathy; and if one insists upon looking at this boy as a victim of injustice, he will be swamped by a feeling of guilt so strong as to be indistinguishable from hate.
“Of all things, men do not like to feel that they are guilty of wrong, and if you make them feel guilt, they will try desperately to justify it on any grounds; but, failing that, and seeing no immediate solution that will set things right without too much cost to their lives and property, they will kill that which evoked in them the condemning sense of guilt.
“And this is true of all men, whether they be white or black; it is a peculiar and powerful, but common, need. Your Honor, let me give you an example. When this poor black boy, Bigger Thomas, was trying to cast the blame for his crime upon one of the witnesses, Jan Erlone, a Communist, who faced this Court yesterday—and this boy thought he would be able to blame his crime upon the Communists with impunity, because the newspapers had convinced him that Communists were criminals—an example of such fear-guilt occurred. Jan Erlone confronted Bigger Thomas upon a street corner and sought to have it out with him, demanding to know why Bigger was trying to blame the crime upon him. Jan Erlone told me that Bigger Thomas acted as hysterically as those people are acting at this moment in that mob outdoors. Bigger Thomas drew a gun and commanded Jan Erlone to leave him. Bigger Thomas was almost a stranger to Jan Erlone and Jan Erlone was almost a stranger to him; yet they hated each other.
“Today Bigger Thomas and that mob are strangers, yet they hate. They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.
“This guilt-fear is the basic tone of the prosecution and of the people in this case. In their hearts they feel that a wrong has been done and when a Negro commits a crime against them, they fancy they see the ghastly evidence of that wrong. So the men of wealth and property, the victims of attack who are eager to protect their profits, say to their guilty hirelings, ‘Stamp out this ghost!’ Or, like Mr. Dalton, they say, ‘Let’s do something for this man so he won’t feel that way.’ But then it is too late.
“Do I say this to make you believe that this boy is blameless? No. Bigger Thomas’ own feeling of hate feeds the feeling of guilt in others. Hemmed in, limited, circumscribed, he sees and feels no way of acting except to hate and kill that which he thinks is crushing him.
“Your Honor, I’m trying to wipe out this circle of blood, trying to cut down into this matter, beneath hate and fear and guilt and revenge and show what impulses are twisted.
“If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we could call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country. If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong. A common way of earning a living gives them a common attitude toward life. Even their speech is colored and shaped by what they must undergo. Your Honor, injustice blots out one form of life, but another grows up in its place with its own rights, needs, and aspirations. What is happening here today is not injustice, but oppression, an attempt to throttle or stamp out a new form of life. And it is this new form of life that has grown up here in our midst that puzzles us, that expresses itself, like a weed growing from under a stone, in terms we call crime. Unless we grasp this problem in the light of this new reality, we cannot do more than salve our feelings of guilt and rage with more murder when a man, living under such conditions, commits an act which we call a crime.
“This boy represents but a tiny aspect of a problem whose reality sprawls over a third of this nation. Kill him! Burn the life out of him! And still when the delicate and unconscious machinery of race relations slips, there will be murder again. How can law contradict the lives of millions of people and hope to be administered successfully? Do we believe in magic? Do you believe that by burning a cross you can frighten a multitude, paralyze their will and impulses? Do you think that the white daughters in the homes of America will be any safer if you kill this boy? No! I tell you in all solemnity that they won’t! The surest way to make certain that there will be more such murders is to kill this boy. In your rage and guilt, make thousands of other black men and women feel that the barriers are tighter and higher! Kill him and swell the tide of pent-up lava that will some day break loose, not in a single, blundering, accidental, individual crime, but in a wild cataract of emotion that will brook no control. The all-important thing for this Court to remember in deciding this boy’s fate is that, though his crime was accidental, the emotions that broke loose were already there; the thing to remember is that this boy’s way of life was a way of guilt; that his crime existed long before the murder of Mary Dalton; that the accidental nature of his crime took the guise of a sudden and violent rent in the veil behind which he lived, a rent which allowed his feelings of resentment and estrangement to leap forth and find objective and concrete form.
“Obsessed with guilt, we have sought to thrust a corpse from before our eyes. We have marked off a little plot of ground and buried it. We tell our souls in the deep of the black night that it is dead and that we have no reason for fear or uneasiness.
“But the corpse returns and raids our homes! We find our daughters murdered and burnt! And we say, ‘Kill! Kill!’
“But, Your Honor, I say: ‘Stop! Let us look at what we are doing!’ For the
corpse is not dead! It still lives! It has made itself a home in the wild forest of our great cities, amid the rank and choking vegetation of slums! It has forgotten our language! In order to live it has sharpened its claws! It has grown hard and calloused! It has developed a capacity for hate and fury which we cannot understand! Its movements are unpredictable! By night it creeps from its lair and steals toward the settlements of civilization! And at the sight of a kind face it does not lie down upon its back and kick up its heels playfully to be tickled and stroked. No; it leaps to kill!
“Yes, Mary Dalton, a well-intentioned white girl with a smile upon her face, came to Bigger Thomas to help him. Mr. Dalton, feeling vaguely that a social wrong existed, wanted to give him a job so that his family could eat and his sister and brother could go to school. Mrs. Dalton, trying to grope her way toward a sense of decency, wanted him to go to school and learn a trade. But when they stretched forth their helping hands, death struck! Today they mourn and wait for revenge. The wheel of blood continues to turn!
“I have only sympathy for those kind-hearted, white-haired parents. But to Mr. Dalton, who is a real estate operator, I say now: ‘You rent houses to Negroes in the Black Belt and you refuse to rent to them elsewhere. You kept Bigger Thomas in that forest. You kept the man who murdered your daughter a stranger to her and you kept your daughter a stranger to him.’
“The relationship between the Thomas family and the Dalton family was that of renter to landlord, customer to merchant, employee to employer. The Thomas family got poor and the Dalton family got rich. And Mr. Dalton, a decent man, tried to salve his feelings by giving money. But, my friend, gold was not enough! Corpses cannot be bribed! Say to yourself, Mr. Dalton, ‘I offered my daughter as a burnt sacrifice and it was not enough to push back into its grave this thing that haunts me.’
“And to Mrs. Dalton, I say: ‘Your philanthropy was as tragically blind as your sightless eyes!’
“And to Mary Dalton, if she can hear me, I say: ‘I stand here today trying to make your death mean something!’
“Let me, Your Honor, explain further the meaning of Bigger Thomas’ life. In him and men like him is what was in our forefathers when they first came to these strange shores hundreds of years ago. We were lucky. They are not. We found a land whose tasks called forth the deepest and best we had; and we built a nation, mighty and feared. We poured and are still pouring our soul into it. But we have told them: ‘This is a white man’s country!’ They are yet looking for a land whose tasks can call forth their deepest and best.
“This is not something that we have to be told. We know this. And, in some of us, as in Mr. Dalton, the feeling of guilt, stemming from our moral past, is so strong that we try to undo this thing in a manner as naïve as dropping a penny in a blind man’s cup! But, Your Honor, life will not be dealt with in such a fashion. It rushes on its fateful course, mocking our delicate feelings. Let us hope that this Court at least will indicate a line of action that is not childish!
“Consider, Your Honor, the peculiar position of this boy. He comes of a people who have lived under queer conditions of life, conditions thrust outside the normal circle of our civilization. But even in living outside of our lives, he has not had a full life of his own. We have seen to that. It was convenient to keep him close to us; it was nice and cheap. We told him what to do; where to live; how much schooling he could get; where he could eat; where and what kind of work he could do. We marked up the earth and said, ‘Stay there!’ But life is not stationary.
“He attended school, where he was taught what every white child was taught; but the moment he went through the door of the school into life he knew that the white boy went one way and he went another. School stimulated and developed in him those impulses which all of us have, and then he was made to realize that he could not act upon them. Can the human mind devise a trap more skilful? This Court should not sit to fix punishment for this boy; it should sit to ponder why there are not more like him! And there are, Your Honor. If it were not for the backwaters of religion, gambling and sex draining off their energies into channels harmful to them and profitable to us, more of them would be here today. Be assured!
“Your Honor, consider the mere physical aspect of our civilization. How alluring, how dazzling it is! How it excites the senses! How it seems to dangle within easy reach of everyone the fulfilment of happiness! How constantly and overwhelmingly the advertisements, radios, newspapers and movies play upon us! But in thinking of them remember that to many they are tokens of mockery. These bright colors may fill our hearts with elation, but to many they are daily taunts. Imagine a man walking amid such a scene, a part of it, and yet knowing that it is not for him!
“We planned the murder of Mary Dalton, and today we come to court and say: ‘We had nothing to do with it!’ But every school teacher knows that this is not so, for every school teacher knows the restrictions which have been placed upon Negro education. The authorities know that it is not so, for they have made it plain in their every act that they mean to keep Bigger Thomas and his kind within rigid limits. All real estate operators know that it is not so, for they have agreed among themselves to keep Negroes within the ghetto-areas of cities. Your Honor, we who sit here today in this court room are witnesses. We know this evidence, for we helped to create it.
“It is not my duty here, today, to say how this great problem can be solved. My job is to show how nonsensical it is to seek revenge on this boy under the pretense that we are making a great fight for justice. If we do that, we shall be merely hypnotizing ourselves, and to our own ultimate disadvantage.
“But the question may be asked, ‘If this boy thought that he was somehow wronged, why did he not go into a court of law and seek a redress of his grievances? Why should he take the law into his own hands?’ Your Honor, this boy had no notion before he murdered, and he has none now, of having been wronged by any specific individuals. And, to be honest with you, the very life he has led has created in him a frame of mind which makes him expect much less of this Court than you will ever know.
“It is indeed unfortunate that Mary Dalton should have been the woman who approached him that night; and it is unfortunate that Jan Erlone should have been the man who sought to help him. He murdered one and tried to lay the blame for that murder on the other. But Jan and Mary were not human beings to Bigger Thomas. Social custom had shoved him so far away from them that they were not real to him.
“What would a boy, free from the warping influences which have played so hard upon Bigger Thomas, have done that night when he found himself alone with that drunk girl? He would have gone to Mr. or Mrs. Dalton and told them that their daughter was drunk. And the thing would have been over. There would have been no murder. But the way we have treated this boy made him do the very thing we did not want.
“Or, am I wrong? Maybe we wanted him to do it! Maybe we would have had no chance or justification to stage attacks against hundreds of thousands of people if he had acted sanely and normally! Maybe we would have had to go to the expensive length of inventing theories to justify our attacks if we had treated him fairly!
“This boy’s crime was not an act of retaliation by an injured man against a person who he thought had injured him. If it were, then this case would be simple indeed. This is the case of a man’s mistaking a whole race of men as a part of the natural structure of the universe and of his acting toward them accordingly. He murdered Mary Dalton accidentally, without thinking, without plan, without conscious motive. But, after he murdered, he accepted the crime. And that’s the important thing. It was the first full act of his life; it was the most meaningful, exciting and stirring thing that had ever happened to him. He accepted it because it made him free, gave him the possibility of choice, of action, the opportunity to act and to feel that his actions carried weight.
“We are dealing here with an impulse stemming from deep down. We are dealing here not with how man acts toward man, but with how a man acts when he feels that he must d
efend himself against, or adapt himself to, the total natural world in which he lives. The central fact to be understood here is not who wronged this boy, but what kind of a vision of the world did he have before his eyes, and where did he get such a vision as to make him, without premeditation, snatch the life of another person so quickly and instinctively that even though there was an element of accident in it, he was willing after the crime to say: ‘Yes; I did it. I had to.’
“I know that it is the fashion these days for a defendant to say: ‘Everything went blank to me.’ But this boy does not say that. He says the opposite. He says he knew what he was doing and felt he had to do it. And he says he feels no sorrow for having done it.
“Do men regret when they kill in war? Does the personality of a soldier coming at you over the top of a trench matter?
“No! You kill to keep from being killed! And after a victorious war you return to a free country, just as this boy, with his hands stained with the blood of Mary Dalton, felt that he was free for the first time in his life.
“Your Honor, the most pathetic aspect of this case is that a young white woman, a student at a university, ignorant and thoughtless, though educated, tried to undo as an individual a gigantic wrong accomplished by a nation through three hundred long years, and was misunderstood and is now dead because of that misunderstanding. It has been said that the proof of the corrupt and vile heart of this boy is that he slew a woman who was trying to be kind to him. In the face of that assertion, I ask the question: Is there any greater proof that his heart is not corrupt and vile than that he slew a woman who was trying to be kind? Oh, yes; he hated the girl. And why not? She was acting toward him in such a way as no white face usually acts toward a Negro, and as a white face acts only when it is about to fleece a Negro of something. He did not understand her. She confounded him. Her actions made him feel that the entire universe was tumbling about his head. What would any man in this court room do if the sun should suddenly turn green?
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