Teacher Guide

The Fire Next Time Lesson Plan

Relationship to Other Books

The Fire Next Time grapples with major themes of race and racism, religion, and coming of age narratives broadly. Additionally, given Baldwin’s appeal, many author’s have used this text as a basis to write about race in a more contemporary setting. There are a number of both older and contemporary texts (books and essays) that would greatly complement this text, including other James Baldwin works.

Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates, who has been compared to Baldwin, wrote this book—really a series of essays—as a letter to his young Black son. Similar to Baldwin’s letter to his nephew, “My Dungeon Shook,” Coates cautions his son about the ills of racism, tracing how it...

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