Take This Hammer

San Francisco? Yeah. Oh, man, I'm gonna tell you about San Francisco. San Francisco did a thing for me. I mean, ever since I got out of high school, I had a couple of jobs. worked at a couple of hat companies and warehouses. I mean, after a while they say, well, I guess we're gonna lay you off for a couple of weeks, you know. Alright, they talk about the South. The South is not half as bad as San Francisco. You want me tell you about San Francisco? I'll tell you about San Francisco. The white man, he's not taking advantage of you out in public like they're doing down in Birmingham. But he's killing you with that pencil and paper, brother. When you go to look for a job, can you get a job? Can you get a job, Winkle? This is the San Francisco Americans pretend does not exist. They think I'm making it up. National Educational Television presents Take This Hammer. This is a film report on a visit to the city of San Francisco by the novelist, essayist and playwright James Baldwin. Mr. Baldwin's guide on this tour of the city is the executive director of Youth for Service, Orville Lustre. Take this

hammer and tell it to the captain. You tell him I'm gone. The drive from the airport into any American city looks pretty much the same. You could be anywhere. But for James Baldwin, this similarity goes deeper. From the drive into San Francisco, Baldwin began talking about the increasing bitterness, demoralization and despair of Negro youths in northern cities. And it was decided that we would explore the existence of such attitudes and conditions in the city of San Francisco with its widely advertised liberal and cosmopolitan traditions. Baldwin also talked about his concept of dues paying or living up to one's responsibilities and commented that many Northerners seem to feel that because they do not live in Mississippi, they are somehow paying their dues.

I think the truth is that everyone on the one hand is fundamentally capable of paying his dues. But no one pays his dues willingly. And the white man, like the black man, like any other man on earth, can pay his dues if he realizes that that's what he's got to do. As long as you think there's some way to get through life without paying your dues, you're going to be bankrupt. Because the bill has come in. It's not coming in. It is in. And the great question now is precisely what we've got in the bank. This, course, is everything we think we have, everything. And Birmingham is an incident, you know, which may become a shrine. What is really crucial is whether or not the country, the people in the country, the citizenry, are able to recognize that there is no moral distance.

No moral distance, which is to say no distance between the facts of life in San Francisco and the facts of life in Birmingham. One's got to call, you know, one's got to tell it like it is. And that's where it's at. I imagine it would easy if any white person walking through San

Francisco to imagine that everything was at peace, because it certainly looks that way, you know, on the surface. San Francisco is much prettier than New York. It's easier to hide in San Francisco than in New York, because you've got the views, you've got the hills. You've got the San Francisco legend, is that it's a cosmopolitan and forward -looking. But it's just another American city. And if you're a black man, that means it's a very bitter thing to say. The children dying here, because they are in New York for the very same reason. Let's see, it's a much better place to lie about it, which really all it comes to. Nobody wants to destroy the image of San Francisco. I like to quench you with San Francisco as a whole, Mr. Baldwin, and I think mostly what's being watched here today is something black. young people go to school together,

they graduate off the same stage, and then when it comes to jobs, the black face is not qualified. But they graduate, then my daughter have to go clean up the same girl's house that she graduates off the stage. As I say, the most thing that's being watched is the black face. What we were talking about last night, coming into the airport, was the real situation in the city, as opposed to the image San Francisco would like to present. Well, why don't you tell me a little bit about it? I know a lot about New York, and I'm a stranger here. But as you say, I'm sure the principal holds, I'm curious about the details. Well, one thing about it, in this particular area, about 80 % of the people in this area are Negro. This is a real large housing project. There's, as far as delinquency is concerned, we'll rank about four. The job situation is bad. This is a real black belt of San Francisco. I think that the lady over to your left, Mrs. Nichols,

is a good representative of one of the indigenous leaders in this area. Tell me something, you sound like a stupid question. There's a question I have to ask myself all the time. What precisely do you say to a Negro kid to invest him with a morale which the country is determined to shan't have, or to spell it out more specifically? When dealing with a Negro kid and trying to insist that he know, that he can do anything he wants to do, how do you make him believe it? That's a difficult question. I think that one of the main things that we have to make him believe, they say everybody could be the president of the United States. And then this boy grows up and he comes up, but time he gets 40 to 50 years old, he begins to find out that this

is not true. to make him be able to face what's coming to him in the future. He's going to be a Negro president in this country. He'll never be a Negro president in this country. Why do you say that? We can't get jobs, how are we going to be a president? Got it. But I want you to think about this, that there will be a Negro president out of this country, but it will not be the country that we are sitting in now. But if you say to yourself, there will never be a Negro president out of this country, then what you're doing is agreeing with white people who say you are inferior. It's not important really, you know, whether or not there's a Negro president. I mean, in that way, what's important is that you should realize that you can become the president. There's nothing anybody can do that you can't do. Well, the truth is that to get, I don't think this is exaggeration, I think the truth still is

that even to get the most Negro opportunity, you've to be at least five times as good as anybody else around. Five times as good, not only at the job, but this is what is so dangerous, I think. You know, to have a certain, the boys that grew up with, I grew up in the streets in Harlem. And now the survivors, one marks all the survivors, is a certain ruthlessness, which was absolutely indispensable if one were going to survive. I can do it. Oh, have work. Don't have to work for nobody. I can make it. How do you make it? To be how I make it. This is something I'm still only how I make it. I mean, look, I haven't died myself, but I thought, you go back to the police when I'm dead. That's so awesome. And it's me who will do that. And you will do something never. It's how I thought to you that I'd rob the bank in Los Angeles. Do you believe that? Well, no, if you don't say you don't. I ain't gonna say I didn't do that. The same kids we're talking about now,

their real problem is that they cannot find in the country any, any reason to accept anything the country says. And they're very young, so they can't find anything else either. And this is how they end up, for example, on the needle. It's a crime committed by one section of the population of the populace against another section of the populace. And it's a crime which really could destroy this country. What do you think about the police? I think they have a purpose, but then, again, the way some of these people do you sometimes when they pick you up and stop you. Well, like a couple of times, they'd be downtown just walking around. look at you. If you look suspicious, they would just stop you. Like I was going to show one night, me and my wife, and we just happened to go around Market Street and we'd seen this police car go by. All right, we could turn the corner, the next corner, they'd meet us and they'd stop us. show starts at 745. We were out there until 9 o 'clock. They didn't have an excuse to stop us, but they stopped us to search the

car and call in and this and that. And what was the purpose of that? We weren't doing anything wrong. Nobody was mad. Let me ask you one thing. What do police do when they get mad? I mean, we ordinary citizens, we get mad and we can do things to hurt people in Robbins still. What do they do when they get mad? Who do they take this team off on? I think you know the answer to that question. Well, I couldn't answer that because the police has never bothered me in that way, but I read newspapers and I've been living around here all my life and I see things going on. Well, when a policeman gets mad, he's got a gun and he's got a club. I mean, you, too, know that. Yeah. It's one thing that's the different in San Francisco and Birmingham. It is that San Francisco is whitewash. Yeah, precisely. In San Francisco, it's under the rug. Yeah. No, it hasn't hit the headline yet. And everyone in San Francisco, every white person in San Francisco, pretend to have got a Negro problem. Everywhere I have been in this country, we talk to a white person who says racial relations

are excellent and I get to find a single Negro in this country who agrees with that. And then if you ask that the Negro have a better opportunity, ask that Negro be hired in a large firm, they'll reach out in high one, that's to shut your mouth. And put him in the window. Well, Mr. Bowell, I'd like to also say that Hunter's Point seems to me, in my opinion, my way I'm looking at it, Hunter's Point is just like being in Alabama right now. And I feel that we don't, some of the ones that can't go down, we can march on San Francisco for the black man, the black woman. We can do that here because it has been stated that until we work on this, San Francisco and other areas, New York and Chicago and all around, that we can get something done. We can help our brothers in the South. South, yes. Those, black people in Alabama are my people. yes. Primarily I'm from Texas. anywhere in the South, anywhere a Negro, a black man is involved, I'm there. I'm the mother of five kids, the mother

of a nine week old baby. But if the time comes where I can't in San Francisco, I certainly will beg barry a ticket to go to Alabama. And I am ready. I suppose that no one in San Francisco has any sense of what a dangerous area this is. And I think this is one of the real troubles is that the Negro in San Francisco, he doesn't really know his place because it hasn't been really spelled out. I mean he's trying to find his place and it's so, you know, this is one of the problems, you know, I mean, what places are for me? know, he came out to escape. then you keep, you know, you find yourself facing the Pacific Ocean, you know, there's no place else to go. yes. You know, now you can see this is

more residence, I mean, apartments and so forth. Going down, it will soon be to mortgage to me. The great problem is how in the world one is going to invest these children with a new morale in some sense of their own worth. Because the country is going to do it. The country won't do it. I suppose one could say that the moment the country can't do it, isn't there much sense of its own worth? You have no race in yourself. We have no race in ourselves. We have no class in the home. No class. Wait minute. Tell me what you mean. What I mean, yeah. I mean, trying to explain. I have nothing over here. I don't have anything. How long I felt that way since 1956? Why did you feel that way?

Because I realized what a dark white man was. How did you come to realize that? When he got to start jumping on me and putting me in jail and everything, you know. Where did that happen? Where? Right here in San Francisco, California. Tell me how it started. How it started? Yeah. What do you mean how it started? Tell me man, the first time you were arrested. The first time I was arrested? Yeah. That was in 1948. That was in 1948? What for? Well, I don't know what they caught it, but I got caught in the bedroom with a little white girl. Where was that? Yeah. How old were you in 1948? Eight. What? Eight. You were eight years old. Yeah. You eight years old in 1948. You were caught in the bedroom with a little white girl. Yeah. And you went to jail? Yeah. When you were eight? Yeah. In San Francisco? Look, you learn from the world you live in, brother. That's why many teach you in this book, but it's what you want to know. And you don't even know nothing about it. He's not even teaching me about the future of my people. Why you go to school for them? Tell me. We don't even have a country.

I know that. Do we have a country? He said, you know what? That's your country, which is not your country. What flag do you a black man flag? You have no flags, brother. No flags at all. I mean, people, we're not going to get nothing. Not by sitting around here, doing these cities and demonstrations and nothing. People are going to do anything. how are we going to do it? By violence. uprising, having a revolution. But there are 20 million of us. 20 million? That's enough. Not these days and not in those cities. Oh, it's enough. They're scattered. 48 states. 48 states, get them together. How? How? Through Islam. What? The true religion, you know? Get all the people together. Get all the people believing one thing, and then they can't help but stick together. I mean, we can't stick together. Now half of us Christians, the other half Baptist, you know, some Jews and all that. How much better is that going to do us?

So you think those things we can do? Let's get together. Let's an armed uprising. Really? Let's put blood, you know? Let everybody bleed a little bit. That's the only way we're going to get anything. What happened to the people in Birmingham? Well, Birmingham isn't over yet. Yeah, it's over. Oh, yeah, it's over. It's They done sent in the state troopers. The federal. That's all over now. People, they had a little old, you know, little old show Sunday night, you know. That was the only thing they did. When they was marching around in them thousands and thousands, what done happened there? They got mad Sunday. Jumped on a few of them. Sent a few of them to the hospital. Then what happened? They said, we're going to give you what you want, huh? Yeah. That ain't nothing. Ain't going get nothing. Now, the Negro teenager doesn't have any possibility. As we sit here now, mean, as of this moment, this is not historical. Does not have any possibility of

accepting American history, is saying there's no way of learning it. Because it is not being taught. There is no possibility for him to begin to act on what we always think of as the American assumptions, know, man to man for all that and all that jazz. It is not he wouldn't. It's because there's no possibility of his doing so. Because the country intends to keep him in his place and still does. So the only way a Negro teenager can make it is to step outside that system. know, to become an effector criminal on whatever level. You know, to become an operator, you know, like really to make it. Or to train the Malcolm X. They try to tear down our homes, brother. When the white man try to tear down your homes, then it's time for you to do something. But what can we do? We don't know anything about what's going on. I mean, we try to go to the meetings and things like that. We watch the television. We watch all this about Birmingham down there. Just like Malcolm X said yesterday on television, he said the white man,

he talk about truths and all this man, Mr. King, he down there talking about, yeah, can we get some kind of, can we get some kind of cooperation? Can we get some kind of truth down there? Oh, what are they doing down there? They're not doing anything. I'm calling him a chump just like Malcolm X called. He's a chump and I think a black Muslim is writing some of his doings. And I think that a truth down there is impossible. It's utterly impossible. It's fantastic and it's unbelievable. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait, let me tell you. They're talking about better jobs. Jobs right here. You want to tell you what kind of jobs they're going to give us? They're going to let us tear down our own homes out here in Hunters Point. That's the job we're getting. And you know what they're going to pay us? Let me tell you what they're going to pay us. They're going to pay you $2 an hour. They're to holler some kind of apprenticeship deal or something like that. Now, else is that gaining you? It's not gaining you a thing. You won't

get anything. They'll help you tear down your own homes. It's a job temporarily. And then what you're going to do? Where you going to live? You're not going to live anywhere. They're not even in the process of trying to tell you where you're going to live. Or are they talking about a tear down Hunters Point? How have been in San Francisco? Well, I've been in San Francisco about 18 years. Every since I was about a year or two old. you live around here, too? Yeah. It's a pretty old man. stay in a temporary house? No, I stay in project. That's a temporary house. There ain't no temporary house no more. They tear them down. That's a temporary house. Not a temporary house. There ain't no more. We ain't going to be no friends when they get through. I ain't no friends. We're going to be living out on the street. I'm going kick your butt, Daddy. You don't think you feel bad? Yeah, I you feel bad. won't be no place to go. We'll be living out here on streets and tents. Well, where would you like to go if you could? What part of San Francisco would you like to go? I'd like to stay up here on top of the hill. You would? Hey. How long have been living on top of the hill? Every since I've been

barred. And then this is part of our redevelopment also. What do you mean? you say redevelopment? You mean the removal of Negroes. Yes, that's what I thought you meant. In other words, a of the Negroes who came because the Japanese were pushed out. Now, they're pushed out themselves. They're being pushed out themselves. That's right. In effect, San Francisco is reclaiming this property. That's right. To build it up, which means Negroes have to go. That's right. And in... Where are they going to go? Well, they're going out to Hunter's Point and to the, uh, Hadesbury area and also into Ocean View. Where will they can find reasonable rents? Yeah. South of Market and all these other places. Where will they can find cheap rent? In other words, it's going from one ghetto to the other. Yes, yes. It's the Negro housing project, in effect. Yes. Well, there's a few Caucasians staying there, you know. Uh -huh. Well, I know a lot about housing projects in New York.

But I'm sure this hasn't differed at all. No. How's there some of the same problems, although the building, the exterior, looks... Well, the exterior looks small, but it's the whole point, Yes. But I know what goes on inside. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm sure that in the housing project... I know the housing project is in New York. The kids are spies, you know. Better housing in a ghetto is simply not possible. You can create, you can build a few better plants, but you cannot do anything about the moral and psychological effects of being in a ghetto. Yes, I do. This is the point. Everybody living in those housing projects is just as endangered as ever before by all the things that a ghetto means. By raising a kid in one of those housing projects. I would still have, at the front door, or probably right next door in the housing project, all the things that I was trying to escape. And I mean such things as... I mean, even from such things as dealing

with insurance companies, if I want to fire insurance, know, to the fact that in the playground, my boy and my girl will be exposed to the man who sells narcotics, for example, to a million forces which are inevitably set in motion when the people are despised. And you can't pretend that you're not despised if you are. You were saying yesterday that children can't be fooled. But I could be fooled, you know, and be glad about having a three room, whatever it is, you know. You might as well try and... a terrace overlooking a garage. But if... my kid won't be. If my kids are being destroyed, that is fantastic about this. This is ILW housing project, which will be interracial. The people who are renegade now are 70 % are Caucasian, 30 % Negro.

Then above that will be the IKLA homes and so forth. IKLA has always let Negroes buy if they had the money of all the apartments. mean, their houses cost, say, from 22 ,000 up to 32 ,000. That's so natural. This automatically... It eliminates a lot of people. I conclude that all this is something to do with money. The land has been reclaimed for money and that the people who are putting up their houses expect to make a profit. But it seems to me, I'm not attacking what's called a profit motive. There are some things more important than profits. I know the New York City has been turned into a desert, really, for the same reason. It's happening in San Francisco now. It's as though the society made the assumption and certainly acts on the assumption that to make money is more important than to have citizens. We're paying to our price for this. Because this isn't only what it's doing to Negro children, which is God knows bad enough. It's what it does to white children who grow up believing

that it is more important to make a profit than it is to be a man. And that's the way the society really operates. I don't care what society says. This is what it operates. And these are the goals it sets. And these goals aren't worthy of a man. Nevertheless, let's know it. Are you working on it? No, I'm not. What has been some of your problems as a Negro in San Francisco? Well, my main problem is finding a job. Yesterday, I talked to a guy, a white fellow that worked at a fitness station. He got a service two months and he got two jobs. I've been here eight years and I worked about three study jobs. And I look here every day. Just like he said, he started out. looked maybe once or twice a day and he worked at a fitness station and worked long summer work. And he told me from his own mouth who was on top. He didn't come out and see it just like I'm going to see it. But he came out and told me that you got to know somebody in San Francisco to get somewhere.

And by knowing somebody, it's got to be somebody with authority. And nobody in San Francisco, no colored man got no authority. You know what There are no Negro leaders in San Francisco. Did you feel the damage? Well, there are a few. There are a few. Do you know any? No, I don't know any. But the ones that get up there, they don't want to help nobody. No one has ever helped you? No, nobody would have thought it. Besides, my parole officer. Even the least damaged of those kids would have to. Put it as mild as it can be put tomorrow. We'll have to be a little sardonic. A little sardonic about the things he sees on television, what the president says, and all those movies about being a good American, and all that jazz. And he'll look at this, look over there, and look up here. And he

would despise the people, you know, who are able to have such a tremendous gap between their performance and their profession. But the more damaged kids, somebody feel like blowing it up. Somebody feel like blowing it up. Speaking only for myself, I feel a little sardonic. I'm civilized, I think. But at the time of life, and I would have felt just like blowing it up, what's more crucial, what's more terrible is how, since one's in the mainland alone, in terms of any help you can get from the country in this effort, how you get through to the least damaged kids. And I don't know what I could say, which would make any sense to them, because in fact, this does not make any sense. Now, with all of these beautiful buildings, now they're going to be ringed in by hostile people, just like they have in New York. Hostile and frightened people, because they walk down the street and wonder why, the first new girl boy they see looks at them as though he wants to kill

them, and if he gets a chance, tries. And it's because he can't go to Asia, know. It's because he has no ground to stand here. The cat said yesterday, I got no country, I got no flag. And it isn't because he was born paranoid that he said that, it's because the performance of the country for his 18 years on Earth has proven that to him. Now, how one manages to make these people, these blind people, begin to see, what does anything about that, that building? It has absolutely no foundation, and it really does not have any foundation. It's going to come down one way or another. Either we will correct what's wrong, or it will be corrected for us. And this is the same... What was that? The St. Mary's Cathedral. This bomb building here. mean, not bomb, but I mean this

fire. It looks like a bomb. That was a fire. But this is going to be torn down, but this will not be the site of the cathedral. They are going to change it. Really, it's horrible to look at. Oh, yeah. This was started one night. Some of the kids were having a dance downstairs. Yeah. It didn't take it very long. just did the whole thing. But as a result, the Catholic Church was able to raise $15 million to build another cathedral. Some people know how to make it. I was raised a Christian. know, my daddy and my mama were very religious. Many of the white Christians were not Christians because of way they treated black people. And the Christian Church in this country has never, in my experience, never as far as I know, been Christian. The record is much more than... is much more than shameful. The record proves that as we stand here as of this moment, Christian Church is bankrupt. It's not a single person I could turn to if I were trying to deal with one of those boys who were talking to yesterday.

If I try to tell him to go to church or even suggest to the name of Jesus Christ, spitting my face. It's not because he doesn't like my face. It's because the white Christians have done and do and now deny. All these churches are absolutely meaningless. They're almost blasphemous. If they don't mean it, they should, you know, they should... Say so. Christianity has become a kind of social club. You have to have a membership card to get in. And black people can't have a membership card. Actually, Christianity at the moment looks rather like that church. That shell. What's the God -shop for me? What place is The God -shops. I think the God -shops... I know the God -shops are there to console a whole lot of desperate people. What we can hear call the fate of Christianity, really. People in the God -shops are there because it gives them the only... There's only one of the few places they can go to find anywhere getting through their day. Dealing

with the landlord and the pawnbroker and the children and the whole horrible complex of forces which bear you down every day. One can no longer accept this whole notion of heaven later in a concentration camp here. Oh, God. Next to the Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church. Yes. This is one of the real little God -shops. White people have always thought that the Negro church is singing and dancing and praying. Maybe they were really quite simple -minded and happier than white people. What goes on in those little God -shops, you know, is exactly the same thing that's going on down in the Muslim temples. But no one has ever made that connection. Off to our left here is one Negro hotel. That's all. The only Negro hotel? Yes. It's called the Book of T. Washington? Yes. Naturally. This is the street that Old Negroes are born on. No.

The street Old Negroes have to survive. Book of T. Washington Baptist Church and the mosque. There's really a great history, you know, a great thing to be summed up in that if one could. Looking at this speed now, the Book of T. Washington hotel, mean, what comes to your mind about some type of music or some passage from the Bible that describes this? Sing the Lord's song in a strange land? I don't know. I'm sure those guys across the street can dance like, you know, their white counterparts can. The reason they can is because they, in a way, they must. It is... It's got to come out somehow. No. And the pressure is great and it has come out in a certain kind of... Negroes have great style. I think this is true, even if it sounds chauvinistic. And white people don't have much style. And one of the reasons that Negroes have a certain style is because they are aware of the conditions of their lives. They can't fool themselves about it. You know?

And when a Negro laughs or tries to make love, or eats, or dances, it's a kind of total action. I don't mean this way. White liberals are really going to think I mean it. I don't mean that they are more sensual, more primitive, spontaneous in all this ethnic jazz. I mean that they live on another level of experience, which doesn't allow them as much room to make believe as white people have. Every American black man knows that there's something that American white men are in the grip of some extraordinary sexual paranoia. And they really are. What that comes from is probably a story for some other, you know, some other time and place, in any case such a long and terrible story, and so

complicated that one couldn't begin to discuss it except by examining, if you like, you know, such things. Well, we read Huckleberry Sin. We read William Faulkner. The relationship between black and white men in this country has always been the most extraordinary. It once... there's something real in it, and a terrifying invention in it. And it goes all the way back from the first time that any American started writing. And there's something you do with the Indian. If one could crack that nut, really, open that can of beans, if one could try to find out, and there's something white people have to do, Negro can't do it. Exactly what a Negro means to a white man. I don't mean what he means in terms of signing petitions and, you know, marching, picking signs and all that jazz. I mean, what he really means. You why are afraid of him? That's what it comes to. If one could begin to examine that,

one might then begin to be able to deal with what is really quite simple matter, well, until we speak in. Let us say, if one could examine that, then the conundrum of the housing situation in San Francisco would not be a conundrum, because it is based on that. And all the lies Americans tell themselves and all the evasions they give themselves are based on some fantastic escape, partly from Europe, and then from the Indian, and now spectacularly, from me. It's insane. Well, white liberals think of themselves as missionaries. I kind of fight once with a fairly well -known white liberal. And I said in the course of my conversation, something of Mr. Charley. This man has been around for a long, time. And he said, who's Mr. Charley? And I was shocked that he didn't know. You know. And I told him who Mr. Charley was. I said, you're Mr. Charley. All white men are Mr. Charley. But liberals have protected themselves

against this level of experience, because their principal motive has so far been, as far as I can tell, a kind of alleviation and protection of their own consciences. They want to do something to help Negroes, because it makes them feel better. But the prices they paid for this kind of effort is that they have never discovered who Negro is. Not what, but who? Only a liberal, for example, could write the script as the defined one. No Negro could. Only a liberal can be offended. John Fisher at Harpers magazine is offended. When, you know, when Negroes make some unmistakable indication that they're going to... they don't want anymore. This is the record, you see. They really think that somehow the record of the Negro people's survival in this country is something on which they can congratulate themselves. And they don't know that for every one man who survived, 20 perished, and that whatever the Negroes managed to do here was done against a tremendous, the tremendous opposition of the power structure. I don't mean there weren't some white people who managed to do it, but in the generality, this is the way it's been.

Do you feel that the white liberal, a lot of times, when the things get real tough, he can escape, he can revert back tomorrow? When things get tough, white woman, the white woman liberal, told me a few weeks ago, she had had the bad luck to be sitting in the same room with about 20 students who were telling like it is that Sterling Brown is there, she was one of the few white liberals in the room. And what these kids were saying in effect was, you know, white people don't know enough about us, to be able to help us. White people say one thing and do another, and all of this is absolutely true. And she was terribly, terribly hurt, bitterly hurt. And she said, I'm sure I've done more for the Negroes than they've ever done. And I got mad, and I said, that's exactly what they were saying. They don't want you to do anything for Negroes. They want you to do it for you. And she said, well, I'm not willing to damage my child, she said. And I said, well, then forget it. After all, speaking for myself, know, it's kind of insult. Here I am, you know, as they say, no visible scars. I'm not isolated,

I got a family, you know, and a history, and I got nieces and nephews. I can't protect them, you know. They're in tremendous danger of every hour that they live, just because they're black, not because they're wicked. You know, and I mean this from the baby nieces to the oldest nephew who was only 16. Now, if this is the way they are, you know, and I know that every time I leave my nephew, I don't know what will happen to him by the time I see him again. mean, not only inside, but physically. How can you expect me to take seriously somebody who says, I'm willing to fight for you, but I can't afford to let my children get, you know, I can't afford to let my children be damaged. And furthermore, how can I take seriously somebody who doesn't realize that their children are being damaged by this, by the continuation of this system? You can't, you know, you can't serve, as they say, two masters. You know, the liberal can't be safe and, um, and heroic too. In other words, he wants to become so safe that he gets behind his safety zone.

Yes, let's try. Let's try. He's with you, but, um, not when the going gets rough. And really, what I really mean at bottom is that he doesn't, if you can, if you can put it, think of it in those terms, you don't see the gravity of the situation. You don't see that we are living in a segregated society and this does terrible things to my child and does terrible things to your child too. If you don't see that, then I don't think you'll see anything. And most liberals do not see that. One of the great American illusions, one of the great American necessities is to believe that I, the poor, benighted black man whom they saved. Elephant ridden jungles of Africa whom they brought to the Bible is still grateful for that. And people say in many, many ways, not only in the South, all over this country, in effect you should be grateful, even, even slavery it released you from that. You're no

longer dodging tepsi flies in some backward country. Well, I know this and anyone who's ever tried to live knows this. The word you say about somebody else, you know, anybody else reveals you what I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessities, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I'm not describing you where I talk about you. describing me. Now, here in this country we've got something called a nigger. It doesn't in such terms, I beg you to remark, it's just in any other country in the world. We have invented the nigger. I didn't invent it. White people invented it.

I've always known I had to know by the time I was 17 years old what you were describing was not me and what you were afraid of was not me. It had to be something else. You had invented it. So it had to be something you were afraid of and you invested me with. Now, that's so. No matter what you've done to me, I can say to you this, and I mean it. I know you can't do anymore and I've got nothing to lose. And I know, and I've always known. You know. And really always. That's part of the agony. I've always known that I'm not a nigger. But if I am not the nigger and if it's true that your invention revealed you, then who is the nigger? I am not the victim here. I know one thing from another. And I know I'm going to be born and

I'm going to be, you know, I was born, I'm going to suffer and I'm going to die. And the only way you get through a life is to know the worst things about it. I know that a person is more important than anything else. Anything else. I learned this because I had to learn it. But you still think I gather that the nigger is necessary. Well, he's unnecessary to me, so he must be necessary to you. So I give you your problem back. Your the nigger, baby, isn't me. Take this hammer filmed with James Baldwin in the spring of 1913. 1963, was produced for national educational television by the KQED film unit San Francisco. This is NET, National Educational Television.