In 1979, the black American author James Baldwin wrote to his publisher proposing a book called Remember This House, a personal memoir of three famous US civil rights activists who were also his friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, all assassinated before reaching 40. By the time Baldwin himself died in 1987, he had only completed 30 pages.
Now the director Raoul Peck has reinvigorated the project in cinematic form, with I Am Not Your Negro (12A, 93 mins, ★★★★) which links Baldwin’s writing – voiced by Samuel L Jackson – to footage of the civil rights era and older historical documentation. The result is undeniably powerful. The stark details of slavery, for example, still shock: an “infant, nine months” casually packaged and sold as part of “a large lot of Negroes”.
