I wrote a letter to the New York Times recently which didn't get printed. Which is getting to be my report with the New York Times. They said that it was too personal. What it concerned itself was, I was in a bit of a stew over the stall in. Because when the stall in was first announced, I said, oh my god, now there has gone crazy. I was tied up and it wasn't that wrong. Who needed it? And then I noticed the reaction starting in Washington and coming on up to New York, among what we're all here calling the white liberal circles. Which was something like, you know, you Negroes act right or you're going to ruin everything we're trying to do. And that got me to thinking more seriously about the strategy and the tactics that the stall had intended to accomplish. And so I said I wrote a letter to the New York Times. I am of a generation of Negroes that comes after a whole lot of other generations. And my father, who was, you know, a real American type American, successful businessman, very civic minded and so forth, was a sort of American put a great deal of money, a great deal of his really extraordinary talents, a great deal of passion. And to everything that we say is the American way of going after goals. As to say that he moved his family into a restricted area where the only gross is supposed to live and then proceeded to fight the case in the courts all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. And this is the way of struggling that everyone says is the proper way to do. And it eventually resulted in a decision against restrictive covenants, which is very famous hands very versus Lee. The problem is that Negroes are just as segregated in the city Chicago now as they were then. My father died a disillusioned exile in another country. That is the reality that I am faced with. When I get up and I read that some Negroes my own age and younger say that we must now lie down in the streets, tie up traffic, stop ambulance, do whatever we can, take to the hills as necessary with some guns, and fight back, you see. Can't you understand that this is the perspective from which we are now speaking? It isn't as if we got up today and said, you know, what can we do to irritate America? You know, it's because that since 1619 Negroes have tried every method of communication, of transformation, of their situation, from petition to the vote, everything. We've all tried it all. There isn't anything that hasn't been exhausted. Is it rather remarkable that we can talk about a people who are publishing newspapers, while they were still in slavery in 1827? You see, have been doing everything, writing editorials, Mr. Wexler, for a long time. You know. And now the charge of impatience is simply unbearable. I would like to submit that the problem is that yes, there is a problem about white liberal. The problem is we have to find some way with these dialogues to show and to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical. I think that then it wouldn't, when that becomes true, some of the really eloquent things that was said before about the basic fabric of our society, which after all is the thing which must be changed, you know. To really solve the problem, you know, the basic organizational American society is the thing that has Negroes in the situation that they are in, and never let us lose sight of it. It is entirely different, you see, the way that you would assess the Vietnamese war and the way I would, because I can't believe. I can't believe that anyone who is given what an American Negro is given, you know, our viewpoint can believe that a government, which has that it is disposal, a federal bureau of investigation, which cannot ever find the motives of Negroes, and by that method never knows, and shows that it can't really very little about American citizens who are black, really are always somewhere fighting a war for a bunch of other colored people, you know. Several thousand miles, you just have a different viewpoint. This is why we want the dialogue to explain that to you. I think, since we closed on a peculiar note for the break that I for one would like to identify my position, our radicalism is not alien to this country, neither black nor white, and we have a very great tradition of white radicalism in the United States. And I've never heard Negroes boo the name of John Brown. So there's no problem no matter how excited we get. I think ultimately anybody at this table who wants to read any patriot out of the Negro movement is not the point. Some of the first people who have died so far in this struggle have been white men. And I for one would be prepared, I must say, an exception to anything said, to accept the leadership of a person who gives that much devotion, as against someone who would exhibit the traitorous characters of, say, a moist trumpet. I don't think that we can decide ultimately on the basis of color. The passion that we express should be understood, I think, in that context. We want total identification. It's not a question of reading anybody out. It's a merger. But it has to be a merger on the basis of true and genuine equality. And if we think that it isn't going to be painful, we're mistaken. So that you, for instance, are an admirer of our late president. And he presumed, with all respect to the dead, but he happens to have been our president, so I have to talk about him that way, to have suggested to the world that if our foreign policy were not honored with regard to Cuba, that we would blow off the world, you see. And we live in a nation where everything which is talked about, is talked about in terms of the fact that we are going to be the mightiest, the toughest, the roughest cats going, you know. In the whole world. And when a Negro says something about, I'm tired. I can't stand it no more. I want to hit somebody. And you say that we're sitting here panting and ranting for violence, you know. It's not right. I think it's very simple that the question of the whole idea of the dead.