748 OTHER ESSAYS

the Jew
oppression, one is not indicting the single figure of White Racism ov World Community?
is also makin g a quite
but the entire human race, and one
. I know that my own oppres -
breathtaking claim for oneself Qres I am not a theologian in any way whatever, I prob-
not even when T though t of myself
sion did not ennoble me; ably ought to tell you what my credentials are. T never
I refuse to
as a practicing Christian. T also know that if today expected to be standing in such a place, because I left the
dy else, it is becaus e 1 know how it feels
hate Jews, or anybo pulpit twenty-seven years ago. That says a good deal, IT sup-
ceased to
to be hated. T learned this from Christians, and I pose, about my relationship to the Christian Church. And in
practice what the Christians practiced. }
and a curious way that is part of my credentials. I also address you
The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds in the name of my father, who was a Baptist minister, who
not produ ced by the star
hearts of black men everywhere, is gave his life to the Christian faith, with some very curious and
Roman cross on which
of David, but by the old, rugged stunning and painful results. I address you as one of those
Christendom’s most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not
people who have always been outside it, even though one tried
by Jews. to work in it. I address you as one of the creatures, one of
The New York Times Magazine, April 9, 1967
God’s creatures, whom the Christian Church has most be-
trayed. And I want to make it clear to you that though I may
have to say some rather difficult things here this afternoon, 1
want to make it understood that in the heart of the absolutely
necessary accusation there is contained a plea. The plea was
articulated by Jesus Christ himself, who said, “Insofar as you
have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto
me.”
Now it would seem to me that the nature of the confron-
tation, the actual historical confrontation between the non-
white peoples of the world and the white peoples of the world,
between the Christian Church and those people outside the
Christian Church who are unable to conceive themselves as
being equally the sons of God, the nature of that confronta-
tion is involved with the nature of the experience which a
black person represents vis-a-vis the Cross of Christ, and vis-
i-vis that enormous structure which is called the Church. Be-
cause I was born in a Christian culture, I never considered
myself to be totally a free human being. In my own mind,
and in fact, I was told by Christians what I could do and what
1 could become and what my life was worth. Now, this means
that one’s concept of human freedom is in a sense frozen or
strangled at the root. This has to do, of course, with the fact
that though he was born in Nazareth under a very hot sun,
and though we know that he spent his life beneath that sun,
the Christ I was presented with was presented to me with blue
749
750 OTHER ESSAYS
eyes and blond hair, and all the virtues to which I, as a black
man, was cxpected to aspire had, by definition, to be white.
This may seem a very simple thing and from some points of
view it might even seem to be a desirable thing. But in fact
what it did was make me very early, make us, the blacks, very
early distrust our own experience and refuse, in effect, to ar-
ticulate that experience to the Christians who were our op-
pressors. That was a great loss for me, as a black man. I want
to suggest that it was also a great loss for you, as white people.
For cxample, in the church I grew up in, we sang a song that
that man who was hung on a Roman cross between two
thieves would have understood better than most church prel-
ates. We sang—and we knew what we meant when we sang
it—“I’ve been rebuked and I’ve been scolded.” We won our
Christianity, cur faith, at the point of a gun, not because of
the example afforded by white Christians, but in spite of it. It
was very difficult to become a Christian if you were a black
man on a slave ship, and the slave ship was called “The Good
Ship Jesus.” These crimes, for one must call them crimes,
against the human being have brought the church and the
entire Western world to the dangerous place we find ourselves
in today. Because if it is true that your testimony as Christians
has proven invalid; if it is true that my importance in the
Christian world was not as a living soul, dear to the sight of
God, but as 2 means of making money, and representatively
more sinister than that too representing some terrifying di-
vorce between the flesh and the spirit; if that is true (and it
would be very difficult to deny the truth of this) then at this
moment in the world’s history it becomes necessary for me,
for my own survival, not to listen to what you say but to watch
very carefully what you do, not to read your pronouncements
but to go back to the source and to check it for myself. And
if that is so, then it may very well mean that the revolution
which was begun two thousand years ago by a disreputable
Hebrew criminal may now have to be begun again by people
equally disreputable and equally improbable. It’s got to be
admitted that if you are born under the circumstances in
which most black people in the West are born, that means
really black people over the entire world, when you look
WHITE RACISM OR WORLD COMMUNITY? ’%[
around you, having attained something resembling adult-
hood, it is perfectly true that you can see that the destruction
of the Christian Church as it is presently constituted may not
only be desirable but necessary.
If you have grown to be, let us say, thirty years old in a
Christian nation and you understand what has happened to
you and your brothers, your mother, your father, your sisters
and the ways in which you are menaced, not precisely by the
wickedness of Christians, but by the wickedness of white peo-
ple; most people are not wicked, most people are terribly lazy,
most people are terribly afraid of acting on what they know.
I think everyone knows that no child is a criminal, I think
everyone knows that all children are sacred, and yet the Chris-
tian world, until today, victimises all black children and de-
stroys them because they are not white. This is done in many
ways. One of the most important ways in which it is done is
the way in which the history of black people, which means
then the history of the Christian world, is taught Christians,
in order to justify the means by which they rose to power,
have had to convince themselves, and have had to try to con-
vince me, that when Africa was “discovered,” as Christians so
quaintly put it, and when I was discovered and brought away
to be used like an animal, we have had to agree, the Christian
Church had to conspire with itself to say that I preferred slav-
cry to my own condition and that I really liked the role I
played in Western culture. Until at last the Christian Church
has got to pretend that black South African miners are pleased
to go into the mines and bring out the diamonds and the
wealth, all the wealth which belongs to Africa, to dig it up for
nothing and give it to Europe. We all know, no matter what
we say, no matter how we may justify it or hide from this fact,
every human being knows, something in him knows, and this
is what Christ was talking about; no one wants to be a slave.
Black people have had to adjust to incredible vicissitudes and
involve in fantastic identity against incredible odds. But those
songs we sang, and sing, and our dances and the way we talk
to each other, betray a terrifying pain, a pain so great that
most Western people, most white Westerners, are simply baf-
fled by it and paralysed by it, because they do not dare imagine
752 OTHER ESSAYS
what it would be like to be a black father, and what a black
father would have to tell a black son in order for the black
son to live at all.
Now, this is not called morality, this is not called faith, this
has nothing to do with Christ. It has to do with power, and
part of the dilemma of the Christian Church is the fact that
it opted, in fact, for power and betrayed its own first principles
which were a responsibility to every living soul, the assump-
tion of which the Christian Church’s basis, as I understand it,
is that ##/ men are the sons of God and that #4 men are free
in the eyes of God and are victims of the commandment given
to the Christian Church, “Love one another as I have loved
you.” And if that is so, the Church is in great danger not
merely because the black people say it is but because people
are always in great danger when they know what they should
do, and refuse to act on that knowledge. To try to make it as
clear as T can; we hear a great deal these days of a young black
man called Stokely Carmichael, we gather from the public
press that Stokely’s a very dangerous, radical, black fanatic rac-
ist. Not long ago we heard much the same thing about the
late Malcolm X, and neither was the late Martin Luther King
the most popular man in his country.
But everyone overlooks the fact that Stokely Carmichael be-
gan his life as a Christian and for many, many years, unnoticed
by the world’s press, was marching up and down highways in
my country, in the deep south, spent many many years being
beaten over the head and thrown in jail, singing “We shall
overcome,” and meaning it and believing it, doing day by day
and hour by hour precisely what the Christian Church is sup-
posed to do, to walk from door to door, to feed the hungry,
to speak to those who arc oppressed, to try to open the gates
of prisons for all those who are imprisoned. And a day came,
inevitably, when this young man grew weary of petitioning a
heedless population and said in effect, what all revolutionaries
have always said, I petitioned you and petitioned you, and you
can petition for a long, long time, but the moment comes
when the petitioner is no longer a petitioner but has become
a beggar. And at that moment one concludes, you will not
do it, you cannot do it, it is not in you to do it, and therefore
I must do it. When Stokely talks about black power, he is
WHITE RACISM OR WORLD COMMUNITY? 753
simply translating into the black idiom what the English said
hundreds of years ago and have always proclaimed as their
guiding principle, black power translated means the self-de-
termination of people. It means that, nothing more and noth-
ing less. But it is astounding, and it says a great deal about
Christendom, that whereas black power, the conjunction of
the word ‘black’ with the word ‘power’, frightens everybody,
no one in Christendom appears seriously to be frightened by
the operation and the nature of white power. Stokely may
make terrifying speeches (though they are not terrifying to
me, I must say) and Stokely may be, though I don’t believe
it, a racist in reverse, but in fact he’s not nearly as dangerous
as the people who now rule South Africa, he’s not nearly as
dangerous as many of the people who govern my own poor
country. He's only insisting that he is present only once on
this earth as a man, not as a creation of the Christian con-
science, not as a fantasy in the Christian mind, not as an object
of missionary charity, not as something to be manipulated or
defined by others, but as a man himself, on this earth, under
the sky, on the same lonely journey we all must make, alone.
He (I am using him as an example) by insisting on the sa-
credness of his soul, by demanding his soul’s salvation, is
closer to the Hebrew prophet than, let us say arbitrarily, an-
other eminent Christian, the Governor of Alabama. And in
the same way it is perfectly possible twenty years from now
that the Christian Church, if indeed it lasts that long, will be
appalled by some of the things some of the sons of the late
Martin Luther King may have to say. After all, speaking now
again as a creation of the Christian Church, as a black creation
of the Christian Church, I watched what the Christian Church
did to my father, who was in the pulpit all the years of his
life, I watched the kind of poverty, the kind of hopeless pov-
erty, which was not an act of God, but an act of the State,
against which he and his children struggled, I watched above
all, and this is what is crucial, the ways in which white power
can destroy black minds, and what black people are now fight-
ing against, precisely that. We watched too many of us being
destroyed for too long and destroyed where it really matters,
not only in chain gangs, and in prisons and on needles, not
only do I know, and every black person knows, hundreds of
 —_————

754 OTHER ESSAYS WHITE RACISM OR WORLD COMMUNITY? 745

people, thousands of people, perishing in the streets of my structure of our politics and in the personalit
nation as we stand here, perishing, for whom there is no hope, ies of our chil-
dren, who would like to learn, if T may put
perishing in the jails of my country, and not only my country, it this way, how
to sing the blues, because the blues are not
For one reason, and one reason only, because they are black a racial creation,
the blues are an historical creation produced
and because the structure into which they were born, the by the confron-
tation precisely between the pagan, the black
Christian. structure, had determined and fore-ordained that pagan from Af
rica, and the alabaster cross. I am suggesting
destruction, to maintain its power. Now, of course, this, from that the nature
of the lies the Christian Church has alway
the point of view of anyone who takes the preaching of the s helplessly told
about me are only a reflection of the lies the Chris
man from Galilee seriously, is very close to being the sin tian Church
has always helplessly told itself, to itself, about
against the Holy Ghost, for which you will remember there is itself.
I am saying that when a person, when a peopl
o forgiveness. e, are able to
persuade themselves that another group or
" It seems to me, then, that the most serious thing that has breed of men are
less than men, they themselves become less than
happened in the world today and in the Christian conscience men and have
made it almost impossible for themselves to
is that Christians, having rationalized their crimes for so long, confront reality
and to change it. If I deny what I know to
though they live with them every day and see the evidence of be true, if I deny
that that white child next to me is simply anoth
them every day, they put themselves out of touch with them- er child, and
if 1 pretend thar that child, because its colou
sclves. There is a sense in which it can be said that my black r is white, de-
serves destruction, I have begun the destructio
flesh is the flesh that St. Paul wanted to have mortified. There n of my own
personality and I am beginning the destr
is a sense in which it can be said that very long ago, for a uction of my own
children. I think that if we have a future,
complex of reasons, but among them power, the Christian we must now begin
to tremble for some of the children of some
personality split itself in two, split itself into dark and light, in of our contem-
poraries. I tremble frankly for the children
fact, and it is now bewildered, at war with itself, is literally of all white South
Africans, who will not deserve their fate.
unable to comprehend the force of such a woman as Mahalia I tremble for that
day that is coming when some non-white nation
Jackson, who does not sound like anyone in Canterbury Ca- s, for example
Vietnam, are able to pay the West back—they
thedral, unable to accept the depth of sorrow, out of which a have a long and
bloody bill to pay. I tremble when 1 wonder
Ray Charles: comes, unable to get itself in touch ‘with itself, if there is left in
the Christian civilizations (and only these civili
with its sclfless totality. From my point of view, it scems to zations can an-
swer this question—1I cannot) the moral energ
me that the flesh and the spitit are one; it seems to me that y, the spiritual
daring, to atone, to repent, to be born again;
when you mortify the one, you have mortified the other. It if it is possible,
if there is enough leaven in the loaf, to cause
would scem to me that the morality by which the Christian us to discard
our actual and historical habits, to cause us
Church claims to live, I mean the public morality, that mo- to take our places
with that criminal Jew, for He was a crimin
rality governing our sexual relations and the structure of the al, who was put
to death by Rome between two thieves, becau
family, is terribly inadequate for what the world, and people se He claimed
to be the Son of God. That claim was a revel
in the world, must deal with now. ation and a rev-
olution because it means that we are all the
One of the things that happened, it seems to me, with the sons of Ged. That
is a challenge, that’s the hope. It is only by attem
rise of the Christian Church, was precisely the denial of a cer- pting to face
that challenge that one can begin to expand
tain kind of spontaneity, a certain kind of joy, a certain kind and transform
God’s nature which has to be forever an act
of freedom, which a man can only have when he is in touch of creation on
the part of every human being. It is important
with himself, his surroundings, his women and his children. to bear in mind
that we are responsible for our soul's salvat
It seems to me that this shows very crucially in the nature, the ion, not the
Bishop, not the priest, not my mother, ultim
ately it is each
756 OTHER ESSAYS

man’s responsibility alone in his own chamber before his own Sweet Lorraine
gods to deal with his health and his sickness, to deal with his
life and his death. When people cannot do this with them-
HAT’S the way I always felt about her, and so I won’t
selves, they very quickly cannot do it with others. When one
apologize for calling her that now. Ske understood it: in
begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to
that far too brief a time when we walked and talked and
stop living.
laughed and drank together, sometimes in the streets and bars
Finally, the mandate of this body is not merely goodwill,
and restaurants of the Village, sometimes at her house, some-
not merely paper resolutions. If one believes in the Prince of
times at my house, sometimes gracelessly fleeing the houses
Peace one must stop committing crimes in the name of the
of others; and sometimes seeming, for anyone who didn’t
Prince of Peace. The Christian Church still rules this world,
know us, to be having a knock-down, drag-out battle. We
it still has the power, to change the structure of South Africa.
spent a lot of time arguing about history and wemendously
It has the power, if it will, to prevent the death of another
related subjects in her Bleecker Street and, later, Waverly Place
Martin Luther King junior. It has the power, if it will, to force
flats. And often, just when I was certain that she was about
my Government to cease dropping bombs in South-East Asia.
to throw me out, as being altogether too rowdy a type, she
These are crimes committed in the name of the Christian
would stand up, her hands on her hips (for these down-home
Church, and no more than we have absolved the Germans for
sessions she always wore slacks), and pick up my empty glass
saying “T didn’t know it,” “T didn’t know what it was about,”
as though she intended to throw it at me. Then she would
“I knew of people having been taken away in the night, but
walk into the kitchen, saying, with a haughty toss of her head,
it has nothing to do with me.” We were very hard on the
“Really, Jimmy. You ain’t right, child!” With which stern put-
Germans about that. But Germany is also a Christian nation,
down, she would hand me another drink and launch into a
and what the Germans did in the Second World War, since
brilliant analysis of just why I wasn’t “right.” I would often
they are human and we are human too, there is no guarantee
stagger down her stairs as the sun came up, usually in the
that we are not doing that, right now. When a structure, a
middle of a paragraph and always in the middle of a laugh.
State or a Church or a country, becomes too expensive for
That marvelous laugh. That marvelous face. I loved her, she
the world to afford, when it is no longer responsive to the
was my sister and my comrade. Her going did not so much
needs of the world, that structure is doomed. If the Christian
make me lonely as make me realize how lonely we were. We
faith does not recover its Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, we
had that respect for each other which perhaps is only felt by
shall discover the meaning of what he meant when he said,
people on the same side of the barricades, listening to the
“Insofar as have done it unto the least of these, you have done
it unto me.” accumulating thunder of the hooves of horses and the treads
of tanks.
Address to the World Council of Churches,
July 7, 1968 The first time I ever saw Lorraine was at the Actors’ Studio,
in the Winter of ’s8-—’59. She was there as an observer of the
Workshop Production of Gigvanni’s Room. She sat way up in
the bleachers, taking on some of the biggest names in the
American theatre because she had liked the play and they, in
the main, hadn’t. I was enormously grateful to her, she
seemed to speak for me; and afterward she talked to me with
a gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten. A small,
shy, determined person, with that strength dictated by abso-
—p—