--- description: Understanding the history James Baldwin was living in 1979 adds an even deeper level of meaning to the Oscar-nominated documentary. title: James Baldwin Documentary 'I Am Not Your Negro' Is the Product of a Specific Moment in History image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3a506819bd771038/6988bb962dce011c4f9ec62b/baldwin.jpeg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [History](/section/history/) ## History Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # James Baldwin Documentary _I Am Not Your Negro_ Is the Product of a Specific Moment in History by [Arica Coleman](/author/arica-l-coleman/) ## Arica Coleman Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Feb 24, 2017 4:00 PM CUT  James Baldwin at his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, southern France, on Nov. 6, 1979. James Baldwin at his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, southern France, on Nov. 6, 1979.Ralph Gatti—AFP/Getty Images by [Arica Coleman](/author/arica-l-coleman/) ## Arica Coleman Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Feb 24, 2017 4:00 PM CUT Though the Oscar-nominated documentary [_I Am Not Your Negro_](http://www.iamnotyournegrofilm.com/ "undefined") is a brand new movie, by filmmaker Raoul Peck, it is also a historical document: the narration, delivered in the film by Samuel L. Jackson, was written by James Baldwin, one of America’s foremost public intellectuals of the 20th century, who died in 1987\. The main source material was a 30-page packet of letters obtained by Peck from Baldwin’s youngest sister, Gloria, that were notes for a book project called _Remember This House_, which Baldwin began to propose in the late 1970s but never got to write. _Remember This Hous_e was to be Baldwin’s magnum opus, a critique of American society from the viewpoint of the assassination of his friends [Medgar Evers](https://donate.naacp.org/pages/naacp-history-medgar-evers "undefined"), [Malcolm X](http://malcolmx.com/ "undefined") and [Martin Luther King Jr](http://www.thekingcenter.org/about-dr-king "undefined"). As Peck aptly notes in the introduction to the film’s [companion book](https://www.amazon.com/Not-Your-Negro-Documentary-International-ebook/dp/B01MTQ1BT1/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486785806&sr=1-1&keywords=i+am+not+your+negro "undefined"), what these activists had in common had less to do with race and each man’s approach to the Black Liberation Movement, but rather that all three were “deemed dangerous” and “disposable.” So, though the film provides a provocative analysis of American race relations up to the present day, as a testament to Baldwin’s continued relevance, an understanding of the moment when Baldwin began the project can add another layer to the movie’s meaning. Baldwin’s straight-no-chaser style of criticism, as captured in his essay collection _The Fire Next Time,_ had made him a household name more than a decade earlier. As a 1963 [TIM](http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,830326-1,00.html "undefined")E cover story about the author and activist noted, “in the U.S. today there is not another writer — white or black — who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South.” At the heart of Baldwin’s argument was the question of who is responsible for the problem of racism, a point the film makes with Baldwin’s use of language. Never one to mince words, he wrote and spoke what Toni Morrison called in [a 1987 remembrance](http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-morrison.html "undefined") of her friend the “undecorated truth” about the American illusion, which juxtaposed whiteness as American innocence with blackness as sullying American purity hence, “the Negro Problem.” Such an illusion was based on what Jabari Asim in his book [_The N Word_](https://www.amazon.com/Word-Who-Can-Say-Shouldnt-ebook/dp/B00CR6WQ7U/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486968071&sr=1-1&keywords=asim+the+n+word "undefined") dubbed one of America’s “founding fictions,” the invention of a specific term to define blacks as subhuman and to lend credence to notions of white supremacy. As Asim notes, “From the outset, the British and their colonial counterparts relied on language to maximize the idea of difference between themselves and their African captives.” Yet it was far more than just a word. Asim demonstrated how over the centuries the N word became the ideological justification that codified American society and its institutions. One of the most striking moments in _I Am Not Your Negro_ comes from a 1963 [PBS interview](http://www.pbs.org/video/2112495022/ "undefined") between Baldwin and the esteemed psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose research — produced with his research partner and wife [Mamie Phipps Clark](http://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/ethnicity-health/psychologists/clark.aspx "undefined") — had influenced the Supreme Court decision in _Brown v. The Board of Education_. Baldwin, rejecting America’s founding fiction quipped, “I am not a ‘nigger,’ I am a man!” He asserted that “the future of the country” depended on white peoples’ ability to ask themselves “why it was necessary to have a ‘nigger’ in the first place” and why they would have invented that idea. Despite his harsh criticism, Baldwin remained hopefully optimistic that American equality was achievable. The passage of the [Civil Rights Act](https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=97 "undefined") of 1964 and the [Voting Rights Act](https://ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=100 "undefined") of 1965 had brought a renewed sense of hope. But, though Baldwin’s message would essentially remain the same for the rest of his life, the world changed around him. The assassination of King in 1968 was the death knell of that period’s Civil Rights Movement, and, in the decade that followed, the assassination did not spur any great movement among white Americans to reconsider. Instead, as Carol Anderson has demonstrated in her book [_White Rage_](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01D1RUOJU/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?%5Fencoding=UTF8&btkr=1 "undefined"), a political backlash against civil rights had ensued, and politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan would capitalize on opposition to civil rights victories in order to win elections. Meanwhile, Baldwin was being tracked by the FBI; as his FBI file, which spanned the years 1958-1974, attests, he was under continued surveillance. The film captures Baldwin’s sentiments during this time with Jackson narrating, “What can I do? Well I’m tired.” When Baldwin began work on _Remember This House_, he had resolved, as he stated in a 1979 [speech](https://www.c-span.org/video/?170651-1/james-baldwin-speech "undefined") at Berkeley, to communicate that, despite the legislative achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, blacks remained ruled by slave codes and that his fallen companions were carrying out a “modern day insurrection.” In other words, though the three assassinated men at the center of _I Am Not Your Negro_ had given their lives to their own visions of black liberation, the film comes not from a place of simple celebration of the legacy of Evers, X and King, but from a moment when Baldwin saw, as much as ever, the need to point out to white audiences that the work those men had done had _not_ achieved its aim, and that it was their job — white Americans — to make things better. [As he once put it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCUlE5ldPvM "undefined"), “You always told me ‘It takes time.’ It’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time. How much time do you want for your progress?” Despite his disillusionment and his view that it was not the responsibility of blacks to fix things, Baldwin continued to use his writing and his voice throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s as a vehicle for social change — though the world to which he spoke was a new one. On Dec. 10, 1986, almost a year before his death, Baldwin, during a Q&A session after a National Press Club lecture, insisted that the country institute “a white history week; and I’m not joking,” focused on dispelling the illusions that kept the nation in a constant state of peril. “History is not the past,” stated Baldwin, “It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.” **_Historians explain how the past informs the present_** _Arica L. Coleman is the author of_ That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia _and chair of the Committee on the Status of African American, Latino/a, Asian American, and Native American (ALANA) Historians and ALANA Histories at the Organization of American Historians._ ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4680673/james-baldwin-documentary-history/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4680673/james-baldwin-documentary-history/"},"headline":"James Baldwin Documentary I Am Not Your Negro Is the Product of a Specific Moment in History","datePublished":"2017-02-24T16:00:18.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-23T03:29:26.200Z","description":"How understanding the 1970s lends an extra layer of meaning to the Oscar-nominated film","url":"https://time.com/4680673/james-baldwin-documentary-history/","keywords":["movies","Opinion"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3a506819bd771038/6988bb962dce011c4f9ec62b/baldwin.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Arica Coleman","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/arica-l-coleman/"}],"articleSection":"History","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3a506819bd771038/6988bb962dce011c4f9ec62b/baldwin.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"American novelist, writer, playwright, p","caption":"American novelist, writer, playwright, p","creditText":"Ralph Gatti—AFP/Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/history/","name":"History"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4680673/james-baldwin-documentary-history/","name":"James Baldwin Documentary I Am Not Your Negro Is the Product of a Specific Moment in History"}}]}] ```