I Am Not Your Negro Page #4

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."

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 cop

standing on that Negro woman's

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.

...He stopped at his house

on the way to the airport

so I could autograph my books

for him, his wife and children.

I remember Myrlie Evers

standing outside, smiling,

and we waved,

and Medgar drove to the airport

and put me on the plane.

Months later,

I was in Puerto Rico,

working on my play.

Lucien 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,

the top to the car was down,

we were laughing and talking,

and the radio was playing.

Then the music stopped...

...and a 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.

Medgar Evers was buried

from the bullet he caught

They lowered him down

as a king

But when the shadowy sun

Sets on the one

That fired the gun

He'll see by his grave

On the stone that remains

Carved next to his name

Only a pawn in their game

The blue sky seemed

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 "ro-aad"

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.

Medgar.

Gone.

Baby, please don't go

Baby, please don't go

Baby, please don't go

Back to New Orleans

You know I love you so

Baby, please don't go

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.

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 its black population,

dreaming of anything like

"The Final Solution".

The Negro has never been

as docile as white Americans

wanted to believe.

That was a myth.

We were not singing

and dancing down the levee.

We were trying to keep alive,

we were trying to survive

a very brutal system.

The n*gger has never

been happy in his place.

One of the most

terrible things,

is that,

whether I like it or not,

I am an American.

My school really was

the streets of New York City.

My frame of reference was...

George Washington

and John Wayne.

But I was a child, you know,

and when a child puts his eyes

on the world,

he has to use what he sees.

There's nothing else to use.

And you are formed

by what you see,

the choices you have to make,

and 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 not for 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.

Forget "The Negro Problem".

Don't write any voting acts.

We had that. It's called

The Fifteenth Amendment.

During the Civil Rights Bill

of 1964,

what you have 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 have lynched Negroes,

knowing them to be their sons.

White women

have had Negroes burned,

knowing them to be their lovers.

It is not a racial problem.

It's a problem of 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 am one of the children

of that house.

Simply, I am the most

despised child of that house.

And it is because

the American people are unable

to face the fact that

I am flesh of their flesh,

bone of their bone,

created by them.

My blood, my father's blood,

is in that soil.

Good afternoon, Ma'am.

It's raining so hard,

I brought rubbers and coat

to fetch my little girl home.

I'm afraid

you've made some mistake.

Ain't this the 3B?

- Yes.

- Well, this is it.

It can't be it.

I have no little

colored children in my class.

Oh, thank you.

There's my little girl.

Peola, you may you home.

Gee, I didn't know

she was colored.

Neither did I.

I hate you,

I hate you, I hate you!

Peola! Peola!

I know very well

that my ancestors

had no desire

to come to this place.

But neither did the ancestors

of the people who became white,

and who require of my captivity

a song.

They require a song of me,

less to celebrate my captivity

than to justify their own.

I have 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 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 selves,

they would never have become

so dependent

on what they call

"The Negro Problem".

They said it wasn't nice

to say "n*gger".

N*gger!

N*gger! N*gger!

Poor little n*gger kids,

love the little n*gger kids.

Who loved me?

Who loved 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

has assigned to the Blacks.

Look man,

don't give me that look.

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