In a 1969 interview, James Baldwin said, “I don’t want to be given anything by you. I just want you to leave me alone so I can do it myself.” By this time, he had already witnessed the assassinations of three of his own friends – Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Three towering figures of the civil rights movement, their accomplishments cut short by the very racism they were fighting against.
In the days after King’s assassination, riots erupted across the country, the most widespread civil unrest since the Civil War. Baldwin had warned of this in his book The Fire Next Time. Published in 1963 on the centennial anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, The Fire Next Time starts as an inspiring letter to his 14-year-old nephew who carries his namesake and is the same age as the protagonist in Baldwin’s first almost autobiographical book, Go Tell It on the Mountain –
“This is your home, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.”
In the next essay, he goes on to describe his own coming of age in 1930s Harlem – the sheer hopelessness of growing up in dire poverty in a ghetto; black college graduates who, at best, might become handymen; the constant harassment by the police who would stop kids, including Baldwin, for no reason, push them down and leave them on the ground, or at other times, throw and beat them in precinct basements. I saw in this last imagery the ways Black Americans have always been forced to remain in not just a physical but psychological inferiority.
In describing the violent suppression of the African-American experience, Baldwin hoped to get everyone to understand the senselessness of segregation and the inhumanity of racism that’s ingrained into all of American history. He attempted to explain – with supernatural empathy – the historical yet delusional reasons for white supremacy and the necessity to end it. He wrote about the emerging Black Power movement initiated by the Muslim Brotherhood, pointing out that freedom has never been gained without blood and violence.
But he also hoped – perhaps too idealistically – that Black Americans do not resolve to the same kind of violence they themselves have been victims of.
“I am very concerned that they achieve their freedom. But I am also concerned for their dignity and must oppose any attempt that they may make to do to others what has been done to them.”
He was clearsighted enough to know that “people are not anxious to be equal, but they love the idea of being superior.” But equality is exactly what he pleads for at the end of The Fire Next Time, with a warning of a burning apocalypse if it’s not achieved.
Baldwin’s father was a preacher, and although Baldwin was contemptuous of religion, the stories of the Bible helped color his writing. The book’s title comes from a rallying slave song for freedom in the Antebellum South. The song was inspired by the story of Noah in Genesis when God appeared before him after the flood and proclaimed how the wicked would be punished in the future.
“God gave Noah the rainbow sign.
No more water, the fire next time.”
Maybe the fires have not been as apocalyptic as Noah’s biblical flood, but they have been burning. They burned in the infamous race riots in Watts in 1965 and New Jersey and Detroit in 1967. They burned in the aftermath of Dr. King’s assassination. They burned again in Los Angeles after the Rodney King trial. They burned in 2014 after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner. And again, we witness them burning now, since the death of George Floyd, and in light of Breonna Taylor’s, Rayshard Brooks’s, and Elijah McClain’s. The fire this time.
The more I have been rereading and researching Baldwin’s work lately, the more frighteningly resonant it becomes. In The Fire Next Time, he wrote of the inarticulable fears African-American parents had of what might happen to their children at the hands of those wielding power (and guns and batons) out in the streets. Over half a century later, it is heartbreaking that parents still have those same fears.
Baldwin was often asked why he always needed to talk about racial problems. He explains in The Fire Next Time –
“The brutality with which we are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it… and neither can this be overstated – he just cannot believe the white people is treating him as they do; he does not know what he has done to merit it.”
Today, we watch videos of that very brutality – from Rodney King to Elijah McClain – that he was trying to tell the world about. And yet, there are still those denying it exists. Today, there are people condemning the violence of the protests and the lootings but not the brutality of the police and the murders.
We see the now global Black Lives Matter movement – what Baldwin might have called “the latest slave rebellion” – being countered by white supremacists waving confederate flags and swastikas. “White supremacy was only a doctrine, never the truth,” Baldwin pointed out regarding colonialism and subjugation. There are people who are still holding onto that doctrine – insisting that the color of their skin makes them superior, using the same unjustified force they have been using in all of history. Baldwin described them as “moral monsters.”
As I try to make sense of this, I wonder what he might say now after an inspired and historic Obama presidency that the pendulum is swinging back to its darker history to reveal the enduring racial divide. In the 1960s, after each assassination, Baldwin became angrier in his rhetoric and wearier in his idealism. This is what I see in the protesters now. They are angrier and wearier by the day. And who can blame them?
In one of the last interviews Baldwin gave, he had this to say about progress:
“I was born here more than 60 years ago. I’m not going to live another 60 years. You always told me it was going to take time. It’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time, my nieces’ and my nephews’ time. How much time do you want for your progress?”
And when asked what he meant by The Fire Next Time, he simply said, “Yes, baby, they’re gonna burn your houses down.”
