https://socialistaction.org/2017/04/27/films-i-am-not-your-negro/
Films: “I Am Not Your Negro”
/ 2 days ago
May 2017 BaldwinBy ERNIE TATE
Now and then, and despite its capitalist and racial biases, our culture
throws up something that can speak quite eloquently and uniquely about
the times we’re living through. In this case, I’m referring to an
amazing documentary film that has been released recently, “I Am Not Your
Negro,” directed by Raoul Peck, an acclaimed Haitian director with major
films to his credit. This latest work is well worth seeing and has been
well received here.
A meticulously woven story of the civil rights movement at a critical
juncture in its history, expressed in the marvellous words of James
Baldwin, the documentary focuses on the lives of three central leaders
of that movement in the 1960s, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr. and
Malcom X, their lives tragically cut short by assassinations, killings
that strategically weakened the movement and from which it never recovered.
From a poor and large working-class family, Baldwin had emerged on the
U.S. scene from the slums of Harlem to become a major writer of his
time, even internationally. In the 1940s he exiled himself to Paris to
escape the deep homophobia of America, becoming a brilliant novelist and
playwright, returning to New York in 1957. He was an extremely
articulate propagandist and theorizer of the then rising civil rights
movement and powerful voice for Black Americans.
The three central leaders of that struggle, Medgar Evers (July 2, 1925 –
June 12, 1963), Martin Luther King Jr. (Jan. 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)
and Malcom X (May 19, 1925 – Feb. 21, 1965), Baldwin had personally
known and considered them friends. All were assassinated within five
years of each other in the 1960s.
Deemed Dangerous
“[A]ll three were deemed dangerous and therefore disposable,” Raoul
Peck, the director says, because “they were eliminating the haze of
racial confusion,” in a short book of the same name that was released at
the time of the film.
The clever conceit of Peck’s documentary is that it’s based on an
incomplete manuscript, 30 pages of notes of a book Baldwin had begun
shortly before his untimely death in 1987. The director says that
Baldwin “was determined to expose the complex links and similarities
among Medgar, Malcolm and Martin. He was going to write his ultimate
book, ‘I Remember This House,’” a revolutionary account of their lives.
Peck’s documentary is a brilliant imagining of that unfinished work. In
preparing the script, the director relied heavily on Baldwin’s notes
that Gloria, a younger sister of Baldwin, generously turned over to him.
They are the skeleton for the narrative.
Through a very clever and subtle weaving together of archival footages,
interviews, stereotypic images from racist advertizing from the thirties
and forties, and from contemporary TV, we are provided with a historical
context and an incredible graphic depiction of the momentous civil
rights movement that swept the American South in those years, the
lunch-counter sit-ins, the courageous fight to integrate the educational
system, the voter registration drives, an important part of the history
often forgotten.
I admired the film especially for the objective way it treats Malcolm X,
who believed Black people should unite independently under their own
leadership and as a nation to confront the white power structure.
Malcolm’s role in history is often distorted, especially in popular
accounts in the media that frequently characterize him as a “black
racist.” Here in Peck’s documentary, we experience him as a legitimate
part of the movement and speaking in his own voice as a revolutionary.
Has Anything Changed?
Seeing on the screen the images of violence of the white mobs and the
brutality of the police, reminds us, should we need reminding, that
nothing much has changed for Black people in America since the murders
of these three Black leaders. Peck, the director, is telling us
something very important here: racism still runs deep in American society.
It’s true that Black people are no longer being lynched—and there are
shocking images of that from the past in the film—but the lack of
improvement in American society for Blacks over time is an idea central
to the documentary, which is re-enforced throughout with horrific images
from today’s headlines, of the gunning down of many unarmed Black people
by the police, commonly captured on video by bystanders, witnesses to
those events.
The main voice we hear throughout the film articulating this thesis is
James Baldwin’s, but the film is also cleverly narrated by Samuel L.
Jackson, one of Hollywood’s leading Black actors, who gives voice to
Baldwin’s words so skillfully it’s as though it’s him we are hearing.
Having become a major public intellectual, the James Baldwin we see in
the film was very much in demand for appearances on talk shows and
debates about the relationship between Blacks and whites in America.
He’s beautiful to listen to. We see him entirely at ease, patiently
putting forward his ideas, restrained and in a beautiful cadence, almost
prose and without notes. It’s worth seeing the documentary for that alone.
Seeing and hearing him speak at the Students Union in Cambridge,
Britain, is a high point. His mastery of his ideas on full display, at
the conclusion of his talk he wins a rousing and standing ovation from
the students, much to his surprise, if the bemused look on his face is
anything to go by. It’s also a reminder that in those years in Britain
students were becoming quickly radicalized and responsive to what he had
to say. Malcolm X spoke at Oxford around that time and received a
similar reception.
But the documentary is not just about a piece of history; it’s very much
about today, and should be an inspiration to many of today’s Black
activists, coming as it does just after the election of Trump, an
essential feature of whose campaign was a naked appeal to racism and the
encouragement of white identity politics, at a time of increasing
violence against Blacks in America. For that Raoul Peck should be thanked.
I’m sure the film will also have a positive impact in Canada, where the
“Black Lives Matter” movement has been on the streets leading a long and
determined struggle against the Toronto police department’s policies of
racial profiling “carding” practices, of which the overwhelming target
has been Black people. It will be a boost to the Black movement as a
whole, on both sides of the border.
I urge you to go and see it, even for a second time, if possible. It has
many lessons to teach us.
Ernest Tate is an activist living in Toronto. His memoir, Revolutionary
Activism in the 1950s and 1960s, recently published, is about the
history of the left in Canada and Britain. This article appeared in The
Bullet, on-line journal of the Socialist Project in Canada.
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April 27, 2017 in Arts & Culture, Black Liberation.
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