Movie tickets cost five dollars at the Lyric Theatre in Blacksburg, Virginia. It’s an old gem – a distinctly American marriage of Art Deco and Spanish Colonial Revival. There are red velvet seats and oak banisters; the walls are lantern-lit, and lined with tapestries from the 1930s. Eight decades of popcorn butter is burned into the air. It’s less a theatre than a time machine.

The first time I saw I Am Not Your Negro – Raoul Peck’s taut and vital, Oscar-nominated documentary about the writer and civil-rights activist James Baldwin (1924–87) – I sat in my usual seat, front-row-centre on the balcony. The view’s not great, but I like the elevated quiet. I have the luxury of choice. During segregation, Black patrons were forced into the recessed dark, hidden from the white audience below. A discreet, brass plaque on the staircase attests to this shameful past, but history can’t be screwed to the wall. ‘History is not the past,’ wrote Baldwin, ‘It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.’ With brutal clarity, I Am Not Your Negro demonstrates that America’s racist history is alive and awake: ‘The story of the negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.’