The now-legendary documentary, aired by KQED in February 1964, is called Take This Hammer — the title borrowed from the Black folk song of the same name that envisions an escape from brutal working conditions. The film follows James Baldwin on a tour of the predominantly Black neighborhoods of 1960s San Francisco and, most importantly, gives a platform for young residents to talk about their lived experience of prejudice.
The film doesn’t waste any time getting to its core point.
“They want to talk about the South?” one young Hunters Point resident exclaims in its opening scene. “The South is not half as bad as San Francisco … Let me tell you about San Francisco. The white man, he’s not taking advantage of you out in public like they’re doing down in Birmingham. But he’s killing you with that pencil and paper, brother. When you go to look for a job, can you get a job?”
The camera pans to Baldwin. “This is a San Francisco America pretends does not exist,” he says stoically. “They think that I am making it up.”
Before the movie even got to air, it received outraged reactions from some corners of the press.
“The fine, fair face of San Francisco will be sullied tonight by Negro author James Baldwin in a special 45-minute Channel 9 program,” Dwight Newton wrote in his San Francisco Examiner column. “Baldwin came here last year and KQED’s Channel 9 mobile film unit toured the town with him — to the uglier areas of Hunter’s Point and the Fillmore District. In this great ‘Paris of the West,’ widely advertised as a liberal, cultural and cosmopolitan center, Baldwin looked for and found what he sought: increasing bitterness, demoralization and despair of Negro youths.”
Newton went on: “Comparing San Francisco with blemished racial conditions elsewhere, [Baldwin] says … ‘Nobody wants to destroy the image of San Francisco.’ But Baldwin destroys it in this film. He takes ‘this hammer’ and beats venom out of the Negro problem.”
Getting the controversial documentary into people’s homes had, for months, already posed a serious challenge for the KQED Film Unit who made it. “The Board of Directors of KQED … were reluctant to broadcast the program as originally filmed,” director Richard O. Moore recalled in 2012 interview with the Bay Area Television Archive. “All of this resulted in a very painful compromise of cutting out about 15 minutes of the film. They didn’t want to project the fact that there was a great deal of unrest in the Black ghettos in San Francisco.”
Moore’s willingness to cut the footage in order to get some form of the project on air so irritated Baldwin that the writer never spoke to Moore again. “Which from my perspective,” Moore noted in 2012, “was a tragic loss. From his, it was ‘good riddance’ probably. Who knows? This was a minor incident in his life, whereas it was a rather important incident in the life of, say, the KQED Film Unit.”
The documentary consists of interviews with local people and analysis from Baldwin, peppered with footage Moore and his crew shot while driving around the city with cameras mounted to a station wagon. The entire film is stark, unyielding and straight to the point. Black residents of San Francisco had plenty they wanted to share with Baldwin and outside viewers.
“In the way that I’ve been looking at it, Hunters Point is just like being in Alabama right now,” one woman tells Baldwin.
Another states: “Young people go to school together, they graduate off the same stage and then, when it comes to jobs, the Black face is not qualified. Then my daughter has to go clean up the same girl’s house that she graduated with.”
A teenage girl talks about the city’s “redevelopment” of Black neighborhoods. “There ain’t gonna be no place when they get through,” she says. “We’re gonna be living out here on the streets in tents.”
This moment — which possibly seemed hyperbolic at the time — hits differently in 2024. A review published by Richmond newspaper The Independent in 1964 captures exactly why Take This Hammer remains essential viewing all these years later.
“Baldwin — volatile, articulate, a bit affected — is an education himself,” Jim Wood wrote. “Baldwin’s point is one that he has made in his writing, that society had to create its image of the Negro to avoid admitting that the image really lies within society itself. But when the writer can point, off-handedly, to the buildings and people of Hunter’s Point, to illustrate precisely what he is saying, the effect is chilling and unforgettable.
“The film itself is simple, beautiful, intimate and unpretentious,” Wood concluded. “Even if you don’t ordinarily watch television, see this film.”
You can watch the full, original version of the documentary courtesy of the Bay Area Television Archive.
