“I Am Not Your Negro” To Be Shown Sunday at All Souls Church

Sunday, August 26th, 2018, at All Souls Church (29 South Street in West Brattleboro, Vt 05301). 12 noon, preceded by a light lunch at 11:15 a.m.
The film is part of the “Looking Inward at White Power and Privilege” series sponsored by the All Souls Church Social and Environmental Action Committee (SEAC). Both the lunch and the film are free and open to the public.  Childcare will be provided upon request. For more information, contact George Carvill at 802-490-2052.

In the film, director Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished, “Remember This House.” It is a journey into black history that connects the Civil Rights movement to #BlackLivesMatter. It questions Black representation in Hollywood and beyond.

In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, “Remember This House.” The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and assassinations of three of his close friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time of Baldwin’s death in 1987, he left behind only 30 completed pages of this manuscript. Filmmaker Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished.

In February 2017 New York Times critic A.O. Scott wrote, “Whatever you think about the past and future of what used to be called ‘race relations’ — white supremacy and the resistance to it, in plainer English — this movie will make you think again, and may even change your mind. Though its principal figure, the novelist, playwright and essayist James Baldwin, is a man who has been dead for nearly 30 years, you would be hard-pressed to find a movie that speaks to the present moment with greater clarity and force, insisting on uncomfortable truths and drawing stark lessons from the shadows of history.” As James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it has ben faced. History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise we literally are criminals.”

All Souls Church launched the film series last year under the leadership of SEAC. The series explores how unrecognized white privilege hampers our society’s requirement for racial justice.

For more background on James Baldwin, check out this Time Magazine article from 2/17: http://time.com/4680673/james-baldwin-documentary-history/.