Carol E. Henderson, James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain: Historical And Critical Essays. Peter Lang Publishing, 2006.

 Go Tell It on the Mountain / The Fire Next Time /  Notes of a Native Son /   Giovanni's Room

If Beale Street Could Talk  /  Conversations with James Baldwin   /  Early Novels and Stories

James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963) sometimes referred to as his "eloquent manifesto", which  he hoped would avert  racial conflagration, appeared first in The New Yorker (1962), a journal which Ishmael Reed described as the "epitome of uptown pretensions and snobbery," as "Letter from a Region in my Mind." Though Baldwin received some heat for his choice of publication, his massive essay caused an immediate sensation and was quickly published in book form. Some believe Baldwin's book spurred and help to "galvanize" the civil rights movement which resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

TThe Fire Next Timeopens with a six to seven page dedicatory letter to his nephew and namesake James, entitled in short "On the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation." Baldwin advises his nephew on how to deal with the racist world in which he was born. In spite the horrors of America, Baldwin believed the Negro must take the high road and show whites, in their ignorance and innocence, how to live the good life, how to love. 

He concludes  his letter of encouragement with these remarks.

The section comprising the dedicatory letter Baldwin entitled "My Dungeon Shook,"  which we see from the above quote were words of some unknown bard, a former Negro slave, who spoke to the glorious spiritual phenomena of emancipation. 

The section comprising the "Letter from a Region of My Mind," was entitled, "Down at the Cross," again another religious allusion. This long essay has a bipartite structure. In the first part Baldwin recounted his religious experience as a fourteen year old boy, about the age of his nephew, and his view of Christianity as an adult. He sketches out his disappointments with the Negro's religion, which he views primarily as escapist.

He then turned to his second mission, which comprised the greater part of the essay, to trash the Muslim movement among African Americans. Here he attempted to come to the grips with the phenomena of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X. Elijah's brand of Islam viewed Christianity as the white man's wicked rationale for oppressing blacks and that all white people were accursed devils whose sway was destined to end. God is black and his proper address is "Allah" and he has chosen black people of America to end the devil's domination by means of the theology of Islam.

In this long letter, Baldwin also described his audience with Elijah Muhammad, who Baldwin believed was lucid, passionate, and cunning. For Baldwin the problem was  that Elijah preached a dogma of racial hatred that was no better than the reverse of whites' hatred for blacks.  Baldwin rejected Elijah and Malcolm. 

Baldwin believed he had a greater vision than Malcolm and Elijah. He believed that the Negro's suffering was redemptive and that's the Negro's example had curative powers for the nation. Baldwin wrote as part of closing statement --

At this stage of his development, Baldwin believed the Negro's redeeming love of whites, in their innocence and ignorance, would make the difference. American blacks' complex fate, Baldwin reiterated his well-tuned song, was the rescue, the delivery of white Americans from their imprisonment in myths of racial superiority and educate them into a new, integrated sensitivity and maturity. 

Should such an effort fail, he warned, then the words of a slave song may come true: "God gave Noah the rainbow sign, / No more water, the fire next time!" Many whites believed that this was Baldwin's  last really good piece of nonfiction.