The Last Patrician by Michael Knox Beran

Author:Michael Knox Beran
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250088017
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

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In November 1962, James Baldwin published “Letter from a Region in My Mind” in The New Yorker. In it he told of ghettos where

the wages of sin were visible everywhere, in the wine-stained and urine-splashed hallway, in every clanging ambulance bell, in every scar on the faces of the pimps and their whores, in every helpless, newborn baby being brought into this danger, in every knife and pistol fight on the Avenue, and in every disastrous bulletin: a cousin, mother of six, suddenly gone mad, the children parceled out here and there; an indestructible aunt rewarded for years of hard labor by a slow, agonizing death in a terrible small room; someone’s bright son blown into eternity by his own hand; another turned robber and carried off to jail.1

Baldwin told of watching old friends degenerate, of finding them, “in twos and threes and fours, in a hallway, sharing a jug of wine or a bottle of whiskey, talking, cursing, fighting, sometimes weeping.”2 He told of a past, “the Negro’s past, of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it.”3 Tame stuff, perhaps, compared with the sentiments expressed by groups like the Black Panthers a few years later. But in 1962 Baldwin’s was as powerful a statement of black rage as most New Yorker readers had ever encountered. It shocked genteel liberals out of their paternalistic complacency; something, they said, had to be done.

The article moved Bobby to seek Baldwin out. The two had met before, briefly, at a White House dinner; now Bobby invited him to breakfast with him at Hickory Hill.4 Though he had in the past ridiculed Baldwin’s homosexuality—he and Jack used to quarrel over who had first thought to call Baldwin “Martin Luther Queen”—Bobby now developed a respect for the man, and asked him to arrange a meeting with a group of blacks to talk about the problems of the ghetto.5 The meeting took place on a late spring afternoon in 1963 at the Kennedy family apartment on Central Park South in New York. Burke Marshall accompanied Bobby. Several black artists and entertainers were present, among them Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, and Lorraine Hansberry. So, too, were two experts on urban problems: Kenneth B. Clark, the social psychologist, and Edwin C. Berry of the Chicago Urban League.6

Also present was a young man named Jerome Smith, a civil rights worker who had spent time in Southern jails and who had on several occasions been beaten to a pulp by white supremacists.7 He was less prominent than the artists and scholars who had gathered to meet the Attorney General, but he quickly established himself as the dominant presence in the room. He was not famous, Baldwin observed; he “didn’t sing or act or dance.”8 But he nevertheless became “the focal point” of the debate.9 Smith began by saying, in an angry,

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