On May 24th 1963 Robert Kennedy met with James Baldwin to discuss race in the US. I already did a post on the meeting itself. This one is mainly about what Kennedy and those who knew him said about it afterwards.
Baldwin brought at least 15 people. Among them were Lorraine Hansberry, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, and Kenneth Clark (he of the Doll Experiment). This was just weeks after the Birmingham protests – fire hoses, police dogs, Bull Connor, King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, all of that.
Enter Jerome Smith: The “cocktail-party patter” was soon swept away by the fury and anger of Jerome Smith. He was a Freedom Rider and CORE activist whose face and jaw had been badly beaten by police.
Kennedy tried to shut Smith down.
Blacks closed ranks behind Smith. Then came the flood: they spoke like it was their one chance to tell Robert Kennedy what they truly thought, their rage running free. He had never seen so much naked, Black pain before. It shook him.
Tone argument: After the meeting Kennedy was in a rage:
“They don’t know what the laws are. They don’t know what we’ve been doing or what we’re trying to do. You can’t talk to them the way you can talk to Martin Luther King or Roy Wilkins. They didn’t want to talk that way.
“It was all emotion, hysteria – they stood up and orated – they cursed – some of them wept and left the room.”
Ad hominem: Baldwin, Kennedy noted, was a homosexual (using an impolite word for that) and a “nut”. And:
“[A] number of them … I think, have complexes about the fact that they’ve been successful, they’ve done so well and this poor boy had been beaten by the police.”
Kennedy said they felt guilty that:
“they really hadn’t done their best … hadn’t done what they should have done for the Negro. So the way to show that they hadn’t forgotten where they came from was to berate me and berate the United States government.”
No ghetto pass for Kennedy: Nicholas Katzenbach, who was not at the meeting but who worked under Kennedy at the time as deputy attorney general (the Rod Rosenstein of his day), said:
“Bobby expected to be made an honorary black. [The meeting] really hurt his feelings, and it was pretty mean. But the fact that he thought he knew so much – and learned he didn’t – was important.”
FBI surveillance for Baldwin and friends: Kennedy started or continued FBI surveillance on many of those who came to the meeting – even Rip Torn, who was White. Much of the 1,884 pages in Baldwin’s FBI file are from after the meeting.
In the long run, though, Robert Kennedy had enough honesty and empathy to understand that what they told him was more or less the truth:
“I guess if I were in his [Jerome Smith’s] shoes, if I had gone through what he’s gone through, I might feel differently about this country.”
– Abagond, 2018.
Source: Google Images; “What Truth Looks Like” (2018) by Michael Eric Dyson.
See also:
- Baldwin-Kennedy meeting
- Some fallacies in Kennedy’s thinking:
- Dramatis Personae:
- Robert Kennedy
- James Baldwin
- Lorraine Hansberry
- Lena Horne
- Kenneth Clark – Doll Experiment
- Jerome Smith – Freedom Riders
- Martin Luther King, Jr: Letter from Birmingham Jail
- Cointelpro – the FBI’s operation to watch communists was later turned on Blacks and others.
619
I will have to purchase this. I am a Michael Eric Dyson fan.
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That quote from Baldwin’s FBI file speaks volumes about:
➤ how deeply embedded anti-Black bigotry is in the social fabric of the USA. Sort of explains why every group that immigrates to this country is emphatically anti-Black American even if they are also Black from Africa and the Caribbean.
➤ how the pen is mightier than the gun (ideas are more dangerous to the status quo than actions)
➤ how the FBI (in spite of numerous television show story lines to the contrary) are in reality the political police of this country. Historically they seem to have a singular focus on identifying and controlling Black people, Black thought and Black actions.
That level of hysteria is mind-blowing.
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Yeah, I long ago stopped buying those movies about the FBI being the “good guys” of America. Especially after watching Mississippi Burning, We got one type of story in that movie, but I knew the real story of how the FBI actually behaved during the sixties.
And its ongoing!
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This is a story that needs to be told. Thank you for sharing.
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Fast forward to 2018 and BLM activists. I am sure they are under surveillance as well. Patrice Cullors one of the founders of BLM wrote a book When They Call You A Terrorist.
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@Mary Burrell
That’s why I can’t understand how any decent person or any of person of color can work for these government agencies knowing full and well J Edgar Hoover’s racist rants still are live and well.
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@ Ikeke35
“Mississippi Burning” would easily make my list of the ten worst movies I have ever seen.
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Kennedy is angry that the black people have a legitimate reason to be angry. “You can’t talk to them the way you talk to Martin Luther King or Roy Wilkins. They didn’t want to talk that way.” The white fragility is screaming in that quote. Kennedy, like so many white people back then and like so many of them today have blind spots and are tone deaf to issues of race in America.
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@abagond
Why? I saw a ‘young’ Eddie Winslow, Gene Hackman and some recognizable actors doing a decent job in that movie. When Hackman’s FBI agent character utters “They wouldn’t dare” line as in report incidents to the proper authorities it kind of baffled me. This was when J Edgar Hoover, elderly by then, was still alive and in charge of the Burea… And you know how he is about ‘Civil Rights’.
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