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GORDON PARKS: I have now started preaching universality to especially Black students everywhere I go, telling them that somehow or another universality too because-- I have now started preaching universality to especially Black students, everywhere I go, telling them that somehow or another, their stuff must have universal themes. That's the main reason everyone wanted to get me here because I told her this on the telephone.

I learned this, I don't know where I learned it from. I guess my mother, who didn't even go to school, taught me this when I was-- before I came to Minnesota and she died when I was 16. I was talking to Evan this morning and I said she's talking about all the things I've done well, all those things I did was to exist, to live because I didn't finish high school.

And I wanted to be somebody. And I knew if I wanted to be somebody I had to get up off my tail and do a few things. I think that in the 1960s, we Blacks found out who we were. A lot of people died, suffered like Martin Luther King and the Kennedys, and a lot of other people, Edgar, and a lot of other people. So we know who we are now.

My main thrust now is that this is a spectrum. You walk in and say you're a Black writer, they're going to say, OK, Two years from now, we're going to do some black stories, so we'll look you up. I want to be there every day. When I went to work for Life Magazine way back in 1948, I told them that then I don't know why, but they accepted it. I went to work at Vogue, they told me the same thing. And I said this is under the circumstances which I work for you.

And as badly as I needed a job, those were my demands. I think I learned that from Sara Parks, my mother, who would never, in a sense, take my Blackness as a reason for not being a success. She says you can do anything a White boy does, and you should be able to do it better. And so don't come home with any excuses. Come home with some good marks and do whatever you have to do.

So in a racist nation, which is still a-- we can still call it a racist nation, one has to learn how to fight these things. If you want to be universally accepted, you have to do things with universal concepts. If you want to be accepted as a great artist in Russia, China, and Japan or wherever, you have to think in universal terms. You can't put yourself in a corner and hang out there with your Blackness.

In Hollywood, since we started Black films there, some of the young Black directors and things have suffered terribly and the actresses and actresses also have suffered, because Hollywood saw that there was money there and they took it away from some of the young Black directors, and so forth and so on. Now and then you'll see a Black actor in a white film and so forth and so on.

And a lot of the young directors and things come to me and the moviemakers and says, well, they gave us a start and they took it away from us. What do we do about it? You don't cry about it. You have to do something about it yourself.

I, for instance, as an example, I'm doing a novel now called Shannon. It's an Irish novel. So I've done a year and a half of research on it. And I've written on it for now for three years. I slept a Black guy in the back door who takes a novel over in the end. Name is Hannibal Jones.

Now, if I had called it novel Hannibal Jones, it would probably still be on the shelf. But I called it Shannon. And in the first week, five major companies bid for it big figures. Now, when it's finished, the screenplay is finished and I come back to the directors, I can see somebody sitting up at Hollywood or Warner Brothers or some hour MGM or someplace, there's a Black guy to direct an Irish novel and somebody will say, well, he wrote it, remember?

So this is the way you solve these situations. This is the way you have to do it. If your poem does not get a message across to a woman or a man in Vladivostok as well as it does in Harlem, South side of Chicago, North side of Minneapolis, you haven't succeeded. If your painting doesn't do that, if what you write, if you were a dancer and you should be able to dance with the Bolshoi if you have to, as well as South St. Paul.

This is what I'm talking about. This is the way you've got to think now. If you're going to survive in this very, very difficult world, you've got to think in universal concepts. And so you just don't want to be here. And let everyone else have the rest of this. That was dangerous talk a few years ago because everybody said Blackness fist in the air. do your Black thing.

Of course, I do my Black thing, but I don't do my white thing too, you understand? I do my universal thing. That's the only way. A lot of kids ask me how I made it through that time. I made it only because I first thought of myself as an artist. My Blackness was next.

I was speaking to a group at Princeton recently, a little Black kid popped up and he says, but what about your responsibility as a Black man? I said you asked me to come here, didn't you? You must be proud of me, or you wouldn't have me here. So my accomplishment as a Black man says that I'm Black, and that a Black man can do what anybody else can do in these particular different fields.

So if I didn't say any more than what I've said now, that's what I come out here to say to you, because I grew up here. And this was the toughest part of my life, was here right in Minnesota. And when my mother died and I was 16, she got me out of Kansas because she thought that I was going to have to suffer the discrimination. And in Kansas, that was so rampant at that time.

But when I got here, it was worse. And I got thrown out in 32 degrees below zero weather with $2.5. And I used to sit in Jim Williams Pool Hall, which none of you-- you all probably be too young to remember. And I'd ride the streetcar between Minneapolis and St. Paul every night so that I would ride that timeout. So that I could go to mechanic arts high school the next day to keep warm and study.

And the janitor would give me a donut, a cup of coffee. And I would hang out there and go back to the Pool Hall, keep my books, study at night at the pool tables back on the streetcar tonight until my $2.5 ran out of $0.10 a ride then. But that's what it was all about. So this is a creative conference, and so I'm going to say a little bit about creativity. And it has many facets in many different meanings.

For some, it is a psychological process of which the ultimate product is fully conceived. For others, it is the solving of an artistic problem of some sort that challenges an individual's ability to express himself or herself in some unique way. For still others, creativity is not the process but the end product, or you might refer to it as a result.

For most of us, however, creativity is simply the bringing of something new and worthwhile into our existence. Anyone I feel would be hard put to assign a single definition to this multifaceted phenomenon. The very best we can do is to think of it as a heading under which a number of creative achievements can be listed. There is a creative process, the end product, the creative person, and the creative situation.

When dealing with either one of these aspects, one must consider the nature, the quality, the kind of psychological process used to arrive at that solution, and also understand what the creative situation is that surrounds it, because circumstances cultural and social leanings invariably influence the creative thought and the achievement.

Because time is limited, I will confine myself to creativity in the light of my own personal experience. That experience has always been more closely associated with the creative situation. And it has strongly influenced my efforts in photography versus literature, music, and film. All aspects of creativity start with a problem. And naturally, that problem simply goads one's aspirations into doing something better than is normally done.

But first, there is a long period of preparation in which one must acquire the experience, the skill, and the technique to face a problem confronting him, then comes the inevitable frustration of trying to make that experience and that skill and technique work. The problems I faced in my situation, my creative situation, were poverty, racism, and segregation in Kansas, where I was born, in Minnesota where I was brought up, and in Washington D.C. where I came to work for Roy Stryker and at the Farm Security Administration in 1942.

Those problems stemmed from a situation, and I had hopes of eradicating them with a camera. The experience had been thrust upon me. Acquiring a skill for the use of the camera was the easiest thing of all. It was finding a technique to best express my discontent that was most difficult and that brought the most frustration. It meant considerably more than taking a picture of someone who refused me entrance to a theater or to a clothing store, or refused to serve me in a restaurant then capturing the picture with the word bigot. Unfortunately, bigots have a way of looking like everybody else.

Well, such things happened to me there at Washington D.C. in 1942 at the theaters and the restaurants. And the Farm Security Administration was the right place for me to develop a technique, and Roy Stryker was the right man to show me how to apply it. For weeks, I kept studying the photographs of fine photographers like Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Walker Evans, John Vachon, Arthur Rothstein, and others to expose the evils of my problem with their cameras and they were white men.

There, in that old red brick building that still stands at 14th and Independence Avenue, where the endless files of pictures of Okies and the road and the jalopies living in shacks and shanties, pictures of poor whites, poor Blacks, poor Indians and Mexicans suffering the injustices of hunger and poverty and discrimination that I had discovered. So one thing that I learned there, very quickly, is that suffering is universal, that you didn't suffer alone in slavery, and so forth and so on.

If you were to see the notes that I've taken in writing Shannon, you'd find out that what the Irish went through under the English and Cromwell made slavery look like as though you were living in mansions. That children couldn't even go to school, they couldn't own a horse that cost more than $5. If they did, they were thrown in jail for four or five years. They were hung up by their toes and squares, heads chopped off, brought their kids to see them.

It was a terrible situation under the English, our most civilized country today. But I learned a lot about people. And the book Shannon deals with how the Irish suffered under the English, how the Blacks suffered under the Irish, and it goes on and on and on, the Jewish, how they suffered. So suffering of that sort is universal.

And if there's one thing I've learned, that's most important to me throughout my lifetime, is that I have learned to accept mankind no matter what color it is, no matter where he was born, no matter what his religion. I've learned to accept him for what he is because I can't forget from where I came.

Here in Minnesota, when I was really down, I needed help, the woman who extended her hand to me was an Irish woman. Madeline Murphy, who was at store right there in St. Paul, you possibly read about it in A Choice of Weapons. Harvey Goldstein, a Jewish boy-- we got an Irish, we got a Jewish boy.

Blacks helped me. Blacks hurt me. My own brother-in-law kicked me out in the snow that morning of 32 degrees below zero. Blacks helped me. Blacks hurt me. Whites helped me. Whites hurt me. So I have to stop and look at that. I have to tell you the honesty of my beginnings, and what I've come to, and the things that have brought me to wherever I am. I don't know where I am, but wherever I am, that's what happened.

Stryker's philosophy who was the White man, was that of the showing the root of the evil with the cameras became my philosophy, as well as the incentive toward creativity. The kind that pointed out what a lot of Americans at that time wished to overlook. However, the fact that I had a new approach to my problem did not ensure that it would be solved creatively, or for that matter, solved at all.

When you look at what's happening down in Miami, I wonder if it's-- first, I had yet to try and analyze the complexity of it. Two, I would have to read a lot, remember a lot, do a lot of planning and make some decisions on my own. It was all a part of that creative process that would have to fit the needs of my situation and meanwhile accomplished some recognizable goal.

Day after day, month after month, I developed them and found a way to communicate them to others, and to hope that they might, in some way, benefit the whole human existence. This meant relying on my perceptions, my emotions, my motivations, and the turbulence of my childhood. And what I'm trying to say, I used these things that happened to me in Minnesota in a way that helped me move along.

In other words, instead of taking a knife and cutting somebody's throat, I have commercialized on my emotions. Do you understand what I'm saying? OK. If I feel angry today, I'm going home and write an angry poem and get some money off of it. If a white man made me angry, white man pays me for the poem that made me angry because he did something to me, you understand? This is what I'm trying to say.

I once, when I did a story on the Panthers, a little chap came up to me with the red manifesto from Marxism and so forth and so on, and was telling me all about Marx. I said yes, I know about Marx. I said, but I don't need Marx to tell me how to suffer. I'm a Black man. I can probably tell Marx what suffering is all about. So I don't need that.

He asked me, if I were to write the Choice of Weapons today, would I write the same way? I said, of course, I wouldn't change a word in it. I said, we're fighting the same cause. It was the NAACP, it was the Urban League. That's been a breath there. You can name all of them. And we needed the Panthers, we needed the Muslims, we needed everybody to show that we had a strong front. Everybody was there to do their thing.

We needed a Roy Wilkins, we needed a Martin Luther King. We needed everybody. . We all came together. That was the greatest moment in our lives when we did come together and do something about it. We had a lot of whites working with us. We had a lot of other people working with us. Those people who died too, a lot of the White ministers and things who died by our sides down there when we were down there protesting. We can't forget those people. We can't forget those things.

And that's what I keep preaching about universal thought, universal feeling. And I told this kid, look, my message in the learning tree, they say now has reached over 5 million people, by now, it's probably reached 6 or 7 million. We'll take another-- the picture probably reached 50 million. Your knife reaches one throat, my book reach reaches 30 million people, which is more important?

I'm here this morning talking to you, that kid is dead. You understand? Now, I could have taken the knife, I could have taken a gun, I could have done the same thing he did. But I think it was more important that I survive and teach other Black kids, other white kids, other Mexicans, other Spanish kids the thing that has propelled me to everywhere I will go.

Certainly, I'm not proud of the fact that I didn't go to high school. I wished sincerely that I had gone, to finish high school, rather. The 16 honorary degrees by now, I appreciate them, but I think that a high school diploma would have been more important to me.

I remember when I addressed the John F. Kennedy High School graduating class about four years ago, and the principal told the graduating students that I had not finished high school but had X number of degrees, and I got up and said, well, don't let that fool you. Finish high school. And the kids voted that I should finish high school with them. So I finished high school finally about four years ago. I got my diploma.

[APPLAUSE]

I have all those degrees. If you come to my den, as this young man was there a couple of weeks ago, you see that the high school diploma is right up front. I love verse, I suppose, if I were to be told that, OK, you're going to have one thing Gordon, providence is going to will you one thing, what would you do?

I think possibly I would sit down and write poetry for the rest of my life because it's so serene. You say what you have to say and precisely, concisely. And you must say it quickly and not flub it up all over the place. I write poetry usually before I start writing a big book because it makes me more concise. It makes me more demanding of myself.

I learned to write music, to write words, and everything simply out of the press process of individual need to be somebody. I didn't have formal training in any of it. That doesn't mean that-- the fact that I didn't doesn't mean that you shouldn't as younger people get every ounce of learning that you possibly can because you should, because it will only help you more.

All people don't think like I do. You will need possibly more of than I needed. It's a different time. But . F. Scott Fitzgerald, who came from this neck of the woods once wrote that, "We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives-- experiences so great and so moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been caught up, and pounded, and dazzled, and astonished, and beaten and broken, and rescued, and illuminated, and rewarded, and humbled in just that way ever before.

Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories-- each time in a new disguise-- maybe 10 times, maybe 100, as long as people will listen. Whether it's something that happened 20 years ago or only yesterday, I must start out with an emotion, one that's close to me and one that I can understand." I was about seven years old when a very peculiar fantasy kindled my love for music. The Kansas day was hot, and I was hunting for June bugs in my father's cornfield when I heard the murmuring.

For the first time in my life, I heard symphony music in a cornfield. I never had a chance to hear it otherwise, not in Kansas and Fort Scott Kansas. But it came to me. And I looked up in the clouds and I heard this drums, and I heard the trumpets, and so forth and so on. We had an old upright Kimball piano, I remember.

And my father was out in the cornfield, and I went in there and I started banging on that piano. And my father came in from the cornfield scratching his head and thought I'd gone crazy. Well, Jack Parks thought boys should ride horses and feed the pigs and the chickens, and so forth and so on, but stay off of the piano, that was for the girls. And unless my mother was around, I couldn't touch that piano. Not that my father wasn't a nice man. He was a wonderful man.

He would dig in his pockets and give me his last dime, but he just thought differently at that time. So my mother was around, I could learn to play the piano. That was a daydream. I capitalized on that daydream. I never forgot it. I sat down from that day on, I started playing the piano. People ask me today, how long have you been playing the piano? I don't know. As long as I can remember, I've been playing the piano.

I can't explain where that dream came from, that daydream. All I know is it was there. And it gave me the intense desire to compose music from then on. And it also introduced me to the trials of learning the hard way. Since I didn't have a chance for musical education, I had to grapple with whatever I had at my fingertips.

So in Paris, when I first started to compose, I had to learn a system of putting down notes, which I used to translate into numbers. So if I had a theme that said, la, la la, la, I put one, two, three, four. But I put the number one.

In other words, I was not going to let the fact that I didn't have a formal training stop me. And I worked like that in the number system, which is difficult, which is even startled Einstein for 2 and 1/2 years to get down my original theme so that as I learned to put music down, at least I had not lost my first creative urge and my first creative outlet. That's what I mean by being persistent, not letting anything stop you.

I used to think, as I did this, look, I'm not that secure in any of these things, but suppose I lost an arm, well, I learned how to play with one hand, or possibly if I lost both hands, I'd learn how to write with my toes. I had it all figured out. If I was blind, I could play the piano. That's the way I think today. That's the way you must think. Nothing can stop you, absolutely nothing, if you want very much to do something.

I think of my good friend Althea Gibson who we picked up off the streets of Harlem. One day, she bowed before the queen of England as the champion of the world. That's the kind of determination that we must instill into our young people, and you young people here must think of. You must never let anything stop you. But first, you have to have the desire. If you don't have the desire, forget it. You have to dream yourself.

I have dreamed myself into situations so deeply that the only way out was for me to accomplish. And this is what I'm talking about. This dream and dream, lives off the dream. I want this. Don't let any dream be too high for you. Just keep going.

For me, the poetry, the photography, the films, and all of it is sort of a grand Dukes mixture. And it's all a mixture of creativity. I find that music is possibly the most difficult. And I'm more in awe of it and more respectful of it than the other processes because it defies me it also beats me and breaks me up and pushes me around, and challenges me to pull a note out of the air from nowhere. And add a 10,000 notes to it to make a symphony or a piano concerto.

I used to wonder a long time about myself as to whether why I did all these things. And I realize now that I used to think that it was the sort of a professional restlessness. But in retrospect, I realized that in those early days, it was a constant rebellion against failure. I wanted to be somebody, so I created those desires until I was drowning in them.

And before I would attempt to leave them alone, I would have to swim myself out of it. And it was all more difficult because I had not finished high school. But perhaps if I had been fortunate enough to have gone to college and study medicine, engineering, architecture, whatever, I more than likely would have given all of my time to one particular avocation. As it happened, I tried several fields. And as I told you in case one failed me I fall back on the other.

I think that in Fitzgerald's terms, I go on attempting to reveal my experiences in different ways through different mediums, hoping that in some small way, they might make a dent or some mark on our times. Actually I was reading myself of the insecurities because of the lack of education. Now, can honestly say that I enjoyed the uncertainty of the broader and the more precarious adventure.

I think if Providence were to say to me now, Gordon, we're going to reborn you. We're going to make you a rich white boy and send you to Princeton, and so forth and so on. And we can't tell you how it's going to turn out. But there you are, or you can go back the way you came and you know where you're going to end. I would take the more precarious way, I'm sorry. I would take that because my life has been full.

There's practically nothing since I left that cornfield that I haven't done. No place in the world I haven't been. I've had Life Magazine to give me three tickets to three different times and said go around the world. We don't care when you come back. Just come back when you want to, see and look, that's a dream assignment. And I've had that in a number of times in my life, and I've taken full advantage of it.

The biggest expense account Life Magazine ever heard of. I once went on an aircraft carrier. And so I came back and Wilson Hicks said to me, Gordon, I just saw your expense accounts. The taxes alone cost you $1,000 for the month. I said, yeah, Wilson, I was gone for a month.

And she said, but you're on an aircraft carrier. I said, have you ever seen the size of that thing? It's a big carrier. So we used to kid a lot about expense accounts and things with Life Magazine, and that was a wonderful. That's probably why I went out of business so long ago.

[LAUGHTER]

I helped that along.

But scores of young people come to New York every year and they ask me about advice about field of photography and journalism, or films and so forth, and I always tell them that all you have to excel, that something about the work must stand out from the others, that they must learn their craft well, so well that it becomes a natural extension of themselves.

They must experiment constantly, and through experimenting, they will begin to discover the unpredictable things about themselves. For there are things hiding inside of all of us, waiting to be fleshed out and used, things that make the difference. We have to resist the easy way out, the urge to settle for what is just acceptable.

For many years now, I have enjoyed working just this side of failure, working beyond the limits of safety and photography, disobeying the exposure meter at times. And this direction has caused me-- tells me not to shoot into the sun, I might shoot into the sun. If they say do not use the film indoors, I may use it indoors just to see what they're trying to tell me. And out of that comes the grand experiment.

If they tell me to hold the camera steady, be sure to hold it steady now, I may twist it a little bit. Just twirl it around and see what happens. That's the curiosity that one must always seek in their work.

To touch on another aspect of my career, which a lot of people have asked me about, is story I did on Flavio, a little Brazilian boy, which was probably the most famous I did the story I did for Life Magazine . I found him in the Favela, which is a Barrio or a slum above Rio de Janeiro, and then probably some of the worst poverty. I've ever seen in my life. Flavio was 12 years old, at the time dying.

He had seven or eight brothers and sisters, and I was there for Life Magazine and assigned to do a story on a poverty-stricken family, showing them what made them what they are. Were they involved in communism? Kennedy was the president then. What was the father's political leanings? What about his religion, and so forth. The normal story which turns out to be sort of a dull story when you put it in the magazine.

But as I was sitting under a jacaranda tree one day, I saw this little boy who looked consumptive. And he had a five gallon tin of water on his head, climbing this terrible mountain, which I could hardly climb. It was just in a hot and the heat of Rio de Janeiro. So I followed Flavio up the hill with my camera. And I had an interpreter with me.

And we went to this little shack where eight kids and mother and father slept one room. And he smiled at me. At first, I offered to carry his water for him and he said no, and he would carry it himself. And then he introduced me to all the kids and the family. And they were crying, and they were hungry. And I became very interested in this little boy, and this boy became interested in me. And we became great friends. He taught me some dirty words in Spanish. And I taught him as best I could about the intellectual leanings in America.

But Flavio went out really. But I remember that I left my sumptuous hotel down on the waterfront and went up to live in the shack with Flavio and his family after I won the kids over, because the kids are the one that I had to win over. Parents made no difference. If the kids trust you, you can do anything. And I got some incredible pictures. There were time when I didn't shoot because there are times when you don't shoot a camera. There are those times when you respect someone's privacy.

Finally, I began to bring presence and things to the family. The tough thing about it was that I knew that any minute, I could walk up to that shack where those people ate rice, stale rice, stale beans day in and day out all their life where 25,000 kids had died from dysentery alone that year. And I know that I could take up money and save that family. But that wasn't what I was sent there for. I was sent there to show the rest of the world how terrible poverty could really be.

And so I had to suffer myself knowing that any moment, I could bring money up, and didn't dare do it. I left the money in the safe down in Rio because it was a very dangerous place where I was working. There were murdered there all the time. Even police were afraid to come in there. The police came in there fifty together. They wouldn't come in there alone. That's the kind of place I was working.

In any case, when I eventually-- the story was about over, and I did begin to bring presents and did begin to bring food and everything, and then the other people around them became jealous of Flavio and his group and began to beat up on them because they said, what about us? Well, my God, here's a mountain full of other poverty-stricken people.

And I realized suddenly that this is a terrible situation, and I had to get them somehow or another try to get them out of there. So I told Flavio one day and I was leaving, he said, well, are you're coming back to see me? And I said, yes, some someday I will, Flavio. I knew I was lying. I'll never go back there. I never wanted to see that kind of poverty again in my life.

So in my diary, which I kept, I reported this in Life Magazine, and I got thousands and thousands and thousands of letters from people all over the country said you've got to go back and get that kid. You can't leave him there. Well, I decided I would go back, not only that-- not only the letters.

They sent $30,000 in a matter of two weeks-- nickels, dimes, quarters, anything, little kids who saved up their savings. Somebody would send a check for 50, somebody would send $0.25. That kind of thing existed in those days. I doubt today that that story would have the same impact.

In other words, Life became very excited about the story, and said Gordon, you've got to go back get Flavio. Well, I went back. The doctor said, what are you going to do? This kid, he can't live another six months. He may make it a year, he may not make it. I said, well, I'm sorry, we're going to have to take that chance.

Then the day before we were supposed to bring him out, we found out that he possibly had tuberculosis, which absolutely could not come into this country. So I cabled New York, they cabled President Kennedy. By then Flavio was known all over the world because of The Life piece and Kennedy says, bring him on. We will meet you on the airport with Limousine and you with Flavio will come. So we were sure that Flavio--

And the clinic in Denver, Colorado, which was the Jewish clinic said, you bring him to us. We will save that kid. So I took-- I had that clinic investigated. We found out that it was the first rate clinic for asthmatic kids and so forth and tuberculosis, and we brought Flavio on.

Eventually, Flavio's life was saved. He lived, he stayed there for two years. He learned English perfectly. He spoke better English than I did in the end, and eventually went back to live in San Paulo. We had problems with him because of the different cultures, because of the people giving him all the attention and everything. And the kid was spoiled. He got toys from every place, and so forth.

But for a 12 years old, he did all right. But when I went back-- Flavio was 12 then-- and I went back, I was in San Paulo and I said, I think I'll drop over to see how Flavio is doing. We had bought his family a home. By then now, 15 other kids.

Every time I've ever seen the mother, she was pregnant. I'd never seen her before she wasn't pregnant. I've seen her five or six times. She's pregnant each time. The last time I was there she had 15 more kids. Flavio was a little ashamed that they hadn't kept the home up that we bought for them. But he had a home of his own.

He didn't know I was coming. The day I arrived, he was spanking clean. He had two beautiful children of his own, had a lovely wife, and he had a home of his own, which shows you that you must have hope and faith in people that they will do something if you give them half a chance. Today, three days before I came out, I got a letter from Flavio. He's moving to San Paulo. He's going to start a business. And he has another child, which is named after me, Gordon, or something like that.

[APPLAUSE]

What I'm trying to say about that is that creativity in the literal sense is not always the primary function of a photographic essay. It is something that most of subservient to another kind of ability, one that has to do with man's awareness of another man's needs, one that has to do with the human spirit.

In the 1960s, I was in a good but sometimes questionable position to make personal observations of people who helped shape the Black revolution, with their actions, and sometimes their lives. I came to each story with a strong sense of involvement, finding it difficult to screen out my memories of my own scarred past.

But I tried for the truth the kind that comes through looking and listening, through the careful sifting of day-to-day emotions, that white America sometimes whips up in the Black people. And my own background enabled me to better share the experiences of some other Black people. I never presume to speak for them. I can only offer a glimpse, however, fleeting of their world through Black eyes behind an unbiased camera.

Eldridge Cleaver who I found exiled in Algiers once asked me to join the Black Panther Party. A lot of young Black cats would follow you and he told me. I refused him. Both of us were caught up in the same truth of the Black man's ordeal. Both of us were possessed by that truth which we defined through a separate existence and a separate experience.

How we chose to act it out was the only difference. He was 35 at the time and I was 57. We had met over a deep chasm of time and the events, of which forged different weapons for us. Perhaps if I had been 20 years old at the time, I might have been a Panther, then maybe not. I do remember that as a kid, I was taught to take the first lick before I fought back, but then a fist is not a bullet.

I too would shoot a cop or anyone else who forced his way into my house to kill me or kill a member of my family as the members of the Panther parties were killed. At the same time, he said to me that he was going back to fight that system in America here that we both disliked. And I would continue to fight it also. But I couldn't exchange my camera for a gun or my words for bullets.

I would have to fight America's racism on my own terms. With those resources that lay deep inside me, the choice was not entirely deliberate. I had been brought up to abhor violence to respect my fellow man. Up till now, I've not been sorry about that choice. But I have been witness-- I have witnessed cause to weaken me sometimes, especially when you see what's happening in a place like Miami and some places nowadays.

The thousands of letters I do get is reasonable evidence that I have somehow communicated and that I'd rather be here with you tonight, as I said before, than lying voiceless in some grave. And those letters keep coming to me and giving me faith in people and myself, and those letters that found their way through years of rubble and human deprivation.

I have talked to you about creativity, about the dilemma that time caused me. I hope that you will react against artistic conformity and try to do things the way you want to do them. But you must first have a base. One doesn't go off in an abstract way and do abstract things without first having a formal base of doing it. That you will have questions to question that which is generally accepted, and that you will dream the impossible dream and then try to fulfill it.

Certainly, we cannot be proud of this past decade with the assassinations of civil violence and the war. The moon landing was a spectacular creative achievement. But if we could only somehow turn some of that awesome creativity inward to serve the human heart, then one could be more optimistic about the decade ahead.

We must not make the error of limiting the use of our creative talents. Words, images are in abundance. Placed end to end, they can make a path a million miles to the moon and back. But we grow weary of words because they have grown hollow. We tired to the music of unfilled promises, and we have grown to distrust the images that our present society holds for us.

Somehow in some way, we must bring new meaning to creativity. We must use it fully and in the broadest sense if we are to inspire men to real brotherhood and lasting peace. And in the end, I'd like to somehow or another, I don't know, I just got this idea, read the last little bit I wrote in my book about myself and what I feel about myself.

I just wrote this a little while back. So it's right off the press. And this is a book, if you get a chance to pick it up, go ahead. It's called To Smile in Autumn. And the epilogue is this--

"Several times, I have crossed the world. And I remember each stone and spring, each flower and Century dying with a kind of dying even rivers can't escape. I have been born again and again, always finding something or someone love, to win or to lose, to mourn or celebrate.

Now, with life quieting down around me, I look back through an autumn mind, searching the clear air for the roots of things I have watched growing are expiring along the way. Wherever my feet have taken me, I have found both goodness and pain. And that is all I have to offer. I could depart with washed hands, keeping the silence and telling nothing. But I have no secret doors to hide the memoirs.

This memoir, The Learning Tree and A Choice of Weapons, should hold more than the man needs to explain himself. Not that I am finished, having lived a lot and done just about everything I've wanted to do it makes me want to live and do even more. In any case, it all boils down to the fact that I have swum the tide with others, some who tried pulling me under, others who, at the risk of going under themselves, helped me toward shore.

Naturally, the latter ones I consider my heroes. But in the end, I had to save myself. Now I mentioned heroes, the world is filled with all kinds of them. Every country, city, and town has closets full of them. And I've seen a beast in hero's clothing, and I've seen real heroes going about in rags, searching garbage cans for supper.

I've met all kinds-- big, fat, ornery ones, Black and white, who are so weightless, you could carry them around like balloons under your arm, and little ones, so heavy with goodness that it would take 1,000 hands to carry them to the grave. I've known some who raised monuments to themselves while others who deserved to be remembered are buried and forgotten.

The real size of a hero, it seems, is determined by how you take his measure. As for all of us ordinary humans, for a long time, I have entertained the impossibility of putting each one of us into a tiny room of letting us remain silent for one moment, and then separately speak the absolute truth of ourselves, knowing that the smallest lie would hurl us into fiery space.

There, we might realize how common our needs are-- that hunger, that hatred, and love are the same wherever we find them, that the Earth in relation to our time upon it is hardly the size of a grain of sand, perhaps then in the justice of understanding, we could escape the past that imprisons us.

As for myself, I still don't know exactly where I am. I've disappeared into myself so many ways that I don't know who me is anymore. I suppose I'm doing all right, yet I'm not quite sure. There's always some idiot hiding in one corner of myself trying to follow up my intelligence. And whether to forget my past or respect it, whether to consult it or reject its errors, that has been my problem.

I got a lot of advice along the way-- I took and I ignored some. When a change was necessary, I went along with it, providing it didn't differ too much from the heart my parents gave me. Driven by insatiable hunger, I have gone slowly with many seasons in search of what I wanted most to find.

I don't know what all this means. To me, it seems that my years have tumbled upward out of darkness. At times, I felt like a tattered black flag gone limp above a wasteland. At other times, I felt like a fine horse galloping in the wind. That's the way certain days leave you feeling. And that's the way life keeps you dying a very interesting death." Thank you.

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