What a gift, to be seen and held in such grace.

CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ, Associated Press

The New Yorker — 21 October 1996 P. 200

Born an illegitimate black child in Mineola, Texas, Brown was brought up by his grandmother and sent to stay with his uncle in San Francisco as a teenager. He attended San Francisco State University, where he met his future wife, Blanche, and Hastings College of the Law. He ran a law practice whose clientele consisted mainly of prostitutes, but became active in the community. He was elected to the California State Assembly in 1964 (after losing in 1962). The thirty-one years he spent there were a political performance that Brown himself calls, not altogether inaptly, “classic politics in American democracy.” He became expert at negotiating power in the Assembly. Brown became chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, presiding over the budget. However, he had to fight for the attention of Reagan Republicans in the Assembly. Brown lost a bid for the Speakership in 1974 and concentrated on his law practice. It gained prestigious clients, and was investigated for possible conflicts between political and business interests (none were found). In 1980, he waged a successful campaign for the Speakership, convincing Republicans to vote for him. He became the first black Speaker in the state’s history, announcing that he expected to stay in that position “forever,” and managed to manipulate the population of the Assembly so that it seemed possible. He was becoming an increasingly familiar national figure. He and Blanche, though they had three children, finally separated, due in part to his many young female escorts. Brown defeated attempts to dislodge him in the Assembly. He was elected San Francisco’s first black mayor in 1995. Brown has ignored, fought, and triumphed over racism for his whole life, from shining shoes in Mineola to proving himself in the Assembly. He believes that San Francisco has two great advantages: its unusual diversity and racial harmony, and its unusually driven mayor, Willie Brown. As Mayor, Brown has to deal with more immediate and tactile problems — such as housing and public transportation — than he did as Speaker. He is a popular figure in San Francisco, a boulevardier known for his natty clothes and social energy. He and Blanche are still close. He has a solitary nature, in spite of his public charisma. Brown’s panache suits San Francisco; he says, “It’s great to look out there and know that you are mayor of everything — as far as you can see.”

A LETTER TO MY NEPHEW
by James Baldwin, 1 December 1962

Dear James:

I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. 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 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. You gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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; remember, I said most of mankind, but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

They have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. 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. I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, “No, this is not true. 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. I know the conditions under which you were born for I was there. Your countrymen were not there and haven’ t made it yet. Your grandmother was also there and no one has ever accused her of being bitter. I suggest that the innocent check with her. She isn’t hard to find. Your countrymen don’t know that she exists either, though she has been working for them all their lives.

You were born here and 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. You were a big baby. I was not. Here you were to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard at once and forever to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that. I know how black it looks today for you. It looked black that day too. Yes, we were trembling. 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.

This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. 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. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits to your ambition were thus expected to be settled. 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. You were not expected to aspire to excellence. You were expected to make peace with mediocrity. 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 your countrymen do not agree with me here and I hear them. saying, “You exaggerate. They do not know Harlem and I do. So do you. Take no one’ s word for anything, including mine, but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. 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.

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. 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. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them, and I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope. 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. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men.

Many of them indeed know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shivering and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one ‘ s sense of one’ s own reality. 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.

Don’t be afraid. 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 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. 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. Do not be driven from it. Great men have done great things here and will again and we can make America what America must become.

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. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, “The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.”

You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free.

God bless you, James, and Godspeed.

Your uncle, James

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be.

And one day, some great moment stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great truth, some great issue, some great cause.

And you refuse to do it for you are afraid.

You refuse to do it for you want to live longer.

You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be run down or that you will lose your status, or you’re afraid that one may stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90.

And the end of breath in your life is but the late signal of an earlier death of the spirit.

—MLK, Jr.

I’ve been writing again. Only in small shots, and as narrow time can allow. But it feels like the beginning of a flood. And thus it is time to reclaim this space — this chronicle of an instrumental, monumental period of my life (2011-2013), within which I can now see the seeds of so much that I’ve produced, designed or brought to life.

My convictions are more clear and firm than before. And with all praise due to the new American loathsomeness, the atmosphere is becoming thick with dissent, ideas, and ultimately – revolution.

Let’s see what seeds these incipient words within me can plant to bring us closer to that. The madness we’re living through now is simply too untenable to last, and I’m looking forward to a summer impeachment to get all the dominoes falling. America is overdue.