In 1979, James Baldwin approached The New Yorker with an idea for a long essay: he would travel to the cities in the South that were central to the civil-rights struggle—Selma, Birmingham, Atlanta, and elsewhere—and consider what the fallen heroes of the movement, including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, would make of the world that had and hadn’t emerged after their deaths. The project soon swelled into a proposal for a book that would be called “Remember This House,” which Hilton Als refers to as “a book that he does not want to write but knows he must write.” Neither the essay nor the book was ever published. Instead, what came out of Baldwin’s trip was the documentary “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” directed by Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley and released in 1982, which tells a story not of the dead but of those who lived to see many of the gains of the movement undone by an increasingly punitive criminal-justice system and the rise of Reaganism. (The Harvard Film Archive is restoring the documentary for a digital release early next year.)
In the video above—which includes footage from the documentary—the filmmakers, along with the historians Jill Lepore, Elizabeth Hinton, and Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., reflect on the conditions of the country in the early nineteen-eighties, and on Baldwin’s own somber summation of what he saw. “It is very bitter to have fought so hard for the vote, only to enter the system and realize there is nothing to vote for,” Baldwin says at one point. “You should know that nobody wanted to see the film,” Hartley says, of its initial release. “Nobody wanted to know that nothing was actually achieved.”
Yet, along with its sharply critical appraisal of the moment, the film contains sparks of fire, as when Baldwin meets with the activist Oretha Castle Haley, whose description of racist policing and the politics that enables it is especially resonant in our current era. Or when Baldwin stands down a racist heckler, who attempts to prevent him from giving a speech, and declares that he will continue, even under the threat of violence or assassination. Of Baldwin’s courage and resolve, Fontaine recalls, “He would not be stopped by anything.”
