I Am Not Your Negro (2017) on Netflix
R20171h 33mDocumentary
James Baldwin's words and recollections shape a documentary essay on race in America. He remembers the civil rights years through Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers.
- Netflix4.5/5
- IMDb7.9/1024,979 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes99%
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Plot summary
A documentary assembles James Baldwin's words and memories alongside archive footage and film clips into a portrait of American racism. Footage covers white resistance to school desegregation, photographs of the 15-year-old Dorothy Counts integrating a North Carolina school, and screen images of Black Americans as suspects or as characters who refused vengeance. The film revisits a meeting in 1963 between Baldwin, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, where Hansberry pressed Kennedy for a moral commitment, and Baldwin's 1965 debate at Cambridge with William F. Buckley Jr. Baldwin holds that the prospects of Black Americans and the prospects of the whole country are tied to one another.
