In the first essay, "My Dungeon Shook — Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation” Baldwin argues that "integration" means something very different than usually understood. Whites, Baldwin asserts, mistakenly assume that the push for integration by blacks is their desire to be accepted by white society. The reality is far more terrible, Baldwin says in a warning to his nephew: blacks must learn to accept whites. This central point introduced a new and important reversal of Americans' understanding of "integration." Baldwin's statement that, in fact, it is blacks who must accept whites—as opposed to the other way around—in order to resolve the country's racial tensions was a novel concept. This central and powerful idea was one of the reasons that The Fire Next Time became one of the most influential texts written about race relations in the 1960s. It is this first essay that would go on to inspire Ta-Nehisi Coates' own book, Between The World And Me, published in 2015. Coates makes use of Baldwin's format: his own text is written as a longer letter to his son, and draws from many of the elements and tropes that Baldwin uses in his original letter. The popularity of Coates' book—which addresses contemporary race relations and draws certain parallels to Baldwin's understanding of them in the 1960s—helped to revive Baldwin's text for the modern age.
The second essay is usually considered the most important part of the volume. “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in my Mind” is directed not to any specific person, but rather the American public. Baldwin draws on autobiographical episodes to develop insights about the political, historical and sociological state of race relations in the country. Along the way, the essay reveals how Baldwin came to reject Christianity, chronicles his meeting Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, and predicts (as it turns out, correctly) that the Civil Rights movements would erupt into violence committed by and against both sides. In this text's conception, there would not be a one-sided history of terrorism conducted by whites against blacks with only rare instances of legal ramifications ever being at stake. Instead, Baldwin predicts that, if the country is to face violence, it will occur on both sides of the racial divide. This warning would ring true in the years to come, as the Civil Rights movement did indeed erupt into violence. Baldwin's essay thus provides both a warning of what was to come, and a possible alternative to it.
The incendiary quality of The Fire Next Time transformed Baldwin into a leading figure on the Civil Rights Movement. The text was widely read and well-received by critics in its time. Baldwin's face would soon grace the cover of Time magazine, he would help organize the March on Washington, and he would take part in the march in Selma. Today, Baldwin's work continues to inspire leading African American thinkers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates. For Coates, white supremacy will not go away. Unlike Baldwin, he does not caution the recipient to make use of love in order to triumph over racial hatred, but rather warns his son that white supremacy is a reality he must learn to face and come to terms with. These differences in the two authors' messages point to the ways in which thinking on this subject has changed between Baldwin's time and ours; whereas Baldwin held out hope for a better future, Coates sees a grim and unchanging reality.
