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Interview: We Want a Black Poem - View article
In search of an interview with James Baldwin, a young Canadian experiences the intensity of Harlem in the 1960s, and ultimately finds Malcolm XSource: Austin Clarke 
This interview, conducted in New York at the CBC Studios in 1963, was the fruitful result of two weeks spent tracking down Malcolm X in Harlem: at the Muslim Restaurant—which does not serve pork: neither ribs nor pork chops!—at Muhammad Speaks, the Muslims’ newspaper office, and in bars and restaurants, where I asked if anyone had seen Malcolm X. And then he called. My reward was an hour of his time. His time was golden. He was a very busy man in 1963, as Minister of Mosque No. 7, and Elijah Muhammad’s right hand man; and this was my first radio interview in my life. I was terrified by the obvious importance of the interview, and more scared when Malcolm X, agreed to the interview.
I remember the tone and the nuance in his voice, when he asked me, “Can you come up to Harlem?”—obviously, in his diplomatic manner, wondering whether I was black or white. I assured him, with a fake black Harlem twang, that I “can come to Harlem, Brother ’ cause I be cool!”
But my second meeting with Malcolm was in my house on Asquith Avenue in Toronto, a few years later, and just before he was gunned down in Harlem. It was a more relaxed conversation—a rap session, if you will—in which we drank tea and talked about jazz – he liked Coltrane and Billie Holiday, as I did; his wife’s name was Betty, and so was mine; he had daughters, so did I; and we discussed the contribution of “black arts” and “black culture” to the political and social environment of the Civil Rights Movement. Malcolm told me that the explosion of these “black arts” and “black culture” contributed more to the success of Civil Rights than any other single social force.
And I had forgotten to turn the borrowed CBC tape recorder on during the three hours we had sat in my study, “shooting the breeze.” I had become, by then, expert in operating the Nagra tape recorder.
