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Master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished, Remember This House. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin’s original words and flood of rich archival material. I Am Not Your Negro is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter. It is a film that questions black representation in Hollywood and beyond. And, ultimately, by confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassination of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Baldwin and Peck have produced a work that challenges the very definition of what America stands for.
Thanks to: Master filmmaker Raoul Peck, Magnolia Pictures, and Amazon Studios.
TRANSCRIPT Anita Johnson: [00:00:00] This week on making contact, James Baldwin: leaving aside the bloody catalog of oppression, which we are in one way too familiar with already. What this does to the subjugated is it destroy his sense of reality. This means in the case of an American Negro, born in that glittering republic, and in the moment you are born, since you don’t know any better. Every stick in stone and every face is white, and since you have not yet seen the 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 that 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 Anita Johnson: that’s activist, public, intellectual, and writer, James Baldwin. Today on Making Contact, you’ll hear excerpts from the Oscar nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro inspired by an unfinished manuscript, “remember this house?” that Baldwin was working on at the time of his death in 1987, about the lives of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. The film, directed by Raul Peck and narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, provides a platform to revisit Baldwin’s brilliance as a public thinker and delve into Baldwin’s analysis of black life in America and the individuals who helped shaped his views. Announcer: We’ve invited three men on the forefront of the Negro struggle to sit down and talk with us in front of the television camera. Each of these men, through his actions and his words, but with vastly different manner and means is a spokesman for some segment of the Negro people today. Malcolm X: Black people in this country have been the victims of violence at the hands of the white man for 400 years. And following the ignorant, uh, negro preachers, we have thought that it was godlike to turn the other cheek to the brute that was brutalizing us. Announcer: Malcolm X, one of the most articulate exponents of the black Muslim philosophy has said of your movement and your philosophy that [00:03:00] it, uh, plays into the hands of the white oppressors that, uh, they are happy to hear you talk about love for the oppressor because this disarmed. The Negro and fits into the stereotype of the Negro as a meek turning the other cheek sort of creature. Would you care to comment on Mr. X’s belief? Martin Luther King Jr.: Well, I don’t think of, uh, love as, uh, in this context as emotional Bosch, but I, I think of love as something strong and that organizes itself into powerful, uh, direct action. Uh, this is what I tried to teach in the struggle in the South, that uh, we are not engaged, uh, in a struggle. That means we sit down and do nothing. Uh, that there’s a great deal of difference between non-resistance to evil and non-violent re. Malcolm X: Uh, Martin Luther King is just the 20th century or modern Uncle Tom or a religious uncle Tom, who was doing the same thing today to keep Negroes defenseless in the face of attack that Uncle Tom did on the plantation to keep those Negroes defenseless in the, in the face of the attacks of the Klan in that day. Martin Luther King Jr.: Uh, I think though that we, we can be sure that the vast majority of Negroes who engage in the demonstrations and who. Uh, understand the nonviolent, uh, philosophy will be able to face dogs and all of the other brutal, uh, methods that are used without retaliating with violence because they understand that one of the first, uh, principles of nonviolence is a willingness to be the recipient of violence while never, uh, inflicting violence upon another. Voiceover (James Baldwin’s writing): As concerns, Malcolm and Martin, I watched two men coming from unimaginably different backgrounds whose positions originally were poles apart, driven closer and closer together. By the time each died, the positions had become virtually the same position. It can be said indeed that Martin picked up Malcolm’s burden, articulated the vision which Malcolm had begun to see, and for which he paid with his life, and that Malcolm was one of the people Martin saw on the mountaintop. Medgar was too young to have seen this happen, though he hoped for it and would not have been surprised, but Medgar was murdered first. I was older than Medgar. Malcolm and Martin, I was raised to believe that the eldest was supposed to be a model for the younger and was of course expected to die first. Not one of these three lived to be 40.[00:06:00] Malcolm X: (Protest chant) We need an organization that no one downtown loves. We need one that’s ready and willing to take action, any kind of action by any means necessary. James Baldwin: And Malcolm talks, they articulate for all the Negro people who hear them, who listen to them, they articulate their suffering. The suffering, which has been in this country so long denied. That’s Malcolm’s great authority over any of his audiences. He corroborates their reality. He tells ’em that they really exist, you know? And there are days, this is one of them. When you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it, Announcer: mm-hmm. James Baldwin: How precise you’re going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how you are going to communicate to the vast heedless unthinking. Cruel white majority that you are here. I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people had deliver themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human. I had basis on their conduct, not on what they say, and this means that they have become in themselves. Moral monsters.[00:09:00] Most of the white Americans I’ve ever encountered really, you know, had a negro friend or a negro maid or somebody in high school, but they never, you know, or rarely after school was over or whatever, you know, came to my kitchen, you know, we were segregated from the, from the schoolhouse door. Therefore, he doesn’t know. He really does not know what it was like for me to leave my house, you know, leave the school and go back to Harvard. He doesn’t know how Negroes live, and it comes as a great surprise to the Kennedy brothers and to everybody else in the country. I’m certain, again, you know, that like, again, like most white Americans, I have, you know, encountered they have no, no. I’m sure they have nothing but ever against Negroes. That is, that’s really not the question. You know, the question is really account of apathy and ignorance, which is a price we paid for segregation. That’s what segregation means, that you don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the world. ’cause you don’t want enough. Voiceover (James Baldwin’s writing): I was in some way in those years without entirely realizing it, the great black hope of the great white father. I was not a racist, or so I thought. Malcolm was a racist. Or so they thought. In fact, we were simply trapped in the same situation. Clip: Well, you tell that to my boy tonight when you put him to sleep on the living room couch and you tell it to him in the morning when his mother goes outta here to take care of somebody else’s kids. I tell it to me when we want some curtains or some drapes and you sneak outta here and go work in somebody’s kitchen. All I want to make a future for this family, all I want to be able to stand in front of my boy like my father never was able to do to me. Voiceover (James Baldwin’s writing): I must sketch now the famous Bobby Kennedy meeting. Lorraine Hansberry would not be very much younger than I am now if she were alive at the time of the Bobby Kennedy meeting. She was 33. That was one of the very last times I saw her on her feet, and she died at the age of 34. I miss her so much. People forget how young everybody was. Bobby Kennedy for another quite different example, was 38. We wanted him to tell his brother, the president, to personally escort to school on that day or the day after. A small black girl already scheduled to enter deep South school. That way we said. It will be clear that whoever spits on that child will be spitting on the [00:12:00] nation. He didn’t understand this either. It would be, he said a meaningless moral gesture. We would like said, Lorraine, from you. A moral commitment. He looked insulted, seemed to feel that he’d been wasting his time. Well, Lorraine sat still watching all the while she looked at Bobby Kennedy, who perhaps for the first time looked at her, but I’m very worried. She said about the state of the civilization, which produced that photograph of the white cop standing on that Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham. Then she smiled and I’m glad that she was not smiling at me. Goodbye, Mr. Attorney General, she said and turned and walked out of the room. James Baldwin: Negro has never been as docile as white Americans wanted you to leave. That was a myth. We were not singing and dancing down the levee. We were trying to keep alive. We were trying to survive a very brutal system. The nigga has never been happy in his place. One of the most terrible things is that in fact, whether our life or not, I am an American. My school really was. The streets of New York City. My frame of reference was, um, George Washington and John Wayne, but I, you know, I was a child, you know, a child of his eyes in the world. He has to use what he sees. There’s nothing else to use. And you are formed by what you see, the choices you have to make in the way you discover what it means to be black in New York and then throughout the entire country. I know how you watch as you grow older. This is not a figure of speech. The cultures of your brothers and your sisters pile up around you and not for anything they have done. They were too young to have done anything. But what one does realize is that when you try to stand up and look the world in the face, like you had a right to be here, you have attacked the entire power structure of the western world. They get the negro problem. Don’t write any voting acts. We had that, it’s called the 15th Amendment, the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. What you had to look at is what is happening in this country and what is really happening is that brother has murdered brother knowing it was his [00:15:00] brother. White men have been Negroes knowing him to be their son. White women have had Negroes burned knowing to be their lovers. It is not a racial problem. It’s a problem whether or not you are willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it. That great western house I come from is one house, and I’m one of the children of that house, Cindy. I’m the most despised child of that house, and it is because the American people are unable. To face the fact that in fact, I’m fresh of their flesh, bone, of their bone created by them, my blood, my father’s blood is in that soil. Anita Johnson: That’s the voice of James Baldwin and the film is, I Am Not Your Negro. You’re listening to Making Contact to hear this entire program and others check out our website. At radio project.org, subscribe to our podcast. Sign up for making contact updates. Take our survey or join the conversation on Facebook or Twitter. James Baldwin wrote about race and identity in America in an unapologetic fashion. In a cross current article in 1961, Baldwin said. Quote, to be a negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. End quote. And that poignant snapshot of black life in America still rings true some 56 years later. Baldwin’s ability to articulate the realities of black life in all forms was prophetic in nature, revealing the dark and ugly truths about racism in America. Here’s Samuel l Jackson’s narration of Baldwin’s words regarding the desexualization of black men in America. Harry Belafonte: I’m Chiquita Banana and I’m here to say, I am the top banana in the world today … Voiceover (James Baldwin’s writing): in spite of the fabulous myths proliferating in this country concerning the sexuality of black people, black men are still used in the popular culture as though they had no sexual equipment at all. Sidney Poitier. As a black artist and a man is also up against the infantile furtive sexuality of this country. Both he and Harry Belafonte, for example, are sex symbols, though no one dares admit that, still less to use them as any of the Hollywood he men are used. Black people have been robbed of everything in this country, and they don’t want to be robbed of their artists. Black people, particularly disliked guess who’s coming to dinner [00:18:00] because they felt that Sydney was in effect being used against them. Guess who coming to dinner may prove in some bizarre way to be a milestone. It is really quite impossible to go any further in that particular direction. Music: If you ever plan to motor west Voiceover (James Baldwin’s writing): the next time, kissing will have to start. Clip: travel my way, that’s the highway that’s the best Well, got your ticket? Yeah. Thank you. Voiceover (James Baldwin’s writing): I am aware that men did not kiss each other in American films, nor for the most part in America, nor do the black detective and the white sheriff kiss here. Clip: You take care, you hear, Voiceover (James Baldwin’s writing): but the obligatory fade out kiss in the classic American film did not speak of love. And still less of sex. It spoke of reconciliation of all things now becoming possible. Anita Johnson: Baldwin not only brought attention to the challenges of being black in America, he also highlighted the realities of being a gay man. In James Baldwin, the last interview and other conversations go the way your blood beats. He spoke candidly with interviewer Richard Goldstein about his experience as a black gay man. In response to a question that examined America’s struggle with homophobia, Baldwin said, quote, Voiceover (James Baldwin’s writing): I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything, and homophobia is simply an extreme example of the American terror that’s concerned with growing up. I never met a more infantile people in my life. The sexual question and the racial question have always been entwined. You know, if Americans can mature on the level of racism, then they have to mature on the level of sexuality. Anita Johnson: Later when asked if black gay people have the same sense of being as white gay people, Baldwin responded by saying, quote, Voiceover (James Baldwin’s writing): well, that I think is because you are penalized, as it were unjustly. You’re placed outside a certain safety to which you think you were born. A black gay person who is a sexual conundrum to society is already long before the question of sexuality comes into it, meed and marked because he’s black or she’s black. The sexual question comes after the question of color. It’s simply one more aspect of the danger in which all black people live. I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born in principle into a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The [00:21:00] anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger unexpectedly. Their reaction seems to me, in direct proportion to the sense of feeling cheated of the advantages which accrued to white people in a white society. There’s an element, it seemed to me, of bewilderment and complaint. Now, that may sound harsh, but the gay world as such is no more prepared to accept black people than anywhere else in society. Anita Johnson: Baldwin’s analysis of America’s racial dilemma was filled with acute directness and fierce honesty. In I Am Not Your Negro Baldwin in 1965, exposed the hypocrisy and arrogance of then ex Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s suggestion that black progress was possible based on a timeline acceptable to white Americans. James Baldwin: I remember for example, when the Ex Attorney General, Mr. Robert Kennedy said that it was conceivable. That in 40 years in America, we might have a Negro president. And that sounded like a very emancipated statement, I suppose, to white people. They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard and did not hear, and possibly will never hear the laughter and the bitterness and the scon, which is taken, was greeted from the point of view of the man of the Harlem Barbershop. Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday. And now he’s already on his way to the presidency. We’ve been here for 400 years and now he tells us that maybe in 40 years, if you’re good, we may let you become president. Music: It was a dream. That’s a dream I had on my mind. It was a dream. That’s a dream I had on my mind. Anita Johnson: With anger and elegance. Baldwin’s compelling analysis of race in America affirmed our existence and experiences where he was a champion of truth and justice, an advocate for black America, and at a time when racial tension is brewing high in the United States, his perspective is even more relevant. James Baldwin: I’ll tell you this, when I left this country in 1948. I had this country for one reason, only. One reason, I didn’t care where I went. I might have gone to Hong Kong, I might have gone to Timbuktu, ended up in Paris on the streets of Paris with $40 in my pocket on the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there. That had already happened to me here. You talk about making it as a writer by yourself. You had to be able then to turn up all the intent of which you live, because once you turn your back on this society, you may die. You may die, and it’s very hard to send a typewriter and concentrate on that. [00:24:00] If you’re afraid of the world around you, the years I lived in Paris did one thing for me. They released me from that particular social terror, which was not the paranoia of my own mind, but a real social danger, visible in the face of every cop, every boss, everybody. I don’t know what most white people in this country feel, but I can only include what they feel from the state of their institution. I don’t know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know that we have a Christian Church, which is white and a Christian Church, which is, which is black. I know as Malcolm X once put it at the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday. That it’s a great deal for me about a Christian nation. It means that I can’t afford to trust most white Christians and certainly cannot trust the Christian Church. I don’t know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me. That doesn’t matter, but I know I’m not in their union. I don’t know if the real estate lobby is anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobbyists keep me in the ghetto. I don’t know if the Board of Education hates black people, but I know the textbooks that give my children to read and the schools that we have to go to now, this is the evidence you want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children. On some idealism, which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen. Voiceover (James Baldwin’s writing): All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism. This means that their history has no moral justification and that the West has no moral authority (music) as I am. States, one of the characters, Indus is the idiot. I don’t believe in the wagons that bring bread to humanity. For the wagons that bring bread to humanity may coldly exclude a considerable part of humanity from enjoying what is brought. For a very long time, America prospered. This prosperity cost millions of people their lives now. Not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits. They can neither understand them, don’t do without them. Above all, they cannot imagine the price paid by their victims or subjects for this way of life, and so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolted. Clip: The girl, the girl now James Baldwin: for an entire people [00:27:00] to surrendered to the notion that one ninth of his population is beneath them. And until that moment, until the moment comes when we, the Americans, we the American people are able to accept the fact. That I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and black. That on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other and that I’m not a ward of America. I’m not an object and missionary charity. I’m one of the people who built the country. Until this moment, there is scarcity. Any hope for the American dream? Because the people who are denied participation in it by their very presence will wreck it. And if that happens, it’s a very grave moment for the West. Thank you. Anita Johnson: Special thanks to Director Raoul Peck, Magnolia Pictures, and Amazon Studios. The making contact team includes Lisa Rudman, Marie Choi, RJ Lozada, Monica Lopez, Sabine Blaizin Vera Tykulsker, and I’m Anita Johnson. Listen to us on iTunes and read us so others may easily find us. Please tell us what you think on Facebook or Twitter. Don’t miss our news. Sign up for our updates at our website@radioproject.org. Thanks for listening.
