Book: No Name in the Street - James Baldwin

Epilogue : Who has believed our report ?

The book has been much delayed by trials, assassinations, funerals, and despair. Nor in the American crisis, which is part of a global, historical crisis, likely to resolve itself soon. And old World is dying, and a new one, kicking in the belly of its mother, time, announces that it is ready to be born. This birth will no be easy., and many of us are doomed to discover that we are exceedingly clumsy midwives. No matter, so long as we accept that our responsibility  is to the new born: the acceptance of responsibility contains the key to the necessarily evolving skill.

The book is not finished - can never be finished, by me. as of this writing, I am waiting to hear the fate of Tony Maynard, whose last address was Attica. Though the cops have been buried, with much patriotic grief, the blacks are still waiting to hear who is alive or dead. Mr Nixon has congratulated Mr Rockefeller, who ha congratulated the police: so much for that. As to the effect of all this - and so much more! - on the Black Panther leadership on black or non-white people, in the country, and all over the world, time will give a sufficiently authoritative answer. People, even if they are so thoughtless as to the born black, do not come into this world merely to provide mink coats and diamonds for chattering, trivial, pale matrons, or genocidal opportunities for their un sexed, unloved, and finally, despicable men - oh, pioneers! 

There will be bloody holding action all over the world, for years to come: but the Western party is over, and white man's sun has set. Period.

Angela Davis is still in danger. George Jackson has joined his beloved baby brother John in that royal fellowship of death. And one may say that Mrs Georgia Jackson and the alleged mother of god have, at last, found something in common. Now, it is the Virgin, the alabaster Mary, who must embrace the despised black mother whose children are also that issue of the Holy Ghost.

Mew York, San Francisco,
Hollywood,Landon, Istanbul,
Saint Paul de Vence
1967-71