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Looking for the Bicentennial Man

A Commentary by
James Baldwin
On the State
Of the Nation,
200 Years After

[[pencil annotation]] LA Times ? 76 ? [[/pencil annotation]]

[[image: of masked man on white horse (Lone Ranger?)]]
[[image credit]] Frances Oelbaum [[/credit]]

[[caption]] "I gather that the principal gift the Bicentennial candidate can offer the American people is freedom from
the poor." [[/caption]]

(This personal statement, written at the invitation of the Los Angeles Times, was sent from St. Paul, in the south of France, where James Baldwin now lives. His books include "The Fire next Time," and, most recently, "If Beale Street Could Talk.")

By James Baldwin
Los Angeles Times

ONE GROWS up early on my street, and so I started looking for you around the time that I - and later my brothers - began selling shopping bags, shining shoes, scavenging for wood and coal, scavenging, period. I was about seven, certainly no more than that, and, as my brothers approached this august and independent age, they joined me in the streets. 

My father, before me, also looked for you, for a long while. He gave up, finally, and died in an asylum: Perhaps I use the word, "asylum" with some bitterness. My father was a big, strong, handsome, healthy black man, who liked to use his muscles, who was accustomed to hard labor. He went mad, and died in bedlam because, being black, he was always "the last to be hired and the first to be fired."

He - we - therefore, spent much of our lives on welfare, and my father's pride could not endure it. He resented, and eventually came to hate, the people who had placed him in this condition and who did not even have the grace or courage to admit it.

My father wasn't stupid and, God knows, he wasn't lazy. But his condition, against which I watched him struggle with all the energy that he had, was blamed on his laziness. And his wife, who knew better, and his children (who didn't) were assured, merely by the presence of the welfare worker, of his unworthiness. No wonder he died in an American asylum - and at the expense, needless to say, of the so victimized American taxpayer. (My father was also an American taxpayer, and he paid at an astronomical rate.)

I GATHER, from the speeches I read and hear, and I see, in the sullen bewilderment in the faces of all the American streets, that the principal gift the bicentennial candidate can
offer the American people is freedom from the poor - a stunning gift indeed for so original a people, a people whose originality resides entirely and precisely in the poverty that drove them to these shores. It is like offering the American people, on their birthday, freedom from the past and freedom from any responsibility for the present: For the poor are always with us, and they can also be against us.

The Bicentennial candidate is to offer for our birthday freedom from the discontented, freedom from the criminals who roam our streets; he is to offer, out of such a dangerous history, at so dangerous a time, nothing less than freedom from danger. America's birthday present, on its 200th birthday, is to be the final banishment of the beast in the American playground.

The niceties of rhetoric, the pretense of democracy, and the explosive global situation prevent the candidate from identifying this beast too precisely, but real Americans know that the American taxpayer is being ruined by the worthless and undeserving poor. You can vote with your feet in this country (so someone said to my father, somewhere between the Reconstruction and the First World War): "If you don't like it in this state, move." And so my father did, Dear Candidate, possibly looking fo your. All the way from the Southern cottonfields, to the ghettoes, factories, prisons and riots of the North. Real American know that the American taxpayer is being ruined by the Indian-Chicano-Mexican-Puerto Rican-black.

These dominate the welfare rolls, and the prison populations, and roam, and make unlivable, the streets of the American cities.

I am saddened indeed to be forced to recognize that my father's anguish - to say nothing of my brothers' - has cost, and costs, the Republic so dearly. I should have thought it cheaper, on the whole, for the American taxpayer to have found a way of allowing my father - and my brothers - to walk on earth, rather than scraping together all those pennies to send a man to walk on the moon. Man cannot live by nuclear warheads alone; so I would have thought. I would have thought that the ceaseless proliferation, the buying and selling and stockpiling of weapons was a far more futile and expensive endeavor than the rehabilitation of our cities. Cities, after all, are meant to be lived in, and weapons are meant to kill.

***

I MAY be somewhat bewildered by the passion with which so many labor for death against life. I could have hoped that pride in America's birthday might have invested the citizens of the great Republic with such pride in their children that they would resolve, at last, and, God knows, not a moment too soon, to educate these children, and build schools and create teachers for that purpose.

The coalition of special interests that rules the American cities, and the collusion between these interests and the boards of education is responsible for the disaster in the schools. Or, in other words, schools are located in "neighborhoods" and neighborhoods are created - or, more precisely, in human terms, destroyed - by those who own the land and who are determined to preserve, out of a cowardice called nostalgia, the status quo.

Perhaps it is not too much to ask of the ex-governor of New York, he of the merry wink and the casual billions, exactly why the reclamation of the land, in Harlem, began with the destruction of the black nationalist bookstore, on 125th street and Seventh avenue. And, catty-corner from it, on 125th street and Seventh avenue, the destruction of the Hotel Theresa. These two institutions were, in Harlem, what in Africa is called the "palaver tree," the place where we discussed and attempted to reclaim our lives. For my father, of course, the "palaver tree" would have been another place, the Lafayette Theatre, long before it was destroyed. For my younger brothers and sisters, and my nieces and my nephews, it was the balcony from which Fidel Castro spoke: spoke, Dear Candidate, to them, to them, from the balcony of a Harlem hotel. The listening crowd knew nothing of Cuba, and couldn't have cared less about communism. But they knew that someone was speaking to them.

***

IT WOULD seem to me that the American social disaster is a tremendous burden on the American taxpayer. It is an investment on which his only return is chaos.

Of course, the candidate will answer, his unhappy priorities are dictated by the responsibility of protecting the "free world."

If the candidate really believes this, and not merely wondering on what unhappy market he can dump our Coca-Cola, I challenge him to take a look at what he thinks he is protecting. I dare the candidate to take to the "chitterling" or the "fried chicken" or the Muslim or the Baptist or the Holy Roller circuit: to walk, not ride, through the black streets of Washington, D.C., and Watts and Detroit and Chicago and San Francisco and Boston and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and Baltimore, and yes, Atlanta, and Cleveland, and Gary, and Jackson, and New York. I dare him to teach to, speak to, not merely bow before, any class in any school in any ghetto.

I challenge the candidate to justify the methadone program. I challenge him to visit the prisons of this country, from hamlet to hamlet and coast to coast, even daring to go so far as to question Senator Eastland's plantation: and not to wait, as in the case of the late, and much lamented J. Edgar, until he is safely dead.

I challenge the candidate to love the country that he claims to love to the entire extent of love: to face it, this present chaos, and help the country to face itself, and, for the sake of all our children, to change it.