I Am Not Your Negro

This section opens with two quotes: one from Leander Perez, of the White Citizens Council, claiming integration should prompt White parents to take kids out of school; and one from a White southern woman, claiming God condemns integration.

Baldwin recalls seeing a photograph of Dorothy Counts, one of the first Black students admitted to a White public school,  being harassed as she entered school, with “unutterable pride, tension, and anguish” on her face (12). Baldwin was in Paris at the time but felt he needed to come home to “pay his dues.” He was sick of listening to Parisians discuss “the Algerian and the Black American problem” (12) and felt a need to be close to Counts and his own American family.          

Although Baldwin didn’t miss America, he did miss his family, life in Harlem, and the Black community that had raised and nourished him.

He recalls being fascinated with the film Dance Fools Dance as a seven-year-old, and tells a story of a time he had seen a Black woman in a market who looked, to him, exactly like Joan Crawford. She had smiled at him, and he had felt strangely unembarrassed.