Only once was I in the presence of James Baldwin (1924–1987): in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, where I was then a singer in the choir and to which Baldwin had been invited to give a sermon. He gave a fiery speech, though not so much a sermon as a prophetic denunciation of Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War, culminating in the vivid but indecorous exhortation, “we’ve got a little old motherfucker in the White House and we’ve got to figure out how to get him out.” So though Baldwin is famous as a novelist and essayist pondering race and civil rights, for me he has always been what he is in the piece included here, a prophetic, eloquent opponent of unjust wars.
Hence his being invited by Bertrand Russell to sit on the Russell-Sartre Tribunal in 1966, brought into being to judge American conduct in Vietnam. (The tribunal was an early and nongovernmental version of the International Criminal Court, without influence but full of interesting people, among them not only Baldwin but also David Dellinger and Stokely Carmichael.) Baldwin’s comments emerge from that context, and are characteristically unsparing of everyone. His judgments bear first on the tribunal itself, whose limitations and hypocrisies he begins by skewering. But then he turns to the Vietnam War, and in an argument by now familiar but still alive in the words he expresses it in, denounces the American hypocrisies the war manifests and reveals: “a racist society can’t but fight a racist war” is the beautifully distilled essence of his argument (dated, appropriately enough, from Istanbul and published in Freedomways in the summer of 1967).
Baldwin was raised in Harlem, attended P.S. 24 and wrote its school song, attended Frederick Douglass Junior High and was taught poetry there by Countee Cullen. At fourteen he converted to Pentecostalism, drawing big crowds as a youthful Pentecostal preacher. Later he turned away from Christianity and religion generally; when asked about his religious identity by Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad, he responded, “Nothing. I’m a writer. I like doing things alone.”
He also liked hanging out with friends and artistic mentors in Greenwich Village, where he began to write, to become aware of his homosexuality, and to put himself in situations where American racism was especially vivid. Worn down by being the object of two modes of prejudice simultaneously, he left for Paris; he spent most of his later life in France, often in his house in Saint-Paul de Vence, which became a gathering place for his friends, painters and actors and musicians among them. He wrote abundantly: novels, extraordinary essays and long-form journalism, songs (including some for Ray Charles), plays. But he did not seek to keep above the battle, and was active in both civil rights work—he marched with King at Selma—and antiwar work, joining other writers in the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge in 1968. (Other signatories represented here: Daniel Berrigan, Robert Bly, David Dellinger, Barbara Deming, Paul Goodman, Denise Levertov, Jackson Mac Low, Norman Mailer, Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and Howard Zinn.)
Toni Morrison wrote an extraordinary eulogy for Baldwin, which ends: “This then is no calamity. No. This is jubilee. ‘Our crown,’ you said, ‘has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do,’ you said, ‘is wear it.’”
MY name is included among the members of Lord Russell’s War Crimes Tribunal, and it is imperative, therefore, that I make my position clear. I do indeed have my own reservation concerning this Tribunal. There may be something suspect in the spectacle of Europeans condemning America for a war which America inherited from Europe, inherited, in fact, directly from France. In spite of my somewhat difficult reputation, I have never had any interest in attacking America from abroad. I know too much, if I may say so, concerning the complex European motives, of which envy and fury are not the least. It might be considered more logical, for example, for any European, and especially any Englishman, to bring before an international tribunal the government of South Africa, or the government of Rhodesia, which I would do, if I had the power, at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. No Englishman has suggested this. Neither did Jean-Paul Sartre suggest that France be brought before an international tribunal during the war which we have inherited from France, or during the French-Algerian war. It is possible, in short, to consider the Tribunal to be both misguided and inept, and I can see to what extent that this is so. But I can also see why. The Tribunal, ideally, wishes to make the conscience of the world aware of the crimes being committed in Southeast Asia by the American government, in the name of the American people; and wishes to do this, not only to bring the horror to an end, but to pull all of us back from the brink of total disaster. But this world can only be the Western world, this conscience can only be the Western conscience, and all the Western world is guilty. If I should make the attempt to accuse the Western powers of the crimes they are now committing in Rhodesia, Angola, South Africa—to leave it at that; or should I attempt to bring to the world’s attention the actual intention, and the actual result, of those treaties the Europeans, who were not yet Americans, signed with the American Indian; to say nothing of what happened to the blacks, concerning which we know at once too much and too little; I would certainly encounter from the Western powers the very same opposition that Lord Russell’s Tribunal has encountered. And for the very same reason: such an attempt not only brings into question the real morality of the Western world, it also attacks what that world considers to be its material self-interest. Such a trial should really be held in Harlem, USA. No one, then, could possibly escape the sinister implications of the moral dilemma in which the facts of Western history have placed the Western world.
I speak as an American Negro. I challenge anyone alive to tell me why any black American should go into those jungles to kill people who are not white and who have never done him any harm, in defense of a people who have made that foreign jungle, or any jungle anywhere in the world, a more desirable jungle than that in which he was born, and to which, supposing that he lives, he will inevitably return. I challenge anyone alive to convince me that a people who have not achieved anything resembling freedom in their own country are empowered, with bombs, to free another people whom they do not know at all, who rather resemble me—whom they do not know at all. I challenge any American, and especially Mr. Lyndon Johnson and Mr. Hubert Humphrey and Mr. Dean Rusk and Mr. Robert McNamara to tell me, and the black population of the United States, how, if they cannot liberate their brothers—repeat: brothers—and have not even learned how to live with them, they intend to liberate Southeast Asia. I challenge them to tell me by what right, and in whose interest, they presume to police the world, and I, furthermore, want to know if they would like their sisters, or their daughters to marry any one of the people they are struggling so mightily to save. And this is by no means a rhetorical challenge, and all the men I have named, and many, many more will be dishonored forever if they cannot rise to it. I want an answer: If I am to die, I have the right to know why. And the non-white population of the world, who are most of the world, would also like to know. The American idea of freedom and, still more, the way this freedom is imposed, have made America the most terrifying nation in the world. We have inherited Spain’s title: the nation with the bloody foot-print.
The American war in Vietnam raises several questions. One is whether or not small nations, in this age of super-states and superpowers, will be allowed to work out their own destinies and live as they feel they should. For only the people of a country have the right, or the spiritual power, to determine that country’s way of life. Another question this war raises is just how what we call the under-developed countries became under-developed in the first place. Why, for example, is Africa under-populated, and why do the resources of, say, Sierra Leone belong to Europe? Why, in short, does so much of the world eat too little and so little of the world eat too much? I am also curious to know just how a people calling itself sovereign allows itself to be fighting a war which has never been officially declared, and I am curious to know why so few people appear to be worried about the arresting precedent thus established. I am curious indeed to know how it happens that the mightiest nation in the world has been unable, in all these years, to conquer one of the smallest. I am curious to know what happens to the moral fabric, the moral sense, of the people engaged in so criminal an endeavor.
Long, long before the Americans decided to liberate the Southeast Asians, they decided to liberate me: my ancestors carried these scars to the grave, and so will I. A racist society can’t but fight a racist war—this is the bitter truth. The assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad, and every American Negro knows this, for he, after the American Indian, was the first “Viet Cong” victim. We were bombed first. How, then, can I believe a word you say, and what gives you the right to ask me to die for you?
The American endeavor in Vietnam is totally indefensible and totally doomed, and I wish to go on record as having no part of it. When the black population of America has a future, so will America have a future—not till then. And when the black populations of the world have a future, so will the Western nations have a future—and not till then. But the terrible probability is that the Western populations, struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen, and for which generations yet unborn will curse our names forever.
I think that mankind can do better than that, and I wish to be a witness to this small and stubborn possibility.