JAMES BALDWIN INTERVIEWÉ PAR KENNETH CLARK (24 mai 1963)

- Through a strange set
of circumstances,

we managed to record
this conversation with James Baldwin

immediately after both of us attended
that now-famous meeting

between a group of Mr. Baldwin's friends
and Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

I believe much of the emotion
of that historic occassion

spilled over into our conversation.

In an attempt to ease the tension,
I started by asking him

to dig back and tell us something
about his childhood

and his growing up.

- My mind is someplace else,
really,

but to think back on it,

I was born in Harlem,
Harlem Hospital, you know,

and we grew up--
the first house I remember

was on Park Avenue.

Which is not the American
Park Avenue,

or maybe it is
the American Park Avenue.

both: Uptown Park Avenue.
- Where the railroad tracks are.

And we used to play on the roof,

and in the...
I can't call it an alley

but near the river, there was
a kind of dump, garbage dump.

That was the first...

Those are the first scenes
I remember.

I remember my father...

had trouble keeping us alive.
There were nine of us.

And... I was the oldest,

so I took care of the kids.

And that was Daddy...
I understand much better now.

Part of his problem was,
he couldn't feed his kids.

But I was a kid,
and I didn't know that.

And he was very religious.
Very rigid.

He kept us together, I must say.

And when I look back on it,

it's nearly 40 years ago
that I was born,

when I think back
on my growing up

and walked that same block today,
because it's still there,

and think of the kids
on that block now,

I'm aware that something terrible
has happened,

which is very hard to describe.

I am, in all but, you know,
technical, legal fact, a southerner.

My father was born in the south.
My mother was born in the south.

And if they had waited, you know,
two more seconds,

I might have been born
in the south.

But that means that I was raised
by a family whose roots

were essentially rural, and...

both: Southern rural.

- And whose relationship
to the church

was very direct, because it was
the only means they had

of expressing their pain
and their despair.

But 20 years later,
the moral authority,

which was present
in the negro northern community

when I was growing up,
has vanished,

and people talk about progress,
and I look at Harlem,

which I really know.

I know it like I know my hand.

And it is much worse there today
than it was when I was growing up.

- Would you say this is true
of the schools too?

- It's much worse in the schools.

- What school did you go to?
- I went to PS24.

I went to PS139.
- 139.

- Frederick Douglass.
- We are fellow alumni.

I went to 139.

- And... I didn't like
one of my teachers,

but I had a couple of teachers
who were very nice to me.

One was a negro teacher.

And I remember, I was...
[stammers]

You asked me these questions.
I'm trying to answer you.

I remember coming home from school,

and you could guess
how young I must have been,

and my mother asked me
if my teacher was colored or white,

and I said she was a little bit colored,
a little bit white.

But she was about your color.

And, as a matter of fact,
I was right.

That's part of the dilemma
of being an American negro,

that one is a little bit colored
and a little bit white,

and not only in terms--
in physical terms

but in the head
and in the heart,

and there are days,
this is one of them,

when you wonder...

what your role is in this country
and what your future is in it.

How precise
are you going to reconcile...

...yourself to your situation here

and how you're going
to communicate

to the vast, heedless, unthinking...
cruel white majority

that you are here.

And to be here means that
you can't be anywhere else.

I'm terrified at the moral apathy,
the death of the heart,

which is happening in my country.

These people have deluded themselves
for so long

that they really don't think
I'm human.

I'd base this on their conduct,
not on what they say.

And this means that they have become
in themselves

moral monsters.

- Well, Jim, I can say--
- That's a terrible indictment.

- Yes.
- I mean every word I say.

- Well, we are confronted with
the racial confrontation

in America today, and I think

the pictures of dogs

in the hands of human beings
attacking other human beings...

- In a free country.
- In a free country.

- In the middle
of the 20th century.

- This Birmingham...
It's clearly not restricted to Birmingham,

as you so eloquently pointed out.

What do you think

can be done to change,
to use your term,

the moral fiber of America?

- I think that one has got to
find some way

of putting the present administration
of this country on the spot.

One has got to force, somehow,
from Washington

a moral commitment,
not to the negro people

but to the life of this country.

It doesn't matter any longer--

and I'm speaking for myself,
for Jimmy Baldwin,

and I think I'm speaking for
a great many other negros too,

it doesn't matter any longer
what you do to me.

You can put me in jail.
You can kill me.

By the time I was 17, you had done
everything that you could do to me.

The problem now is, how are you
going to save yourselves?

It was a great shock to me...
I want to say this on the air.

The attorney general did not know...

- You mean the attorney general
of the United States?

- Mr. Robert Kennedy...

...didn't know that I would have trouble

convincing my nephew to go to Cuba,
for example,

to liberate the Cubans

in defense of a government

which now says it has done--
it is doing everything it can do--

which cannot liberate me.

Now, there are 20 million people
in this country.

And you can't put them all
in jail.

I know how my nephew feels.
I knew how I feel.

I know how the cats
in the barbershop feel.

A boy last week, he was 16,
in San Francisco,

told me on television--
thank God we got him to talk.

Maybe somebody will start to listen.

He said, "I've got no country.
I've got no flag."

He's only 16 years old.

And I couldn't say, "You do."

I don't have any evidence
to prove that he does.

They were tearing down his house

because San Francisco is engaging,

as most northern cities
now are engaged,

in something called urban renewal.

Which means moving the negros out.
It means negro removal.

That is what it means.

And the federal government
is an accomplice to this fact.

Now, this--we're talking about
human beings.

There's not such a thing
as a monolithic wall

or, you know, some abstraction
called the negro problem.

These are negro boys and girls,

who, at 16 and 17, don't believe
the country means anything that it says

and don't feel they have
any place here,

on the basis of the performance
of the entire country.

- But, now, Jimmy--
- Am I exaggerating?

- No, I certainly cannot say
that you're exaggerating.

But there is this picture of a group
of young negro college students

in the south,
coming from colleges

where the whole system
seemed to conspire

to keep them from having courage,
integrity, clarity,

and the willingness to take the risks
which they have been taking

for these last three or four years.

Could you react to the student
nonviolent movement

which has made such an impact
on America, which has affected

both negros and whites
and seems to have jolted them

out of the lethargy of tokenism
and moderation?

How do you account for this, Jim?

- Well, of course, one of the things
I think that happened, Ken, really,

is that in the first place,
the negro has never been

as docile as white Americans
wanted to believe.

That was a myth.

We were not singing and dancing
down the levee.

We were trying to keep alive.

We were trying to survive
a very brutal system.

The negro has never been happy
in his place.

What those kids,
first of all, prove...

First of all, they prove that.

They come from
a long line of fighters.

And what they also prove--

again, I want to get
to your point, really.

What they also prove
is not that the negro has changed

but that the country
has arrived at a place

where it can no longer contain
the revolt.

It can no longer, as it could do once--

Let's say I...
was a negro college president

and I needed a new chemistry lab,
so I was a negro leader.

I was a negro leader
because the white man said I was.

And I came to get
a new chemistry lab.

"Please, sir."

And the tacit price I paid
for that chemistry lab

was the control
of people I represented.

And now I can't do that.

When the boy said, this afternoon...

We were talking to a negro student
this afternoon

who has been through it all,
who's half dead by 25.

both: Jerome Smith.

- That's an awful lot to ask
a person to bear.

The country sat back in admiration
of all those kids

for three or four or five years

and has not lifted a finger
to help them.

Now, we all knew--

I know you knew,
and I knew too--

that a moment was coming
when we couldn't guarantee,

that no one could guarantee,
that it won't reach the breaking point.

You know, you can only survive
so many beatings, so much humiliation,

so much despair, so many broken promises,

before something gives.

Human beings
are not, by nature, nonviolent.

Those children had to go--
had to pay a terrible price

in discipline, in moral discipline,

and interior effort and courage

which the country cannot imagine,

because it still thinks Gary Cooper,
for example, was a man.

I mean his image. I have nothing
against, you know, him.

- You said something--
that you cannot expect them

to remain possibly nonviolent?
- No, you can't. You can't.

And furthermore, they were always,
these students that we're talking about,

a minority.

The students we're talking about,
when I was in Tallahassee,

there were some students protesting,

but there were many,
many, many more students

who had given up,
who were desperate,

and who Malcolm X can reach, for example,
much more easily than I can.

- What do you mean?

- Well, what Malcolm tells them...

What Malcolm tells them, in effect,

is that they should be proud of being black,
and God knows that they should be.

That's a very important thing to hear

in a country which assures you
you should be ashamed of it.

Of course, in order to do this,
what he does

is destroy a truth
and invent a history.

What he does is say,
you're better because you're black.

But, of course, that isn't true.

That's the trouble.

- Do you think
that this is an appealing approach

in that the black Muslims,
in preaching black supremacy,

seek to exploit the frustration
of the negro?

- I don't think--
to put it as simply as I can

and without trying, now, to investigate
whatever the motives of any given

Muslim leader may be,

it is the only movement in the country
which we can call grassroots.

I hate to say that, but it is true.

Because it is only...
When Malcolm talks,

or when... [inaudible]

They articulate, for all
the negro people who hear them,

who listen to them,
they articulate their suffering,

the suffering which has been,
in this country, so long denied.

That's Malcolm's great authority
over any of his audiences.

He corroborates their reality.

He tells them that they really--
It is, you know?

- Jim, do you think that this is
a more effective appeal

than the appeal of Martin Luther King?

- It's much more sinister
because it is much more effective.

It's much more effective
because it is, after all,

comparatively easy
to invest a population

with a false morale by giving them
a false sense of superiority.

And it will always break down
in a crisis.

It's the history of Europe, simply.

It's one of the reasons
we're in this terrible place.

It's one of the reasons that
we have five cops

standing on a black woman's neck
in Birmingham,

because, at some point, they believed,

they were taught and they believed
that they were better than other people

because they were white.

It leads to a moral bankruptcy.

It is inevitable.
It cannot but lead there.

But my point here is that
the country is, for the first time,

worried about the Muslim movement.

They shouldn't be worried
about the Muslim movement.

That's not the problem.

The problem is to eliminate the conditions
which breed the Muslim movement.

- Well, I'd like to come back to...

...get some of your thoughts
about the relationship

between Martin Luther King's appeal,

that is effectively nonviolent,
and his philosophy

of disciplined love
for the oppressor,

and what do you think this...
what is the relationship

between this and the reality
of the negro masses?

- Well, to leave Martin out of it
for a moment,

Martin's a very rare,
very great man.

Martin's rare for two reasons,

partly because just--
just because he is,

and because he's a real Christian,
and he really believes in nonviolence.

He's arrived at something
in himself,

which permits him or allows him
to do it.

And he still has great moral authority
in the south.

He has none whatever in the north.

Poor Martin has gone through
God knows what kind of hell

to awaken the American conscience,

but Martin has reached
the end of his rope.

There are some things Martin can't do.
Martin's only one man.

Martin can't solve the nation's
central problem by himself.

There are lots of people,
lots of black people, I mean, now,

who don't go to church no more
and don't listen to Martin, you know?

And who, anyway, are themselves
produced by a civilization

which has always glorified violence
unless the negro had the gun.

So then Martin is undercut
by the performance of the country.

The country is only concerned
about nonviolence

if it seems that I'm going to get violent.

It's not worried about nonviolence
if it's some Alabama sheriff.

- Jim,

what do you see
deep in the recesses of your own mind

as the future of our nation?

And I ask that question in that way
because I think that

the future of the negro
and the future of the nation are linked.

- They're insoluble.
- Yeah.

Now, what do you see?

Are you essentially optimistic?
Or pessimistic?

And I really don't want
to put words in your mouth,

because what I really want to find out
is what you really believe.

- Well, I'm both glad and sorry
you asked me that question.

I'll do my best to answer it.

I can't be a pessimist,

because I'm alive.

To be a pessimist means that
you have agreed that human life

is an academic matter.

So I'm forced to be an optimist.

I'm forced to believe that we can survive
whatever we must survive.

But...

The negro in this country...

The future of the negro in this country

is precisely as bright or as dark
as the future of the country.

It is entirely up to the American people
and our representatives,

it is entirely up to the American people

whether or not they are going to face
and deal with and embrace

this stranger,
who they've maligned so long.

What white people have to do
is try to find out in their own hearts

why it was necessary
to have a "nigger" in the first place,

because I'm not a nigger.
I'm a man.

But if you think I'm a nigger,
it means you need it.

And the question you got to ask yourself,
the white population of this country

has got to ask itself, north and south,
because it's one country,

and for a negro, there is no difference
between the north and the south.

There's just a difference in the way
they castrate you,

but the fact of the castration
is the American fact.

If I'm not the nigger here
and you invented him,

you, the white people, invented him,
then you got to find out why.

- Well...

- And the future of the country
depends on that,

whether I was able
to ask that question.

- As a negro
and as an American,

I can only hope that America
has the strength and the capacity...

- The moral strength.

- To ask and answer that question
in an affirmative and constructive way.

- Simply to face that question.
To face that question.

- Thank you very much, Jim.
- Thank you, Ken.