BIBLIOTECA TECLA SALA November 21, 2019 I Am Not Your Negro James Baldwin « You never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me. Not everything that is faced can Contents: Introduction 1 be changed; but nothing can Brief Author 2-3 Biography From Remember 4-5 be changed until it is faced. This House to I Am Not Your Negro: An Unfinished Book » Becomes A Successful Movie James Baldwin and 6- Margaret Mead on 10 Indentity, Race, the Immigrant Experience, and Why the “Melting Pot” Is a Problematic Metaphor Notes 11 Page 2 Brief Author Biography James Arthur Baldwin was born minister for three years at the In 1944 he met author Richard on August 2, 1924 in New York Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, Wright, who helped him to land City’s Harlem and was raised but gradually lost his desire to the 1945 Eugene F. Saxton under very trying circumstances. preach as he began to question fellowship. Despite the financial As is the case with many writers, Christian tenets. freedom the fellowship provided, Baldwin’s upbringing is reflected in Baldwin was unable to complete his writings, especially in Go Tell It Shortly after he graduated from his novel that year. He found the on the Mountain. high school in 1942, Baldwin was social tenor of the United States compelled to find work in order increasingly stifling even though Baldwin’s stepfather, an to help support his brothers and such prestigious periodicals as evangelical preacher, struggled to sisters; mental instability had the Nation, New support a large family and incapacitated his stepfather. Leader and Commentary began to demanded the most rigorous Baldwin took a job in the defense accept his essays and short religious behavior from his nine industry in Belle Meade, N.J., and stories for publication. In 1948 he children. As a youth Baldwin read there, not for the first time, he moved to Paris, using funds from constantly and even tried writing. was confronted with racism, a Rosenwald Foundation He was an excellent student who discrimination and the debilitating fellowship to pay his passage. sought escape from his regulations of segregation. The Most critics feel that this journey environment through literature, experiences in New Jersey were abroad was fundamental to movies and theater. During the closely followed by his Baldwin’s development as an summer of his 14th birthday he stepfather’s death, after which author. underwent a dramatic religious Baldwin determined to make conversion, partly in response to writing his sole profession. “Once I found myself on the his nascent sexuality and partly as other side of the ocean,” Baldwin a further buffer against the ever- Baldwin moved to Greenwich told the New York Times, “I could present temptations of drugs and Village and began to write a see where I came from very crime. He served as a junior novel, supporting himself by clearly, and I could see that I performing a variety of odd jobs. carried myself, which is my home, Page 3 with me. You can never escape disillusioned as he felt his considerable renown, James that. I am the grandson of a celebrity being exploited as Baldwin bore articulate witness slave, and I am a writer. I must entertainment. Baldwin did not to the unhappy consequences of deal with both.” Through some feel that his speeches and essays American racial strife. Baldwin’s difficult financial and emotional were producing social change. writing career began in the last periods, Baldwin undertook a The assassinations of three of years of legislated segregation; process of self-realization that his associates, Medgar Evers, his fame as a social observer included both an acceptance of Martin Luther King, Jr. and grew in tandem with the civil his heritage and an admittance of Malcolm X, shattered his rights movement as he mirrored his bisexuality. remaining hopes for racial African American aspirations, reconciliation across the U.S. disappointments and coping Baldwin’s move led to a burst of strategies in a hostile society. creativity that included Go Tell It At the time of his death from on the Mountain, Giovanni’s cancer late in 1987, Baldwin was Baldwin died on December 1, Room and other works. He also still working on two projects—a 1987 in France. wrote a series of essays probing play, The Welcome Table, and a the psychic history of the United biography of Martin Luther King, [https://www.chipublib.org/james States along with his inner self. Jr. Although he lived primarily in -baldwin-biography/] Many critics view Baldwin’s France, he never relinquished essays as his most significant his United States citizenship and contribution to American preferred to think of himself as literature. They include “Notes a “commuter” rather than as an of a Native Son,” “Nobody expatriate. Knows My Name,” “The Fire The publication of his collected Next Time,” “No Name in the essays, The Price of the Ticket: Street” and “The Evidence of Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985, Things Not Seen.” and his subsequent death In addition to his books and sparked reassessments of his essays, Baldwin wrote plays that career and legacy. “Mr. Baldwin were produced on Broadway. has become a kind of prophet, a Both The Amen Corner, a man who has been able to give a treatment of storefront public issue all its deeper moral, pentecostal religion, and Blues for historical and personal Mister Charlie, a drama based on significance,” remarked Robert the racially motivated murder of F. Sayre in Contemporary Emmett Till in 1955, had American Novelists. “Certainly successful Broadway runs and one mark of his achievement… numerous revivals. is that whatever deeper comprehension of the race issue Baldwin’s oratorical prowess— Americans now possess has honed in the pulpit as a youth— been in some way shaped by brought him into great demand him. And this is to have shaped as a speaker during the civil their comprehension of rights era. Baldwin embraced his themselves as well.” role as racial spokesman reluctantly and grew increasingly A novelist and essayist of Page 4 From Remember This House to I Am Not Your Negro: the dominant story was not the INTRODUCTION RAOUL PECK real story. In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a I started reading James Baldwin The successful Haitian letter to his literary agent when I was a 15-year-old boy Revolution was ignored by describing his next project, searching for rational history (as Baldwin would put it: Remember This House. The book explanations to the because of the bad niggers we was to be a revolutionary, contradictions I was confronting were) because it was imposing a personal account of the lives and in my already nomadic life, which totally different narrative, which successive assassinations of three took me from Haiti to Congo to would have rendered the of his close friends—Medgar France to Germany and to the dominant slave narrative of the Evers, Malcolm X and Martin United States of America. day untenable. The colonial Luther King, Jr. Together with Aimée Césaire, conquests of the late nineteenth Jacques Stéphane Alexis, Richard At the time of Baldwin’s death in century would have been Wright, Gabriel García Márquez 1987, he left behind only thirty ideologically impossible if and Alejo Carpentier, James completed pages of his deprived of their civilizational Baldwin was one of the few manuscript. justification. And this justification authors that I could call “my would have no longer been In his incendiary documentary, own.” Authors who were needed if the whole world knew master filmmaker Raoul Peck speaking of a world I knew, in that these “savage” Africans had envisions the book James Baldwin which I was not just a footnote. already annihilated their never finished. The result is a They were telling stories powerful armies (especially radical, up-to-the-minute describing history and defining French and British) less than a examination of race in America, structure and human century ago. using Baldwin’s original words relationships which matched and flood of rich archival what I was seeing around me. I So what the four superpowers of material. I Am Not Your Negro is a could relate to them. You always the time did in an unusually journey into black history that need a Baldwin book by your peaceful consensus, was to shut connects the past of the Civil side. down Haiti, the very first black Rights movement to the present Republic, put it under strict I came from a country which had of #BlackLivesMatter. It is a film economical embargo and a strong idea of itself, which had that questions black strangle it to its knees into fought and won against the most representation in Hollywood and oblivion and poverty. powerful army of the world beyond. And, ultimately, by (Napoleon's) and which had, in a And then they rewrote the confronting the deeper unique historical manner, whole story. connections between the lives stopped slavery in its tracks, and assassination of these three Flash forward. I remember my creating the first successful slave leaders, Baldwin and Peck have years in New York as a child. A revolution in the history of the produced a work that challenges more civilized time, I thought. It world, in 1804. the very definition of what was the sixties. In the kitchen of America stands for. I am talking about Haiti, the first this huge middle-class apartment free country of the Americas. in the former Jewish Haitians always knew the real neighborhoods of Brooklyn, story. And they also knew that where we lived with several Page 5 An Unfinished Book Becomes A Successful Movie other families, there was a kind of Medgar Evers died on June 12, This is exactly the point where I large oriental rug with effigies of 1963.