I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO

The great African-American novelist and essayist James Baldwin observed the tumultuous social changes of the ‘50s and ‘60s from a singular vantage point. Black, gay and brilliant, he was the consummate outsider, even as he maintained a high visibility as one of the most prominent public intellectuals of his day. His final, unfinished at the time of his death, manuscript “No Name In The Street”, memorializes the civil rights era, in particular the lives and deaths of his friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. Now, filmmaker Raoul Peck has used Baldwin’s own words, read by Samuel L. Jackson, and decades worth of archival footage of the era, to present Baldwin’s message to us in a film that is as powerful and direct as Baldwin himself.