I Am Not Your Negro

“Paying My Dues” is the first of six loosely organized sections in the text. In the film, these sections are introduced with text on the screen. “Paying My Dues” broadly follows Baldwin’s feeling that he owes his upbringing to Black friends, family, and community in Harlem and that he must honor that legacy by returning to America from Europe.

Dorothy Counts, who Baldwin references in this section, is an American woman who was one of the first Black student to integrate into an otherwise all-White North Carolina high school in 1957. Counts was fifteen years old at the time. Upon entering her new school, she endured harassment from White students, who were encouraged by other White locals (including members of the White supremacist organization, the White Citizens Council) to attack and ostracize her. Her White classmates excluded her, blocked her path, spit on her, threw rocks at her, and shattered her family’s car window. Although Counts wanted to be enrolled at her high school, her parents withdrew her a week later out of fear for her safety.

The photograph Baldwin saw was likely the same photograph that won the World Press Photo of the Year in 1957 taken by photographer Douglas Martin. In the image, jeering White boys mock Counts in the background while she walks with her head held high toward the school.

Baldwin expresses how he did not miss America while he was in France, but he felt he had to return home after he could not stomach French people talking about race as if it was a distant, foreign issue. This underlines Baldwin’s turmoil at his position in America, and his sense that the America experienced by Black and White people are two entirely different realms that rarely, if ever, interact.