[Sixth National Conference of Friends on Race Relations Booklet] Page: 12 of 16
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of President Kennedy. Perhaps it was one of the
closing manifestations of the gift of prophecy that
James Baldwin was exercising when last year he
wrote these words, from his self-imposed exile:
We are in the hideous center of a mortal storm which
many of us saw coming. Many of us will perish and
certainly no one of my generation can hope honorably to
survive. And whether or not one agrees with me, I think
it is useful to assume that America will not survive this
storm either, nor should she. She is responsible for this
holocaust at which the living cry out. It is American
power which makes death an enviable state for so many
millions of people. We are a criminal nation built on a
lie and, as the world cannot use us, it will presenty find
some way of disposing of us. I take this for granted,
and the future of this nation, even though it may also
be my own, cannot concern me any longer. I am con-
cerned with the living. I am concerned with a new nioral-
ity and a new creation. I hope I do not sound literary.
In any case, I mean what I say. I really believe that it
is possible for human beings to make a place in which we
all can live.
Is this the gift of prophecy? Or shall we simply
assume that this is another mad, black man not
knowing whereof he speaks? The most important
thing, though, I think, is that James Baldwin, like
many others of these strange, black and tortured
prophets, has not spoken out of hatred for America.
Rather his words pour out because of a deep concern
to find a new and loving way for mankind, and he
is convinced that America now stands in the way of
this new hope for the world.
Perhaps words like those of Baldwin and King
and Stokeley already suggest what I think is the
deepest element of the gift of blackness, and that is
compassion. For in our pilgrimage through this land
there has been much raw material for the building
of compassion. We are the rejected ones, the humil-
ated ones, the spit-upon ones of America. There is
much in our experience that may make it possible
for us to have some sense of knowing what it means
to be among the outcasts of the world, and this
knowledge may well be the key to survival in today's
world. Before he died, A. J. Muste said that the
world was no longer divided between communists
and non-communists (if it ever was) but the great
division in the world is now between those nations
who have never known humiliation and those who
have known humiliation as a national experience
for centuries. We who are black live among the
leaders of the arrogant white west, but we've "been
'buked and we've been scorned," and our experience
may have been for the world.
There was a strange little bit of dialogue that
took place between Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo
Emerson at one point in their lives. Whitman said
to Emerson, "Master, I am a man who has perfect
faith, but master, we have not come through cen-
10turies, caste, heroism, fables to halt in this land to-
day." Now in our own time, a black Whitman has
paraphrased those words in a way that seems to me
to be most significant for this gift of compassion.
Lerone Bennett transposes Walt Whitman in this
way, "Fellow Americans, we have perfect faith, but,
fellow Americans, we have not come through slavery,
degradation, blood, cotton, roaches, rats to halt in
this land today." Somehow I think these words are
saying that we who have known the rejection of
America, the nation that stands as the paragon of
whiteness and "freeness" in the world today, are
people who must know what it is that other people
are feeling the world around and we must serve
their cause.
What I am suggesting is that those of us who
have known humiliation in this country may well
have been granted the gift of a sense of compassion
for the humiliated of the world. And it may be that
we shall understand more clearly than other Ameri-
cans are able to understand what it is that the rest
of the poor and the dying and burning world are
shouting at America as they try to beat back our air
forces with their rifles and their swords. The re-
jected of the world may have spokesmen within the
black heart of American society, spokesmen who per-
haps remember that the loving Father has never dis-
owned any of his children-not even for being Com-
munists.
This may be our gift, and it is a strange gift to
ponder because we have not usually thought of our
position on such terms. Indeed, I remember James
Weldon Johnson, in his Autobiography of An Ex-
Colored Man, having his protaganist say, "I don't
want to look at the world with narrow, constricted
Negro eyes; I want to look at it through human
eyes." What he really meant was, "I want to look at
it through white eyes." Now, however, it is clear
that if we simply count up the people in the world,
a man actually sees more when he looks at the world
through non-white eyes, partly as a matter of arith-
metic, partly as a matter of history. And the com-
passion that those eyes may hold, may indeed be a
gift worth developing.
I think this is something that needs to be said
more fully and more clearly. For it is my own deep
conviction that our position as black people in Amer-
ican society gives us a perspective on this society
and on this world that makes it possible for us to
be free from the deadly narrowness of white Ameri-
can nationalism and self-righteousness. In this kind
of trembling world, such freedom is surely a gift,
for it is the freedom to care.
It may well be that our position in the American
society over the last 350 years makes it also possible
for us to be free from any need to protect the Ameri-
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[Sixth National Conference of Friends on Race Relations Booklet], text, July 1967; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth595342/m1/12/?rotate=90: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas Southern University.