Max Roach, 1956 (© Gilles Petard/Redferns)
Last summer I spent some time at the Library of Congress looking through the collected papers of Max Roach. I was knocked out. His correspondence, music, notebooks, manuscripts – just incredible to be so close to his ideas and experiences manifest in those archived materials. I was specifically checking out iterations of a monograph he worked on for years called I Hate Jazz, and another, Jazz Is A Four Letter Word – more about that down the line.
While recently working through some of the photos I’d taken of poems and articles I was hit hard by a poetic essay Roach wrote while in Japan in 1963. I don’t yet have much context for this yet and haven’t seen it published or mentioned anywhere, but I want to share it here as its sentiment feels especially relevant this July 4, 2025.
A page from a handwritten draft of “The Basket Case” (1963) – Library of Congress, Max Roach Papers
In the essay, Roach names the centuries-long calamity that is white supremacy (“europeon society” [sic]), that social technology used to justify global histories of imperialism and colonialism. He reflects on how anyone who is not European, not white, has historically been dehumanized into a powerless “basket case”; the powerless wretched of the earth. Despite dogma spread by the present regime in the USA it’s plain that the dominance of these ideas has not changed. Rather, patriarchal white supremacy in the USA continues to be normalized, invisibilized, naturalized.
Roach calls for revolution among all “colored people,” to reject white supremacy, to work collectively for our common good. We might go a step further and encourage all people – especially those that benefit from it – to reject white supremacy. The mythical club that is “whiteness is,” of course, not real. Nor is the justification for the hierarchy it has asserted by force around the world. And those of us, like myself, born into this historical construct must recognize it, name it, and divest from it.
Rejection of the logic of white supremacy and its outcomes is collective work. Fannie Lou Hamer is forever right: “Nobody’s free until everyone is free.” And as Noel Ignatiev so often reminded us: “Treason to whiteness is to loyalty to humanity.”
Of course, Roach knew music can help create spaces for us to be together in our difference. He celebrated that and built his life on it and his life is a powerful model I hope to emulate. We’re so lucky there is music.
So, Basket Cases of the world, I love you. Let’s do the work together.
The Basket Case
Written by Max Roach
Japan, 1963
The Europeon [sic] society that exists today has murdered my fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters cold bloodedly. I, myself, walk around only an empty shell of a man. I myself, have been so brutally wounded and wantonly mangled, while still a baby in my mother’s arms, til I am no more than a “basket case”.
I have no arms, legs, penus [sic], I cannot see, I cannot hear, I cannot talk. I CANNOT AVENGE THE MURDER of my parents and my brothers and sisters. My soul, my body, my mind cry out in anguish and intolerable pain for restitution!!!
The Europeon is the scum of the earth. The europeon is the cancer that is slowly destroying all life and matter. on earth. The Europeon is the carrier of diseases that are rapidly destroying this great earth and its good people. I ask myself, are we all basket cases?
Are we all without arms, legs? Are we all blind? Are we all deaf? Can no one speak? Fear??? What have we to fear? For our lives? What lives? Until we people of color rid the earth of this europeon pigism, which is destroying the earth and all humanity, we people of color are no more than “basket cases”. We are dead. We are cowards, we are less than human, we have no respect for life, love and happiness. We are “BASKET CASES”. FEAR? A basket case would be better off dead.
I ask myself, what kind of human being am I? Even the cockroach when its legs and head and even body has been severed, fights to the death. HUM D’ ALLAH.
“THE BASKET CASE”. What does it care for its mangled body, its tormented soul, its crippled mind? I cannot cry. My being has been wrung dry of all tears. When the farmer sows seed for corn, conditions permitting, he will harvest corn. The farmer puts the seed for corn in the earth, conditions permitting, the farmer will get corn in return. When hate, prejudice, and barbaric cruelties of all dimensions are put on one race of people by another race of people, conditions permitting, the race who put hate, prejudice and barbaric cruelties of all dimensions on another race of people will get hate, prejudice and barbaric cruelties of all dimensions in return. When? For the “Basket Case”, when? People of color, people of color, people of color, PEOPLE OF COLOR!!!!! Hear, hear, hear hear!!! People of color. We are human!!!
We love, we cherish, we respect, we cultivate, we appreciate, yet we are “The Basket Case”.
For what are we the basket case? For the europeon way of life? For the so called europeon civilization? For democracy? For the FREE WORLD? For europeon culture and ideas? WAKE UP BASKET CASE!!
This is only a bad dream. We are not really a basket case. We are LIFE IN ALL OF LIFE’S GREAT GLORY!!! WE ARE CHARGED BY LIFE TO not only protect Life, not only to care for life, not only to respect life, not only to love life, not only to appreciate life, with all our mental, physical and spiritual capacities, but we are also charged by life to stand by life.
Especially now, when literally the very existence of life is being threatened with total annihilation by an element, that poses as a human being, namely the europeon society. Do we people of color not appreciate?
Do we not love? do we not care for? do we not respect? do we not have the desire to protect life?
AJ Kluth 