The Pitch
'you keep the facts alive with people'
This is a letter Jimmy Breslin sent to his editor at the New York Herald Tribune in, I believe, May 1964. He's pitching a series about Harlem. The language is dated, for sure, but there are lessons:
Dear Jim [Bellows]:
Here, for your information and consideration, is a schedule of ideas and the mechanics of carrying them out which I intend to put into effect starting today. I was out bouncing on the street at 6:30 a.m. today so I might as well do something with all this freaking time. . .
Tomorrow night (Tues.) I intend to move into somebody's apartment in Harlem. Joe Glaser is in charge of this. I told him I lived bad all my life and I don't have to live with roaches to know what they are like. So he is getting me something he says will be all right.
What I intend to do there is simple. Build five murderous parts, and build them on the hallmark of anything of this sort: small facts, gathered in many places, and gathered in such numbers that the copy can be flat, understated and totally effective because of the facts. Take a woman at the supermarket. Get her order, can by can, and list it and what she paid for it. With almost no comment on it by me, this list will be meaningful to housewife in Larchmont. Maybe more meaningful than all the big words written of this thing.
You follow this theory with everything. With the schoolyards, which are crowded at 7:30 a.m. because parents have to leave early and the kids are locked out of the apartments with nothing else to do, they go to school. And with the furniture repossessions and water and gas and electric shut-offs and the gas-station habits - 50 cents' worth of gas for a Cadillac. You do this with facts from small people in the street and from merchants and bankers.
But always, you do it with people. You keep the facts alive with people.
Then the violence aspects. Ride with the police for a night. Take my man Bumpy Johnson, the first major Negro criminal. Talk to the unimaginative junkies who steal for their habit; "You think I like paddin' around in the dark in somebody else's bedroom?" And talk to the X's and their people; the ones everybody expects trouble from. And talk to the colored leaders who have sold out their own people so they can be patted on the heads by the whites.
These are people who have had very few heroes, but they are trying to find heroes right now. Some of the ones they look for are bad. Others are exceptional human beings. Who they will turn to when the heat makes the tar on the roofs soft and sticky and it gets into the masonry and comes through the cracked plaster ceilings and makes the apartments too hot to stay in and everybody spills out onto the streets until 2 and 3 a.m. is the question.
The police walk three abreast on the streets now. Their clubs spin on the leather cords. And all around them, the dark faces look at them. The people believe only demonstrations will get them anything. They never got a thing before they started trouble, they all believe. The credo in Harlem is simple: "Anything that costs Whitey money is good." A demonstration, even the threat of one, forces police overtime. Yet the voting rolls show that in this most important of all areas, the people of Harlem are terribly deficient.
"We are missing two million voters," the Democratic leaders say. "They all should come from Negro areas."
Yet ask the average colored people in Harlem when was the last time they voted, and the answer is a stare. So many of these people do not even know where or how to vote. They have no tradition of voting. In the old neighborhoods, Bay Ridge, say, election day is a ritual. It is a ritual because your father, grandfather, and great-grandfather voted so they could have decent shots at city jobs. Now the city jobs are not needed, because there are insurance men and stockbrokerage workers in the families. But the tradition of voting goes on.
The people in Harlem have no traditions. They have no heritage. But they want one. And in some ares, a very good story Walt Kelly handed me, they are after it. An Episcopal church has started a big voter-registration drive and they came to Kelly for help.
"It's a lot more fun to go on sit-ins," he told the kids.
"We want to do it by voting," they said.
"But if you go on sit-ins you can go to jail and be heroes," Kelly told them. "If you go to all the trouble of getting a big vote out, then nobody will be calling you niggers any more and there'll be no reason for sit-ins and you'll have the same dull life everybody else has."
The entire story is based on one idea: these are people. They are bewildered, uncared-about, and angry. They have a right to anger because white people would prefer to speak of them in great generalities and do nothing about the housing or the type of food they have to eat because of the salaries they make. The question is, as this summer comes up, will their anger show in a legitimate drive or will it erupt as it did in 1936 and 1943?
Now this is a nice, big statement. It is on the type I intend not to use. Not even once. But the small facts, gathered and put together, will say the things themselves.
I would have this thing started and into the office by Friday for the Sunday papers and have another in on Saturday for Monday and the remainder in Sunday. The outline of the entire series will be in by late Thursday.
I feel this is the most important thing I can do for the Tribune at this time, and perhaps the most important thing I have done for you at any time. It will work fine, as long as somebody does not throw a garbage can at me from a rooftop. The rooftops, not the sidewalks, are the things to look out for.
respectfully,
j. breslin.