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FREEDOMWAYS             THIRD QUARTER 1973

Still, there are only two kinds of people in Europe where I fully experienced this complete human integration. They were Russian people and French people. I admit that I spent only two and a half months in the Soviet Union, as a guest of the Soviet satirical magazine Krokodil. In that space of time I traveled from Leningrad to Tashkent sketching, talking, drinking and laughing, and once in an open decked bus on the twisting road up to Lake Ritza, in the Caucasus, I sang along with Russian tourists. They were city folks and peasant folk with a sprinkling of vacationing Soviet GIs and their wives or girl friends. Hell, I didn't know the words of their spontaneous songs, but I knew the music and I sensed the immense generous heart beating beneath that music, sometimes gay, sometimes plaintive, always human. And as those people realized that I had joined their singing - and it was a thoroughly unconscious act - I saw the tears well up in many eyes and shimmering light seemed to completely envelope that bus. We'd reached a dizzying height - and it had nothing to do with mountains.  

Twelve of those "exile" years I spent in France and as a result I can only say that I love the French people. Above all I love and deeply admire the French working class, its proudly working class artists, poets and other intellectuals, and when all is said and done, these are THE French people. THEY are France. But space doesn't permit me to do justice to this subject.

Last summer, the summer of 1972, John Pittman one of the editors of the Daily World wrote me from New York suggesting that  I grab a flight and pay them a visit in September. I'd been very, very happily turning out two political cartoons each week for the Daily World and it seemed that the arrangement was mutually rewarding. It's alright to live in Europe drawing and painting for personal satisfaction while turning out illustrations and cartoons for European publications for porkchops, but there is something missing somehow. I'm Black, and my people are engaged in a difficult and heroic struggle for freedom.  While this is a worldwide struggle of oppressed people against the injustice and savage brutality which seem to be essential weapons for the maintenance of capitalism, my personal part of that struggle seems inseparably bound to how the struggle is being waged in the United States. Although I believe that "art for art's sake" has its merits, I personally feel that my art must be involved, and the most profound involvement must be with the Black liberation struggle. My cartoon character Bootsie has been part of that struggle for 39 years and I believe, as Langston Hughes did, that 

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Transcription Notes:
Do not indicate italics. I have corrected. ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-26 13:40:49