This panel met at Howard University to discuss the black doll - white doll test. For those who are unfamiliar, the famous doll test was a survey taken years ago, where black school age children where asked positive and negative questions about black and white dolls. To sum things up, the kids overwhelmingly preferred the white dolls. The test was run again recently with the same results.
Panelist joining Brian Williams included: radio host Tom Joyner, author Michael Eric Dyson, entrepreneur Malaak Compton-Rock, screenwriter Kriss Turner, writer Kevin Powell, and columnist Mike Barnicle. Tim Wise, the Director of the Association for White Anti-Racist Education (AWARE) and Rev. Buster Soaries.
MSNBC's panel needs improvement. In that, it is understandable that MSNBC's intended to get a well rounded diverse panel to discuss race, but they missed the mark. Chris Rock's wife is not a scholar. Although she's seems to be quite active with charity work, but she needed to be a black female counterbalance to Dr. Michael Eric Dyson. There are some great black female scholars like Dr. bell hooks, Dr. Alice Walker, Dr. Toni Morrison, and Dr. Francis Cress that have written, researched, published, and presented scholarly works on black female images and popular culture.
Mike Barnacle and Brian Williams should have been required to read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, before they even opened their mouths. None of the panelists have any idea how painful it is to be black, female, dark and ugly. Chris Rock's wife is too beautiful to know how painful it is to be considered ugly by society.
One more criticism on this panel. Who the hell invited the police! I guess if we're gonna talk about black folks then we need to call the cops. WTF! While I can deal with Chris Rock's wife, and Micheal Eric Dyson......the cops are just too much. It just subliminally reinforces the criminal stereotype of blackness. Negrophobia propaganda rears it's evil head once again.
Lastly, why the heck is Mike Barnacle on the panel? If MSNBC must give a white male voice, there are some excellent scholars on the subject like Eric Foner, David Bryon Davis, David Blight, et al.
If MSNBC is going to teach, then there are some great professors that do this for a living they should cast their nets a little wider for panel discussions.
Costco Wholesale Corp. on Thursday apologized to any of its customers who may have been offended by a doll the company pulled from its stores after a complaint about possible racist connotations.
The doll wore a headband that said "Lil' Monkey" and was cuddling with a stuffed monkey. The "Cuddle with Me, Doll with Plush Monkey" doll came in Caucasian, African-American and Hispanic representations.
But shortly after the toys were put up for sale in late July, Costco received a complaint from a customer in North Carolina concerning the version of the doll that showed an African-American baby with the monkey.
Costco immediately pulled the doll from its shelves and discontinued the product. The Issaquah, Wash.-based retailer said the doll was carried only in its Northeast and Southeast regions and the company's Web site and was only for sale for a matter of days before it was pulled.
A number of reports and Web sites have criticized the retailer for carrying the product, and Costco said it apologizes.
Segregation Ruled Unequal, and Therefore Unconstitutional
Kenneth B. Clark & Mamie Phipps Clark
Psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark Ph.d demonstrated that segregation harmed Black children's self-images. Their testimony before the Supreme Court contributed to the landmark Supreme Court case that desegregated American public schools: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS
Findings
In their groundbreaking studies, Kenneth and Mamie Clark investigated black children's racial identification and preference. Using drawings and dolls of black and white children, these researchers asked Black preschool and elementary school children to indicate which drawing or doll they preferred and which drawing or doll looked most like them. They also asked children to color line drawings of children with the color that most closely matched their own skin color. The Clarks found that Black children often preferred the white doll and drawing, and frequently colored the line drawing of the child a shade lighter than their own skin. Samples of the children's responses illustrated that they viewed white as good and pretty, but black as bad and ugly. Clark and Clark concluded that many Black children at the time (1939-1950) "indicate a clear-cut preference for white and some of them evidence emotional conflict when requested to indicate a color preference. It is clear that the Negro child, by the age of five is aware of the fact that to be colored in contemporary American society is a mark of inferior status. A child accepts as early as six, seven or eight the negative stereotypes about his own group."
Until 1954, public schools were racially segregated, meaning that Black and White children could be forced to attend different schools. A Supreme Court ruling from 1892, Plessy v. Ferguson, legitimized these children's "separate, but equal" educations. With the help of Clark and Clark's research findings, that illustrated the effect of prejudice and discrimination on personality development, the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education were able to show that segregated schools were inherently unequal, and therefore unconstitutional. Clark and Clark's research prompted several future studies about racial identification and preference among minority children.
Practical Application
The impact of their research is evident in the court's unanimous decision, as written by Chief Justice Earl Warren: "Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has the tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of Negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system." In short, segregation failed to provide Black and White children equal protection under the law — a protection guaranteed by the 14th amendment. Segregation was therefore deemed unconstitutional. Chief Justice Warren noted Kenneth Clark as one of the "modern authorities" on which the decision was based. This acknowledgment was significant because it was the first time that psychological research was cited in a Supreme Court decision and because social science data was seen as paramount in the Court's decision.
Well, I put on my shoes and I started. Going up some roads and down some others to see what Negroes do for a living. Going down one road I smelt hot rosin and looked and saw a “gum patch.” That’s a turpentine still to the outsider, but gum path (sic) to those who work them. It was not long before I was up i (sic) the foreman’s face talking and asking to be talked-to. He was a sort of pencil-shaped brown-stained man in his forties and his name was John McFarlin. He got to telling and I got to listening until the first thing I knew I was spending the night at his house so I could “Ride the Wood” with him next morning and see for myself instead of asking him so many questions. So that left me free to ask about songs go (sic) the turpentine woods.
“No, Ma’am. they don’t make up many songs. The boys used to be pretty ad (sic) about making up songs but they don’t do that now.”
“If you don’t make up songs while you are working, don’t you all make some up round the jook?”
“Mo (sic), ”mam, its (sic) like I told you. Taint like saw-mills and such like that. Turpentine woods is kind of lonesome.”
Foreman McFarlin had me up before five o’ clock next morning. He had to wake up his camp and he always started out about 5:30 so that he had every man on the job by 6.
Turpentine Dipper
Every man took his tools, went to his task-whatever he was doing when he knocked off at 5:30 the afternoon before, he got right on it in the morning. The foreman had 18 men under him and he saw everyone in his place.
He had 5 chippers, 7 pullers and 5 dippers and a wood-chopper. All the men off to work, John McFarlin straddled his horse, got one for me and we began riding the wood. Talking about knowing his business!
Turpentine Chipper
The foreman can ride a “drift” and with a glance tell if every “face” on every tree has been chipped.First he rode a drift of virgin boxes. That is when a tree is first worked, it is a virgin box for three years. That is the finest rosin. The five men were chipping away. The chipper is the man who makes those little slanting cuts on pine trees so that the gum exudes, and drains down into the box. He has a very sharp cutting tool that heavily weighted in the handle and cunningly balanced so that he chips at a stroke. The company pays a cent a tree. We stopped and watched Lester Keller chip because he is hard to beat anywhere in the world. He often chips 700 or more trees a week.
A puller is a specialized chipper. He chips the trees when they have been worked too high for the chipper. He does this with a chipping axe with a long handle knows (sic) as a puller. The foreman explained that the tree are chipped three years and pulled three years then it is abandoned. Leroy Heath is the champ puller.
He inspected a drift that was being dipped. The men who dip take the cup off the tree, scrape out the gum with the dipping iron and put it back in place and pass on to the next face. The dippers are paid $.85 a barrel for gum and 10 barrels a week is good dipping. Dan Walker is the champ. He can dip two barrels a day.
The wood-chopper cuts wood for the still. Wood is used to fire the furnace instead of coal because the company owns millions of cords of wood for burning in trees that have been worked out. McFarlin explained that thee(sic) is no chipping and dipping from November to March. In November they stop working the trees, scrape the faces, how(sic) and rake around the trees as a caution against fire.
The foreman gets $12.50 a week, the foreman’s house, all the firewood he wants and all the gardening space he wants. He said shyly that he would raise(sic) in wages, but feels that he will not get it. He wants to know if the Government is sending people around to make folk pay better wages. He hopes so.
Visit to Aycock & Lindsey, Turpentine Camp, Cross City, Florida
CROSS CITY: TURPENTINE CAMP
ZORA HURSTON, August 1939
Zora Neale Hurston worked for the WPA, collecting folklife and folklore from Floridians throughout the state. She is pictured here collecting music from French and Brown.
Photograph was part of a 1985 traveling exhibit called "Pursuits and Pastimes". Reproducted from the collection of the Library of Congress. Forms part of series S1606, Florida Folklife Archive, Photographs and Slides of Folk Arts, Artisans, and Performers.
The PBS premiere episode begins with the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, periods that held so much promise for free black men and women. But as the North gradually withdrew its support for black aspirations for land, civil and political rights, and legal due process, Southern whites succeeded in passing laws that segregated and disfranchised African Americans, laws that were reinforced with violence and terror tactics. By 1876, Reconstruction was over.
"Promises Betrayed" recounts black response by documenting the work of such leaders as activist/separatist Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, as well as the emergence of Booker T. Washington as a national figure.
'What we are in justice entitled to': A 1865 letter from a freedman
To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Col. Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again and see Miss mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville hospital, but one of the neighbors told me Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.
I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here; I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks here call her Mrs. Anderson), and the children, Milly, Jane and Grundy, go to school and are learning well; the teacher says grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday- School, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated; sometimes we overhear others saying, "The colored people were slaves" down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks, but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Col. Anderson. Many darkies would have been proud, as I used to was, to call you master. Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again. As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free- papers in 1864 from the Provost- Marshal- General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely disposed to treat us justly and kindly -- and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty- two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters, esq, Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night, but in Tennessee there was never any pay day for the Negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.
In answering this letter please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up and both good- looking girls. You know how it was with Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve and die if it comes to that than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood, the great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
P.S. -- Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
Booker T. Washington’s 'Atlanta Compromise Speech'
Booker T. Washington: Mr. President and gentlemen of the Board of Directors and citizens. One third of the population of the South is of the Negro race. No enterprise seeking the material, civil, or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and reach the highest success. I must convey to you, Mr. President and Directors, and Secretaries and masses of my race, when I say that in no way have the value and manhood of the American Negro been more fittingly and generously recognized, than by the managers of this magnificent exposition at every stage of its progress.
It is a recognition that will do more to cement the friendship of the two races than any occurrence since the dawn of our freedom. Not only this, but the opportunities here afforded will awaken among us a new era of industrial progress.Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of the bottom, that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill, that the political convention of some teaching had more attraction than starting a dairy farm or a stockyard.
A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal: “Water, water. We die of thirst.” The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” A second time, the signal, “Water, send us water!” went up from the distressed vessel. And was answered: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” A third and fourth signal for water was answered: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River.
To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of preservating friendly relations with the southern white man who is their next door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down, making friends in every manly way of the people of all races, by whom you are surrounded. To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted, I would repeat what I have said to my own race: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your fireside. Cast down your bucket among these people who have without strikes and labor wars tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, just to make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South.
Although W. E. B. DuBois would later publish his pointed challenge to Booker T. Washington's educational and political philosophy in his celebrated work, Souls of Black Folk (1903), at the time of Washington's Atlanta speech, DuBois wrote this letter to express his congratulations. W. E. B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington, September 24, 1895. Autograph letter.
My dear Mr. Washington,
Let me heartily congratulate you upon your phenomenal success at Atlanta—it was a word fitly spoken..
My readers will be delighted to learn that Frederick Douglass—the fugitive slave—has at last concluded his narrative. All who know the wonderful gifts of friend Douglass know that his narrative must, in the nature of things, be written with great power. It is so indeed. It is the most thrilling work which the American press ever issued—and the most important. If it does not open the eyes of this people, they must be petrified into eternal sleep.
The picture it presents of slavery is too horrible to look upon, and yet it is but a faint picture of what to millions is a vivid life. It is evidently drawn with a nice eye, and the coloring is chaste and subdued, rather than extravagant or overwrought. Thrilling as it is, and full of the most burning eloquence, it is yet simple and unimpassioned. Its eloquence is the eloquence of truth, and so is as simple and touching as the impulses of childhood. There are passages in it which would brighten the reputation of any living author,—while the book, as a whole, judged as a mere work of art, would widen the fame of Bunyan or De Foe. A spirit of the loftiest integrity, and a vein of the purest religious sentiment, runs through its pages, and it must leave on every mind a deep conviction of the author's strength of mind and purity of heart. I predict for it a sale of at least twenty thousand in this country, and equally great in Europe. It will leave a mark upon this age which the busy finger of time will deepen at every touch. It will generate a public sentiment in this nation, in the presence of which our pro-slavery laws and constitutions shall be like chaff in the presence of fire. It contains the spark which will kindle up the smouldering embers of freedom in a million souls, and light up our whole continent with the flames of liberty. Great efforts will be made in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, of James Polk and the Apostle Paul, to suppress it: but it will run through this nation from house to house, and from heart to heart, as the wild fire, finding wings in every wind which blows, flies across the tall and boundless prairies. Its stirring incidents will fasten themselves on the eager minds of the youth of this country with hooks of steel. The politics of the land will stand abashed before it, while her more corrupt religion will wish to sink back into the hot womb which gave it birth. It will fall in among the churches and state-houses of the land like a bomb-shell, and those who madly undertake to pick it to pieces will share the fate of that poor New-Yorker who attempted something of the kind on a bomb-shell picked up on the shores of Jersey, i. e., they will be blowed to atoms at the first blow.
Our house stood within a few rods of the Chesapeake Bay, whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe. Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition. I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer's Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of that noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The sight of these always affected me powerfully. My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul's complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships:--
"You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom's swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your protecting wing! Alas! betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll. Go on, go on. O that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute. The glad ship is gone; she hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hottest hell of unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Page 65
Let me be free! Is there any God? Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand it. Get caught, or get clear, I'll try it. I had as well die with ague as the fever. I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die standing. Only think of it; one hundred miles straight north, and I am free! Try it? Yes! God helping me, I will. It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This very bay shall yet bear me into freedom. The steamboats steered in a north-east course from North Point. I will do the same; and when I get to the head of the bay, I will turn my canoe adrift, and walk straight through Delaware into Pennsylvania. When I get there, I shall not be required to have a pass; I can travel without being disturbed. Let but the first opportunity offer, and, come what will, I am off. Meanwhile, I will try to bear up under the yoke. I am not the only slave in the world. Why should I fret? I can bear as much as any of them. Besides, I am but a boy, and all boys are bound to some one. It may be that my misery in slavery will only increase my happiness when I get free. There is a better day coming."
COINTELPRO is an acronym for a series of FBI counterintelligence programs designed to neutralize political dissidents. Although covert operations have been employed throughout FBI history, the formal COINTELPRO's of 1956-1971 were broadly targeted against radical political organizations. In the early 1950s, the Communist Party was illegal in the United States. The Senate and House of Representatives each set up investigating committees to prosecute communists and publicly expose them. (The House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy). When a series of Supreme Court rulings in 1956 and 1957 challenged these committees and questioned the constitutionality of Smith Act prosecutions and Subversive Activities Control Board hearings, the FBI's response was COINTELPRO, a program designed to "neutralize" those who could no longer be prosecuted. Over the years, similar programs were created to neutralize civil rights, anti-war, and many other groups, many of which were said to be "communist front organizations." As J. Edgar Hoover, longtime Director of the FBI, put it
The forces which are most anxious to weaken our internal security are not always easy to identify. Communists have been trained in deceit and secretly work toward the day when they hope to replace our American way of life with a Communist dictatorship. They utilize cleverly camouflaged movements, such as peace groups and civil rights groups to achieve their sinister purposes. While they as individuals are difficult to identify, the Communist party line is clear. Its first concern is the advancement of Soviet Russia and the godless Communist cause. It is important to learn to know the enemies of the American way of life.
The FBI conducted more than 2000 COINTELPRO operations before the the programs were officially discontinued in April of 1971, after public exposure, in order to "afford additional security to [their] sensitive techniques and operations." Click here for more information.
The parallels between the civil rights movement of the 1960's and the events and issues of the Civil War has forced historians to revise the history of reconstruction, placing a new emphasis on race and slavery as the main cause of The Civil War. Dean Lawrence R. Velvel interviews James McPherson, Pulitzer and Pritzker prize winning author, noted Civil War Historian and Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University , about his new book, This Mighty Scourge- Perspectives on the Civil War, on this episode of The Massachusetts School of Law's Books of our Time.
Civil War - James. M. McPherson - This Mighty Scourge, Perspectives on the Civil War, part 1
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.
Kwame Ture the man formerly known as Stokely Carmichael represents one of the most energetic voices from the Civil Rights/Black Power Movement. As we discover the history of 400 years of enslavement and the 100 years of subjugation following emancipation, certain voices like Kwame Ture from the struggle for black freedom emerge. These people were the generals in the freedom struggle. It wasn't easy. I thank them for their earnestness in times of cynicism.
Dr. Kenneth Clark: Through a strange set of circumstances, we managed to record this conversation with James Baldwin immediately after both of us attended that now-famous meeting between a group of Mr. Baldwin's friends and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. I believe much of the emotion of that historic occasion spilled over into our conversation. In an attempt to ease the tension, I started by asking him to dig back and tell us something about his childhood and his growing up.
James Baldwin: My mind is someplace else, really. But to think back on it -- I was born in Harlem, Harlem Hospital, and we grew up -- first house I remember was on Park Avenue -- which is not the American Park Avenue, or maybe it is the American Park Avenue --
Clark: Uptown Park Avenue?
Baldwin: Uptown Park Avenue, where the railroad tracks are. We used to play on the roof and in the -- I can't call it an alley -- but near the river -- it was a kind of dump, garbage dump. Those were the first scenes I remember. I remember my father had trouble keeping us alive -- there were nine of us. I was the oldest so I took care of the kids and dealt with Daddy. I understand him much better now. Part of his problem was he couldn't feed his kids, but I was a kid and I didn't know that. He was very religious, very rigid. He kept us together, I must say, and when I look back on it -- that was over 40 years ago that I was born -- when I think back on my growing up and walk that same block today, because it's still there, and think of the kids on that block now, I'm aware that something terrible has happened which is very hard to describe.
I am, in all but technical legal fact, a Southerner. My father was born in the South -- no, my mother was born in the South, and if they had waited two more seconds I might have been born in the South. But that means I was raised by families whose roots were essentially rural --
Clark: Southern rural...
Baldwin: Southern rural, and whose relation to the church was very direct, because it was the only means they had of expressing their pain and their despair. But 20 years later the moral authority which was present in the Negro Northern community when I was growing up has vanished, and people talk about progress, and I look at Harlem which I really know -- I know it like I know my hand -- and it is much worse there today than it was when I was growing up.
Clark: Would you say this is true of the schools too?
Baldwin: It is much worse in the schools.
Clark: What school did you go to?
Baldwin: I went to P.S. 24 and I went to P.S. 139. Frederick Douglass...
Clark: We are fellow alumni. I went to 139.
Baldwin: I didn't like a lot of my teachers, but I had a couple of teachers who were very nice to me -- one was a Negro teacher. You ask me these questions and I'm trying to answer you. I remember coming home from school -- you can guess how young I must have been -- and my mother asked me if my teacher was colored or white, and I said she was a little bit colored and a little bit white. But she was about your color. As a matter of fact I was right.
That's part of the dilemma of being an American Negro; that one is a little bit colored and a little bit white, and not only in physical terms but in the head and in the heart, and 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? And to be here means that you can't be anywhere else.
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. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say, and this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters. It's a terrible indictment -- I mean every word I say.
Clark: Well, we are confronted with the racial confrontation in America today. I think the pictures of dogs in the hands of human beings attacking other human beings --
Baldwin: In a free country -- in the middle of the 20th century.
Clark: In a free country. This Birmingham, clearly not restricted to Birmingham, as you so eloquently pointed out. What do you think can be done to change -- to use your term -- the moral fiber of America?
Baldwin: I think that one has got to find some way of putting the present administration of this country on the spot. One has got to force, somehow, from Washington, a moral commitment, not to the Negro people, but to the life of this country.
It doesn't matter any longer, and I'm speaking for myself, for Jimmy Baldwin, and I think I'm speaking for a great many Negroes too. It doesn't matter any longer what you do to me; you can put me in jail, you can kill me. By the time I was 17, you'd done everything that you could do to me. The problem now is, how are you going to save yourselves?
James Baldwin Interview (2 of 3)
Dr. Kenneth Clark: You mean the attorney general of the United States?
Baldwin: Mr. Robert Kennedy -- didn't know that I would have trouble convincing my nephew to go to Cuba, for example, to liberate the Cubans in defense of a government which now says it is doing everything it can do, which cannot liberate me. Now, there are 20 million people in this country, and you can't put them all in jail. I know how my nephew feels, I know how I feel, I know how the cats in the barbershop feel.
A boy last week, he was sixteen, in San Francisco, told me on television -- thank God we got him to talk -- maybe somebody thought to listen. He said, "I've got no country. I've got no flag." Now, he's only 16 years old, and I couldn't say, "you do." I don't have any evidence to prove that he does. They were tearing down his house, because San Francisco is engaging -- as most Northern cities now are engaged -- in something called urban renewal, which means moving the Negroes out. It means Negro removal, that is what it means. The federal government is an accomplice to this fact.
Now, we are talking about human beings, there's not such a thing as a monlithic wall or some abstraction called the Negro problem, these are Negro boys and girls, who at 16 and 17 don't believe the country means anything that it says and don't feel they have any place here, on the basis of the performance of the entire country.
Clark: But now, Jim --
Baldwin: Am I exaggerating?
James Baldwin Interview (3 of 3)
Clark: What do you see? Are you essentially optimistic or pessimistic, and I really don't want to put words in your mouth, because what I really want to find out is what you really believe.
Baldwin: I'm both glad and sorry you asked me that question, but I'll do my best to answer it. I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I'm forced to be an optimist. I'm forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. But the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people and our representatives -- it is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face, and deal with, and embrace this stranger whom they maligned so long.
What white people have to do, is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I'm not a nigger, I'm a man, but if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need it.
The question you have got to ask yourself -- the white population of this country has got to ask itself -- North and South, because it's one country, and for a Negro, there's no difference between the North and South. There's just a difference in the way they castrate you. But the fact of the castration is the American fact. If I'm not a nigger here and you invented him, you, the white people, invented him, then you've got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. Whether or not it's able to ask that question.
Clark: As a Negro and as an American, I can only hope that America has the strength and the capacity --
Panelist joining Brian Williams included: radio host Tom Joyner, author Michael Eric Dyson, entrepreneur Malaak Compton-Rock, screenwriter Kriss Turner, writer Kevin Powell, and columnist Mike Barnicle. Tim Wise, the Director of the Association for White Anti-Racist Education (AWARE) and Rev. Buster Soaries.
To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted, I would repeat what I have said to my own race: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your fireside. Cast down your bucket among these people who have without strikes and labor wars tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, just to make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South.
