Books: "What Truth Sounds Like" By Michael Eric Dyson

  

What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America

By Michael Eric Dyson

St. Martin's; paperback, 304 pages; $18.00

Michael Eric Dyson, one of the premier public intellectuals, is a Distinguished University Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies, College of Arts and Science, and of Ethics and Society, Divinity School, and NEH Centennial Chair at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of many New York Times bestsellers, including Tears We Cannot Stop, JAY-Z, and Long Time Coming. 

In the compelling book, What Truth Sounds Like, which was originally released in 2018 and is now in paperback, Dyson looks at a seminal moment in the civil rights movement.

In 1963, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy sought out writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin to explain the rage that threatened to engulf black America. 

Baldwin invited some friends of his to the meeting, including boldface names like actor and singer Harry Belafonte, singer Lena Horne, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, psychologist Kenneth Clark, who became a leading Civil rights activist after World War II, and activist Jerome Smith.

Baldwin also sought a wide-range of opinion, from different walks of life as well as race. He invited his secretary, Edward False, and his brother, David, as well as Thais Aubrey, a friend of David, and his attorney, Clarence Jones, who also served as Martin Luther King Jr.'s lawyer. Also brought into the meeting by Baldwin were white people such as his agent, Robert Park Mills, the actor Rip Torn, and television producer Henry Morgenthau III.

As much as the meeting itself was important, Dyson brings out the delicacy in just getting them all in the room. Belafonte, who turned his stardom, which included performing Calypso music, was wary of attending because he didn't want anything said by the group to be used by Kennedy against King and other civil rights leaders. 

While the four biggest names there were Belafonte, Hansberry, Horne, and Clark, they all recognized that Jerome Smith, a Freedom Rider, "was the most important witness to black struggle in their midst," writes Dyson. "He happened to be in town receving medical treatment for his vicious beatings at the hands of white hooligans, those in uniform and not."

The meeting was held at the Kennedy family's New York City residence at 24 Central Park South. This was also where John F. Kennedy had his first face-to-face meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. while he was running for president in 1960.

The thing that appealed to both Baldwin and Robert F. Kennedy about this meeting was that they, as Dyson writes, "were on the same page when it came to getting black folk in that room who hadn't been deputized by a civil rights group and therefore were not beholden to official and safe lines of thought."

While John F. Kennedy had support in the black community, there were some who did not view favorably due to his courting of Southern white leaders and not advancing civil rights that rapidly, as he viewed the idea of equality in the abstract, while not fully a massive overhaul of racial politics. 

Robert was viewed as, if not fully, but mostly his brother's opposite, that while he wasn't as well-versed in it, he sought to make a difference. With this meeting, it all came to a head, as Bobby, as he was known, confronted the attendees in a way he took on the legitimacy of politics in a manner that might have impressed King, but not this group.

One thing Dyson does a phenomenal job of doing is giving the perspective of each participant and the meaning of terms. Baldwin didn't see the point of public policy changes if the value of a black life had yet to be established. When he wanted to present himself as a "witness," it meant his voice being heard, and the ability to be seen, or witnessed. 

Kennedy started the meeting by listing all the things that his brother's administration did for civil rights, but as Dyson points out, that wasn't much of an achievement, as anything on the topic until then was minimal at best.

The nearly three-hour meeting, which graced the cover of the New York Times the next morning, left Bobby Kennedy angry, that they didn't understand politics, weren't as easy to talk to as King, and were more interested in witness than policy. 

Kennedy's anger did turn to empathy, especially for Jerome Smith, as he conceded during a debate on the meaning of patriotism, "I guess if I were in his shoes...I might feel differently about this country." 

Ultimately, the meeting transformed Kennedy's thinking in fundamental ways, and this book has resonance today as a lot of the issues touched on here still persist. It has to be noted that this book was released when Donald Trump was early his first term as President, so fitting this is now out in paperback as he returned to the White House.

In this excerpt, Dyson writes of why this meeting held such resonance for him: "America, Baldwin believed, was split in two - not between North and South but between the powerful and the disenfranchised. Racism, that scourge that beclouded our democracy, remained - remains - the nation's greatest peril. But the powerful maintained the status quo by sowing discord among the disenfranchised. Poor white folk, rather than uniting with their socioeconomically oppressed brothers and sisters against the rich, trained their ire on poor black folk. They channeled their anxieties into a vengeance against blackness...

Bobby Kennedy was widely viewed as a white man of means who was willing to lay it all on the line to help the vulnerable in our nation. As a politician, he seemed to spurn small talk for big ideas; he could be blunt, sometimes angry, in the pursuit of his goals, but he was willing to learn by listening. First as attorney general, then as a senator, and later as a presidential candidate, Bobby was eager to engage folk, to come face-to-face with people who might have interesting and helpful points of view.

Bobby's eagerness to engage occasionally got him more than he'd bargained for, and that was never truer than when he had an encounter that felt as if he had stepped onto a fast-moving train of rage and grief. When he invited James Baldwin to assemble an intimate gathering of friends to discuss rave in May 1963, he had no idea that he was setting himself up for a colossal failure. He didn't anticipate the sober lesson ahead: even elite Negroes, no matter their station, feel the pain of their less fortunate brothers and sisters; they remain in tough with their people, and indeed, with their very humanity.

The meeting intrigues me because it teamed Bobby and Jimmy, and though he was absent, Martin Luther King Jr., as motal touchstone and racial reference. I heard over the years how explosive it was, hot it brought together other folk I had admired, including Harry Belafonte. The gathering pitted an earnest if defensive white liberal against a raging phalanx of thinkers, activists, and entertainers who were out for blood...

Each of the groups that participated in that bitter clash - the politicians, the artists, the intellectuals, the activists - is vital if we are to continue the conversation on race that began that day."