Just a few days after the Confederate State of Florida announced it will start teaching the “benefits” of Slavery upon the enslaved, the Biden/Harris Administration proclaimed it will designate a series of national monuments to honor Emmett Till, the 14-year old Black child tortured, brutalized and lynched by Florida’s fellow White Supremacists of Mississippi, back in 1955.
The announcement came on what would have been Emmett Till’s 82nd birthday, clearly intended as a graphic illustration of the murderous racism and hate that is intertwined into nearly every sinew of American history. It was the equivalent of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris using the pulpit of the Presidency, to reopen Emmett Till’s casket, just like Mamie Till did 68 years ago, to force the world to see the real evil and inhumanity wrought by racial hatred upon her only child.
Stare at the body of that mutilated child, Florida; affix your eyes on the mangled manifestation of your immorality. We won’t let you erase it, nor the brutalization of millions of Black people enslaved, or ensnared in your still-cruel laws and customs, or thrown into camps of mass incarceration–the new, institutionalized face of Jim Crow.
I heard the news about Emmett Till’s national monuments today and first thought that he could have been my child, or my grandchild, since he was murdered at the same tender age that my oldest granddaughter has just reached. How easy, I thought, for my beloved granddaughter–an out, proud Lesbian–to be targeted by hateful people who view her mere existence as a threat.
I heard the news about Emmett Till today, and thought about a 16-year old Black child, Yusef Hawkins, murdered for wandering into an unfamiliar White neighborhood in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, at precisely the “wrong” time, 34 years ago next month, during a long, hot New York City summer.
I worked with New York State’s Governor Mario M. Cuomo at the time, at 2 World Trade Center, when the news assaulted us that a mob of some 30 white men wielding baseball bats chased Hawkins—a young black face in an enclave of mostly white Italian-Americans—and then someone in the crowd shot him to death. Hawkins was innocently responding to a newspaper ad to purchase a used car, and the subway he took to arrive at the location, deposited him in Bensonhurst for the first time—and the last– in his short, beautiful life.
I was sickened by the brutal murder, and outraged at the young Italian tough-guys—John Gotti wannabes—who rushed to tell the tabloid and TV reporters that the “nigger” (their word) had no place in their neighborhood. I kept Cuomo informed all day of the rapidly unfolding events following the murder of Yusef Hawkins, drafted his official response, and knew that we’d be attending the Black child’s funeral in East New York, not far from where I was born.
The Hawkins murder by violent Italian-American punks haunted me for days. I knew these people. I left them behind to fester in their own ignorance, while I pursued a far different life, for a working-class, Italian-American kid. I knew these people, and I used all my strength to escape their grasp. I tried to push them away and out of my memory and experiences, but what good did it all do when a 16-year old Black child was dead?
I detested these wise guys who swaggered around their neighborhoods, swimming in their own ignorant smugness; despised them for their violence and the crimes they committed, and for what they made people think of us, and for how little they made us think of ourselves.
I blamed myself for Yusef Hawkins’ death, because, somehow, in my desperation to get out, to get away, I lost sight of how I might have changed some other life like mine; shown another young Italian-American kid struggling with his identity and place in the world, that there were avenues of education and compassion to escape from all of our own personal Bensonhursts.
Yusef Hawkins was my own child—just two years older than my own son, who too, was without guile, and trusting of other humans, regardless of race or background or neighborhood. Yusef was a child of the City which took his life, and no matter how hard I scrubbed, I could not get his blood off my hands.
So, I cannot think about children like Emmet Till without thinking of Yusef Hawkins, and of thousands upon thousands of others like them, who wander into a world of hostility and hatred, and cannot, like many of us, comprehend the depths of the heart of darkness.
(At the nearly 100-year old Chapin Family compound in Andover, New Jersey, Tom Chapin—Harry Chapin’s younger brother, and— a singer/songwriter/activist and Grammy Award winner in his own right, ponders the photo of his brother Harry (center, on mantlepiece) and the painting of his maternal grandfather, the 20th Century literary giant Kenneth Burke, or K.B., as he was called. The portrait of Kenneth Burke, with the old manual typewriter at his shoulder, was painted by Tom and Harry’s paternal grandfather, James Ormsby Chapin, a prominent depression-era folk artist.)
( Photo & Story by Steve Villano, Copyright, 2021)
(This month marks the 42nd Anniversary of the death of Harry Chapin, and the interest in this unique life of an American musician, artist and citizen activist continues to grow. I’ve written much about Harry Chapin, and had the distinct pleasure of working on the documentary entitled “When In Doubt Do Something,” about his life with Producer Rick Korn, and Harry’s son, Jason Chapin. Yet, what frequently gets overlooked by the focus on Harry’s music and his family’s continuing fight against poverty and food insecurity, is the fascinating story of the generations of Chapin (and Burke) history-makers which came before him. Here is part of that story:
Harry Chapin’s life was, at it’s core, a love story — a complicated, triangulated, convoluted, undisputed, multi-generational, non-denominational, big-brotherish, earth-motherish, Bohemian-maniacal, Yankee Puritanical, serendipitous, so ridiculous love story that it could just as well have been fiction, or the subject of one of Harry’s own story songs. But, it was a love story as real as life, with roots as deep as roots can reach, and lots of reminders that it happened, and was not just imagined.
It’s a story that dates back decades, into generations and centuries, back in time before there was a country to be part of, or proud of, but not before there were some things that mattered so much, everything would be risked.
It began, as many love stories do, with some headstrong romantic infatuated with the notion that, somewhere, there was a better life than the one he or she was living, and that something — anything —needed to be done to bring it about. That headstrong romantic was not Harry.
Unlike Frank Sinatra, who came from a family of poor immigrants, during a time of virulent anti-Italian and anti-immigrant fervor in the United States, Harry Chapin was born of American bluebloods — White Anglo Saxon Protestants who came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony just two decades after the first African Slaves were dragged in chains to the Commonwealth of Virginia.
The risk-taking romantic in the Chapin family was Harry’s great grandfather to the ninth generation, Deacon Samuel Chapin, who escaped England in the 1600’s with his wife and lover Cicely, to be free from religious persecution. Deacon Sam Chapin became one of the founders of Springfield, Mass., where — in one of the first colonies to abolish slavery in America — former slaves knew they would find a welcoming haven, just across the border from Connecticut, an early slave-holding state.
Unlike Bruce Springsteen, who grew up in a working-class enclave of Freehold, New Jersey, or Elvis Presley, whose parents and grandparents were dirt poor in Tupelo, Mississippi, or Billy Joel, with whom he shared a musical legacy passed on by their fathers, the social, intellectual and political skills of Harry Chapin’s ancestors put them among the elite of American culture. To them, the Mayflower was a means of transportation, not an historic old New York hotel, nor a moving truck on US highways.
Harry’s maternal grandfather, Kenneth Burke, authored 15 books, and among students of language, was considered a literary and linguistic giant for most of the 20th Century. In 1981, the year Harry died, “KB”, as family members called him, won the National Medal for Literature, at 84 years old.
Burke brought the practice of the literary & artistic salons, made famous by Virginia Wolfe and the Bloomsbury Writers in London, Gertrude Stein in Paris, or Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table in New York, out to a 165-acre family compound in Andover, New Jersey—still used by the Chapin family– he purchased with the proceeds from a $2800 literary prize he won in 1928.
There he entertained writers, artists and philosophers from around the world, giving them space and freedom to work on their craft and discuss it, while he did the same. That kind of laboratory for creativity and learning, and a passion to do something that mattered, even if it didn’t pay well, was not lost on Harry Chapin, nor his brothers, who spent endless summers of their youth barefoot and sometimes bare-bottomed in the Walden-like environment at Andover.
In fact, it was KB’s daughter Eleanor’s husband, Ricky Leacock, the great documentary film maker and inventor of the art of Cinema Verite and a colleague of such giants of documentary filmmaking as D.A. Pennebaker and Albert & David Maysles , who perfectly captured the atmosphere of Andover in a short film featuring the young Chapin boys, and their male cousins, entitled The Barebottom Tribe. Few other families could boast that one of them was a legendary filmmaker making home movies, but that was the milieu in which the Chapins and the Burkes came of age.
During some of the most tumultuous times for intellectuals, writers and artists in the United States in the 1930’s, 1940’s and early 1950’s — at the peak of Red-baiting and anti-Communist hysteria — Burke hosted writers like Malcolm Cowley, Jon Dos Passos, Shirley Jackson (author of the later-banned short story The Lottery), and Ralph Ellison; poets William Carlos Williams and e.e. cummings, and artists like Alexander Calder, and a local scenic and portrait painter and illustrator named James Ormsby Chapin, who did some design work for The Dial Magazine, which Burke edited.
Shortly before his book The Invisible Man was published(Random House, NY, 1952), Ralph Ellison sat on Kenneth Burke’s piano bench at the main house in Andover, and as KB’s son Michael Burke recalled, read excerpts from his incendiary book on race relations in the United States:
“Ellison sat on KB’s bench, and I was mesmerized as he read from the chapter where he described young Black men boxing bare-chested for the entertainment of the wealthy, White elite of the community, “ Michael Burke said.
Toward the end of the chapter, the winning, young Black boxers were forced to jump for coins tossed onto an electrified carpet by the inebriated, inhumane White men, who found entertainment in the young Black men’s suffering. Each coin the young Black athletes touched sent an electric shock through their bodies until, as Ellison wrote, “ I saw one boy…his back glistening with sweat like a circus seal…landing flush upon the charged rug, heard him yell and saw him literally dance upon his back, his elbows beating a frenzied tattoo upon the floor, his muscles twitching like the flesh of a horse stung by many flies.”
On other days, Michael Burke, who became like an older brother to Harry Chapin, would hear William Carlos Williams read his poetry, or use the hand-shaped, wire toilet-paper hold made by Alexander Calder, with the middle finger extended to hold the roll of paper. Andover, and the literary world Kenneth Burke nurtured, was a remarkable, Renaissance-like, place, and for the Chapin brothers it was an endless summer camp.
“It was an ever shifting feast of people, all kinds of people “ Princeton historian Sean Wilentz said of Andover, where he spent some time as a child. Wilentz, the author of books on Ronald Reagan, Andrew Jackson and five other history books — and one of the country’s foremost authorities on Bob Dylan (Bob Dylan in America, Anchor Books, NY, 2010) — grew up right behind the Chapin/Harts in Brooklyn. His family ran the 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, and his father Elias Wilentz, who edited The Beat Scene —an early anthology of Beat poetry — was a drinking buddy of Kenneth Burke’s.
“There was a whirwind of activity there, “ Wilentz said, “and all of this was going on in this sylvan, beautiful rural atmosphere — in the middle of nowhere. It was a Bohemian, but very loving environment. In that family, everybody got divorced, but no one ever left. When you were welcomed in by them, you knew you were loved.”
Those “sylvan, beautiful rural” mountains of New Jersey also appealed to James Ormsby Chapin as an escape from the highly commercialized New York City art world, which he detested. A close friend of the poet Robert Frost’s for three decades, Harry’s paternal grandfather illustrated Frost’s first book of poetry, North of Boston, in 1917. The following year, in 1918, a serendipitous encounter on a NYC subway train between James Ormsby Chapin and his former high school teacher, Abigail Forbes, led to the two dramatically different personalities getting married.
James Ormsby Chapin not only did illustrations for Robert Frost and Kenneth Burke, he designed several covers for Time Magazine and become one of the most accomplished depression-era artists of his time, with his haunting depictions of people enduring the hardships of life, inspiring painters of the caliber of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. Decades later his grandson Harry would be so deeply influenced by his painting, that the younger Chapin’s story songs seemed as if they simply put lyrics to the lives of the beaten down individuals James Ormsby Chapin captured on his canvases.
Many resembled the people Harry Chapin encountered years later in Flint, Michigan, when he gave benefit concerts there for Michael Moore’s Flint Voice, and may have explained the deep connection they felt for each other. However, the marriage between the distinguished and proper Victorian schoolteacher, and the much younger bohemian artist was not nearly as enduring as James Ormsby Chapin’s art. Their marriage lasted only two years, with Abby Forbes giving birth to one son, James Forbes Chapin, who would later become the father of Harry Chapin, and his brothers James, Tom and Steven.
Serendipity seemed to be the stuff of life for the Burkes and Chapins. In the mid-to-late 1930’s, several years before Harry was born, James Ormsby Chapin took a teaching fellowship at the Summer Art Institute of Claremont College in Southern California. While there, he walked into a small sportswear shop and in another act of kismet similar to how he met Abby Forbes on the NYC subway, and how, years later, Harry would meet Sandy Gaston Cashmore when he showed up at the front door of a Brooklyn brownstone to give her guitar lessons, the talented portrait artist recognized the young, lithe Mary Fisher from one of his art classes and was smitten when he saw her amidst the delicate dresses she sold. He told Mary he wanted to paint her portrait, and by August, 1937, they were married in Pasadena, California.
The artist Chapin and his new wife, moved back east and into an old barn on Kenneth Burke’s sprawling Andover compound where they lived and Big Jim painted. When his grown son James from his marriage to Abby Forbes visited Big Jim and Mary at the Burke compound, James — already a musician at the age of 21 — met Elspeth — Kenneth Burke’s eldest daughter, and later, Harry’s mother — and they immediately fell in love, marrying in 1940.
Mary Chapin, in her unpublished diaries entitled “The Beginnings of Our Life Together,” chronicled the artists and writers who dropped in and out of Andover, and called life at the Burke compound “bliss.”
“In the mornings, everyone did his work,” Mary Chapin wrote. “The writers wrote, the painters painted, the comforters (mostly the women) prepared the creature comforts. Jim’s (Chapin’s) easel was set up in the open section of the barn.”
Then Mary, who would open a dress shop in New Jersey before taking off in 1968 to Canada with James Ormsby Chapin and their two sons Elliot and Jed who were avoiding the draft for the Vietnam War, located the thread which stitched all of the Burkes and Chapins together:
“In the case of the Burke household, not even the problem of the broken family was going to do them damage. In later years, I asked one of their young men how it happened that he had such strong family ties even with the families marital scrambling. He said that he felt as if he just had more people loving him. There was plenty of love.”
Harry Chapin was born into this fearlessly creative, loving, hippie-ish family in 1942 — on the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor — and was exposed, from his earliest years, to a world where wealth was measured in the richness of the writing, artistic work and the hurricane of ideas swirling around him, not in dollars. To create, was to be alive, and, with family, all that was necessary for success. The fundamental non-financial values of Harry’s family were not the same of Sinatra’s, Springsteen’s, Elvis’ or even Billy Joel’s, where daily economic survival was essential. To the Burkes and the Chapins, money really didn’t matter.
Harry Chapin, like Pete Seeger, had been blessed with a simple, carefree life, despite members of each of their families — including Seeger himself — being “Blacklisted” for their political activities by rabidly anti-Communist Right Wing public officials. Seeger’s own father, Charles, was forced out of the music department he established at the University of California at Berkeley because of his publicly professed pacifism toward World War I. Imagine, being forced out of Berkeley for being a pacifist.
At virtually the same moment Charles Seeger was being booted from Berkeley in 1917, Harry’s great Aunt Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Workers movement, was being physically attacked for her work in the Women’s Suffrage Movement. A journalist who wrote for the Socialist and IWW (International Workers of the World) newspaper The NewYork Call; interviewed historic figures like Margaret Sanger and Leon Trotsky; and was close friends with the playwright Eugene O’Neill, Dorothy Day crusaded against American entrance into World War I, and in favor of Women’s Suffrage.
Day’s work on the movement to secure the right to vote for women nearly got her killed. She joined her friend Peggy Baird Johnson (who would later marry K.B’s best friend, the writer Malcolm Cowley) at a November 1917, Suffragette demonstration in Washington, DC, where Dorothy and Peggy would be arrested along with 46 others and jailed for 30 days.
During her incarceration, Dorothy Day was nearly beaten to death by guards armed with billy clubs in “the worst and most brutal incident of the treatment of the suffragists, where they were dragged, kicked, trampled and choked,” according to Day’s youngest granddaughter, Kate Hennessey, in the comprehensive biography of her grandmother, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty (Scribner, NY, NY, 2017). Three years later, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, securing the right to vote for women.
In sharp contrast to their ancestors, Harry Chapin and Pete Seeger lived charmed lives.
“ I was born into a very easy life in many ways,” Seeger said. “ My parents were professional musicians and when they split up I went to spend vacations with my grandparents who had a private house in the country.”
It’s as if Pete Seeger was foreshadowing the path that awaited Harry Chapin.
While Harry’s grandfather Kenneth Burke was a music critic and understood all the elements of sound, orchestration and lyrics, and his “private house in the country” paralleled that of Pete Seeger’s grandparents, the most likely musical influence for Harry, Tom and Steve Chapin, was their father, Jim Chapin, who became a top drummer with some of the leading musicians of his time, including the Glenn Grey Orchestra and Tony Pastor. He taught and wrote books on drumming, most notably Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer, Volumes I & II,which became, and remains, the essential professional instruction book for most modern drummers, more than a decade after Jim Chapin’s death in 2009.
Jim Chapin’s drumming Techniques book became world famous, but his musical career did not, missing some opportunities to play with the biggest bands of his time.
“Dorsey (Tommy Dorsey) didn’t like his foot,” said Harry’s younger brother Tom, flashing a sweet smile at the memory of his father. “He didn’t hit the base drum hard enough.”
Much later, Tom Chapin would say that his father’s example “provided the joy of music. He was a fun, attractive guy who loved to play. We’d see him on weekends, and the sense of possibility (of a musical career) was there.”
Jim Chapin’s obsession with his music kept him away from his wife Elspeth, and their four sons, and that, as well as his love for other women, contributed to their divorce when Harry was only 6 years old.
But, when Harry, Steve & Tom played as The Chapins in clubs like the Bitter End and the Bottom Line around New York in the mid-to-late 1960’s, their father Jim joined them on the drums, keeping their music a full family affair for a while, underscoring the musical tradition into which the Chapin sons were born.
Harry’s early insights about poverty and hunger came from the brilliant work of Michael Harrington, a friend and colleague of his politically astute oldest brother James, who was active in the Democratic Socialists of America. Harrington’s book, The Other America detailing extensive poverty and hunger in the US (Penguin Books, NY, 1962) seized the nation’s attention when it was published, especially that of President John. F. Kennedy. The book became the blueprint for JFK’s—and later LBJ’s–War on Poverty. It also served as one of the inspirations for the Chapin family’s lifelong fight against poverty and food insecurity. James Chapin, Harry’s oldest brother, would serve as Harry’s political guru and advisor throughout his lifetime and steered him toward making a difference on a single, significant social issue.
Born to privilege and into a family of thinkers and artists, Harry felt compelled to do something about the promise of what he believed America was supposed to be for others not as fortunate as the Chapins. His unapologetic patriotism, and unfettered sense of fairness, would, at roughly the same age, lead him to take the same approach Frank Sinatra took in 1945, at age 30 toward civil and human rights activism.
Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, into a struggling Italian family of immigrants — less than an hour from the Andover compound where the Burkes and Chapins would congregate. Pete Hamill, in his remarkable book about Sinatra entitled Why Sinatra Matters, writes how “music was the engine of Sinatra’s life.” Not so, for Harry Chapin. He was the engine of his own life.
““Having Harry for a brother was like having a steam engine for a brother, “ said his oldest brother James Chapin, during Harry’s memorial service at Grace Episcopal Church in Brooklyn, in 1981, acknowledging the effect he had on everyone who came in contact with him. He would never take “no” for an answer, had boundless energy, and was as relentless in fighting for his social and political causes as he was in pursuing his musical career.
“Harry gave away more than he got, “ said Billy Joel, in an interview in his motorcyle shop in the heart of the Village of Oyster Bay, not far from where the Chapins lived in Huntington. “ He concentrated on helping people, whenever he could, giving his money away to other people, for a cause. He had so much talent, and he used it for other people, not for his own gain.”
“We need Harry now more than ever,” Joel said. “Today, when it’s all about greed, all about selfishness, he’d be nudging the hell out of me, out of everyone, to get involved.”
Yet, his music and his life as an artist, in a family of artists, mattered to Harry as much as his activism and citizenship did.
Harry Chapin’s great gift was to merge the many parts of himself — artist, activist, decent human being, brother, father, citizen — into a sort of one-man movement — “a movement among movements” to paraphrase the great social activist and food insecurity guru Frances Moore Lappe, whose first book, Diet for A Small Planet (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1971) had a profound influence on the Chapin family’s thinking about poverty, hunger, income inequality, and the politics of social change, and whose second book Food First, was funded with a starter grant from Harry.
“He wanted to change the world,” said Big John Wallace, his longtime guitarist, fellow singer, and childhood friend dating back to Brooklyn’s Grace Episcopal Church Choir, where they first sang together.
July 4th in the USA is jammed with jingoist junk; stuffed with solipsistic slop of self-congratulation and “exceptionalism;” inebriated on the insanity of illuminating the night sky for mere minutes with a fortune in feel-good fireworks, while the people gawking at them below, get ground into the dirt on which they stand.
Nothing illustrates that sharp contrast of Red, White and Black and Blue this July 4th holiday, than the three-pronged missiles of mass destruction aimed at every person of color, and every person of modest means in this country, by the US Supreme Court of High Executioners.
The High Court’s poison-dipped darts came “in bunches, not as single spies,” as Shakespeare wrote, but their targets were all the same: people of modest means, and people of color, left out of this country’s original contract; shackled, whipped, beaten, robbed and robbed again and again and again. Reparations? Don’t be ridiculous—this rich man’s country and its’ institutions are hell-bent on Decimation of any poor, or Black or brown human different from it’s wealthy, White overlords.
First, the repeal of Roe, and the termination of a woman’s right to have freedom over her own body, comes down like a hammer on the heads of predominantly poor women of color, in the States of the Old Confederacy—which once had laws protecting the rights of Slave owners to rape Black women, and now, in 2023, has laws forcing poor, Black women to give birth to the child of their rapists. How far have we come? In the good ole’ boy days of the Confederacy, that’s just the way Slave owners increased their workforce, with the approval of their Christian churches & governments.
Secondly, the assault and dismemberment of Affirmative Action was an arrow aimed directly at a noble, 60 year movement toward fairness, to level the playing field for many whose ancestors’ labor and the very fields they worked were ripped out from under them, without compensation, or remorse. Affirmative Action—an affirmative, constructive step to approach equality—was a measured, modest, long-term attempt to rebuild some of that stolen wealth over generations, and to overcome the onerous obstacles continually constructed to block Black people—like Black Veterans being denied the right to go to college, or use the GI Bill’s benefits they risked their lives to earn. Affirmative Action was intended to make a minor correction to those crimes against Black humanity; a very mild attempt, not unlike Germany’s, to recompense the families of the six million Jews that German Nationalists slaughtered.
Finally, and much like an assault weapon obliterates the flesh of its victims, the Supreme Court’s malicious destruction of a Student Loan forgiveness program, decapitated one concrete hope millions of striving, working-class Americans of all colors had of building wealth for their families and their communities, by dramatically reducing their college debt. But in this rich man’s corporate playground known as the United States, only big banks, oil & gas companies, and Justices Thomas, Alito, & Roberts are permitted to get bailed out –-by government or billionaires, and multi-million dollar law firms with business before their kept Court.
My anger over these these intentional, pre-meditated acts of murder of poor women, Black people and generations of working families, has unlocked some of my darkest demons. I want revenge; I want to even the score; I want to understand how generations of Black Americans have never lost hope in this goddamned, amoral country.
So, not for comfort, but to learn how to better channel my fury, I turned to James Baldwin, in his brilliant book, The Fire Next Time. The tight, tough book, was first published in 1963, the year Medgar Evers and President Kennedy were assassinated; and, republished in 1964, the year that Civil Rights Freedom Riders, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were gunned down in Mississippi by the KKK working in collaboration with local law enforcement officials. The fire, the fury, was all around us; the following year, Malcolm X was assassinated; three years later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In his powerful and prescient closing pages, Baldwin wrote in 1963:
“ A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay. ‘The problem of the 20th Century, ‘ wrote W.E.B. Dubois around 60 years ago, is the problem of the color line.”
Baldwin continued:
“A tearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world—here, there or anywhere. It is for this reason that everything White Americans think they believe in, must now be reexamined. “
“What one would not like to see again is the consolidation of peoples on the basis of their color. But as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible to consolidate, according to any other principle. Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality. . .
“And, at the center of this dreadful storm, stand the Black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk—eviction, imprisonment, torture, death.
“For the sake of one’s children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion… I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand…
“One is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and in American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less, than the achievement of the impossible.”
“If we—and now, I mean the relatively conscious Whites and the relatively conscious Blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.
“If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in a song by a slave, is upon us: ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!’
