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Celebrating James Baldwin at 100

I Am Not Your Negro Documentary Screening & Discussion

Join us for a screening of the documentary I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO followed by a community conversation facilitated by Cynthia Young, Chair of the Dept. of African American and African Studies at OSU.

The Oscar-nominated documentary I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO is a thought-provoking, prescient film that explores James Baldwin's return to America during the civil rights movement of the 1960s and examines his relationships with three leading civil rights activists: Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.

Join us for a screening of I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO followed by a conversation facilitated by Dr. Cynthia Young, Chair of the Department of African American and African Studies at OSU, as we celebrate the life, writing, and legacy of James Baldwin at 100. 

Learn more about the film here.

About the Facilitator:

Cynthia A. Young is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. Previously, she has taught and led Black Studies departments at Boston College and The Pennsylvania State University. At Penn State, she co-led a cluster hire that recruited 11 Africana scholars to the university. Her first book, Soul Power (Duke UP) considers a group of white, Black, and Latinx writers, filmmakers, and unionists whose art and activism were inspired by US civil rights and anticolonial movements in Cuba, China, and Ghana. Her second book, Culture Wars, Terror Wars, considers how US racialization, state surveillance and immigration transformed and intensified during the so-called war on terror. She is particularly interested in how civil rights rhetoric has been appropriated by right-wing terror groups to promote white supremacy to a mainstream, white audience. During her graduate school years, she was a grad student union organizer at Yale University, which was finally recognized in 2022 after a 30+ year battle for union representation. She has been recognized for her efforts to support and sustain underrepresented scholars and their work with two Mellon grants totaling over $1 million dollars.

Trained as a literary critic and an interdisciplinary cultural historian, she specializes in 20th century radical social movements, US civil rights history, 21st century forms of antiblackness, and African diasporic cultural production reflecting the precarity of Black life facing economic exploitation, xenophobia, and various forms of state and imperial terror.

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