Take This Hammer

Richard O. Moore and the KQED mobile film unit documented James Baldwin’s visit to San Francisco in 1963. Accompanied by Youth for Service Executive Director Orville Luster, Baldwin meets with community leaders as he seeks to discern “the real situation of Negroes in the city as opposed to the image San Francisco would like to present.” His conversations with the black youths he encounters provide just that, as they describe their frustrations with structural racism manifest in substandard housing, segregation, and lack of opportunity. Baldwin concludes, “There is no moral distance . . . between the facts of life in San Francisco and the facts of life in Birmingham. Someone’s got to tell it like it is. And that’s where it’s at.”