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Transcription: [00:00:06]
{SPEAKER name="James Baldwin"}
-- and then that cow prodder and that nightstick and that gun, because the white power structure in the South put him there and put those weapons in his hand.

[00:00:15]
He is a overseer, he works for them, to protect their interests to keep the negro in his place.

[00:00:20]
This has done terrible things to Negroes, this has done something worse to the sheriff, and what he has done to the people whom he represents is almost not to be believed, and it is the nature of that destruction which menaces us today.

[00:00:36]
-- What I saw -- What I saw was that if one had to make this terrible choice between being that sheriff and being that boy and the boy might die, and one knew that, in any human sense

[00:00:52]
the only choice you could make was to be that boy, because the boy had what most white people in this country do not have: a real sense of himself. A real sense -- of his human value.

[00:01:12]
His irreplaceable value. Nobody can be replaced. Everybody -- is sacred.

[00:01:22]
And in this country now we do not believe that.

[00:01:26]
-- We do not act on that. And the paradox is, that the humanity which the country has always denied me, because it has denied me my humanity, it is losing its own.

[00:01:43]
You do become -- what you think other people are. You do become-

[00:01:49]
[[clapping]]

[00:02:02]
{SPEAKER name="James Baldwin"}
You do become your victim. If we-