The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [459]
Bobby knew no more what to make of the rising black militancy than did most of his fellow white citizens. He asked the writer James Baldwin to set up a meeting with a group of blacks to talk about the situation. The Kennedy attitude was that when you had a problem, you found the most prominent experts, brought them together, heard their opinions, and took the best of their ideas. Then after solving that dilemma, you went on to the next problem. There seemed to be no better expert on race in America than Baldwin, who in November 1962 had written a passionately apocalyptic essay in The New Yorker (published the following year as The Fire Next Time). In the controversial work, Baldwin condemned Bobby for his “assurance that a Negro can become president in forty years” as a prime example of the white American attitude that “they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want.”
Baldwin assembled a group of what he called “fairly rowdy, independent, tough-minded men and women” and brought them to Bobby’s apartment at the UN Plaza in New York City. The attorney general began by detailing what the administration was doing for blacks, and those in the room replied by saying that it should do more. This was all part of the civilized nomenclature of traditional American politics. Then a young man spoke out. “You don’t have no idea what trouble is,” he told Bobby. “Because I’m close to the moment when I’m going to pick up a gun.”
The speaker, Jerome Smith, bore the scars of the beatings he had received when as a Freedom Rider he attempted to enter the white bus depot in McComb, Mississippi, and had spent time in a Mississippi prison. By anybody’s account, he had paid more dues than these artistes and scholars who filled Bobby’s living room, and he intended to be heard.
“When I pull the trigger,” he stammered in rage, “kiss it good-bye.”
For all Smith’s profound feelings, if there were indeed a “fire next time,” it would burn the black minority more than it would the whites who dominated the country and ran the machinery of oppression with a firm hand. In Baldwin’s own essay he had accused white liberals of being full of “incredible, abysmal and really cowardly obtuseness.” In 1963 many liberals enjoyed being humiliated for their sins and accepted whatever penance was meted out as their due, but even they had only so much skin to be flayed. Despite whatever hidden racism may have darkened their souls, they were the natural allies of a revolution of equality. And it was perhaps not wise to alienate them. Bobby was not a liberal, and he listened to Smith’s nearly incomprehensible, raging sermon while feeling no compulsive need to flagellate himself.
Baldwin was the impresario of this drama. He sought in others an authenticity he perhaps did not have in himself. He had grown up gay in New York City, a morbidly sensitive young man. He was feted and dined at the well-set tables of highbrow liberalism, his presence an immunization against charges of racism. Like a prosecutor who knew how his witness would answer, Baldwin asked the young activist whether he would fight for his country. “Never! Never!” shouted Smith.
“How can you say that?” Bobby asked. This relationship between blacks and whites was a deeply troubled marriage in which the whites bore the brunt of the blame. But the largely blameless partner did not appear to realize that there were nonetheless certain things that could not be said, or threatened, without changing the relationship forever.
Smith was full of the pain of what he had seen and felt,