For those interested in the Civil Rights era, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time is a concise read into the debate between whether black nonviolence (bi-racial cooperation) or black nationalism (represented by Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam) was more effective for bringing about racial equality in the United States. Baldwin makes an impassioned appeal for the value of nonviolence and cooperation and insists that the "American Negro" is a product of his particular history in the United States. Unlike Nation of Islam pundits, Baldwin believes that the African-American cannot exist in another nation but most work instead to effect change in the United States.

This is also an eye-opening account of how black ghettos, the police, and white spinelessness and overt hostility toward blacks have all conspired to make crime "not a possibility but the possibility" (21) for black men who could "never defeat one's circumstances." Or that led black men and women toward "other ghettos . . . on wine or whiskey or the needle . . . [or had] fled into the church" (20). Baldwin's writing still have important implications and resonances today and remind us that we are not far removed from the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s—indeed, we are still trying to accomplish the goals initially staked out by Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others.