The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings

by James Baldwin

  Everyone has basic emotions of hate, fear, and love, and I think the whites in this country have used the machinery of propaganda very skillfully. You find blacks who want to know something about their history and you find whites who don’t understand or who are fearful. They will publicize this sort of thing as a hate gathering and a hate meeting, when actually it could possibly be a historical meeting that whites and blacks could learn from.

  (1969)

  Speech from the Soledad Rally

  The Soledad Brothers was the name given to three black inmates who were charged with the January 1970 beating death of John V. Mills at Soledad State Prison in California. George Jackson (twenty-nine), John Clutchette (twenty-eight), and Fleeta Drumgo (twenty-six) were accused of killing the white prison guard in retaliation for the earlier shooting deaths of three black inmates at San Quentin by another guard, whose case had been dismissed by a grand jury as “justifiable homicide.”

  At the age of nineteen Jackson had been given a peculiar sentence: from one year to life, after being convicted for stealing $70.20 from a gas station. The year of the prison killing he published a book—Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1964–1970). The noted French ex-convict, playwright, and novelist Jean Genet wrote the introduction. The reviewer for the New York Times called it “the most important single volume from a black since The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” The book earned significant awards and praise and international support.

  On April 20, 1971, a rally was held at the Central Hall in Westminster, England. The rally drew over three thousand people and raised over two thousand pounds. This is the speech Baldwin delivered that day. According to his biographer, Baldwin was so taken with Jackson’s writing and story that he wanted to make a film based on Jackson’s life.

  Later that same year, on August 22, George Jackson was shot and killed in an attempt to escape from San Quentin Prison during an uprising he caused. Five other men lost their lives that day.

  The head of his defense committee and the organizer for the 1971 rally, Professor Angela Y. Davis, had already been involved in another dramatic escape attempt in 1970, which resulted in four deaths. She was free on bail at this time, awaiting trial in California. (See “An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Y. Davis”)

  · · ·

  I CAN’T KEEP YOU very long, because the hall’s going to close very soon, and I must tell you this: that I was very honored and very excited to be here, because of what I’ve heard and because of the feeling in the hall. I haven’t got time to go into all that, either, so let me tell you, let me simply say two things: we’ve heard a lot in my country lately, and you’ve heard a lot in your country too, about law and order. And people ask me from time to time if “Mr. Baldwin, does that mean that you’re advocating violence?” And by and by you hear the question so long and so often that you begin to understand that in the question there is a threat, and what the question really means is: “If you have the effrontery to seem to be advocating violence, you must bear in mind that we have the police forces, we have the tanks, we have the helicopters, we have the guns, we have the mace, we have the chemicals, we got the jury, we got the judge, and we got you! It means: if you don’t like where you are, we can keep you where you is!”

  Now, there are people in England and there are people in France, and there are sounds—no matter how quiet it is kept—from people in America who are aware of what is happening to them and what criminal action has been taken against their lives. I don’t merely mean black lives: that’s merely the greatest metaphor, the most visible symptom of the rottenness of a certain state, of the end of a certain history. Because, let us face this fact—it’s a brutal fact and everyone here and many more people than that, whether or not they want to, will be forced to deal with the central fact of this century, and it is a very simple fact, so simple that no one wants to face it—that this civilization, including this hall, including that extraordinary god the Europeans found in the desert, and dragged all the way to England—that invention and this hall and this economy and the bank of the Holy Ghost which stands in Rome were built on a principle which is politely called cheap labor. If we translate that from the high English into where I was born, it means that every dark child born—and this was the intention of a civilization—was born to be used for the profit of white people. And this hall in which we stand is yet more important than the guns, the fleets, the bombs, because this hall represents the ways in which black people were taught to despise themselves.

  Now, something very serious happens in a civilization because the reason we’re here tonight is not merely because of the performance of my unhappy country; it is not merely because of the fate of Angela Davis and the Soledad Brothers or the Third World all over the world; it isn’t even merely because of the bloody slaughter in Vietnam. It is because every Western government is implicated and is guilty of and responsible for the shoddy performance of my country. Mr. Nixon, who sits in Washington, is also your President.

  Now, what is important here, what is happening in this century is for the first time within the history of anyone living anywhere, a certain group of people who have always been despised, who were born to be shoeshine boys, who were born to be political prisoners, in fact were born to be used, have discovered, as it happens in time, what happened to them. And they have begun to understand that if they are going to liberate themselves, they have to begin it first of all within themselves. No one is going to do it for them.

  Alas, it is called power. And alas, people who have power very rarely have morals: the power corrodes the morals. Someone said earlier this evening that it is not the judge’s court, it is our court. It is not Mr. Reagan’s Sacramento—my blood is in that soil! Senator Eastland, if he is still alive—and it’s difficult to tell—never had any legal rights to his job. Governor Wallace holds his job illegally, because I did not vote for him. And if that is so, that means the machinery which put into power Mr. Nixon, Mr. Agnew, Mr. Mitchell and his charming wife, and is afraid to get rid of King Lear—otherwise known as Hoover—also hold its job illegally. I did not vote for that machine. I don’t have a swimming pool unpaid for in California. I am not worried about whom my children may or may not play with. I’m not worried about … There’s something obscene about a people who are willing to send their sons off to be slaughtered by the thousands in a foreign jungle and are afraid to have them make love to the boy or girl next door.

  History, in short, has achieved its own bankruptcy. That puts on our shoulders an enormous responsibility. We have no way. When Martin was alive, we marched and we petitioned; many people died, many people went mad, many people have been forgotten. That was a heroic endeavor, but it will never come again. Now, what is beginning to happen, and in spite of all the things that have happened to all our brains for all these generations, to divide black people from black people, to divide Indians from West Indians, to divide me from you, to divide whites from whites, it is absolutely true, absolutely true, that if George Jackson and Angela Davis and my child have no life, have no future, no one in this room has any future.

  We cannot afford, to put it briefly, all those prisoners in South Africa. We cannot afford all those European-trained leaders in what we call Africa. We cannot afford, for the sake of our lives and our children’s lives, to suppose that any country or any civilization has a right to murder half the world and menace all the rest in the name of profits. It is perfectly possible, in short … now I’ll have to leave you.

  [Interruption: “What is ‘civilization’?”]

  “Civilization” is a word used by those who think of themselves as civilized because they describe you as uncivilized!

  I want to leave you with one thing, one thing only. We are the victims and we are the result of a doctrine called white supremacy, which came into the world God knows how many years ago, it doesn’t matter now. Now, it is over. We cannot fall into the same trap. Now, I must tell you that white people are, in the generality, terrifie
d of being identified with black people, because, of course, they don’t want to be treated like a nigger. What white people have to understand, in spite of their sad history, is that they invented the nigger—I didn’t! And if they invented the nigger, then they are guilty of what they’ve always accused me of, which is acting like one!

  Black people will have to understand, though it won’t be easy, that history creates strange children, and our responsibility is to the children we will produce and to the world which we will create. The world which we have to create has to evolve itself in such a way that never again will a man like Ronald Reagan or a man like Governor Wallace or a man like Richard Nixon or (I don’t want to speak about your country, I’m a guest here!) Enoch Powell!—hold public office again. These are the men who should be kept away from all children, should never be allowed to drive cars! But the fact that these men are in power proves the bankruptcy of the civilization which has put them there. That is all I mean.

  [Interruption from black woman protesting about black children in Britain being put into “subnormal” schools.]

  Let me say one thing: that woman’s voice, that woman’s voice is what you have to hear. We’re responsible to that, and if the people who rule us don’t hear that voice, then something terrible will happen to us.

  (1971)

  A Challenge to Bicentennial Candidates

  ONE GROWS UP EARLY on my street, and so I started looking for you around the time that I—and later my brothers—began selling shopping bags, shining shoes, scavenging for wood and coal, scavenging, period. I was about seven, certainly no more than that, and as my brothers approached this august and independent age, they joined me in the streets.

  My father, before me, also looked for you, for a long while. He gave up, finally, and died in an asylum. Perhaps I use the word “asylum” with some bitterness. My father was a big, strong, handsome, healthy black man, who liked to use his muscles, who was accustomed to hard labor. He went mad and died in Bedlam because, being black, he was always “the last to be hired and the first to be fired.”

  He—we—therefore, spent much of our lives on welfare, and my father’s pride could not endure it. He resented, and eventually came to hate, the people who had placed him in this condition and who did not even have the grace or courage to admit it.

  My father wasn’t stupid and, God knows, he wasn’t lazy. But his condition, against which I watched him struggle with all the energy that he had, was blamed on his laziness; and his wife (who knew better) and his children (who didn’t) were assured, merely by the presence of the welfare worker, of his unworthiness. No wonder he died in an American asylum—and at the expense, needless to say, of the so-victimized American taxpayer. (My father was also an American taxpayer, and he paid at an astronomical rate.)

  I gather, from the speeches I read and hear, and I see, in the sullen bewilderment in the faces of all the American streets, that the principal gift the Bicentennial candidate can offer the American people is freedom from the poor—a stunning gift indeed for so original a people, a people whose originality resides entirely and precisely in the poverty which drove them to these shores. It is like offering the American people, on their birthday, freedom from the past and freedom from any responsibility for the present: for the poor are always with us; and they can also be against us.

  The Bicentennial candidate is to offer for our birthday freedom from the discontented, freedom from the criminals who roam our streets; he is to offer, out of such a dangerous history, at so dangerous a time, nothing less than freedom from danger. America’s birthday present, on its two hundredth birthday, is to be the final banishment of the beast in the American playground.

  The niceties of rhetoric, the pretense of democracy, and the explosive global situation prevent the candidate from identifying this beast too precisely, but real Americans know that the American taxpayer is being ruined by the worthless and undeserving poor. You can vote with your feet in this country (so someone said to my father, somewhere between the Reconstruction and the First World War): “If you don’t like it in this state, move.” And so my father did, dear candidate, possibly looking for you. All the way from the Southern cotton fields to the ghettoes, factories, prisons, and riots of the North, real Americans know that the American taxpayer is being ruined by the Indian/Chicano/Mexican/Puerto Rican/black. These dominate the welfare rolls, and the prison populations, and roam, and make unlivable, the streets of the American cities.

  I am saddened indeed to be forced to recognize that my father’s anguish—to say nothing of my brothers’—has cost the Republic so dearly. I should have thought it cheaper, on the whole, for the American taxpayer to have found a way of allowing my father—and my brothers—to walk on earth, rather than scraping together all those pennies to send a man to walk on the moon. Man cannot live by nuclear warheads alone; so I would have thought. I would have thought that the ceaseless proliferation, the buying and selling and stockpiling, of weapons was a far more futile and expensive endeavor than the rehabilitation of our cities. Cities, after all, are meant to be lived in, and weapons are meant to kill.

  I may be somewhat bewildered by the passion with which so many labor for death against life. I could have hoped that pride in America’s birthday might have invested the citizens of the great Republic with such pride in their children that they would resolve—at last, and, God knows, not a moment too soon—to educate these children, and build schools and create teachers for that purpose.

  The coalition of special interests which rule the American cities, and the collusion between these interests and the boards of education, are responsible for the disaster in the schools. Or, in other words, schools are located in “neighborhoods,” and neighborhoods are created—or, more precisely, in human terms, destroyed—by those who own the land and who are determined to preserve, out of a cowardice called nostalgia, the status quo.

  Perhaps it is not too much to ask of the ex-governor of New York [Nelson A. Rockefeller], he of the merry wink, and the casual billions, exactly why the reclamation of the land, in Harlem, began with the destruction of the black nationalist bookstore on 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, and, catty-corner from it, on 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, the destruction of the Hotel Theresa. These two institutions were, in Harlem, what in Africa is called the “palaver tree,” the place where we discussed and attempted to reclaim our lives. For my father, of course, the “palaver tree” would have been another place, the Lafayette Theatre, long before it was destroyed. For my younger brothers and sisters, and my nieces and my nephews, it was the balcony from which Fidel Castro spoke: spoke, dear candidate, to them, from the balcony of a Harlem hotel. The listening crowd knew nothing of Cuba, and couldn’t have cared less about communism; but they knew that someone was speaking to them.

  It would seem to me that the American social disaster is a tremendous burden on the American taxpayer. It is an investment on which his only return is chaos.

  Of course, the candidate will answer, his unhappy priorities are dictated by the responsibility of protecting the “free world.”

  If the candidate really believes this, and is not merely wondering on what unhappy market he can dump our excess Coca-Cola, I challenge him to take a look at what he thinks he is protecting. I dare the candidate to take to the “chitterling” or the “fried chicken” or the Muslim or the Baptist or the Holy Roller circuit: to walk, not ride, through the black streets of Washington, D.C., and Watts and Detroit and Chicago and San Francisco and Boston and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and Baltimore, and, yes, Atlanta, and Cleveland, and Gary, and Jackson, and New York. I dare him to teach to, speak to, not merely bow before, any class in any school in any ghetto.

  I challenge the candidate to visit Harlem Hospital, and then stand in the streets and explain to the Harlem populace how Harlem Hospital comes about. I challenge the candidate to justify the methadone program. I challenge him to visit the prisons of this country, from hamlet to hamlet and coast to coast, eve
n daring to go so far as to question Senator Eastland’s plantation: and not to wait, as in the case of the late and much lamented J. Edgar, until he is safely dead.

  I challenge the candidate to love the country which he claims to love to the entire extent of love: to face it, this present chaos, and help the country to face itself, and, for the sake of all our children, to change it.

  (1976)

  The News from All the Northern Cities Is, to Understate It, Grim; the State of the Union Is Catastrophic

  I CAN SCARCELY BELIEVE that I first met Martin Luther King Jr. twenty-one years ago, in Atlanta. I find it nearly impossible to believe that my stocky younger brother, which is the way I thought of him, has been dead for ten years. Ten years!

  The mind and the heart refuse and resist the knowledge. (So does the body, perhaps: this note has been delayed for twenty-four hours because the moment I began to write it, I fell ill.) Searching for a kind of lucidity, one picks up the sorrowful chronology and holds on to it. Yes, for example, it was 1957 when we first met. Martin was stealing a few days from Montgomery to work on his book. The blacks in Montgomery were still marching. Yes, I last saw him alive in 1968 in New York, and, yes, I was in Hollywood, in 1968, when he was murdered in Memphis.

  And this is 1978. Ten years ago, I was working on the screen version of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and was sitting beside a California swimming pool, with Billy Dee Williams, when the phone rang and a friend’s voice told us that Martin had been shot. And I really feel, as I write this now, the same unbelieving wonder, the same shock and helpless rage.

  I have a dream.

  One looks around this country now, remembering those words, and that passion. A vast amount of love and faith and passion, and blood, have gone into the attempt to transform and liberate this nation.