“. . . something in me wondered,” James Baldwin reflected in the celebrated New Yorker piece, whether “the intransigence and ignorance of the white man might make that vengeance inevitable . . . historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance, based on the law that we recognize when we say, ‘Whatever goes up must come down.’ . . . The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power . . .”
“And I cherish the . . . idea,” writes James Jackson Kilpatrick, “that a really massive, significant change in race relations will not come until the Negro people develop leaders who will ask themselves the familiar question, ‘Why are we treated as second-class citizens?’ and return a candid answer to it: ‘Because all too often that is what we are.’ . . . When the Negro race proves itself, in terms of Western values of maturity and achievement, it will be time enough to talk of complete social and economic integration . . . The Negro says he’s the white man’s equal; show me.”
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