In I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck wanted to bring into today’s context the brilliant thinking of James Baldwin, an author he admires and whose work has engaged him for decades. Raoul’s first compilation of all the materials and pieces of Baldwin’s works he intended to use was massive. I was alarmed by the thought that we were heading toward creating a four-hour film. Even so, within this tentative and copious document, we could already clearly sense the general outline of meaningful images, chapters, and sequences. As a filmmaker, Raoul is adept with words and images, but the task of finding the right images for the right text in the right chronology and structure was an extremely complex endeavor.
Luckily, Baldwin had written extensively about cinema and its role in shaping our culture and ideology. The films Baldwin saw—the films that shaped his own mythology, that framed his childhood and marked him, as they marked Raoul’s childhood a few decades later—provided the best vehicle for our audiovisual interpretation of Baldwin’s vision. Beyond this, the pages of an incomplete manuscript entitled Remember This House, given to Raoul by the Baldwin family, gave us the narrative direction for the film—a film that would be this unfinished book or at least a vivid projection of what that book might have encompassed.
Early on, we knew that this was going to be neither a film about civil rights nor a biographical film, without, however, completely avoiding either. The most delicate question was rather how to tie the heterogeneous material of Baldwin’s unfinished project about his three friends—Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X—together with his words, his experience, his life, and his commitment to form a comprehensive and uncompromising monument to Baldwin.
The first edit was a test for us: How do we connect a narrating voice that obviously could not be Baldwin’s with the real footage of him speaking so eloquently? How could we achieve a discursive continuity between these two elements? Further, how to find the appropriate images that would resonate with the written words?
Our archivist, Marie-Hélène Barbéris, faced a difficult and compelling task: researching, assembling, and cataloging hundreds of photos, old movies, newsreels, newspaper headlines, advertisements, and amateur videos, all in different formats and styles. We faced countless complications in the variable quality of some of the material, in getting access, and in clearing rights that were often spread among multiple rights holders. The process presented at times an improbable spiderweb of complexity.
But gradually the film found its form, its rhythm, and its autonomy. We worked in complete freedom in terms of the production process, iconographic choices, content, form, and time, which is a luxury these days. During the two full years that I worked on the film, I was able to take time off, either to work on other projects or to get some valuable distance from the current edit and come back with fresh ideas, new resolutions, and creative solutions. Meanwhile, Marie-Hélène and her team continually deepened their research and supplied us with new and rare material. Our freedom also depended on the producer’s ability to find additional funding, allowing us to extend our scope. This generous production framework was key to our creativity and efficiency.
Raoul Peck trusted me to bring to his film my own sensibility, my ideas, and something else I find essential, which is hard to describe but that I would call a kind of poetic, intuitive inspiration.
Jean-Luc Godard wrote, “If directing is a vision, editing is the heartbeat.” His words describe the very core of cinema and its mystery. This was our guiding assumption during the improbable journey of this film as we worked to bring the past into the present moment through James Baldwin’s finest writing.
In June 1979,
acclaimed author James Baldwin
commits to a complex endeavor:
tell his story of America
through the lives of three
of his murdered friends:
Medgar Evers
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Malcolm X
Baldwin never got past
his thirty pages of notes,
entitled: Remember This House
THE DICK CAVETT SHOW - 1968 -
DICK CAVETT: Mr. Baldwin, I’m sure you still meet the remark: “What are the Negroes…why aren’t they optimistic?”
But they say it’s getting so much better. There are Negro mayors. There are Negroes in all of sports. There are Negroes in politics. They are even accorded the ultimate accolade of being in television commercials now. I’m glad you’re smiling. Is it at once getting much better and still hopeless?
JAMES BALDWIN: Well, I don’t think there’s much hope for it, you know, to tell you the truth as long as people are using this peculiar language. It’s not a question of what happens to the Negro here or to the black man here—that’s a very vivid question for me, you know—but the real question is what is going to happen to this country. I have to repeat that.
To Jay Acton
Spartan Literary Agency
June 30th, 1979
My dear Jay,
I’ll confess to you that I am writing the enclosed proposal in a somewhat divided frame of mind. The summer has scarcely begun, and I feel, already, that it’s almost over.
And I will be fifty-five (yes! fifty-five!) in a month. I am about to undertake the journey: and this is a journey, to tell you the truth, which I always knew that I would have to make, but had hoped, perhaps (certainly, I had hoped), not to have to make so soon.
I am saying that a journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do with what you find, or what you find will do to you.
MARTIN LUTHER KING: Not only do we have the right to be free, we have a duty to be free. So when you sit down on a bus, when you sit down in the front, or you sit down by a white person, you are sitting down because you have a duty to sit down not merely because you have a right.
The time of these lives and deaths,
from a public point of view,
is 1955, when we first heard of Martin,
to 1968, when he was murdered.
Medgar was murdered in the summer of 1963.
Malcolm was murdered in 1965.
The three men—
Medgar, Malcolm, and Martin—
were very different men.
Consider that Martin was only twenty-six in 1955.
He took on his shoulders the weight of the crimes,
and the lies and the hope of a nation.
I want these three lives to bang against
and reveal each other,
as, in truth, they did…
and use their dreadful journey
as a means of instructing the people
whom they loved so much,
who betrayed them,
and for whom they gave their lives.
Credits 1, 2, and 3
PAYING MY DUES
LEANDER PEREZ, WHITE CITIZENS COUNCIL: The moment a Negro child walks into the school, every decent, self-respecting, loving parent should take his white child out of that broken school.
WOMAN IN THE SOUTH: God forgives murder and he forgives adultery. But he is very angry and he actually curses all who do integrate.
Credit 4
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That’s when I saw the photograph.
Facing us, on every newspaper kiosk
on that wide, tree-shaded boulevard in Paris
were photographs of fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts
being reviled and spat upon by the mob
as she was making her way to school
in Charlotte, North Carolina.
There was unutterable pride, tension, and anguish
in that girl’s face
as she approached the halls of learning,
with history, jeering, at her back.
It made me furious,
it filled me with both hatred and pity.
And it made me ashamed.
Some one of us should have been there with her!
But it
was on that bright afternoon
that I knew I was leaving France.
I could, simply, no longer sit around
in Paris discussing the Algerian
and the black American problem.
Everybody else was paying their dues,
and it was time I went home and paid mine.
I had at last come home.
If there was, in this, some illusion,
there was also much truth.
In the years in Paris,
I had never been homesick for anything American—
neither waffles, ice cream, hot dogs,
baseball, majorettes, movies,
nor the Empire State Building, nor Coney Island,
nor the Statue of Liberty, nor the Daily News,
nor Times Square.
All of these things had passed out of me.
They might never have existed,
and it made absolutely no difference to me
if I never saw them again.
But I had missed my brothers and sisters,
and my mother.
They made a difference.
I wanted to be able to see them,
and to see their children.
I hoped that they wouldn’t forget me.
I missed Harlem Sunday mornings
and fried chicken and biscuits,
I missed the music,
I missed the style—
that style possessed by no other people in the world.
I missed the way the dark face closes,
the way dark eyes watch,
and the way, when a dark face opens,
a light seems to go everywhere.
I missed, in short, my connections,
missed the life which had produced me
and nourished me and paid for me.
Now, though I was a stranger,
I was home.
I am fascinated by the movement
on and off the screen.
I am about seven.
I am with my mother, or my aunt.
The movie is Dance, Fools, Dance.
I was aware that Joan Crawford was a white lady.
Yet, I remember being sent
to the store sometime later,
and a colored woman, who, to me, looked exactly
like Joan Crawford, was buying something.
She was incredibly beautiful….
She looked down at me with so beautiful a smile that
I was not even embarrassed.
Which was rare for me.
Credit 6
HEROES
By this time,
I had been taken in hand by a young white
schoolteacher named Bill Miller,
a beautiful woman,
very important to me.
She gave me books to read and talked to me
about the books,
and about the world:
about Ethiopia,
and Italy,
and the German Third Reich;
and took me to see plays and films, to which no one
else would have dreamed of taking a ten-year-old boy.
It is certainly because of Bill Miller,
who arrived in my terrifying life so soon,
that I never really managed to hate white people.
Though, God knows,
I have often wished to murder more than one or two.
Therefore, I begin to suspect that white people
did not act as they did because they were white,
but for some other reason.
I was a child of course,
and, therefore, unsophisticated.
I took Bill Miller as she was,
or as she appeared to be to me.
She too, anyway, was treated like a nigger,
especially by the cops.
And she had no love for landlords.
In these days, no one resembling my father has yet
made an appearance on the American cinema scene.
No, it is not entirely true.
There were, for example, Stepin Fetchit
and Willie Best and Mantan Moreland,
all of whom, rightly or wrongly, I loathed.
It seemed to me that they lied about the world
I knew, and debased it,
and certainly I did not know anybody like them—
as far as I could tell;
for it is also possible that their comic, bug-eyed terror
contained the truth concerning a terror
by which I hoped never to be engulfed.
Yet, I had no reservations at all concerning the terror
of the black janitor in They Won’t Forget.
I think that it was a black actor named
Clinton Rosemond who played this part,
and he looked a little like my father.
He is terrified because a young white girl,
in this small Southern town, has been raped
and murdered, and her body has been found
on the premises of which he is the janitor.
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The role of the janitor is small,
yet the man’s face bangs in my memory until today:
the film’s icy brutality both
scared me and strengthened me.
Because Uncle Tom refuses to take vengeance
in his own hands, he was not a hero for me.
Heroes, as far as I could see, were white,
and not merely because of the movies
but because of the land in which I lived,
of which movies were simply a reflection.
I despised and feared those heroes because
they did take vengeance into their own hands.
They thought vengeance was theirs to take.
And yes. I understood that:
my countrymen were my enemy.
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I suspect that all these stories are designed
to reassure us that no crime was committed.
We’ve made a legend out of a massacre.
JAMES BALDWIN AND WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR., CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY DEBATE - 1965 -
JAMES BALDWIN: Leaving aside all the physical facts which one can quote, leaving aside rape or murder, leaving aside the bloody catalogue of oppression, which we are in one way too familiar with already, what this does to the subjugated—is to destroy his sense of reality.
This means in the case of the American Negro, born in that glittering republic…and in the moment you are born, since you don’t know any better, every stick and stone and every face is white, and since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose that you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of five, or six, or seven to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you.
It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.
My dear Jay,
You must, it is to be hoped, be as curious as I am concerning the execution of this book project.
I know how to do it, technically.
It is a matter of research, and journeys. And, with you, or without you, I will do it anyway.
I begin in September, when I go on the road. “The road” means my return to the South. It means, briefly, for example, seeing Myrlie Evers, and the children—those children, who are children no longer. It means going back to Atlanta, to Selma, to Birmingham. It means seeing Coretta Scott King, and Martin’s children.
I know that Martin’s daughter, whose name I don’t remember, and Malcolm’s oldest daughter, whose name is Attallah, are both in the theater, and apparently, are friends.
Credit 9
It means seeing Betty Shabazz, Malcolm’s widow, and the five younger children. It means exposing myself as one of the witnesses to the lives and deaths of their famous fathers. And it means muc
h, much more than that—a cloud of witnesses, as old St. Paul once put it.
WITNESS
I first met Malcolm X.
I saw Malcolm before I met him.
I was giving a lecture somewhere in New York.
Malcolm was sitting in the first row of the hall,
bending forward at such an angle
that his long arms nearly caressed the ankles
of his long legs, staring up at me.
I very nearly panicked.
I knew Malcolm only by legend,
and this legend, since I was a Harlem street boy,
I was sufficiently astute to distrust.
Malcolm might be the torch
that white people claim he was—
though, in general, white America’s evaluations
of these matters would be laughable
and even pathetic did not these evaluations
have such wicked results.
On the other hand, Malcolm had
no reason to trust me, either.
And so I stumbled through my lecture,
with Malcolm never taking his eyes from my face.
As a member of the NAACP,
Medgar was investigating the murder
of a black man, which had occurred months before;
had shown me letters from black people,
asking him to do this;
and he had asked me to come with him.
I was terribly frightened,
but perhaps that “field trip” will help us define
what I mean by the word “witness.”
I was to discover that the line which separates
a witness from an actor is a very thin line indeed;
nevertheless, the line is real.
I Am Not Your Negro Page 2