I Am Not Your Negro

Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary

To compose his stunning documentary film I Am Not Your Negro, acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck mined James Baldwin’s published and unpublished oeuvre, selecting passages from his books, essays, letters, notes, and interviews that are every bit as incisive and pertinent now as they have ever been. Weaving these texts together, Peck brilliantly imagines the book that Baldwin never wrote. In his final years, Baldwin had envisioned a book about his three assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. His deeply personal notes for the project have never been published before. Peck’s film uses them to jump through time, juxtaposing Baldwin’s private words with his public statements, in a blazing examination of the tragic history of race in America.

“I Am Not Your Negro is a kaleidoscopic journey through the life and mind of James Baldwin, whose voice speaks even more powerfully today than it did 50 years ago. . . . He was the prose-poet of our injustice and inhumanity. . . . The times have caught up with his scalding eloquence.” —Variety
 
“A searing and topical indictment of racial prejudice and hatred in America that makes for uneasy viewing and is not easily forgotten. . . . Vividly intelligent.” —Hollywood Reporter
 
“A striking work of storytelling. . . . One of the best movies about the civil rights era ever made. . . . This might be the only movie about race relations that adequately explains—with sympathy—the root causes.” —The Guardian
 
“Thrilling. . . . A portrait of one man’s confrontation with a country that, murder by murder, as he once put it, ‘devastated my universe.’… One of the best movies you are likely to see this year.” —The New York Times

Teacher's Guide: https://www.randomhouseacademic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/I-Am-Not-Your-Negro-Teachers-Guide.pdf