4 PAILA TROJAN	Wednesday, April 17, 1968
Just a man, but he was there
ERIC COHEN
approval. And I still was in awe of Baldwin the author, even wh:ie accepting Baldwin the man.
He has been asked to say a few words about the King assassination. A vacuum because he is James Baldwin and James Baldwin is obliged to say something about Martin Luther King at a white party at this moment.
He gets up during dinner and walks into the library. I follow a little bit later. He is sitting at the desk opposite the beautiful black man. He is talking to three white guests.
He has had a lot to drink and now his tone varies between indifference and contempt.
“There is no difference between the tenor of white America in the South and in San Francisco.’’
The whites can’t agree. They look like affluent midale-aged hippies and are trying hard to prove they’re not racists.
“You don’t love me,” scorns the beautiful black man. A white man with long, styled grey hair, love beads, a Don Loper turtle-neck, and a taylored suit bounds toward him. “Oh no?” ana he places a kiss on the cheek of the beautiful black man.
Everyone laughs except Baldwin. I stare at him intently, trying to decide Whether he is ugly or grotesquely handsome. His eyes are huge, and seem to bulge out of his head. His nose is broad and classically African.
“It won’t do a damn bit of good to talk to those white people out there,” Baldwin says, and begins to tell us what he really thinks. His words now are dappled with profanities and I think of “Another Country.” “Why be here,” I ask.
“Because I'm alive.”
“But why speak to these people? You've admitted it can't help.”
“I have to keep trying.”
“Don’t you despair? What keeps energizing you?”
“A force from outside of me. I don't know what. But I'm talking for a lot of people.” Then the beautiful black man walks over to Baldwin and they clasp hands. “It's time for you to speak,” he tells Baldwin.
“Not yet. I need another minute,” he whispers. “I’m just so up tight about Martin. Nobody knows. Nobody can understand, not even you.”
He gets up and I rise too. Baldwin walks towards the door but stops in front of me. He reaches out his hand and touches the side of my face with his palm. But it is a paternal gesture, as if silently acknowleag-ing my sincerity.
I follow him into the banquet room and he steps to the microphone.
“Let’s be honest.” He speaks quietly, intensely, making them strain to listen. I keep thinking about whac he had said: “It won't do a damn bit of good to talk to those white people.”
“We are a kidnapped people,” he tells them. And then somberly, “Martin Luther King is dead.”
A buxom, heavily made-up starlet leans toward her escort and whispers, “I didn't know that.”
“Don’t feel sorry for ‘Little Black Sambo,” Baldwin closed. “Feel sorry for you.”
And I did.
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University of Southern California
DAILY TROJAN
STAN METZLER Editor
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The calm Martin Luther King-LA. visit
When Martin Luther King got off a United Airlines flight in Los Angeles at 6:35 pm. yesterday, he was met by a glare of light, and a man holding a microphone.
He didn't even blink. He walked straight up to the man because he knew what the man wanted.
Since the mid-1950's, things have been that way for Martin Luther King, and because of it, he has become a very calm man—except when he speaks.
He spoke at USC last night despite a bomb scare, and throughout the entire evening he was calm, like the philosophy of Negro nonviolence he expounds.
He was calm when he met the man holding the microphone, and calm answering his questions.
King was also met by a USC reception committee that included Paul A. Bloland. dean of students. Dr. John Cantelon, director of the School of Religion, Rick Flam, from the Great Issues Forum, which was sponsoring the speech, and Carol Williamson, who was along because Flam thought a pretty face was needed.
But nothing was really needed with Martin Luther King, although he is not really impressive until he gets in back of a lectern and tells people what he thinks.
When he got off the plane, he was wearing an unpretentious dark suit and a plain grey tie. The suit was slightly wrinkled after the flight, and King's broad neck flopped over the sides of a light blue collar. He is a short, chunky man with a large round head. He speaks in a slow, tired drawl in private. He •eemed tired, and did not talk much. Any
man who averages three hotel rooms a week is bound to be tired.
He waited quietly for the car that was to drive him to his hotel, the Hyatt House, and then immediately to USC, where he would speak at 8 p.m.
“Now, we have two cars and nine people,” someone said, “how are we going to divide this up?”
“Random choice,” King said softly. “First-come, first-served.” A soft smile broke into his fleshy face.
“I really liked your speech at Riverside Church," he was told. That was in New York this year, when King first came out against the war in Vietnam. “I’m not sure I agree with everything you said. I haven’t made up my mind about Vietnam.”
“You haven’t?” King said. “That is something you should do right away.” His tone was not disapproving, but fatherly.
The car came, and took him to the hotel. He was there for about 15 minutes, but did not change his wrinkled suit. Considerations of dress seem secondary to him.
He talked more on the way to the campus, about the church.
“The church in white neighborhoods should be in the forefront of the fight for open housing and California is a good place to start.” he said.
“California has gone backwards. They had an open housing act here and went back and abolished it.
“That’s what I wanted to say about the Catholic Church. Archbishop McIntyre could have done something. He could have spoken from a more authoritarian position.” He was much more animated here. His palm and ex-
tended fingers chopped up and down as he spoke.
He is disappointed in the church's reluctance, in many cases, to step into fights about social issues.
“It has been a great tragedy of the church that this has been considered secondary. The church must be concerned with the total man, his physical as well as his spiritual being.”
He arrived at USC and was escorted to Bovard Auditorium just 15 minutes before his second speech of the day. He spoke at Sacramento State earlier, and would fly to Houston that night.
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This study of Dr. Martin Luther King was written hy Hal Lancaster, fall editor of the Daily Trojan, after Dr. King’s Great Issues Foruin speech in Bovard Auditorium. The article recently was named the second-best feature in a California college newspaper hy the California Intercollegiate Press Association —The editor.
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He requested some time alone, and finally, shortly after 8, he was introduced. He began his talk, much as he had spoken before —seemmingly tired. The ground he covered, he had covered many times before, and he did not need notes. But after the 30-minute delay while the auditorium was checked for a bomb that everyone knew was not there, he seemed much more alive. Almost all of the crowd had returned. King was unimpressed by the bomb scare; he had seen them before.
His speech now picked up. King at his
best is a magnificent speaker. The words are lyrical, filled with literary allusions. He makes his points effectively, using repetition and parallel structure.
He talked loudly then, and no longer looked tired. His hands waved and he move about more. His voice was more alive.
It is called charisma, and King has it. If, as people say, he is losing his hold on the Negro populace, it is because of mass despair, and the resultant psychological damage, not because of King’s lack of persuasive abilities.
He was soon through, and'he left shortly afterwards. He was driven back to the Hyatt House, where he reassumed his calm, placid exterior.
In trying to be relevant, King is being forced into new actions to bring the disenchanted, rioting Negro back into the non-violent circle.
“We must make nonviolence much more militant,” King said. “We have to escalate it, to use the military term.
“We must be able to dislocate cities with massive civil disobedience and without the loss of life and property.
“We must make the power structure react. Riots do no good. They just relieve the guilt of the white community.
Andy Young, the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King is president of, told him they would have to go. It was close to 11 p.m., and they had to catch a late plane for Houston.
After this tour, King will go to jail for five days for breaking a court injunction and marching in Birmingham in 1963.
And just like everything else, he was calm about it.
Dr. King's glory
It is somewhat self-defeating to go over again the many whys and hows that surround the tragedy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
His death is but the last of these.
It follows the hate so often hurled by those he sought to reach with love, the wild reactions of blacks and whites who refused to listen to his message. It builds upon the tragic residue of shame, the vacuum of conscience, that provided the Baptist minister with a pulpit before the nation.
It is much more satisfying, indeed, to focus upon Dr. King’s glory. Not that such a man was needed, but that he appeared. Not that acceptance was often halting, but that it came. Not that he was so oltcn misunderstood, but that he finally forced his nation to listen.
Not even that he was shot.
His death came from a madman. The madman is not alone in America, but there are very few like him. Their guilt is their own, whether they shoot a President, rape a young child or set fire to a city.
Granted that his death was noi a shock. With Kennedy we wept, but we also refused to believe. With King we only wept. Perhaps we wept a little harder because we could believe.
Still, the dead Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. serves no purpose if he still leads our thoughts. His time has been taken from him, and if we spend our concern on that time we will spend it in waste.
It is necessary, instead, to focus upon the message of need that Dr. King preached. He told it loudest from the first and to
HAL LANCASTER
I didn’t expect to see him there.
Anthropologists call it potlatch. And we call the people who practice it primitives. A man gathers all the material wealth he can. He measures his wealth in whale oil or seal skins. He invites his most pretentious rival to a feast and burns everything.
Humbled, the rival starts collecting whale oil to reciprocate.
This was a Hollywood party. A man was burning his whale oil before more than 200 rivals. I had not been invited, but it was an uncle s party and I had asked to go.
I wanted only to look. To sit for an evening in quiet contempt. To watch in safe aloofness as the people performed for me.
But I didn’t expect to see him there.
It went as planned, at first. My contempt seemed impenetrable. I could not be impressed because they were all flawed.
Abby Lane looked coarse.
Mel Torme looked old.
Annette Funicello looked average.
Mario Thomas looked emaciated.
But I hardly expected to see him there.
They all seemed to be swirling in a vortex of self.
And I just watched. Secure. Guarded. I was convinced that no one in that room that night was capable of any real display of emotion, least of all me.
That’s why I didn’t expect to see him there. Because I didn't think I could be impressed’ by anything at that party. That wasn't the plan.
But then I didn’t expect to see James Baldwin there. Just a man. But I chose to be impressed now. He could write the. way I wanted to. And I felt I knew him very well. He had bared himself to me across thousands of pages and I respected him.
My pomposity was punctured. The insula-
tion, the immunity were gone. I was a fan.
“Hello Mr. Baldwin,” and I introduce myself, offering my hand.
He is a slight man and his grasp is not firm. I tell him that my only claim to fame is that I am the host's nephew.
He doesn't react. His expression is fixed. But he continues to shake my hand.
Baldwin is with a tall, beautiful black man who leans towards me, “What did you say your name is?”
I tell him.
“That's your only claim to fame.”
I smile ana' turn back to Baldwin. He still shakes my hand but says nothing. Out of nervousness I start to babble.
“You’re one of my folk heroes.”
Nothing. It seems he will hold my hand interminably.
“I really admire your work.”
He squeezes harder when I say something he likes, but he still says nothing. I begin to think about “Giovanni's Room.”
I want to ask him if he will have any time to talk to me at length later iti the evening but the instant I say it I knew it has come out wrong—“What are you jdoing tonight?”
“Right after the party I'm leaving for Martin’s funeral.” These are the fifrst words I hear him speak. They are said slowly, solemnly, rhythmically. Baldwin pronounces each word carefully. He has punctuated my monologue at him with one sentence and we separate to our respective tables for dinner.
I eat in silence, recreating the encounter in my mind. I know what he is. But I had known before we met. I was not repulsed. It was because there was no shame. He made no excuses or pretenses. He didn’t need my
DAILY# TROJAN
STAN METZLER —Editor	The opinions expressed in tha Daily Tro[an are not necessarily those of th* Universty of Southern
California or the student Dody. Th* opinions of tha Daily Trojan ara expressed only in th* editorials. ERIC COHEN — Editorial Director	All columns, letters and cartocns ar* th* expressed opinions of th* writers.
the last—we need to make it right. This is America, baby, land of the free. Wake up and see that it’s free. Wake up and see that it’s not just your America. It’s free America. It’s their America too. It’s a country not of madmen but of free men. Free men well-clothed, well-fed, well-educated and well-housed. Men with as free a chance as any other men to move forward in their own life. Free men under the law, yes, but also free in love with all others. One free people under God.
It is necessary, also, to focus upon what must be done. In the individual conscience, the hate that spawns murder, and the dislike that brings discrimination, must be removed.
In the university community, such programs as the Resolution cn Urban Responsibility, the Neighborhood Community Scholarship, Interchange and the Community Action Coordinating Council must be adopted and strengthened. USC is in a position to make an impact for understanding. To walk away from this opportunity is to kill a chance for justice.
In America, the need is simply to make things right. Massive amounts of time and money may be required, but time and money mean much less than lives.
And the lives of many, we must remember, were not served by Dr. King unless we follow his tragedy with his glory. That would be the most satisfying for all.
Our tragedy