By Carla Bell
James Baldwin was many things: a novelist, essayist, orator, a realist, a forerunner of intersectionality before it had a name, and a playwright. Perhaps his most well-known works are Notes of a Native Son, which “inaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the twentieth century” (Amazon), and The Fire Next Time, a compilation of two essays, A Letter To My Nephew and Down at the Cross.
Now, there is simply no possibility of a real change in the Negro’s situation without the most radical and far-reaching changes in the American political and social structure –Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Baldwin was a bright, unforgiving light and mirror on America. His work is a treasure of eloquent indictment. He was almost clinical in his manner of observing and disseminating truth through brave storytelling, and duty-bound in his activism, but at rest in it, because his activism was his art, and his art was his activism. Perhaps that’s what makes his work relevant in every season of every year, whenever looking back.