34 pages • 1 hour read
James BaldwinI Am Not Your Negro
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Front MatterChapter Summaries & Analyses
Front Matter Summary: “Introduction: On A Personal Note”
Peck relates how he first read Baldwin as a teenager, along with writers Aimé Césaire, Jacques Stephen Alexis, and Richard Wright. He says these writers gave him a sense of context in his own life as an immigrant from Haiti, site of the world’s first successful slave revolution in 1804. The Haitian Revolution has historically been erased, however, and Peck writes, that “the dominant story was not the true story” (ix). This context was also important to Peck when his family moved to Brooklyn, where he believed in “the myth of a single and unique America” (x).
Front Matter Summary: “There are New Metaphors: Meeting Gloria”
Peck recounts meeting Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, James Baldwin’s younger sister, while doing research for the film project. Four years into considering the project, Gloria gave Raoul a packet of letters called “Notes Toward Remembering This House”—Baldwin’s unfinished book. Peck thanks her and acknowledges the project would be impossible without her generosity.
Front Matter Summary: “Notes on the Writing Process”
Peck discusses how he approached the project. He used Baldwin’s notes, letters, manuscripts, speeches, and books to create a draft of the unfinished book. He acknowledges this process sometimes entailed combining multiple drafts of Baldwin’s writing and correcting minor errors and typos, but he says he did his best to preserve Baldwin's work. The first draft of Peck’s compiled manuscript would have resulted in a three-hour film.
Front Matter Summary: “Editing I Am Not Your Negro”
Alexandra Strauss, the film editor for the I Am Not Your Negro documentary, discusses the difficulty of preserving Baldwin’s perspective while also incorporating music, film clips, and other visual materials. Fortunately, Baldwin had written about film, and the editors were able to use the films he discussed as a style guide. The editors delved into archives to find appropriate visual materials to support Baldwin’s words.
Intro Text Summary
Baldwin started Remember This House in June 1979, leaving behind thirty pages of notes.
In a 1968 interview with television host Dick Cavett, Baldwin says that the future of Black people in America is a question of the future of America.
In a 1979 letter to literary agent Jay Acton, Baldwin says he’s about to turn fifty-five, and is embarking on a new journey.
Between 1963 and 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X were all murdered. Baldwin says he wants their lives to “bang against and reveal each other,” and that he hopes to illustrate this in his new project (6).
Front Matter Analysis
I Am Not Your Negro’s Front Matter is used to give context to the project, explaining the text’s relationship to the film. The first three introductory portions are written by Peck, who takes the reader through his process approaching the project. Peck explains his long-standing desire to work on a project centering James Baldwin’s life, and his years-long journey toward developing what the project would be. In the introduction, Peck relates how moving from Haiti to New York gave him a desire to understand history and politics more fully and how he became aware that the Haitian Revolution was widely ignored in history books. This erasure made him conscious of how history is often misrepresented in order to uphold racist values and led him to look critically at how race is constructed in America.
Alexandra Strauss, the editor of the documentary, adds her notes on the process. She indicates that it was challenging to preserve Baldwin’s voice in editing, both because the film includes so many materials not present in Baldwin’s notes and because the film transitioned frequently between interview clips with Baldwin and audio of screen actor Samuel L. Jackson reading Baldwin’s notes and letters. She expresses concern that this transition would be jarring but notes that using video from films Baldwin discusses in his writing helped to create a consistent stylistic tone.
The final portion of the Front Matter is the beginning of the material that also appears in the film. In the film version, text on the screen explains that the film is using Baldwin’s notes. The film then shows the same interview clips and letters that appear in the text. For the rest of the film, interviews, speeches, letters, and voiceovers correspond to the material in the book.
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