Even with the magazines we have now, we lack a national publishing force.

That's really what we need, a national publication, maybe more than one.

What about "Muhammad Speaks?"

That's treacherous paper in many, ways. I've known a few guys who worked for them. They've never been critical since they left, but I guess I was turned off because of what they did with the King book. I'm not sure that the guy that wrote the piece had ever read the book. I suspect that he hadn't. When The Man Who Cried I Am came out I was a saint. I could do no wrong. Now this book-not only do I work for the CIA, but I'm probably just coming back from an all-expense, CIA-paid tour of Europe and sitting down at a gold-plated type-writer. I would hope that the readers would find that a bit ridiculous, but those are the extents that publications of this kind go to when the readers allow them to. Muhammad Speaks and the Panther paper are not the answer to the kind of publications we need.

Towards the end of the book you said, "To what Constitutional, to what moral authority do the black, the poor, and the young now appeal? This book is basically addressed to that point . . ." Then a few lines later you said, "There is no reliable authority." Do you think there are any useful values that can be derived from the African experience and applied to this moral void?

Yeah, I think that there are values that can come out of Africa, and very positive ones. I would on the other hand be reluctant to accept these as the over all cure; because I feel we've been on this toboggan and you have to get off where the damn thing stops. You know, if it's 50,000 miles from Africa then that's where you have to get off and do your thing. If you can reach back and bring some good from Africa to where this thing has stopped-beautiful.

The authority that people must appeal to, as far as I'm concerned, is totally lacking from contemporary society. It seems to me that we are in a time when before much longer the people must protest. I'm not only talking about black people, but white people who are getting tired of these damn taxes. I'm talking about white people who are getting tired of shaky business ventures because of this silly war we're in. I'm talking about all kinds of people that are tired of the direction we seem to be moving in. Well, if this means revolution in the streets like the French Revolution, and I'm talking about a real revolution with all of the attendant gore . . . then it will have to come. What we've been trying to do unsuccessfully since before the Civil War . . . is to create this relationship with the white under-classes, but they've been duped away from it. But I think that there will probably be some kind of revolution-fractured, with whites doing their thing and blacks doing their things, but all directed toward government, toward change. The terrible thing about that is that when that is done, then you're going to have the blacks and whites at each others' throats again because they didn't unite in the first place. Once more, I-think the out-look is very pessimistic.

In an article in the December '70 issue of "Black World" you said that the tradition of black communications needed to be molded anew. What forms would you like to see it take?

I THINK I'd like to see more rapport between older black writers and younger black writers. I think the publishing industry has had us in such a bag-you know, we're gonna give you this as an advance, but you don't tell lob how much you got cause we didn't give him this much. And the critics like Jimmy Baldwin, but they hate Ernie Gaines, and it'd be a disaster if them two cats got together. And all the rest of that, which is nonsense. I mean, you view the white literary establishment: Styron, Roth, Ma???, Updike, all of those cats, well, maybe they get together and maybe they don't, but the fact is they got their signals all so together, that it's not necessary. But we don't. We need to clean up some of this garbage and verbiage that has been built up between the black generations. We need to explain to ourselves our own writers. Explain that Ishmael Reed is a fantastic satirist as well as brilliantly knowledgeable of all facets of black people. That Bill Kelley has finally come around. . . . The publicity made it appear to be so impossible that young guys like Kelley and Reed could ever get together; because Kelley went to Feilston School and Harvard or wherever the hell he went. But that's crap. Kelley is in the same bag with Ishmael Reed, with me, with Baldwin, with Ellison, because we're black. Our problems deal with our approaches to our experiences, the way we can command or demand advances so we can support our families, and these are way out of line with the advances white writers get. Things of this nature.

There seems to be a movement towards the past afoot, particularly among whites. A return to Jeffersonian concepis of necrophilia. In the past, these periods when America seemed to be doing an intellectual about-face have always coincided with a loss of black people's rights, a breaking of what seemed to be a progressive trust. Do you see any way of counteracting this trend?

I really don't know or foresee any hopeful trends. This is not basically our fault, I think that black people, in terms of political clout and education are doing as much as they possibly can: because most of these things are dependent upon public money-whether it be state or federal. As always the burden is on white America, and even today white America as a mass is not terribly interested in what happens to us. The business with pollution and environment and so on and so forth. I think white youth veered to this business much too quickly for there to have been any real sincerity in what they seemed to have been involved in with us in the early sixties. And this is where you have to go, to the white youth; because the older people are cliche-set in their ways All they want to do is just hold the damn until they die, and let it become somebody else's problem. But if they can begin manipulating their children to perhaps necessary, but in terms of the immediate needs of this country, ethereal goals; then when the kids reach their ages, it's going to be the same thing all over again. I'm just not that hopeful on the white side that anything good is going to come.

In an interview in the "Paris Review," Ralph Ellison said the search for identity is, "THE American theme. The nature of our society is uch that we are prevented from knowing who we are." Do you agree with that, and do you see any particular reflection of it in the situation of black Americans?

This is most true of black people, and maybe only true of black people. You know, we've had a great deal of recent political awareness of ethnic political potential, and I'd say the Jews are a foremost example of awareness of the ethnic limitations and the exercise of that ethnic power. Ellison's statement is mostly true of black people, and I would disagree with his seeming contention that it's a problem for all Americans. It's not. I think that even Indians or Spanish-speaking Americans are more positive of their identity than are we: because they have languages to fall back on. We are saddled with this old American English and that's all there is to it.