I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO
Book by BALDWIN JAMES (Author)
DETAILS
Publisher : PENGUIN (March 25, 2017) Language : English ISBN-10 : 0141986670 ISBN-13 : 978-0141986678 Item Weight : 4.6 ounces Dimensions : 5.12 x 0.43 x 7.83 inches Best Sellers Rank: #393,454 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #132 in Screenplays #536 in Civil Rights & Liberties (Books) #2,913 in Performing Arts (Books) #132 in Screenplays , BRAND NEW, Exactly same ISBN as listed, Please double check ISBN carefully before ordering. Read more
REVIEW
Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.
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