The Fire Next Time

by James Baldwin

To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.

know how black it looks today, for you. It looked bad that day, too, yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived.

Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The

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.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality.

Western nations will be forced to reëxamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving.

Elijah Muhammad has been able to do what generations of welfare workers and committees and resolutions and reports and housing projects and playgrounds have failed to do: to heal and redeem drunkards and junkies, to convert people who have come out of prison and to keep them out, to make men chaste and women virtuous, and to invest both the male and the female with a pride

is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

The sunlight came into the room with the peacefulness one remembers from rooms in one’s early childhood—a sunlight encountered later only in one’s dreams.

began to see that Elijah’s power came from his single-mindedness. There is nothing calculated about him; he means every word he says.

the power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.

This is why the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.

But in order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is: in the present case, to accept the fact, whatever one does with it thereafter,

The paradox—and a fearful paradox it is—is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past.

To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.

In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems.

where identity is almost impossible to achieve and people are perpetually attempting to find their feet on the shifting sands of status.

For if they find their state intolerable, but are too heavily oppressed to change it, they are simply pawns in the hands of larger powers,

One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears.

white Americans have supposed “Europe” and “civilization” to be synonyms—which they are not—and

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power—and no one holds power forever.

The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.

we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation—if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women.

this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful.

he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words.

It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.

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

the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion.

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.