The Cross of Redemption (17 page)

MR. HATHAWAY
. Perhaps we should tell more of the truth about our heroes, such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who are built up in history books almost as myths. We know that they had frailties. We know that they made a lot of mistakes. Those mistakes are never built up, so that the white man has the impression immediately that his heroes are almost gods.

MR. BALDWIN
. I don’t think that any kid believes any of those legends about George Washington and his cherry tree—“I cannot tell a lie” and all that nonsense.

MR. HATHAWAY
. I think at certain stages they do. After a while they get to believe that it is not true.

MR. BALDWIN
. I never did.

This is fine. I think it does a disservice to a child to tell him things which are not true. Children cannot really be fooled. For example, and I will be very brief, you remember that several years ago the Birmingham church school was bombed and there were four girls killed in there. They were not killed by some madman, but by a mad society, which is not only located in Birmingham. At that time some of us threw together an ad hoc committee to prevent celebrations on Christmas Day. We had lost the right as a Christian nation to celebrate the birth of Christ. I discovered during this that Santa Claus is not needed by children, but by grown-ups. People say we couldn’t do that because the children would be so upset. The fact is that it wasn’t true; what they really meant was that
they
would be upset.

We give them those legends and they try to survive them, but no kid has ever believed anything written about George Washington. Anyway, even if they did, by the time they are seventeen they have got to revise their whole estimate of reality around the fact of human beings, not legends.

I think the sooner one learns the truth, the better. Do I make myself clear?

MR. HATHAWAY
. I am just wondering whether I agree with you. Perhaps we just need a more realistic appraisal of what our heroes should be.

MR. BALDWIN
. Anyway, leaving aside the hypothetical matters, the black kid in the ghetto doesn’t believe in these heroes for a moment. You begin the process of the breakdown of communication virtually from the cradle.

I really didn’t believe at the time I was seven the Pledge of Allegiance, and no black boy I knew did, either. For very good reasons, too. I didn’t believe it, in effect, because the country didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it because
you
didn’t believe it. If you had believed it, I would have been in a different place. My father would have been a very different man. You didn’t believe it, so I didn’t. You can’t fool a kid. You still don’t believe it, and so they don’t, and they won’t believe it until you do. You have to prove that you do.

MR. HATHAWAY
. By action?

MR. BALDWIN
. Yes. Let me get a job, allow me the right to protect my women, my house, my children. That is all the Negro wants: his autonomy. Nobody hates you. The time is far gone for that. I simply want to live my life.

I suggest, too, that the kids all up and down this country in the streets of all our cities are coming to ruin and are going on the needle. They are coming to nothing. This is a waste no country can afford.

I am the flesh of your flesh and bone of your bone; I have been here as long as you have been here—longer—I paid for it as much as you have. It is my country, too. Do recognize that that is the whole question. My history and culture has got to be taught. It is yours.

MR. HATHAWAY
. Do you think that there is some hope that if the culture is brought back to white America that the black America has a better chance?

MR. BALDWIN
. Yes. This would involve a change in your institutions. It is not just a matter of passing a bill. The Christian church in this country is a very popular institution. But this has always been a racist institution, and we take this as immoral.

Once I become a part of that church, that institution is a different institution. It is not a matter of letting me into it; it has to change. This is true for all American institutions—including schools and the textbook industry.

You are to accept the fact that I am the darker brother, and the key word there is “brother.” Whereas you from Europe came here voluntarily, I was kidnapped, and my history was destroyed here. For your purposes, this has to be faced. I am not trying to be bitter or anything. This is the way it is.

MR. SCHEUER
. I would like to emphasize that we are in entire accord with you in that we want the institutions to change. We want the textbook industry to change; we want the teaching industry to change. We want the radio and television and press industry to change, and we hope that this
commission could start to do the hard intellectual work and play the leadership role to induce change.

This commission, if it is anything, will be a change effort. We would like to have your views on how it can best be achieved to perfect the design of this commission so that it will open up doors.

MR. BALDWIN
. I am not gifted in this area. Let me offer a suggestion. You can do whatever you like with it. We are talking about mass media. One is up against this: There is a very successful movie going around which I saw a few days ago in Hollywood. It is called
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
. This movie is about an interracial marriage, I suppose. Sidney Poitier plays a very beautiful and modest role. That is all he ever plays. This is the mass media for you.

Now, if one is going to deal with the mass media, you have to be aware that you are reaching two publics: the white people in this country and abroad; I talked to some people in London who adored it and think it is true. But, of course, when I watch it, some cat in the ghetto is watching it; it may do great things for your morale, but it does terrible things to him. He recognizes that the movie is a cop-out. Mr. Poitier is not an ordinary citizen. It obviously would be a different movie if he were able to play a real man.

I am not overstating my case; the movie does say that in order for me to marry this particular white chick, I have to be what he is in the movie. Well, that is not so of any white person, he can marry whomever he wants to marry. I am trying to say that the structure of the mass media is such that I think you ought to be aware that there would be a tremendous resistance.

You will hear what I have heard for years. “It is great and powerful, but it is not for our readers.” Or—“It is a risky picture and we can’t do it.” The mass media is mainly a form of escape, and someone said many, many years ago that no white person is going to make his escape personality black, especially in this country. I don’t think we should be deluded about that.

MR. SCHEUER
. Here exactly is that kind of a challenge that we hope the commission will face squarely.

MR. BALDWIN
. We are terribly penalized in this country, every single one of us, famous and obscure. It is like being what America still considers one of your niggers. This commission has to begin to break down that terrifying heritage, which, after all, destroys the white child, too.

MR. SCHEUER
. That was the point I was trying to make with Mr. Innis before you came. The 90-percent white majority has as much or more of an interest
in this purification process, because they are deprived by not knowing of Negro history and culture.

MR. BALDWIN
. They are frightened. I don’t hate white people; I don’t have to. I am not afraid of you. You face a Southern deputy, and he
does
hate you—because he is scared to death of you. He is the one who is in trouble, and that is the man you have to liberate.

MR. SCHEUER
. We can’t thank you enough for coming to see us. You certainly deserve the door prize for having come the longest distance. We are grateful, and we benefited enormously by your views.

MRS. SHABAZZ
. I am in complete accord with this bill and in teaching black history in the schools. Some of the things I have heard I have disagreed with, and some I have agreed with. I think primarily the problem is one of getting black history in the schools. If it is wanted by blacks and whites, I think this would solve some of the problems, if cooperation is wanted.

This is needed to curb the things that are going on and some terrible things that will continue to go on. I think a lot of the hysteria has been created primarily by whites, who basically have not understood blacks, who have not treated them as human beings.

Everyone has basic emotions of hate, fear, and love, and I think the whites in this country have used the machinery of propaganda very skillfully. You find blacks who want to know something about their history and you find whites who don’t understand or who are fearful. They will publicize this sort of thing as a hate gathering and a hate meeting, when actually it could possibly be a historical meeting that whites and blacks could learn from.

(1969)

·      ·     ·

I
CAN’T KEEP YOU
very long, because the hall’s going to close very soon, and I must tell you this: that I was very honored and very excited to be here, because of what I’ve heard and because of the feeling in the hall. I haven’t got time to go into all that, either, so let me tell you, let me simply say two things: we’ve heard a lot in my country lately, and you’ve heard a lot in your country too, about law and order. And people ask me from time to time if “Mr. Baldwin, does that mean that you’re advocating violence?” And by and by you hear the question so long and so often that you begin to understand that in the question there is a threat, and what the question really means is: “If you have the effrontery to seem to be advocating violence, you must bear in mind that we have the police forces, we have the tanks, we have the helicopters, we have the guns, we have the mace, we have the chemicals, we got the jury, we got the judge, and we got
you
! It means: if you don’t like where you are, we can keep you where you
is
!”

Now, there are people in England and there are people in France, and there are sounds—no matter how quiet it is kept—from people in America who are aware of what is happening to them and what criminal action has been taken against their lives. I don’t merely mean black lives: that’s merely the greatest metaphor, the most visible symptom of the rottenness of a certain state, of the end of a certain history. Because, let us face this fact—it’s a brutal fact and everyone here and many more people than that, whether or not they want to, will be forced to deal with the central fact of this century, and it is a very simple fact, so simple that no one wants to face
it—that this civilization, including this hall, including that extraordinary god the Europeans found in the desert, and dragged all the way to England—that invention and this hall and this economy and the bank of the Holy Ghost which stands in Rome were built on a principle which is politely called cheap labor. If we translate that from the high English into where I was born, it means that every dark child born—and this was the intention of a civilization—was born to be used for the profit of white people. And this hall in which we stand is yet more important than the guns, the fleets, the bombs, because this hall represents the ways in which black people were taught to despise themselves.

Now, something very serious happens in a civilization because the reason we’re here tonight is not merely because of the performance of my unhappy country; it is not merely because of the fate of Angela Davis and the Soledad Brothers or the Third World all over the world; it isn’t even merely because of the bloody slaughter in Vietnam. It is because every Western government is implicated and is guilty of and responsible for the shoddy performance of my country. Mr. Nixon, who sits in Washington, is also
your
President.

Now, what is important here, what is happening in this century is for the first time within the history of anyone living anywhere, a certain group of people who have always been despised, who were born to be shoeshine boys, who were born to be political prisoners, in fact were born to be used, have discovered, as it happens in time, what happened to them. And they have begun to understand that if they are going to liberate themselves, they have to begin it first of all within themselves. No one is going to do it for them.