I am Not your Negro

Film: I am Not your Negro

Filmmaker: Raoul Peck

The inspiration from this film comes from Baldwin’s unfinished book, Remember This House.  The book was intended to be a personal recollection of his friends, the civil-rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—all of whom were assassinated within five years of each other. Baldwin made little progress on the book and left behind only 30 pages by the time he died in 1987. The documentary about American life in the 1960s compares the radical perspective during this time to the current racial tone in America. The film revisits his work, speeches, and television appearances weaved with the footage of 1940s Birmingham, Alabama, juxtaposed by videos of 2014 Ferguson, Missouri.The movie’s intense scenes alternate footage of police violence directed against black people in the 1960s and shots of similar violence happening today.

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During the late 1960s, the United States saw firsthand what could happen when institutional racism was allowed to persist. The string of racial violence Americans have witnessed in the past three years has brought the nation to a comparable historical inflection point. I read this article, Racism Today, and found this last sentence so comparable to Baldwin’s thoughts.

At the beginning of I Am Not Your Negro, Baldwin discusses his decision to return to America from France. “That’s when I saw the photograph…of fifteen year old Dorothy Counts, being reviled and spat upon by the mobs as she made her way to school in Charlotte, North Carolina… It made me furious, it filled me with both hatred and pity, and it filled me with shame. Some one of us should have been there with her…And it was on that bright afternoon that I knew that I was leaving France…everyone else was paying their dues, and I knew it was time for me to pay mine.”

Quotes from the Film:

“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be” ― James Baldwin

“There are days in this country when you wonder what your role in this country is and your place in it. How precisely are you going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how you are going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here? I am terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. This means that they have become moral monsters.”-James Baldwin

“A Black man who sees the world in the way John Wayne sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac…The truth is that this country does not know what to do with it’s Black population.”- James Baldwin