(1963)
We Can Change the Country
BEFORE I SAY ANYTHING ELSE, I have an announcement to make. I want all of you, and your wives and your children and your brothers-in-law and everyone you know, to resolve as of this moment that you will buy no presents for Christmas. And when I say no presents, I mean not a nail file, not a toothbrush, and I want you to tell your children, as of this moment and on Christmas Day, that the reason there is no Santa Claus this year is because we have lost the right—by the murder of our brothers and sisters—to be called a Christian nation. And until we regain that right, we cannot celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace. And I am very serious about this for two reasons: (a) morally, I think this nation should be, for the foreseeable future, in mourning; (b) one must face the fact that this Christian nation may never have read any of the Gospels, but they do understand money.
We are not—we who are on the barricades in this unprecedented revolution—in the position of someone in the Congo or someone in Cuba. That is, we cannot take over the land. The terms of this revolution are precisely these: that we will learn to live together here or all of us will abruptly stop living. And I mean that. This is not, and never has been, a white nation. I am not a pupil or a ward of Senator Eastland.* I am an American. My forefathers bled and suffered and died to create this nation, and if my forefathers had not dammed all those rivers and picked all that cotton and laid all that track, there would not be an American economy today.
We are living, at the moment, through a terrifying crisis, and let me try to put it in the cruelest and most abrupt terms that I can. Let us say that a hundred years ago, when I was technically emancipated from the land and given over to the landlords and the bosses—let us say that I was happy in my place and that I loved doing all that singing and dancing down on the levee. Now I, and my father and my grandfather, to say nothing of my grandmother and her mother, never for a moment believed that we were singing and dancing down on the levee because we were so happy, and not for a moment does any black man that I’ve ever encountered believe that he really was what the country said he was. But what has happened is that the country (by “the country” I mean our government and most of our citizens) believes that I was happy in my place. They believe it so strongly that now they have the courage to ask, What does the Negro want? Well, I know what the Negro wants, and any man who is able to walk and talk knows what the Negro wants. If you know what you want, then you know what I want.
It is the American Republic—repeat, the American Republic—which created something which they call a “nigger.” They created it out of necessities of their own. The nature of the crisis is that I am not a “nigger”—I never was. I am a man. The question with which the country is confronted is this: Why do you need a “nigger” in the first place, and what are you going to do about him now that he’s moved out of his place? Because I am not what you said I was. And if my place, as it turns out, is not my place, then you are not what you said you were, and where’s your place? There has never been in this country a Negro problem. I have never been upset by the fact that I have a broad nose, big lips, and kinky hair. You got upset. And now you must ask yourself why. I, for example, do not bring down property values when I move in. You bring them down when you move out.
Now there are several concrete and dangerous things that we must do to prevent the murder—and please remember there are several million ways to murder—of future children (by which I mean both black and white children). And one of them, and perhaps the most important, is to take a very hard look at our economic structure and our political institutions. For example, the North (for as long as I’ve been in the North, and I was born in the North) has prided itself on not being like the Southern racists. In the North they don’t have signs up saying “white” and “colored.” No one tells you where you can and cannot go. In the North, you have to find that out day by day, by what we call trial and error. But the moment you go anywhere near what The Man is really concerned about—I mean his pocketbook—what happened in Birmingham happens in New York.
New York is a segregated city. It is not segregated by accident; it is not an act of God that keeps the Negroes in Harlem. It is the real estate boards and the banks that do it. And when you attack that, that’s where the power is. For example, I ask all of you to ask yourselves what would happen if Harlem refused to pay the rent for a month. We’ve got to bring the cat out of hiding. And where is he? He’s hiding in the bank. We’ve got to flush him out. We have to begin a massive campaign of civil disobedience. I mean nationwide. And this is no stage joke. Some laws should not be obeyed.
Secondly, when I talk about our political institutions, there is no reason for any American to continue to be victimized by what we still refer to as the Republican and Democratic parties. Speaking for myself, I cannot imagine voting for any Republican, because the party contains Goldwater. I can’t imagine voting for any Democrat, because that party contains Eastland. It is important to bear in mind, or to recover the notion, that we are responsible for our government and the government is responsible to us. The government is supposed to represent us. It is time that the government knew that if the government does not represent us, if it insists on representing a handful of nostalgic Southern colonels, the government will be replaced.
For a very long time, we have operated on the theory of the lesser of two evils. For example, I myself was so terrified of that salesman called Nixon that I allowed myself to be stampeded into the Kennedy camp. And I believe that was done, if you remember, by a phone call to Martin Luther King, when he was in jail. That swung the Negro vote. Well, the man has been in power for quite some time. If we care about this country—and not only the area of civil rights—it is time to serve notice on our representatives that they are under the obligation to represent us and that they cannot be said to represent us if they continually betray twenty million citizens. It is time to let the government know that we will no longer accept this peculiar, pathetic excuse: “We have no right to act.” If they can invade Cuba, they can act. It is time to say, and unequivocally, that I—speaking now for myself, Jimmy Baldwin, and speaking for myself as though I were white even—I don’t see any reason why I should invade Havana. I would much rather invade Miami.
The moral leaders of the Free World are in great trouble. This is not a free country, and if you doubt me, when you leave here, walk or ride up to 125th Street and walk through those streets and ask yourself what you’d feel like if you lived there, why you lived there if you did, and why it looks like a concentration camp. I mean the police walking two by two and three by three. Ask yourself what chances you would have, if you lived there, to get theft or fire or life insurance. Now, this, as I said, is not an act of God. It is an act of the nation, and it began not quite a hundred years ago when the North signed a bargain with the South: they would take me out of the cotton fields and lift me over to the factories, where I’ve been ever since. If you doubt me, check it out with your labor unions. Ask yourself why the Puerto Ricans and the Negroes are pushing carts in the Garment Center and nobody else.
Now we are here not only to mourn those children, who cannot really be mourned. We are here to begin to achieve the American Revolution. It is time that we the people took the government and the country into our own hands. It is perfectly possible to tap the energy of this country. There is a vast amount of energy here, and we can change and save ourselves. We don’t have to be at the mercy forever of these sordid political machines. It is possible to create a third party, you know.
And finally, let me leave you with this: the government pretends it has no right to arrest Governor Wallace, but I know that governors have been impeached. The FBI has not been able to find a single bomber. In Alabama alone, fifty bombings and not one culprit—not yet. The FBI can’t find them. Let me tell you why they can’t find them. They can’t afford to. They stay at the homes of the people who did the bombings. And when they come into town they investigate the students.
We are the guilty party. When they come into Birmingham and Mississippi, they don’t investigate the Ku Klux Klan or the White Citizens’ Council or the mayor. They investigate the people in the streets …
If I had done one-tenth of what General Edwin Walker has done in Mississippi, if I had been inciting a mob to murder children, I would be in jail. When Robert Williams armed the Negroes in Monroe, North Carolina, the Justice Department hounded him out of this country on charges of kidnapping and called him—I’ve seen the posters in the post office myself—a psychopathic, dangerous, armed kidnapper. Well, General Edwin Walker is white and Robert Williams is black, and that is the reason one is in Cuba and the other is—probably working in the Justice Department. If we don’t now move, literally move, sit down, stand, walk, don’t go to work, don’t pay the rent, if we don’t now do everything in our power to change this country, this country will turn out to be in the position, let us say, of Spain, a country which is so tangled and so trapped and so immobilized by its interior dissension that it can’t do anything else.
We have already paid a tremendous price for what we’ve done to Negro people. We have denied, and we are paying for the denial of the energy of twenty million people. No society can afford that. The future is going to be worse than the past if we do not let the people who represent us know that it is our country. A government and a nation are not synonymous. We can change the government, and we will.
(1963)
*Senator James Oliver Eastland (1904–1986) represented the state of Mississippi in the United States Senate briefly in 1941 and later from 1943 until 1978. He was a vocal opponent of civil rights legislation.
Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare
EVERY WRITER in the English language, I should imagine, has at some point hated Shakespeare, has turned away from that monstrous achievement with a kind of sick envy. In my most anti-English days I condemned him as a chauvinist (“this England” indeed!) and because I felt it so bitterly anomalous that a black man should be forced to deal with the English language at all—should be forced to assault the English language in order to be able to speak—I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression.
Again, in the way that some Jews bitterly and mistakenly resent Shylock, I was dubious about Othello (what did he see in Desdemona?) and bitter about Caliban. His great vast gallery of people, whose reality was as contradictory as it was unanswerable, unspeakably oppressed me. I was resenting, of course, the assault on my simplicity; and, in another way, I was a victim of that loveless education which causes so many schoolboys to detest Shakespeare. But I feared him, too, feared him because, in his hands, the English language became the mightiest of instruments. No one would ever write that way again. No one would ever be able to match, much less surpass, him.
Well, I was young and missed the point entirely, was unable to go behind the words and, as it were, the diction, to what the poet was saying. I still remember my shock when I finally heard these lines from the murder scene in Julius Caesar. The assassins are washing their hands in Caesar’s blood. Cassius says:
Stoop then, and wash.—How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!
What I suddenly heard, for the first time, was manifold. It was the voice of lonely, dedicated, deluded Cassius, whose life had never been real for me before—I suddenly seemed to know what this moment meant to him. But beneath and beyond that voice I also heard a note yet more rigorous and impersonal—and contemporary: that “lofty scene,” in all its blood and necessary folly, its blind and necessary pain, was thrown into a perspective which has never left my mind. Just so, indeed, is the heedless State overthrown by men, who, in order to overthrow it, have had to achieve a desperate single-mindedness. And this single-mindedness, which we think of (why?) as ennobling, also operates, and much more surely, to distort and diminish a man—to distort and diminish us all, even, or perhaps especially, those whose needs and whose energy made the overthrow of the State inevitable, necessary, and just.
And the terrible thing about this play, for me—it is not necessarily my favorite play, whatever that means, but it is the play which I first, so to speak, discovered—is the tension it relentlessly sustains between individual ambition, self-conscious, deluded, idealistic, or corrupt, and the blind, mindless passion which drives the individual no less than it drives the mob. “I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet … I am not Cinna the conspirator”—that cry rings in my ears. And the mob’s response: “Tear him for his bad verses!” And yet—though one howled with Cinna and felt his terrible rise, at the hands of his countrymen, to death, it was impossible to hate the mob. Or, worse than impossible, useless; for here we were, at once howling and being torn to pieces, the only receptacles of evil and the only receptacles of nobility to be found in all the universe. But the play does not even suggest that we have the perception to know evil from good or that such a distinction can ever be clear: “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones …”
Once one has begun to suspect this much about the world—once one has begun to suspect, that is, that one is not, and never will be, innocent, for the reason that no one is—some of the self-protective veils between oneself and reality begin to fall away. It is probably of some significance, though we cannot pursue it here, that my first real apprehension of Shakespeare came when I was living in France, and thinking and speaking in French. The necessity of mastering a foreign language forced me into a new relationship to my own. (It was also in France, therefore, that I began to read the Bible again.)
My quarrel with the English language has been that the language reflected none of my experience. But now I began to see the matter in quite another way. If the language was not my own, it might be the fault of the language; but it might also be my fault. Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.
In support of this possibility, I had two mighty witnesses: my black ancestors, who evolved the sorrow songs, the blues, and jazz, and created an entirely new idiom in an overwhelmingly hostile place; and Shakespeare, who was the last bawdy writer in the English language. What I began to see—especially since, as I say, I was living and speaking in French—is that it is experience which shapes a language; and it is language which controls an experience. The structure of the French language told me something of the French experience, and also something of the French expectations—which were certainly not the American expectations, since the French daily and hourly said things which the Americans could not say at all. (Not even in French.) Similarly, the language with which I had grown up had certainly not been the King’s English. An immense experience had forged this language; it had been (and remains) one of the tools of a people’s survival, and it revealed expectations which no white American could easily entertain. The authority of this language was in its candor, its irony, its density, and its beat: this was the authority of the language which produced me, and it was also the authority of Shakespeare.
Again, I was listening very hard to jazz and hoping, one day, to translate it into language, and Shakespeare’s bawdiness became very important to me, since bawdiness was one of the elements of jazz and revealed a tremendous, loving, and realistic respect for the body, and that ineffable force which the body contains, which Americans have mostly lost, which I had experienced only among Negroes, and of which I had then been taught to be ashamed.
My relationship, then, to the language of Shakespeare revealed itself as nothing less than my relationship to myself and my past. Under this light, this revelation, both myself and my past began slowly to open, perhaps the way a flower opens at morning, but more probably the way an atrophied muscle begins to function, or frozen fingers to thaw.
The greatest po
et in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love—by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him. It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it—no time can be easy if one is living through it. I think it is simply that he walked his streets and saw them, and tried not to lie about what he saw: his public streets and his private streets, which are always so mysteriously and inexorably connected; but he trusted that connection. And, though I, and many of us, have bitterly bewailed (and will again) the lot of an American writer—to be part of a people who have ears to hear and hear not, who have eyes to see and see not—I am sure that Shakespeare did the same. Only, he saw, as I think we must, that the people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is responsible to them.
The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings Page 8
