What is the importance of the American South in the film, I Am Not Your Negro?

Throughout this text, Baldwin references several southern cities. Baldwin refers to Alabama, Mississippi, in order to offer a comparison between the struggles faces by African Americans in these different environments with his experience as a "Harlem street boy" (29). It was Charlotte, North Carolina, to which Baldwin first felt compelled to go in his capacity as a witness, because of the hatred leveled at Dorothy Counts, a 15 year old student integrating a local high school there. Baldwin explains some of the differences between his experience and the experience of African Americans fighting for civil rights in the south, citing the NAACP as more of a support network there, whereas up North, where Baldwin was from, it "was fatally entangled with black class distinctions, or illusions of the same, which repelled a shoe-shine boy like me" (30). The Civil Rights Movement in the South, also, was much more religiously charged in the South.