-
- 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.