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The Fire Next Time Analysis

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James Baldwin’s strive to bringing awareness to American’s race, The Fire Next Time, was critically reviewed by Max Heidelberger in November 2016. Heidelberger embark on the review of the critic, Frederick Wilcox Dupee, as he revealed one’s fear on the success of Baldwin taking note within the effects of racism. In the book, The Fire Next Time, Baldwin reverts to African American literature by focusing on hope for a future that has not yet come, but protecting the life and name of African Americans in the moment. James Baldwin’s life began in Harlem, where he was hands on with racial injustice. The Fire Next Time, was an creation of literature that reverted back to the opportunity to create a voice during the civil rights movement. Heidelberger …show more content…

With the African Americans joining together to fight for the ideal world of freedom, they would be able to change the world. Baldwin wasn’t writing for a black audience, “Baldwin wrote for a black audience in a white world” (Heidelberger 2). Throughout The Fire Next Time, it gave a lesson pointed towards the African Americans about how one should never stoop down to the level of the whites. Blacks not only saw hands on the way in which the whites had treated them, but the physically were placed through the actions given. With African Americans holding up a great wall of strength,“black has become a beautiful color-not because it is loved but because it is feared” (Baldwin 77). With having such a powerful mindset of positivity, African Americans were turned to being feared by the white community. Having that strength, it gave the blacks one step ahead into making the world a place that included freedom, as always dreamed of by the African American culture. The way in which the book was written, was to turn towards the white community, in the to commit to loving on another. .Baldwin wrote a letter to his nephew, “asking his nephew to love his white neighbor away from the inhibitions which keep her from seeing him as he is: fully human, and capable of both giving and receiving love” (Heidelberger 4). Exchanging the concept of hatred into love, is one step closer of the African Americans to end the racial nightmare. African Americans, joined together, could erase the idea of racial

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