It was never said, in so many words, but everyone appeared to suspect that this particular computer had had its own reasons for selecting this particular judge.
Each of us knows, though we do not like this knowledge, that a courtroom is a visceral Roman circus. No one involved in this contest is, or can be, impartial. One makes the attempt, or imagines that one does: but it is, in any case, and strenuously, an attempt. Or, in other words, the ability to suspend judgment is, in each of us, suspect—to leave it at that: without, that is, going so far as to say that the suspension of judgment is impossible.
For to suspend judgment demands that one dismiss one’s perceptions at the very same moment that one is most crucially—and cruelly—dependent on them. We perceive by means of the kaleidoscopic mirror of this life. This means that our ability to perceive is at once tyrannized by our expectations, and at war with them. Our expectations are revealed in our habits, our manner: our defeats, terrors, genuine or imagined triumphs risk being more visible to others than to ourselves: for that mirror, mirror, on the wall! hears no questions and answers none.
The light is always changing in that mirror. This light will not permit us to forget that we are mortal: which means that we are all connected—which complicates the judgment.
It is one thing to be part of the audience at the courtroom Roman circus, and quite another matter to be in the ring. The audience is there to distract or justify itself with questions of right or wrong. The gladiators know only that one of them must win. They are not suspending judgment. They are creating judgment: ours.
The circus and the audience are absolutely indispensable to the hygiene of the State.
The judge that the computer selected is a young and very likable Black man, Clarence Cooper. He is one of the many Black legal talents nurtured by District Attorney Lewis Slaton. Slaton is a White native Atlantan, and he guided the Prosecution—although, according to some of the people I met, “guided” is not the word.
Judge Cooper, the younger of two children, was born on May 5, 1942, in Decatur, Georgia. Decatur is a suburb of Atlanta. But, a “suburb” of Atlanta in 1942 is not at all the same entity as a suburb of Atlanta in 1982: which may be why Cooper was raised in Cincinnati. His birthplace is, in any case, ambiguous. It means that he can or cannot claim, as do so many others, I’m from Atlanta. I’m not from Georgia.
This claim struck me as a stubborn and stunning delusion. It is as though I should claim, for example, that l’m from Harlem. I’m not from New York. The intention, or the meaning, of the claim is clear; but Harlem is not an independent entity or nation. It exists in, and is controlled by, the city and state of New York. Or, if, on another level I should proclaim, in Europe—or in Africa—to be from New York but not from America, one would be justified in worrying about my sanity, to say nothing of my reliability. I do not mean to go so far, as concerns my friends in Atlanta, but this has been their posture since we first met—in 1957—and may be one of the keys, if keys there are, to the city.
Atlanta is a railroad town, comes into existence, that is, around one of the triumphs of the Industrial Revolution—the railroad—and it was first called, bleakly enough, Terminus. This was in the 1830s, when the institution of slavery had a few more years left in it than does the present century. It is inland, which is why General Sherman had to march to the sea, destroying a crucial segment of the Confederacy’s transportation system. “He didn’t destroy great works of art, or the opera, because they weren’t here—there was nothing here.” There was, probably, a little more than “nothing,” but Atlanta’s eminence was and is as a commercial hub, a wheeling-and-dealing transportation center, and one of the world’s busiest and most interminable airports has taken the place of the railroads.
But Atlanta’s high visibility and commercial importance do not mean that Atlanta is not in the state of Georgia. This is one of the reasons—the principal reason—that, during the plague years of the child murders, and, then, the arrest, and, then, the trial, Atlanta’s leitmotif was the presence, and responsibility, of the Black Administration. The presence of a Black Administration—as distinguished, perhaps, from an incontestable actuality—proved that the “city too busy to hate” could not be accused of administering “Southern” justice. (It proved nothing of the sort, not only because Atlanta belongs to the state of Georgia but because Georgia belongs to the United States.)
Cooper’s mother was a maid and his father drove a truck. His father was disabled in 1966, when Cooper would have been twenty-four. He was twenty-one at the moment of the March on Washington, in 1963, and the same age when Medgar Evers was assassinated, earlier that same year, and when Kennedy, the only president to whom he could have felt any allegiance, was murdered, twenty-two when Malcolm was murdered, and twenty-five when Martin was blown away.
I met the Judge only once, hence cannot claim to know the man. His major, in Clark College, in 1964, was political science and history. He was twenty-two then, and forty when I met him—as a judge—which suggests a swift and strong-willed passage on a rocky road.
In June 1981, after twenty-two months and twenty-eight corpses, Wayne Bertram Williams, then twenty-three, was arrested for murder. That he is Black is important, since the Administration of the city is Black, and all of the murdered children were Black.
It is also important that he was not charged with twenty-eight murders, but with two: the last two, those of Jimmy Ray Payne and Nathaniel Cater.
These last two, however, were not children, but grown men—no matter how alcoholic or “retarded” they may have been: and, anyway, at the bottom level of poverty and despair it is hard to judge who is “retarded.” I was told that, because they were “retarded,” they were perceived as children: I found this unconvincing. Though, as I was abruptly forced to realize, I had not the faintest notion as to what impelled a man to murder children, it yet seemed to me—hopefully, perhaps—that this impulse had to be special. A man who murdered children was not likely to perceive a male adult as a male child. This meant, though, that I was approaching the quicksand of my ignorance and judgment had to be suspended.
Copyright © 1985 by James Baldwin and 1995 by the James Baldwin Estate
Foreword from the Ten-Year Anniversary Edition copyright © 1995 by Derrick Bell and Janet Dewart Bell
Foreword copyright © 2023 by Stacey Abrams
