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Transcription: [00:44:02]
{SPEAKER name="James Baldwin"}
There is tremendous kind of vitality, a tremendous kind of virility, a tremendous kind of dignity and elegance

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coming all the way, from the auction block, down to 1963.

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There is something stunning about the fact that this virility, this vitality, this elegance and this dignity

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which has been so long maligned, denied and spat upon by this entire country has now become this country's only hope.

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During all these generations,

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when we were singing and dancing down on the levee,

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when we were happy, as Mr Charlie put it, in our place,

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and singing 'Steal away to Jesus', and eating all those greens, and doing all that funky dancing,

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white people actively cultivated

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in themselves, the expensive delusion,

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that my songs, my greens and my dances

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and the sorrow and the beauty and the force,

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that they heard in these songs

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they cultivated in themselves the delusion that these,

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things apply to something which they called nigger, but do not apply to man, and, in any case, did not apply to them.

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That what happened to me, in my slave quarters, and later in my relevated slave quarters,

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and later in my relevated slave quarters in the North,

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that all of these things, which I endured, was happening to someone else.

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and the danger in which I stood,

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the danger in which my children stood,

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the destruction we encountered, every day and every hour of every day, for generation upon generation,

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this was happened to colored people.