by Imani Perry
Lorraine continued to write however, multiple works with many drafts. And she threw herself into political organizing. She communicated with the young members of SNCC and arranged fund-raisers for them. She lent her voice to other causes also. At the Negro History Week program of the Liberation Committee for Africa, February 10, 1963, Lorraine served as a speaker, along with Carlos Gonçalves of the National Front for the Liberation of Angola and Oyil Chakamoi of Uganda. Gonçalves spoke about Portuguese colonial domination; Chakamoi spoke of Pan-African solidarity and the particular needs of African students in the United States. Lorraine expressed her admiration for young Africans taking steps toward liberation. And she yet again decried the “present and insufferable idea of the ‘exceptional Negro.’ Fair and equal treatment for Ralph Bunche, Jackie Robinson and Harry Belafonte is not nearly enough. Tea parties at the White House for the few will not make up for 300 years of wrong to the many. The boat must be rocked for the good of all.”13 Lorraine much preferred the overall-wearing fieldworkers who were pursuing a grassroots model of freedom deep in the Mississippi Delta.
And though she disagreed politically with the Nation of Islam, Lorraine refused to distance herself from them like so many respectable bourgeois Black people did. While Jimmy thought their racial absolutism was a problem, he too felt a bond with the Nation. Lorraine was less bothered by their response to whiteness, but considered it strange that they romanticized Islam as a Black religion, given how sub-Saharan Africans had been enslaved and colonized by Arab invaders before Europeans. And yet she saw value in the boldness of the Nation of Islam and in Black Americans maintaining a variety of political visions, including nationalist ones. In a March 22, 1963, letter to Daniel Thompson, a professor at Howard University and an editor of the Journal of Negro Education, Lorraine responded to questions he’d asked for their annual civil rights yearbook. In it she explicated her thoughts on the landscape of Black politics. She did not see the problem of racial inequality through the lens of individual experiences of discrimination but rather a universal condition of oppression. On this and other counts she found traditional civil rights organizations lacking. Regarding the NAACP she wrote:
I am not sure that our people will ever have enough money to fight ALL the court cases it would take to begin to re-state what is already on the books. I think it is probably an outmoded organization. Hostile power in this country does not appear to be in the least responsible to legalisms. The celebrated Supreme Court decision of several years ago seems to have virtually invalidated its implications by the sheer fact of the nature of Negro life as a reality today. I mean I cannot see that it changed anything.14
Lorraine knew something about this, had known it since she was ten when her family won their lawsuit and the ghetto stayed as segregated as ever. As a result of that, and her diligent study of race as an adult, Lorraine’s hope lay in direct-action protest rather than courts or the appeals of Black elites to white elites. She believed African Americans ought to
attract the attention of the rest of the world to our plight and thereby use international sensitivity on the matter as a weapon in behalf of our otherwise mostly powerful people. This to me, is the real value of things like the Montgomery struggle and the subsequent student movements: they make it possible for the Negro question to be forced upon the conscience of a nation which is otherwise delighted to have any number of priority questions that it must always deal with first.15
Lorraine was not simply a person who felt fidelity with oppressed people across the globe; she believed that the liberation of African Americans was also a cause for international concern. And though she advocated direct action, she also sustained a belief that art and intellectual work mattered in this struggle. There was no either-or for her or for her friends. In the same letter to Thompson, she used Jimmy as an example of this. Like her, Jimmy was involved with SNCC. In fact, he was even more directly involved. Though Lorraine wrote letters, raised money, and dedicated her time to organizing in the North, Jimmy traveled down south and put his body on the line with the young people. Lorraine said of his art that it held the urgency of the political moment, that “in his essays, . . . [he] has taken the politeness out of discussions of the brutalizing experience of the black man in this country and put it down as it is. I think Mr. Baldwin has left the apologists, black or white, nowhere to go but toward the truth.”16
The contrast between the artist who serves as a witness for justice and the use of prominent artists or other Black people as respectable representatives was significant for Lorraine. She hated the American habit of exceptionalizing certain Black people and the way such practices were used to neglect or even justify the mistreatment of others. She wrote, “I feel that the old games of giving Ralph Bunche an award (or Lorraine Hansberry for that matter) for doing something that a Negro has not been allowed to do before is today intolerable. Leontyne Price is a very great artist—but the fact of her presence in the Metropolitan alters the condition of the masses of Negroes not in the least; neither will a Negro stuck here and there in the cabinet eventually.”17
Lorraine ultimately shared her vision for a national Black political vision, one that certainly had to be inspired by what she saw on the international stage. She believed the answer would be a “mass organization” of Black people that could be organized to boycott or vote collectively or, as imagined in her good friend Douglas Turner Ward’s future play, engage in a Day of Absence and put a wrench in the works of American industry. She saw the Southern freedom movement as the root of such possibility. For her it was not a reform movement, at least not the student movement, but rather a revolutionary one. Lorraine wrote:
I don’t think there is much of another direction. Julian Mayfield has said that whether we like the world or not we are going to have to deal with the fact that the condition of our people dictates what can only be called revolutionary attitudes. It is no longer acceptable to allow racists to define Negro manhood; and it will have to come to pass that they can no longer define his weaponry. I look forward to the day, therefore, when a centralized Negro organization will direct me not to pay taxes in protest of this segregated society: it will be a privilege to go to jail.18
Yet again, Lorraine emphasized self-determination for Black people. She was neither interested in status nor seeing Black folks manipulated by elites, whether said elites be Black or white. She wanted to be led by the people. It is this unflinching posture that makes Lorraine and Jimmy’s famous 1963 meeting with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy so fascinating. Of course she was an elegant and poised role model, an achiever and an exception. But she’d also proven herself to be unwavering and even confrontational in ways that did not leave much room for working with elites and powerful politicians. Perhaps because RFK hadn’t paid attention to her strident positions and firm convictions, or he underestimated her, Lorraine wholly surprised the attorney general.
The day has been written about in numerous books and essays. The story is as follows: In response to the unrest in Birmingham, the attorney general called James Baldwin and other prominent Black people, and a few liberal white people, to meet with him quietly. He hoped to quell the Black people of my hometown, Birmingham, which was best described, for lack of a more appropriate metaphor, as a powder keg. The meeting took place on May 24, 1963, at a Kennedy-owned apartment at 24 Central Park South in Manhattan. In addition to RFK and his aide, Burke Marshall, present at the meeting were Jimmy and his brother David; Harry Belafonte; famous Black psychologist Kenneth Clark; Edwin Berry of the Chicago Urban League; Clarence Jones, an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr.; the singer, actor, and activist Lena Horne; the actor Rip Torn; June Shagaloff of the NAACP; and Southern freedom movement organizer Jerome Smith. Smith had founded the New Orleans chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and had initially come to New York so that doctors could attend to the jaw and head damage he’d sustained from beatings at the hands of Southern cops.
The energy of that time in histo
ry is important to understand. That year, Baldwin was touring the South and said, “There is, I should think, no Negro living in America who has not felt, briefly or for long periods, simple, naked, unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter . . . to break the bodies of all white people and bring them low, as low as that dusk in which he himself has been and is being trampled.”19 Lorraine also felt this rage. Though the meeting began quietly, things heated up when Jerome asked about the government’s real role in Birmingham. He implied that they were insincere with respect to protecting the civil rights of African Americans. Having faced the violence of the white South with no assistance from the federal government, Jerome had an empirical basis for this feeling. Jimmy recalled that “Bobby—and here I am not telescoping but exercising restraint—had turned away from Jerome, as though to say, ‘I’ll talk to all of you, who are civilized. But who is he?’”20
And then she unleashed. Recalled Baldwin, “Lorraine said (in memory she is standing, but I know she was sitting—she towered, that child, from a sitting position). ‘You have a great many very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General, but the only man you should be listening to is that man [Jerome Smith] over there. That is the voice,’ she added after a moment during which Bobby sat absolutely still staring at her, ‘of twenty-two million people.’”21
For Jimmy, Lorraine became a representative of a special sort, of Black womanhood, of freedom fighting, of her people writ large. He watched her face, saw her insistence that Bobby Kennedy hear her. He wrote,
Her face changed and changed, the way Sojourner Truth’s face must have changed and changed, or to the truth, the way I have watched my mother’s face change when speaking to someone who could not hear. Who yet, and you know it, will be compelled to hear one day. . . .
“We would like,” said Lorraine, “from you, a moral commitment.”
He did not turn from her as he had turned away from Jerome. He looked insulted—seemed to feel that he had been wasting his time.22
Lorraine stood up and Jerome continued. Jerome talked about the “perpetual demolition” faced when Black men tried to protect their families’ homes and lives. Lorraine interjected, and though it might seem like a contradiction, it was her way of getting to the root. “That is all true,” she said, “but I am not worried about black men—who have done splendidly, it seems to me, all things considered.” Jimmy remembered a pregnant pause, and her words “But I am very worried . . . about the state of the civilization which produced that photograph of the white cop standing on that Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham.” She smiled a cutting smile at the attorney general, turned, and walked out. Most of the others followed.
Jimmy wrote more than once about this meeting. In each account, Lorraine was magnificent. But just as she was at once towering and childlike, she was both mighty and vulnerable. This struck him deeply. He returned to it in the way Thelonious Monk would go back to a song he wanted to turn over in his head, to see it for all its beauty and majesty. That was how Jimmy saw Lorraine. And remembered her. After the meeting was over, he wrote,
I had forgotten that I was scheduled to be interviewed by Dr. Kenneth Clark, and we were late. We were hurried into the car. We passed Lorraine, who did not see us. She was walking toward Fifth Avenue—her face twisted, her hands clasped before her belly, eyes darker than any eyes I had ever seen before—walking in an absolutely private place.
I knew I could not call her.
Our car drove on; we passed her.
And then, we heard the thunder.23
Years later, in recollection, her posture was ominous, but it followed a moment that would become legendary. Small but overtaking a room, hers was a presence much greater than her remarkable attractiveness, stylishness, and poise. It was a presence beyond the expectations of her role, her place, her celebrity. She gave public voice to her belief that the Black working class were at the center of the struggle for liberation, and that she must be an amplifier not a figurehead. That was something for which Robert Kennedy was not prepared.
Though RFK was reported to have considered the meeting a great waste of time, less than one month later, his brother President Kennedy, at RFK’s urging, gave his landmark civil rights address during which he proposed the legislation that would be known as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the address, JFK spoke of civil rights as not just a legal issue but also, as Lorraine said, a moral one. He asserted that the Congress must pursue equal access to education, public accommodations, and employment.
On Lorraine’s end, after the meeting she returned to her home in the Hudson Valley and held a rally and fund-raiser for the Southern freedom movement five days later. The performer Judy Collins began the event by singing folk songs, and Jerome Smith was an invited speaker. Lorraine wasn’t simply making a point in directing RFK’s attention to him. She held Jerome in high regard. As a child of nine or ten, he’d first challenged segregation on a public bus in New Orleans after having seen his father, a seaman, do the same. When the white passengers responded angrily, he was protected by an elderly Black woman who fussed at him in front of the angry whites but privately praised his courage once they disembarked. He recollected, “She hugged me and said: ‘Never stop doing what you’re doing. Never stop taking that sign down.’ Then she cried, and said a prayer. That was the jump-off point for me.”24
Jerome had participated in two freedom rides, one from Montgomery to Jackson and another from New Orleans to McComb, Mississippi. In McComb, he and his fellow freedom riders were beaten with brass knuckles, sticks, and fists by an angry white mob that shouted their plans to kill the niggers. The freedom riders hid out outside McComb in a juke joint. And it was there in McComb that Jerome had first spoken to Burke Marshall, RFK’s assistant attorney general, on the phone two years before their meeting in Manhattan on Central Park West. Jerome remembered, “He called and said he wanted us to stop protesting. We were in pretty bad shape, so he said, ‘You need to go to the hospital.’ I said: ‘You deal with this just like you would if President Kennedy was down here. We’re not stopping. We’re going back.’”25 His words echoed the fictional voice Lorraine gave Nannie Hansberry when she defended their right to take space in their home: “We are not moving.” Jerome, however, wasn’t one of the representative few who could “break barriers.” He was a person who gave voice to the many unknown people who, as he said, “paid a tremendous price. He said freedom fighting had always been “about our collective strength. To face those monsters every day with no cameras rolling, plain ordinary people had to extend their hand and help you get your job done.”26 This was what Lorraine meant when she said to RFK, and to Burke Marshall, that Jerome spoke for “twenty-two million Negroes.” This is also what she wanted the well-intentioned audience in the Hudson Valley to understand.
When Lorraine took the stage at the fund-raising rally, she told the crowd about the meeting she and Jerome had had with the attorney general five days prior. She described the tension in the room, and how Jerome had made clear to Robert Kennedy that “the passion and the absence of patience of a sorely oppressed, native American people is beyond anything that we can sit around and be polite about any more.” She described her own words too; how she told the attorney general that he ought to reconsider his impatience and frustration because, despite the room being full of Black celebrities, “we are not remotely interested in the all-insulting concept of the exceptional Negro, we are not remotely interested in any tea at the White House. . . . What we are interested in is making perfectly clear that between the Negro intelligentsia, the Negro middle class, and the Negro this and that, that we are one people and as far as we are concerned, we are represented by the Negroes of the streets of Birmingham.”27
The salience of her point is perhaps lost today. The Black folks on the streets of Birmingham are now talked about as heroes. But back then they were considered out of control, pushing too fast and hard. They raced beyond the authority of Martin Luther
King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They had their own local leaders, and they were not uniformly committed to nonviolent resistance. Even the children of Birmingham were ready to fight. Those were Lorraine’s heroes. That day, as a result of Lorraine’s organizing, the people of Croton raised $5,000 for the movement. With part of the proceeds, CORE bought a station wagon for civil rights organizers in the Mississippi Delta.
In 1964, when Jimmy was unable to complete an assignment for SNCC to write for a fund-raising photo-essay book titled The Movement, Lorraine filled in for him. In the pages, filled with images of protest and of daily life, both North and South, she wove a story that was about the Southern freedom movement. In it, she connected the Southern domestic struggle for racial justice with the global one—including references to the Northern US and the colonized world. Lorraine wrote about the condition of the white poor of the South, and how racism had poisoned them against allying themselves with Black people. She wrote, “The New South slams up against the Old, but the coming of industry in the Southland has not changed the problems of many of its people—white or black—for the better. This is why, for a long time, one of the South’s chief exports has been people. Their destination: the ghettos of the North.”28
