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.
Part 3: “Witness”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3 Summary: “Witness”
Baldwin recalls seeing Malcolm X for the first time, during a lecture in New York City. Baldwin knew his reputation, but was skeptical. X left an impression of intensity and strength.
Medgar Evers was investigating the murder of a Black man, and asked Baldwin to join him. Baldwin reflects on his role as a witness, who could write and share the story.
In 1966, the FBI includes Baldwin’s name in a security report.
Baldwin says White people don’t realize that the racist violence in Birmingham, Alabama is nationally endemic.
In a 1963 interview, Dr. Kenneth Clark asks Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. about their different approaches. X argues that King’s nonviolence keeps Black people defenseless; King counters that nonviolence makes it possible to withstand violence. By the time of their murders, their stances had converged. Baldwin reflects on the strangeness that he is the only one of them who survived to age forty.
In a 1963 forum, Baldwin says White people are so segregated, they have no idea how Black people live.
He recalls meeting Bobby Kennedy, along with playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin In The Sun. Baldwin and Hansberry wanted an escort for a young Black girl integrating into a southern school. Kennedy said it would be a “meaningless moral gesture,” and Hansberry countered that they wanted a “moral commitment” (43). Baldwin misses her.
Baldwin recalls hearing that Evers had been shot in his carport, in front of his family. He remembers Evers telling him about seeing a lynched body in a tree he had to walk past every day.
In 1969, Baldwin says his idea of being an American was informed by White figures like George Washington. He says the problem isn’t about Black people or voting acts—it’s how White people won’t accept Black people as equally human.
The section ends with an excerpt from the film Imitation of Life. A Black mother picks up her daughter from school, and discovers she has been passing as White. The daughter is furious that her mother came to her classroom.
Part 3 Analysis
Baldwin meditates on the meaning of being a witness and on the impediments to witnessing. This section is organized around two main ideas: that being a witness is a distinct role from being an actor (although the lines can be blurred) and that, for a variety of social and political reasons, White people do not witness Black life.
It is also in this section that Baldwin begins to reflect on his relationship with Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. In his first meeting with X, Baldwin reflects that myths surrounding figures are often unreliable, suggesting that he has heard negative or frightening things about X. Baldwin’s reluctance to accept this legend again ties into his belief that reality is often obscured to support racism.
Medgar Evers was a civil rights activist, and the Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP. Evers was directly involved with investigating hate crimes and racist violence. By briefly joining him on an investigation, Baldwin becomes aware of the difference between their positions. Despite engaging with civil rights and racism in his writing, Baldwin feels himself to be physically and ideologically removed from the work Evers is doing in Mississippi. Rather than fighting this, Baldwin concludes that he must be mindful of his own position. He meditates on the power of writing and commits to telling the story of Evers’ work, spreading the narrative as far as he can.
The section closes with a reflection from Baldwin that White people are both unwilling to see Black people as equals, and unable to witness Black life generally. This sentiment is reinforced through a film clip from Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life. In this 1959 melodrama starring Lana Turner, a light-skinned Black girl named Susie is able to pass as White. Instances in which others learn of or fail to see her race determine how she is treated and what she is able to do. She rejects her mother, Annie, whose skin is darker than her own, in order to assume a White identity. When Annie dies, brokenhearted, Susie declares “I killed my mother!” suggesting a moral cost of Whiteness.
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