I Am Not Your Negro

I Am Not Your Negro

Summary

The New York Times bestseller based on the Oscar nominated documentary film

In June 1979, the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin embarked on a project to tell the story of America through the lives of three of his murdered friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. He died before it could be completed. In his documentary film, I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck imagines the book Baldwin never wrote, using his original words to create a radical, powerful and poetic work on race in the United States - then, and today.

'Thrilling . . . A portrait of one man's confrontation with a country that, murder by murder, as he once put it, "devastated my universe"' The New York Times

'Baldwin's voice speaks even more powerfully today . . . the prose-poet of our injustice and inhumanity . . . The times have caught up with his scalding eloquence' Variety

'A cinematic séance . . . One of the best movies about the civil rights era ever made' Guardian

'I Am Not Your Negro turns James Baldwin into a prophet' Rolling Stone

Reviews

  • Lets James Baldwin's searing work soar . . . you will be astounded by the brilliance of his polemic
    Geoffrey Macnab, Independent

About the authors

James Baldwin

James Baldwin was born in 1924 in New York. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which evokes his experiences as a boy preacher in Harlem, was an immediate success. Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956) has become a landmark of gay literature and Another Country (1962) caused a literary sensation. His searing essay collections Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961) contain many of the works that made him an influential figure in the Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin published several other collections of non-fiction, including The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972). His short stories are collected in Going to Meet the Man (1965). His later works include the novels Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1973) and Just Above My Head (1979).

James Baldwin won a number of literary fellowships: a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship and a Ford Foundation grant. He was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour in 1986. He died in 1987 in France
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Raoul Peck

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