A LETTER TO MY NEPHEW

...I know your countrymen do not agree with me here and I hear them saying, "You exaggerate...

...To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger...

...You were a big baby...

...remember, I said most of mankind, but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent...

...Do not be driven from it...

...I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, "No, this is not true...

...It looked black that day too...

...They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it...

...She isn't hard to find...

...Now, my dear namesake, these innocent and well meaning people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago...

...The limits to your ambition were thus expected to be settled...

...The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you...

...You were expected to make peace with mediocrity...

...Know whence you came...

...Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words "acceptance" and "integration...

...Let him curse and I remember his falling down the cellar steps and howling and I remember with pain his tears which my hand or your grandmother's hand so easily wiped away, but no one's hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs...

...We cannot be free until they are free...

...Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity and fear...

...You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature...

...Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar, and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations...

...Remember that...

...You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason...

...It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy peasant stock, men who picked cotton, dammed rivers, built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity...

...Great men have done great things here and will again and we can make America what America must become...

...You must accept them and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope...

...Your countrymen were not there and haven't made it yet...

...Well, you were born...

...You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention and by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality...

...There is no reason for you to try to become like white men and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you...

...Yes, we were trembling...

...Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shivering and all the stars aflame...

...In this case the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity...

...One of them said, "The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off...

...I don't know if you have known anybody from that far back, if you have loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man...

...To be loved, baby, hard at once and forever to strengthen you against the loveless world...

...You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer...

...One can be—indeed, one must strive to become—tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of war...

...I was not...

...Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his...

...Your uncle, James...

...here you came, something like fifteen years ago, and though your father and mother and grandmother, looking about the streets through which they were carrying you, staring at the walls into which they brought you, had every reason to be heavy-hearted, yet they were not, for here you were, big James, named for me...

...If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go...

...So do you...

...I know the conditions under which you were born for I was there...

...Many of them indeed know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know...

...We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other, none of us would have survived, and now you must survive because we love you and for the sake of your children and your children's children...

...You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early...

...The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them, and I mean that very seriously...

...It is the innocence which constitutes the crime...

...Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do and how you could do it, where you could live and whom you could marry...

...I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it and I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it...

...I said it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go beyond and behind the white man's definition, by never being allowed to spell your proper name...

...You gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort...

...Here you were to be loved...

...But these men are your brothers, your lost younger brothers, and if the word "integration" means anything, this is what it means, that we with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it, for this is your home, my friend...

...Let him laugh and I see a cellar your father does not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his present laughter his laughter as a child...

...How bitter you are," but I am writing this letter to you to try to tell you something about how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist...

...God bless you, James, and Godspeed...

...You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity and in as many ways as possible that you were a worthless human being...

...Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that for the heart of the matter is here and the crux of my dispute with my country...

...Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality...

...You were not expected to aspire to excellence...

...This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish...

...Your countrymen don't know that she exists either, though JAMES BALDWIN, novelist and essayist, wrote "Notes of A Native Son" and "Nobody Knows My Name," two books of essays, and three novels, "Another Country," "Giovanni's Room," and "Go Tell It on the Mountain...

...I have known both of you all your lives and have carried your daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed him and spanked him and watched him learn to walk...

...I suggest that the innocent check with her...

...They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men...

...They do not know Harlem and I do...

...You don't be afraid...

...Your grandmother was also there and no one has ever accused her of being bitter...

...she has been working for them all their lives...

...Take no one's word for anything, including mine, but trust your experience...

...I know how black it looks today for you...