Take This Hammer + The Negro and the American Promise

Take This Hammer
Richard O. Moore, USA, 1963, digital projection, 58m
James Baldwin’s devastating 1963 tour of San Francisco, filmed and released by KQED, documents the struggle to shield black children in the city from the almost universal message of dispossession and despair that at the time engulfed communities already under siege by the forces of gentrification and urban renewal: “What precisely do you say to a Negro child to invest him with a moral which the country is determined he shan’t have … To insist that he know that he can do anything he wants to?”

The Negro and the American Promise
WGBH, USA, 1963, digital projection, 59m
This is a series of three interviews for Boston public television, with Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X speaking individually with Kenneth Clark, commenting one another’s ideas and philosophies, just after the now-infamous meeting with Robert Kennedy. The New York Times characterized Baldwin’s powerful segment as “a television experience that seared the consciousness.”