FOOTNOTES ON AN ANNIVERSARY

...The Negro makes his way, to the extent he makes it at all, only as creator...

...Sonny Liston is not a Negro hoodlum to us but simply a hoodlum...

...This is a lesson Jackie Robinson taught...

...but it was easy, if you were not a Dodger fan, to be affronted by his belligerence on the field...

...He was in Chicago one day and stopped in to see Adlai Stevenson...

...but it was also ridiculous, pathetic, and deceptive...

...Malcolm X was in a condition of honest shock and indignation, and his audience cheered fervently his message that no white man deserved to be liked or trusted...

...I look at the back to see who's handling the garbage...

...that right was hard-earned for him, but he gave us for nothing the priceless boon of being able to dislike him as a human being...

...I once spent a long afternoon in the office of a Citizens Council leader in a Southern city...

...Mississippi would have been quiet if James Meredith had not insisted on enrolling in its university...

...But in this case, Bunche seemed to reflect a uni-versal sentiment...

...When he was only a candidate for President, John F. Kennedy met twice with Jackie Robinson to solicit his support...

...1 once served as chairman of a roundtable of Negro speakers, one of whom was Malcolm X. The audience was largely Muslim...

...There will never be many Muslims, but I should be surprised if there were not a little Muslim in every Negro...

...In his small way, he is rendering the special service so many other Negroes have given America, which is to tell us the truth about ourselves...

...One of those he questioned asked in turn what they had talked about...

...This is not a fanciful notion...

...Liston is the first morally-inferior Negro to be given an equal chance at a position revered by any great number of his fellow Americans...

...The union flesh-peddler, the sheriff of Holmes County, Mississippi, the television space salesman, the loud man in the saloon—all these luxuries of a wasteful society have no real claim upon our contributions to their comfort except that they are citizens and white...

...How strange that we who are white should think of that date with pride and that the Negro should think of it with gratitude...

...Robinson could be harsh, combative, and ungracious...

...Perhaps the stereotypes are accurate, and white people are smug, and Negroes are instinctively polite...

...The Negro woman, as domestic, is most often the support of the family...

...Who would have thought that these school children, when they began, might have done something as important as to make life easier for every poor Southern Negro who goes to jail...

...We are more enlightened...

...To government, he seems only an inconvenience...

...Yet, for once at least, the Negro has judged us whites unfairly...

...he asked...

...There is, of course, a gap between Negroes who have made their way in the white world and those who have been left behind...

...The meetings were cold, hostile, and left the Senator baffled...

...The most significant opposition to Liston's advancement did not come from the White Citizens Councils, to whom any Negro is as bad as any other, unless that other is, like Floyd Patterson, a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People...

...If," his mother answered, "you got the guts to go, I got the guts to take you...

...Any Negro's face in a white public place in our world is consequently likely to be the face of the Negro, that, is, the problem...

...But what is simple and obvious is quite the opposite...

...Our surplusage sits in offices exercising its imagination only to fabricate expense accounts...

...For there is also a little bit of every Negro which understands what Camus meant when he said that we are all condemned to live together...

...Still we boast of this event and the Negro is appreciative of it...

...How proud a Southern Negro Woman is of a son who goes to jail...

...The difference is not just in the places a Negro is kept out of but in the atmosphere of the places he gets into...

...I bet they've got my office wired right now and are taking down everything I say...

...My main function for the occasion was as object to be pointed at in evidence...

...afterwards a brave sports writer asked Slaughter whether he might not have misjudged the ball...

...He did not represent a race...

...there is no longer danger that he will discredit the Negro...

...And, because of these children, it will never again be easy for a Southern deputy sheriff to think one Negro like every other...

...Liston has an impressive criminal record...

...A nine-year-old boy named James Gordon was listening to the radio and heard about the National Guard being summoned to enforce integration in a school a hundred miles away...

...There ain't a left fielder in this game could have caught that ball," Slaughter answered...

...It came rather from Negroes who thought Liston might disgrace their community...

...Yet even an instinct may be submerged by the overpowering pressures of circumstances, pressures which can produce the Muslims, a current concern of fashion...

...But is what everyone knows necessarily the truth...

...A decade ago, the hope of the South was generally considered to be in its upper middle class...

...The last time was in Albany, Georgia, where by then the police were so well-trained and circumspect that some advanced social thinkers complained that there was not enough violence to dramatize the problem...

...Before Liston, a Negro heavyweight was expected not merely to fight well enough to win the office but to ennoble it when he got it...

...Yet the act of living together can provide release...

...And there is a little bit of government in all of us...

...Robinson's last important hit in baseball was a triple in the 1956 World Series against the Yankees...

...The American economy seems peculiarly designed for the care and feeding of incompetent white men...

...He hit it, as a judgment of history, over the head of Enos Slaughter, a North Carolinian, who, as a Saint Louis Cardinal, had welcomed Robinson to the major leagues and the border South by trying to spike him, "that nigger...

...their surplusage sits on doorsteps in Harlem in the daytime...

...But he is the first Negro thug to have that chance...

...Right after his greeting, Stevenson said wryly that he supposed his visitor had come to talk about civil rights...

...If it's a white man, I move on...

...There were never many of them...

...Of course," said the Senator...

...The image of a Negro boy who wills to go to jail to assert himself a man is a sudden, delightful surprise, "I don't think it's fair," an Albany mother said last summer, "to get a boy out of jail if he don't want to...

...A hundred years later, they have started where the Emancipation Proclamation should have started...

...Robinson's hit won the game for the Dodgers...

...But now they are silent...

...They might be said, for purposes of identification, to have begun in Clay, Kentucky, where the Negro settlement is, by decision of the citizens of Clay, outside of town...

...In the same way, we went— we know now—to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, not to find out what Negroes are, but what white people are...

...We owe to unknown Southern Negroes whatever has been epic in the history of the United States for the last ten years...

...Integration cannot make the poor comfortable and the untrained skillful...

...Sonny Liston has finally relieved the Negro of this function for boxing...

...Near the end, he turned confidential...

...Harlem, by all accounts, was as united against Liston as it had been against any challenger for the championship since Joe Louis fought Max Schmeling in 1938...

...But there has come the poor, barely literate Southern Negro child meeting the poor white face to face, enforcing a reminder of his human identity...

...he competed for a team...

...And he and she went down to the school together and were driven off with shotguns, and the National Guard came in for them, too...

...They were that ready to trust an enemy they had never seen before that night...

...Most black nationalists are persons of small education, in middle age, with menial employment...

...If they were Negroes, how many of them would have any expression but black nationalism...

...So it does make a difference when your face is a label...

...I never saw even that bastard hit a ball that hard...

...Oh, civil rights, of course," Senator Kennedy answered...

...The Negro affronts our conscience less than he disturbs our peace...

...Only civil rights...

...it was a few days after a Los Angeles Muslim Temple had been shot up by the local police...

...To narrow the question, almost everyone seems to know by now that white people do not understand the Negro...

...Charley Jones answered, "I guess you've never been in a Southern jail...

...It makes an enormous difference what color a man's skin is...

...That is a revolutionary movement...

...To this have we come one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation...

...It was never possible not to respect Robinson...

...Cooks and maids, poor farmers, students in colleges that hardly have libraries have become authors of that history...

...It was at best a mixed compliment...

...What is more likely, I am afraid, is that, whatever our color, we do not understand ourselves...

...I looked at the porter and constructed a whole network of colored domestics reporting back on masters, who, like this one, were not even aware of their presence...

...Sonny Liston looks back over what has been as close to an animal existence as could be possible for an American, and the only figure outside his world who seems to him worthy of admiration is Martin Luther King...

...Offer no victims, and there will be no mobs...

...There are two lines that William Butler Yeats set down about another country, also productive of special talents but generally inhabited by propertyless country people and their children : "Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man: 'Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.'" A friend of mine talked recently to a Negro who had traveled the South looking for work...

...Perhaps the most consequential of all the things Robinson did for America is seldom mentioned...

...we only are...

...You know," he said, "there's something I don't understand...

...By all evidence, he is a cleaner fighter inside the ring than Tony Galento ever thought of being...

...But was that not an invasion of his privacy, an assumption one would hardly make about a stranger unless that stranger were a Negro...

...The South was full of white people who understood that segregation was— what was that expression?—morally wrong, and who reached out their hands to what tiny Negro middle class there was...

...We shall never again, I am sure, have a member of the President's cabinet unequipped with a special assistant who is a Negro...

...It was out of the black poor, the most powerless and abandoned of our citizens, that people came who had the guts to go...

...And don't you think it's nice that they're not beating us up any longer...

...Charley Jones, of Charlotte, North Carolina, has been in prison eight times as a CORE leader...

...It was affecting to have a champion who talked as though he were seeking admission to the University of Mississippi...

...We think they aren't interested in anything else...

...Maturity comes more slowly in other areas of national life, but the last five years of all this depressing century have been the best, and they began somewhere when no one was looking...

...There were reports that Ralph Bunche had asked Patterson not to risk this disaster...

...After awhile he was free to be these things when the fit was on him...

...We know now that we should have gone to him to find out what the Southern Negro could do...

...But he is not the first thug of this generation to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world...

...Yet, as I was leaving, three Muslims came up to meet me and asked whether I could go to Los Angeles and find out the truth about what had happened to their brothers...

...One of his duties, a basic necessity of government, is to provide protective coloration...

...It doesn't make any difference what color anyone's skin is...

...Cities where no change seemed possible have found themselves at the mercy of little colored children, who have gone, afraid but proud, to prison, and emerged laughing...

...He is shortly to become one of the editors of the New Republic...

...The Muslims are most relevant to an unmentioned fact about the Negro's real situation in the American city...

...I sat there and elected him a conspirator and laughed inside and cheered him on...

...Every reference to it is a reminder that as recently as our great-grandfathers' time, Americans held other Americans as bond slaves and might well have kept holding them if the South had not gone to war to expand the limits of a system which the North was resigned merely to containing...

...But there is no Muslim either who is so thoroughly alienated as he says and genuinely feels he is...

...What does Robinson want...

...Mommy," he asked, "why can't I go to the white school...

...he offers only the bright promise of giving boxing the discredit it has deserved all these years...

...But, after a century, it remains a particular complication that what is truly obvious is so seldom said...

...But," this little girl had said, "it's all so simple...

...The Negro male is peculiarly a menial in this culture...

...They know everything we do just as soon as we do...

...All these things are, of course, simple and obvious...

...Negroes produce jazz, for which the explanatory notes are always written by white critics...

...It would be hard to think of an American Negro, no matter how psychologically integrated, who does not enjoy the speeches of Malcolm X, a Negro who hates us so much that he adopted the initial X to erase his original surname of Little, which, he has to assume, belonged originally to the white family that also owned his ancestors...

...The rest of their lives holds no other prospect...

...It was Jackie Robinson's triumph that, when he came into the league, Enos Slaughter called him "that nigger" and, when he went out, Enos Slaughter called him "that bastard...

...MURRAY KEMPTON has covered most of the major developments of the past decade in the struggle for human rights as featured columnist for the New York Post...

...Sonny Liston may tell us still more than Robinson—or even Ralph Bunche—about the Negro's progress since Emancipation...

...I like to get to a town early," the Negro said, "when the garbage trucks are out...

...And who predicted this wild card in our history except William Faulkner...

...Yet they and the children who follow them have turned and changed that which everyone had thought would be the inevitable development of the South...

...He is the first heavyweight champion to suggest to us the truth about the office he holds...

...And, once a society decides, without feeling any need to ask him, that a man is nothing except the burning embodiment of a problem, with time he comes to seem to us only a crank...

...A Negro porter was cleaning his waiting room at that moment and could certainly hear everything he said...

...The white middle class can no longer talk to the Negro middle class...

...And he is a menial whose degradation is less in demand than it once was...

...There's no job in that town for me...

...For to be a Negro in America is to be required to be superior to your station in life...

...There are important Negro novelists but no fashionable Negro critics...

...It is not a fashion, I am afraid, that has much to do with what they are about, because the concern is for their words and not their faces...

...It was a moment of emancipation for him and for us the first time he was booed, not as a Negro, but as Jackie Robinson, a Dodger player...

...A mother reported with pride to me the other day her daughter's comment on the Mississippi riots...

...Sonny Liston is a symbol of national maturity...

...when we see a Negro we confront someone who threatens to become...

...I have a friend who is a reporter for one of the news magazines...

...to refuse to spy can, after all, be a point of pride...

...His specialties—exceptionally non-parochial for a Negro—are labor and politics...

...In some ways he has more privacy in the South because he is taken for granted there, How many secret meetings of White Citizens Council leaders have been held in offices while the omnipresent Negro porter went in and out emptying ash trays...

...White Southerners thought for years that Negroes weren't interested in civil rights...

...Integration, if it came tomorrow, would not alter their lives...

...The parasitic occupations are not for Negroes...