I saw Malcolm before I met him.
I was giving a lecture somewhere in New York.
Malcolm was sitting in the first row of the hall,
bending forward at such an angle
that his long arms nearly caressed the ankles
of his long legs, staring up at me.
I very nearly panicked.
I knew Malcolm only by legend,
and this legend, since I was a Harlem street boy,
I was sufficiently astute to distrust.
Malcolm might be the torch
that white people claim he was—
though, in general, white America’s evaluations
of these matters would be laughable
and even pathetic did not these evaluations
have such wicked results.
On the other hand, Malcolm had
no reason to trust me, either.
And so I stumbled through my lecture,
with Malcolm never taking his eyes from my face.
As a member of the NAACP,
Medgar was investigating the murder
of a black man, which had occurred months before;
had shown me letters from black people,
asking him to do this;
and he had asked me to come with him.
but perhaps that “field trip” will help us define
what I mean by the word “witness.”
I was to discover that the line which separates
a witness from an actor is a very thin line indeed;
nevertheless, the line is real.
I was not, for example, a Black Muslim,
in the same way, though for different reasons,
that I never became a Black Panther:
because I did not believe that
all white people were devils,
and I did not want
young black people to believe that.
I was not a member of any Christian congregation
because I knew that they had not heard
and did not live by the commandment
“love one another as I love you,”
and I was not a member of the NAACP
because in the North, where I grew up,
the NAACP was fatally entangled
with black class distinctions,
or illusions of the same,
which repelled a shoe-shine boy like me.
I did not have to deal with
the criminal state of Mississippi,
hour by hour and day by day,
to say nothing of night after night.
I did not have to sweat cold sweat after decisions
involving hundreds of thousands of lives.
I was not responsible for raising money,
for deciding how to use it.
I was not responsible for strategy controlling
prayer meetings, marches, petitions,
voting registration drives.
I saw the sheriffs, the deputies, the storm troopers
more or less in passing.
I was never in town to stay.
This was sometimes hard on my morale,
but I had to accept, as time wore on,
that part of my responsibility—as a witness—
was to move as largely and as freely as possible,
to write the story, and to get it out.
