James Baldwin was born in 1924 in Harlem, New York. As a youth he dodged the perils of his rough neighborhood by preaching in a local church. When he heard his father proclaim that his Jewish friends were damned, however, James grew wary of Christian dogma. Abandoning the church, he moved to Greenwich Village to pursue a career as a writer. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, recounts his disillusionment with religion. After its publication, Baldwin went to France hoping to escape the racism that he felt poisoned the United States. A decade later he returned home to join the budding civil rights movement. In The Fire Next Time Baldwin expressed both his frustration with the reluctance of the federal government to deal effectively with segregation in the South and his fear that militant separatists such as Elijah Muhammad might persuade black Americans that integration was a farce.
The civil rights movement. During the Second World War, the United States had fought alongside Great Britain to defend the self-determination of European countries against Nazi Germany. As the war ended, British officials were forced to concede that the British colonial administrations in countries like India and Nigeria infringed on the native peoples' right to govern themselves.
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