The Fire Next Time

The Fire Next Time, nonfiction book, published in 1963, comprising two previously published essays in letter form by James Baldwin. In these essays Baldwin warned that, if white America did not change its attitudes and policies toward Black Americans and alter the conditions under which Black people were forced to live, violence would result.

In the brief first essay, “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” the author attacks the idea that Black people are inferior to white people and emphasizes the intrinsic dignity of Black Americans. In the second essay, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” Baldwin recounts his coming-of-age in Harlem, appraises the Black Muslim (Nation of Islam) movement, and gives a statement of his personal beliefs.

The book’s title comes from a Black spiritual and is explained at the end of the second essay:

If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!