Dear Carl Van Vechten :

Please forgive me for my silence. My natural tendency to procrastinate has been somewhat aggravated by a weird microbe which attacked me as I got off the boat and which is still lurking, no doubt, somewhere in my system. The microbe led to doctors, which led to expenses and a somewhat paralyzing gloom.

But am now beginning to be myself again. Have found a place to live and a place to work: am struggling with a new novel.

As for your pictures, they are far and away the best - and most various - I have ever seen of me and I thank you very much indeed. It's a pity I can't see the colored pictures yet, but I'm looking forward to them as a kind of reward for being good; that is, as soon as I finish my novel I can come home and have my candy.

All 14 of my Persian cats died over the holidays from an excess of pate de foie gras but a man I know who looks Chinese and says he knows all about Chinese prisons, etc, assures me that Jean Genet is working with him on a translation, Chinese, of Notre Dame de Fleurs. But he's not sure it will be finished in time.

All my best. Am looking forward to seeing you again.

119 Ave. de Versailles,
Paris, 16e

CORE SCHOLARSHIP, EDUCATION AND DEFENSE FUND, INC.

1 UNION SQUARE, ROOM 902
NEW YORK 3, N. Y.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

December 16, 1963

ANDREW NORMAN, Chairman

ADELE ADDISON
JOHN ALLISON
SHELLEY APPLETON
JAMES BALDWIN
KATRINA MCCORMICK BARNES
CHARLOTTE DEVREE
RABBI MARTIN FRIEDMAN
THE REV. FREDERICK JAMES
EDNA LEMLE
HENRY MORGENTHAU, III
DR. WILLIAM STUART NELSON
ELAINE SLATER
THE REV. GARDNER TAYLOR
NORMAN THOMAS
WILLIAM VANDEN HEUVEL
PEARL L. WILLEN

NANNETTE SACHS
Administrator

Dear Friend,

There's a lot of hidden suffering behind the civil rights headlines -- students expelled from colleges for taking part in demonstrations, workers dispossessed and fired after trying to register to vote, youngsters held too long in jails for lack of legal defense. Our new venture, CORE Scholarship, Education and Defense Fund, Inc., is setting up programs for the immediate aid of those who make the primary sacrifice.

This we have already done:

-- Given scholarships to seven students, four of them expelled for taking part in demonstrations, the others prison veterans - one subjected to unspeakable abuse on a chain gang. None of the seven could have gone back to college without our help.

-- Given training in managing a handicraft cooperative to Mississippi Negroes who lost their scant livelihoods for trying to exercise their right to vote.

-- Agreed to pay the legal fees for the defense of Zev Aelony, one of four jailed almost three months in Georgia on charges of insurrection, an offense that carries the death penalty in Georgia. Our lawyer succeeded in getting the law declared unconstitutional and winning the release of all four young men.

The enclosure tells you about some of the students we have helped and about others in acute need of scholarship aid. In another educational program, we are sending a field worker to the Delta counties of Mississippi to teach Negroes under the severest economic repressions how to apply for government and other aid -- aid they can get if they know how to ask for it.

Our third program is in legal defense. We must build a fund for defense of a kind we cannot ask other organizations to supply -- that is, immediate legal defense, available locally where possible, to meet the emergency calls that come in almost daily.

Our program is pointed precisely at specific and desperate needs. Speaking for those who risk their lives, their educations and their livelihoods, we ask you to help. An envelope is enclosed. Our application for tax-exempt status is pending. Please be generous.

72

COMMITTEE TO AID THE MONROE DEFENDANTS

168 W. 23 ST. NEW YORK 11, N. Y.
CHelsea 3-8245

Executive Committee

Dr. A.E. Perry, Chairman
Berta Green, Secretary
Dave Dellinger
James Dickerson

COUNSEL
Conrad Lynn

A Personal Appeal
From James Baldwin

January 13, 1964

Dear Friend,

I want to call your attention to a case which is crucial for the civil-rights movement and for justice in America.

This is the so-called kidnap case in Monroe, North Carolina, a case trumped up against those fighting racism there. This is a "kidnap" case in which there was no kidnaping; in which a white couple took refuge in a Negro leader's home during the disturbances following a police-encouraged riot against Freedom Riders and local Negro pickets. After a brief stay the white couple went their way unharmed. Yet this incident has been made the basis for legal charges carrying a mandatory sentence of 20 years and maximum of life imprisonment.

Three young men -- two Negro teenagers from Monroe and a white Freedom Rider from New York -- were arrested several days later and held for 64 days in the medieval conditions of the local jail before this committee was able to secure their release on heavy bail. A fourth defendant, a Negro mother, who had been in Monroe helping in the civil-rights effort there, has just been extradited from Ohio after a two-year legal battle to Monroe, N.C.

Monroe's Negro leader, Robert F. Williams, informed that he "would soon be hanging" from a tree in the courthouse square, fled with his family and has found safety in exile. After his flight, he, too, was included in the indictment which serves as an effective bar to his return since no one questions that the racially discriminatory and prejudiced juries of the area would unhesitatingly and regardless of evidence give him a life sentence.

For almost two and a half years now the prosecution has refused to bring the three young men defendants to trial. This is not only a denial of their constitutional right of speedy trial but constitutes a refined form of torture. The deliberate prolongation of the case also exhausted the financial resources of this defense committee and served to dim the case in the public consciousness.

Now, however, we expect the case to come to trial in February. It is vital that we prevent innocent people from being victimized because they fought for racial justice in America. The defendants must be afforded the best legal defense possible and the facts of the case must be brought to the conscience of the American people.

It is to those ends that I earnestly ask you to make a generous contribution now to the Committee to Aid the Monroe Defendants.

JAMES BALDWIN
6 East 117th Street
New York 35, N. Y.

Dear Friend:

The rat, jumbo-sized and vicious, has become the symbol of the spreading rent strikes in the old-law tenements of Harlem, the East Bronx and the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

But there is more than the rat. There are the fat roaches, and the bed bugs. There are the broken and patched window panes, the leaking ceilings, the falling plaster, the peeling paint, the toilets that won't flush, the bath tubs that can't be used, the total absence of heat, the cold water (when it runs at all), the hallways without light, the uncollected garbage, the smell of decay, and the always-present danger of fire.

Some 900,000 New Yorkers live---or exist---in 43,000 tenement houses built before 1902. Their years-long struggle for dignity and decency erupted last November in the rent strike. Their slogan is: No service or repairs, no rent.

Today more than 500 buildings are on strike. 400 of them in Harlem. Tenants in more than 1,000 other slum buildings are asking for help in organizing to improve their lives.

I am writing this personal appeal because this movement needs and deserves our help---yours and mine.

The moving spirit of the rent strike is a dynamo of energy named Jesse Gray, head of the Community Council on Housing operating out of a Harlem store front at 6 E. 117th St. A 12-hour day is normal of him; he sometimes works 20. The Council's long-range goal is new low-rent housing to replace today's festering slums. The immediate goal is to make them livable until they can be replaced.

Some court decisions have been favorable to the strikers, holding that rents can be held in escrow and released to the landlords only for repairs and correction of violations. But recently landlords have been demanding--- and getting---forcible evictions for non-payment of rent.

The Council has people but little money. The need is great---for leaflets, for meetings, for sound trucks, for an organizing staff, for court cases and for nominal lawyers' fees. A big push now can force the city government to take corrective action.

Won't you join me in sending a check today to the Community Council On Housing at the address above? Will you send $100, will you send $50, will you send what you can? Will you demonstrate in a tangible way to these people engaged in the battle for better housing that their fellow Americans care?