The Fire Next Time

It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.

Told in the form of two intensely personal ‘letters’, The Fire Next Time is an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice, drawn from Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and his experience as a prominent cultural figure of the civil rights movement.