Once Saying Nigger.”
One play is directed by Strom Thurmond, the other by Richard Daley. In one play Mr. Thurmond also acts to remind the hero of his lines; in the other, a prompter from Texas is always standing in the wings to remind the leading man if he forgets his part.
In some parts of the country there will be alternatives for both the left and the right, but the right is the winner in this year’s election because it has three candidates to choose from.
Those on the left can choose or, of course, make no choice at all. To do the latter will make one feel purer, of course, but to opt out altogether leaves something to be desired.
There is an obvious longing in America for change, and that longing is shared not just by blacks in the cities and students on the campus but by millions of housewives and farmers and laborers and others.
The job of the liberal and the job of the radical is to put those people and their longing together.
When Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy, some of us cringed. He’s ruthless, we said, or he was a bad attorney general, we said, or it’s a plot by President Johnson, we said.
But no one who saw black people in Watts scrambling for his hand or who saw white farmers in Alabama smiling at his jokes could believe that for long, and no one who saw the miles and miles of mourners from New York to Washington could remember old tales or harbor old grudges.
When Eugene McCarthy, months before Kennedy, announced his candidacy, we said it’s only a trick. We said he just wants to get us off the streets and into the system. We said he wants to kill the student movement.
But no one who saw the students in New Hampshire could believe that student movements are dead, and no one who saw the battle of the Conrad Hilton in Chicago can believe McCarthy got the students off the streets.
These two campaigns, for all their failures and their tragic losses, brought to America the fervor and the feeling that had not existed since the Freedom Rides of 1961; that had not existed since the sit-in demonstrations of 1960; that had not existed since the March on Washington in 1963.
These moments in history, representing no accomplishment but only people in motion, signified a beginning.
That beginning is best told in a poem by a woman named Margaret Rigg:
Face possible end of business as usual stop white silence in America stop kidding stop killing stop mace stop foam stop police arms race stop napalm stop bombing stop bloodletting stop Nixon stop sleeping stop dreaming stop crying stop mumbling stop now begin again begin beginning begin hearing begin seeing begin trying begin doing begin working begin working hard begin organizing begin being human begin living begin being possible begin facing the possible surprise of your own voice begin.
Beginning again reads nicely as a poem; for our lives it requires something more than reading nicely. It requires a realization that we have not overcome, that our enemies are not against the wall, and that tomorrow will not be a better day.
It requires constant attention to the problems of today, to racism, to hunger and to war.
It requires some form of unity among those who insist on a better day, rather than one hundred different drummers beating different tunes.
It requires that those least affected and least involved—the great mass of middle-class Americans, white and black—involve themselves.
It requires that action replace slogan, and it requires that rhetoric be replaced with reality.
It requires finally a commitment—the commitment that might have kept the South in ferment; the commitment that would have kept Chicago’s police force busy; a commitment that might have insured a choice and not an echo on the top of the ballot in November.
And it will require that each of us keep in mind a prophecy written by the late Langston Hughes—that dreams deferred do explode.
For if this dream is deferred much longer, then an explosion will come—and in the words of the old song, it will be like God giving Noah the rainbow sign; now more water, the fire next time.
Fighting Nixon
In this November 1969 speech—arguably the most militant speech he had given up to this point—Bond calls for the need to defeat the police state, build community socialism, and demand reparations to “the tune of $15 a nigger.”43
Now that America has had a change of leaders and the new set has had a chance to operate for some 22 months, one has had time to consider exactly what will be the attitude of the new faces in Washington toward tired old faces of the poor, the hungry, and the black.
It does not present a pretty picture.
The long fingers of American might are still sticking in other people’s pies. More than 300,000 American soldiers are still engaged in trying to tell the Vietnamese people what kind of government they can have and under what circumstances.
Here at home, the campuses of America have barely quieted down from last semester, and the upcoming ones promise to be just as long and may be just as hot.
On the campus, attempts at reform are refuted, and attempts at revolution are suppressed. Young people have discovered that our finest universities hold investments in slave mines, or research the best ways to defoliate jungles and people.
All Americans have learned over the past several years that the machinery that we were told was built to protect us—college deans and the machinery, American presidents and their machinery—were in fact bent on suppressing those with whom they dealt. . . .
For some Americans in the 1960s, politics failed completely. One potential candidate in 1968 fell victim to an assassin’s bullet; another was stilled by parliamentary democracy.
But some lessons didn’t have to be learned.
It didn’t take a Kerner Report for black people to discover that white people were our problem, and not we theirs.
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