Kaiju Agonistes

January, 1969—CBS Evening News Partial Transcript—Walter Cronkite Interviews James Baldwin

MR. CRONKITE: What is your reaction to those Americans now claiming that the maintenance of an active civil rights movement is an unaffordable or irresponsible distraction is this time of struggle against the Mid-Pacific Entity?

MR. BALDWIN: It is not lost on any Black American that the activities of his oppression have not ceased, have not ceased, despite the so-called urgency of the situation. Only the activities of his liberation must be abandoned; the routine of his oppression and all the resources thus wasted—that goes on as though no entity had ever appeared. We are told our cooperation is desired, but the situation was not so urgent that Congress felt moved to pass the 1968 additions to the Civil Rights Act. The situation was not so urgent that the man who murdered Martin felt compelled to set aside his gun and do something constructive instead. The entity has brought us no new situation. This is the oldest situation in America.

MR. CRONKITE: You contend that you derive, or perhaps the Negro more generally derives, no benefit from the government expenditures on this crisis?

MR. BALDWIN: Billions of dollars may be allocated in the name of the downtrodden and the displaced, without ever being of any benefit to those persons. Such monies may be used, and generally are used, to build an infrastructure of contentment for the sensibilities of the subjugator, rather than the material needs of the subjugated. Billions have been sent to Oregon and Alaska and California to build fortresses and gun emplacements and sea walls and other fantasies, billions have been allocated for the longshoremen thrown out of work by the total collapse of Pacific trade. But those men are not being cared for. Those walls are not being built. The money goes in, and it goes as far as the contractors and the concrete suppliers and the banks and the insurers but it never quite reaches the coast, it never reaches the unemployed, it never reaches the people who need their savings restored or their insurance paid out. And there are men in, for example, Governor Reagan’s office, who could tell you exactly where the money goes, if they cared to. If they were to ever stop laughing behind their hands.

MR. CRONKITE: So you no longer believe that the progress of 1964 was noteworthy?

MR. BALDWIN: I treat every victory, Walter—I treat even incomplete victories as water in the desert. But I do not lose sight of the fact that we remain in a desert, and this desert is not a natural circumstance. This desert was built and maintained by a white world that still, to all evidence, disdains true mutuality and would prefer to spend the budget of a paradise on the maintenance of a desolation.