Dear Sister:
One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains
on black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight
for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves
spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But, no, they appear to
glory in their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure their safety
in chains and corpses. And so, Newsweek, civilized defender of the
indefensible, attempts to drown you in a sea of crocodile tears (“it remained
to be seen what sort of personal liberation she had achieved”) and puts you on
its cover, chained.
You look exceedingly alone—as alone, say, as the Jewish
housewife in the boxcar headed for Dachau, or as any one of our ancestors,
chained together in the name of Jesus, headed for a Christian land.
Well. Since we live in an age in which silence is not only
criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can, here in
Europe, on radio and television—in fact, have just returned from a land,
Germany, which was made notorious by a silent majority not so very long ago. I
was asked to speak on the case of Miss Angela Davis, and did so. Very probably
an exercise in futility, but one must let no opportunity slide.
I am something like twenty years older than you, of that
generation, therefore, of which George Jackson ventures that “there are no
healthy brothers—none at all.” I am in no way equipped to dispute this
speculation (not, anyway, without descending into what, at the moment, would be
irrelevant subtleties) for I know too well what he means. My own state of
health is certainly precarious enough. In considering you, and Huey, and George
and (especially) Jonathan Jackson, I began to apprehend what you may have had
in mind when you spoke of the uses to which we could put the experience of the
slave. What has happened, it seems to me, and to put it far too simply, is that
a whole new generation of people have assessed and absorbed their history, and,
in that tremendous action, have freed themselves of it and will never be
victims again. This may seem an odd, indefensibly impertinent and insensitive
thing to say to a sister in prison, battling for her life—for all our lives.
Yet, I dare to say, for I think that you will perhaps not misunderstand me, and
I do not say it, after all, from the position of a spectator.
I am trying to suggest that you—for example—do not appear to
be your father’s daughter in the same way that I am my father’s son. At bottom,
my father’s expectations and mine were the same, the expectations of his
generation and mine were the same; and neither the immense difference in our
ages nor the move from the South to the North could alter these expectations or
make our lives more viable. For, in fact, to use the brutal parlance of that
hour, the interior language of that despair, he was just a nigger—a nigger
laborer preacher, and so was I. I jumped the track but that’s of no more
importance here, in itself, than the fact that some poor Spaniards become rich
bull fighters, or that some poor black boys become rich—boxers, for example. That’s
rarely, if ever, afforded the people more than a great emotional catharsis,
though I don’t mean to be condescending about that, either. But when Cassius
Clay became Muhammed Ali and refused to put on that uniform (and sacrificed all
that money!) a very different impact was made on the people and a very
different kind of instruction had begun.
The American triumph—in which the American tragedy has
always been implicit—was to make black people despise themselves. When I was
little I despised myself, I did not know any better. And this meant, albeit
unconsciously, or against my will, or in great pain, that I also despised my
father. And my mother. And my brothers. And my sisters. Black people were
killing each other every Saturday night out on Lenox Avenue, when I was growing
up; and no one explained to them, or to me, that it was intended that they
should; that they were penned where they were, like animals, in order that they
should consider themselves no better than animals. Everything supported this sense
of reality, nothing denied it: and so one was ready, when it came time to go to
work, to be treated as a slave. So one was ready, when human terrors came, to
bow before a white God and beg Jesus for salvation—this same white God who was
unable to raise a finger to do so little as to help you pay your rent, unable
to be awakened in time to help you save your child!
There is always, of course, more to any picture than can
speedily be perceived and in all of this—groaning and moaning, watching,
calculating, clowning, surviving, and outwitting, some tremendous strength was
nevertheless being forged, which is part of our legacy today. But that
particular aspect of our journey now begins to be behind us. The secret is out:
we are men!
But the blunt, open articulation of this secret has
frightened the nation to death. I wish I could say, “to life,” but that is much
to demand of a disparate collection of displaced people still cowering in their
wagon trains and singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” The nation, if America is
a nation, is not in the least prepared for this day. It is a day which the
Americans never expected or desired to see, however piously they may declare
their belief in “progress and democracy.” These words, now, on American lips,
have become a kind of universal obscenity: for this most unhappy people, strong
believers in arithmetic, never expected to be confronted with the algebra of
their history.
One way of gauging a nation’s health, or of discerning what
it really considers to be its interests—or to what extent it can be considered
as a nation as distinguished from a coalition of special interests—is to
examine those people it elects to represent or protect it. One glance at the
American leaders (or figure-heads) conveys that America is on the edge of
absolute chaos, and also suggests the future to which American interests, if
not the bulk of the American people, appear willing to consign the blacks.
(Indeed, one look at our past conveys that.) It is clear that for the bulk of
our (nominal) countrymen, we are all expendable. And Messrs. Nixon, Agnew,
Mitchell, and Hoover, to say nothing, of course, of the Kings’ Row basket case,
the winning Ronnie Reagan, will not hesitate for an instant to carry out what
they insist is the will of the people.
But what, in America, is the will of the people? And who,
for the above-named, are the people? The people, whoever they may be, know as
much about the forces which have placed the above-named gentlemen in power as
they do about the forces responsible for the slaughter in Vietnam. The will of
the people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an ignorance not merely
phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly cultivated: the better to be used by a
carnivorous economy which democratically slaughters and victimizes whites and
blacks alike. But most white Americans do not dare admit this (though they
suspect it) and this fact contains mortal danger for the blacks and tragedy for
the nation.
Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take
refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk out of this
most monstrous of traps—they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in
their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they
will think of—and justify—as a racial war. They will never, so long as their
whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own
experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human,
sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders,
their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put
it in our black church) in their sins—that is, in their delusions. And this is
happening, needless to say, already, all around us.
Only a handful of the millions of people in this vast place
are aware that the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and for George
Jackson, and for the numberless prisoners in our concentration camps—for that
is what they are—is a fate which is about to engulf them, too. White lives, for
the forces which rule in this country, are no more sacred than black ones, as
many and many a student is discovering, as the white American corpses in
Vietnam prove. If the American people are unable to contend with their elected
leaders for the redemption of their own honor and the lives of their own
children, we, the blacks, the most rejected of the Western children, can expect
very little help at their hands: which, after all, is nothing new. What the
Americans do not realize is that a war between brothers, in the same cities, on
the same soil, is not a racial war but a civil war. But the American delusion
is not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their
brothers.
So be it. We cannot awaken this sleeper, and God knows we
have tried. We must do what we can do, and fortify and save each other—we are
not drowning in an apathetic self-contempt, we do feel ourselves sufficiently
worthwhile to contend even with inexorable forces in order to change our fate
and the fate of our children and the condition of the world! We know that a man
is not a thing and is not to be placed at the mercy of things. We know that air
and water belong to all mankind and not merely to industrialists. We know that
a baby does not come into the world merely to be the instrument of someone
else’s profit. We know that democracy does not mean the coercion of all into a
deadly—and, finally, wicked—mediocrity but the liberty for all to aspire to the
best that is in him, or that has ever been.
We know that we, the blacks, and not only we, the blacks,
have been, and are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is greed, whose
only god is profit. We know that the fruits of this system have been ignorance,
despair, and death, and we know that the system is doomed because the world can
no longer afford it—if, indeed, it ever could have. And we know that, for the
perpetuation of this system, we have all been mercilessly brutalized, and have
been told nothing but lies, lies about ourselves and our kinsmen and our past,
and about love, life, and death, so that both soul and body have been bound in
hell.
The enormous revolution in black consciousness which has
occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America.
Some of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to
bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented
nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in
our name.
If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it
were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to
the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for
us that night.
Therefore: peace.
Brother James
