The Fire Next Time

BlackOxford

Rating: really liked it
Black Tyranny and How to Overcome It

We are what we read as well as what we eat. Because what we read brings us experiences we have never had. As Baldwin says elsewhere, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” Reading The Fire Next Time cannot but change one's experience of the world. Written an half century ago, it sadly remains timeless. Sadly because the position of the black man in the America of white racism has not been remedied.

White America still defines itself as 'not black'. White America has no other unifying force. Not religion, not culture, not history, not even language. Race is what determines all these things and more. The phrase "Make America Great Again" is not an abstraction. It is a call to rally against the threat of loss of racial identity, a threat which has been increased not diminished by the existence of a black man as president. Baldwin knew this:

"... the danger in the minds of most white Americans is the loss of their identity... those innocents who believe that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grip on reality... If integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our [white] brothers to see themselves as they are."

The sight of a black president showed what black people are. The task of finding what white people are has yet to be started. Donald Trump knew his main chance lay not in directly exploiting American racism, something too powerful for Americans to confront, but in capitalising on American uncertainty, the threat to Americans' own self-image. Baldwin diagnosed this precisely:

"It is the individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion let alone elucidation , of any conundrum - that is, any reality - so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality... whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves."

Trump knows that without this touchstone of the self, he can say and do anything with impunity. Reality has no meaning. Baldwin understood the consequences.


American racism is best expressed in its religion, an evangelical, social, virtually tribal Christianity which has transcended sectarian divisions and has become the Republican Party at prayer. The foundation of this religion is not doctrinal but racial. As Harold Bloom, among others, have noted, the authentic American religion is a baptised Gnosticism, the principle feature of which is the dualistic separation of the world into literally its light and dark components. The belief in the ultimate triumph of the light is not a sterile, spiritual metaphor; it is a pervasive, concrete expectation. From the point of view of black America, Christianity had nothing to do with Faith, Hope, and Charity; Baldwin's experience is that it was designed to engender "Blindness, Loneliness, and Fear."

Baldwin understood the historical import Christianity and its American variant:

"... the real architect of the Christian church was not the disreputable, sun-baked Hebrew who gave it his name but the mercilessly fanatical and self-righteous St. Paul."

For Baldwin, this is not merely an historical fact which is ignored by Christians, it is the establishment of a pattern which culminates in the sanctification of white racism,

"The struggle therefore that now begins in the world is extremely complex, involving the historical role of Christianity in the realm of power - that is, politics - and in the realm of morals."

From missionary activities in Africa, to the enforced segregation of American churches (even those like the Pentecostalists which had been founded by black people), Christianity had been a persistent tool of black suppression.


Baldwin devotes a good proportion of the book to his meeting with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the militant Black Muslim movement. He recognises the charismatic power of the movement's message and the inherent drive for power of its leaders. So he distrusts them both. But Muhammad's pronouncements to him about the state of the world and the future of America in it is eerily prescient in light of subsequent Islamic militancy around the world. White people, he points out, are a global minority. America has no natural allies in the non-white world. Baldwin concludes that

"... the American dream has become something much more closely resembling a nightmare on the private, domestic, and international levels... We are an unmitigated disaster."

Baldwin's solution is probably as relevant and as distant as it was in the 1960's:

"The White man's unadmitted - and apparently to him, unspeakable - private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro. The only way he can be released from the Negro's tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become part of the suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveller's cheques, visits surreptitiously after dark."

To quote Trump, "What have you got to lose?”

Rowena

Rating: really liked it
Baldwin doles out some tough love to the American people, 100 years after Emancipation, and also writes to his 14-year old nephew about the race issue in America. I have never read any of Baldwin’s nonfiction so I was surprised at how frank and direct he was.

The letter to the American people was more compelling to me than the one to his nephew. It discussed the racist realities in the USA, and also religion, Christianity (which James Baldwin adhered to, for a while at least) and the Nation of Islam (NOI). The meeting he recounted between himself and the NOI leader, Elijah Muhammad, was very interesting. Muhammad saw Caucasians as "white devils" while Baldwin's view was “whoever debases others is debasing himself.”


Despite the fact that I am a Christian, I agree wholeheartedly with Baldwin’s analysis of the Christian church at the time, its racism (black people are a cursed race, descendants of Ham) and its hypocrisy. It's something I've thought about a lot.

Again, I’m shocked about how little things have changed since the 1960s. Baldwin makes the point that: “…the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems.” Sadly, I think we can substitute "America" with pretty much any country on the planet.

Despite the frankness, I don’t think this is an angry book at all.This isn’t a misguided rant about race, this was written based on Baldwin's personal experiences, and is hopeful and also offers solutions. As a writer during the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement, I feel Baldwin felt the real need to get things off his chest. I will never be able to understand how cruelly African-Americans were treated. No wonder Baldwin feared for African-Americans’ identity crisis, no wonder he felt the need to encourage and preserve the arts in his community. James Baldwin is amazing.

Muhtasin

Rating: really liked it
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

A beautiful thought process that was written by a wonderful man who sought love to dispense hate. Excellent book and very compelling to read. Enjoyed James Baldwin's writing style. His reflections are very thoughtful as he went deep into topics of black self-identity, religion, American white supremacy. This book, The Fire Next Time, fuels readers to think deeply about our own present time and to confront the realities of it with raw transparency.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Essential read.

carol.

Rating: really liked it
"And all this is happening in the richest and freest country in the world, and in the middle of the 20th century. The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur and you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless."

Baldwin considers this, after he and two friends in their thirties were refused service at a busy bar in O'Hare Airport 'because they were too young.' The Fire Next Time remains sadly pertinent, despite publication in 1962. The first section, titled 'My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,' muses on society and exhorts his nephew to meet it with dignity and love. The second section, 'Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind' begins like a memoir, develops into political analysis and ends with a sermon. It is devastatingly brilliant, and near the end I found myself highlighting quotes nearly every page. But I'm clearly not the only one who has read his work: one of the oddest aspects for me is that I have read both writers and poets who were influenced by him, as I heard their echoes in his writing.

"How can one, however, dream of power in any other terms then in the symbols of power?" ~ Baldwin, bringing immediately to mind Audre Lorde: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

'Down at the Cross' begins from adolescent years, when James was fourteen and underwent "a prolonged religious crisis." It was a fascinating recounting, giving the feel of Harlem of a particular time, and looked at how religion became the way he coped with the perils of growing up, and yet how, in many ways, it was no less controlling or harmful to the soul than "the whores or the pimps or the racketeers on the Avenue." For a short time he was known at the boy preacher and while it gave him some freedom from his father, his faith was only an infirm illusion.

"I date it – the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress- from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoevski."

I loved that words and writing were his real salvation. He muses more on the role of the church and his breaking with religious faith before seguing to a meeting with Elijah Muhammad, recalling me to The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Baldwin was clearly uncomfortable, confronting his own echoes of churchgoing, but felt the limitations of the Nation of Islam were no better than those of Christianity, ie. a failure to dream of something outside the paradigm. He noted that the young follower who drove him to his next appointment in an expensive car that the Nation was still conceiving of power in the same terms that white people defined it, and in owning land of their own.

"He was held together, in short, by a dream-- though it is just as well to remember that some dreams come true-- and was united with his 'brothers' on the basis of their color. Perhaps one cannot ask for more. People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility."

He then spirals off into the musing on human nature, the relationship between blacks and whites, and linking them both to the spiritual as well as the political. It's an extraordinary achievement, the way one thought leads to the next, and the next, and suddenly you've run into a philosophical truth that touches the soul. The truth I recognized:

"It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death-ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage is nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us... It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant--birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so--and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths--change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not--safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayal and the entire home--the entire possibility--of freedom disappears."

Somehow, I've never read James Baldwin. Despite a rather liberal high school, we still read far too many of the 'classics' (and I, for one, will never read Dickens again). College was Women's Studies when I ventured outside the sciences, a reading list universally written by women. My free time, fun time reading just never ran into Baldwin, perhaps because I stay away from lit-fic like the plague. Now that I am finally class-free (on more than one level, *snort), I find myself gravitating towards the occasional non-fiction. What I discovered is that Baldwin writes lyrical, exacting prose, clear, and yet somehow poetic, with a belief in love and in dreaming better. I loved immersing myself in his writing. I rather wish I was in a classroom of people with whom I could wrestle with these ideas.

Bill Kerwin

Rating: really liked it

This little book had been on my long “to-read” list for many years, but when I heard its first essay, “My Dungeon Shook,” was the inspiration for Ta-Nahisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, I moved the book right up to the top. I am glad I did.

At first, though, I was disappointed. The essay “My Dungeon Shook”—the model for Coates epistolary device, the way he addresses his young son directly, as Baldwin once addressed his nephew here—is short, relatively insignificant compared to “Down at the Cross,” the essay which fills the rest of the book.

Not that “My Dungeon Shook” is without value. It is particularly powerful when it speaks of how racial oppression has caused even more damage to white people than to black people because it has made them unable to see reality as it is:

They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.  They have had to believe for so many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men.  Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know.  To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.  In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of identity.  Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame...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.

It was, however, “Down at the Cross,” with its treatment of religion in the black community, that interested me more. Then, as I was absorbed in Baldwin’s account of his childhood growing up in Harlem, I encountered the following passage:

The fear that I heard in my father’s voice, for example, when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction. A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other. He reacts to the fear in his parents’ voices because his parents hold up the world for him and he has no protection without them...That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church.

Here we see the essence of what Coates learned from Baldwin, to identify the fear which controlled his vision of the world. Although he never sought to evade his fears by seeking refuge in the church—as Baldwin briefly did, even becoming a “boy preacher”—his fears controlled him nevertheless, and blocked out reality, "standing between the world and me."

I’ll end with this passage where Baldwin describes his memories of the church services he led. It is, among other things, an excellent example of his style:

There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to rock. Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, “the Word”—when the church and I were one. Their pain and their joy were mine, and mine were theirs—they surrendered their pain and joy to me, I surrendered mine to them-and their cries of “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” and “Yes, Lord’ ” and “Praise His name!” and “Preach it, brother!” sustained and whipped on my solos until we all became equal, wringing wet, singing and dancing, in anguish and rejoicing, at the foot of the altar. It was, for a long time, in spite of—or, not inconceivably because of—the shabbiness of my motives, my only sustenance, my meat and drink. I rushed home from school, to the church, to the altar, to be alone there, to commune with Jesus, my dearest Friend, who would never fail me, who knew all the secrets of my heart. Perhaps He did, but I didn’t, and the bargain we struck, actually, down there at the foot of the cross, was that He would never let me find out.

He failed his bargain. He was a much better Man than I took Him for.

emma

Rating: really liked it
Sometimes I have nothing to say about a book except read it.

This is one of those times.

Candi

Rating: really liked it
“The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.” – letter from James Baldwin to his nephew

This slim novel speaks volumes. It shouts and exhorts. It’s filled with passion, despair, and hope. The Fire Next Time is essentially a set of two letters, or essays, written at the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. The first is a letter written by James Baldwin to his nephew, titled “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.” The second, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” delves further into American racism, religion and spirituality, and Baldwin’s encounter with the Nation of Islam. Both are stunning and beautifully written. When reading something that stirs me this much, I often want to yell “Enough, my heart can’t take anymore!” In the case of Baldwin, it feels like a punch in the gut, but one that makes me cry “Do it again, please. I need more!”

“We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels. Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster.”

James Baldwin speaks a truth that may make one turn his or her back in denial. His words are uncomfortable in their clarity and authenticity. Others, while recognizing the veracity of his words, will want to crawl back into their cozy dens of innocence and ignore such naked truth. I often wonder why it is so difficult for others to recognize inhumanity and the pain of another. We watch movies, listen to music, read books and then cry about injustices. We go to church and lament over the treatment of our saints and saviors; we bow down and pray and claim to love everyone. But when we are faced with reality, somehow we convince ourselves that this is perhaps all just some sort of fiction that doesn’t really apply to us.

“Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum – that is, any reality – so supremely difficult.”

James Baldwin incites us to act. He does not breed hate or support lawlessness. He promotes awareness and self-evaluation. He urges for consciousness, brotherliness, and progress. He advocates love. His words may have been written decades ago but are timeless and vital to our healing as a nation and as human beings. One thing that struck me is that he turned down an appeal to join the Nation of Islam after a meeting with Elijah Muhammad and his followers. He recognized why and how such an organization developed and flourished, but he feared this: “… the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose. You do not need ten such men – one will do.” Rather, Baldwin’s vision was for each man and woman, black and white, to recognize that we need one another to create the greatest nation and to live our best lives right here in America.

I can’t seem to get enough of this brilliant man’s writing. His intensity, his humanity and his forgiving nature are something we so desperately need to see more of in our fellow citizens. Perhaps these past several months would not have felt quite so brutal otherwise.

“If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.”

William2

Rating: really liked it
At 106 pages, The Fire Next Time is a brief snapshot of U.S. race relations in 1963. Like a balance sheet it concisely details the nation's racial strengths and (considerable) shortcomings. It was published one year before LBJ's Great Society program passed Congress, which, for the first time in the nation's history, sought to address longstanding racial injustices. Baldwin describes the unrelenting degradation faced by black Americans, both white indifference and murderous hostility toward them, in a spare, unadorned prose whose effect is harrowing. At the time of its publication it must have scared bigoted white people shitless. Yet it was also a prescription for change, and much of the change it calls for has come to pass. That is not to say that today we are without racial problems. Black Lives Matter-- that's irrefutable--but if you want to know how truly god awful it was in the bad old lynching days, this is the book, one of the few, that you must read.

PS Lynching still occurs, though now it’s in the form of the police gunning down young, unarmed black men: see Trayvon Martin, George Floyd et al.

Darwin8u

Rating: really liked it
If we -- and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others -- do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophesy, re-created from the Bible in a song by a slave, is upon us:

"God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
No more water, the fire next time!"

- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time



I just couldn't watch the second GOP debates tonight. I knew I couldn't face the Donald and his band of equally exquisite misfits. I'm not exactly in love with the Democrats either, but the GOP clown car is just too long, too tiring, too damn depressing. So I turned my TV off, tuned out, and read me some James Baldwin.

You could say Ta-Nehisi Coates brought me here (after reading Between the World and Me). Or perhaps, it has been these last couple years of official violence directed at the poor and the black in many of our biggest cities (St Louis, Baltimore, Las Angeles, New York). Or perhaps, I could also say that Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain also brought me here. Perhaps, it was reading the Old Testament with my own teenage children that pushed me in this direction. Or perhaps, even the promise of the New Testament. Maybe, it was my despair over the way that 14-year-old Muslim boy was treated with his homemade clock. I needed tonight a poetic healing and a spiritual justice. An Old Testament warning with a New Testament salve and a black rhythm. I needed James Baldwin's force, his poetry, his humanist hope, his infinitely quotable words. God, his prose is poetic. I literally ran out of post-it notes as I read this 106 page thesis, laid at the feet of his namesake nephew.

God this book was beginning to end sad and moving and powerful and beautiful; and so now writing this and glancing at the highlights (lowlights) of the GOP debates, I can securely say, I made the right damn choice tonight.

J.L. Sutton

Rating: really liked it
“And if the word integration means anything, 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."



Written during the battle for Civil Rights in the early 60s, Baldwin's impassioned call to action in The Fire Next Time is unmistakable. Racism in America has had a devastating effect on African Americans and White Americans. Baldwin challenges us to see past the signs (Colored and White) which divide us. Accepting the artificial barriers of segregation may not be wicked, but denying our fellow citizens dignity is both racist and most assuredly spineless. Baldwin claims people cling to their hatred and bigotry because hate gives them a purpose as well as an identity. It allows them to deflect the pain of their own lives. However, such thinking traps them in a history or story which doesn't make sense and further detaches them from reality. States Baldwin, "They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand, and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it." Baldwin's words are still powerful. Still relevant!

Kevin Kelsey

Rating: really liked it
Fantastic. Required reading.

Lisa

Rating: really liked it
I had this feeling of having lost my sting, my passion, my indignation and rage at injustice.

Too tired, too old, too burdened with the small hells that life hands out so generously in 2020, I thought I did not have it in me anymore to become passionately frustrated with racism and patriarchy and religion's glib power grab ...

And then came James Baldwin's short essay dedicated to his nephew, and IT ALL CAME BACK!

HOW DARE WE CALL OURSELVES HUMANS IF WE FORGET WHAT WE DO TO EACH OTHER?

How dare we forget the really important issues, the fights to pick, the people to protect, the dignity to stick to, no matter what?

In times like these, matters of gender, race, inequality and identity become matters of survival - or not, as the case may be!

Not having time for the question of social injustice when the pandemic is raging is like not having time to save women and children when the Titanic is sinking. If we don't do it now, it will be too late for those who sink to the bottom of the ocean this very moment ...

That's what James Baldwin made me aware of again: never to lose your spirit when hard times hit, because if you do, it is not really your "spirit" in the first place, but only a "decoration" for the pleasant times.

No more water. The Fire Next Time!

Alex

Rating: really liked it

All policeman have by now, for me, become exactly the same, and my style with them is designed simply to intimidate them before they can intimidate me. No doubt I am guilty of some injustice here, but it is irreducible, since I cannot risk assuming that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms.
- James Baldwin in 1964

Fuck the police
coming straight from the underground
A young nigga got it bad cause I'm brown
And not the other color, so police think
They have the authority to kill a minority
- Ice Cube in 1988

The police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction...Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2015

It feels like there's only one new thing about the Black Lives Matter movement, and that's cell phones. Now people can record policemen destroying bodies and show it to people who weren't there, who have never been there. The destruction has always happened. The evidence is what's new.

But there's a big difference between The Fire Next Time and its descendant, Coates's Between the World and Me: Baldwin in giddy 1964, before the assassinations of Malcolm X (1965) and MLK (1968), thought real change was coming. The end of white people. An African American nation. Everything seemed possible. Baldwin's title refers to a spiritual:

God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water, the fire next time!

This is a warning. He wants a revolution for his nephew, to whom this book is written. Coates, fifty years later, is just trying to protect his son's body.

It's not that nothing has happened. Things got better, are better. It just wasn't exactly a revolution. More of a twitching of the needle. Black people have a president, but their bodies still aren't safe.

But it's thrilling to read this dispatch from a time when people thought a revolution might be a good thing. James Baldwin is one of the great voices of the 20th century, and this book is smashing.

Thomas

Rating: really liked it
A powerful couple of essays about race relations in the 1960s, with an emphasis on America's determination to destroy black men. Despite the brevity of this book, James Baldwin covers a lot of meaningful ground, ranging from transforming his anger into a sense of purpose and leaving the church due to its oppressive nature. As others have written, it is sad how the themes of these essays remain relevant today.

I felt most inspired by Baldwin's explicit naming of whiteness and the confidence of his writing voice. To so boldly challenge white supremacy in the 1960s as a black queer man must have taken so much courage. I get the sense that deep within Baldwin lied an unshakable commitment to naming the truth, no matter how painful or dangerous. For this courageous commitment, I feel grateful.

Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤

Rating: really liked it
"Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear."

I feel inadequate to review this book. James Baldwin was one of the most insightful and most eloquent writers I have ever read. This book should be required reading material for all Americans. His words are as relevant today as when Mr. Baldwin wrote them. It's time we listen and it's time to do the work of dismantling white supremacy.

From The Fire Next Time, "If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world."