Men are given to worshiping malevolent gods, and that which is not cruel seems to them not worth their adoration.
Anatole France, LAffaire Crainquebille
It's 62 years ago, and were in that room at 24 Central Park West, in an apartment owned by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. A delegation that includes Lena Horne, Dr. Kenneth Clark, Harry Belafonte, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin is assembling. The atmosphere is charged. What could be more urgent to Black Americans from all walks of life, if not the freedom to be!
As writer Nicholas Boggs writes in his article, What Really Happened Inside that Meeting Between James Baldwin and RFK, Baldwin was instrumental in inviting this group of Black Americans, I've read enough of Baldwins essays to know he talked with these individuals many times before, and they would represent Blacks who were tired of being tired. Blacks who had had enough.
CORE activist, James Smith was also present. Smith had recently experienced anti-Black racism when he was beaten and jailed for participating in a non-violent Freedom Riders boycott, organized to integrate buses in Mississippi. The 25-year-old activist was invited to speak his mind by giving an account of the brutality he experienced just for wanting Black Americans free of the chains of Jim Crow.
Those men who beat and jailed him certainly didn't want to hear him or see him. Maybe, Baldwin thought, Kennedy, with his brother in the White House, will listen and take action to protect Black Americans engaged in securing their freedom from white supremacy. After all, it was just a matter of beatings and incarceration. There were Black communities such as Tulsa's Black business community, burned to the ground, many of its residents were killed while others were sent fleeing the city. The frequency of rapes and lynchings besieged a community, terrorized by vigilante and organized gangs of radicalized haters.
In September of this same year, four little Black girls, preparing for Sunday school, will never know how much they were hated by random white strangers, neighbors, fellow human beings, when dynamite is set to explode at 16th Street Baptist Church. In 1955, visiting family in Mississippi, a 14-year-old Chicagoan, Emmett Till is taken to a barn after a white woman claimed he whistled at her. The Black boy in the barn is surrounded by white men who torture and then shot him in the head. Till's body is found three days later in the Tallahatchie River.
Why wouldn't the individuals in this room be tired of the violence? Why wouldn't they be angry? Yet, here was an opportunity, in this room, on May 24, 1963, to reach out to the president himself through his brother.
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