Forum Post: THE FIRE NEXT TIME -- Why did the White House and the nation lose their minds in a good way over this essay by internationally acclaimed author James Baldwin?

OCCUPY WALL STREET MOVEMENT has a lot in common with THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT. I believe we should shorten our learning curve and learn some lessons from those who struggled before us in similar efforts.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated shortly after he started helping Americans connect the civil rights movement, workers' rights movement and the anti-war movement. The establishment didn't like that he connected people. Not one bit. This shows that it is exactly what needs to be done.

World renowned author James Baldwin would make great reading for any Occupy Wall Street supporter, especially his essays "Nothing Personal" and "The Fire Next Time" which are both in his excellent book of collected essays "Price of the Ticket".  Excerpts of both at the bottom of this page.  

Vincent Harding also has a lot of relevance here because he continually pointed out that the problems of America were much deeper than race and class.  He referred to a "loss of sense of self, a lack of attunement, a spiritual poverty" and argued that there could never be justice on these shores until the issue of the human spirit was addressed.

THE FIRE NEXT TIME BY JAMES BALDWIN http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fire_Next_Time The entire essay is over 50 pages and can be purchased from any bookseller.  The essay was so powerful that it shook the nation.  Robert Kennedy convened a meeting of leaders to discuss it. 

FASCINATING BIO OF JAMES BALDWIN AND HIS INVOLVEMENT IN CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baldwin

From essay "Nothing Personal":

"The light in the eyes is the only light there is in this world. . . and it is always there waiting to be found."

"We are unbelievably ignorant concerning what goes on in our country--to say nothing of what goes on in the rest of the world--and appear to have become too timid to question what we are told. Our failure to trust one another deeply enough to be able to talk to one another has become so great that people with these questions in their hearts do not speak them; our opulence is so pervasive that people who are afraid to lose whatever they think they have persuade themselves of the truth of a lie, and help disseminate it. . . The best that can be said is that some of us are struggling. And what we are struggling against is that death in the heart which leads not only to the shedding of blood, but which reduces human beings to corpses while they live." — James Baldwin (Nothing Personal)

From the "Fire Next Time" (This is just short excerpt from the introduction which begins with a letter to Baldwin's nephew):

". . . 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. . . The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. . . Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.

You, don't be afraid. . . By a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. . . We, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off."

(The entire essay is over 50 pages and can be purchased from any bookseller.  The essay was so powerful that it shook the nation.  Robert Kennedy convened a meeting of leaders to discuss it).