I Am Not Your Negro Read online

  I was not, for example, a Black Muslim,

  in the same way, though for different reasons,

  that I never became a Black Panther:

  because I did not believe that

  all white people were devils,

  and I did not want

  young black people to believe that.

  I was not a member of any Christian congregation

  because I knew that they had not heard

  and did not live by the commandment

  “love one another as I love you,”

  and I was not a member of the NAACP

  because in the North, where I grew up,

  the NAACP was fatally entangled

  with black class distinctions,

  or illusions of the same,

  which repelled a shoe-shine boy like me.

  I did not have to deal with

  the criminal state of Mississippi,

  hour by hour and day by day,

  to say nothing of night after night.

  I did not have to sweat cold sweat after decisions

  involving hundreds of thousands of lives.

  I was not responsible for raising money,

  for deciding how to use it.

  I was not responsible for strategy controlling

  prayer meetings, marches, petitions,

  voting registration drives.

  I saw the sheriffs, the deputies, the storm troopers

  more or less in passing.

  I was never in town to stay.

  This was sometimes hard on my morale,

  but I had to accept, as time wore on,

  that part of my responsibility—as a witness—

  was to move as largely and as freely as possible,

  to write the story, and to get it out.

  Credit 10

  FBI REPORT

  March, 1966

  FBI MEMORANDUM

  Information concerning

  James Arthur Baldwin

  To assistant FBI director Alan Rosen

  Bureau files reveal that Baldwin, a negro author, was born in NYC and has lived and travelled in Europe. He has become rather well-known due to his writing dealing with the relationship of whites and negroes. It has been heard that Baldwin may be an homosexual and he appeared as if he may be one.

  J. EDGAR HOOVER: We should all be concerned with but one goal: the eradication of crime. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is as close to you as your nearest telephone. It seeks to be your protector in all matters within its jurisdiction. It belongs to you.

  FBI REPORT

  Information collected clearly depicted the subject as a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United States in times of emergency. Consequently his name is being included in the security index.

  White people are astounded by Birmingham.

  Black people aren’t.

  White people are endlessly demanding to be

  reassured that Birmingham is really on Mars.

  They don’t want to believe,

  still less to act on the belief,

  that what is happening in Birmingham

  is happening all over the country.

  They don’t want to realize that there is not one step,

  morally or actually, between

  Birmingham and Los Angeles.

  THE NEGRO AND THE AMERICAN PROMISE - 1963 -

  DR. KENNETH CLARK: We’ve invited three men on the forefront of the Negro struggle to sit down and talk with us in front of the television camera. Each of these men through his actions and his words, but with vastly different manner and means, is a spokesman for some segment of the Negro people today.

  MALCOLM X: Black people in this country have been the victims of violence at the hands of the white man for four hundred years. And following the ignorant Negro preachers, we have thought that it was godlike to turn the other cheek to the brute that was brutalizing us.

  KENNETH CLARK: Malcolm X, one of the most articulate exponents of the Black Muslim philosophy, has said of your movement and your philosophy that it plays into the hands of the white oppressor, that they are happy to hear you talk about love for the oppressor because this disarms the Negro and fits into the stereotype of the Negro as a meek, turning-the-other-cheek sort of creature. Would you care to comment on Mr. X’s beliefs?

  MARTIN LUTHER KING: Well, I don’t think of love as, in this context, as emotional bosh, but I think of love as something strong and that organizes itself into powerful direct action. This is what I have tried to teach in the struggle in the South, that we are not engaged in a struggle that means we sit down and do nothing. There is a great deal of difference between nonresistance to evil and nonviolent resistance.

  MALCOLM X: Martin Luther King is just a twentieth-century or a modern Uncle Tom, or a religious Uncle Tom, who is doing the same thing today to keep Negroes defenseless in the face of attack that Uncle Tom did on the plantation to keep those Negroes defenseless in the face of the attacks of the Klan in that day.

  MARTIN LUTHER KING: I think though that we can be sure that the vast majority of Negroes who engage in the demonstrations and who understand the nonviolent philosophy will be able to face dogs and all of the other brutal methods that are used without retaliating with violence, because they understand that one of the first principles of nonviolence is a willingness to be the recipient of violence, while never inflicting violence on another.

  As concerns Malcolm and Martin,

  I watched two men, coming from

  unimaginably different backgrounds,

  whose positions, originally, were poles apart,

  driven closer and closer together.

  By the time each died, their positions

  had become virtually the same position.

  It can be said, indeed, that Martin

  picked up Malcolm’s burden,

  articulated the vision which

  Malcolm had begun to see,

  and for which he paid with his life.

  And that Malcolm was one of the people

  Martin saw on the mountaintop.

  Medgar was too young to have seen this happen,

  though he hoped for it,

  and would not have been surprised;

  but Medgar was murdered first.

  I was older than Medgar, Malcolm, and Martin.

  I was raised to believe that the eldest

  was supposed to be a model for the younger,

  and was, of course, expected to die first.

  Not one of these three lived to be forty.

  Credit 11

  MALCOLM X: We need an organization that no one downtown loves. We need one that is ready and willing to take action, any kind of action by any means necessary.

  JAMES BALDWIN: When Malcolm talks, or the other Muslim ministers talk, 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 is Malcolm’s great authority over any of his audiences. He corroborates their reality. He tells them that they really exist, you know.

  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 precisely are you going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how you are going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here. 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. And I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters.

  FLORIDA FORUM - 1963 -

  JAMES BALDWIN: Most of the white Americans I’ve ever encountered, really, you know, had a Negro friend or a Negro maid or somebody in high school, but they never, you know, or rarely, after school was over or whatever came to my kitchen, you know
. We were segregated from the schoolhouse door. Therefore, he doesn’t know, he really does not know, what it was like for me to leave my house, you know, to leave the school and go back to Harlem. He doesn’t know how Negroes live. And it comes as a great surprise to the Kennedy brothers and to everybody else in the country. I’m certain, again, you know…that again like most white Americans I have encountered, they have no…I’m sure they have nothing whatever against Negroes, but that’s really not the question, you know. The question is really a kind of apathy and ignorance, which is the price we pay for segregation. That’s what segregation means. You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall, because you don’t want to know.

  I was, in some way, in those years,

  without entirely realizing it,

  the Great Black Hope of the Great White Father.

  I was not a racist—

  or so I thought;

  Malcolm was a racist,

  or so they thought.

  In fact, we were simply trapped in the same situation.

  A RAISIN IN THE SUN

  SIDNEY POITIER: Well you tell that to my boy tonight, when you put him to sleep on the living room couch. You tell it to him in the morning when his mother goes out of here to take care of somebody else’s kids. And tell it to me, when we want some curtains or some drapes and you sneak out of here and go work in somebody’s kitchen. All I want is to make a future for this family. All I want is to be able to stand in front of my boy like my father never was able to do to me.

  I must sketch now

  the famous Bobby Kennedy meeting.

  Lorraine Hansberry would not be very much

  younger than I am now if she were alive.

  At the time of the Bobby Kennedy meeting,

  she was thirty-three.

  That was one of the very last times

  I saw her on her feet,

  and she died at the age of thirty-four.

  I miss her so much.

  People forget how young everybody was.

  Bobby Kennedy, for another, quite different,

  example, was thirty-eight.

  We wanted him to tell his brother the President

  to personally escort to school,

  on that day or the day after,

  a small black girl already scheduled

  to enter a Deep South school.

  “That way,” we said,

  “it will be clear that whoever spits on that child

  will be spitting on the nation.”

  He didn’t understand this either.

  “It would be,” he said, “a meaningless moral gesture.”

  “We would like,” said Lorraine,

  “from you, a moral commitment.”

  He looked insulted—seemed to feel

  that he had been wasting his time.

  Well Lorraine sat still, watching all the while…

  She looked at Bobby Kennedy, who,

  perhaps for the first time, looked at her.

  “But I am very worried,” she said,

  “about the state of the civilization which produced

  that photograph of the white cop standing

  on that Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham.”

  Then, she smiled.

  And I am glad that she was not smiling at me.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Attorney General,” she said,

  and turned and walked out of the room.

  And then, we heard the thunder.

  Credit 12

  Credit 13

  The very last time I saw Medgar Evers,

  he stopped at his house on the way to the airport

  so I could autograph my books for him,

  his wife and children.

  I remember Myrlie Evers standing outside, smiling,

  and we waved,

  and Medgar drove to the airport

  and put me on the plane.

  Months later,

  I was in Puerto Rico, working on my play.

  Lucien and I had spent a day or so

  wandering around the island,

  and now we were driving home.

  It was a wonderful, bright, sunny day,

  the top to the car was down,

  we were laughing and talking,

  and the radio was playing.

  Then the music stopped…

  …and a voice announced that Medgar Evers

  had been shot to death in the carport of his home,

  and his wife and children had seen the big man fall.

  “ONLY A PAWN IN THEIR GAME,” BOB DYLAN

  Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught.

  They lowered him down as a king.

  But when the shadowy sun sets on the one

  That fired the gun

  He’ll see by his grave

  On the stone that remains

  Carved next to his name

  His epitaph plain:

  Only a pawn in their game.

  The blue sky seemed to descend like a blanket.

  And I couldn’t say anything,

  I couldn’t cry;

  I just remembered his face,

  a bright, blunt, handsome face,

  and his weariness, which he wore like his skin,

  and the way he said ro-aad for road,

  and his telling me how the tatters of clothes

  from a lynched body hung,

  flapping, in the tree for days,

  and how he had to pass that tree every day.

  Medgar.

  Gone.

  In America, I was free only in battle,

  never free to rest—

  and he who finds no way to rest

  cannot long survive the battle….

  And a young, white revolutionary remains,

  in general, far more romantic

  than a black one.

  White people have managed to get through

  entire lifetimes in this euphoric state,

  but black people have not been so lucky:

  a black man who sees the world the way

  John Wayne, for example, sees it

  would not be an eccentric patriot,

  but a raving maniac.

  The truth is that this country does not know

  what to do with its black population,

  dreaming of anything like “the final solution.”

  THE NEGRO AND THE AMERICAN PROMISE - 1963 -

  JAMES BALDWIN: The Negro has never been as docile as white Americans wanted to believe. That was a myth. We were not singing and dancing down on the levee. We were trying to keep alive; we were trying to survive a very brutal system. The “nigger” has never been happy in his place.

  BALDWIN’S NIGGER - 1969 -

  JAMES BALDWIN: One of the most terrible things is that in fact, whether I like it or not, I am an American. My school really was the streets of New York City. My frame of reference was George Washington and John Wayne. But, I was a child, you know, and when a child puts his eyes in the world he has to use what he sees. There’s nothing else to use. And you are formed by what you see, the choices you have to make, and the way you discover what it means to be black in New York and then throughout the entire country.

  I know how you watch as you grow older, and it is not a figure of speech, the corpses of your brothers and your sisters pile up around you. And not for anything they have done. They were too young to have done anything. But what one does realize is that when you try to stand up and look the world in the face like you had a right to be here, you have attacked the entire power structure of the Western world.

  Forget the Negro problem. Don’t write any voting acts. We had that—it’s called the fifteenth amendment—during the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. What you have to look at is what is happening in this country, and what is really happening is that brother has murdered brother knowing it was his brother. White men have lynched Negroes knowing them to be their sons. White women have had Negroes burned knowing them to be their lo
vers. It is not a racial problem. It is a problem of whether or not you’re willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it. That great Western house I come from is one house, and I am one of the children of that house. Simply, I am the most despised child of that house. And it is because the American people are unable to face the fact that I am flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone, created by them. My blood, my father’s blood, is in that soil.

  IMITATION OF LIFE - 1934 -

  MOTHER: Good afternoon, ma’am. It’s raining so hard, I brought rubbers and a coat to fetch my little girl home.

  TEACHER: I’m afraid you’ve made some mistake.

  MOTHER: Ain’t this 3B?

  TEACHER: Yes.

  MOTHER: Well this is it.

  Credit 14

  TEACHER: She can’t be. I have no little colored children in my class.

  MOTHER: Oh. Thank you….There’s my little girl.

  TEACHER: Peola, you may go home.

  CLASSMATE #1: Gee, I didn’t know she was colored.

  CLASSMATE #2: Neither did I.

  PEOLA: I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!

  MOTHER: Peola! Peola!

  PURITY

  I know very well that my ancestors

  had no desire to come to this place.

  But neither did the ancestors of the people

  who became white and who require

  of my captivity a song.

  They require a song of me

  less to celebrate my captivity

  than to justify their own.

  Credit 15

  I have always been struck, in America,

  by an emotional poverty so bottomless,

  and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep,