20 Books About Black Lives Matter and Civil Rights to Put on Your Essential Reading List

Through her essays and poems about race, Jesmyn Ward's The Fire This Time acts as a response to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. Ward looks at the past, present, and future of America's notion of race, and the progress made from Baldwin's era up until now. Baldwin said that if we don't solve our country's problem of racial inequality, our society will be set ablaze, and Ward proves that that fire has already started.