Great Writers: "the Fire Next Time" James Baldwin

Shopify: Great Writers “The Fire Next Time,” James Baldwin
The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

Published: 1963; 128 pages

Dialectic Journal/Lesson Plans: 56 pages, 11,171 words, visuals

My Dungeon Shook, Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation
Powerful Book about an important man, Baldwin, and the men who tried to influence his thinking, and why Baldwin chose to follow his own path. A biography that surfaces one of the modern, complicated Americans.

On grandfather: “he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.” (4)

On his countrymen: “that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.” (5)

On “most of mankind”: (But remember most of mankind is not all of mankind.” (5)

“It is the innocence that constitutes the crime. (6)

“This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.” (7)

Wherever, you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you can do it) and where you can live and whom you could marry. (8)

There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. (8)

Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. (9)

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. (10)