Movie review: I Am Not Your Negro (2016)

I Am Not Your Negro is a documentary based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, Remember This House.

James Baldwin was an author and voice for social justice issues. (He rejected the label of civil rights activist.) In 1948, he left the US for Paris, due to the atmosphere of fear created by racist American society. After seeing a photo of a black woman being taunted and attacked by whites as she walked to a school that she was integrating, Baldwin could no longer remain abroad but returned in 1957. Baldwin then traveled through the south as a witness to the civil rights movement and a writer of his experiences. Through this time, he met and became friends with many prominent folks in the civil rights movement, including Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.

The documentary, based on his unfinished manuscript, is a reflection on these three great figures in the civil rights movement, the civil rights movement itself, and racism in America. Baldwin explains his experiences in the US and those of African-Americans. Clearly a well-read and reflective thinker, Baldwin illuminates for whites the experiences of African-Americans in the US. Time and time again he patiently explains how experiences are interpreted differently by whites and blacks. He provides a stark education to his white audience.

I Am Not Your Negro is a combination of many different media. The movie shows clips of Baldwin giving talks at Cambridge or interviews on The Dick Cavett Show. His own words and thoughts are narrated over images. Clips from movies in his youth are shown that depict African-Americans and whites in different ways. These clips speak to what he explains about life in the US. His three friends are shown as the movie rolls through the late 50s to the late 60s—the deaths of Evers, Malcolm, and King are covered in succession.

Baldwin has a talent for holding a mirror up to us to reflect the soul of America. It shows a sobering portrait—a portrait well-known to African-Americans and unknown by whites who keep themselves in ignorance through formal and informal segregation. Baldwin’s words and description of America speak eerily of the present moment and the film overlays his words on scenes from modern-day America—an America long after his death in 1987.

I suspect that Baldwin would have been insightful despite his self-exile, but being an ex-pat gives one distance from which to view one’s own culture and reflect on one’s experiences. Baldwin’s time abroad likely sharpened his assessment of America and the cancer of racism.

Baldwin did not share a number of things with African-Americans from the 1950s and 1960s. He was not a Muslim or a black panther because he did not believe that all whites were the devil. He was not Christian because Christians, he observed, do not live by the commandment to love one another. He was not a member of the NAACP because that organization was entangled with black class distinctions.

His distance and separation from American culture and membership in variety societal groups gave him a removal from which to observe. Why is Malcolm X liked? Malcolm X, he explained to whites, articulates the suffering of African Americans and corroborates their reality. Whites do not know about the lives of their black brethren. Segregation that occurs after school when we go to our separate homes creates apathy and ignorance.

The commonality between whites and blacks seems to be hatred. The root of black man’s hatred is rage. The root of white man’s hatred is terror. Baldwin explains how a movie scene is seen differently based on one’s racial experiences in America. Rather than getting away to safety, a black convict jumps from the moving train when the white convict is unable to ascend it safely. White liberal audiences, Baldwin points out, love the black man for doing this; it reassures them that they are not hated. Black audiences abhor the scene, calling for the black man to get back on the train.

From his vantage point, Baldwin describes American virtues as simplicity, sincerity, and immaturity. The American hero, portrayed by John Wayne, epitomizes these traits. (Ouch. Wayne is considered to be the pinnacle of masculinity in the US, so this observation suggests that American males are immature and simple. Baldwin’s comments seem timeless.)

Blacks were originally needed for the American economy—to pick cotton. But now they are no longer needed. Will they be killed like the native Americans were? Comments like this made me pause and think about modern slavery through economics and the criminal justice system—and the killing of black men that seems to be an epidemic.

Baldwin also points out that in America and other western countries, whites easily pick up guns and cry “give me liberty, or give me death.” No one bats an eye at that. But if a black man did the same? It would not be interpreted or dealt with in quite the same way. Again, Baldwin’s comments seem timeless.

I Am Not Your Negro is an interesting glimpse into the civil rights movement and the lives of Evers, King, and Malcolm as told through the eyes of an ex-pat author. Baldwin’s comments and perspectives based on his life experiences as a black American in the US and abroad provide food for thought. And it makes me wish that he had finished his manuscript Remember This House.

Book review: March: Book Three

The March trilogy covers five years of the civil rights movement experienced by legend John Lewis. Like the other books (Book One, Book Two), March: Book Three weaves the events of the time (1963 through 1965) with the inauguration of President Obama.

The book starts with the infamous 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing, in which four young girls were killed. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke after the bombing about the system, the way of life, and the philosophy that produced the killers. Going after the murderers isn’t sufficient, he said. One must dig out the roots that produced the tree with the fruit of violence.

Book Three discusses the wave of killings and protests that followed. The goal of the protests in Selma was for all African Americans to be able to register to vote and to vote. In Selma’s county, only 2.1% of African Americans were registered to vote. Barriers to registration were huge: limited registration times, literacy (and other farcical) tests, publication of registrants’ names in public papers (which invited firings from employers and attacks by the Klan).

Things also got heated next door in Mississippi. Activists organized the Mississippi Freedom Vote, a mock election with African-American candidates. Similar to a tactic used in South Africa, the mock election’s goal was two-fold: give African Americans a sense of what it was like to vote AND dramatize their exclusion from voting.

Activists also organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the state’s Democratic Party and its white delegates to the Democratic convention in 1964. MFDP was thwarted from getting an adequate number of delegates. (The powers-that-be offered them a paltry two delegates.)

While the Democratic Party was composed of segregationists, the Republican Party was not much different (or better). In 1964, the Republican Party was the party of Barry Goldwater, who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Rockefeller, who lost the Republican nomination, begged in vain for the party not to turn its back on its guiding principles.

Book Three prints a lengthy, moving quote from Rockefeller that could speak for the present times:

“It is essential that this convention repudiate, here and now, any doctrinaire, militant minority—whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan, or Bircher—which would subvert this party to purposes alien to the very basic tenets which gave this party birth. Precisely one year ago today on July 14, 1963, I issued a statement wherein I warned that: ‘The Republican Party is in real danger of subversion by a radical, well-financed, and highly disciplined minority. At the time, I pointed out that the purposes of this minority were: Wholly alien to the sound and honest conservatism that has firmly based the Republican Party in the best of a century’s traditions, wholly alien to the sound and honest Republican liberalism that has kept the party abreast of human needs in a changing world, wholly alien to the broad middle course that accommodates the mainstream of Republican principles.’” (page 102)

The book highlights the changes within SNCC, the organization that John Lewis chaired. The organization, working in the trenches in Alabama, felt threatened by SCLC and Martin Luther King, Jr. They saw others swoop into town to steal the limelight and the credit after they did the hard, grassroots effort. Also, funding was not split equally between different organizations. SNCC, considered the youngest and most radical, received the least funding. And SNCC was changing, moving away from its nonviolence roots.

In Book Three, numerous other people important to the protests and activities of the civil rights movement show up. I was tickled to see James Baldwin mentioned in passing. And I was surprised to read about Malcolm X’s seeming change of heart and tactics prior to the Selma march.

Harry Belafonte took John Lewis and others on a short tour of Africa. During that trip, Lewis learned how much Africans looked to Malcolm X for inspiration. Although SNCC was deemed radical in the US, in Africa it was not radical enough. In Africa, Malcolm X had already started his shift in philosophy; his focus was no longer on race but poverty, reminiscent of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s focus on poverty right before he was assassinated. What could have been accomplished in the fight against poverty if neither leader had been assassinated?

Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a milestone, it was severely deficient. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not ban literacy tests or other voting restrictions. There was nothing in the act to ensure voter registration. A Voting Rights Act was needed to ensure the right to register and to vote.

The Civil Rights Movement described in Book Three ends with the march from Selma to Montgomery and the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Malcolm appears as a foil to Martin Luther King, Jr. Seen as a radical element compared to King, Malcolm used his reputation to strike fear in whites in hopes that they would acquiesce to King’s demands rather than deal with the unpredictability and likely violence from Malcolm X and his followers. The march from Selma to Montgomery finally ended in success on the third attempt, on March 21, 1965. (The inspiring marches from Selma are retold in the movie Selma.)

The five years of the movement that the three books of March cover are awe-inspiring. Clearly the work is not done and in some ways the movement has slid backwards. The books remind us of what was done and how it was accomplished in the 1950s and 1960s. History can be a guide, illuminating, encouraging, enlightening. March does all three. Through its illustrations and text, March shows us what is possible and educates us about the important historical events and people who made a difference.

Quest for existence

“A section of the white population, perceiving Negro pressure for change, misconstrues it as a demand for privileges rather than as a desperate quest for existence.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr. “Negroes Are Not Moving Too Fast.”  Saturday Evening Post (pdf). November 1964.

Book review: March: Book Two

The struggle continues.

I could be talking about resistance to rights being rolled back now. Or the second book in the trilogy about John Lewis and the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

As with Book One, March: Book Two recounts events in the civil rights movement against the backdrop of modern events. In Book One, a woman and two children visit John Lewis in his DC office, listening to stories from his childhood and about his involvement in the early movement. In Book Two, John Lewis is preparing to attend President Obama’s 2009 inauguration. The contrast between welcoming the first African-American president and recounting stories of struggle to gain basic rights in the 1960s is stark.

Whereas Book One focused on the rise of nonviolent protest, the beginning of SNCC, and lunch counter sit-ins, Book Two focuses on the Freedom Rides and the March on Washington in 1963—the spot of the famous “I have a dream speech”.

The sit-ins didn’t end with lunch counters, but moved to fast food venues and cafeterias—and then to movie theatres. The second-class citizenship of African Americans had been so normalized that people didn’t seem to notice or question it. The protests brought the discrimination to the forefront. But those in power—in this case whites—do not give up their power voluntarily. Nonviolent protest was increasingly being met with violence.

In 1961, the Supreme Court in Boynton v. Virginia outlawed segregated buses and bus terminals. Legal judgments are one thing. Reality can be quite another. The judgment had no real impact on the experience of African Americans.

Initially, the movement was split on what action to take. But ultimately, a contingent moved forward with plans to test the Supreme Court decision. Before embarking on what came to be called the Freedom Rides—bus rides from DC to New Orleans—James Farmer sent a letter to people who should be made aware of what was happening—President Kennedy, the Attorney General (Robert Kennedy), the head of the FBI (J. Edgar Hoover), the chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the presidents of Greyhound and Trailways. The letter explained what would be happening and why.

Unsurprisingly, the Freedom Rides encountered problems—mobs angry that blacks would seek to exercise their rights to ride on buses and enjoy bus terminals, mobs angry that whites rode with blacks in solidarity. Busses were firebombed. Cops stepped aside, letting mobs savagely beat the riders—one man was beaten so severely that he suffered brain damage and was paralyzed for the rest of his life. Cops arrested blacks and whites for riding together—and then drove them across the border, dumping them in KKK country, knowing that they would likely be killed.

However, one officer was different. Floyd Mann, the director of the Alabama Department of Public Safety, stopped the beatings at the Montgomery bus terminal. He stood up for the life and liberty of the Freedom Riders.

One quote in the book about the culture of violence in Alabama jumped out at me. Replace “Governor Patterson” and “Alabama” and Martin Luther King’s words could apply today. “Governor Patterson bears the ultimate responsibility for the hideous action in Alabama. His consistent preaching of defiance of the law, his vitriolic public pronouncements, and his irresponsible actions have created the atmosphere in which violence could thrive.” (March: Book Two, page 88)

Interestingly, Alabama and Mississippi were quite different in their racism. Unlike Alabama, which met the Freedom Riders with unbridled violence, Mississippi tried to hide open violence, using economic and political pressure to support segregation. The White Citizen’s Council was the “businessman’s KKK”, which reminded me of the KKK membership among the elites of Indianapolis, a northern city historically rife with racism, segregation, and the evils of both, during the early 20^th century.

In Mississippi, the Freedom Riders were fined. If they didn’t pay the fine, they would spend 60 days in jail. They refused to pay. (After 40 days, someone—no names are given—posted bail for them.) Despite this, John Lewis missed his college graduation. He was busy fighting for social justice by being imprisoned for exercising his legal right to ride a bus.

The end result: The Justice Department petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission for a ruling to enforce Boynton v Virginia.

March: Book Two shows reality from John Lewis’s perspective. Our liberal heroes sometimes are not quite so liberal or heroic as we believe from our modern-day perspective. Lewis shows us their clay feet. Martin Luther King would not ride with the Freedom Riders in Mississippi—he was on probation, which, as March: Book Two points out, were all of the Freedom Riders.

Bobby Kennedy is not quite the big supporter of the little guy that he is portrayed in modern myth. He had no patience with the movement and demanded that they stop protesting. Bobby Kennedy then suggested that the movement focus on voter registration rather than actions or protests, which the civil rights movement had historical done. Martin Luther King endorsed this shift in focus. SNCC itself was divided into two wings: direct actions and voter registration.

The movement had its share of disappointments too. Jim Farmer backed out of the Freedom Rides. Stokely Carmichael didn’t believe in nonviolence; he would use it as a tactic but not as a philosophy that motivated all he did.

Regardless of the change of focus from protests to voter registration, the violence continued. In Liberty, MI, Herbert Lee, a farmer who helped with voter registration, was killed. His murderer, E.H. Hurst (a state representative no less!) was found not guilty. The Birmingham march resulted in 1,000 arrests, King’s famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and promises for desegregation and fair housing practices. Medgar Evers was killed. Three hundred US Marshals were injured while protecting James Meredith, the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi.

SNCC was changing. Its goal shifted from integration to fair employment practices. Nonviolence was no longer the normal practice. This turning away from nonviolence violated the early spirit of the movement and its members—and tore at John Lewis’s heart. In 1963, he became chairman of SNCC and moved to Atlanta.

This was also the year of what would become the famous March on Washington. Officially SNCC did not support the march or the civil rights bill. (The bill would limit voting to people with 6^th grade education or greater. SNCC’s position was that the only limit should be age and residence.) But John was invited to speak, and became one of what was known as the Big Six—six important members in the civil rights movement who organized the March on Washington.

Lewis was by far the youngest, and the most outspoken. His proposed speech was controversial—many other members in the movement were upset by some of the things that he proposed to say. March: Book Two describes this situation—and how the march ultimately got away from the organizers and took on a life of its own. The book covers what was taken out and what was left in Lewis’s speech…and includes an original draft of the speech.

Like its predecessor, March: Book Two illuminates the story through the powerful interplay of words and images. The story educates and informs about events that occurred in the not too distant past…and provides fodder for reflection in our current times. For John Lewis, it is not whether to struggle or how to struggle. For John Lewis, nonviolent struggle must continue to protect the rights of everyone.

Book review: March: Book One

John Lewis. He speaks, I listen. Congressman Lewis is one of those rare figures for me in the public realm who command a moral high road and a sense of gravitas. He came out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s to occupy a space of integrity and values that I believe more of our public officials should occupy.

So when I learned in a podcast that the third book in his graphic novel trilogy was being published, I was intrigued. How did I not know of this trilogy? What bits of his life story would be highlighted in visual form?

I started at the beginning, with Book One in the March trilogy. I was hooked. I’m not a graphic novel fan girl. I frankly am not hip to the graphic novel genre and might raise hackles by my assumption born out of ignorance that the graphic novel developed in parallel with or from comic books and Japanese manga. Clearly, they are different but share the same storytelling modus operandi: tell stories through a combination of words and images.

Graphic novels seem to be picture books for adults, a form of art that brings words more to life by showing scenes juxtaposed in ways that highlight the words or illuminate bits of a story that remain unspoken. What was the nonviolent confrontation with police and angry mobs like for the people who occupied lunch counters in the early 1960s? Words can only go so far to describe it, but illustrations that show the struggle against peaceful demonstrators can and do reveal a deeper experiential story of what it was like.

March: Book One uses the storytelling vehicle of a woman with two young boys visiting John Lewis at his congressional office. From their questions and interest in his life, we are privy to key bits in his life. The story starts with John Lewis’s childhood, specifically his desire to be a preacher and his love of the chickens that he raised (and how the two intersected—a delight to me who never grew out of my childhood love of silliness). The book continues to describe defining moments in his life, his growth towards adulthood, and his participation in the civil rights movement.

An important moment in his childhood was when an uncle took him on a road trip north to Buffalo, New York. John’s world suddenly expanded in a massive way. He saw a different way for blacks and whites to exist—as neighbors. While surely not an idyllic place in terms of race relations, Buffalo offered a stark contrast to what he was experiencing growing up in the South.

Other important moments in his life unfold: preaching as a teenager, meeting Martin Luther King, Jr., attending college, encountering Jim Lawson and the burgeoning nonviolence movement, participating in lunch counter sit-ins, and becoming a part of SNCC. The common thread through all of these events was his drive towards social justice, the lynchpin for him even today.

March is wonderfully done—both the storyline and the illustrations. The combination of the words with images drives home the message of social justice. In a time when one would hope that March is relevant as a history of who we were and what our country went through, March is also relevant today as a reminder of who we are, what our values are, and the importance of social justice.

In light of recent events, March can be a depressing realization that the struggle for social justice is being swamped by the waves of bigotry, xenophobia, and misogyny gripping the nation. It can also be a rallying cry: if the darkness of social injustice could be rolled back before, then it can be again.

To understand the present and the future, you need to revisit the past. People forget the lessons of the past, and history tends to repeat itself, fueled by those ignorant of—or willfully disregarding—the past. Those active in the 1960s may in some way see today as the same struggle, or an entirely new incarnation of the struggle. The struggle for social justice, John Lewis’s raison d’etre, continues.

In March, I learned of another graphic novel that had profound implications: the 1958 comic book Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, which inspired the activists of the 1960s. Who might March inspire and what will be the outcome of that inspiration?