“These Things We Sort of Know”: Speech at U.C. Berkeley

On May 7, 1963, Baldwin appeared at his first major event during a loaded and intense western tour for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a speech at the packed Harmon Gymnasium on the U.C. Berkeley campus. Published estimates measured the crowd to be between 7,000 and 9,000. While he had been a committed member of CORE for years and had toured and appeared on the organization’s behalf, throughout the 1963 West Coast tour Baldwin took on a role and summoned a force quite beyond anything he had been involved in before. This speech allows us to track Baldwin’s shifting sense of engagement while the civil rights movement changed rapidly in multiple directions and as Baldwin’s notoriety grew. The transcription below has been prepared by Ed Pavlić and Justin A. Joyce. Vocal emphasis has been captured with italics. Significant pauses, interruptions, and non-word interjections have been captured in editorial brackets.