The Fire Next Time [Paperback]

James Baldwin (Author)

Book Description

Release date: December 1, 1992

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 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. 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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

It's shocking how little has changed between the races in this country since 1963, when James Baldwin published this coolly impassioned plea to "end the racial nightmare." The Fire Next Time--even the title is beautiful, resonant, and incendiary. "Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?" Baldwin demands, flicking aside the central race issue of his day and calling instead for full and shared acceptance of the fact that America is and always 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."

Baldwin's seething insights and directives, so disturbing to the white liberals and black moderates of his day, have become 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; it is a political reality"; that whites can only truly liberate themselves when they liberate blacks, indeed when they "become black" symbolically and spiritually; that blacks and whites "deeply need each other here" in order for America 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. Baldwin ranges far in these hundred pages--from a memoir of his abortive teenage religious awakening in Harlem (an interesting commentary 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. Baldwin clearly paid in sweat and shame for every word in this text. What's incredible is that he managed to keep his cool. --David Laskin

From Publishers Weekly

Speakers or headsets will have to be turned up to listen to Jesse L. Martin's low, slow reading of Baldwin's classic long essay on racism and African-American identity. Martin seeks to be respectful of Baldwin, but he ends up rendering the meaning and the force of his work relatively inert. Pausing in poorly selected places, placing emphasis where little should be placed, Martin does not convey the precision and anger of Baldwin's prose. Instead, Baldwin's book becomes Great Literature, to be intoned and honored, but not truly grasped. Readers with an interest in Baldwin's work will be far better served by reading his prose to themselves than having Martin read it to them. A Vintage paperback.(Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; Reissue edition (December 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067974472X
• ISBN-13: 978-0679744726
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.4 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #35,217 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #27 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Specific Demographics > Minority Studies
  • #37 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Civil Rights & Liberties
  • #78 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Sociology > Race Relations

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A powerful snapshot of America in the 1960's February 25, 2002

By Christopher A. Smith

Format:Paperback

I was born in 1968, six years after The Fire Next Time was published - I lived the period that Baldwin chronicles vicariously through my parents. There are few essayists who equal Baldwin's gift for finding the right phrase to communicate a concept, both intellectually and emotionally. Indeed it's the emotion that Baldwin so effectively weaves into his prose that gives The Fire Next Time its impact. At its core, this essay is a plea.

Baldwin dissects the nature of Black-White relations in the early sixties. He rejects the both the pandering of White liberals and the separatist rhetoric of Black radicals as simplistic; the former as condescending and insincere and the latter as unrealistic and reactionary. The conclusion that he reaches is that Blacks and Whites, whether they realize it or not, are locked in a symbiotic relationship, and destruction for one will mean destruction for both. Put positively, however, the key to their salvations are linked. No one is free until all are free.

Baldwin focuses on two important anecdotes. The first deals with his seduction by the church, his brief career as a child minister, and his subsequent rejection of Christianity. The second deals with an encounter with Elijah Muhammad, then leader of the Nation of Islam. Both show religion as an escape mechanism, and both are told with a convincing immediacy and a sense of candor.

Baldwin's rejection of Christianity appears to be a crucial step in his awakening, and in his rejection of the beliefs that 60's White society expected Black people to hold. The church for Baldwin was an escape mechanism, but having been consoled he soon fled the church, overwhelmed by its hypocrisy and abuses, both historical and current. He concludes "...whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being...must first divorce himself for all of the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church." In the end Baldwin refuses to accept Christianity's (and, by implication, White society's) definition of him as the descendent of Ham, cursed forever.

Baldwin turns the same critical eye on the Nation of Islam. He's sympathetic to the emotions and suffering that have pushed Black people into internalizing the NOI's separatist rhetoric, but he recognizes that this will not be the salvation of the Black community. Baldwin writes "...the Negro has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other - not to Africa, and certainly not to Islam. The paradox...is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past."

Despite his cutting commentary on 60's White society, Baldwin in his heart is an integrationist. His rejection of the Nation of Islam and their philosophy is his rejection of the idea of adopting the very tactics that Whites have used against Blacks; "Whoever debases other is debasing himself", he states emphatically. Baldwin understands imitation and aggression as a tactic, but he finds awe not in an eye-for-an-eye, but in a community who's dignity has produced children of kindergarten age capable of walking through a mob to get to their schoolhouse.

Not every metaphor which Baldwin uses in this essay works, and he does at time stray in his musings, but as a snapshot of the state of America in the sixties The Fire Next Time is a powerful piece of writing. As I read this book there were passages with which I identified personally; sentiments that I myself have felt but could never have articulated so effectively. There were other passages in which I was an outsider looking in. As a Black American reading this essay some forty years after it was published, this gives me a good yardstick as to how far America has come, and in what areas we are still lacking.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A prescient assessment of racial relations, past and future December 22, 2004

By D. Cloyce Smith TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback

James Baldwin caused quite a stir in 1961 when he published "Letter from a Region in My Mind" in The New Yorker, followed by "A Letter to My Nephew" in The Progressive the next month. He collected these two essays in this small volume, and it's considered (along with "Notes of a Native Son") his best work. His biting, heartfelt analysis on race relations flings its barbs equally at the legacy of American white supremacy and the duplicity of liberal white guilt; although it was written more than forty years ago, it reminds us both how far we've come and how far we have yet to go.

Baldwin frames his observations around two thematically related biographical episodes: his brief three-year stint as an adolescent Pentecostal preacher in Harlem in the early 1940s and his journalistic visit to the headquarter of the Nation of Islam in Chicago's South Side twenty years later. Both institutions, Baldwin finds, suffer from an ambivalent myopia: Christianity in general "helped to protect and sanctify the power that was so ruthlessly being used by people who were indeed seeking a city, but not one in the heavens, and one to be made, very definitely, by captive hands"; the Nation of Islam "inculcated in the demoralized Negro population a truer and more individual sense of its own worth" through the "fearful paradox" of creating a hopeful future with "an invented past." Blacks, he seems to say, have traded in the belief system forced on them by their oppressors to a understandable longing for an illusory past. His conclusion is aggressive but perceptive: "the Negro has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other--not to Africa, and certainly not to Islam."

But that's only half the story--or certainly less than half. Baldwin has far more to say about this nation's white majority; the underlying subject is the predicament of " 'the so-called American Negro,' who remains trapped, disinherited, and despised in a nation that has kept him bondage for nearly four hundred years and is still unable to recognized him as human being." Baldwin correctly posits that, historically, the usual recourse by an oppressed group in such desperate circumstances has been violent upheaval. Throughout history--white history--it is incontrovertible that "violence and heroism have been made synonymous," from the Norman Invasion to the American Revolution. And, indeed, in such a nation as ours, "there is no reason that black men should be expected to be more patient, more forbearing, more farseeing than white; indeed, quite the contrary."

Despite the historical legacy and Baldwin's dire warnings of the potential for bloodshed, Baldwin nevertheless remains cautiously hopeful for the future, and he predicted--correctly, notwithstanding church bombings and assassinations and riots--that integration and civil rights victories and black advancement might be achieved with relatively little violence, certainly when compared to the horrors other revolutions have engendered. For one thing, blacks had--and have--an advantage: they understand, all too well, white Americans, while the reverse is not--and has never been--true: "Ask any Negro what he knows about the white people with whom he works. And then ask the white people with whom he works what they know about him."

For another, American black history has, if anything, been testimony "to nothing less then the perpetual achievement of the impossible." Only by acknowledging the past and confronting the future Americans can "achieve our country, and change the history of the world."

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A work of prophetic power December 28, 2000

By Michael J. Mazza HALL OF FAME

Format:Paperback

Of all of the great authors of the 20th century, James Baldwin was probably closest, both in style and moral authority, to some of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. "The Fire Next Time," first published back in 1963, represents Baldwin at his most impassioned. This book consists of an open letter to Baldwin's nephew, along with an extended autobiographical essay. Throughout the book, Baldwin writes with insight and compassion about the complexities of race in the United States.

Baldwin writes of his spiritual crisis as a teenager--a crisis which led to his career as a youth minister in an African-American Christian church. He writes bitterly of his ultimate disillusionment with the emptiness and hypocrisy he found in the church. Baldwin also writes of his meeting with Elijah Muhammad, the fiery leader of the Nation of Islam sect and mentor to controversial Black leader Malcolm X.

Baldwin's testament is a harsh critique of 20th century Christendom. Reflecting upon the rise of the Nazis in one of the world's most "Christian" nations, Baldwin declares, "From my own point of view, the fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority, except in technological terms."

"The Fire Next time" is both an illuminating historical document of a turbulent era, and a superb piece of literary craftsmanship. All those interested in the art of nonfiction prose should take time to experience Baldwin's mastery of the medium. But even more importantly, we should all take time to consider his ideas on race, on religion, on prejudice, and on hope.