I Am Not Your Negro: A Companion Edition to the Documentary Film Directed by Raoul Peck (Vintage International) by James Baldwin (EPUB)

Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In his final years, one of America’s greatest writers envisioned a book about his three assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. His deeply personal notes for the project had never been published before acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck mined them to compose his Academy Award-nominated documentary.“Thrilling…. A portrait of one man’s confrontation with a country that, murder by murder, as he once put it, ‘devastated my universe.’” —The New York TimesPeck weaves these texts together, brilliantly imagining the book that Baldwin never wrote with selected published and unpublished passages, essays, letters, notes, and interviews that are every bit as incisive and pertinent now as they have ever been. Peck’s film uses them to jump through time, juxtaposing Baldwin’s private words with his public statements, in a blazing examination of the tragic history of race in America.This edition contains more than 40 black-and-white images from the film.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Paying DuesJames 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.

⭐Raoul Peck’s documentary film, “I Am Not Your Negro,” is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, “I Am Not Your Negro” is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin’s political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters.My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic’s 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic’s thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film’s accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between “the public James Baldwin,” whom we meet here in all his power, and “the personal Jimmy Baldwin,” friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and “Jamie,” the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in “I Am Not Your Negro,” who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is “an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin.””I Am Not Your Negro,” both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot’s definition of genius, comes from our history’s most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that “left the church to preach the gospel,” as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

⭐I thought I had purchased the book…turned out to instead be excepts of the movie.

⭐A few interesting snapshots of the ideas and people behind the civil rights movement. We still have a way to go but it’s interesting looking back and adding more context to the present.

⭐Interested info. Good book

⭐I am a HUGE FAN of James Baldwin!

⭐Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin’s work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an “other”, a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There’s no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people’s house.

⭐This book is basically the notes, essays, letters etc etc that James Baldwin had planned to pull together for his book ‘Remember this House’ which remained unfinished at the time of his death.These notes where then pulled together by Raoul Peck and resulted in the I Am Not Your Negro documentary.It’s a very quick read, for me I would prefer to watch the documentary, and I will do, however it did slightly build upon the Martin Luther King / Malcom X book that I read last year so it was worthwhile.

⭐With all going on in the USA right now (re- police profiling and killing of black people) and the resulting worldwide movement that have sprung and gained momentum, this book sheds some light that will help people have the necessary conversations around race. Evil continues because good people remain silent! Black, brown, white, red, whatever colour (shouldn’t really be saying this as we’re the human race and shouldn’t be defined by colour) , get yourselves some books on the subject.

⭐As a Baldwin fan, I was eager to read more about the history of Black Americans, and although this has some relevant and very timely messages, it is barely more than a slim compilation of notes, seemingly random in sequence – it took about an hour to read. As such, I’m sure the film will prove a better bet for your money, as the intent of the project is good. Reading any one of Baldwin’s Books will give an insight into the historical violence, injustice and inhumanity that many black people in the US have been, and still are, forced to endure.

⭐The author states he loved John Wayne films when he was young; until, that is, he realised he was the Indians. It’s a different perspective on life & America, from a black man’s point of view. It’s a short easy read & so a great introduction to this author, as recommended to me by someone on Twitter. Recommended.

⭐I love this book and recommend it to all those seeking the truth about a history that’s been “Whitewashed” and deceitfully hidden thus leaving a legacy of fear, ignorance and arrogance.James Baldwin tells it like it is and makes no apologies.

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