Narrated by the iconic actor Samuel L. Jackson and with unprecedented access to writer James Baldwin’s original work, award-winning filmmaker Raoul Peck has completed the cinematic version of the book Baldwin never wrote – a radical narration about race in America that tracks the lives and assassinations of Baldwin’s friends and piers, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers.
Whilst being partly anchored in the struggle for equality in the 50s and 60s, I Am Not Your Negro is about what it means to be black in America today. By confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassinations of these three men we uncover a larger narrative of America’s historical current irrational relationship with race.
I Am Not Your Negro is the autopsy of American racial imagery and iconography, and a beautiful bringing to life of Baldwin’s sharp writing.