0:42 do [Music] do [Music] [Music] mr baldwin i i'm sure you still meet the
1:28 uh remark that um what are the negroes why aren't they optimistic um they say but it's getting so much better they're negro mayors there's negroes in all of sports there are negroes in politics they're they're even accorded the ultimate accolade of being in television commercials now and i'm glad you're smiling is it at once getting much better and still hopeless well i don't think there's much hope for it you know to tell you the truth you know as long as people are using this peculiar language it's not a question of what happens to the to the negro here to the black man here that's a that's a very very question for me you know but but the real question is what's gonna happen to this country i have to repeat that
2:15 i got the blue you damn runner got the blue from my head down to my shoe [Music]
3:03 acton spartan literary agency june 30th 1979 90th j i'll confess to you that i am writing the enclosed proposal in a somewhat divided frame of mind the summer has scarcely begun and i feel already that it's almost over and i will be 55 yes 55 in a month i am about to undertake the journey and this is a journey to tell you the truth which i always knew that i would have to make but it hoped perhaps i certainly
3:51 hadn't hoped not to have to make so soon i am saying that a journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey what you will do with what you find or what you find will do to you i not only have a right to be free we have a duty and so when you sit down on the bus and you sit down in the front or you sit down by a white person you're sitting down because you have a duty to sit down not merely because you have a right the time of these lives and deaths from a public point of view is 1955 when we first heard of martin to 1968 when he was murdered
4:38 medgar was murdered in the summer of 1963 malcolm was murdered in 1965 [Music] the three men medgar malcolm and martin were very different men consider that martin was only 26 in 1955 he took on his shoulders the weight of the crimes and the lies and the hope of a nation
5:25 i want these three lives to bang against and reveal each other as in truth they did and used their dreadful journey as a means of instructing the people whom they loved so much who betrayed them and for whom they gave their lives [Music] the moment a negro child walks into the school every decent self-respecting loving parent should take this white child out of approach of
6:18 school [Music] [Music] [Music] god forgives merida and he forgives adultery but he is very angry and he actually creates all who do [Applause] integrate that's when i saw the photograph
7:06 on every newspaper kiosk on that wide tree-shaped boulevard in paris were photographs of fifteen-year-old dorothy counts being reviled and spat upon by the mob as she was making her way to school in charlotte north carolina there was unutterable pride tension and anguish in that girl's face as she approached the halls of learning with history jeering at her back it made me furious it filled me with both hatred and pity and it made me ashamed some one of us should have been there with her but it was on that bright afternoon that i knew i was leaving france
7:53 i could simply no longer sit around paris discussing the algerian and the black american problem everybody else was paying their dues and it was time i went home and paid mine if you was white should be all right if he was brown you stick around but as you black oh brother get back get back get back [Music] to employment they called everybody's number but they never did call mine and said if he was white you'd be all right if he was brown
8:38 stick around but as you fly [Music] i had at last come home [Music] if there was in this some illusion there was also much truth in the years in paris i had never been homesick for anything american neither waffles ice cream hot dogs baseball majorettes movies
9:26 nor the empire state building nor coney island nor the statue of liberty nor the daily news nor times square all of these things have passed out of me they might never have existed and it made absolutely no difference to me if i never saw them again but i missed my brothers and sisters and my mother they made a difference i wanted to be able to see them and to see their children i hoped that they wouldn't forget me i missed harlem sunday mornings and fried chicken and biscuits i missed the music i missed
10:14 the style that style possessed by no other people in the world i miss the way the dark face closes the way dark eyes watch and the way when a dark face opens a light seems to go everywhere i missed in short my connections missed the life which had produced me and nourished me and paid for me now though i was a stranger i was home [Music] i am fascinated by the movement on and off the screen
11:00 [Music] i'm about seven and with my mother or my aunt the movie is dance fools dance [Music] i was aware that joan crawford was a white lady yet i remember being sent to the store sometimes later and a colored woman who to me looked exactly like joan crawford was buying something she was incredibly beautiful she looked down at me with so beautiful a smile when i was not even embarrassed which was rare for me
11:47 [Applause] by this time i had been taken in hand by a young white school teacher named bill miller a beautiful woman very important to me she gave me books to read and talk to me about the books and about the world about ethiopia and italy and the german third race it took me to see plays and films to which no one else would have dreamed of taking a ten-year-old boy
12:36 it is certainly because of bill miller who arrived in my terrifying life so soon that i never really managed to hate white people though god knows i have often wished to murder more than one or two therefore i began to suspect that white people did not act as they did because they were white but for some other reason [Music] i was a child of course and therefore unsophisticated i took bill miller as she was or she appeared to be to me she too anyway was treated like a [ __ ]
13:22 especially by the cops and she had no love for landlords [Music] in these days no one resembling my father has yet made an appearance on the american cinema scene [Music] no it's not entirely true there were for example stephen fetchett and willie best and man tan moreland all of whom rightly or wrongly i loathed it seemed to me that
14:09 they lied about the world i knew and debased it and certainly i did not know anybody like them as far as i could tell for it is also possible that their comic bug-eyed terror contained the truth concerning a terror by which i hoped never to be engulfed yet i had no reservations at all concerning the terror of the black janitor and they won't forget [Music] i think that it was a black actor named clinton rosemond who played this part and he looked a little like my father [Music] he is terrified because a young white
14:55 girl in this small southern town has been raped and murdered and her body has been found on the premises of which he is the janitor the role of the janitor is small yet the man's face bangs in my memory until today nobody says you have tom but they might the film's icy brutality built scared me and strengthened me [Music]
15:43 because uncle tom refuses to take vengeance in his own hands he was not a hero for me heroes as far as i could see were white and not merely because of the movies but because of the land in which i lived of which movies were simply a reflection i despised and feared those heroes because they did take vengeance into their own hands they thought vengeance was theirs to take and yes i understood that my countrymen were my enemy
16:32 i suspect that all these stories are designed to reassure us that no crime was committed we've made a legend out of a massacre leaving aside all the physical facts that one can quote leaving aside rape or murder leaving aside the bloody catalog of oppression which we are in one way too familiar with already what this does to the subjugated is to destroy his sense of reality this means in the case of an american negro born in that glittering republic and in the moment you were born since you don't know any better every stick and stone and every face is white and since you
17:20 have not yet seen the mirror you suppose that you are too it comes as a great shock around the age of five or six or seven to discover that gary cooper killing off the indians when you were rooting for gary cooper that the indians were you it comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system a reality evolved any place for you my dear jay you must get us to be hoped be as curious as i am concerning the execution of this book project
18:06 i know how to do it technically it is a matter of research and journeys and with you or without you i will do it anyway i begin in september when i go on the road the road means my return to the south it means briefly for example seeing merlie evers and the children those children who are children no longer it means going back to atlanta to selma to birmingham it means seeing coretta scott king and martin's children i know that martin's daughter whose name i don't remember and malcolm's oldest daughter whose name is attila are both in the theater and apparently
18:53 are friends it means seeing betty shabazz malcolm's widow and the five younger children it means exposing myself as one of the witnesses to the lives and deaths of their famous fathers and it means much much more than that a clod of witnesses as old saint paul once put it i first met malcolm x i saw malcolm before i met him i was giving a lecture somewhere in new york malcolm sitting in the first row of the hall bending forward at such an angle that his long arms nearly
19:40 caressed the ankles of his long legs staring up at me i very nearly panicked i knew malcolm only by legend and this legend since i was a harlem street boy i was sufficiently astute to distrust malcolm might be the torch that white people claim he was though in general white america's evaluations of these matters would be laughable and even pathetic did not these evaluations have such wicked results on the other hand malcolm had no reason to trust me either and so i stumbled through my lecture with malcolm never taking his eyes from my face stormy weather
20:37 since my man alive together [Music] keeps raining all the time as a member of the naacp mega was investigating the murder of a black man which had occurred months before had shown me letters from black people asking him to do this and he had asked me to come with him together i was terribly frightened but perhaps that field trip will help us define what i mean by the word witness
21:24 i was to discover that the line which separates a witness from an actor is a very thin line indeed nevertheless the line is real 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
22:10 naacp was fatally entangled with black class distinctions or illusions of the same which repelled a shoeshine 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
22:58 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 had to accept this time war 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
23:43 [Music] we should all be concerned but one goal the eradication of crime the federal bureau of investigation is as close to you as your nurse telephone it seeks to be your protector in all matters within its jurisdiction belongs to you
25:18 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 lest 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
26:08 angeles [Music] is [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] 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
26:54 and his words but with vastly different manner and means is a spokesman for some segment of the negro people today black people in this country have been the victims of violence at the hands of the white man for 400 years and following the ignorant negro preachers we have thought that it was godlike to turn the other cheek to the group that was brutalizing us malcolm x one of the most articulate exponents of the black muslim philosophy has said of your movement and your philosophy that it uh plays into the hands of the white oppressors that they are happy to hear you talk about love for the oppressor because this disarms the negro and fits into the stereotype
27:40 of the negro as they meet turning the other cheek sort of creature would you here to comment on mr x's belief well i don't think of uh love as uh in this context as emotional bosch but i think of love as something strong and that organizes itself into powerful a direct action this is what i try to teach in the struggle in the south that we are not engaged in a struggle that means we sit down and do nothing that there's a great deal of difference between non-resistance to evil and non-violent resistance uh martin luther king is just a 20th
28:26 century or modern uncle tom or a religious uncle tom who was 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 in the face of the attack of the klan in that day uh i think though that we we can be sure that the vast majority of negroes who engage in the demonstrations and who uh understand the non-violent 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 non-violence is a willingness to be the recipient of violence while never uh inflicting violence upon
29:14 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
30:01 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 live to be 40. [Music] [Applause]
30:48 hey [Music] we need an organization that no one downtown loves we need one that's ready and willing to take action any kind of action by any means necessary the melbourne talks one of the messengers is talk they articulate for all the negro people who hear them who listen to them they articulate their suffering there's something which has been in this country so long denied that's malcolm's great authority over any of his audiences he corroborates their reality he tells
31:35 them that they really exist you know [Applause] stay back [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] and their days is one of them when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it how precisely you're going to reconcile
32:21 yourself to your situation here and how you're going to communicate to the vast heedless unthinking cruel white majority that you are here i am terrified at the moral ability the death of the heart which is happening in my country these people have deluded themselves for so long they really don't think i'm human i admit is on their conduct not on what they say and this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters
33:22 so [Music] 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 you know came to my kitchen you know we were segregated from the from the schoolhouse door therefore he doesn't know he really does not know what it was like me to leave my house you know leave the school and go back to home he doesn't know how negroes live and it comes as a great surprise
34:09 to the kennedy brothers and to everybody else in the country i'm certain again you know that like again like most white americans i have no encounter they have no no i'm sure they have nothing whatever against nicholas that is no that's really not the question you know the question is really a kind of apathy and ignorance which is the price to be paid for segregation that's what segregation means you don't know what's happening on the other side of the world because you don't want or not 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
34:54 we were simply trapped in the same situation well you tell that to my boy tonight when you put him to sleep on the living room couch and 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 33.
35:41 that was one of the very last times i saw her on her feet and she died at the age of 34. i miss her so much people forget how young everybody was bobby kennedy for another quite different example was 38. 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 deep south school that way we said it will be clear that whoever spits on that child will be spitting on the nation
36:27 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'd 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 cops standing on that negro woman's
37:13 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 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
37:59 his wife and children i remember merely ever standing outside smiling and we waved and mega drove to the airport and put me on the plane months later i was in puerto rico working on my play lucian 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 top of the car was down we were laughing talking and the radio was playing
38:44 and the music stopped and the 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 him down as a king [Music] but when the shadowy sun [Music] [Music] his name
39:32 [Music] the blue skies seem 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 rod 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
40:19 medgar gone [Music] [Music] baby [Music] 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
41:11 and the 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 this black population dreaming of anything like the final solution
41:58 negro has never been as docile as white americans wanted to believe that was a myth we were not singing and dancing down the level we were trying to keep alive we were trying to survive a very brutal system the [ __ ] has never been happy in this place one of the most terrible things is that in fact whether life is not i am an american my school really was the streets of new york city my frame of reference was um george washington and john wayne but i you know i was a child you know i'm a child of his eyes in the world he is what he sees there's nothing else to use and you are formed by what you see the
42:44 choices you have to make in 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's not a figure of speech the corpses of your brothers and your sisters pile up around you and after 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 [Music]
43:30 forget the negro problem don't write any voting acts we had that it's called the 15th amendment you're under civil rights 1964 what you had 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 of negroes knowing them to be their sons white women have had negroes burned knowing their lovers it is not a racial problem it's a problem 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'm one of the children of that house simply i'm the most despised child of
44:17 that house and it is because the american people are unable to face the fact that in fact i am fresh of their flesh bone of their bones created by them my blood my father's blood is in that soil good afternoon ma'am it's raining so hard i brought robbers and coat to fetch my little girl home i'm afraid you've made some mistakes ain't this a 3b yes well this is it she can't be it i had no little colored children in my class oh thank you
45:07 there's my little girl piola you may go home i hate you i hate you i know very well that my ancestors had no desire to come to this place but neither did the ancestors of the
45:54 people who became white and who require my captivity a song they require a song of me lest to celebrate my captivity than to justify their own i've always been struck in america by an emotional poverty so bottomless and a terror of human life of human touch so deep that virtually no american appears able to achieve any
46:41 viable organic connection between his public stance and his private life this failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on american public conduct and on black white relations if americans were not so terrified of their private self it would never have become so dependent on what they call the negro problem but they said it wasn't nice to say [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] poor little [ __ ] kids love the little
47:28 [ __ ] kids who love me who love me this problem which they invented in order to safeguard their purity has made of them criminals and monsters and it is destroying them and this not from anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role of a guilty and constricted white imagination as assigned to the blacks look man don't give me that look you
48:15 should have got was coming here after spitting in that guy's face it is impossible to accept the premise of the story a premise based on the profound american misunderstanding of the nature of the hatred between black and white that time is now the root of the black man's hatred is rage and he does not so much hate white men that simply wants them out of his way and more than that out of his children's way the root of the white man's hatred is terror a bottomless and nameless terror which
49:02 focuses on this dread figure an entity which lives only in his mind [Music] when sydney jumps off the train the white liberal people downtown were much relieved and joyful but when black people saw him jump off the train they yelled get back on the train you fool the black man jumps off the train in order to reassure white people
49:49 to make them know that they are not hated that though they have made human errors they done nothing for which to be hated in spite of the fabulous myths proliferating in this country concerning the sexuality of black people black men are still used in the popular culture as though they had no sexual equipment at all as a black artist and a man is also up against the infantile furtive sexuality of this country both he and harry belafonte for example
50:37 are sex symbols though no one dares admit that still lest to use them as any of the hollywood he men are used black people have been robbed of everything in this country and they don't want to be robbed of their artist black people particularly disliked guess who's coming to dinner because they felt that sydney was in effect being used against them guess who's coming to dinner may prove in some bizarre way to be a milestone because it is really quite impossible to go any further in that particular direction if you ever planned to move west
51:24 the next time the kissing will have to start [Music] well got your ticket thank you i am aware that men do not kiss each other in american films nor for the most part in america nor do the black detective and the white sheriff kiss here you take care you're here yeah but the obligatory fade-out kiss
52:12 in the classic american film did not speak of love and still less of sex it spoke of reconciliation of all things now becoming possible [Music] i knew a blind girl in the village a long time ago and eventually we never walked out of the house together
53:00 she was far safer walking the streets alone than when walking with me a brutal and humiliating fact which sterling destroyed whatever relationship this girl and i might have been able to achieve this happens all the time in america but americans have yet to realize what a sinister fact this is and what it says about them when we walked out in the evening then she would leave ahead of me alone i would give about five minutes and then i would walk out alone taking another route
53:45 and meet her on the subway platform we would not acknowledge each other we would get into the subway car sitting at opposite ends of it and walk separately through the streets of the free and the brave to wherever we were going the friends house or the movies all over the country families such as this are enjoying new prosperity they have new interests new standards of living a buying power they've never enjoyed before they're good prospects for practically all types of goods and services
54:32 all too often though they're overlooked prospects since 1940 in san francisco alone the negro market has increased by 89 [Music] here are millions of customers for what you have to sell customers with 15 billion dollars to spend someone once said to me that the people in general cannot bear very much reality he meant by this that they prefer fantasy to a truthful recreation of their experience people have quite enough reality to bear by simply getting through their lives raising their children dealing with the eternal conundrums of
55:17 birth taxes and death negroes are continuously making progress here in this country the progress in many areas not as fast as it should be but they are making progress and we will continue to make progress there's no reason that uh in the uh near in the foreseeable future that a negro could also be president of the united states i remember for example when the ex-attorney general mr robert kennedy said that it was conceivable that in 40 years in america we might have a negro president and that sounded like a very emancipated statement i suppose to white people
56:02 they were not in harlem when this statement was first heard and did not hear and possibly will never hear the laughter and the bitterness and the scorn which is taken was greeted from the point of view of the man in the hall and barbershop bobby kennedy only got here yesterday and now he's already on his way to the presidency we've been here for 400 years and now he tells us that maybe in 40 years if you're good we may let you become president it was a dream just a dream i had on my mind it was a dream just a dream i had on my
56:51 mind [Music] and when i woke up not a thing could i find [Music] [Applause] i dreamed i went out with an angel and had a good time i dreamed i was satisfied let me put it this way that from a very literal point of view the harbors and the ports
57:40 and the railroads of the country the economy especially of the southern states could not conceivably be what it has become if they had not had and do not still have indeed and for so long so many generations cheap labor [Music]
58:48 it is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one ninth of its population is beneath them and until that moment until the moment comes when we the americans we the american people are able to accept the fact that i have to accept for example that my ancestors are both white and black that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other and that i am not a ward of america i'm not an object in missionary charity i am one of the people who built the country until this moment there is scarcely any
59:35 hope for the american dream because the people who are denied participation in it by their very presence will wreck it and if that happens it's a very great moment for the west thank you [Music]
1:00:37 we're here in the studio today with seven men who have two things in common they are entertainers and artists and they've all come to washington they're seven out of some 200 000 american citizens who came to the capitol to march for freedom and for jobs uh will this tremendous outburst now uh uh lead to a course of action mr belafonte uh the now that is being spoken about is the fact that in a hundred years finally uh through whatever the causes have been in history and most of them have been because of oppression the negro people have uh strongly and fully taken the bit in their teeth they're asking absolutely no quarter from anyone but i do say that
1:01:24 the bulk of the interpretation of whether this thing is going to end successfully and joyously or is going to end disastrously lays very heavily with the white community it lays very heavily with the profiteers it lays very heavily with the vested interests it lays very heavily with a great middle stream in this country of people who have refused to commit themselves or even have the slightest knowledge that these things have been going on i am speaking as a member of a certain democracy and very complex country
1:02:10 which insists on being very narrow-minded simplicity is taken to be a great american virtue along with sincerity i'm sorry i am deeply sorry and i'm sorry i'm deeply sorry about it there are no excuses i am solely you've made plenty of mistakes for that i apologize i am very sorry you know i'm sorry i did this to you but you got to get used to it it's one of those little problems in life i take full responsibility here today to again apologize i just apologize for that to her any mistakes i have made i take full responsibility it's an honor to serve the city of ferguson and the people who live there
1:02:58 one of the results of this is that immaturity is taken to be a virtue too so that someone like that let's say john wayne who spent most of his time on screen admonishing indians was in no necessity to grow up i had been in london on this particular night we were free and we decided to treat ourselves to a really fancy friendly dinner the headwaiter came and said that was a phone call for me my sister gloria rose to take it
1:03:46 she was very strange when she came back she didn't say anything and i began to be afraid to ask her anything then nibbling at something she obviously wasn't tasting she said well i've got to tell you because the press is on its way over here they have just killed malcolm [Music]
1:04:34 [Music] there is nothing in the evidence offered by the book of the american republic which allows me really to argue with a cat who says to me they needed us to speak to cotton and now they don't need us anymore now they don't need us they're going to kill us all off just like they did the indians and i can't say it's a christian nation
1:05:22 they were your brothers will never do that to you because the record is too long and too bloody that's all we have done all your buried corpses now begin to speak but i say violence is necessary violence is a part of america's culture it is as american as cherry pie black power brothers [Applause] [Music]
1:06:09 [Applause] if we were white if we were irish if we were jewish if we were poles if we had in fact in your mind a frame of reference our heroes will be your heroes too not turner would be a hero for you instead of a threat malcolm x might still be alive and you know everyone is very proud of brave little israel i stayed against which i have nothing no i don't want to be misinterpreted i'm not an anti-semite but you know when the israelis pick up guns or the poles or the irish or any white man in the world says give me liberty or give me death the entire white world applauds when a black man says exactly the same thing word for word he is judged a criminal
1:06:58 and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad [ __ ] so they won't be any more like him look out across this land we love look about you wherever you are there's unending scenic beauty and there's freedom it's an inherent american right meaning many different things to every single city it's a leisurely afternoon of golf along a pleasant course it's an amusement park a roller coaster ride a day at a county fair [Music] a day of excitement unrestricted travel across all our 50 states
1:07:43 unlimited enjoyment of all these jewels in the continent's crown for all of us there's all of america all of its scenic beauty all of its heritage of history all of its limitless opposition we've dropped too many bombs on vietnam now let us save our national honor stop the bombing and stop the war [Music] what i'm trying to say to this country to us is that we must know this we must realize this
1:08:32 that no other country in the world have been so fat and so sleek and so safe and so happy and so irresponsible and so dead no other country can afford to dream of a plymouth and a wife in the house with a fence and the children growing up safely to go to college and to become executives and then to marry and have the plymouth and the house and so forth a great many people do not live this way and cannot imagine it and do not know that when we talk about democracy this is what we mean
1:09:24 [Music] the industry is compelled given the way it is built to present to the american people a self-perpetuating fantasy of american life their concept of entertainment is difficult to distinguish from the use of narcotics what worries you about them having black partners do you think people are going to look down on them or judge yes i think people licked it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] to watch the tv screen for any length of time is to learn some really frightening things about the american sense of reality
1:10:10 we are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are and we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we're willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty so tame and so ugly these images are descending not to trouble but to reassure they also weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is ourselves as we are i would like to add someone to our group here uh professor paul weiss a sterling professor of philosophy at yale
1:11:02 [Applause] were you able to listen to the show backstage a good deal of it but then i was behind the roster so i heard only some of it did you hear anything that you disagreed with i disagree with a great deal of it and of course it's a good deal i agree with but i think uh he's overlooking one very important matter i think each one of us i think is terribly alone he lives his own individual life there's all kinds of obstacles in the way of religion or color or size or shape or lack of ability and the problem is to become a man but what i was discussing was not that problem really i was discussing the difficulties the obstacles the very the very real danger of death
1:11:48 thrown up by the society when a negro when a black man attempts to become a man all this emphasis upon black men and white does emphasize something which is here but it emphasizes it or perhaps exaggerates it and therefore makes us for uh put people together in groups which they ought not to be in i have more in common with a black scholar than i have with a white man who is against scholarship and you have more in common with a white author than you have with someone who's against all literature so why must we always concentrate on color or religion or this there are other ways of connecting men i'll tell you this when i left this country in 1948 i know this country one reason only one reason i didn't care where i went i might have gone to hong kong i might have gone to timbuktu
1:12:34 i ended up in paris on the streets of paris with forty dollars and i parked on the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there but it already happened to me here you talk about making it as a writer by yourself you had to be able then to turn up all the intent of which you live because once you turn your back on this society you may die you may die and it's very hard to send a typewriter and concentrate on that if you're afraid of the world around you the years i lived in paris did one thing for me they released me from that particular social terror which is not the paranoia of my own mind but a real social danger visible in the face of every cop every boss everybody i don't know what most white people in
1:13:19 this country feel but i can only include what they feel from the state of their institutions i don't know if white christians hate negroes or not but i know that we have a christian church which is white and a christian church which is which is black i know as malcolm x once put it it's the most segregated hour and american life is high noon on sunday that's a great deal for me about a christian nation it means that i can't afford to trust most white christians and certainly cannot trust the christian church i don't know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me that doesn't matter but i know i'm not in their unions i don't know if the real estate lobby is anything against black people but i know the real estate lobbies keep me in the ghetto i don't know if the board of education hates black people but i know the textbooks i give my children to read and the schools that we have to go to now this is the evidence
1:14:05 you want me to make an act of faith risking myself my wife my woman my sister my children on some idealism which you surely exist in america which i have never seen [Applause] [Music] all of the western nations have been caught in a lie the lie of their pretended humanism this means that their history has no moral justification and that the west has no moral authority [Music] isle as i am states one of the
1:14:50 characters in dostoyevsky is the idiot i don't believe in the wagons that bring bread to humanity for the wagons that bring bread to humanity may coldly exclude a considerable part of humanity from enjoying what is brought a very long time america prospered this prosperity cost millions of people their lives now not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits they can neither understand them nor do without them above all they cannot imagine the price
1:15:35 paid by their victims or subjects for this way of life and so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolt this is the formula for a nation or kingdom decline for no kingdom can maintain itself by force alone force does not work the way its advocates think in fact it does
1:16:20 it does not for example reveal to the victim the strength of the adversary on the contrary it reveals the weakness even the panic of the adversary and this revelation invest the victim with passion there's a day in palm springs that i will remember forever a bright day i was based in hollywood working on the screen version of the
1:17:06 autobiography of malcolm x this was a difficult assignment since i had known malcolm after all crossed swords with him worked with him [Music] and held him in that great esteem which is not easily distinguishable if it is distinguishable from love billy d williams had come to town and he was staying at the house i very much wanted billy d for the role of malcolm phone had been brought out to the pool and now it rang and i picked it up the record player was still playing
1:17:54 he's not dead yet but it's a head wound i have some very sad news for all of you and i think uh sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world and that is that martin luther king was shot and was killed tonight i hardly remember the rest of the evening at all i remember weeping briefly more in helpless rage than in sorrow and billy trying to comfort me
1:18:41 but i really don't remember that evening at all [Music] in a freedom march today but mother i won't be alone other children will go with me and march the streets of birmingham to make my country free no the church was packed
1:19:29 and the pew before me said marlon brando sammy davis er the kid sydney poitier nearby i saw harry belafonte sitting next to coretta king i have a childhood handover thing about not weeping in public and i was concentrating on holding myself together i did not want to wait for martin tears seemed futile but i may also have been afraid and i could not have been the only one that if i began to weep i would not be able to stop i started to cry and i stumbled
1:20:16 sammy grabbed my arm the story of the negro in america is the story of america it is not a pretty story what can we do well i am tired i don't know how it will come about i know that no matter how it comes about it will be bloody it will be hard i still believe that we can do with this country something that has not been done before we are misled here because we think of numbers you don't need numbers you need passion
1:21:03 and this is proven by the history of the world the tragedy is that most of the people who say they care about it do not care what they care about is their safety and their profits [Music] with [Music] the american way of life has failed to
1:21:49 make people happier or make them better we do not want to admit this and we do not admit it we persist in believing that the empty and criminal among our children are the result of some miscalculation in the formula that can be corrected that the bottomless and aimless hostility which makes our cities among the most dangerous in the world is created and felt by a handful of aberrants but the lack yawning everywhere in this country of passionate conviction of personal authority proves only our rather appealing tendency to be gregarious and democratic to look around the united states today
1:22:35 is enough to make profits and angels weep this is not the land of free it is only very unwillingly and sporadically the home of the brave i sometimes feel it to be an absolute miracle that the entire black population of the united states of america has not long ago succumbed to raging paranoia people finally say to you in an attempt to dismiss the social reality but you're so
1:23:22 bitter [Music] well i may or may not be bitter but if i were i would have good reasons for it chief among them that american blindness or cowardice which allows us to pretend that life presents no reasons for being bitter [Music]
1:24:13 in this country for a dangerously long time there have been two levels of experience one to put it cruelly can be summed up in the images of gary cooper and dora's day two of the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen and the other subterranean indispensable and denied can be summed up let us say in the tone and in the face of rachel's [Music]
1:25:06 between these two levels of experience [Music] should i surrender pleading words [Music] is this [Music]
1:25:52 ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves and furthermore you give me a terrifying advantage you never had to look at me i had to look at you i know more about you than you know about me not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced history is not the past it is the present
1:26:37 we carry our history with us we are our history if we pretend otherwise we literally are criminals i attest to this the world is not white it never was white cannot be white white is a metaphor for power [Music] and that is simply a way of describing chase manhattan bank
1:27:22 [Music] [Music] [Music] i can't be a pessimist
1:28:08 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 supposed to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive but negro in this country 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
1:28:54 and deal with and embrace this stranger when they rely on so long what white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a [ __ ] in the first place because i'm not a [ __ ] i'm a man but if you think i'm a [ __ ] it means you need it the question you got to ask yourself the white population of this country's got to ask itself north and south because it's one country and for negro there's others in north in the south there's just no a difference in the way they in a way they castrate you but that's but the fact of the castration is the american fact if i'm not the [ __ ] here and the you invented it you the white people invented him and you gotta find out why
1:29:42 and the future of the country depends on that whether or not it's able to ask that question [Music] [Music] i'm the biggest hypocrite in 2015. once i finish this witness this will convince is what i mean i mean it's evidence that i'm irrelevant to society that's what you're telling me penitentiary would only hurt me curse me till i'm dead church me with your fake prophesizing that i'ma be just another slave in my
1:30:27 head institutional lies manipulation and lies reciprocation of freedom only living your eyes you hate me don't you i know you hate me just as much as you hate yourself jealous of my wisdom and cards i don't watching me as i pull up fill up my tank to pillow muscle cars like pull ups to show you what these big wheels about black is successful this black man meant [Music] emancipation of a real [ __ ] [Music]
1:31:15 [Music] [Music] i'm the biggest hypocrite in 2015 when i finish this if you listen this sure you will agree that platter's bigger than me it's generational hatred the shitlessism is grimy little justification i'm african-american i'm african i'm black as the heart of a [ __ ] area i'm black as the name of tyrone and darius excuse my french but [ __ ] you no [ __ ] y'all that's the blunt as it gets i know you hate me don't you you ain't my people i can tell cause there's threats when i see you i can tell cause your waist is equal no i can tell because you're in love with the desert eagles thinking maliciously he gets a change and you complete them
1:32:01 it's funny how sulu and those are might go to war two tribal armies they want to build and destroy but mommy are these coptic kings that live next door beefing with power rules only death settled the score so no matter how much i say i'd like to preach with the panthers or tell georgia state marcus garvey got all the answers i try to celebrate february like it's my b day or eat watermelon chicken and kool-aid on weekdays or jump high enough to get michael jordan endorsements or watch bt because urban support is important so why did i reconstrain my mind what's in the street when gangbanging make me kill a [ __ ] blacker than me
1:32:46 [Music] oh [Music] bye [Music]
1:33:34 uh you
