Today is the day to catch all your civil rights: ‘i’m black and i’m proud’, ‘blacka than black’, ‘no justice no peace’ feels! After you leave your official Martin Luther King Day Parade and finish with your service projects for the day, make sure you make it back home by 9pm EST to watch the acclaimed documentary “I Am Not Your Negro”. The Oscar nominated 2016 film will air tonight on PBS and it’s all about about one of the Civil Rights era’s most powerful speakers, James Baldwin. On a day where we celebrate the most influential civil rights leader of our day, its a great time to watch a documentary on one of the greatest writers and one of the most outspoken civil rights heroes of our era.Read more about “I Am Not Your Negro” Here.
The Oscar-Nominated autobiography, “I Am Not Your Negro” opened this past weekend; the critically acclaimed work honor’s James Baldwin, one of the greatest writers in American history and an outspoken pillar of the civil rights movement.
Director Raoul Peck had this to say about the film: “I had no choice but to make the movie, an autobiographical sketch of literary icon James Baldwin. It’s not a game, this is the future of the country. The film is a sort of last call, or we’re going down the drain like everybody else – including everyone in power.”
The irony of listening to Baldwin as we go back in time in this film, or while viewing online footage, often feels as if he’s speaking to us today! All that Baldwin has given the world can be applied to what’s going on right now in our country.
In the first 60 seconds of the clip below Baldwin proclaims:
“If any white man in the world says give me liberty or give me death, the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, he is judged a criminal and treated like one, and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won’t be anymore like him.”
This statement rings true of how many white Americans have labeled the Black Lives Matter movement as a racists and terrorist organization, comparing it to the KKK – although BLM has never had a violent history of murdering, hanging or harming anyone.
Peck believes this movie is for people of all color and says he wants people to understand the “country’s racial backstory” in order for everyone to have an honest conversation. Peck says, “You can’t be innocent anymore, nobody can go out this movie and say they didn’t understand this world. I didn’t understand what America was. I didn’t understand that the American Dream was a myth.”
