But the Republic has told itself nothing but lies. If one accepts my basic assumption, which is that all men are brothers—simply because all men share the same condition, however different the details of their lives may be—then it is perfectly possible, it seems to me, that in re-creating ourselves, in saving ourselves, we can re-create and save many others: whosoever will. I certainly think that this possibility ought to be kept very vividly in the forefront of our consciousness. The value of a human being is never indicated by the color of his skin; the value of a human being is all that I hold sacred; and I know that I do not become better by making another worse. One need not read the New Testament to discover that. One need only read history and look at the world—one need only, in fact, look into one’s mirror.
The specific reason for this rather long letter is the series of articles concerning the Jew in Harlem (in Liberator magazine). I think it is most distinctly unhelpful, and I think it is immoral, to blame Harlem on the Jew. For a man of Editor Dan Watts’s experience, it is incredibly naive. Why, when we should be storming capitols, do they suggest to the people they hope to serve that we take refuge in the most ancient and barbaric of the European myths? Do they want us to become better? Or do they want us, after all, carefully manipulating the color black, merely to become white?
(1967)
An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Y. Davis
Alabama-born Angela Yvonne Davis was an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California-Los Angeles in 1969. She considered herself an activist, a radical feminist, was a member of the Communist Party, and worked with the Black Panther Party. Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, led the call for her termination from the university system, but she was soon rehired.
In 1970 a number of armed black militants, led by Jonathan Jackson, the brother of Soledad Prison inmate George Jackson, took over a Marin County courtroom in an attempt to free three convicts during a trial. Guns were drawn. A judge was held at gunpoint. Ultimately, two of the prisoners were shot dead, as well as Jonathan Jackson; the prosecutor was paralyzed by a policeman’s bullet; the judge, Harold Haley, was killed. Angela Davis, who reportedly had purchased the guns used by Jackson and his cohorts, escaped and fled California. She became the third woman ever listed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, charged with conspiracy, kidnapping, and homicide. She was captured two months later in New York, and her 1972 trial became one of the most publicized criminal trials of the 1970s. She was eventually acquitted of all charges, and today is a highly respected professor, author, and activist. Abolishing the death penalty has become one of her key causes.
Baldwin wrote this piece while she was awaiting trial.
· · ·
Dear Sister:
One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But no, they appear to glory in their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure their safety in chains and corpses. And so, Newsweek, civilized defender of the indefensible, attempts to drown you in a sea of crocodile tears (“it remained to be seen what sort of personal liberation she had achieved”) and puts you on its cover, chained.
You look exceedingly alone—as alone, say, as the Jewish housewife in the boxcar headed for Dachau, or as any one of our ancestors chained together in the name of Jesus, headed for a Christian land.
Well. Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can, here in Europe, on radio and television—in fact, have just returned from a land, Germany, which was made notorious by a silent majority not so very long ago. I was asked to speak on the case of Miss Angela Davis, and did so. Very probably an exercise in futility, but one must let no opportunity slide.
I am something like twenty years older than you, of that generation, therefore, of which George Jackson ventures that “there are no healthy brothers—none at all.” I am in no way equipped to dispute this speculation (not, anyway, without descending into what, at the moment, would be irrelevant subtleties), for I know too well what he means. My own state of health is certainly precarious enough. In considering you, and Huey, and George, and (especially) Jonathan Jackson, I began to apprehend what you may have had in mind when you spoke of the uses to which we could put the experience of the slave. What has happened, it seems to me, and to put it far too simply, is that a whole new generation of people have assessed and absorbed their history and, in that tremendous action, have freed themselves of it and will never be victims again. This may seem an odd, indefensibly impertinent and insensitive thing to say to a sister in prison, battling for her life—for all our lives. Yet, I dare to say it, for I think that you will perhaps not misunderstand me, and I do not say it, after all, from the position of a spectator.
I am trying to suggest that you—for example—do not appear to be your father’s daughter in the same way that I am my father’s son. At bottom, my father’s expectations and mine were the same, the expectations of his generation and mine were the same; and neither the immense difference in our ages nor the move from the South to the North could alter these expectations or make our lives more viable. For, in fact, to use the brutal parlance of that hour, the interior language of that despair, he was just a nigger—a nigger laborer preacher, and so was I. I jumped the track, but that’s of no more importance here, in itself, than the fact that some poor Spaniards become rich bullfighters, or that some poor black boys become rich—boxers, for example. That’s rarely, if ever, afforded the people more than a great emotional catharsis, though I don’t mean to be condescending about that, either. But when Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali and refused to put on that uniform (and sacrificed all that money!) a very different impact was made on the people and a very different kind of instruction had begun.
The American triumph—in which the American tragedy has always been implicit—was to make black people despise themselves. When I was little I despised myself; I did not know any better. And this meant, albeit unconsciously, or against my will, or in great pain, that I also despised my father. And my mother. And my brothers. And my sisters. Black people were killing each other every Saturday night out on Lenox Avenue, when I was growing up; and no one explained to them, or to me, that it was intended that they should; that they were penned where they were, like animals, in order that they should consider themselves no better than animals. Everything supported this sense of reality, nothing denied it: and so one was ready, when it came time to go to work, to be treated as a slave. So one was ready, when human terrors came, to bow before a white God and beg Jesus for salvation—this same white God who was unable to raise a finger to do so little as to help you pay your rent, unable to be awakened in time to help you save your child!
There is always, of course, more to any picture than can speedily be perceived and in all of this—groaning and moaning, watching, calculating, clowning, surviving, and outwitting—some tremendous strength was nevertheless being forged, which is part of our legacy today. But that particular aspect of our journey now begins to be behind us. The secret is out: we are men!
But the blunt, open articulation of this secret has frightened the nation to death. I wish I could say “to life,” but that is much to demand of a disparate collection of displaced people still cowering in their wagon trains and singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” The nation, if America is a nation, is not in the least prepared for this day. It is a day which the Americans never expected or desired to see, however piously they may declare their belief in progress and democracy. Those words, now, on American lips, have become a kind of universal obscenity: for this most unhappy people, strong believers in arithmetic, never expected to be confronted with the algebra of their history.
One way of gauging a nation’s health, or of discerning what it really considers to be its interests
—or to what extent it can be considered as a nation as distinguished from a coalition of special interests—is to examine those people it elects to represent or protect it. One glance at the American leaders (or figureheads) conveys that America is on the edge of absolute chaos, and also suggests the future to which American interests, if not the bulk of the American people, appear willing to consign the blacks. (Indeed, one look at our past conveys that.) It is clear that for the bulk of our (nominal) countrymen, we are all expendable. And Messrs Nixon, Agnew, Mitchell, and Hoover, to say nothing, of course, of the Kings Row basket case, the winning Ronnie Reagan, will not hesitate for an instant to carry out what they insist is the will of the people.
But what, in America, is the will of the people? And who, for the above-named, are the people? The people, whoever they may be, know as much about the forces which have placed the above-named gentlemen in power as they do about the forces responsible for the slaughter in Vietnam. The will of the people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an ignorance not merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly cultivated: the better to be used by a carnivorous economy which democratically slaughters and victimizes whites and blacks alike. But most white Americans do not dare admit this (though they suspect it), and this fact contains mortal danger for the blacks and tragedy for the nation.
Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of—and justify—as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in our black church) in their sins—that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to say, already, all around us.
Only a handful of the millions of people in this vast place are aware that the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and for George Jackson, and for the numberless prisoners in our concentration camps—for that is what they are—is a fate which is about to engulf them, too. White lives, for the forces which rule in this country, are no more sacred than black ones, as many and many a student is discovering, as the white American corpses in Vietnam prove. If the American people are unable to contend with their elected leaders for the redemption of their own honor and the lives of their own children, we, the blacks, the most rejected of the Western children, can expect very little help at their hands; which, after all, is nothing new. What the Americans do not realize is that a war between brothers, in the same cities, on the same soil, is not a racial war but a civil war. But the American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their brothers.
So be it. We cannot awaken this sleeper, and God knows we have tried. We must do what we can do, and fortify and save each other—we are not drowning in an apathetic self-contempt; we do feel ourselves sufficiently worthwhile to contend even with inexorable forces in order to change our fate and the fate of our children and the condition of the world! We know that a man is not a thing and is not to be placed at the mercy of things. We know that air and water belong to all mankind and not merely to industrialists. We know that a baby does not come into the world merely to be the instrument of someone else’s profit. We know that democracy does not mean the coercion of all into a deadly—and, finally, wicked—mediocrity but the liberty for all to aspire to the best that is in him, or that has ever been.
We know that we, the blacks, and not only we, the blacks, have been, and are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is greed, whose only god is profit. We know that the fruits of this system have been ignorance, despair, and death, and we know that the system is doomed because the world can no longer afford it—if, indeed, it ever could have. And we know that, for the perpetuation of this system, we have all been mercilessly brutalized, and have been told nothing but lies, lies about ourselves and our kinsmen and our past, and about love, life, and death, so that both soul and body have been bound in hell.
The enormous revolution in black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America. Some of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.
If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.
Therefore: peace.
Brother James
November 19, 1970
A Letter to Prisoners
ARTISTS AND PRISONERS have more in common with each other than have the servants of the State. Put it another way: the warden of the prison is not expected, still less required, to answer to his conscience; he is expected (and required) to execute the will of the State. (How he explains this to his children is, cunningly enough, no concern of the State, which has every reason to believe that the son will grow up to be like the father.) Or, to put it in yet another way, the artist, insofar as the State is compelled to consider this inconvenient creature at all, is nothing more—and also nothing less—than a potential prisoner. The artist is the prisoner at large who has so far escaped his just deserts by means of his private cunning and the liberal bleeding-heart public cowardice.
What artists and prisoners have in common is that both know what it means to be free.
Now, this is a thoroughly unattractive paradox which I, like many another, would like to be able to avoid. But it is impossible not to recognize that the people who are endlessly boasting of their freedom—we’re the best because we’re free!—loathe the very suggestion of such a possibility for anyone other than themselves. They are forever stitching flags, making and threatening and dropping bombs, creating instruments of torture and torture chambers and overseers and deputies and detention centers. Their notion of freedom is so strenuously calisthenic, not to say defensive, that freedom becomes a matter of keeping everybody else out of your backyard. Or bomb shelter: there are none, by no means incidentally, in the ghetto. (If I happen to be wrong about ghetto bomb shelters, I would love to be corrected.)
A vast amount of energy (the word is not yet obsolete) and an indefensible proportion of the public treasury—this government is spending our money, after all—go into endeavors which have as their single intention and concrete purpose and effect that no one be so rash as to act, or to dream of acting, on his or her right to be.
I have suggested that the connection between the artist and the prisoner is an unattractive paradox. But it is more than that. I have called it an unattractive paradox because it would seem to indicate that, in general, we value freedom, or find ourselves compelled to attempt to define it, only when it is arbitrarily limited, or menaced: when another human power has the right to tell us when and where to stand or sit or move or live or make love or have (or claim) our children—or bow mighty low, or die. We do not feel this way about the rain, the snow, the thunder, or the earthquake, or death. These have no reason to consider our hope, or anguish. The thunder which deafens me or the water which drowns me is not a man like me, is not compelled to hear my cry or answer my plea.
But we are compelled to hear each other: knowing perfectly well how little can be done, one discovers how to do some things.
This may be part of the definition, or pride or price of freedom, for this apprehension necessarily involves a real recognition of, and respect for, the other and for the condition of the other. The other is no longer other and is indeed, as the song puts it, closer than a brother—the other is oneself
.
There is absolutely nothing, in my experience, more painful, more devastating, than this revelation. One can scarcely live with it, but one can certainly not begin to live without it. It is this perception, as I begin more and more to believe, which gives the person the energy—the passion—to break the chains which bind him. Or, to be accurate, the chains which bind us. The unattractive paradox is that it is this danger, this action, this recognition of what it means to love one another, which defines freedom, which brings it to being, which makes it as real as the Word become flesh, to dwell among us.
Brethren, please remember, especially in this speechless time and place, that in the beginning was the Word. We are in ourselves much older than any witness to Carthage or Pompeii and, having been through auction, flood, and fire, to say nothing of the spectacular excavation of our names, are not destined for the rubble.
(1982)
The Fire This Time: Letter to the Bishop
When this open letter was published in the New Statesman in August 1985, Desmond Mpilo Tutu (b. 1931), then the Anglican bishop of Johannesburg, had recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1986 Tutu was made the archbishop of Cape Town, making him the first black person to lead the Anglican Church in South Africa. He had been deeply involved in the fight against apartheid—and for human rights around the world—for most of his adult life.
• • •
THOUGH I AM MOT a religious or, more precisely, a churchgoing man, I, like all black Americans, come out of the church—the black church, for we were not allowed to be members of the white one. I can, therefore, use an image which is part of my inheritance and say that you and I, who have never met on earth (but who may meet in that kingdom that you are struggling to make real), have already met: in hell. And a more felicitous dwelling place has a very precise meaning for those who meet in hell.