The Fire Next Time

If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one's bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.

“...if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”







“White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”







“There [the police] stood, in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club or a fist or a gun. I might have pitied them if I had not found myself in their hands so often and discovered, through ugly experience, what they were like when they held the power and what they were like when you held the power.”



“You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.”






“The unprecedented price demanded—and at this embattled hour of the world's history—is the transcendence of the realities of color, of nations, and of altars.”






“Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”

James Baldwin was a brilliant writer, and in this slim book we get a good look at him. One wonders what he would think of America electing President Obama, but I'm certain he would recognize that we are by no means a post-racial country. Voices on both sides of the divide have gotten louder and nastier, and racism is still the biggest problem our country faces.