Viewing page 76 of 100

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

FREEDOMWAYS FIRST QUARTER 1968

to his society, an obligation to understand it and to serve as its conscience. Melville and Whitman had known this. So had Twain and Howells, Norris and London, Sandburg and MacLeish, Sinclair and Dos Passos, Wright and Steinbeck. The responsible American writer makes it his duty to report on his corner of the nation. Los Angeles is my corner. I was raised there. I had gone to Watts in my youth to hear T-Bone Walker and other local jazzmen in the honky-tonks of what was then a small rural chunk of the South tossed into the outskirts of the crazyquilt sprawl that was and is Los Angeles. In the Sixties, Watts was no longer six thousand but sixty thousand; the black ghettoland of South Los Angeles had leaped to 600,000 in an exploding county population of six million. Still the bottom-dog tenth.

“I was there in Los Angeles. I was self-appointed to go to Watts while the fires were still smoldering. If I were to understand this urban tragedy, it would require not merely a look but a lot of looks, and not merely superficial looks but finally, somehow, from the inside looking out.”

The idea for the Workshop was in motion. The first students spent most of their time judging the teacher while he waited out their suspicion of him. It is fortunate that the students and the teacher finally got together. Out of their collective efforts a new and vital body of literature has emerged.

This is proof, if proof is needed, that the people of the Watts and other ghettos have hope and latent power that can be converted into an instrument for their liberation. They also have the creative talent to use their lives as the ingredient for a new literature that will live.

John Henrik Clarke

Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-12 14:56:55 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-13 12:09:10 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-13 18:10:10 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-13 18:24:00