Free and brave / James Baldwin

[Intro music] The following program is brought to you by the Pacifica Program Service and Radio Archive Two lines I want you to pretend you are delivering on some stage, somewhere in the world as though these lines never been heard before. The Oh say does that that Star Spangled Banner still wave Or the land of the free and the home of the brave. I want you To somehow make a certain leap with me. That I one more quotation I want to give you... and this comes from Nietzsche.

because and that's because of his driving. But it's been in my mind all week long. Then point, the man says I stand before my highest mountains and before my longest journey. And therefore, must I descend deeper than I have ever before descended. Now, there are several thousand things

that one has got to say. In the context that we're speaking, out of which we speaking. And I suppose the first thing I have to suggest, is that one. Consider the fact that In the life of a man, the life of a woman - in anybody's life, There are several elements always at work. With the crucial element I want to, I want to consider here. Is that element of life which we consider to be an identity. The way in which one puts oneself together, the way one imagines oneself to be,

The reality, for example the invented reality, standing before you now, arbitrarily called Jimmy Baldwin, who contains a great many other things. We have agreed, we have succeeded in striking a certain kind of Baldwin of the world. This is his name, and this is what he does, and it's who he is OK but that's not it. Beneath that, wherever- where everybody Is something else. Is a stranger, the stranger with whom one is forced to deal day in and day out. Forced in fact to discover. Forced and back to create as distinct from invent. Life demands of everyone a certain kind of humility, the humility to be able to make the dissent that Nietsche was talking about.

There is, there are two ways, I think. I think there are two ways only, to achieve a life or nation. Let us consider -- I'll be personal because I think it may be the easiest way for me to say it and maybe you will take my word. And the whole business of communication of communion really is to find some common term to make something mean to you, some-- roughly what it means to me. In my life, as I'm sure in your life, when one is young, one supposes there is some way to avoid disaster. If I can spell it out: I mean that when one is young, when I was a little boy, for example,

I used to tell my mother 'I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that I'm going to go here and I'm gonna go there, I'm gonna be a writer, I'm gonna be a fireman, I'm going to do. Do, do, be this.' And Mama would look at me and she would say, 'It's more than a notion.' It took me a long time, a very long time, to begin to realize that she was right and begin to realize what she meant. I, like all of us, thought I knew what I wanted. And thought I knew who I was and thought that I could do it and we all do this. Whatever it was I wanted, wherever I wanted to go, I thought that I could do it without paying my dues. It's one of the things

that one cannot imagine, especially when one's young, is how to pay your dues. You don't even know there are dues to be paid. And later on, one begins to discover, and with great pain, and very much against one's will, that if you want something, whatever it is you want, and whatever it is you want at bottom must be to become yourself. There is nothing else to want. Whatever that is, however, whatever that journey is, one's got to accept the fact that disaster is a condition under which you will make it. The journey, I mean, not make it in the American sense. [audience laughs, claps lightly] And you will learn a certain humility because the term

that you have invented, which you think described and defined you, inevitably collide with the facts of life. And when this collision occurs, and make no mistake, this is an absolutely inevitable collision, when this collision occurs, like two trains in a tunnel, one's got the choice. And it's a very narrow choice, of holding on to your definition of yourself, or saying, as the old folks used to say, and everybody wants to live has to say, 'Yes Lord.' Which means to say yes to life.

Until you can do that, you'll not become a man, or a woman. Now in this country, part of the dilemma, which could become a tragedy, of being what is known, somewhat arbitrarily as an American. The collective effort until this moment, and the collective delusion until this moment, has been precisely my delusion when I was a little boy, that you could get what you wanted and become what you said you were

going to be, painlessly. Furthermore, if one examines, for a second, or if one tries to define the proper noun, "American," one will discover, first of all, that to be an American means a catalogue of virtues. We have something called "I am an American Day", which I gather is meant to reassure everybody [laughter, applause] and to be

an American, in these terms apparently means-- check me out, you think about it. Apparently means, that though Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Scotch, Scotsmen, Italian, may be corrupt. Sexual. Unpredictable. Lazy. Evil. A little lower than the angels. [laughter] We are not. [laughter, applause] I'm quite overlooking the fact that the country was settled by Englishmen, Scots, Germans,

Turks, and Armenians, a little later, to be sure. Every nation under heaven is here. And not, after all, for a very long time. I think that it might be useful in order to survive our present crisis, to do what any individual does, is forced to do, to survive his crisis, which is to look back on his beginnings. The beginnings of this country, it seems to be-- it's a banality to say it, but alas it has to be said: The beginnings of this country have nothing whatever to do with the myth we have created about it, because it did not come about because

a handful of people in Europe, various parts of Europe, said 'I want to be free.' And promptly built a boat or a raft and crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Not at all. Not at all. In passing, let me remark that the word 'liberty', the word 'freedom', are terribly misused words. Liberty is a fact which is also used as a slogan and freedom may be the very last thing that people want. The very last thing. Anyway, the people who settle in the country, the people who came here, and

came here for one reason, no matter how disguised. They came here because they thought it would be better here than where they were. That's why they came. And that's the only reason that they came. Anybody who is making it in England [laughter] [laughter] did not get on the Mayflower. [laughter, applause] This is important, it is important that one begin to recognize this. Because part of the dilemma of this country

is that it has c- it has managed to believe the myth it has created about its own past. Which is another way of saying that it has entirely denied its past. And we all know if we think about it what happens to a person, who was born at a-- say, where I was born, in Harlem. And goes through the world pretending he was born in Sutton Place. However odd this may sound, also happens to a nation, a nation being, when it finally comes into existence, the achievement of a people who make it up. And the quality of the nation being absolutely at the mercy, defined, dictated, by the nature and the quality of the

people who make it up. In this extraordinary endeavor and to create the country called America, a great many crimes were committed. And I want to make it absolutely clear, or as clear as I can make it that I understand perfectly well that crime is universal and common. And I trust that no one will assume that I am indicting or accusing. I'm not any longer interested in the crime. People treat each other very badly and always have. And very probably always will. I'm not

talking about that. I'm talking about denying what one does, which is a much more sinister matter. We did several things in order to conquer the country. There was at the point we reached these shores, a group of people who had never heard of machines or, as far as I know of, money. I think we would call them now a backward nation. And we promptly eliminated them. We killed them. I'm talking about the Indians, in case you don't know what I'm talking about. Well, people have done this for centuries, but, I hazard, I'll bet you, as you

say in Harlem, a fat man, did not many American children, being taught American history, have any real sense of what that collision was like, or what we really did? How we really achieved the extermination of the Indians? What that meant. And it is interesting to consider that very few social critics, none to my knowledge, or I say very few, have begun even to analyze the hidden reasons the cowboy and Indian legend is still one of the most popular legends in American life, so popular that [inaudible] in 1963 dominates the television screen.

And I suppose, you can be sure of that particular item or to close it for the moment, that all those cowboy and Indian stories are designed to reassure us that no crime was committed. We made a legend out of a massacre. Which connection, if I may for a moment digress, there used to be an old joke running around my Negroes if you remember the Lone Ranger, I think he had a sidekick called Tonto, an Indian, there's always a good Indian. They go around the-- [laughter] he rode around with the Lone Ranger and according to my version of the story, the version I heard, Tonto and the Lone Ranger ran into this ambush of nothing but

Indians. And the Lone Ranger said "what are we going to do Tonto?" And Tonto said, "What do you mean, 'we?'" [laughter] Now slavery, like murder, is one of the oldest human institutions so we cannot crawl about the fact of slavery. That is to say we could, but that's another story. But we enslaved him because in order to conquer the country we had to have cheap labor. And the man, who is now known as the American Negro, who is one of the oldest of American citizens, and the

only one who never wanted to come here -- [laughter, applause] [applause] did the dirty work. Hoed the cotton -- do you hoe cotton? No -- chopped cotton, whatever you do with cotton. Picked cotton. [laughter] Lined track. Helped-- in fact I think it is not too strong a statement to say, let me put it this way, without his presence, without that strong back,

the American economy, the American nation, would have had a vast amount of trouble creating its capital. If then-- If one had not had the cat toting the barge, lifting the bales, as we put it, it would be a very different country. And it would certainly be much poorer. And that's alright. But the people I am speaking of, who settled the country, had a fatal flaw. They could see, they could recognize, a man when they saw one.

They knew he wasn't-- I mean you can tell, they knew he wasn't anything else but a man. But since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, and some of them really meant it by the way, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one's life was to say that he was not a man. Because if he wasn't a man then no crime had been committed. That is the basis. That lie is the basis of our present trouble.

Because that is an extremely complex lie. If on the one hand, one man cannot avoid recognizing another man, it is also true then, obviously, that the man, the Black man, who is in captivity and treated like an animal and told that he was one, knew that he was a man and knew that something was wrong. When we got here, those of us who survived the Middle Passage-- let me tell you a very small anecdote: I was in Dakar about a year ago, in Senegal, and just off Dakar there is a very small island

called Gorée which was once property of the Portuguese. And it's simply a rock with a fortress. It is the nearest-- from Africa, the nearest point to America. On this island, my sister and I went to this island, they had something called the slave house and we went there to visit it. And the house is not terribly large. Looks a little like a house you see in New Orleans -- It's the truth. It's about two stories, courtyard, staircase on each side, stone staircase. And the bottom section, which is the first story, I assume that the captains and the slavers were upstairs. Downstairs were the slave

quarters, which were-- You walk through a kind of archway, on either side of you, very dark, very low, and this is made of stone, were a series of cells on either side. Stone floor. Still rusted iron in the walls. It seemed to me -- this may be my imagination, but it seemed to me -- that I could still smell it. What it must have smelled like with all those human beings chained together in such a place. And remember they could not speak to each other because they didn't even come from the same tribe. On either side as I say, in this corridor,

they have the cells. Well straight ahead of you, you come in through this archway and straight ahead of you is a very much smaller doorway made of stone which opens on the sea. You go to the edge of the door and you look down and at your feet are some black stones, the foam of the Atlantic Ocean bubbling up against you. And then I was there, we were there, I tried, but it's impossible -- because the ocean is just the horizon -- I tried to imagine what it must have felt like to find yourself chained

and speechless, in the most serious sense of that word, on your way, where? I confess it for a minute, there were some tourists around who were French, and I almost hit one of them on the head, you know they would not have known why I was angry but it hurt. Anyway. It was the Black man's necessity once he got here to accept the cross. Because he had to survive, to somehow manage to outwit his Christian master. Because what he faced when he got here

was really the Bible and the gun. And that's all right too. What is terrible in it is the fact that American white men are not prepared, first of all, to believe, for example, my version of this story. To believe that it happened. In order to avoid believing that, they have set up in themselves a fantastic system of evasions and denials and justifications which destroyed or is about to destroy their grasp of reality. Which is another way of saying their moral sense. What I'm trying to say, is that the crime

is not the most important thing here. What makes our situation serious is that we have spent so many generations pretending that it did not happen. If you doubt me, ask yourself on what assumptions rest those extraordinary questions that white men ask. No matter how politely, on what assumption rests the question 'would you let your sister marry a [unintelligible]'? is based on some preoccupation in somebody's mind. God knows, you know, I have never given any evidence

of having that particular problem. I'm not interested in marrying your sister. My God. [laughter] I mean that. On what assumption, again, rests the extraordinary question: What does a Negro want? This again comes out of some extraordinary preoccupation in the mind. Something entirely, if I may say so, divorced from reality. It's like saying, "What do seals eat," or I don't know. It is unreal as unreal can be.

When the baby cries you don't ask the baby what it wants, you find out, you know, you change the baby's diaper. That's what you do. You know. You don't run to your next door neighbor and say, "What does my baby want?" [audience laughs] Now let's go back for a minute to where I started. Let's go back to Nietzsche. I stand before my highest mountain. And before my longest journey. And therefore must I descend deeper than I have ever before descended. And we spoke a little earlier about the necessity when the collision between your terms and life occurs.

Of saying yes to life. That's the descent. The difference between a boy and a man is that a boy imagines there is some way to get through life safely. And a man knows he's got to pay his dues. In this country, the entire nation has always assumed that I would pay their dues for them. What it means to be a Negro in this country is that you represent, you are the receptacle of, you are the vehicle of, all the pain, disaster, and sorrow which White Americans think they can escape.

This is what is meant, really what is meant, by keeping the Negro in his place. It is why White people until today are still astounded and offended, if by some miscalculation they are forced to suspect that you are not happy in your place. [audience laughs] This is absolutely true. And I'm not talking about the Deep South. People finally say to you, "But you're so bitter!" [laughter] [applause] [applause] [applause]

There has been in this country for a dangerously long time two levels of experience: One, to put it cruelly, but I think quite truthfully, can be summed up in the image of Doris Day and Gary Cooper. I think you know what they do. And the other, subterranean, indispensable, but denied, which can be summed up, let us say, in the tone of Ray Charles. And there's never been in this country any real confrontation between these two realities. Let me force you, or try to force you to observe a paradox: Though all white Americans, in essence, essentially came from Europe

it is only American Negroes whom Europe understands. Let me spell it out: When the America Negro is in Europe, he and the people whom he finds himself among, are able to establish dialogue which white Americans have great difficulty establishing if they ever do. And the reason is very simple: The European and the Black Americans know what it is to suffer. And Americans don't. Now the bill for this endeavor, to get from the cradle to the grave, looking like Eisenhower,

has now come in. White people are astounded by Birmingham. Black people aren't. White people are endlessly demanding to be reassured that Birmingham is really on Mars. [audience laughs] They don't want to believe, still less, to act on the belief, that what is happening in Birmingham -- now I mean this and I am not exaggerating -- there are several or thousand ways to kill a man. There's several, several thousand ways to be violent. They don't want to realize that there is not

one step, one inch, morally or actually, there is no distance between Birmingham and Los Angeles. [applause] [applause] Now it is entirely possible that we may all go under but until that happens, I prefer to believe, as since a society is created by man, it can be remade by man. The price for this transformation is

high. White people will have to ask themselves precisely why they found it necessary to invent a nigger. Because they invented him. For reasons out of necessities of their own. And every white citizen of this country will have to accept the fact that he is not innocent. Because those dogs and those hoses, those crimes are being committed in your name. Black people, well,

will have to do something very hard, too. But they've done it, some of it, already. Which is to allow the white citizen his first awkward steps toward maturity. But we have functioned in this country precisely that way, for a very long time. We were the first psychiatrists in this country [laughter]. If we can hang on just a little bit longer, all of us, we may make it. We've got to try. For I think that those are the conditions. Thank you.

[applause] [Host/Moderator/Male] First, I must report that there were over 100 questions asked and we selected those that we thought were more pertinent and also those that -- we put aside those that were duplicates. The first one, Mr. Baldwin, reads: Could you please comment on the Muslim situation and the significance of their movement? [Baldwin] The significance of the Muslim movement, it would seem to me, first of all, well this is a complicated question and a complicated answer. A: the Muslim movement came about,

exists and begins to flourish, because the American republic has never honored any of its promises, repeat, any of its promises to its black citizens. That is it's first significance to me, in my mind. It has another significance: It is, at the moment, probably, the only way that a Black boy or a Black girl -- Let me go back. It is probably, if not the only way, one of the only ways that a Black boy or a Black girl can be invested

with a pride in the fact of being Black. And this is extremely important. [applause] The entire country, having lied, in fact, the entire white civilization, having lied about Black people so long, until this very moment -- this was absolutely inevitable. Now I have no objection to those, to that. See, this begins my objection. I am perfectly aware, or imperfectly aware, that I was born in a ghetto, raised there, and in fact never left it, really, no Negro ever does,

if he stays in this country. I am perfectly aware, I think, of the demoralization, and the despair and the destruction which is being bred in those ghettos every single hour of every single day. And I know how hard it is -- any Black person in this country to arrive at any sense of his own value. And yet, there are two ways to arrive at this sense, and this is perhaps rather subtle, I don't think it is, but perhaps it is -- I think one of them is false, and one of them is true. What white

people have done for all of these generations is lie about themselves. And they have put on the color of their skin a totally false value. They have said in effect, for 2000 years, that they're better than everyone else in the world because they are white and look at them. Look at the result. The spiritual, the actual political result, is nothing more or less than a moral and a spiritual bankruptcy because it is not true that the color of the skin has any importance at all in a human life. I know that it seems to, and I know that people have perished because of the color of their skin. But it is not because of the color of their skin, really. It is because of the value placed on it. Is because of what it means in the eyes of someone else or in their own eyes. I want, from the very bottom of my heart, that Black people in this country arrive at a real sense of who they are

and I also understand that life being what it is, and power being what it is, that it is entirely possible that the world will have to align itself for the next 2000 years on the basis of color with the roles reversed. Speaking only for myself, I would like to see this happen. Speaking for myself, my objection to the Muslim movement is two-fold. I do not see that they have an articulate program, by which I mean such things as a rent strike in Harlem, I mean a real revolution. And I do not want my nephew or my son to begin to believe that he is better than white people because he is Black. I don't think one needs to

invest-- I think the Negro people in this country have any need to invent a reason to be proud, they have achieved already-- I know but this a hard thing, but this is true-- they have achieved and endured, and survived, and triumphed over and turned to their advantage already one of the cruelest inflictions in the history of mankind. I think that we have every right to be proud. To be proud that our mothers and our fathers-- [applause] That our mothers and our fathers, in fact our forebears, carried washing on their heads. And even to be proud, I hope you understand what I mean, that they knew how to say, "Yes, sir," and, "No, ma'am," and get what they wanted anyway. That they are with it,

this civilization, to the extent... [APPLAUSE] they are with it, this civilization, to the extent that they took that crossing, they took that cross, and made it something it had never been before in this country. And they took that anguish, and turned it into music. And they are the only people in this country, on the basis of the evidence, who've been able to produce children, to walk through mobs, to get to school. They are the only people in this country, so far, as a body, who seem to have any sense of what America is about. And the American Revolution, if I may say so, depends entirely at the moment on their energy. Now this is a tremendous heritage. And I would not like to throw it away. One invented one.

[APPLAUSE] [APPLAUSE] [APPLAUSE] [APPLAUSE] [LORENZ GRAHAM]: Is there a relationship between the African independence movement, and the present-day struggles of the Negro people in the United States today? [JAMES BALDWIN]: Now, that's a complex question, too. And it's mainly a question which the American government is determined not to face. We are living -- whether or not J Edgar Hoover likes it --

in an age of revolution. There's nothing any of us can do about that, except say no or say yes. The 20 million Negroes in this country, are not only involved, but profoundly involved, with the events, the revolution, in Africa. But with the revolution all over the world, we have made, for the reasons I tried to outline when I was talking to you earlier, the profound mistake of thinking that when we speak, only we are listening. We made the extraordinary mistake of assuming that what we think Cuba is, *is* what Cuba is. [APPLAUSE] I don't know, and this is...

this is really what Bobby Kennedy has in mind when he always...when he asks for a cooling-off period so he won't be embarrassed before the Russians. [LAUGHTER] I don't know, speaking honestly, for example, and this is a very important example, but it's only an example, there are many many many many others. But we can't sit here all night. I don't know, so far, a single Negro, who knows, for what reason, he would go to Cuba to free the Cubans. [APPLAUSE AND LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] [APPLAUSE] [LORENZ GRAHAM]: The next two questions I will ask Mr. Baldwin to ask, together. The first one -- "What specific action can the Caucasian American take

to achieve full human dignity?" The next one -- "What specific political action can the Negro take to achieve full human dignity?" [CROWD MURMURS] [JAMES BALDWIN]: They would appear to be from the same person. I don't want to be... I don't want to sound cruel. I'm not trying to be malicious, and I'm not trying to be clever. Well it seems to me, the first question especially, "What specific action can the Caucasian American take to achieve full human dignity?" -- occurs to me as being somewhat pathetic.

And I mean that. If I may be allowed to be rude for a moment -- not very rude, but I'm trying to make a point. It reminds me of those people who run to doctors or other friends or, I don't know, you know...Anyway, the question comes up, "What should I tell my child about sex?" And I always think, "Don't you know yet??" [LAUGHTER] [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] [APPLAUSE] [JAMES BALDWIN]: I don't think, if I may be harsh, that any white American has the right to such innocence. If you don't know what action you should take to achieve full human dignity, God knows I can't tell you.

[APPLAUSE] [JAMES BALDWIN]: And the second question, "What specific action, etcetera, can the American Negro take to achieve full human dignity?" is [?unclear]? the first. Because obviously, if you don't know what *you* should do to become a human being, you can't imagine what *I* should do to become a human being. [LAUGHTER] And it's part of our dilemma that such questions can be asked. The question has to be asked of someone else, not of me. Of you. [APPLAUSE] [APPLAUSE] [APPLAUSE] [LORENZ GRAHAM]: My son is seven and a half years old, a Negro. He thinks white people are greater than we are. What do I say? [CROWD MURMURS] [JAMES BALDWIN]: That's a hard question.

And, again, I don't want to sound harsh. But it would seem to me the question betrays a certain insecurity on the part of the woman or man who asked it. If your child of seven and a half thinks white people are greater than we are, it can't yet be because of white people, so it must be because of you. [APPLAUSE] [APPLAUSE] [JAMES BALDWIN]: So, the only way to answer your kid's question, is for you, I suspect, to cease trying to be white. [APPLAUSE] [APPLAUSE] [APPLAUSE] [LORENZ GRAHAM]: Do you believe that the Negro in America should or

must limit his struggle to nonviolent action to achieve equality? [JAMES BALDWIN]: Should or must? Do I believe that the Negro in America should or must limit his...? As an extremely complex question, I'll try to tell it like it is -- for me. First of all, it's a question I cannot really answer, because I have not answered it for myself. I don't know. That's the first thing I have to say. I, as far as nonviolence is concerned, I happen, myself, to think of it as an extremely effective strategy -- in some cases. I happen, myself, personally -- speaking now only for me --

to be very not, to... fight physically if I can... any...if I can avoid it. On the other hand, speaking only for myself again, I know very well that I really am not nonviolent. And... I know very well that if you try to kill me, I'm going to try to kill you. [APPLAUSE] [APPLAUSE] The reason I had to put it that way, is because not all American Negroes, and certainly not all students, are Martin

Luther King. And when I say that, I do not mean, in any way whatever, or claim to disrespect, for a man whom I admire and love very much, and who I consider to be a friend of mine. And Martin is an extremely rare person, especially in this civilization, because he really is a Christian. It's from that that his moral force comes. It's also from that, that his trouble comes. Because the students -- they speak only of the students at the moment. I'm not like Martin, and I don't, when I say that, mean to imply the faintest disrespect for the students, either. What I am trying to say is that the strategy of nonviolence,

which is extremely effective, as I say, in some situations -- it has been effective enough, for example, to precipitate crisis in Birmingham -- will probably have to be reevaluated as a strategy, because -- and this is very important -- Martin and the children, or even say we, one light, whoever has been really trying to do anything, has been operating -- let's use just Martin, for the moment, and the children -- Martin and the children have been operating in an almost total vacuum. It would appear, on the basis of the evidence, that everyone in the country expects Martin and David Abernathy and a few other beleaguered ministers and a handful of children to do a very difficult job for them. One of the reasons that the strategy of nonviolence

has to be overhauled, for example, is because neither the government nor the citizenry have shown any suspicion that this is...that this is their battle too. It is possibly time that the question which was posed to me, whether or not Negroes must or should use...stick to the tactic of nonviolence. The question should not be asked of Martin, or of any student, any Negro student, or of me. The question has to be asked of the nation. Because what happens now, depends on what you do. It doesn't depend on Martin, or on me. I may say right now, and Martin certainly says, that we are opposed to violence. But that does not mean there will not be violence. It is too late to

be able to negotiate with any Negro leader. For many many many years the technique of Mr. Charlie was to ask me, for example, in effect, we made a bond. I wanted...I had to have books for the schoolhouse. And I had to go to Mr. Charlie to get it, get them. And the tacit price I was paying for the books for the schoolhouse, which I had to have for the children, was that I would, in some way, control the children. Well the negotiations have broken down to this extent, for ever, that I cannot guarantee the docility of the children, thank God. Whether or not you become violent or remain nonviolent depends entirely on this country. [APPLAUSE] [APPLAUSE] Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you very much.