James Baldwin

All the grief, grit, and unassailable dignity of the civil rights movement are evoked in this illustrated edition of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, with photographs by Steve Schapiro. Together, Baldwin's frank account of the black experience and Schapiro's vital images offer poetic and potent testimony to one of the most important...

The Fire Next Time

Stephen Schenkenberg

Marcos Rodriguez

Sabrina D. 

Helen 

 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. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must acept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. 

In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law-in a word, power.  

And the blood of the Lamb had not cleansed me in any way whatever. I was just as black as I had been the day that I was born. 

The sunlight came into the room with the peacefulness one remembers from rooms in one's early childhood- a sun- light encountered later only in one's dreams. 

 There is absolutely no reason to suppose that white people are better equipped to frame the laws by which I am to be governed than I am. It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores. 

Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.  

The Fire Next Time quotes

Join the club