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Peck tells us that Baldwin left only thirty pages of notes on the proposed book. (If the film has information the viewer needs, then Peck will impart it by means of typewriter noise producing white letters on a black screen.) Peck composed his script by drawing from some of Baldwins uncollected writings, maybe a bit from The Fire Next Time, as well as from two extended essays, No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976), both included in Baldwins collected essays.

In the beginning of his film, Peck juxtaposes smoky black-and-white and Technicolor footage of Baldwin with high-resolution still photographs of Black Lives Matter demonstrations. A line from Baldwin heard later in the film is about how history is not the past; history is the present. Throughout, Peck makes connections between what is going on today and what Baldwin was protesting decades ago. His urgency had a point, and still does, the clip of a Ferguson, Missouri, riot says.

We hear lines from No Name in the Street, in which Baldwin is remembering the fall of 1956, when he was living in Paris:

Facing us, on every newspaper kiosk on that wide, treeshaded boulevard, were photographs of fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts being reviled and spat upon by the mob as she was making her way to school in Charlotte, North Carolina. There was unutterable pride, tension, and anguish in that girls face as she approached the halls of learning, with history, jeering, at her back.

It made me furious, it filled me with both hatred and pity, and it made me ashamed. Some one of us should have been there with her! . . . It was on that bright afternoon that I knew I was leaving France. I could, simply, no longer sit around in Paris discussing the Algerian and the black American problem. Everybody else was paying their dues, and it was time I went home and paid mine.

Meanwhile, Jackson is speaking over those photographs of Dorothy Counts. We get to look into her face and wonder just how light-skinned she was, but we also can see clearly the faces of the white boys taunting her.

[ Return to the review of Busted in New York. ]

A few of the images may be familiar from other documentaries: deputies prodding King and Abernathy onto the pavement with batons, probably in Selma; a black man shoved up against a wall in Watts in 1965 gets in a blow at a surprised cop and is answered by three or four wildly swinging batons; they are swinging again in 1992, beating Rodney King, and not just for a few seconds of video either. Then there is Ferguson, Missouri. I Am Not Your Negro climaxes in what are probably mug shots of the Scottsboro Boys from 1931 that lead into recent images of police struggling with black men and assaulting black women. At another point, the faces and names of recent child victims of police killings fade in and out.

But one of the strongest features of Pecks film is how much we see of ordinary white people and their violent resistance to integration in the 1950s and 1960s. In the course of the film, we see howling young white males, some mere boys, carrying signs painted with swastikas and tracking demonstrators; the National Guard escorting black schoolchildren through the gauntlet of angry faces in Little Rock. One of the most shocking sequences shows white men attacking what must be lunch-counter sit-in protesters. It is color footage from 1960 or 1961. The violence has not been choreographed. It is sudden and raw. The hatred of black people is out there. The unguarded face of the South contrasts with images that play when Jackson is reading what Baldwin has to say about the myths and ignorance reinforced by American cinema.

The Devil Finds Work is a memoir of Baldwins childhood and youth in the form of his reflections on films that made an impression on him or that express something about how dangerous American innocence is when it comes to race. Jacksons voice-over: I am about seven. I am with my mother, or my aunt. The movie is Dance, Fools, Dance. Suddenly, there she is, dancing away with her long legs in that 1931 film:

I was aware that Joan Crawford was a white lady. Yet, I remember being sent to the store sometime later, and a colored woman, who, to me, looked exactly like Joan Crawford, was buying something. She was so incredibly beautiful . . . and looked down at me with so beautiful a smile that I was not even embarrassed. Which was rare for me.

About his schoolteacher, Orilla Miller, as Baldwin recalled her in The Devil Finds Work:

She gave me books to read and talked to me about the books, and about the world: about Spain, for example, and Ethiopia, and Italy, and the German Third Reich; and took me to see plays and films, plays and films to which no one else would have dreamed of taking a ten-year-old boy. . . .It is certainly partly because of her that I never really managed to hate white peoplethough, God knows, I have often wished to murder more than one or two. . . .

From Miss Miller, therefore, I began to suspect that white people did not act as they did because they were white, but for some other reason, and I began to try to locate and understand the reason. She, too, anyway, was treated like a nigger, especially by the cops, and she had no love for landlords.

While we have been listening to Samuel Jackson, among the images we have also been watching are black-and-white photographs of black children at their school desks; a young HaileSelassie and his court; German children waving Nazi flags; film of Nazi book burnings; and lastly a still photograph of Miss Miller herself:

It is not entirely true that no one from the world I knew had yet made an appearance on the American screen: there were, for example, Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best and Manton Moreland, all of whom, rightly or wrongly, I loathed. It seemed to me that they lied about the world I knew, and debased it, and certainly I did not know anybody like themas far as I could tell. . . .

Yet, I had no reservations at all concerning the terror of the black janitor in They Wont Forget. I think that it was a black actor named Clinton Rosewood who played this part, and he looked a little like my father. He is terrified because a young white girl, in this small Southern town, has been raped and murdered, and her body has been found on the premises of which he is the janitor...The role of the janitor is small, yet the mans face hangs in my memory until today.

And there is the scene of the janitor in his cell, on his bunk, filmed from above, the white faces looking down at him not visible to the audience. He cringes, sweats, and begs, a scene followed by footage from a silent film of 1927, Uncle Toms Cabin, and Baldwins words that because Uncle Tom refused to take vengeance, he was no hero to him as a boy:

In the case of the American Negro, from the moment you are born every stick and stone, every face, is white. Since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6 or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.

The photographs of the massacre at Wounded Knee are a surprise when they turn up.

Before Pecks film ends, Richard Widmark will scream, Nigger, nigger, nigger in a clip from No Way Out (1950), a radical movie for its time, also starring Sidney Poitier, whom Baldwin does not blame for the ridiculousness of the films The Defiant Ones (1958), Guess Whos Coming to Dinner (1967), or In the Heat of the Night (1967). A scene from another Poitier film, A Raisin in the Sun (1961), moves into Baldwins memoir of the plays author, Lorraine Hansberry, and one of the last times he saw her on her feet, at a historic confrontation with Robert Kennedy, in June 1963. After a frosty farewell to the attorney general, Hansberry walked out of the meeting. Hansberry was thirty-four years old when she died of cancer. Baldwin remembers how young everyone was in those days, even Bobby Kennedy.

The use of clips is clever, and they in themselves are often marvelous. We can hear a serious point being made about, say, the American idea of democracy as material abundance, and the screen will fill with something like a mad dance at a picnic from the 1957 musical The Pajama Game. Or Doris Day could be singing along after some sharp analysis concerning Americas infantilism. The clips complement Baldwins way of moving from paradox to paradox.

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Busted in New York: And Other Essays, by Darryl Pinckney: An Excerpt - The New York Times