A Filmmaker’s Review: 'I Am Not Your Negro' (2017)

When I was in university, I had just heard that the author James Baldwin was going to be featured in his own film-length documentary. I was very excited to say the least; it was 2016 and by this time I had almost completed the James Baldwin bibliography and just about to read Just Above My Head which went on to become one of my favourite Baldwin novels ever. I had read his plays and essays such as The Fire Next Time, his great novels like Go Tell it on the Mountain and his lesser known novels like Giovanni’s Room. Baldwin to me was a figurehead of hope, reconciliation and quite possibly one of my own personal heroes. I was too excited for this documentary film, I counted down the days for over a year until its release.

It was based on Baldwin’s unfinished book about three men in 20th century Race Relations History: Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the legend that was Malcolm X. It went through their principles, their philosophies, how they were different and how they were the same. The one thing that they all had in common is that they were assassinated for their values, philosophies and arguments that they made to progress the world into a more equal state.

I Am Not Your Negro (2017) was never just a film all about James Baldwin, it was a film about how James Baldwin came back to America after spending some years in France and how he worked with the other men fighting to make America a more equal state, dying and being beaten by the white people who didn’t agree. James Baldwin made this about finding himself and finding who he was in this fight and where he stood. Malcolm X was the violent, Dr. King was the non-violent, Medgar Evers just about had the chance and James Baldwin stood directly in-between all three of them as a figurehead of peace and hope. Baldwin was more like a father figure rather than a politician or a philosophical leader. Baldwin made his arguments after selling his books, he had a wider audience and a bigger people to deal with. But when he did, it made way for the others and, when told of Dr. King’s death—he said he “didn’t remember the rest of the evening.”

Baldwin didn’t just talk about the deaths of the leaders, but he also spoke of what the political climate of the USA was when it came to speaking, somewhat pointlessly, with men like Bobby Kennedy who, no matter how charismatic he was, couldn’t understand the struggles that were faced by Baldwin and his own kind. Rather, he would just dismiss Baldwin as not being convenient enough for him, along with his friend, writer of A Raisin in the Sun—who would die only a year later at the age of 34. This is what Baldwin was dealing with and he wasn’t complaining about the racism, rather he was complaining about the ignorance to the way of life and the difference between the lives of people of colour and white people. There is still a stark difference between us and them, its just that in the 21st century it’s more demonised to show racial hatred or preference than it was in Baldwin’s time. He took the argument that Dr. King stated about love and took that argument of Malcolm X which included the famous line “By Any Means Necessary” and he put them together, he put in his own and he formed an argument that was so great that neither poet, professor, politician nor philosopher could shut his debate down—as we see in the film at the Cambridge Debate.

Baldwin, to me, is more than just a figurehead. I hold him in the same regard I hold the heroic, legendary Malcolm X. He is a hero of the 20th century, a modern great that will soon become a myth and legend of the times only just before our own. He is a legend.