The Fire Next Time

This next one hit me like a freight train. James Baldwin’s words are as powerful now as they were back then. I’ve read it twice, and every time, it hits me in a new way. His perspective on race, his life in Harlem, and that unforgettable moment when he talks about his chains falling off—I felt that in my soul.

Baldwin doesn’t just talk about race; he lives it, breathes it, and gives you the truth straight up. This book is everything we need to hear, now more than ever.

I was at that famous Jimmy Baldwin-Robert F. Kennedy meeting off Central Park. Jimmy gave the president’s brother both barrels.

See, he always told people the truth, no matter how hard it was to hear. I set up the publication of the first part of The Fire Next Time at The New Yorker – see, it started as a letter from Jimmy to his nephew. But thanks to the power of the published word, every Black boy and girl can – and should – take his familial wisdom about navigating America while Black to heart.

Again, not so much an explicit memoir (though it is framed by Baldwin’s “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation”) but a portrait of a community, and the values it stands for, values heralded by everyone from Zora Neale Hurston to Albert Murray to Paul Laurence Dunbar to... Sam Cooke, the subject of my biography. The world that Baldwin described possessed, he wrote, “a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster… very moving and very rare. Perhaps we were, all of us – pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and… show more.