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From Dreams of Love to Dreams of Terror
JAMES BALDWIN

Stokely. . . . will not live the life I've lived.

I first met Stokely Carmichael in the Deep South, when he was just another non-violent kid, marching and talking and getting his head whipped. This time now seems as far behind us as the Flood, and if those suffering, gallant, betrayed boys and girls who were then using their bodies in an attempt to save a heedless nation have since concluded that the nation is not worth saving, no American alive has the right to be surprised -- to put the matter as mildly as it can possibly be put. Actually, Americans are not at all surprised; they exhibit all the vindictiveness of the guilty; what happened to those boys and girls, and what happened to the Civil Rights movement, is an indictment, of America and Americans, and an enduring monument, which we will not outlive, to the breath-taking cowardice of this sovereign people. . . .

America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of the black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one's sleep. So it was not in the least surprising for me to encounter (one more time) the American surprise when Stokely -- as Americans allow themselves the luxury of supposing -- coined the phrase, Black Power. He didn't coin it. He simply dug it up again from where it's been lying since the first slaves hit the gangplank. I have never known a Negro in all my life who was not obsessed

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with Black Power. Those representatives of White Power who are not too hopelessly brain-washed or eviscerated will understand that the only way for a black man in America not to be obsessed with the problem of how to control his destiny and protect his house, his women and his children, is for that black man to become in his own mind the something less than a man which this Republic, alas, has always considered him to be. And when a black man, whose destiny and identity have always been controlled by others, decides and states that he will control his own destiny and rejects the identity given him by others, he is talking revolution. In point of sober fact, he cannot possibly be talking anything else, and nothing is more revelatory of the American hypocrisy than their swift perception of this fact. The "white backlash" is meaningless 20th-century jargon designed at once to hide and to justify the fact that most white Americans are still unable to believe that the black man is a man -- in the same way that we speak of a "credibility gap" because we are too cowardly to face the fact that our leaders have been lying to us for years. Perhaps we suspect that we deserve the contempt with which we allow ourselves to be treated.

The government would like to be able to indict Stokely, and many others like him, of incitement to riot; but I accuse the government of this crime. It is, briefly, an insult to my intelligence, and to the intelligence of any black person, to ask me to believe that the most powerful nation in the world is unable to do anything to make the lives of its black citizens less appalling. It is not unable to do it, it is only unwilling to do it. Americans are deluded if they suppose Stokely to be the first black man to say, "The United States is going to fall. I only hope I live to see the day." Every black man in the howling North American wilderness has said it, and is saying it, in many, many ways, over and over again. One's only got to listen, again, to all those happy songs. Or walk to Harlem and talk to any junkie, or anybody else -- if, of course, they will talk to you. It was a nonviolent black student who told Bobby Kennedy a few years ago that he didn't know how much longer he could remain nonviolent;

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didn't know how much longer he could take the beatings, the bombings, the terror. He said that he would never take up arms in defense of America -- never, never, never. If he ever picked up a gun, it would be for very different reasons.

That boy has grown up, as have so many like him -- we will not mention those irreparably ruined, or dead -- and I really wonder what white Americans expected to happen. Did they really suppose that the tremendous energy and the incredible courage which went into those sit-ins, wade-ins, swim-ins, picket-lines, marches, was incapable of transforming itself into an overt attack on the status quo? I remember that same day in Selma watching the line of black would-be voters walk away from the courthouse which they had not been allowed to enter. And I thought, the day is coming when they will not line up any more.

That day may very well be here -- I fear it is here; certainly Stokely is here, and he is not alone. It helps our situation not at all to attempt to punish the man for telling the truth. I repeat: we have seen this show before. This victimization has occurred over and over again, from Frederick Douglass to Paul Robeson to Cassius Clay to Malcolmn X. And I contest the government's right to lift the passports of those people who hold views of which the government -- and especially this government -- disapproves. The government has the duty to warn me of the dangers I may encounter if I travel to hostile territory -- though they never said anything about the probable results of my leaving Harlem to go downtown and never said anything about my travels to Alabama -- but it does not have the right to use my passport as a political weapon against me, as a means of bringing me to heel. These are terror tactics. Furthermore, all black Americans are born into a society which is determined -- repeat: determined -- that they shall never learn the truth about themselves or their society, which is determined that black men shall use as their only frame of reference what white Americans convey to them of their own potentialities, and of the shape, size, dimensions and possibilities of the world. And I do not hesitate

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for an instant to condemn this as a crime. To persuade black boys and girls, as we have for so many generations, that their lives are worth less than other lives, and that they can only live on terms dictated to them by other people, by people who despise them, is worst than a crime, it is the sin against the Holy Ghost.

Now, I may not always agree with Stokely's views, or the ways in which he expresses them. My agreement, or disagreement, is absolutely irrelevant. I get his message. Stokely Carmichael, a black man under thirty, is saying to me, a black man over forty, that he will not live the life I've lived, or be corralled into some of the awful choices I have been forced to make. And he is perfectly right. The government and the people who have made his life, and mine, and the lives of all our brothers and sisters and women and children an indescribable hell have no right now to penalize the black man, this so despised stranger here for so long, for attempting to discover if the world is as small as the Americans have told him it is. And the political implications involve nothing more and nothing less than what the Western world takes to be its material self-interest. I need scarcely state to what extent the Western self-interest and the black self-interest find themselves at war, but it is precisely this message which the Western nations, and this one above all, will have to accept, if they expect to survive. Nothing is more unlikely than that the Western nations, and this one above all, will be able to welcome so vital a metamorphosis. We have constructed a history which is a total lie, and have persuaded ourselves that it is true. I seriously doubt that anything worse can happen to any people. One doesn't need a Stokely gloating in Havana about the hoped-for fall of the United States; and to attempt to punish him for saying what so many millions of people feel is simply to bring closer, and make yet more deadly, the terrible day. One should listen to what's being said, and reflect on it: for many, many millions of people long for our downfall, and it is not because they are Communists. It is because ignorance is in the saddle here, and we ride mankind. Let

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us attempt to face the fact that we are a racist society, racist to the very marrow, and we are fighting a racist war. No black man in chains in his own country, and watching the many deaths occurring around him every day, believes for a moment that America cares anything at all about the freedom of Asia. My own condition, as a black man in America, tells me what Americans really feel and really want, and tells me who they really are. And therefore, every bombed village is my home town.

That, in a way, is what Stokely is saying, and that's why this youth can so terrify a nation. He's saying the bill is in, the party's over, are we going to live here like men or not? Bombs won't pay this bill, and bombs won't wipe it out. And Stokely did not begin his career with dreams of terror, but with dreams of love. Now he's saying, and he's not alone, and he's not the first, if I can't live here, well, then, neither will you. You couldn't have built it without me; this land is also mine; we'll share it, or we'll perish, and I don't care.

I do care -- about Stokely's life, my country's life. One's seen too much already of gratuitous destruction; one hopes, always, that something will happen in the human heart which will change our common history. But if it doesn't happen, this something, if we cannot hear and cannot change, then we, the blacks, the most despised children of the great Western house, are simply forced, with both pride and despair, to remember that we come from a long line of runaway slaves who managed to survive without passports.

from an interview

Question: You made a remark about the Beat Generation. I can't remember the exact quote, I think it was something to the effect that when you were six years old you were beat, and any black person living in the ghetto knew he was beat -- he didn't have to go to school and get out of college and run away to become beat. I was wondering if you had that same view now.

Answer: I'm afraid I must say I never paid very much attention

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to the Beat Generation. It never struck me as being very interesting or very relevant to me -- I'd seen those kids before and it didn't matter what they were doing, because presently they would go home and take over the family business. And that's what they really do, unless they're hung up on junk or something, or unless they do grow up, which is extremely difficult to do in this country. This is another symptom of Western despair. It shows me how little people care about their children.

Q: How do you view the hippie scene?

A: Again, it shows me how unable people are to love their children. That's what's wrong with those kids. They just want someone to pay attention to them, and I can't blame them. Their mothers and fathers thought it was more important to become something else rather than to raise their children.

Q: Rap Brown made the statement that he thought the hippie movement -- the hippie scene -- was politically irrelevant.

A: Well, it is politically irrelevant -- but so, in this country, is politics.

Q: Evidently not so to Rap Brown.

A: Politics? What do you mean by that?

Q: If he finds the hippies politically irrelevant, then he must find other forces that are relevant in this country.

A: Well, Rap and I are very different people. I'm much older than Rap, and Rap may know a lot that I don't know -- but the political institutions of this country, as we see them now, are visibly unresponsive, let us say that, to the real needs of what we have to call the American community. It does strike me as occurring mainly in a vacuum. And it'll be a long time before that changes. You know, the most stunning collection of mediocrities ever seen are sitting in Washington. God knows how they got there. And I don't know what they're doing there. They could not be more dangerous, but they're also ignorant.