THE POEM BOOK

JAMES BALDWIN

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Below is an excerpt from a documentary about James Baldwin. In 1963, Baldwin went to San Francisco and began a study tour of the city. He wanted to know about the state of race relations in a so called progressive city. Baldwin's San Francisco is an echo of Baltimore today: the city destroyed, the city 'recovered' through mass evictions and demolitions and the use of fire breaks to separate people along racial lines.

Take This Hammer, a study tour of San Francisco, 1963:
Link: https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/216518
Directed by Richard O. Moore


Boy: They trying to tear down our homes, brother.... Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, let me tell you. Now they talking about better jobs, jobs right here. You want me tell you what kind of jobs they gonna give us? They're gonna let us tear down on own homes. That's the job we're getting. And you know what they gonna pay us? Let me tell you want they're going to pay. They're going to pay you $2 an hour... I mean, what does that end up gaining you? That's not gaining you a thing. You won't get anything. They'll help you tear down your own home. It's a job, temporarily. And then what you going to do? Where you going to live? You're not going to live anywhere. They not even in the process of trying to tell you where you're going to live. All they're talking about is tearing down your house.

TV Reporter: How long have you been in San Francisco?

Boy: Well I've been in San Francisco about 18 years. Ever since I was a year or two old.

Baldwin: And you live around here, too.

Girl: Yeah.

TV Reporter: In temporary housing?

Girl: No, city projects. Ain't no temporary housing no more, they're tearing 'em down. Ain't no more. Ain't going to be no place when they get through. We're going to be living out on the streets.

TV Reporter: Does that make you feel bad?

Girl: Yeah, make you feel bad. Won't be no place to go. We'll be living out here on streets in tents.

TV Reporter: And where would you like to go if you could?

Girl: I'd like to stay up here on top of the hill.

TV Reporter: You would? How long you've been living on top of here?

Girl: Ever since I been born.

*

Man: And then this is part of a redevelopment also.

Baldwin: What do you mean? You say redevelopment meaning what?

Man: Removal of Negroes.

Baldwin: Uh-huh. Yes. That's what I thought you meant.

Man: In other words, a lot of the Negroes who came because the Japanese were pushed out, now are now being pushed out.

Baldwin: In effect, San Francisco is reclaiming this property to build it up, which means Negroes have to go.

Man: That's right.

Baldwin: Where are they going to go?

Man: Well, they're going out to Hunter's Point, and to the Haight-Ashbury area, and also into Ocean View, wherever they can find reasonable rents. South of Market, and all those other places. Wherever they can find cheap rent. In other words, going from one ghetto to the other.

Baldwin: Yes, yes. So, this is the Negro housing project in effect.

Man: Yes.

Baldwin: Uh-huh. I know a lot about housing projects in New York. But I am sure this isn't different at all.

Man: No, houses there have some of the same problems although the buildings, the exterior looks--

Baldwin: Oh, the exterior looks marvelous, that's the whole point. But I know what goes on inside. Correct me if I'm wrong... Better housing in the ghetto is simply not possible. You can build a few better plans but you cannot do anything about the moral and psychological effects of being in the ghetto. This is the point. Everybody living in those housing projects is just as endangered as ever before by all of the things that the ghetto means. By raising a kid in one of those housing projects I would still have, at the front door, or probably right next door in the housing project, all the things I was trying to escape. I mean, even such things as dealing with insurance companies if I want fire insurance, you know, to the fact that, in the playground, my boy or my girl will be exposed to the man who sells narcotics, for example, to a million forces which are inevitably set in motion when a people are despised. You can't pretend that you're not despised if you are. We were saying yesterday that children can't be fooled. But I could be fooled, and be glad about having a whatever it is, a terrace, a garage. But, my kid won't be. It's my kids that are being destroyed by this fantastic democracy.

It isn't only what it's doing to Negro children which is, God knows, bad enough. It's what it does to white children who grow up believing that it is more important to make a profit than it is to be a man. And that's the way that society really operates. I don't care what society says, this is how it operates and these are the goals it sets. And these goals aren't worthy of a man.

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TPB's notes: TAKE THIS HAMMER a study tour of San Francisco, 1963 was directed by Richard O. Moore, Link: https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/216518

"To send your email vote in support of Take this Hammer's nomination to the National Film Registry, please visit this web page at the Library of Congress's web site: http://www.loc.gov/film/vote.html.

Please note: copyright to Take this Hammer (the Director's Cut) is held by WNET. All rights reserved. WNET is the premier public media provider of the New York metropolitan area and parent of public television stations THIRTEEN and WLIW21. Take this Hammer (the Director's Cut) was originally produced by KQED for National Educational Television (NET) - the predecessor of WNET - and was never televised. After 15 minutes of footage was cut from the original version, a 44 minute edit first aired on February 4th 1964 at 7:30pm, on KQED Ch.9 in the Bay Area. This shorter broadcast edit was remastered by Monaco Digital Labs in 2009 and may also be viewed in DIVA.
KQED's mobile film unit follows author and activist James Baldwin in the spring of 1963, as he's driven around San Francisco to meet with members of the local African-American community. He is escorted by Youth For Service's Executive Director Orville Luster and intent on discovering: "The real situation of Negroes in the city, as opposed to the image San Francisco would like to present." He declares: "There is no moral distance ... between the facts of life in San Francisco and the facts of life in Birmingham. There is no moral distance ... between President Kennedy and Bull Connor because the same machine put them both in power. Someone's got to tell it like it is. And that's where it's at." Includes frank exchanges with local people on the street, meetings with community leaders and extended point-of-view sequences shot from a moving vehicle, featuring the Bayview Hunters Point and Western Addition neighborhoods. Baldwin reflects on the racial inequality that African-Americans are forced to confront and at one point tries to lift the morale of a young man by expressing his conviction that: "There will be a Negro president of this country but it will not be the country that we are sitting in now." The TV Archive would like to thank Darryl Cox for championing the merits of this film and for his determination that it be preserved and remastered for posterity.
Director Richard O. Moore was interviewed in 2012 by the TV Archive, and discussed the film production of Take this Hammer and working with Baldwin in The Making of Take this Hammer. As Moore notes, 15 minutes were cut from his original version by order of KQED's Board of Directors, some of whom felt the film cast San Francisco's race relations in an overly negative way. One board member stated that: "I believe we would all agree that it is not the function of KQED to produce inflammatory, distorted, sacrilegious, extremist programming under the name of educational television. I believe this program is all of these." The 59 minute Director's Cut was found in August 2013, as a result of information which came to light during the Moore interview and is preserved at San Francisco State University. Movette Film Transfer of San Francisco remastered this 16mm positive film print in August 2013 in 2K resolution (2048x1556 pixels), using a Kinetta film scanner. A low-res video screener was made publicly available for the first time ever from San Francisco State's Digital Information Virtual Archive (DIVA), in August 2013.
In March and April of 2014, the TV Archive worked with BAFTA Award winning sound editor John Nutt on a digital restoration of Take this Hammer's optical soundtrack, to improve sound quality. A screener featuring this audio restoration, synchronized with the 2K picture was uploaded to DIVA in April 2014. Sound editor John Nutt's explanation of this audio reiteration - together with a sample comparison between audio quality of the original optical soundtrack and the digitally restored soundtrack - are also available in DIVA."