We cannot be free until they are free.” (22) Baldwin positions white Americans as “trapped in a history which they do not understand” and therefore unable to escape it – neatly reversing an infantilizing, racist dynamic that positions white Americans as potential saviors: “You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.Emmett Till was 14 when he was murdered in 1955 – less than 10 years before Baldwin wrote these essays.

“My Dungeon Shook” is written to Baldwin’s 14 year old nephew “Down at the Cross” begins with a recollection of Baldwin’s life at 14 and his visceral sense he was on the brink of danger.But this country is still that country.” One might consider Baldwin’s rendering of American racism, then and now, in a similar way: this country is still that country. Alexander Chee recently stated, considering the AIDS crisis in relation to COVID-19: “This virus is not that virus.He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor. Baldwin spent much of his life in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time were bestsellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement. James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. You can read the original versions of these essays online, where they were first published separately in 1962 – “ Letter from a Region of My Mind” in The New Yorker and “ My Dungeon Shook” in The Progressive – before being published together as a short book in 1963. 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. 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. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and an examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. ABOUT THE BOOKĪ 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. We’ll be reading and discussing one of the texts from the NYU Office of Global Inclusion and Diversity’s Anti-Black Racism Education Resource List. Join us on Friday, June 26 from 5-6pm on Zoom. While we’re unable to meet in the theater, we’re taking our book club online. JOIN US FOR OUR VIRTUAL BOOK CLUB MEETING

The fire next time