Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 139 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is axiomatic that the Negro is religious, which is to say that he stands in fear of the God our ancestors gave us and before whom we all tremble yet. There are probably more churches in Harlem than in any other ghetto in this city and they are going full blast every night and some of them are filled with praying people every day. This, supposedly, exem plifies the Negro's essential simplicity and good-will; but it is actually a fairly desperate emotional business. These churches range from the august and publicized Abys sinian Baptist Church on West 1 3 8th Street to resolutely un classifiable lofts, basements, store-fronts, and even private dwellings. Nightly, Holyroller ministers, spiritualists, self appointed prophets and Messiahs gather their flocks together for worship and for strength through joy. And this is not, as Cabin in the Sky would have us believe, merely a childlike emotional release. Their faith may be described as childlike, but the end it serves is often sinister. It may, indeed, "keep them happy"-a phrase carrying the inescapable inference that the way of life imposed on Negroes makes them quite actively unhappy-but also, and much more significantly, religion op erates here as a complete and exquisite fantasy revenge: white people own the earth and commit all manner of abomination and injustice on it; the bad will be punished and the good rewarded, for God is not sleeping, the judgment is not far off. It docs not require a spectacular degree of perception to re alize that bitterness is here neither dead nor sleeping, and that the white man, believing what he wishes to believe, has mis read the symbols. Quite often the Negro preacher descends to levels less abstract and leaves no doubt as to what is on his mind: the pressure of life in Harlem, the conduct of the Italian-Ethiopian war, racial injustice during the recent war, and the terrible possibility of yet another very soon. All these THE HARLEM GHETTO 49 topics provide excellent springboards for sermons thinly coated with spirituality but designed mainly to illustrate the injustice of the white American and anticipate his certain and long overdue punishment. Here, too, can be seen one aspect of the Negro's ambivalent relation to the Jew.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Well, that is the way they have always treated me. They weren't cruel, they just didn't know you were alive. They didn't know you had any feelings. What I am trying to suggest here is that in the doing of all this for 100 years or more, it is the Amc�jcan white man who has long since lost his grip on reality. In some peculiar way, having created this myth about Negroes, and the myth about his own history, he created myths about the world so that, for example, he was astounded that some people could prefer Castro, astounded that there arc people in the world who don't go into hiding when they hear the word "Co mmu nism," astounded that Communism is one of the realities of the twentieth century which we will not overcome by pre tending that it docs not exist. The political lcvc l__iruhis..J: oun try now, on the part of peopl e who should know bener, is abysmal, The Bible says somewhere that where there is no vision the people perish. I don't think anyone can doubt that in this country today we arc menaced-intolerably menaced-by a lack of vision. It is inconceivable that a sovereign people should continue, as we do so abjectly, to say, "I can't do anything about it. It's the government." The g_ o_vc rnmcnt is the creation of the people. It is responsible to the people. And the pcopk__ arc A TALK TO TEAC HER S 685 responsible for it. No American has the right to allow the present governm ent to say, when Negro children are being bombed and hosed and shot and beaten all over the deep South, that there is nothing we can do about it. There must have been a day in this country's life when the bombing of four children in Sunday School would have created a public uproar and endangered the life of a Governor Wallace. It hap pened here and there was no public uproar. I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that pre�iscly at thc__l1Qint when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your soci�.!)' _, It is your responsibility to change society ifyou think of your self a,��n educated Qf_�Q.l1.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But what I could not understand was how nothing seemed to have touched this man. We are living through what our church described as "these last and evil days," through wars and rumors of wars, to say the least. He could, for example , have known something about the anti-pove rty program if only be cause his wife was more or less involved in it. He should have known something about the then raging school battle, if only because his stepdaughter was a student; and she, whether or not she had thought her position through, was certainly in volv ed. She may have hoped, at one time, anyway, for his clarity and his help. But, no. He seemed as little touched by the cataclysm in his house and all around him as he was by the mail he handled every day. I found this unbelievable, and, given my temperament and our old connection, maddening. We got into a battle about the war in Vietnam. I probably really should not have allowed this to happen, but it was partly the stepdaughter's prodding. And I was astounded that my friend would defend this particular racist folly. What for? for NO NAME IN THE STRE ET his job at the post office? And the answer came back at once, alas- yes. For his job at the post office. I told him that Amer icans had no business at all in Vietnam; and that black people certainly had no business there, aiding the slave master to en slave yet more millions of dark people, and also identifying themselves with the white American crimes: we, the blacks, are going to need our allies, for the Americans, odd as it may sound at the moment, will presently have none. It wasn't, I said, hard to understand why a black boy, standing, futureless, on the corner, would decide to join the Army, nor was it hard to decipher the slave master's reasons for hoping that he wouldn't live to come home, with a gun; but it wasn't nec essary, after all, to defend it: to defend, that is, one's murder and one's murderers. "Wait a minute," he said, "let me stand up and tell you what I think we're trying to do there." "We?" I cried, "what motherfucking we? You stand up, mother fucker, and I'll kick you in the ass!" He looked at me. His mother conveyed-but the good Lord knows I had hurt her-t hat she didn't want that lan guage in her house, and that I had never talked that way be fore. And I love the lady. I had meant no disrespect. I stared at my friend, my old friend, and felt millions of people staring at us both. I tried to make a kind of joke out of it all. But it was too late. The way they looked at me proved that I had tipped my hand.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Makes television and ra dio appearances, gi\'es nu merous inten·iews. \Vins George Polk Memorial Award for outstanding magazine journal ism in April and is subject of Time cm·er story on May 17. Continues lecture tour in New York and California, where he sees half -brother Samuel Baldwin for first time in 30 years. Photo-story on CORE tour appears in Life on May 24. Wires Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy on May 12 to protest police assaults on peaceful civil rights dem onstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, and blames the \'io lcnce in part on inaction by President John F. Kenned y. Meets with Robert Kennedy at his home in McLean, Vir ginia, on May 23. Brings a group of ci\'il rights leaders and entertainers, including freedom rider Jerome Smith, Dr. Kenneth Clark, attorney Clarence B. Jones, Edwin C. Berry of the Chicago Urban League, Lorraine Hansberr y, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Rip Torn, and Henry Mor genthau, to meeting with Robert Kennedy and Burke Marshall, head of the Jus tice Department's Civil Rights Di\'ision, held at Kennedy's New York City apartment on May 24. Works on new play, Blues for Mr. Charlie, dedi cating it to Medgar E\'ers, who was assassinated in Jackson on June 12, and plans a collaborative book project with Richard Avedon. Participates in March on \Vashington, a major demonstration for civil rights, in August. Along with brother David assists James Forman and Student Non-V iolent Coordinating Commit tee (SNCC) in drive to register black voters in Selma, Alabama, in October. As part of a group that also includes Thurgood Marshall, 852 CHRON OLOGY Harry Bclafonte, and Sid ney Poirier, goes to Nairobi in December for celebration of Kenya 's independence. 1964-65 Elected to National Institute of Arts and Letters in Feb ruary 1964. Blttes for Mr. Chm-lie, directed by Bur gess Meredith and starring Pat Hingle, AI Freeman Jr., Diana Sands, and Rip Torn, runs at ANTA Theater in New York City from April 23 to August 29, 1964. The play is pub lished by Dial and Nothing Personal, with photographs by Richard Avedon, by Atheneum in 1964. In Camb ridge Union Society debate at Cambridge University on Feb ruary 18, 1965, successfully supports motion that "the American dream is at the expense of the American Ne gro"; opposition is led by William F. Buckley Jr. Malcolm X is assassinated February 21, 1965, in New York City. Par ticipates in civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, led by Martin Luther King Jr. in late March. Speaking engagements include the New School for Social Research and Harvard University. Prepares story collection Going To Meet the Man (pub lished by Dial in December). The Amen Corner opens April 16 at the Barrymore Theater in New York (runs for 48 performances) and another pro duction of it tours in Europe and Israel. Spends holiday season in Istanbul with friends.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  His own condition is overwhelming proof that white people do not live by these standards. Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes filr generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people. Even the most doltish and servile Negro could scarcely fail to be impressed by the disparity between his situation and that of the people for whom he worked; Negroes who were neither doltish nor servile did not fe el that they were doing anything wrong when they robbed white people. In spite of the Puritan-Yankee equation of virtue with well-being, Ne groes had excellent reasons fo r doubting that money was made or kept by any very striking adherence to the Christian virtues; it certainly did not work that way filr black Christians. In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law-in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be fe ared but not re spected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever. And those virtues preached but not practiced by the white world were merely another means of holding Negroes in subjection. It turned out, then, that summer, that the moral barriers that I had supposed to exist between me and the dangers of a criminal career were so tenuous as to be nearly nonexistent. I certainly could not discover any principled reason filr not becoming a criminal, and it is not my poor, God-fearing parents who arc to be indicted fo r the lack but this society. I was icily determined-more determined, really, than I then knew-never to make my peace with the ghetto but to die and go to Hell bcfclrc I would let any white man spit on me, DOWN AT THE CROSS 3 01 before I would accept my "place" in this republic. I did not intend to allow the white people of this country to tell me who I was, and limit me that way, and polish me off that way. And yet, of course, at the same time, I was being spat on and defined and described and limited, and could have been pol ished off with no effort whatever. Every Negro boy-in my situation during those years, at least-who reaches this point realizes, at once, profoundly, because he wants to live, that he stands in great peril and must find, with speed, a "thing," a gimmick, to lift him out, to start him on his way. And it does not matter what the gimmick is. It was this last realization that terrified me and-since it revealed that the door opened on so many dangers-helped to hurl me into the church.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  After the funeral, while I was downtown desperately cele brating my birthday, a Negro soldier, in the lobby of the Hotel Braddock, got into a fight with a white policeman over a Negro girl. Negro girls, white policemen, in or out of uni form, and Negro males-in or out of uniform-were part of the furniture of the lobby of the Hotel Braddock and this was certainly not the first time such an incident had occurred. It was destined, however, to receive an unprecedented publicity, tor the fight between the policeman and the soldier ended with the shooting of the soldier. Rumor, flowing immediately to the streets outside, stated that the soldier had been shot in the back, an instantaneous and revealing invention, and that the soldier had died protecting a Negro woman. The tacts were somewhat different-for example, the soldier had not been shot in the back, and was not dead, and the girl seems to have been as dubious a symbol of womanhood as her white counterpart in Georgia usually is, but no one was interested in the facts. They preferred the invention because this inven tion expressed and corroborated their hates and tears so per fectly. It is just as well to remember that people are always doing this. Perhaps many of those legends, including Chris tiani ty, to which the world clings began their conquest of the world with just some such concerted surrender to distortion. The effect, in Harlem, of this particular legend was like the effect of a lit match in a tin of gasoline. The mob gathered before the doors of the Hotel Braddock simply began to swell and to spread in every direction, and Harlem exploded. The mob did not cross the ghetto lines. It would have been easy, for example, to have gone over Morningside Park on the west side or to have crossed the Grand Central railroad tracks at 12 5 th Street on the east side, to wreak havoc in white neigh borhoods. The mob seems to have been mainly interested in something more potent and real than the white face, that is, in white power, and the princi pal damage done during the riot of the summer of 194-3 was to white business establish- 82 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON ments in Harlem. It might have been a £<r bloodier story, of course, it� at the hour the riot began, these establishments had still been open. From the Hotel Braddock the mob fanned out, east and west along 12 5 th Street, and for the entire length of Lenox, Seventh, and Eighth avenues. Along each of these avenues, and along each major side street-II6th, 12 5 th, 135 th, and so on-bars, stores, pawnshops, restaurants, even little luncheonettes had been smashed open and entered and looted-looted, it might be added, with more haste than ef ficiency.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  What this means for the nm·el is that a nec essary dimension has been cut away; this dimension being the relationship that �egroes bear to one another, that depth of involvement and unspoken recognition of shared experience which creates a way of life. What the novel reflects-and at no point interprets-is the isolation of the �egro within his mm group and the resulting fury of impatient scorn. It is this which creates its climate of anarchy and unmotivated and un apprehended disaster; and it is this climate, common to most �egro protest nm·els, which has led us all to believe that in �egro life there exists no tradition, no field of manners, no possibility of ritual or intercourse, such as may, for example, sustain the Jew eYen after he has left his father's house. But the fact is not that the �egro has no tradition but that there has as yet arrived no sensibility sufficiently profound and tough to make this tradition articulate. For a tradition ex- 28 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON presses, after all, nothing more than the long and painful ex perience of a people; it comes out of the battle waged to maintain their integrity or, to put it more simply, out of their struggle to survive. When we speak of the Jewish tradition we arc speaking of centuries of exile and persecution, of the strength which endured and the sensibility which discovered in it the high possibility of the moral victory. This sense of how Negroes live and how they have so long endured is hidden fr om us in part by the very speed of the Negro's public progress, a progress so heavy with complexity, so bewildering and kaleidoscopic, that he dare not pause to conjecture on the darkness which lies behind him; and by the nature of the American psychology which, in order to appre hend or be made able to accept it, must undergo a metamor phosis so profound as to be literally unthinkable and which there is no doubt we will resist until we arc compelled to achieve our own identity by the rigors of a time that has yet to come. Bigger, in the meanwhile, and all his furious kin, serve only to whet the notorious national taste for the sensa tional and to reinforce all that we now find it necessary to believe.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Leaving aside the considerable question of what relationship precisely the artist bears to the revolutionary, the reality of man as a social being is not his only reality and that artist is strangled who is forced to deal with human beings solely in social terms; and who has, moreover, as Wright had, the necessity thrust on him of being the representative of some thirteen million people. It is a false responsibility (since writers are not congressmen) and impos sible, by its nature, of fulfillment. The unlucky shepherd soon finds that, so far fr om being able to feed the hungry sheep, he has lost the wherewithal for his own nourishment: having not been allowed-so fearful was his burden, so present his audience!-to recreate his own experience. Further, the mili tant men and women of the thirties were not, upon exam ination, significantly emancipated fr om their antecedents, however bitterly they might consider themselves estranged or 26 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON however gallantly they struggled to build a better world. Ho we\'er they might extol Russia, their concept of a better world was quite helplessly American and betrayed a certain thinness of imagination, a suspect reliance on suspect and badly digested formulae, and a positively fretful romantic haste. Finally, the relationship of the Negro to the Worker cannot be summed up, nor even greatly illuminated, by saying that their aims are one. It is true only insofar as they both desire better working conditions and usefi.1l only insofar as they unite their strength as workers to achieve these ends. Further than this we cannot in honesty go. In this climate Wright's voice first was heard and the strug gle which promised for a time to shape his work and give it purpose also fixed it in an ever more unrewarding rage. Re cording his days of anger he has also nevertheless recorded, as no Negro before him had ever done, that fantasy Americans hold in their minds when they speak of the Negro: that fan tastic and fearful image which we have lived with since the first slave fell beneath the lash. This is the significance of Na tive Son and also, unhappily, its overwhelming limitation. Native Son begins with the Erring! of an alarm clock in the squalid Chicago tenement where Bigger and his family live.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I fe lt that if she fo und a black man so frightening I would make her fr ight worth-while. She did not ask me what I wanted, but repeated, as though she had learned it somewhere, "We don't serve Negroes here." She did not say it with the blunt, derisive hostility to which I had grown so accustomed, but, rather, with a note of apology in her voice, and fe ar. This made me colder and more murderous than ever. I fe lt I had to do something with my hands. I wanted her to come close enough fo r me to get her neck between my hands. So I pretended not to have understood her, hoping to draw her closer. And she did step a very short step closer, with her pencil poised incongruously over her pad, and repeated the fo rmula: " ... don't serve Negroes here." Somehow, with the repetition of that phrase, which was already ringing in my head like a thousand bells of a night mare, I realized that she would never come any closer and that I would have to strike from a distance. There was nothing on the table but an ordinary watermug half fu ll of water, and I picked this up and hurled it with all my strength at her. She ducked and it missed her and shattered against the mirror behind the bar. And, with that sound, my frozen blood NOTES OF A NATIVE SON abruptly thawed, I returned fr om wherever I had been, I saw, tlx the first time, the restaurant, the people with their mouths open, already, as it seemed to me, rising as one man, and I realized what I had done, and where I was, and I was fri ght ened. I rose and began running fo r the door. A round, pot bellied man grabbed me by the nape of the neck just as I reached the doors and began to beat me about the fa ce. I kicked him and got loose and ran into the streets. My friend whispered, aRun!)) and I ran. My friend stayed outside the restaurant long enough to mis direct my pursuers and the police, who arrived, he told me, at once. I do not know what I said to him when he came to my room that night. I could not have said much. I felt, in the oddest, most awful way, that I had somehow betrayed him.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Any one of its clements, perceptively stud ied, would make an impressive novel; and, further, because of the crudity of the story structure, the cli max-the murder of a bigoted white man by his Negro stooge, an incident valid in itself and with terrible implications-f ails of its effect and seems almost an afterthought; and the resolution-the hold ing aloft of the union banner-leaves one with that same em barrassed rage produced by a reading of Invict us. The book, nevertheless, has flashes of power and insight-the handling of the white girl's relation to Lee, fi>r example, and Lee's sex ual relationship with his wife; and one of the subsidiary char acters, the Uncle Tom named Luther, is handled and seen so accurately that no white man, ever again, should dare to turn his back on any Negro he feels that he has bought and conquered. I ha\'e already indicated that Mr. Himes seems capable of some of the worst writing on this side of the Atlantic, but his integrity has actually the cumulative effect of making him seem tar wiser and more skillful than he is. The value of his book lies in its earnest effort to understand the psychology of oppressed and oppressor and their relationship to each other. It tails to raise his book to the level of A Passalre To India but it docs lend it an historical importance, not unlik e that ac corded to Uncle Tom)s Cabin or, more recently, to Native Son. For, of all the spate of recent novels concerning racial oppression not one has exhibited any genuine understanding of its historical genesis or contemporary necessity or its psy chological toll. One might over-simplifY our racial heritage sufficiently to observe, and not at all flippantly, that its essen tials would seem to be contained in the tableau of a black and white man facing each other and that the root of our trouble is between their legs. More and more it is impossible to dis cuss the Negro in America without also discussing American HIS TOR Y AS NIG HTMARE customs, morals and fears. Lon ely Crusade is an ugly story but the story of American Negroes and white America's relation to them is a far uglier story and with more sinister implications than have yet found their way into print. It is no longer just a Negro's story, we have no longer the convenient symbol of a minstrel man and his wild guitar, or the Negro rapist, or the brave, black college student battl ing upward against all odds. Time moves too fast, human beings are too complex, yester day's benevolence is more dangerous than a time bomb now.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Since the blacks are so seriously outnumbered, it is possible to dis miss these passionate exercises as mere acts of faith, prepos terous to everyone but the believer: but no one in power appears to find the Panthers even remotely preposterous. On the contrary, they have poured out on these black, defenseless, outnumbered heads a storm of retribution so unspeakably vin dictive as to have attracted the wondering and skeptical notice of the world-which docs not accept the American version of reality as gospel; and they apparently consider the Panthers so dangerous that nations-or, rather, governments-friendly to the United States have refused to allow individual Panthers to land on their shores, much to the displeasure of their already restive and distinctly crucial student populations. This is to sum up the effect of the Panthers negatively, but this effect reveals volumes about America, and our role in the world. Those who rule in this country now-as distinguished, it must be said, fr om governing it-are determined to smash the Pan thers in order to hide the truth of the American black situa tion. They want to hide this truth fr om black people-by making it impossible for them to respond to it-and they would like to hide it fr om the world; and not, alas, because they arc ashamed of it but because they have no intention of TO BE BAPTIZED changing it. They cannot afford to change it. They would not know how to go about changing it, even if their imaginations were capable of encompassing the concept of black freedom. But this concept lives in their imaginations, and in the popular imagination, only as a nightmare. Blacks have never been free in this country, never was it intended that they should be free, and the spectre of so dreadful a freedom-the idea of a license so bloody and abandoned-conjures up another, unimagina ble country, a country in which no decent, God-fearing white man or woman can live. A civilized country is, by definition, a country dominated by whites, in which the blacks clearly know their place. This is really the way the generality of white Americans feel, and they consider-quite rightly, as far as any concern for their interest goes-that it is they who, now, at long last, are being represented in \Vashington. And, of course, any real commitment to black fr eedom in this country would have the effect of reordering all our priorities, and al tering all our commitments, so that, for horrendous example, we would be supporting black freedom fighters in South Af rica and Angola, and would not be allied with Portugal, would be closer to Cuba than we are to Spain, would be supporting the Arab nations instead of Israel, and would never have felt compelled to follow the French into Southeast Asia.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Anyway, I could not, with the best will in the world, make any sense out of The White Negro and, THE BLACK BOY LOOKS AT THE WHITE BOY 277 in fa ct, it was hard for me to imagine that this essay had been written by the same man who wrote the novels. Both The Naked and The Dead and (for the most part) Barbary Shore are written in a lean, spare, muscular prose which accom plishes almost exactly what it sets out to do. Even Barbary Shore, which loses itself in its last half (and which deserves, by the way, far more serious treatment than it has received) never becomes as downright impenetrable as The White Negro does. Now, much of this, I told myself, had to do with my resis tance to the title, and with a kind of fury that so antique a vision of the blacks should, at this late hour, and in so many borrowed heirlooms, be stepping off the A train. But I was also baffled by the passion with which Norman appeared to be imitating so many people inferior to himself, i.e., Kerouac, and all the other Suzuki rhythm boys. From them, indeed, I expected nothing more than their pablum-clogged cries of Kicks! and Holy! It seemed very clear to me that their glori fication of the orgasm was but a way of avoiding all of the terrors of life and love. But Norman knew better, had to know better. The Naked and The Dead, Barbary Shore, and The Deer Park proved it. In each of these novels, there is a toughness and subtlety of conception, and a sense of the danger and complexity of human relationships which one will search for in vain, not only in the work produced by the aforementioned coterie, but in most of the novels produced by Norman's con temporaries. What in the world, then, was he doing, slum ming so outrageously, in such a dreary crowd? For, exactly because he knew better, and in exactly the same way that no one can become more lewdly vicious than an imitation libertine, Norman fe lt compelled to carry their mys tique further than they had, to be more "hip," or more "beat," to dominate, in fact, their dreaming field; and since this mystique depended on a total rejection of life, and insisted on the fulfillment of an infa ntile dream of love, the mystique could only be extended into violence.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I really do not know whether my answer came out of innocence or venom, but I said coldly, "No. He's Jewish." My father slammed me across the face with his great palm, and in that moment ever ything flooded back-all the hatred and all the fear, and the depth of a merciless resolve to kill my father rather than allow my father to kill me-and I knew that all those sermons and tears and all that repentance and rejoicing had changed nothing. I wondered if I was ex pected to be glad that a friend of mine, or anyone, was to be tormented forever in Hell, and I also thought, suddenly, of the Jews in another Christian nation, Germany. They were not so far from the fiery fu rnace af ter all, and my best friend might have been one of them. I told my father, "He's a better Chris tian than you arc," and walked out of the house. The battle between us was in the open, but that was all right; it was almost a relief. A more deadly struggle had begun. Being in the pulpit was like being in the theatre; I was be hind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked. I knew the other ministers and knew the qual ity of their lives. And I don't mean to su ggest by this the "Elmer Gantry" sort of hypocrisy concerning sensual ity; it was a deeper, deadlier, and more subtle hypocrisy than that, and a little honest sensuality, or a lot, would have been like water in an extremely bitter DO WN AT THE CROSS 309 desert. I knew how to work on a congregation until the last dime was surrendered-it was not very hard to do--and I knew where the money for "the Lord's work" went. I knew, though I did not wish to know it, that I had no respect for the people with whom I worked. I could not have said it then, but I also knew that if I continued I would soon have no respect for myself. And the fact that I was "the young Brother Baldwin" increased my value with those same pimps and rack eteers who had helped to stampede me into the church in the first place. They still saw the little boy they intended to take over. They were waiting for me to come to my senses and realize that I was in a very lu crative business. They knew that I did not yet realize this, and also that I had not yet begun to suspect where my own needs, coming up (they were very patient), could drive me. They themselves did know the score, and they knew that the odds were in their favor. And, really, I knew it, too.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And how do they know that? 799 Soo OTH ER ESS AYS Well, some of them know it because they must raise their children and bring them to a place, somehow, where the American guile and cowardice cannot destroy them. No black citizen (!) of what is left of Harlem supposes that either Car ter, or Reagan, or Anderson has any concern for them at all, except as voters-that is, to put it brutally, except as instru ments, or dupes-and, while one hates to say that the black citizens are right, one certainly cannot say that they are wrong. One has merely to look up and down the streets of Harlem; walk through the streets and into what is left of the houses; consider the meaning of this willed, inhuman and criminal devastation, and look into the faces of the children. lVho you going to vote for, Uncle Ji mmy? John Br01vn, I have sometimes been known to say, but that flippant rage is, of course, no answer. But, if we're to change our children's lives and help them to liberate themselves from the jails and hovels-the mortal danger-in which our countrymen have placed us, the vote does not appear to be the answer, either. It has certainly not been the answer until now. Here one finds oneself on treacherous ground indeed. I am, legally anyway, an adult, a somewhat battered survivor of this hard place, and have never expected my power to vote to have any effect whatever on my lite, and it hasn 't. On the other hand, I have been active in voter registration drives in the South because the acquisition of the vote, there and then, and even if only for local aims, was too crucial and profound a necessity even to be argued. Nor can it be denied that the sheer tenacity of the black people in the South, their grace under pressure (to put it far too mildly) and the simple fact of their presence in the voting booth prot(mndly challenged, if it did not expose, the obscene Southern mythology. Thus, though there is certainly no New South yet, the old one has no future, and neither does the "old" North. The situation of the black American is a direct (and deliberate) result of the collusion between the North and South and the federal Government. A black man in this country does not live under a two-p arty system but a four-party system. There is the Republican Party in the South, and there is the Repub lican Party in the North; there is the De mocratic Party in the THE HOUSE OF BOND AGE 801 North and the Democratic Party in the South . These entities are Tweedledum and Tweedledee as concerns the ways they have been able, historically, to manipulate the black presence, the black need.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Now, in the interest of the public peace, it is the Black Panthers who are being murdered in their beds, by the dutiful and zealous police. But, for a policeman, all black men, es pecially young black men, are probably Black Panther s and all black women and children are probably allied with them: just as, in a Vietnamese village, the entire population, men, women, children, are considered as probable Vietcong. In the village, as in the ghetto, those who were not dangerous before the search-a nd-destroy operation assuredly become so after ward, for the inhabitants of the village, like the inhabitants of the ghetto, realize that they are identified, judged, menaced, murdered, solely because of the color of their skin. This is as curious a way of waging a war for a people's freedom as it is of maintaining the domestic public peace. The ghetto, beleaguered, betrayed by Washington, by the total lack of vision of the men in Wash ington, determined to outwit, withstand, survive, this present, overwhelming danger, 4-H NO NAME IN THE STREE T yet lacks a focus, a rallying point, a spokesman. And many of us looked at each other and sighed, saying, Lord, we really ueed Malcolm 11 011'. Ho llywood, or a segment of it, at least, was becoming in creasingly active on the question of civil rights-now, I thought, sourly, and somewhat unjustly, that the question had been rendered moribund. Just the same, there was a ground swell to replace the toothsome, grimly folksy mayor, Sam Yorty, who had been in office since 1911, with someone who had heard of the twentieth century, in this case, Tom Bradley, a Negro. People lik e Jack Lemmon, Jean Seberg, Robert Culp, and france Nuyen were actively supporting Martin Luther King, pledging money and getting others to pledge, and some were helping to raise money for a projected Malcolm X foundat ion. Marlon Brando was very much in the forefront of all this. He had a strong interest in the Black Panthers and was ac quainted with many of th em. On April 6, Eldridge Cleaver was wounded, and Bobby Hut ton was killed, in Oakland, in what the police describe as a "shoot-o ut." Marlon called me to say that he was going up to Oakl and. I wanted to go with him, but Martin Luther King had been murdered two days before, and, to tell the truth, I was in a state resembling shock. I can't describe this, or def end it, and I won't dwell on it. Marlon flew up to Oakland to deliver the eul ogy for seven teen-year-old Bobby Hu tton, shot down, exactly, by the du tiful police, lik e a mad dog in the streets.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  In my experience, the defenders of the public peace do not care who is guilty. I ha\'e been arrested by the New York police, for example, and charged guilty be- +4 2 NO NAME IN THE STREET t( >rc the judge, and had the charge entered in the record, without anyone asking me how I chose to plead, and without being allowed to speak. (I had the case thrown out of court, and if I'd had any means, I would have sued the city. The judge, when asked to explain his oversight, said that the court was crowded that day, and that the traffic noises, coming in tr om the streets, distracted him.) In Tony Maynard's case, the question of justice is simply mocked when one considers that no attempt appears to have been made to discover the white assailant, and also by the fact that Tony has been asked to plead guilty and promised a light sentence if he would so plead. I know this to be a fact because, during Tony's trial, while the jury was out-and the jury was out much longer than anyone expected it to be-Galena, the D.A. who was prosecuting Tony, took me aside, in the pres ence ofTony's sister, Valerie, and the second lawyer I engaged tor Tony, Selig Lcnctsky, to ask me to usc my influence to persuade Tony to accept the deal. He also told me that they would "get" him, anyway. Lcncfsky and Galena arc partners now, a perfectly normal development, which enhances the re spectful trust and aflcction with which the poor regard their protectors. But I anticipate. My absence fr om New York meant that there was virtually no pressure on Siegel, and Siegel, as far as I could discover, did nothing whatever. Most of his corre spondence with me mentions money. I had paid him a re tainer, and I wasn't trying to beat him out of his fee; but I was naturally reluctant, especially as time wore on, with no progress being made, to continue throwing good money after bad. This led, really, to a stalemate, and Valerie and I found ourselves thoroughly at a loss. I wanted to fire Siegel, but on what basis would I hire the next lawyer? No one I knew knew anything about criminal lawyers; the lawyers I knew dismissed them as a "scurvy breed." I thought of Melvin Belli, but he operates in California; I thought of Louis Nizcr, and, in fact, tried to sec him: but I knew I couldn't pay the fee for either of these lawyers. I thought of publicity, but it is not so easy to get publicity f( >r a case which is, alas, so unremarkable.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Taylor and Cole looked at each other uncomfortably. Taylor responded, “We’re not lawyers so I can’t really understand where they’re coming from. If I was in prison for something I didn’t do and you were my lawyer, I hope to hell you’d get me out as soon as you could.” When they left, Bernard and I were very excited, but we remained troubled by this plan to “maintain the status quo.” I decided I would call the attorney general’s office and see if they would concede legal error in the pending appeal, which would ensure relief at the appellate court and perhaps expedite Walter’s release. Another lawyer from the attorney general’s office named Ken Nunnelly had taken over the appeal. I had dealt with Nunnelly in several other death penalty cases. I told him that I’d met with the ABI investigators and that I understood there were some case developments that favored Mr. McMillian. It became clear that the state lawyers had been discussing this case quite a bit. “Bryan, it’s all going to work out, but you’ll need to wait a few more months. He’s been on the row for years, so a few more months are not going to make that much of a difference.” “Ken, every day makes a difference when you’re locked down on death row, and you’ve been wrongly convicted.” I tried to get a commitment but he offered nothing. I asked to meet with the attorney general or whatever official had final decision-making authority, and he said that he would see what he could do. Within a few days the State submitted a peculiar pleading to the Court of Criminal Appeals. The attorney general’s motion asked the court to stay the litigation and not issue a ruling because they “may have uncovered exculpatory evidence favorable to Mr. McMillian that could entitle him to a new trial,” but they needed more time to complete their investigation. I was furious that the State would try to prolong any order granting relief to Walter. It was consistent with everything that had happened over the last six years, but it was still maddening. We quickly filed a response opposing the State’s motion. We told the court that there was overwhelming evidence that Mr. McMillian’s rights had been violated, and that he was entitled to immediate relief. Delaying relief would add further injury to a man who had been wrongfully convicted and condemned to death row for a crime he did not commit. We urged the court to deny the State’s request and rule quickly. I was talking to Minnie and the family every week now, keeping everyone updated about the new state investigation. “I feel like something good is about to happen, Bryan,” Minnie said to me. “They’ve kept him for years. Now it’s time they let him go. They have to let him go.” I appreciated her optimism, but I worried, too. We’d been disappointed so often before. “We have to remain hopeful, Minnie.”

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He was not lying. As it turned out, the proces-verbal was over that day. Trying to be realistic, I dismissed, in the Ci troen, all thoughts of lun ch and pushed my mind ahead to dinner. At the Prefecture we were first placed in a tiny cell, in which it was almost impossible either to sit or to lie down. After a couple of hours of this we were taken down to an office, where, for the first time, I encountered the owner of the bed sheet and where the proces-verbal took place. This was simply an interrogation, quite chillingly clipped and efficient (so that there was, shortly, no doubt in one's own mind that one 108 NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON should be treated as a criminal), which was recorded by a sec retary. \Vhen it was over, this report was given to us to sign. One had, of course, no choice but to sign it, even though my mastery of written French was very far from certain. We were being held, according to the law in France, incommunicado, and all my angry demands to be allowed to speak to my em bassy or to see a lawyer met with a stony aoui, oui. Plus tard. JJ The proces-Perbal over, we were taken back to the cell, before which, shortly, passed the owner of the bedsheet. He said he hoped we had slept well, gave a vindictive wink, and disap peared. By this time there was only one thing clear: that we had no way of controlling the sequence of events and could not pos sibly guess what this sequence would be. It seemed to me, since what I regarded as the high point-the proces-ve1•bal had been passed and since the hotelkeeper was once again in possession of his sheet, that we might reasonably expect to be released from police custody in a matter of hours. We had been detained now for what would soon be twenty-f our hours, during which time I had learned only that the official charge against me was 1'ecelettr. My mental shifting, between lunch and dinner, to say nothing of the physical lack of either of these delights, was beginning to make me dizzy. The steady chatter of my friend from New York, who was determined to keep my spirits up, made me feel murderous; I was praying that some power would release us from this freezing pile of stone befi>re the impulse became the act. And I was beginning to wonder what was happening in that beautifl.tl city, Paris, which lived outside these wal ls. I wondered how long it would take before anyone casually asked, "B ut where's Jimmy? He hasn't been around"-and realized, knowing the people I knew, that it would take several days. Quite late in the afternoon we were taken from our cells; handcuffed, each to a separate officer; led through a maze of steps and corridors to the top of the building; finger-printed; photographed.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Gadsden police had stopped Mr. Ruffin one night because they said his car was swerving. Police discovered that his license had expired a few weeks earlier, so he was taken into custody. When he arrived at the city jail badly bruised and bleeding, Mr. Ruffin told the other inmates that he had been beaten terribly and was desperately in need of his inhaler and asthma medication. When I started investigating the case, inmates at the jail told me they saw officers beating Mr. Ruffin before taking him to an isolation cell. I heard from other families about loved ones who had died or been killed at the jail. Despite the reforms of the 1970s and early 1980s, inmate death in jails and prisons was still a serious problem. Suicide, prisoner-on-prisoner violence, inadequate medical care, staff abuse, and guard violence claimed the lives of hundreds of prisoners every year. I soon received other complaints from people in the Gadsden community. The parents of a black teenager who had been shot and killed by police told me that their son had been stopped for a minor traffic violation after running a red light. Their young son had just started driving and became very nervous when the police officer approached him. His family maintained that he reached down to the floor where he kept his gym bag to retrieve his newly issued driver’s license. The police claimed he was reaching for a weapon—no weapon was ever found—and the teen was shot dead while he sat in his car. The officer who shot the boy said that the teen had been menacing and had moved quickly, in a threatening manner. The child’s parents told me their son was generally nervous and easily frightened but was also obedient and would never have hurt anyone. He was very religious and a good student, and he had the kind of reputation that allowed the family to persuade civil rights leaders to push for an investigation into his death. Their pleas reached our office, and I was looking into the case along with the jail and prison cases. Figuring out Alabama civil and criminal law while managing death penalty cases in several other states kept me very busy. The additional prison conditions litigation meant a lot of long-distance driving and extremely long hours. My weathered 1975 Honda Civic was struggling to keep up. The radio had stopped working consistently a year earlier; it would come to life only if I hit a pothole or stopped suddenly enough to violently shake the car and spark a connection.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  On the contrary, It is written (Prov. 13:24): “He that spareth the rod hateth his son,” and further on (Prov. 23:13): “Withhold not correction from a child, for if thou strike him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell.” Again it is written (Ecclus. 33:28): “Torture and fetters are for a malicious slave.” I answer that, Harm is done a body by striking it, yet not so as when it is maimed: since maiming destroys the body’s integrity, while a blow merely affects the sense with pain, wherefore it causes much less harm than cutting off a member. Now it is unlawful to do a person a harm, except by way of punishment in the cause of justice. Again, no man justly punishes another, except one who is subject to his jurisdiction. Therefore it is not lawful for a man to strike another, unless he have some power over the one whom he strikes. And since the child is subject to the power of the parent, and the slave to the power of his master, a parent can lawfully strike his child, and a master his slave that instruction may be enforced by correction. Reply to Objection 1: Since anger is a desire for vengeance, it is aroused chiefly when a man deems himself unjustly injured, as the Philosopher states (Rhet. ii). Hence when parents are forbidden to provoke their children to anger, they are not prohibited from striking their children for the purpose of correction, but from inflicting blows on them without moderation. The command that masters should forbear from threatening their slaves may be understood in two ways. First that they should be slow to threaten, and this pertains to the moderation of correction; secondly, that they should not always carry out their threats, that is that they should sometimes by a merciful forgiveness temper the judgment whereby they threatened punishment. Reply to Objection 2: The greater power should exercise the greater coercion. Now just as a city is a perfect community, so the governor of a city has perfect coercive power: wherefore he can inflict irreparable punishments such as death and mutilation. On the other hand the father and the master who preside over the family household, which is an imperfect community, have imperfect coercive power, which is exercised by inflicting lesser punishments, for instance by blows, which do not inflict irreparable harm. Reply to Objection 3: It is lawful for anyone to impart correction to a willing subject. But to impart it to an unwilling subject belongs to those only who have charge over him. To this pertains chastisement by blows.