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the other things you didn’t want to look at, including love, my life was in your hands, and I had to look at you. I know more about you, therefore, than you know about me. I’ve had to spend my life, after all—and all the other Negroes in the country have had to spend their lives—outwitting and watching white people. I had to know what you were doing before you did it. People talk about the new Negro, but he’s been coming for three hundred years. The country thinks he’s new because they’ve never had to look at him before. And they are looking at him now, not because there’s been a change of heart, but only because they must.
    It was never the intention of England or France or Portugal, or any of the colonial powers, to raise the colonial people to their level. No matter what they say now about highways and hospitals and penicillin, whatever was done in those colonies was not done for the natives. And the Belgians may not know this, but the natives do. What happened was very simple. You cannot walk into a country and stay there as long as the Europeans did and dig coal and iron and gold out of the earth and use it for yourself. Put all the natives in one place and have them working for you, and have a European sector where only Europeans live. By and by, it’s inevitable that someone will make a connection between the machines you have and the power you have. And from there, it’s just a matter of detail. Now the details can be bloody, or they can be less so; they will in any case be difficult.
    We in this country now—and it really is one minute to twelve—can really turn the tide because we have an advantage that Europe does not have, and we have an advantage that Africa does not have, if we could face it. Black and white people have lived together here for generations, and now for centuries. Now, on whether or not we face these facts everything depends.
    (1961)
    * Senator James Oliver Eastland (1904–1986) represented the state of Mississippi in the United States Senate briefly in 1941 and later from 1943 until 1978. He was a vocal opponent of civil rights legislation.
    * John Malcolm Patterson (b. 1921) was governor of Alabama from 1959 to 1963, some of the most turbulent years of the civil rights movement in Alabama.
    † Carl (1914–1975) and Anne (1924–2006) Braden were journalists and anti-segregation activists based in Kentucky. In 1958 Carl Braden refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was sentenced to a year in prison. He served nine months, and was released in 1962 after Martin Luther King Jr. pushed for clemency in his case.

Theater: The Negro In and Out
    I T IS A SAD FACT that I have rarely seen a Negro actor really well used on the American stage or screen, or on television. I am not trying to start an artificial controversy when I say this, for in fact most American performers seem to find themselves trapped very soon in an “iron maiden” of mannerisms.
    Somehow, the achieved record falls below the promise. Henry Fonda, for example, is one of the most accomplished actors around, but I find it very difficult to watch him because most of the roles he plays do not seem to me to be worth doing.
    Moreover, it would seem to me that his
impulse
as an actor is very truthful; but the roles he plays are not. His physical attributes, and his quality of painful, halting honesty are usually at the mercy of some mediocre playwright’s effort to justify the bankruptcy of the American male, e.g., the nebbish with whom he so gallantly struggles in
Two for the Seesaw
.
    The point is that one can attend the Broadway theater, and most of the Off-Broadway theater all season long without ever being moved, or terrified, or engaged.
    The spectacle on the stage does not attempt to re-create our experience—thus helping us to deal with it. The attempt is almost always in the opposite direction: to justify our fantasies, thus locking us within them.
    Now, the figure of the