James Baldwin: The literary voice of the Civil Rights movement

James Baldwin's appearance on The Dick Cavett Show in 1969, in which he responded to the suggestion from Yale professor Paul Weiss that the impact of race was overemphasised, features in I Am Not Your Negro.

In this excerpt Baldwin described to Weiss the systemic oppression that forced him to leave America in 1948.

Baldwin said: "I don't know what most white people in this country feel but I can only include what they feel from the state of their institutions".

He first moved to Europe in 1948 and in 1970 he settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France - where he welcomed guests including Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone.

Speaking on the Today programme in 2017, Raoul Peck, the director of I Am Not a Negro, explained why he set the words of James Baldwin against contemporary footage.

Despite Baldwin dying in 1987, Baldwin's words remain extremely relevant.

Peck said: "It shows how current and precise Baldwin's thoughts were. Watching these images of Ferguson [Missouri, USA] or the killings of young black men today in America or elsewhere. Those words ring so truthful, as if they were written on the same morning."

For BBC Radio 4's Open Book, writer Sara Collins examined the passage of Baldwin's 1956 novel Giovanni's Room in which the protagonist David first meets the titular character. She said: "The scene is a marvel of interiority. Nothing happens. Nothing is said. Yet it encapsulates the themes and the trajectory of the entire novel."

In Paul Mendez's 2020 novel Rainbow Milk, Jesse, a young black man from Wolverhampton, comes to the realisation about the impact of race on his life while reading Giovanni's Room, concluding, "He knew he would have to spend the rest of his life convincing people he wasn't too black".

Professor Magdalena Zaborowka makes the case for Baldwin's humanism. She said: "I think his legacy is that he created a kind of humanism within American culture that has been unparalleled... The very often cited conclusion of his essay Here Be Dragons tells us 'Each of us, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white'".