Black Judgment

Extract

It was an uneasy summer. Yet all seemed usual enough on the crowded freeways, the trailers loaded with the burdens that Americans bear for their annual love affair with what they imagine to be the past: guns and fishing rods, plaid shirts and folksong records, bags of charcoal nuggets for the forest cook-outs, stickers on the rear window of Yoshe-mite, Virginia City and Gettysburg. But the papers they read as they sat at the teakwood tables in Oregon camping grounds or lay by the motel pools in Florida always told the same story: a single theme whose only variations were Bull Connor’s police dogs savaging the Negro boys or the high-pressure hoses mowing a black mob down, or, as summer ended, the exploded bomb in Birmingham, Alabama, and the broken bodies of children in the street. And there had been the Washington march and a quarter-of-a-million witnesses to all this huge iniquity.

James Baldwin’s book had headed the best-seller list in the NewYork Times all summer long. And The Fire Next Time, enraged and apocalyptic, matched the new mood. Somehow the old arguments had become as irrelevant as war-time rationing. And even the high-minded, faithful over the years to the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People (and how suddenly archaic that had come to sound!), seemed still to be speaking of another time, another place and certainly another people. The religious leaders, with various degrees of caution, sounded trumpets—mostly of tin, it must be admitted. And Catholic Bishops spoke afresh, or at least again, of the Natural Law.