I Am Not Your Negro Page #3

that Birmingham

is really on Mars.

They don't want to believe,

still less 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 Angeles.

Move on, move on!

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 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 brute

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 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

of the Negro as a meek,

turning the other cheek

sort of creature.

Would you care to comment

on Mr. X's beliefs?

Well, I don't think of love

as...

in this context,

as emotional bosh,

but I think of love

as something strong

and that organizes itself

into powerful direct action.

This is what I've tried to teach

in the struggle in the South.

We are not engaged in a struggle

that means we sit down

and do nothing.

There is a great deal

of difference between

non-resistance to evil

and non-violent resistance.

Martin Luther King is just a

20th century or modern Uncle Tom

or a religious Uncle Tom,

who is 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 face of the attacks

of the Klan in that day.

I think, though,

that we can be sure

that the vast majority

of Negroes

who engage in

the demonstrations,

and who 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 inflicting violence

upon 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 mountain-top.

Medgar was too young

to have seen this happen,

though he hoped for it, 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

lived to be forty.

Two, four, six eight,

we don't want to integrate!

Two, four, six eight,

we don't want to integrate!

We want King! We want King!

We want King!

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.

When Malcolm talks,

or one of the Muslim

ministers talk,

they articulate for all

the Negro people who hear them,

who listen to them,

they articulate their suffering.

The suffering 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 them that

they really exist, you know.

Get back. Get back!

I am!

I am!

There are days,

this is one of them...

...when you wonder...

...what your role is

in this country

and what your future is in it.

How precisely

are you going to reconcile...

...yourself

to your situation here,

and how you are going

to communicate...

...to the vast,

heedless, unthinking...

...cruel white majority

that you are here.

I'm terrified

at the moral apathy,

the death of the heart,

which is happening

in my country.

These people have deluded

themselves for so long

that they really don't think

I'm human.

I base this on their conduct,

not on what they say.

And this means that they

have become, in themselves...

...moral monsters.

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,

came to my kitchen, you know.

We were segregated

from the schoolhouse door.

Therefore, he doesn't know,

he really does not know,

what it was like for me

to leave my house,

to leave the school

and go back to Harlem.

He doesn't know

how Negroes live.

And it comes as a great surprise

to the Kennedy brothers

and to everybody else

in the country.

I'm certain, again, you know,

that again like most white

Americans I have encountered,

they have no...

I'm sure they have nothing

whatever against Negroes...

That's really not the question.

The question is really

a kind of apathy and ignorance,

which is the price we pay

for segregation.

That's what segregation means.

You don't know what's happening

on the other side of the wall,

because you don't want to know.

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, 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.

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 thirty-three.

That was one of the very last

times I saw her on her feet,

and she died at the age

of thirty-four.

I miss her so much.

People forget how young

everybody was.

Bobby Kennedy, for another,

quite different example,

was thirty-eight.

We wanted him

to tell his brother,

the president,

to personally escort to school,

on that day or the day after,

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