James Baldwin: “The Free and the Brave,

“The Free and the Brave,”
Lecture by James Baldwin, April 1963 (see video)

I want you somehow to make a certain leap with me. I have one more quotation that I want to give you. And this comes from Nietzsche, from Thus Spake Zarathrustra I think. It’s been on my mind all week long. At some point the man says: “I stand before my highest mountain and before my longest journey and therefore must I descend deeper than ever before I have descended.” 

Now there are several thousand things that one must think out of the context in which we are speaking. I suppose the first thing I have to suggest is that one considers the fact that in the life of a man, the life of a woman, in everybody’s life, there are several elements always at work. But the crucial element that one can consider here is that element of a life that we consider to be an identity, the way in which one puts oneself together, the way one imagines oneself to be, the reality, for example, the invented reality, standing before you now, arbitrarily called Jimmy Baldwin, who retains a great many other things. We’ve agreed ?? certain kind of involvement in the world and this is what he does and this is who he is. OK. But that’s not it. The ? fact forever for everybody is something else. It is a stranger, a stranger with whom one is forced to deal day in and day out. Forced in fact to discover. Forced in fact to create as a ? event .  

Life demands a certain kind of humility, the humility to make the descent Nietzsche was talking about. There are two ways only to achieve a life or a nation. Let us consider. I’ll be personal because I think it will be the easiest way for me to say it. The whole business of communication, of communion really, is to find some common terms to make something mean to you roughly what it means to me. In my life as I’m sure suppose in your life when one is young one supposes that there is some way to avoid disaster. I can spell it out. When I was young, when I was a little boy for example, I would tell my mother I’m going to do this, do that, go there. I’m going to be a fireman. I’m going to do, do, do, be this. And Momma would look at me and she would say, ”It’s more than a notion.” It took me a long time, a very long time, to figure out she was right and realize what she meant. 

I like all of us thought I knew what I wanted and thought I knew who I was and thought I could do it, and we all do this, I could go wherever I wanted, do whatever I wanted, without paying my dues. ? one cannot imagine, especially when one is young, is how to pay your dues. You don’t even know there are dues to be paid. And later on one begins to discover, and with great pain and very much against one’s will, that if you want something, whatever it is you want, what it is you want at bottom must be to become yourself. There is nothing else to want. 

Whatever that is, however that journey is, one has got to accept the fact that disaster is the condition under which you will make it — the journey I mean, not “make it” in the American sense. And you will learn a certain humility because the terms that you’ve invented, which you think describe and define you, inevitably collide with the fact of life. And when this collision occurs — and make no mistake, this is an absolutely inevitable collision —  like two trains in a tunnel, one has got a choice and it’s a very narrow choice of holding on to your definition of yourself or saying as the old folks used to say, and everybody who wants to live has to say, Yes, Lord, which means to say Yes to life. Until you can do that you will not become a man or a woman. 

Now in this country part of the dilemma, which could become a tragedy, of being what is known somewhat arbitrarily as an American, the collective effort until this moment and the collective delusion until this moment was precisely my delusion when I was a little boy: that you could get what you wanted and become what you said you were going to be, painlessly. Furthermore, if one examines for a second, or if one tries to define the proper noun American, one will discover first of all that to be an American means a catalog of virtues where something called I Am An American Day, which I gather is meant to reassure everybody.

And to be an American in these terms apparently means, check me out, you think about it, apparently means that those Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Scotsmen, Italians, may be corrupt, sexual, unpredictable, lazy, evil, a little lower than the angels. We are not. Quite overlooking the fact that the country was settled by Englishmen, Scots, Germans, Turks, Armenians a little later to be sure. Every nation under heaven is here, and not after all for a very long time. 

I think it might be useful in order to survive our present crisis is to do what any individual does in order to survive his crisis is to look back on his beginnings. The beginnings of this country, it seems a banality to say it but it has to be said, the beginnings of this country have nothing whatever to do with the myths we have created about it. The country did not come about because a handful of people in various parts of Europe said, “I want to be free” and promptly built a boat or raft and crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Not at all. Not at all. 

? The word Liberty and the word freedom are terribly misused words. Liberty is a fact that is also used as a slogan and freedom may be the very last thing people want, the very last thing. Anyway, the people who settled the country, the people who came here, came here for one reason – no matter how disguised – they came here because they thought it would be better here than where they were. That’s why they came, and that’s the only reason that they came. Anybody who was making it in England did not get on the Mayflower. [Laughter and applause.] This is important. It is important that one begin to recognize it because part of the dilemma of this country is that it has managed to believe the myths it has created about its own past. 

Which is another way of saying that it entirely denies its past. And we all know what happens to a person who was born let’s say where I was born in Harlem and goes through the world pretending he was born in a certain place. How odd this may sound. It also happens to a nation, a nation being when it finally comes into existence the achievements of the people who make it up. And the quality of the nation being absolutely at the mercy, dictated, defined, by the nature and quality of the people who make it up. 

In this extraordinary endeavour to create the country called America a great many crimes were committed. And I want to make it absolutely clear or as clear as I can make it that I understand perfectly well that crime is universal and common. And I assume that no one will assume that I am indicting or accusing. I’m not any more interested in the crime. People treat each other very badly and always have and very probably always will. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about denying what one does, a much more sinister matter. 

We did several things in order to conquer the country. There was, at the point we reached these shores, a group of people who had never heard of machines or as far as I know of money, I think we call them now a “backward” nation, and we promptly eliminated them. We killed them. I’m talking about the Indians, in case you didn’t know what I’m talking about. Well, people have done this for centuries. 

But I hazard,  I’ll bet you as we say in Harlem, (?), that there are not many American children being taught American history who have any real sense of what that collision was like or what we really did, how we really achieved the extermination of the Indians, or what that meant. And it is interesting to consider that there are very few social critics, none to my knowledge but I say very few, who have begun even to analyze the hidden reasons the Cowboy/Indian legend is still one of the most popular legends in American life, so popular that it still in 1963 dominates the television screen. And I suppose that all those Cowboy/Indian stories are designed to reassure that no crime was committed. We have made a legend out of a massacre. 

[Digress, joke: Lone Ranger were ambushed by Indians. Lone Ranger to Tonto: What are we going to do. Tonto: What do you mean “we”?]

Now slavery, like murder, is one of the oldest human institutions. So we cannot quarrel about the fact of slavery; that is to say we could, but that’s another story. But we enslaved him because in order to conquer the country, we had to have cheap labor. And the man who is now known as the American Negro, who is one of the oldest of American citizens, and the only one who never wanted to come here, [applause] did the dirty work. Hoed the cotton. Do you hoe cotton? No? Chopped the cotton... whatever you do with cotton, picked cotton. [laughter] Lined track. Helped, in fact, I think it is not too strong for me to say; let me put it this way: without his presence, without that strong back, the American economy, the American nation would have had a vast amount of trouble creating its capital. If one did not have the captive toting the barge and lifting the bale as they put it, it would be a very different country, and it would certainly be much poorer. And that’s alright.

But the people I am speaking of who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t, I mean, you can tell, they knew he wasn’t anything else but a man. But since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, and some of them really meant it by the way, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man, because if he wasn’t a man then no crime had been committed. 

That lie is the basis of our present trouble. Because that is an extremely complex lie, if on the one hand one man cannot avoid recognizing another man, it is also true then, obviously, that the man, the black man who was in captivity and treated like an animal and told that he was one, knew that he was a man and knew that something was wrong. 

When we got here, those of us who survived the Middle Passage, [let me tell you an anecdote: about a slave house in Africa that was on the nearest point to America. His sister and he went there] 

It was the Black man’s necessity once he got here to accept the Cross and somehow manage to outwit his Christian master because what he faced when he got here was really the Bible and the gun. And that’s alright too. What is terrible in it is the fact that American white men are not prepared to believe my version of this story, to believe that it happened. In order to avoid believing that they have set up in themselves a fantastic system of evasion, denials, and justifications which is about to destroy their grasp of reality, which is another way of saying their moral sense. What I am trying to say is that the crime is not the most important thing here. What makes our situation serious is that we have spent so many generations pretending it did not happen. If you doubt me, ask yourself on what assumptions rest those extraordinary questions that White men ask, no matter how politely. On what assumption ? the question, Would you let your sister marry one? It is based on some preoccupation. … On what assumption again rests the extraordinary question, What does the Negro want? Again, this comes from extraordinary preoccupation in the mind. Something entirely, if I may say so, divorced from reality…..

Let’s go back to where I started. Let’s go back to Nietzsche: I stand before my highest mountain and before my longest journey and therefore must I descend deeper than I have ever before descended. And I spoke to you earlier about the necessity and the collision between your terms and life occurs, of saying Yes to life. That’s the descent. The difference between a boy and a man is that the boy imagines that there is some way to get through life safely and a man knows he’s got to pay his dues. 

In this country the entire nation has always assumed that I was here to do [?]. What it means to the Negro in this country is that you represent [?], you are the receptacle, the vehicle of all the pains, disaster, all the sorrows, that White American thinks [?]  This is what is meant, what is really meant, by “to keep the Negro in his place.” It is why White people until this day are still astounded and offended as if by some miscalculation they are forced to suspect that you are not happy in your home. It is absolutely true. I’m not talking about the Deep South. He will finally say to you “But you are so bitter.” There’s been in this country for a dangerously long time two levels of experience, one to put it cruelly but quite truthfully can be summed up in the image of Doris Day and Gary Cooper. I think  you know what they do. And another subterranean, indispensable can be summed up in the tone of Ray Ccharles. And there’s never been in this country any real confrontation between these two realities. 

Let me try to force you to observe a paradox. Though all White Americans essentially came from Europe it is only American Negroes whom Europe understands. Let me spell it out. When an American Negro is in Europe, he and the people he finds himself among are able to establish dialog, which White Americans have a great deal of trouble establishing if they ever do. And the reason is very simple. Europeans and the Black Americans know what it is to suffer and Americans don’t.  Now the bill for this endeavor to get from the cradle to the grave looking like Eisenhower has now come in. 

White people are astounded by Birmingham. Black people aren’t. White people are endlessly demanding to be reassured that Birmingham is really on Mars. They don’t want to believe [?] that what is happening in Birmingham and I mean this and I’m not exaggerating there are several thousand ways to kill a man there are several thousand ways to be violent, they don’t want to realize that there is not one step, one inch, morally or actually there is no distance between Birmingham and Los Angeles. 

Now it is entirely possible that we may all go under. But until that happens I prefer to believe that since this society is created by men, it can be remade by men. The price for this transformation is high. White people will have to ask themselves precisely why they found it necessary to invent a nigger — because they invented him for reasons out of necessity of their own. And every white citizen of this country will have to accept the fact in that distance between those dogs and those hoses those crimes are being committed in your name. Black people, well Blacks do something very hard too. And they’ve done it [?] already which is to allow the white citizen his first awkward steps toward maturity. But we  have functioned in this country precisely that way for a very long time.  We were the first psychiatrists in this country. ?  a little longer. We’ve got to try, I think those are the conditions. Thank you.

Q&A

Muslims?

 A. ..It began to flourished because America never honored any of its commitments to its black citizens

B. It is a way to be proud about being Black….

C. … One never leaves the ghetto…. White people have put a false value on the color of their skin, they have that they are better than everyone else because of the color of their skin. And look at the result, the spiritual, the actual, the political result. Is nothing less than a spiritual and moral bankruptcy because it is not true that the color of the skin has any importance at all in human life. …. 

...Speaking for myself I do not see that they have an articulate program by which I mean such things as a rent strike in Harlem. I mean a real revolution. And I do not want my nephew or my brother to or my son to begin to believe that he is better than white people beause he is black. The Negro in this country has no reason to invent a reason to be proud. They have achieved….and turned to their advantage one of the cruelest…… We have every right to be proud…. They outwitted this civilization to the extent that they turned the Cross into something it never was before. They took the anguish and turned it into music….This is our heritage and I would not like to throw it away for an invented one.

African independence movement?

…. We are living, whether or not J. Edgar Hoover likes it in an age of revolution….all over the world…. 

What action can the Caucasion American take to achieve full human dignity?. 

...Don’t you know yet? ...No white American has the right to such innocence. If you don’t know, God know I can’t tell you.… 

Non-violence?

… It’s an extremely effective strategy in some situations… The question must be asked of the nation…. Whether or not it remain nonviolent or violent depends entirely on this country.