If we examine our own history, we see quite clearly how long it took before there was any acknowledgment of the inequities in our society. Through most of the history of film, we were making movies, for Christ’s sake, where the Indians were all bad guys.
When you’re addressing power, don’t expect it to crumble willingly. If you’re going to say, “Hey now, look you guys, please look at what you did and look at yourselves and punish yourselves and at least try to square this thing, right?”—well, you’ll make slower progress at that than you would expect. I mean, even the most modest expectations are going to be unfulfilled.
Think about it. Today there are still people all over the world who maintain that the Holocaust didn’t happen. There are people in the United States—people among that power echelon we speak of—who maintain that all slaves were happy. There are those power symbols that always say, “Well, it was for the good of the states. It was for the cohesion of the political process.” There are myriad justifications for denial.
There are also people who say, “Hey, after thirty years of affirmative action, they’ve got it made. Black people—it’s their own fault if they can’t make it today.”
Yeah, well,
of course
they say that. And they say it not just about black people. They say it in every country. We did something for you people, whoever “you” are. And we think that’s quite enough now.
That’s the gist of it: we’ve done something, and we think it’s enough. It may not be perfect, but it damn sure comes close to being okay. Now let us hear you applaud that for a little while. And thank us. And you can take that hat off your head when you come in here thanking us.
That’s the way it is. But let’s not get stuck there. We have miles to go before we sleep. We have lots to do, and some things just aren’t going to get done, you know?
A lot of black leaders, along with a lot of sympathetic white people, would say it’s too early in this country for forgiveness. We haven’t dealt with accountability yet, admission of guilt yet. And we certainly don’t have equality yet. But among the things that we must try to get done is the nurturing of a civilized, fair, principled, humane society. Now, if a part of that nurturing—part of the movement toward it, some of the efforts spent in that direction—would bring us to a new understanding, a new acceptance, even some forgiveness, what then? And not just forgiveness from the people who’ve been wronged. Forgiveness works two ways, in most instances. People have to forgive themselves too.
The powerful have to forgive themselves for their behavior
. That should be a sacred process.
Compassion for other human beings has to extend to the society that’s been grinding the powerless under its heel. The more civilized the society becomes, the more humane it becomes; the more it can see its own humanity, the more it sees the ways in which its humanity has been behaving
in
humanly. This injustice of the world inspires a rage so intense that to express it fully would require homicidal action; it’s self-destructive, destroy-the-world rage. Simply put, I’ve learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me. I have to try to find a way to channel that anger to the positive, and the highest positive is forgiveness.
Put simply, I’ve learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me. There is a certain anger; it reaches such intensity that to express it fully would require homicidal
rage—self-destructive, destroy-the-world rage—and its flame burns because the world is so unjust. I have to try to find a way to channel that anger to the positive, and the highest positive is forgiveness.
When I was barely sixteen, still back in Miami, late one night I was stranded in a white, middle-class neighborhood. I had gone to the dry cleaners in “our” part of town, only to discover that my clothes weren’t yet ready. This was a major problem for me, because it was already late afternoon and I was planning to leave town the next day. The cleaners told me that I could try to pick up my stuff at the dry-cleaning plant across town. So I took the bus across town to this plant, but my clothes
still
weren’t ready. Compounding the problem, by then the buses had stopped running and there I was, left high and dry and extremely out of place.
I focused my attention on passing cars heading in the general direction of “colored town.” Whenever I saw one that appeared to have black occupants, I would then—and only then—raise a hitchhiking thumb in the hope of flagging a ride. The first vehicle to stop was the unmarked police car that I had mistakenly thought to contain a black family.
I knew I was in trouble when the window on the front passenger side rolled down and the cop sitting there pointed to his right and said, “See that alley over there, boy? Get your ass up in there. Now.” After a quick assessment of the situation, something inside me assumed a steadying control and I complied. The unmarked police car then rolled into the alley behind me.
There was no one else around. Whatever happened, there would be no witnesses. When I turned back around, I saw the muzzle of a revolver sticking through the open rear window on the driver’s side, pointed at my head. Through that open window I could hear the dialogue inside the vehicle: “What should we do with this boy?” “Find out what he’s doing over here.” “Should we shoot him here?” I could see that the hammer of the gun was cocked, and I was scared out of my mind—but mad too, furious at what appeared to be their need to belittle me.
I told them about taking the bus to the dry-cleaning plant, about trying to get my stuff, but the talk in the car only got meaner as the questioning intensified. The officer behind the wheel said, “Boy, if we let you go, you think you can walk all the way home without looking back once?”
“Yes, sir.” I replied.
“Think about it now,” he challenged. “‘Cuz if you look back, just once, we gonna shoot you. Think you can do that?”
“Yes, sir,” I reassured him.
“All right, you go ahead now. We’ll be right behind you.”
I exited the alley, turned right onto the main street, and proceeded to walk the next fifty blocks—never once looking back. By shifting my eyes, but not my head, ever so slightly to the right, I could see that police car reflected in the plate-glass windows I passed. The cops were there, right on my tail, and there they stayed for the entire fifty blocks, until I turned the corner to the place where I was living with my relatives. At that point they sped away.
Fifty blocks is a long time to think about what’s happening to you, to stew in the insane injustice of it all. But it’s also a good long time to internalize messages such as discipline, independence, the value of character, and toughness of mind.
I’ve seen reports on the news about parents whose children were murdered, and these parents sought out the murderers to get to know them and try to help them, which is astounding until you think it through. In essence, what else
could
they do? Sure, they could take revenge, destroy the world. But that’s the worst hurt a person could have: to see his or her child
senselessly
murdered. So there are people who find a way to turn even that horrible, destructive energy into something positive.
It comes down to changing the way you look at a particular injustice. The parents whose child has been murdered seek to understand the murderer and to go in and try to salvage whatever is salvageable in human terms—in this particular case, a kernel of goodness in the murdered. Well, the parents don’t arrive there three days after the child has been murdered, nor do they arrive there some weeks after they’ve buried their child. They go through what’s probably an unbearable hell, because striving for control within them are the various human forces that command us: hatred, anger, fear, a sense of revenge. All of those forces have to play out individually and in groups and sometimes in juxtaposition one to the other.
And when those parents are unable to find easy answers, they have to face their pain. It’s when they do that—somewhere in that confrontation—that they may find some suggestion, some indication, some hint, some intuition that will lead
them toward looking at the circumstances differently. And one day, one moment, one minute, one second somewhere along the line, they’re going to realize that there’s no way for them to live with the requirements of their anger, with the requirements of their rage, with the requirements of their hatred. They have to find peace, because they won’t get any peace from rerunning those emotions. Somewhere along the line, I guess out of nature’s inexplicable ways, they stumble on a light (or they consciously arrive at that light, or it comes from someplace unknown), and the seed of forgiveness is illuminated.
Did I always have that peace? No. Wasn’t I an angry young man when I played the teenager in
Blackboard Jungle
? Certainly I was a different young man when I was nine or ten, and when I was twelve or fifteen, and when I was twenty-seven. So how did I deal with my rage? I dealt with it in ways that were shaped by my early life, my family surroundings, my friends, the fact that I was a member of the black community that was indeed the majority of people in the country. All those things interplayed with each other over my early years to put a certain kind of youngster on that boat heading for Florida in 1943. And when that kid got to Florida and Florida said, “Oh, wow! Let’s sit this kid down and tell him, or show him, or explain to him what the rules are,” it was too late. You see, by then I had already fashioned my own rules—rules quite contrary to what Florida was then saying to me.
That rage wasn’t given very fertile ground in my early, early years on Cat Island and then in Nassau. It was well in its formative stages in the Bahamas, but it never came to the kind of
fruition it did in Florida. Florida was in-your-face stuff. Florida was asking you who you were, and you were telling Florida who you were, and then Florida said to you. “No, that’s not who you are.
This
is who you are, and
this
is who you will be.” And I said no, and the more Florida said yes, the more that fed my rage.
I didn’t try to grab a gun from one of the cops and have a shootout with them in that alley in Miami, because that wasn’t my nature. That would have been self-destructive. My rage would have destroyed me. The sense of survival I had learned on Cat Island served me well.
Social movement doesn’t come all at once, just as it doesn’t come out of nowhere. There are moments when it captures the news, like the National Guard in Little Rock, and then we don’t hear anything about it nationally for a year, two years, three years, four years, five years—and then
wham
! So much happened in the ten-year period between making
The Defiant Ones
and making
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night
, and
To Sir, with Love
that when you look at the first picture set against the latter three, it’s as if, culturally, far more time than a decade had gone by.
A filmmaker such as Stanley Kramer was an artistic wedge during that period, but art doesn’t solve social problems. It’s a reminder, it’s an irritant, it clarifies, it focuses, but it doesn’t
solve
. Potential solutions were ignored until America was forced to confront them. Thurgood Marshall went all over the country in pursuit of solutions, and he sometimes had to dodge Klansmen on his way from court to the airport, or travel from
town to town at night, or go home unannounced, or be picked up at railroad stations by patriots in darkened automobiles who sought to protect him. And hard as the
NAACP
tried, that fearsome anti-solution activity very seldom reached the newspapers. The
NAACP
had, by that time, become an irritant. It was just, “Oh, those people, they’re having problems. They’re complaining again.”
But something was brewing among the students, and that began to catch on in the late fifties and then take tenacious hold in the early sixties. When they started sitting in, it was small, and they were way ahead of the country. The country was reading about their activity in little bits of coverage that slowly began to appear in the newspapers. Finally they said, “Oh, my God, what’s happening here?” As if suddenly someone were creating a crisis. As if this civil disobedience were out of the blue, with no roots to it.
That’s how that began to mushroom, but it wasn’t an easy journey. Those ten years between
The Defiant Ones
and
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
were rough. The government found itself asked to defend the rights of people who were denying the rights of others. The government was placed in the position of decreeing that what was on the statute books in the cities and states was improper and defied the Constitution. And the young black students were saying no to the status quo very vocally, and they were laying themselves on the line.
There was turmoil, but there was progress as well. But then Vietnam sidetracked some of that progress with new forms of
division in the country, and then protest took on a different tone, creating a more violent reaction. There were riots. There were killings. It was like three steps forward, two steps back, at least in terms of the sentiment expressed in
The Defiant Ones
—the feeling that there’s more that joins us together than separates us.
But one progressive step that
wasn’t
reversed—and the most fundamental change—was the enforcement of the Constitution with regard to suffrage for blacks. But that was a long time coming. You’re talking way back to W.E.B. Du Bois. You’re going back to historians like John Hope Franklin. You go through men like A. Philip Randolph, the head of the sleeping-car porters. You go through Roy Wilkins. And then you go through artists like Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. And there were more extreme views—people like Marcus Garvey, who was so frustrated, who said, “These people are so intractable, they’re so bullheaded with their wrong-headedness, let’s all go back to Africa. Let’s just get out of here.”