The Cross of Redemption (13 page)

He was a father; he had a wife; he had children; he was an American! He was also killed, we are told, by a lunatic. I am suspicious of these “lunatics” who crop up in the most inconvenient or convenient times and places. In any case, I don’t care what hand pulled the trigger; he was put to death by the same oligarchy who still intend, with the country’s help, to keep the Negro in his place. That is why he died and that is why nobody cared.

Six kids were murdered in Birmingham on a Sunday and in Sunday school in a Christian nation, and nobody cared. And because nobody cared
then
, we are in this trouble
now;
because the forces which we have allowed to take over in this country also killed poor President Kennedy, and not because—let us tell the truth—not because he had turned into John Brown and not because he was a great civil rights leader. Let’s not be so pious as to make a myth out of what we
know
. He died for a very simple and also very complex reason, and when one examines the reason we are seeing something that all of our communications systems deny. What he did was break the bargain the country had struck around the turn of the century, when we agreed in the North that we would do what we wanted to with “our niggers” and in the South you would do what you wanted with “your niggers.” That is what created the “Solid South,” and he broke the bargain, poor man. When James Forman talks about “one man, one vote,” if we really should achieve one man, one vote, that is the end of the Southern oligarchy and that really is also the end of the Democratic Party as we now know it.

That fact suggests to me some of the dimensions of the crisis which we now face. How can I put this? I was trying to suggest before that what the country has done to one-tenth of its citizens has had a disastrous effect on the country. It is obvious—or maybe it is not so obvious, as it seems to be a controversial point, but it seems to me obvious—that if you are intending to establish, to live in, to create a democracy, then you have a responsibility
to all of your citizens. It would seem obvious to me that any son, any native son or daughter, has all the rights that any other native son or daughter has.

It’s bad enough for this not to be so; that’s bad enough. But what is really much worse is the system of lies, evasions, and naked oppression designed to pretend this isn’t so. It is one thing to trample a kid half to death or to death—that is bad enough—but it is quite another thing to then be told by the agents of that oppression, “Be patient; we will do better tomorrow.” The question will cross your mind just for a moment: “You will do
what
better tomorrow?” No, no, the militancy and the vitality that I heard in the music here today come from the kind of energy which allows you, which in fact forces you, to examine everything, taking nothing for granted. To say that it has been this way for the last two hundred years, but that it will
not
be this way for the next five minutes; that if, for example, you don’t think you can work in the Democratic Party, you don’t have to—there are other things. It is a vitality, in short, which allows you to believe, to act on the belief, that it is
your
country, and your responsibility to your country is to
free it
, and to free it you have to
change
it.

Americans are the youngest country, the largest country, and the strongest country, we like to say, and yet the very notion of change,
real
change, throws Americans into a panic and they look for any label to get rid of any dissenter. A country which is supposed to be built on dissent, built on the value of the individual, now distrusts dissent at least as much as any totalitarian government can and debases the individual in many ways because it places security and money above the individual; and when these things are cultivated and honored in the country, no matter what else it may have, it is in danger of perishing, because no country can survive, it
cannot
survive, without a patient, active responsibility for all its citizens. This country now, in terms of its politicians, always seems to feel “it is out of our hands”; “we can’t do anything.” A country which has no objective need to do so is always talking about the lesser of two evils. I hope you see what I am trying to suggest. I am trying to suggest that in order for me as a black citizen of this country to begin to be a free man here, in order for that to happen, a great many other things have to happen. I cannot be, even if I wanted to be, fitted into the social structure as it now stands; there is no possibility of opening it up to let me in. In the very same way, in the Deep South, Christian churches do not have many Christians in their congregations, and when I move into the congregation, and when the church itself embraces all Christians, the church will have had to change.

In order for us to survive and transcend the terrible days ahead of us, the country will have to turn and take me in its arms. Now, this may sound mystical, but at bottom that is what has got to happen, because it is not a matter of
giving me
this or that; it is not yours to give me. Let us be clear about that. It is not a question of whether they are going to give me any freedom. I am going to take my freedom. That problem is resolved. The real problem is the price. Not the price I will pay, but the price the country will pay. The price a white woman, man, boy, and girl will have to pay in themselves before they look on me as another human being. This metamorphosis is what we are driving toward, because without that we will perish—indeed, we are almost perishing now.

Internal dissension in this country has had a terrifying effect all over the world, because we are locked in civil war. Now, some of the changes which begin to achieve the liberation of a country have to be awkward and disturbing; and just think about one single aspect of this problem—jobs and freedom. The economy cannot employ all of its white people. And in my view one of the reasons for this—and I am deliberately not talking about the fantastic nuclear situation which is costing so much money—one of the reasons for this is that a great deal of the energy of this economy goes into creating things that nobody needs and nobody wants and everybody buys. Nobody needs a new car every year, and it doesn’t really matter what kind of toothpaste you use, you know; these things are not important. And in order for me to get a job, we have to have ways of getting everybody a job, and we are not going to do it the way we are doing it now. That’s a fact! And as for freedom, I will tell you what I know about freedom, and you will think I don’t have any political sense. I know that James Forman, for example, and many of the students he leads, are much, much freer than most of the white people I know in this country. For that matter, I am too. The reason is, I think, the reason is that in order to be free—let’s look some facts of your life in the face—you have to look into yourself and know
who you are
, at least know who you are, and decide what you want or at least what you will
not
have, and will
not
be, and take it from there. People are as free as they wish to become. If one thinks of Americans in this way, “freedom” is used here as a synonym for “comfort.” People think they are free because they don’t have a military machine oppressing them; but one of the simplest ways to lose freedom is to stop fighting for it and stop respecting it. And when it goes that way, something much worse happens, I think: when freedom goes that way, it completely vanishes, and nobody cares. Chaos takes its place, rather like what we watched in Germany—and
again, this is going to be a horrible example. I still believe when a country has lost all human feeling, you can do anything to anybody and justify it, and we do know that in this country we have done just that. The nature of our crisis then, it seems to me, is that those of us who will not live unless we can be free make this known. The events, the terrible events of the last days, have done nothing to alter this determination. In fact, if one had been undecided or uncertain before about what it meant to try to liberate oneself in this country, one is undecided no longer, because now we have seen with our own eyes the danger we are in. We have seen with our own eyes what happens to a society when it allows itself to be ruled by the least able and the most abject among us. We have seen what happens when the word “democracy” is taken to be a synonym for mediocrity; is not taken to mean to raise all of its members to the highest possible level, but on the contrary to reduce such members as aspire to excellence down to the lowest common denominator.

We have begun to see what happens to a country when it is run according to the rules of a popularity contest; we have begun to see that we ourselves are far more dangerous for ourselves than Khrushchev or Castro. What we do not know about our black citizens is what we do not know about ourselves; and what we do not know about ourselves is what we do not know about the world—and the world knows it. Nothing can save us—not all our money, nor all our bombs, nor all our guns—if we cannot achieve that long-, long-, long-delayed maturity.

(1964)

I
SHOULD SAY TWO THINGS
before I begin. One: I beg you to hold somewhere in the center of your mind the fact that this is a centennial year, that we are celebrating, this year, one hundred years of Negro freedom. Two: we are speaking in the context of the Birmingham crisis. And in this attempt to speak to you, I am going to have to play entirely, as they say, by ear. I want you to reconsider, or really to listen to, for the first time, the last two lines of an extremely celebrated song, as though you were an actor, and you were on the stage, under the necessity to deliver Hamlet’s soliloquy “To be or not to be,” etc., as though these lines had never been heard before. These two lines could be considered extremely corny, but I ask you to take them seriously. They are a question. The two lines I want you to pretend you are delivering on some stage, somewhere in the world, as though these lines had never been heard before, are these:

And now please try to make a certain leap with me. I have one more quotation I want to give you, which comes from Nietzsche—it has been on my mind all week long. At some point, the man says:

There are several thousand things one must attempt to suggest, due to the context in which we are speaking. In the life of a woman, in the life of a man, in anybody’s life, there are always many elements at work. The crucial element I wish to consider here is that element of a life which we consider to be an identity; the way in which one puts oneself together, what one imagines oneself to be; for one example, the invented reality standing before you now, who is arbitrarily known as Jimmy Baldwin. This invented reality contains a great number of elements, all of them extremely difficult, if not impossible, to name. The invented reality has struck a certain kind of bargain with the world: he has a name, we know what he does, and we think, therefore, that we know who he is. But it is not that simple. The truth, forever, for everybody, is that one is a stranger to oneself, and that one must deal with this stranger day in and day out—that one, in fact, is forced to create, as distinct from invent, oneself. Life demands of everyone a certain kind of humility, the humility to be able to make the descent that Nietzsche is talking about.

Life does not offer one as many choices as one would like to believe. In my life—and in your life, too, I am sure—when young, one supposes that there is some way to avoid disaster. Let me try to spell that out a little. When I was a little boy, for example, I used to tell my mother, “I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that, I’m going to go here and I’m going to go there, I’m going to be a writer—I’m going to
do, do, do, be
this.” Mama would look at me and say, “It’s more than a notion.”

It took me a long time, a very long time, to begin to realize that she was right, and begin to realize what she meant. I, like all of us, thought I knew what I wanted, and I thought I knew who I was, and—like all of us—I thought that whatever it was I wanted and wherever I wanted to go, I could achieve without paying my dues. For one of the things that one cannot imagine, especially when one is young, is how to pay your dues. You don’t even know that there are dues to be paid. Later on, one begins to discover, with great pain, and very much against one’s will, that whatever it is you want, what you want, at bottom, must be to
become yourself:
there is nothing else to want. Whatever one’s journey is, one’s got to accept the fact that disaster is one of the conditions under which you will make it. (The journey, I mean, not “make it” in the American sense.) And you will learn a certain humility, because the terms that you have invented, which you think describe and define you, inevitably collide with the facts of life. When this
collision occurs—and, make no mistake, this is an absolutely inevitable collision—when this collision occurs, like two trains meeting head-on in a tunnel, life offers you the choice, and it’s a very narrow choice, of holding on to your definition of yourself or saying, as the old folks used to say, and as everybody who wants to live has to say:
Yes, Lord
.

Which is to say yes to life. Until you can do that, you’ve not become a man or a woman. Now, in this country this inability to say yes to life is part of our dilemma, which could become a tragic one; it is part of the dilemma of being what is known as an American. The collective effort until this moment, and the collective delusion until this moment, has been precisely my delusion when I was a little boy: that you could get what you wanted, and become what you said you were going to be, painlessly. Furthermore, if one examines for a second, or if one tries to define, the proper noun “American,” one will discover that the noun equates with a catalogue of virtues, and with something called, plaintively enough, “I Am an American” Day. To be an American means, I gather—check me out, you think about it—that, though Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Scots, Italians, may be corrupt, sexual, unpredictable, lazy, evil, a little lower than the angels, Americans are not—quite overlooking the fact that the country was settled by Englishmen, Scots, Germans, Turks, Armenians, etc. Every nation under heaven is here, and not, after all, for a very long time.