The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

From the publisher: At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document from the iconic author of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain. 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.

James Baldwin is cemented in American literary history both on his strength as a fiction writer and on his contributions to cultural discourse, particularly on issues of racial justice and equity. His most enduring document in this discursive arena is The Fire Next Time, a text built on two linked but disparate letters. The first, only roughly ten pages in length, is a letter written to his nephew. In it, Baldwin relies on intimacy, tracing snippets of his family’s history and conveying his most urgent advice to a nephew coming of age as a black man in early 1960s America. He punctuates this brief letter with a heartbreaking and prescient sentiment, deeply felt in our present time, regarding the nature of American race relations. In noting the context for his writing this letter at all, which was the nation’s celebration of 100 years since the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Baldwin laments: “You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.”

His second letter is more measured treatise than personal relation; a carefully crafted assessment of the racial landscape and a thesis on what must change. What makes The Fire Next Time so powerful, in 2020, is the foresight that Baldwin displays, his words often feeling like something that would be written today, within our specific cultural context, rather than something written nearly sixty years ago. But Baldwin’s text is not a revolutionary one in a literal sense – these aren’t the words of Malcolm X or Stokley Carmichael or even Martin Luther King Jr. Instead, Baldwin relies on a deep humanism, attempting to understand both oppressor and oppressed, calling for a radical re-envisioning of our society through a patient empathy. Obviously, in the struggle for Civil Rights, both past and present, there are many disparate philosophies, prominent leaders regularly were and are in disagreement. Why Baldwin’s work is so impressive, then, is that his words here transcend much of the subjectivity and observation that fuels debate, instead attempting to understand the disease rather than the symptoms, and in so doing proving predictive of our current world. In a world so divided, and encouraged in that division, The Fire Next Time is an important text from a writer and thinker of massive heart and intellect, one that avoids extremes in pursuit of absolutely necessary and foundational truths about who we are as people, both individually and collectively, a sermon for anyone willing to listen.

The Galesburg Public Library owns The Fire Next Time as an audiobook and an ebook.