'The very real dangers of death'

Here is one of the most famous talk show clips in history, James Baldwin on the Dick Cavett show on this day in 1968 — a time of when America and indeed much of the world was tearing itself apart.

The set up is provided by Professor Paul Weiss, who joins the conversation and asks why men like Baldwin always analyse inequality and social disfunction through the lens of race.

Keep in mind that Martin Luther King Jr had been assassinated eight weeks earlier.

Baldwin’s response is for the ages. Things to note as you listen to it:

• He doesn’t allow the question to be reframed by Professor Weiss. Baldwin has been talking about the trials of reaching manhood as a black man. He uses his first paragraph to get back onto the track he wants to talk about.

• He injects autobiography and therefore emotion into his depiction of how bad things are for African Americans, in America: ‘I ended up in Paris, on the streets of Paris, with forty dollars in my pocket on the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there, that had already happened to me here.’

• He rebutts the Professor - why he as a writer does no have so much in common with white writers: ‘it's very hard to sit at the typewriter and concentrate on that if you're afraid of the world around you.’

• He uses a series of ‘I don’t knows’ and ‘I knows’ to give rhythm and dynamism to his experience of segregation and Jim Crowism. His body language is incredible, so much punch and vigour (but also elegance) in the hand gestures and body movements.

Wikimedia Commons, London 1969

Here is the transcript:

James Baldwin: 'I am not your Negro" Dick Cavett show - 1968

13 June 1968, New York City, New York, USA

Dick Cavett: I would like to add someone to our group here, Professor Paul Weiss, a Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale. Were you able to listen to the show backstage?

Prof. Paul Weiss: A deal of it, but then I was behind the [inaudible] So I did hear only some of it.

Dick Cavett: Did you hear anything that you disagreed with?

Prof. Paul Weiss: I disagreed with a great deal of it. And of course, there was a good deal I agree with. I think he's overlooking one very important matter, I think. Each one of us, I think, is terribly alone. He lives his own individual life. There's all kinds of obstacles in the way of religion or colour or size or shape or lack of ability. And the problem is to become a man.

James Baldwin:: But what I was discussing was not that problem, really. I was discussing the difficulties, the obstacles, the very real danger of death thrown up by the society when a Negro, when a black man, attempts to become a man.