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By Root 406 0

of slavery. White people were in the majority, and blacks have been conditioned from birth into thinking of themselves as inferior. They sense it every day; they are denied hope, yet have survived adversities while enriching our culture enormously. Much American humor comes from blacks; so does our music. Blacks taught the world how to dance, from the jitterbug to rock ’n’ roll, and I believe they were largely responsible for helping liberate Americans from the puritan attitudes toward sexuality that weighed down our culture for most of this century and the one before it. Along with their music, sex was among the few things granted slaves, because when they procreated it meant a new chattel. Their dancing and music were expropriated by whites, but through it they taught us, and others in much of the rest of the world, to be aware of our sexuality and be less inhibited by the impulses that are a natural part of all of us.

When the civil rights movement took shape in the late fifties and early sixties, I did whatever I could to support it and went down South with Paul Newman, Virgil Frye, Tony Franciosa and other friends to join the freedom marches and be with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. At the March on Washington, I stood a few steps behind Dr. King when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, and it still reverberates in my mind. He was a man I deeply admired. I’ve always thought that while a part of him regretted having to become so deeply involved in the cause of racial equality, another part of him drove him to it, though I’m convinced he knew he would have to sacrifice himself.

I have never been so moved by anything as the words King spoke the night before he was murdered in Memphis: “I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you …” but his people would reach the promised land. “I’m not fearing any man.” He said he would like to live a long life, for longevity had its place, but, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.…” It was almost as if he were announcing his death; somehow he knew it was near and inevitable. I believe he was ready to die. He had accomplished much, but I think he felt such anguish and pain that he was near the end of his tether. His mission in Memphis had simply been to get a small wage increase for the city’s garbage collectors, a job that was among the best a black man could hope for. His bravery and courage in the face of imminent disaster still move me.

After King’s murder and the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Medgar Evers, black people could rightly say that they no longer had any reason to have faith in nonviolence and passive resistance. Mayor John Lindsay asked me to walk with him through the streets of Harlem to cool things down after Dr. King’s assassination, and I agreed, not realizing it was a political act meant to court black votes. The mayor’s staff alerted the press, so as soon as we arrived we were surrounded by photographers. People from Harlem began pushing and shoving me; I thought they wanted to ask me for an autograph, but instead they were pleading for jobs.

After I returned to California, I read an article about the Black Panther party, whose members the year before had invaded the state capitol in Sacramento. I didn’t know anything about them or their agenda, but I was curious, and so I called their headquarters in Oakland and spoke to one of the leaders—either Bobby Seale or Eldridge Cleaver, I don’t remember—who invited me to Oakland. I was met at the airport by a contingent of Panthers, who took me to Eldridge’s apartment, where I stayed most of the night with him, his wife, Kathleen, a man named Crutch, Bobby Seale and a seventeen-year-old Black Panther named Bobby Hutton.

I was hungry for information about the Panthers and still trying to understand what it was like to be a black man in America. Other than my friendship with Jim Baldwin, I had no frame of reference and felt I had to know. Eldridge spoke with incisive and impressive