They burst into my hotel room, a dozen of them, laughing and screaming and singing, and for a moment all I saw were the flickering flames the first one was carrying in his hands. I jumped up and my stomach turned over and then I was angry because they had scared me, and then I cried. It was a cake with candles. It was my first birthday party. I was thirty-one.
Jim Sanders was there, and his new wife, Jackie, and my managers and agents and writers and some of the other performers from the night club. We drank and we talked and they didn’t believe this was my first real party. And I told them about Richard, the kid I once knew in St. Louis who used to buy himself a Twinkie Cupcake and steal a little pink candle and pretend he was having a party.
Oh, Momma, I wish you could see your little Richard now. He’s all right. I didn’t lie to you, Momma, about people buying me birthday presents, about people inviting me over to their houses. It’s true now, so it’s no lie any more. And you know, Momma, that old lady who saw a star in the middle of my forehead, she was right. We thought I was going to be a great athlete, and we were wrong, and I thought I was going to be a great entertainer, and that wasn’t it either. I’m going to be an American citizen. First-class.
Hot damn, we’re going to bust this thing. I feel it when I stand in front of a crowd of people hungry for freedom, and I feel it when we march down a street for our rights. Hot water seeping up into a cold body, that dry taste in my mouth. The monster. But it’s not content to beat some mother’s son in a foot race any more, and it’s not satisfied to make people laugh and love me. Now it wants some respect and dignity, and it wants freedom. It’s willing to die for freedom.
It’s getting stronger every day. It would frighten you, Momma. But now it has truth and justice and the Constitution of the greatest country in the world on its side.
It’s not just a Negro monster. I saw it in a Northern white boy who marched with us for freedom through the snow in Georgia. He had no soles on his shoes, and his feet were blue and he never said a word. I asked him why he didn’t go home and take that big engineering job he had been offered. He said that there would be nothing to build on unless every American citizen got his rights first.
When I saw him, Momma, I laughed at every Northern liberal who ever said: “Slow down, you people, don’t alienate your friends.” Yeah, baby, were you there when they crucified the Lord? Or were you just singing?
Yeah, that monster’s growing stronger, Momma, I saw it in New York where we marched against school segregation, Northern-style, marched to give little black kids a chance for a better education and college and good jobs. And a chance for little white kids to sit with us and know us and learn to love and hate us as individuals, not just fear and hate us as a color like their parents do.
I saw it in Chester, Pennsylvania, with Stanley Branche where we marched for equal opportunities, a chance to be ordinary if we wanted, to be great if we could. Just a chance to be Americans.
I saw it in Atlanta where we marched against segregation in restaurants. I was in my first sit-in there, and I did my first official negotiating. I learned that when honesty sits around a conference table, black men and white men can understand and feel each other’s problems, and help each other.
I saw the monster in Mississippi where we marched for voter registration, so a Negro can cast his ballot for the government he lives under and supports with his tax money, and dies for in wars.
I saw it in San Francisco where white doctors and lawyers marched on the lines with us and went to jail with us and showed the world that this isn’t a revolution of black against white, this is a revolution of right against wrong. And right has never lost.
This is a revolution. It started long before I came into it, and I may die before it’s over, but we’ll bust this thing and cut out this cancer. America will be as strong and beautiful as it should be, for black folks and white folks. We’ll all be free then, free from a system that makes a man less than a man, that teaches hate and fear and ignorance.
You didn’t die a slave for nothing, Momma. You brought us up. You and all those Negro mothers who gave their kids the strength to go on, to take that thimble to the well while the whites were taking buckets. Those of us who weren’t destroyed got stronger, got calluses on our souls. And now we’re ready to change a system, a system where a white man can destroy a black man with a single word. Nigger.
When we’re through, Momma, there won’t be any niggers any more.