Arts & Entertainment
Sierra Kay
In 1979, James Baldwin, an American novelist,
activist, essayist, playwright, and poet, began a novel,
Remember This House, about his friends and fellow
civil rights activists: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Filmmaker Raoul Peck received the notes regarding
this book and used it as the foundation for the
documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro.”
Baldwin himself never completed this book prior to his death in 1987. So to fill in
the notes, Peck curated interviews, books, letters, notes and video. This allowed him
to mesh together a pattern detailing the complexity of this bolt of fabric in American
history.
As Peck described the relationship between all four in the companion novel of the
same name, “They were Black, but it is not the color of their skin that connected them.
They fought on quite different battlefields. And quite differently. But in the end, all
three were deemed dangerous and therefore disposable. For they were eliminating
the haze of racial confusion. Like them, James Baldwin also saw through the system.
And he knew and loved these men.”(I Am Not Your Negro, page XI)
Racism and homophobia drove Baldwin to Paris where he lived for years. And then,
he saw an image of Dorothy Counts, courageously walking to a “white” school, being
ridiculed, spat upon and harassed. That was the turning point which made Baldwin
come back to America. Baldwin stated, “I could, simply, no longer sit around in
Paris discussing the Algerian and the Black American problem. Everyone else was
paying their dues; it was time for me to pay mine.”
Accompanied by the eloquent narration of Samuel L. Jackson, James Baldwin told
of the exact time he learned about the death of all of his friends and the devastating
impact on him. For him to attempt to write, Remember This House, would have
required him to open pains long buried.