♪ Listervelt> Good evening and welcome to For the People.

Two words describe our guest for this evening's program.

Those words are backbone and commitment.

They most aptly describe one of the most outspoken judges in the country, the Honorable Bruce Wright of the state Supreme Court of New York.

While serving on the bench of the Criminal Court of New York City, Judge Wright earned the uncharitable nickname, "Turn them loose Bruce" from the Policemen's Benevolent Association, because of his refusal to use bail as preventive detention against African Americans and Hispanic Americans.

After several senseless killings of African Americans by the police in New York City, Judge Wright lashed out at the police by saying, quote, "The police have a license to "hunt down Blacks and kill them with impunity", end quote.

Recently, Judge Wright spoke at a forum sponsored by the University of South Carolina Black Scholar Lecture Series.

And For The People.

Judge Wright> I've been handed a rather melancholy subject to address tonight.

It's more melancholy for me, I suppose, than for any of you because I address it every day.

So I speak to those of you, especially who are my fellow convicts, behind the bars of our hopes for humanity, my fellow inmates within the prisons of our Black skins, my fellow displaced persons and descendants of kidnaped Africans, my fellow sufferers from the wounds of America's cruel blessings, my fellow survivors of American Apartheid, my fellow dreamers, who perceive possibilities in an American education.

You're also my fellow visionaries, who believe that civilizing White America is more than just a mirage in the desert of our minds.

You are my fellow intellectuals, who think that you think and who believe that you believe.

Not only that, you are my fellow members of an endangered species, and also my fellow victims trapped in the treacherous comforts of America's racist holocaust.

You and I are Black cats, with nine lives.

And I salute you for not giving up.

And I praise you, for not surrendering to the melancholy brooding of the New England poet who wrote life goes on, but I don't remember why.

I kissed the hem of your garment, for believing that education and a university degree will help you become invisible to the slings and darts of an outrageous fortune.

And if I were deeply religious, and could believe that a merciful god presides over all, I would sing a hymn of praise to you for honoring scholarship in a time of incredible famine, cruise missiles, inner city rot, and the national miseducation of Black children in public schools.

So I celebrate your survival, and your freedom from suicide, at a time when many more people might commit suicide except for their fear of what the neighbors might say.

And I bow to you, for trying to emancipate America The Beautiful from its insanity over skin color.

I cheer your ability to prosper under a so-called civilization that is blinded by its eyes.

I'm astonished and always amazed that the Black sense of humor has been able to triumph, over the warning, that the Black Person who smiles has not yet been told the truth.

Tonight, test the tensile strength of your sanity by joining me and a Black brood on the troubling question, is justice denied, the African Americans and the United States Judicial system?

Justice is a riddle.

Some people, generally those caught in the magic thrall of religion and its charismatic, Pentecostal and emotional seizures believe that the law and justice are synonymous, but it's a riddle.

We may as well place tonight's question at the feet of the Sphinx, or in the mouth of the Oracle.

Life answers questions in Delphic codes and the raveled ends of an alien syntax.

For example, I question the Sphinx on the meaning of riddles, and was answered in phrases with no ends and no middles.

I asked, which was first, orgasm or seed in the lusty enigma of a Seminole creed?

The woman or lion posing as just said, life and death will be what they must.

So justice is the absent symmetry of that damned elusive Scarlet Pimpernel.

It is a vision passionately pursued by optimists.

Now I can see that some of you are very young.

And for those of you who are too young to be either cynical, or truthful, let me tell you what an optimist is.

An optimist is one who, believes that this is the best of all possible lives and the best of all possible worlds.

And a pessimist is one who believes that the optimist may just be right, "Damn it."

A searching for justice for Blacks in White America, where we are dark figures on an alien landscape, has had about as much success as the quest for the cure for cancer.

There is an incurable madness transmitted to the American brain.

As soon as its eyes behold the Republic's of a Black skin.

Still, daily, we must confront that demon of national torment known as racism.

Let us then gaze upon some of its manifestations in our Judicial system.

Perhaps in our ruminations, our wanderings, our public brooding, one among you may be able to hit upon a way in which to teach a retarded, White America the meaning of its own twin inventions, which they call, Democracy and the Constitution.

And let me tell you at the outset.

I am angry, as I seek to escape the infection that says, "whom the gods would destroy they first make mad."

However, in a world of limited options, we do what we must and seldom what we wish.

And with Omar, the tent maker, we can weep that oh, if we could grasp this sorry scheme of things and tire and shape it to our heart's desire.

Before dashing off into the Jabberwocky Land of the frubius bandersnatch, let me tell you briefly, how I became insane.

During the dirty 30s when lynchings and castrations of Black men were at their height, I received a four year scholarship to Princeton University.

I was 15.

I was skinny and Black, and I was taken from the registration line at that beautiful university and led to the office of the Dean of admissions, one, Radcliffe Heermance.

This Falstaffian figure was the first person ever to address me as Mr.

Wright.

And what he said, however, shattered the mirror of my self-image.

He said, with some degree of annoyance, "When Professor Weiss "arranged your scholarship, "he did not tell us you were Colored."

He then told me that he was so liberal that his Colored cook lived under the same roof with him and his family, and he bragged, about the patriotism of his World War One orderly who was Colored, and he then sent me packing.

Actually, I had not had time really to unpack.

My mother, whose experiment in integration when she married my Black father, lost her the love and affection of her Irish brothers muttered to my father, saying, "Oh.

Bruce, we should have sent him to Not And she thought her rosary and Hail Marys were an infallible passport to Heaven, at the appropriate time.

But Notre Dame was as stuffed with hypocrisy, as Princeton, and while Heermance had assured me that he had always had pleasant relationships with my people, Notre Dame said its first president had given up and freed his slaves before coming to South Bend to take up his duties.

And even before that rather surrealistic t I'd had the YMCA experience.

The Y ran a camp in those days between wars, which was called, Camp Washington, and when the segregated Blacks were there, we had Booker T. Washington's picture, above the fireplace in the dining hall.

But as we left, we had to put up George Washington's picture, because then the Whites were coming in for their two weeks.

It is better, it seems, that they should have honored the slave owner, rather than us.

We shortly after I was rebuffed by that, Vatican of football infallibility, Notre Dame, that I foreswore my childish allegiance, to altar boy piety, abandoned the Church of the resurrection, and became a clear thinker, on the subject of White Christianity.

And despite these corruptions of America, as a land where, God was rumored at least to have shed his good on brotherhood from sea to shining sea, it never occurred to me, that racism might somehow seep into the Judicial system and into the courts.

Here in South Carolina of course, you are isolated from racism and its penalties that incinerate the human spirit, like the vengeful arson of Satan.

It's unknown to you here, but racism is America's sociopolitical staple.

It is a crippling disease that slices off the legs of Blacks, and then condemns them for not running the 100 meters in nine seconds flat.

It thrives in the country's most elegant homes, its clubs, its tawdry tenements, South Boston's Irish Ghetto, Park Avenue's cathedrals of commerce.

If I expected it, somehow to miss the Judicial system, it was because I was lost in the midst of the waste and the ruin of celibacy, while unaware of its furtive joys and celebrations.

And yet, I came of age, fought a war against Hitler's racism, in a regiment, dictated to by the racism of America's segregation.

It didn't make sense.

And obviously I became assimilated.

I hope, however, that I have not become an Afro Saxon, despite my adoption of Western civilization and a necktie.

Of course, such an adoption may or may not be a good thing.

George Bernard Shaw said about civilization, that America is the only country in the world to have suffered a decline and fall in its civilization before becoming civilized.

And he was so exasperated with American pretensions that he once said that he believed that the other planets were using the Earth as its lunatic asylum.

And yet, we can smile, as though discounting the wise elder's observation about not knowing the truth.

For those of us who remember the power of the law, it is disheartening to see how justice "comes a cropper", in the hands of those who live by a credo of bias.

And Blacks have striven, so heroically to emancipate America from its insanity over skin color, and yet America remains blinded by its eyes.

Some of you may be old enough to remember a famous case called Brown versus the Board of Education.

It was certainly hailed and cheered.

I was cheering in the streets, as I recall, when that decision came down.

But it was one of the greatest pieces of pious hypocrisy ever to come from the Supreme Court of the United States.

First, it said that segregation in the public schools based on race, was unconstitutional, and then, in effect it allowed segregationists to continue their evil deprivation by being told in the mildest manner possible, you can desegregate, but with all deliberate speed, whatever that means.

And seizing upon that treason of words there was laid the foundation for many, many more lawsuits.

And what a shameful display was put on by the great and powerful congressmen of this country.

William Fulbright, you remember him, Phi Beta Kappa, Rhodes Scholar, Senator from Arkansas, who himself provided something we call the Fulbright Awards.

He signed the so-called Southern Manifesto to interpose the will of the South, against Brown, but he was not alone.

In a national splurge of racism, Fulbright was joined in his hateful folly by such virtuous Klan philosophers as Sam Erwin.

You remember him, the senator from North Carolina who never leaves home without his American Express card, and a former judge.

He proudly hands out, handed out copies, of the United States Constitution to everyone who visited his Senate chambers.

There was a perfect example of people of power having no goodwill and people of goodwill, having no power.

Confirmed for all the world to see, was a line from the Walter Benton poem, which he called, "This is my Beloved".

And that poem starts, hate is legislated, shot into the veins, like a vaccine.

And so Brown versus the Board of Education has become the official false face of judicial pretension.

There is so much institutionalized racism in our lives that the Judicial system could not be expe to escape or be shriven, once contaminated.

America today is in a posture of strange and contradictory vexations.

Conservatism is the cry of the day, and makes one wonder when the country turns right, what's left?

Your president, President Reagan supports the death penalty.

At the same time, he joins the right to life zealots against abortion.

That's very strange, but everybody who's for the death penalty, is against abortion.

Society condemns transvestites, for example.

But at the same time, it tolerates the Ku Klux Klan, and, you know, they dress in drag.

(laughter) The United States Supreme Court has said that sodomy, even when practiced by consenting adults, married to each other, may still be prosecuted by the state.

Presumably, the prosecutor needs an undercover agent as a witness to such bedtime stories.

And if justice is denied in the Judicial system, it may well be because bigotry and bias has come from the national fountainhead, Washington itself.

For example, there is Reagan's woman at the United Nations, Dr.

Jeane Kirkpatrick.

And last year, as you may remember, she met secretly with several gentlemen from the South African military.

And when her rendezvous was revealed and her close relations with sponsors of apartheid criticized, Dr.

Kirkpatrick, became petulant and defensive.

And she said on the front page, of The New York Times, a racial dictatorship is not as bad as a Communist one.

Well, I haven't had a Communist one.

She has mercifully decided to take her anti-Black mouthings elsewhere.

She has retired.

Long may she vanish.

In 1980, Reagan, your president, while campaigning, deliberately selected Philadelphia, Mississippi to speak out in support of states' rights.

States' rights that had so many of us lynched with impunity to the lynchers for many years in this country.

And despite the fact that he must have known that Philadelphia was the place where three civil rights workers had been tortured, and murdered by the sheriff and his deputies.

In 1984, the same President Reagan, a little less gray, took to the radio to accuse Black leaders of creating two Americas, one White, one Black.

We did that.

This theory of creation only italicizes how retarded our president can be when it comes to skin color in America and the two Americas.

In October of 1984 to show that he was consistent, Reagan went to Macon, Georgia.

And there before a mostly White audience, where Confederate flags were as numerous as the stars and stripes.

He invoked the name of Jefferson Davis and cried out with passionate zeal that the South will rise again.

That's your president.

Only his hairdresser knows for sure.

(laughter) And of course, with Justices Brennan and Thurgood Marshall nearing 80, Reagan will soon be able to lay his conservative imprint more solidly than ever upon the Supreme Court.

And American apartheid has become so attractive to those old one of the old civil rights guys named Roy Inez.

The fearless leader of corps, that he appears to have become a Republican, apparently not the worst thing he has been.

And here we are in the great state of South Carolina, where Jimmy Byrnes once ruled supreme.

And he will be remembered as the man who employed a New York lawyer to argue against the public school integration.

And he used tax funds to reimburse the lawyer, both Black and White taxes were integrated for that purpose.

Or did he segregate White taxes, from Black ones.

The ghost of Jimmy Byrnes must be spinning in its grave to know that Afro-American Studies are now housed in the Byrnes International Center.

Justice sometimes rivals, the aberrations of a Dr.

Strangelove.

And years ago, In our Black fight to rehabilitate justice we used to have Jewish allies in this country that may surprise some of you.

But they disappeared with the Civil Rights movement, that glorious brief period in our history, which now appears to have been a little better, than skywriting on a windy midnight.

Now the Jews have elected to pass for White, but whether they know it or not, they may be an even more endangered species than the Blacks in a White Christian world.

For many years, I campaigned to have Jack Greenberg removed as the Head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

I was called an anti-Semite for that.

Although I was directing my criticism at J not the Jews.

His presence as the leader of a Black intellectual revolution was a scandal and an insult to every Black lawyer in this country, as though Black lawyers were incompetent to lead our own Civil Rights struggle, in the courts and elsewhere.

Of course, we need allies among the Whites.

And we need allies among those who pass for White.

But we don't need their leadership.

I used to complain that we were the only Civil Rights people with an alien to our ordeal as our leader.

And when I was asked by some Jewish friends to stop inveighing against Jack Greenberg, I told them that when the Catholic Church is ready for a Communist atheist as its Counsel, and when the Women's Movement is ready for a sexless wife beater, as its counsel, then, and when B'nai B'rith is ready for Yasser Arafat as its counsel, then we will be ready for a White leader of our struggle.

Well, Jack is now gone.

I didn't do it.

He did it.

He has retired to become a professor of the Black Ordeal at Columbia University.

And to write books as an expert on us.

But before he left, what he said, in the New York Times is important and interesting.

And he spoke about the gulf, between Blacks and Jews in this country.

Quote.

"I really must say, "that I lay the largest part of the responsibility, "on some organizations in the Jewish community, "Like the Anti-Defamation League, "which has for no reason that I can possibly imagine, has taken up a crusade, against affirmative action.

You know, about the Bakke case, I'm sure.

You know that, that's the case that murdered affirmative action, assassinated it from ambush, and is now buried in an unmarked grave in the Middle American mind.

What a tragedy that the two great minorities in America should be at odds and both of us should be allies in the same struggle.

I think that one of the problems with justice for Blacks in the court system is that Whites no longer see us as a downtrodden and helpless group.

When it comes to basketball, at least, the White athletes seem to be the helpless ones.

Look at the colleges of the nation today.

They had the chutzpah.

That's translated, "testicles" for those of you who don't know Yiddish.

Look at what they do.

Even those colleges in this country and in this section of the world, who wouldn't allow Blacks on the campus years ago, now have basketball teams that are all Black.

A Black man has won the title of Mr.

Universe.

Two Black women have been Miss America.

One had some problems, of course.

(laughter) Leontyne Price dominated opera for all the time she was on the stage.

Some of America's major cities have Black mayors.

Professional football is dominated by Blac and how can you feel sorry for a man under two tons of White flesh on a football field, who gets up and swaggers back to the huddle for more?

Then there's a Mr.

Johnson of Ebony and Johnson Publications, said to be one of the richest men in this The makers and shakers of American Policy see this.

They think that Blacks are in a posture of national triumph.

They don't need any help.

They forget, we haven't seen any Black polo players, swimming team members in the Olympics, hockey players, chess, tennis, bowling, and the judiciary is still very White.

At the last count, we had about 600 Black judges in this country from coast to coast.

Six hundred, that includes America's possessions in the Caribbean.

Only 600.

You won't find any in Idaho or Wyoming or Montana or the Dakotas.

And the powerbrokers, see that we have moved on now from being sharecroppers to shareholders in some of America's most prestigious corporations.

Peter de Vries, a White author who teaches I believe at Smith College, has written a book entitled Mrs.

Wallop.

And in that book, he marvels at the progress of Blacks in America.

And he said that many Black families now have at least two cars, one of which may be a Mercedes or a Cadillac.

Many have townhouses, he said, and suburban homes, as well.

And incredibly, he said, some Negroes even have yachts.

And he said, the next book written about the suburbanization of the American Negro, will have to be entitled Uncle Tom's Cabin Cruiser.

Now, it's too bad that a few Afro Saxons are regarded as success for all of us.

This has resulted in a certain amount of unfortunate tribalism among us.

And instead of uniting behind Jesse Jackson, for example, last Fall and frightening political America into recognizing our Black power, we fragmented ourselves into Democrats, Republicans, socialists, Liberals, Conservatives, Communists, and whatever.

What a marvelous impact it would have been had we all united to vote for Jesse Jackson.

All of us should know by now that there is little distinction between the Democrats and the Republicans in this country.

The Democrats believe in a Republican form of government, and the Republicans believe in a Democratic form of government.

This is important to remember when we think of the perfidies and betrayals of Black trust by both major parties.

Sometimes I become so disconsolate in winters of my discontent that I believe a Brooklyn guru, who told me one day, he says, "You know, Bruce, the only Black power we' in this country, is if all Whites die immediately.

Now, while this is an interesting thought, the probabilities of White cooperation are rather discouraging.

Meanwhile, the Black bourgeoisie, the Afro Saxons, the smug, the complacent, the self-satisfied, the respectable Negroes, that is, in close cooperation with the Urban Leaguem and Delta Sigma Theta and Alpha Phi Alpha.

This is a rumor, remember, are staging a beauty contest with the winner.

to be crowned "Mis...cegenation" I suppose that the only sturdy characteristic, that remains from our diluted African genes is, unhappily, tribalism.

Once again, one of the historical truths, we have nevertheless revealed to America is that people of power, have no goodwill, and people of goodwill, have no power.

Still, we must not forego the task of trying to rehabilitate this country's sociology.

Now, I apologize for these asides and animate versions, but they are a rather necessary background, or "Black-ground" to understanding the quixotic aberrations in our Judicial system.

Indeed, it is extremely difficult to telescope so many psycho political complications into a single lecture.

In the past, I have had entire semesters to lecture on this subject, and those who got the highest grades, were the White students, I'm sorry to advise you.

The Judicial system in this country is the mirror image of the rest of life in America.

And once you see that the nation's moral c are based on Christianity and religion, then you should not be surprised at any, any anti-intellectualism.

In this month, when we Blacks have our rituals and special obsequies over Black history, it is well also to remember, just how we got here, more so than the Jews and their sacred ordeal with their great seven thousand year old b we, the Blacks in this country, should pause at least once a year, and allow a little child to ask an elder of the tribe, "O father, how is this time so different from all others?"

And the elder would reply, "We were once slaves."

A Black police officer gave a White man a summons, recently in New York.

And the White man's reaction was to take his fist and punch the Black police officer in his mouth.

He then tore up the summons, in the presence of the officer to show his contempt.

He was tried and found guilty.

The judge, who happens to be a rabbi, also refused to sentence the man to jail, saying that with his blond hair and his blue eyes, he would be raped by the Black and Hispanic prisoners.

So he sentenced the man to write an essay.

(Audience laughs) The subject is not revealed.