[Music] [Music] [Music] Master Bolan it I'm sure you still meet the remark that what are the Negroes weren't they optimistic they say but it's getting so much better there are negro mayor's there's Negroes in all of sports there are Negroes in politics there they're even accorded the ultimate accolade of being in television commercials now and I'm glad you're smiling it is it at once getting much better and still hopeless well I don't think there's much hope for it you know the truth as long as people are using this peculiar language it's not a question of
what happens to the negro here to the black man here that's that's a very very question for me you know but the real question is what's gonna happen to this country I had to repeat that [Music] you down I've got the blue my hair down to my suit [Music] I don't have [Music] today actor Spartan literary agency June thirtieth nineteen seventy nine ninety oj i'll confess to you that I am writing the enclosed proposal in a somewhat divided frame of my the summer has scarcely begun and I feel already that it's almost over and I
will be 55 yes fifty-five and a month I am about to undertake the journey and this is a journey to tell you the truth which I always knew that I would have to make but it hoped perhaps certainly hadn't hoped not to have to make so soon I am saying that a journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey what you will do with what you find Oh what you find the time of these lives and deaths from a public point of view is 1955 when we first heard
of Martin to 1968 when he was murdered Medgar was murdered in the summer of 1963 Malcolm was murdered in 1965 the three men Medgar Malcolm and Martin were very different men consider that Martin was only 26 in 1955 he took on his shoulders the weight of the crimes and the lies and the hope of a nation I want these three lives to bang against and reveal each other as in truth they did and use their dreadful journey as a means of instructing the people whom they loved so much who betrayed them and for whom they
gave their lives [Music] child walks into the stove every decent self-respecting loving parent should take this white child out of that broken stove [Music] [Music] God forgives murder and he forgives adultery but he is very angry and he actually creases powerful to integrate [Applause] that's when I saw the photograph on every newspaper kiosk on that wide tree-shaped Boulevard in Paris were photographs of 15 year-old Dorothy camps being reviled and spat upon by the mob as she was making her way to school in Charlotte North Carolina there was unutterable Pride tension and anguish in that girl's
face as she approached the halls of learning with history jeering at her back it made me furious it filled me with both hatred and pity and it made me ashamed some one of us should have been there with her but it was on that bright afternoon that I knew I was leaving France I could simply no longer sit around Paris discussing the Algerian and the Black American problem everybody else was paying their dues and it was time I went home and paid mine [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I had at last come home if
there was in this some illusion there was also much truth in the years in Paris I had never been homesick for anything American neither waffles ice cream hot dogs baseball majorettes movies nor the Empire State Building nor Coney Island nor the Statue of Liberty nor the Daily News nor Times Square all of these things have passed out of me they might never have existed and it made absolutely no difference to me if I never saw them again but I missed my brothers and sisters and my mother they made a difference I wanted to be able
to see them and to see their children I hoped that they wouldn't forget me I missed her on Sunday mornings and fried chicken and biscuits and mr. music I missed the style that style possessed by no other people in the world I missed the way the dark face closes the way darker as watch and the way when a dark face opens light seems to go everywhere I missed in short my connections missed the life which had produced me and nourished me and paid for me now though I was a stranger a song [Music] I'm fascinated
by the movement on and off the screen I'm about seven and with my mother or my aunt the movie is dance fools dance I was aware that Joan Crawford was a white lady yet I remember being sent to the store sometimes later and a colored woman who to me looked exactly like Joan Crawford was buying something she was incredibly beautiful she looked down at me was so beautiful a smile when I was not even embarrassed which was rare for me by this time I had been taken in hand by a young white school teacher named
Bill Miller a beautiful name very important to me she gave me books to read and talk to me about the books and about the world about Ethiopia and Italy and a German third rush it took me to see plays and films to which no one else would have dreamed of taking the ten-year-old boy [Music] [Music] it is certainly because of Bill Miller who arrived in my terrifying life so soon but I never really managed to hate white people though God knows I have often wished to murder more than one or two [Applause] [Music] therefore I
began to suspect that white people did not act as they did because they were white but for some other reason I was a child of course and therefore unsophisticated I took Bill Miller as she was or as she appeared to be to me she to anyway was treated by the Navy especially by the cops and she had no love for landlords in these days no one resembling my father has yet made an appearance on the American cinema see [Music] no it's not entirely true there were for example step-in Fetchit and Willie best and mantan Moreland
all of them rightly or wrongly I had loathed it seemed to me that they lied about the world I knew and based it and certainly I did not know anybody like them as far as I could tell for tis also possible that their comic bug-eyed terror contained the truth concerning a tear about which I hoped never to be engulfed yet I had no reservations at all concerning the terror of the black janitor and they won't forget I think that it was a black actor named Clinton in Rosamond who played this part and he looked a
little like my father [Music] he's terrified because a young white girl in a small southern town has been raped and murdered her body has been found on the premises of which he is the janitor the role of the janitor small yet the man's face bangs in my memory until today nobody says you have done what they might the film's icy brutality dopes scared me fan strengthened me [Music] because Uncle Tom refuses to take vengeance in his own hands he was not a hero for me heroes as far as I could see were white and not
merely because of the movies but because of the land in which I lived of which movies were simply a reflection I despised and feared those heroes because they did take vengeance into their own hands they thought vengeance was they used to take and yes I understood that my countrymen were my enemy I suspect that all these stories are designed to reassure us that no crime was committed we made a legend out of a massacre leaving aside all the physical facts which one can quote leaving aside rape or murder leaving aside the bloody catalogue of oppression
which we are in one way to familiar with already what this does to the subjugated is destroy his sense of reality this means in the case of an American Negro born in that glittering Republic and in the moment you are born since you don't know any better every sticking stone and every face is white and since you have not yet seen the mirror you suppose that you are too it comes as a great shock around the age of five or six or seven to discover the Gary Cooper killing off the Indians when you were rooting
for Gary Cooper that the Indians were you it comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity as not in its whole system a reality about any place for you my dear J you must it is to be hoped be as curious as I am concerning the execution of this book project I know how to do it technically it is a matter of research and journeys and with you or without you I will do it anyway I begin in September when
I go on the road the road means my return to the south it means briefly for example seeing Myrlie Evers and the children those children who are children no longer it means going back to Atlanta to Selma to Birmingham it means seeing Coretta Scott King and Martin's children I know that Martin's daughter whose name I don't remember and Malcolm's oldest daughter whose name is Attila our bolt in the theater and apparently our friends it means seeing Betty Shabazz Malcolm's Widow and the five younger children it means exposing myself as one of the witnesses to the
lives and deaths of their famous fathers and it means much much more than that a cloud of witnesses as old Saint Paul wants put it I first met Malcolm X I saw Malcolm before I met him I was giving a lecture somewhere in New York Malcolm sitting in the first row of the hall pending forwarded such an angle that his long arms nearly caressed the ankles of his long legs staring up at me I very nearly panicked I know Malcolm only by legend and this legend since I was a Harlem Street boy I was sufficiently
astute to distrust Malcolm might be the torch that white people claim he was though in general might America's evaluations of these matters would be laughable and even pathetic did not these evaluations have such wicked results on the other hand Malcolm had no reason to trust me either and so I stumbled through my lecture with Malcolm never taking his eyes from my face [Music] there's no Sun up in the sky stormy weather since my mana line together keeps Elena [Music] as a member of the n-double a-c-p mega was investigating the murder of a black man which
had occurred months before had shown me letters from black people asking him to do this and he had asked me to come with him I was terribly frightened but perhaps that field trip will help us define what I mean by the word witness I was to discover that the line which separates a witness from an actor is a very thin line indeed nevertheless the line is real I was not for example a Black Muslim in the same way though for different reasons that I never became a black panther because I did not believe that all
the white people were Devils and I did not want young black people to believe that I was not a member of any Christian congregation because I knew that they had not heard and did not live by the commandment love one another as I love you and I was not a member of the n-double a-c-p because in the North where I grew up the n-double-a-cp was fatally entangled with black class distinctions or illusions of the same which repelled a shoeshine boy like me I did not have to deal with the criminal state of Mississippi how I
work and day by day to say nothing of night after night I did not have to sweat cold sweat after decisions involving hundreds of thousands of lives I was not responsible for raising money for deciding how to use it I was not responsible for strategy controlling prayer meetings marches petitions voting registration drives I saw the sheriff's the deputies the storm troopers more or less in passing I was never in town to stay this was sometimes hard on my morale but I had had to accept this time war on the part of my responsibility as a
witness must move as largely and as freely as possible to write the story and to get it out [Music] [Music] we should all be concerned but one goal the eradication of fire Federal Bureau of Investigation is close to you as your nearest telephone it seeks to be your protector in all matters within its jurisdiction belongs to you [Music] [Music] white people are astounded by Birmingham black be blocked white people are endlessly demanding to be reassured 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's not one step morally far actually between Birmingham and Los Angeles [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] we've invited three men on the forefront of a 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 segments 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 group 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 they meet turning the other cheek for preachers would you care to comment
on the directors plea 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 in powerful a direct action this is what I've tried to teach him to struggle in the South that we are not engaged in a struggle that means we sit down and do nothing that has great deal of difference between non-resistance to evil and nonviolent resistance the 20th century or modern Uncle Tom or a religious Uncle Tom who was 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 in the face of the attack of the Klan in that day I think though that we we can be sure that the vast majority of Negroes who engage in the demonstrations and who understand the nonviolent philosophy will be able to face dogs and all of the other brutal methods that he 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
on another as concerns Malcolm and Martin I watched two men coming from unimaginably different backgrounds whose positions originally were pulled apart different closer and closer together by the time each died their positions had become virtually the same position it can be said indeed then Martin picked up Malcolm's burden articulated the vision which Malcolm had begun to see and for which he paid with his life and then Malcolm was one of the people Martin saw on the mountaintop 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 40 [Applause] 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 the Malcolm talks all that Messner's is talk they articulate for all the Negro people who hear them who listen to them they articulate
their suffering there's something which has been in this country so long denied that's Malcolm's been authority over any of his audiences he corroborates their reality he tells them that they really exist you know [Applause] [Applause] and their days is one of them when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it how precise you're going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how you're 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 had looted themselves for so long they really don't think I'm human I add basis on their conduct not on what they say and this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters [Music] mostly white American died I've encountered really you know had a Negro friend or a Negro maid or somebody in high school but they never know oh really school was over or whatever you know came to my kitchen you know we were segregated from the schoolhouse door therefore he doesn't know he does not know
what it was like me to leave my house not leave the school and I like to Harlem doesn't know how Negroes live and it comes as a great surprise to the Kennedy brothers and everybody else in the country I'm certain again you know that like again like most white Americans I know encountered they have no no I'm sure whatever against that is no that's really not the question the question is really a kind of apathy and ignorance which is a price to be paid with segregation segregation means 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 while 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 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 us 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 I must sketch now the famous Bobby Kennedy meeting 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 33 that was one of the very last times I saw her on her feet and she died at the age of 34 I
miss her so much people forget how young everybody was Bobby Kennedy for another quite different example it was 38 we wanted him to tell his brother to President to personally escort to school on that day or the day after 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 the rain sat still watching all the while she looked at Bobby Kennedy who perhaps for the first time looked at her but I'm 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 the very last time I saw medgar
evers 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 merely ever standing outside smiling and we waved and make a 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 there was a wonderful bright sunny day top of the car was down we were laughing talking and the radio was playing and
the music stopped and a voice announced then Medgar Evers had been shot to death in the carport of his home and his wife and children had seen the big man fall him down is king [Music] it's on fire you know see by three on the stone that the game [Music] [Music] 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 roared the 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 [Music] [Music] in America I was free on the 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 have seized the world away
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 this 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 when we're trying to keep alive we're trying to survive a very brutal system the Negro has never been happy in his place one of the most terrible things is that in fact what her
life is 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 I was a child no new trial of his eyes and worldly interviews where he sees there's nothing else to use and you are formed by what you see the choice you have to make in 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 it's not a figure of speech the
conscience of your brothers and your sisters pile up around you and not for anything they have done there were two yahood have done anything but what one does realize is that when you try to stand 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 they get the Negro problem don't let any voting axe we had that call a Fifteenth Amendment linda's civil rights for the 1964 what you had to look at is what is happening in this country and
what is really happening is that brother has murdered brother knowing about his brother white men of bench Negroes knowing to be their sons white women have had Negroes burn knowing to be their lovers it is that a ratio of problem it's a problem 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 Cindy I'm the most despised child of that house and it is because the
American people are unable to face the fact in eyes that iron flesh of their flesh bowl of their bowl created by them my blood my father's blood is in that soil good afternoon them it's raining so hard I brought Robertson Cole to fetch my little girl home I'm afraid you've made some mistake hey this is a 3b yes what this is it she can't be it I have another little colored children in my class oh there's my little girl Peola you make a home she was calm if it did I hate you I hate you
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 my captivity a song they require a song of me list to celebrate my captivity and to justify their own [Music] 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 self it would never have become so dependent 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 as a sign to the blacks [Music] look man don't give me that look you should have got what was coming
here after spitting in that guy's face it is impossible to accept the premise of the story a premise based on the profound American misunderstanding of the nature of the hatred between black and white the root of the black man's hatred is a rage and he does not so much hate white and as simply wants them out of his way and more than that out of his children's way the root of the white mattock is to a bottomless and nameless terror which focuses on this dread figure an entity which lives only in his mind [Music] when
Sydney jumps off the train the white liberal people downtown were much relieved and joyful but what black people saw him jump off the train they yelled get back on the train you fool the black man jumps off the train in order to reassure white people to make them know that they're not hated and though they have made human errors they done nothing for which to be hated in spite of the fabulous myths proliferating in this country concerning the sexuality of black people black men are still used in the popular culture as though they had no
sexual equipment at all Sydney Poitier as a black artist and a man is also up against the infantile furtive sexuality of this country both he and Harry Belafonte for example are sex symbols though no one dares admit that still less to use them as any of the hollywood he men are you black people have been robbed of everything in this country and they don't want to be robbed of their artists like people particularly disliked guess who's coming to dinner because they felt that Sydney was in effect being used against them guess who's coming to dinner
may prove in some bizarre way to be a milestone because it is really quite impossible to go any further in that particular direction the next time the kissing will have to start [Music] well got your ticket yeah thank you I am aware that men did not kiss each other in American films nor for the most part in America nor do black detective and the white sheriff kiss here you take care yeah but the obligatory fade-out kiss and the classic American self did not speak of love and still less of sex it spoke of reconciliation of
all things and how becoming possible [Music] I knew a blonde girl in the village a long time ago and eventually we never walked out of the house together she was far safer walking the streets alone than been walking with me a brutal and humiliating sacked wood stair Lee destroyed whatever relationship this girl and I might have been able to achieve this happens all the time in America but Americans have yet to realize what a sinister fact this is and what it says about them when we walked out in the evening then she would leave ahead
of me alone I would give about five minutes and then I would walk out alone taking another route and meet her on the subway platform we would not pick knowledge each other we would get into the subway car sitting in opposite ends of it and walk separately through the streets of the free and the brave to where for we were going the friend's house or the movies all over the country families such as this are enjoying new prosperity they have new interests new standards of living a buying power they've never enjoyed before they're good prospects
for practically all types of goods and services all too often though they're overlooked prospects since 1940 in San Francisco alone the liberal market has increased by 89 percent here are millions of customers for what you have to sell customers with 15 someone once said to me that the people in general cannot bear very much reality he meant by this that they prefer fantasy to a truthful recreation of their experience people have quite enough reality to bear by simply getting through their lives raising their children dealing with the eternal conundrums of birth taxes and death Negroes
are continuously making progress here in this country the progress in many areas not as fast as it should be but they are making progress and we will continue to make progress there's no reason that they in the linear in the foreseeable future that a Negro could also be President of the United States I remember for example when the ex Attorney General mr. Robert Kennedy said that it was conceivable that in 40 years in America we might have a Negro president and that sounded like a very emancipated statement I suppose to white people they were not
in Harlem when this statement was first heard and did not hear and possibly we'll never hear the laughter and the bitterness and the scorn which is taken was greeted and the point of view of the manner that in Harlem barbershop Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday and now he's already on his way to the presidency we have 400 years and now he tells us that maybe in 40 years if you're good we made that you become president [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] ah he's I was satisfied [Music] let me put it this way that from
a very literal point of view the harbor's and the ports and the railroads are the country the economy especially of the southern states could not conceivably be what it has become if they had not had and do not still have indeed and for so long for many generations cheap labor [Music] it is a terrible thing for entire people to surrender the notion that 1/9 of its population is beneath them and until that moment until the moment comes when we the Americans we the American people are able to accept the fact that I have to accept
for example the my ancestors both white and black that aren't that confident we are trying to forge a new identity which we need each other and that I am NOT a ward of America I'm not an object of missionary charity I am one of the people who built the country until this moment there is scarcely any hope for the American Dream because the people who are denied participation in it by their very presence will wreck it and if that happens it's a very great moment for the West thank you [Applause] [Music] we're here in the
studio today with seven men who have two things in common they're entertainers and artists and they've all come to Washington they're seven out of some 200,000 American citizens who came to the Capitol to march or freedom and for jobs will this tremendous outburst now lead to a course of action mr. Belafonte then now that is being spoken about is the fact that in a hundred years finally through whatever the causes have been in history and most of them have been because of oppression the Negro people have strongly and fully taken the bit in their teeth
they're asking absolutely no quarter from anyone but I do say that the bulk of the interpretation of whether this thing is going to end successfully and joyously oh it's going to end disastrously ladies very heavily with the white community it lays very heavily with the profit ears it lays very heavily with the vested interests plays very heavily with a great middle stream in this country of people who have refused to commit themselves or even have the slightest knowledge that these things have been going on [Music] I am speaking as a member of a certain democracy
in very complex country which insists on being very narrow-minded simplicity is taken to be a great American virtue along with sincerity I'm sorry I am deeply sorry and I'm sorry I'm deeply sorry about there are no excuses I am solely you've made plenty of mistakes for that I apologize I am very sorry you know I'm sorry I did this to you but you got to get used to it it's one of those little problems in life I take full responsibility just apologize for that to her or any mistakes I have made I take full responsibility
it's an honor to serve the city of Ferguson and the people who live there one of the results of this is that immaturity is taken to be a virtue chip so that someone like that let's say John Wayne who spent most of his time on screen admonishing Indians was in no necessity to grow up I had been in London on this particular night we were free and we decided to treat ourselves to a really fancy friendly dinner the head waiter came and said that was a long phone call for me my sister Gloria rose to
take it she was very strange when she came back she didn't say anything and I began to be afraid to ask her anything then nibbling at something she obviously wasn't tasting she said well I've got to tell you because the press is on its way over here they have just killed Malcolm [Music] [Music] there is nothing in the evidence offered by the book of the American Republic which allows me really to argue with the cat who says to me they need to speak to cotton and now they don't need us anymore and other Armenians are
gonna kill us all off just like they did the Indians and I can say it's a Christian nation there with your brothers will never do that to you because the record is too long and to Bonnie that's all we had done all your very corpses now begin to speak but I say violence is necessary violence is a part of America's culture it is as American as cherry pie like how [Applause] [Applause] [Music] if we were white and we were Irish if you were Jewish if we were poles if we had in fact in your mind
a frame of reference our heroes be your heroes to not turn it would be a hero for you instead of a threat Malcolm X might still be alive and know everyone is very proud of brave little Israel stated against what you have nothing don't misinterpret I'm not an anti-semite but you know when the Israelis pick up guns or the poles or the Irish or any white man in the world says give me liberty or give me death the entire white world applauds when a black man says exactly the same thing word for word he is
judge of criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad [ __ ] so they bump anymore like in look out across this land we love look about you whatever you are there's an ending scenic beauty and there's freedom it's an inherent American right meaning many different things to every single city it's a leisurely afternoon of GARP along a pleasant cause it's an amusement park a roller coaster ride the County Fair a day of excitement unrestricted travel across unlimited enjoyment of all these jewels and a countenance prompt
for all of us there's all of America all of its scenic use all of its heritage of we've dropped too many bombs on Vietnam now let us save our national honour stop the bombing and stop the war what I am trying to say to this country to us is that we must know this we must realize this that no other country in the world have been so fed so sleek and so safe so happy and so irresponsible and so dead no other country can afford to dream of a Plymouth and the wife in the house
with events and the children growing up safely to go to college and to become executives and then to marry and have the plumber in the house and so forth a great many people do not live this way and cannot imagine it and do not know that when we talk about democracy this is what we mean [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the industry is compelled given away it is built to present to the American people a self-perpetuating fantasy of American life your concept of entertainment is difficult to distinguish from the use of narcotics do you think people
are gonna look down on them or judge [Music] [Applause] [Music] to watch the TV screen for any length of time is to learn some really frightening things about the American sense of reality we are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are and we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the labs we lead on this continent are mainly so empty so tame and so ugly these images want to say not to trouble but to reassure they also weaken
our ability to deal with the world as it is our selves as we are I would like to add someone to our group here professor Paul Weiss a sterling professor philosophy [Applause] [Music] [Applause] were you able to listen to the show backstage and deal a bit but then I was behind the do yes so I heard only some of them did you hear anything that you disagreed with I disagreed with a great deal of it and of course it's a good deal I agree with but I think he's overlooking one very important matter I think
each one of us I think is terribly alone he lives his own individual life there's all kinds of obstacles in the way of religion or color or size or shape or lack of ability and the problem is to become a man but what I was discussing him is not that problem really I'm discussing the difficulties the obstacles the very very real danger of death thrown up by the society when a negro when a black man attempts to become a man will this emphasis upon black men and white does emphasize something which is here but it
emphasizes it or crept exaggerated and therefore makes us for people together in groups which they ought not to be in I have more in common with a black scholar that I have with a white band was against scholarship and you have more in common with a white author then you have with someone who is against our literature so why must we always concentrate on color or religion or this there are other ways of connecting men I'll tell you this when I left this country in 1948 I thought it's gotta be one reason only one reason
I didn't care where I went I mean I got a Hong Kong I might have gone to Timbuktu ended up in Paris on the streets of Paris the ROI dollars in my pocket on the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there so it already happened to me here you talk about making it as a write about yourself you had to be able then to turn up all the intent of a bit you live because once you turn your back on this society you may die you may die and it's very hard for the
typewriter and concentrate on that if you're afraid of the world around you the years I live in Paris did one thing for me they released me from that particular social Terror which is not the paranoia of my own mind but a real social danger visible in face of every cop every boss everybody I don't know what those why people in this country feel I can only include what they feel from the state of their institutions I don't know that white Christians hate Negroes or not I know that we have a rich in church which is
white and the Christian Church which is black I know it's Malcolm X once put it the most decorated owl in American life is I knew on Sunday that's it's a great deal for me about a Christian nation it means I can't afford to trust most white Christians in certain conduct across the Christian Church I don't know what the labor unions and their bosses really hate me that doesn't matter but I know I'm not in their unions I don't feel real estate lobby has anything against black people but I know the real estate lobbies keeping me
in the ghetto I don't know if the Board of Education hates black people I know the textbooks I get my children to read and the schools that we have to go to now this is the evidence you want me to make an act of faith risking myself my life I woman my sister my children on some idealism which you are surely exist in America which I have never seen [Music] all of the Western nations have been caught in a lie the lie of their pretended humanism this means that their history have no moral justification and
that the West has no moral authority [Music] biyo as I am States one of the characters in dusty ask is the idiot er I don't believe in the wagons that bring bread to humanity for the wagons that bring bread to humanity may coldly exclude a considerable part of humanity from enjoying what is brought for a very long time America prospered this prosperity cost millions of people their lives now not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits they can neither understand them and
do without them above all they cannot imagine the price paid by their victims or subjects for this way of life and so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolt [Music] this is the formula for a nation or Kingdom decline when no Kingdom can maintain itself by force alone force does not work the way it's a fix think in fact it does it is not for example reveal to the victim the strength of the adversary on the contrary it reveals the weakness even the panic of the adversary and this revelation invest the victim
with passion there is a day in Palm Springs that I will remember forever a bright day I was based in Hollywood working on the screen version of the autobiography of malcolm x this was a difficult assignment since I had known Malcolm after all crossed swords with him worked with him and held him in that great esteem which is not easily distinguishable if it is distinguishable from love Billy Dee Williams had come to town and he was staying at the house I very much wanted Billy Dee for the role of Malcolm phone had been brought out
to the pool and now it rang and I picked it up the record player was still play he's not dead yet but it's and I have some very sad news for all of you and I think sad news people who love peace all over the world and that is I hardly remember the rest of the evening at all I remember weeping briefly Lauren helpless rage denim sorrow and Billy tried to comfort me but I really don't remember that evening at all [Music] the church was packed and the Pew before me said Marlon Brando Sammy Davis
or the kid Sidney Poitier nearby I saw Erica LaFontaine sitting next to Coretta King I have a childhood handover thing about not weeping in public and I was concentrating I'm holding myself together I did not want to weep for Martin tears same futile but I may also have been afraid and I could not have been the only one that if I began to weep I would not be able to stop I started to cry and I stumbled Sammy we have my harm the story of the Negro in America is the story of America it is
not a pretty story what can we do I am tired I don't know how it will come about I know that no matter how it comes about it will be bloody it will be hard I still believe that we can do with this country something that has not been done before we are misled here because we think of numbers you don't need numbers you need passion and this is proven by the history of the world the tragedy is that most of the people who say they care about it do not care what they care about
is their safety and their profits the American Way of life has failed to make people happier or make them better we do not want to admit this and we do not admit it we persist in believing that the empty and criminal among our children are the result of some miscalculation in the formula that can be corrected at the bottomless and aimless hostility which makes our cities among the most dangerous in the world is created and felt by a handful of aberrant at the lack yawning everywhere in this country of passionate conviction a personal Authority proves
only our rather appealing tendency to be gregarious and democratic to look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep this is not the land of free it is only very unwillingly and sporadically the home of the brave I sometimes feel it to be an absolute miracle that the entire black population of the United States of America has not long ago succumbed to raging paranoid people finally say to you in an attempt to dismiss the social reality but you're so bitter [Music] well I may or may not be better but if
I were I would have good reasons for it chief among them that American blindness cowardice which allows us to pretend that life presents no reasons for being bitter [Music] in this country for a dangerously long time there have been two levels of experience one to put it cruelly can be summed up when the images of Gary Cooper and Doris Day - the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen and the other subterranean indispensable and denied can be summed up let us say in the tone and in the face of Ray Charles [Music]
and there had never been any genuine confrontation between these two levels of experience should I Suren his bleeding [Music] is this the night you cannot catch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves and furthermore you give me a terrifying advantage you never had to look at me I had to look at you I know more about you than you know about me not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced history is not the past it is the present we carry our history with
us we are our history if we pretend otherwise we literally are criminals I attest to this the world is not white it never was white cannot be white white is a metaphor for power and that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive to be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter so I oppose to be an optimist and possibly we can survive but ever we must survive but the liberal in this country the future
will grow in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as a future of the country it is entirely up to the American people and our representatives it is entirely up to the American people whether or not they're going to face and deal with and embrace the stranger when they rely on so long what white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts why was necessary I have a [ __ ] in the first place because I'm not a [ __ ] I'm a man but if you think I'm
a [ __ ] means you need it the question you gotta ask yourself the white population of this country is gotta ask itself north and south because it's one country and one Negro there is others in North myself there's just no difference in the way they in a way they castrate you but that's but the fact of the castration is American fact and I'm not [ __ ] here and you invented it you the white people invented him and you gotta find out why and the future the country depends on that whether or not is
able to ask that question [Music] that's what you're telling me penitentiary will only hire me curse me til I'm dead Church me with your prophesied that imma be just another slave in my head institutionalize witness relation in life reciprocation of freedom oniy liver your eyes you hate me don't you I know you hate me just watch you should hate yourself jealous of my wisdom me Karthik dose watching me as I pull up fill up my tank below muscle cars let's pull up show you what these [ __ ] will successful it could be special can't
scare so my radar [ __ ] out canal how can I tell you I'm making a killing you made me a killer emancipation of a real [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] excuse my French [ __ ] you [ __ ] y'all that's plenty I know you hate me I can tell cause it's when I see you I can tell Chris away no I can tell because you in love with ego taking maliciously each either changing you complete them it's funny out to Lewin throw some I go to war to try bombers that wanna build in the
store I'm on the Edit copy Chris Kings that live next door he threw a bow settle the score so no matter how much I say I'd like to preach with the practice or tell Georgia State Marcus Garvey got all the answers I try to celebrate February like it's my bday or eat watermelon chicken and kool-aid on weekdays I jump high enough to get Michael Jordan endorsements or watch beauty cause our support is important so why did I week went straight from winding with center street we can break and make me kill a [ __ ]
blacker than me [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] you
