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James d baldwin american ag credit8/15/2023 ![]() Instead, as Carol Anderson has demonstrated in her book White Rage, 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. 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. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had brought a renewed sense of hope.īut, though Baldwin’s message would essentially remain the same for the rest of his life, the world changed around him. 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.ĭespite his harsh criticism, Baldwin remained hopefully optimistic that American equality was achievable. One of the most striking moments in I Am Not Your Negro comes from a 1963 PBS interview between Baldwin and the esteemed psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose research - produced with his research partner and wife Mamie Phipps Clark - had influenced the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. As Peck aptly notes in the introduction to the film’s companion book, 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.” Remember This House was to be Baldwin’s magnum opus, a critique of American society from the viewpoint of the assassination of his friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. 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. Jackson, was written by James Baldwin, one of America’s foremost public intellectuals of the 20th century, who died in 1987. Though the Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro is a brand new movie, by filmmaker Raoul Peck, it is also a historical document: the narration, delivered in the film by Samuel L.
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