The Fire Next Time: List 3

After all, I had seen men dragged from their platforms on this very corner for saying less virulent things, and I had seen many crowds dispersed by policemen, with clubs or on horseback.

Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.

The bar was very crowded, and our altercation had been extremely noisy; not one customer in the bar had done anything to help us.

This is a stately mansion on Chicago’s South Side, and it is the headquarters of the Nation of Islam movement.

The affluent populations, which should have been their help, didn’t, as far as could be discovered, read, either—they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes.

I was introduced, they greeted me with a genuine cordiality and respect—and the respect increased my fright, for it meant that they expected something of me that I knew in my heart, for their sakes, I could not give—and we sat down.

Something came into the room with him—his disciples’ joy at seeing him, his joy at seeing them.

He teased the women, like a father, with no hint of that ugly and unctuous flirtatiousness I knew so well from other churches, and they responded like that, with great freedom and yet from a great and loving distance.

I can scarcely remember what we ate, except that it was plentiful, sane, and simple—so sane and simple that it made me feel extremely decadent, and I think that I drank, therefore, two glasses of milk.

Elijah mentioned having seen me on television and said that it seemed to him that I was not yet brainwashed and was trying to become myself. He said this in a curiously unnerving way, his eyes looking into mine and one hand half hiding his lips, as though he were trying to conceal bad teeth.

I looked around. It was a very young man who had said this, scarcely more than a boy—very dark and sober, very bitter.

There is nothing new in this merciless formulation except the explicitness of its symbols and the candor of its hatred.

No doubt I am guilty of some injustice here, but it is irreducible, since I cannot risk assuming that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms.

My weak, deluded scruples could avail nothing against the iron word of the prophet.

It is galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them.