James Baldwin
on the Black Panthers
The following interview with author JAMES BALDWIN (Another Country, The Fire Next Time, Go Tell It On The Mountain) was done soon after his recent visit with Huey Newton, minister of defense of the Black Panther Party, in prison,   KAREN WALD did the interview for Liberation News Service.
YOU WERE JUST DOWN AT THE CALIFORNIA MEN'S COLONY IN SAN LUIS OBISPO VISITING HUEY NEWTON.   CAN YOU TELL US WHAT THE TRIP WAS ABOUT?
Huey is one of the most important people to have been produced by the American chaos.   His fate is very important.   And not one person in white America,  if they read the mass media,  knows anything about Huey, what produced him or what produced the Black Panther Party.
Black people have always played, in this country, a tormented role in the white man's imagination. They prefer to believe him to be King Kong, or whatever it is white Americans take black people to be.    It's inconceivable to them, because it says too much about the republic,  I think,  that the Black Panther Party was originally called the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.   And that it was produced as a reaction to, and I'm a witness to this because I was born in the ghetto, to the tremendous irresponsibility of the police force.    It didn't come out of nothing,  it didn't come about because Huey and his cohorts are some kind of weird, anti-social monsters.   It came out of the very real necessity to invest the black community, with a certain kind of morale, which cannot be found in any American institution.
HAVE YOU SEEN CHANGES IN HUEY SINCE YOU FIRST MET HIM?
In much the same way that the events of the last two years have caused everybody to re-think the situation, Huey has gone through some changes himself. I think that oppressors always make the
same mistake.   They think that they're going to break you by the degree ana the nature of your punishment. But they always miscalculate, because you may be able to break ten people on whom it doesn't work, who use it to find out something and to become, in a sense, more dangerous than they were before.   More dangerous than if you'd left them alone--more dangerous, that is, to the status quo.   I think Huey is changing that way.
WOULD YOU BE WILLING TO COMMENT ABOUT SOME OF THE blue-tail fly
CHANGES YOU,  YOURSELF, HAVE BEEN GOING THROUGH IN THE LAST TWO YEARS?
I think that no one any longer can be fooled about the intentions of the
knows won't tell you and anyone who claims to is a fool.   The truth is, any black person in this country at the time when the Muslim movement was at its height, was a Black Muslim. Any black person in this country at this
American government because they've hour is in some way a Black Panther, made that perfectly clear.   And that And even if he weren't, the fact is
may be the most healthy thing that has that the cop isn't going to ask me my
happened in this time.   Nobody, after all, can say anything for the present administration.   It represents the American illusion that it's a white country, that it's a white world and
name and address before he shoots me, and the only difference between me and any other black cat in this country is that if they shoot me my name would be in the papers.   We all know many
that they can make it a white universe  people have died, none of us knows
--the moon is our first colony.
ELDRIDGE ONCE SAID THAT THERE WERE BASIC DIFFERENCES
CONCERNING THE ATTITUDE YOU HAD TOWARD DEALING WITH THE
VIOLENCE OF THE WHITE OPPRESSOR--DO YOU SEE ANY CHANGES IN
THE WAY YOU FEEL ABOUT THIS?
My enormous concern has been, and still is, that I don't want to see a generation go out into the streets and die.    On the other hand,  I was also forced to realize that it wasn't up to me.   Nobody can answer for a generation except that generation itself.   We don't have the helicopters, we don't have the tanks, the weight against us is tremendous --which demands of the people in the situation that they find a way to respond.
Some very respectable people in this country,  respectable in the ordinary sense, are aware of what is happening.   This has made very peculiar bedfellows --the position of Justice Douglas is not that different, after all, from the position of Huey Newton. Some of the people are beginning to see what has happened to the civilization, what has happened here, as a result of the fantastic greed of the corporate system.
One of the reasons for the Nixon-Agnew business about the silent majority and the whole claim that people who are against the war are really murdering American boys, is in the hope that somehow they can unite the whole country around a series of really bloody contradictions. Which is not possible.
They cannot put thirty million black people in jail in secret, and in any case there are many more than, thirty million--black people aren't the only dissenters here.   What this country does not really understand is something very simple.   That Huey is right when he says that as long as there     WHAT WOULD YOU SAY ABOUT are black people, there will be Black    THE CONSPIRACY TRIAL? Panthers.   Malcolm was right when he
was asked about the numerical strength I think that it is simply too obscene of the Black Muslims --anyone who        to be discussed.
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how many, but I know that for every one of me there would be twenty people dead, here in my own generation.   But they don't understand about the Viet Cong.   My brother puts it this way--we are the first Viet Cong.
Shooting people in their apartments in the middle of the night creates exactly what they would like not to happen, this does something to people who ostensibly don't care, wouldn't care--something begins happening to the American consciousness --it's not
not just happening to black people, it's also happening to me.   When society becomes that anarchic, it's not only black people that are menaced, it's everybody.   So they create a resis-tence that wasn't there before.
WHAT ABOUT THE PANTHER 21
CASES IN NEW YORK OR THE SUPPOSED MURDER IN NEW HAVEN, WHAT ARE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT THOSE CASES?
I see all those cases as harassment, as intimidation.   Even if I were a very different person than the person that I am, there is no way for me to believe what the police or what the government says.   Unless I am really in a position to check it out myself.   I've seen too much, I don't care what the white press says about the exaggerations of police brutality, I've lived with it all my life, I know, whether the New York Times wants to believe it or not.   I was there and the New York Times was not.
DO YOU HAVE ANY DOUBTS THAT THE NEW YORK AND NEW HAVEN CASES ARE FRAME-UPS?
Until it is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, preferably in the halls of the U.N. , that it is not a frame-up, I will believe that it is a frame-up, because I am part of a people who have been historically framed-up.