Raoul Peck’s galvanizing documentary I Am Not Your Negro reacquaints viewers with one of the most powerful voices of the civil rights era, the great novelist, playwright, and essayist James Baldwin. His 1963 book The Fire Next Time, a best seller in the U.S., squarely confronted white Americans with the moral cost of their apartheid government and for several years made him a prominent public figure. As Peck’s archival clips illustrate, Baldwin was a captivating speaker, his bold language and dramatic cadences drawn right from the pulpit. His forbidding stepfather, David Baldwin, had been a Pentecostal preacher in Harlem, and 14-year-old James had followed him into the ministry, preaching the gospel for three years, before he’d turned his back on organized religion. Baldwin understood the theatrics of the sermon, and the apocalyptic tone he brought to his pronouncements on race is no less arresting now than it was 50 years ago.
With that background, Baldwin was naturally fascinated by King, also the son of a minister. Baldwin first met King in September 1957, when Baldwin was writing about the Montgomery bus boycott for Harper’s and Partisan Review. By that time he’d published his novel Giovanni’s Room, whose frank treatment of homosexual and bisexual characters might have made King more guarded around him. The two men would cross paths numerous times as Baldwin became a more important voice in civil rights, and according to biographer David Leeming, Baldwin was struck by King’s willingness to serve as a symbol for the movement, which would inevitably make King the target of harassment. I Am Not Your Negro includes excerpts from a 1963 TV program in which psychologist Kenneth Clark presents a trilogy of one-on-one interviews with King, Malcolm, and Baldwin. The program highlights the growing philosophical conflict between King’s nonviolence and Malcolm’s more militant stance, a conflict that Baldwin was still trying to work out for himself.
Peck may not be able to get inside the spiritual struggle that made Baldwin such a complex figure, but I Am Not Your Negro, with its frequent reminders that there are still two Americas, proves that Baldwin’s writing has lost none of its currency. Baldwin never joined the Nation of Islam, he explains, “because I did not believe that all white people were devils, and I did not want young black people to believe that. I was not a member of any Christian congregation, because I knew that they had not heard and did not live by the commandment ‘Love one another as I love you.’ And I was not a member of the NAACP, because in the north, where I grew up, the NAACP was fatally entangled with black class distinctions, or illusions of the same, which repelled a shoeshine boy like me.” Baldwin came at the racial crisis not as a congregant but as an individual, which is how he managed to connect across racial lines and, now, reaches across generations. v
Directed by Raoul Peck
