Timeless James Baldwin

BY: Howard Karren

James Baldwin was more than just a gifted writer, a passionate artisan of prose: he was the conscience of America during his lifetime (1924–87), a disillusioned observer of its corrupted spirit. Born and raised in Harlem, he wrote beautiful, heart-rending novels about the African-American experience. And being gay and largely un-public about it, he doubly understood the sense of Other in white—and deeply repressed—postwar America. The remarkable Giovanni’s Room tells the story of a young, blond white American expatriate discovering his gay self while spending time abroad in Paris. Its black author, James Baldwin, also an expatriate in France for much of his adult life, is virtually invisible in that book.

But Baldwin was anything but invisible. He wrote essay upon essay, and spoke out against racism in America in ways that were far ahead of his time. He understood that racism was a pox that deeply infected the nation, its primordial sin. And that’s the subject of I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary about Baldwin directed by the Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck. Magnolia Pictures is releasing it in theaters, briefly, on December 9, for award consideration, then more widely on February 3. Watch the trailer, above, then see the movie that Variety’s Owen Gleiberman called a “transcendent documentary,” one that “takes a kaleidoscopic journey through the life and mind of James Baldwin, whose voice speaks even more powerfully today than it did 50 years ago.”