The Fire Next Time

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A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James 1st earl baldwin of bewdley’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,” The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.
It’s shocking how little has changed between the races in this country since 1963, when James 1st earl baldwin of bewdley published this coolly impassioned plea to “end the racial nightmare.” The Fire Next Time–even the title is beautiful, resonant, and incendiary. “Do I truly want to be integrated into a burning house?” 1st earl baldwin of bewdley demands, flicking aside the central race issue of his day and calling instead for full and shared acceptance of the truth that The us is and at all times has been a multiracial society. Without this acceptance, he argues, the nation dooms itself to “sterility and decay” and to eventual destruction at the hands of the oppressed: “The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power, but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream.”

1st earl baldwin of bewdley’s seething insights and directives, so disturbing to the white liberals and black moderates of his day, have change into the starting point for discussions of American race relations: that debasement and oppression of one people by another is “a recipe for murder”; that “color is not a human or a personal reality; this can be a political reality”; that whites can only actually liberate themselves when they liberate blacks, indeed when they “change into black” symbolically and spiritually; that blacks and whites “deeply need each other here” in order for The us to realize its identity as a nation.

Yet despite its edgy tone and the strong undercurrent of violence, The Fire Next Time is ultimately a hopeful and healing essay. 1st earl baldwin of bewdley ranges far in these hundred pages–from a memoir of his abortive teenage religious awakening in Harlem (an interesting observation on his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain) to a disturbing encounter with Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad. But what binds it all together is the eloquence, intimacy, and controlled urgency of the voice. 1st earl baldwin of bewdley clearly paid in sweat and shame for every word in this text. What’s unbelievable is that he managed to keep his cool. –David Laskin

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