The Burning House: Revolution and Black Art

“a spark brought from nothing … Stone rubbed against stone

Upon the thirsty grass,

Dried and baked by a burning son … Then suddenly: flame.

Flame feeding flame.

… Now, nothing is the same.”

Sun Ra, “Saga of Resistance,” Black Fire

In his autobiography My Song (2011), Harry Belafonte recounts talking with Martin Luther King, Jr. a week before his death, after a meeting with Amiri Baraka in Newark left him shaken. Belafonte recalls King saying: “We fought hard and long … But what deeply troubles me now is that for all the steps we’ve taken toward integration, I’ve come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house. King said something analogous in an interview on NBC News “After Civil Rights: Black Power” in 1967. Asked about Black Power’s rejection of white, bourgeois values, King calls for a “restructuring of the architecture of our society where values are concerned,” speaking specifically about militarism and economic exploitation in the context of the war in Vietnam. “These young people are saying that there must be a revolution of values in our country. As Jimmy Baldwin said on one occasion, what advantage is there being integrated into a burning house? I feel that there is a need for a revolution of values in America … the dream that I had has in many points turned into a nightmare. The comment about integrating into a burning house has been widely attributed to King, seen as a hallmark of his later thought more critical of militarism, the war in Vietnam, economic inequality, and poverty When Belafonte asked what should be done, King replied: “We’re just going to have to become firemen.

Earlier, Lorraine Hansberry questioned the necessity of integrating into a burning house on WBAI radio in January 1961. In a panel discussion “The Negro in American Culture” with Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Alfred Kazin, Emile Capouya, and Nat Hentoff, Hansberry said: “There are tones of Negro nationalism, articulated in a far more sophisticated and pointed way than years ago. The question is openly being raised today among all Negro intellectuals and among all politically conscious Negroes: Is it necessary to integrate oneself into a burning house? The conversation was about Black art, the representation of Black life, and the role of the Black writer as she questioned the value of integrating into the literary mainstream of American letters. But Hansberry also used the image of the burning house to refer to the Cuban revolution and anti-colonial independence movements across the globe, connecting these revolutionary movements to the self-determination of the Black nationalism reemerging in the early 1960s. She also implicitly referenced Malcolm X as a politically conscious Black intellectual—and his own fiery rhetoric about the US as a house of bondage.

Hansberry’s words circulated among a cadre of Black intellectuals in the early 1960s—and became one of the defining images of Black radicalism, but also of Black art. Just after the WBAI panel discussion, James Baldwin directly quoted Hansberry in an article “The Negro Assays the Negro Mood” that he wrote in the New York Times Magazine, but without citing her The same quote also made its way into “Letter from a Region in My Mind” and The Fire Next Time—leading King to attribute the comment to Baldwin. After the comment circulated on WBAI, in the NYT Magazine, and in the New Yorker, Malcolm X developed his own imagery of the master’s house on fire. Though Baldwin, Malcolm X, and King all seem to directly quote Hansberry in their references to “integrating into a burning house,” her own contribution to this debate has not been acknowledged or cited. As her biographer Imani Perry observes: “Lorraine remains in their shadows, although she was key to them and they to her.

Through the eschatological—but also revolutionary and insurrectionary—image of the burning house, this article traces the roots and routes of this rhetorical trope, exploring an “insurgent genealogy” of the image Its circulation among these politically conscious Black intellectuals testifies to the power of the conversation between them—one that played out as a feedback loop that was both debate and “tag team assault on white supremacy,” a process of sampling that was tribute and re-interpretation, a sermonic call and response that preached a liberation theology At a critical juncture in the early 1960s, this dialogue expanded the dimensions of the Black counterpublic, amplifying its critique of the white public sphere and bourgeois values—with Black fire signifying insurrection, rooted in a longer tradition of Black protest It is well known that the Black Arts Movement grew out of Malcolm X’s influence, speeches, and rhetorical style. But Malcolm X also listened to, read, and engaged with the leftist intellectuals of his time through imagery that they sampled from each other and used to powerful effect in the American public sphere, on radio, on television, in newspapers and journals, in interviews, and in debates and speeches at universities and in public lecture halls. Just as Malcolm X so clearly influenced the intellectuals of his time, they also influenced him—in ways that both dovetailed and diverged from the teachings of Elijah Muhammad.

The words integrating into a burning house have lived on through a kind of call and response between politically conscious Black intellectuals, through a dialogic transfer from person to person, “from one context to another context, from one social collective to another, from one generation to another generation,” carrying the power of the different contexts in which they were uttered The image of fire is rooted in earlier literary interventions like the 1926 Harlem Renaissance periodical Fire!! spearheaded by Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, and Aaron Douglas—a journal that shut down after only one issue, partly because its offices burned down FIRE, says the journal’s Foreword, is emancipatory (“melting steel and iron bars”), political (“a cry of conquest in the night, warning those who sleep”), spiritual, and esthetic (“the soul an inward flush of fire … Beauty? … flesh on fire—on fire in the furnace of life blazing”). The language of fire is threaded through James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963), Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal’s seminal Black Arts Movement anthology Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968), and later critical interventions like Cornell West’s Black Prophetic Fire (2015). It became integral in Black Arts Movement poetry and thought, symbolizing a torching of the bourgeois values of the white public sphere—and the flourishing of a radical poetics of a Black counterpublic The imagery of the burning house has continued to inform a new generation of Black creatives, thinkers, and writers: Jesmyn Ward’s edited volume The Fire This Time (2016) dedicated to Trayvon Martin; Amir Sulaiman’s visual poem “Laying Flowers, Setting Fires” (2020); and Meshell Ndegeocello’s music performance “No More Water/the Fire Next Time” (2022) Malcolm X used the image of fire on several occasions of police brutality—after the beating of Johnson Hinton (in 1957) and the death of Ronald Stokes (in 1962)—suggesting the reasons for its power as protest of violence against Black life. Black Classic Press reissued Black Fire in 2013, only months after George Zimmerman’s acquittal for killing Trayvon Martin. In a new introduction, Amiri Baraka called the anthology a document “of the BLM in overview historically and yet it focuses on aspects of the struggle still very much in evidence today.” He calls for a Black art and for uniting against white supremacy, rather than “’integration into the burning building’ (as Malcolm and Dr. King both told us).

The misattribution of Hansberry’s words testifies to her “invisibilization and erasure” as a “radical producer of knowledge inside and outside of academia,” as Christen A. Smith, Erica L. Williams, Imani A. Wadud, Whitney N.L. Pirtle, and The Cite Black Women Collective write. She has been largely written out of histories of Black radicalism, something her biographers Imani Perry and Soyica Diggs Colbert have worked to redress Hansberry played a seminal role in fostering a “creative, liberation-focused, and generally radical political-intellectual practice” at a pivotal moment in the early 1960s, as Black nationalist consciousness fueled a revolution of values, shored up by a flourishing of Black writings laying the foundations of Black Studies as a discipline Like the “spark” in Sun Ra’s “Saga of Resistance,” Hansberry’s words were “flame feeding flame.

The Burning House & the American Nightmare

Only a few months before the panel discussion, in November 1960, Malcolm X debated the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin on WBAI, criticizing the idea of “integration in the house of bondage,” comparing Elijah Muhammad to Moses leading the “Black masses” in an exodus out of captivity Throughout 1960, sit-in protests against Jim Crow segregation spread across the South—in Greensboro, Nashville, and Atlanta—something that Malcolm X would fiercely criticize as “begging for a cup of coffee in a white man’s restaurant” in his own 1961 radio interview on WNYC. Baldwin would riff on this comment in his NYT Magazine article, saying that “all of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee. In the Rustin debate, Malcolm X also talked about Islam spreading like “wildfire” across the globe—quoting a New York Times article that linked the Ahmadiyya movement in the US to Islam in newly independent Nigeria—connecting African American Islamic movements to anti-colonial struggle in the Third World. (In October 1960, King had attended the inauguration of Nnamdi Akikiwe.) Malcolm X would develop this image of the “house of bondage” over time, as a reference to slavery, but also as a way of analyzing the relationship between property ownership and citizenship rights in the US—and the exclusion of the “Black masses” from full citizenship through the denial of “a land of their own” and self-governance

In September 1960, Malcolm X and Lorraine Hansberry both served as orientation leaders for John F. Kennedy’s Airlift Africa program, circulating through each other’s intellectual and activist commitments The same month, Malcolm X and other Black leaders like Robert F. Williams met with Fidel Castro in Harlem, after the Cuban delegation to the United Nations moved uptown to the Hotel Theresa, greeted and cheered on, as Hansberry would say in the WBAI panel discussion, by “10,000” African Americans In December 1960, just before the panel discussion, the US abstained from UN resolution 1514, “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples” and voted against Algerian independence in the UN’s GA/Res 1573 In questioning the necessity of integrating into a burning house, Hansberry talks about both Castro’s visit to Harlem and the US’s position on the two UN resolutions, connecting anti-colonial struggle to Black liberation in the US and embracing “politically conscious” Black nationalism.

“Activism took a cultural turn,” writes Manning Marable, in Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention The WBAI panel discussion is a remarkable literary conversation about the relationship between Black life, art, and politics, just as new Black Arts organizations like the Umbra Workshop were emerging out of earlier collectives like the Harlem Writers Guild. The WBAI discussion revolved around the metaphor of American letters as a house, developing earlier theorizations of Black Art and its relationship to the literary mainstream of white literature (as in the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes) Langston Hughes elaborates on this metaphor specifically through reference to Raisin in the Sun, saying that despite all the “differences and difficulties, this is our house.” His comment is an interesting case of him interpreting Hansberry’s play, a play that took Hughes’s own Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) as a point of departure, creating a literary dialogue about the hypocrisies of the American dream, as exemplified by the dream house, but also about Black writers’ contentious relationship to a house that has placed them in a subordinate position. As an example, the panelists discuss the work of William Faulkner as characteristic of this problem, as his writings about Southern life brutalized Black life through stereotyped mis-characterizations. Baldwin notes that Faulkner surely never sat in the kitchen of an African American home, even though African Americans have been sitting in white kitchens for generations, giving a different perspective. Baldwin observes the limits of what white Americans are able to know not only about Black life, but also about the realities of American life and the American dream. Extending the metaphor of the house of American letters, Baldwin quotes a French idiom: “’If you want to know what’s happening in the house, ask the maid.’ And it occurred to me that in this extraordinary house, the maid. By making himself the “maid” in the house of literature, Baldwin comments on the subordinate position of Black authors (with reference to the gendered subordination of Black women). But Baldwin also cleverly casts a queer eye on his own position within the structural mechanisms of the white value system, openly acknowledging his gayness through cleverly coded language. His—and Hansberry’s—non-normativity creates what he calls “a very great advantage” with respect to the literary mainstream of white cultural production. And Hansberry responds that Black Americans’ “intimacy of knowledge … of white Americans does not exist in reverse. The same could be said about a queer knowledge of heteronormativity, that does not exist in reverse.

The WBAI panel discussion came at the height of Hansberry’s career. The film of A Raisin in the Sun starring Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee was about to premiere (in May 1961), and the Broadway play had received a glowing critical reception and was broadly popular. Yet her success was double edged, leading some critics to interpret the play as a dramatization of middle class, bourgeois dreams of integration Yet such an analysis misinterprets the radical politics coded into the play, her insistence on Black characters, her advocacy of the working class, her intellectual work with W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, and her membership in the Communist Party A Raisin in the Sun (1959) drew on autobiographical elements from her own family’s traumatic experience buying a house in a white neighborhood governed by racially restrictive covenants, leading to a Supreme Court case challenging such covenants. At the end of the play, as at the end of the Hansberry’s court case, the family moves into the house in the white neighborhood. Perry describes the experience as “a harrowing story”: Hansberry, her mother, and her siblings living “under siege. Outside their door a howling white mob lay in wait,” hitting, spitting on, and cursing them on their way to school. “In truth,” writes Perry, “the Hansberry experience was not unique. The scene, in fact, resonates closely with what would become “The Nightmare” (versus “the dream”), the opening chapter of The Autobiography of Malcolm X that similarly describes a harrowing story of an attack on the family home by a howling white mob. Both works reflect on the Black home as a kind of refuge, the difficulty of property ownership in the face of racial discrimination, its fraught effects on the possibility of class mobility, and its crushing impact on people’s dreams.

In his own analysis of the play, Amiri Baraka recognized the radicalness of Hansberry’s intervention. The play clearly summed up the Black liberation movement at a moment of transition, he argues, just as “Malcolm X, ‘the fire prophet,’ emerged as the truest reflector of black mass feelings.” Raisin in the Sun, Baraka writes:

is the accurate telling and stunning vision of the real struggle … We thought that Hansberry’s play was part of the ‘passive resistance’ phase of the movement, which was over the minute Malcolm’s penetrating eyes and words began to charge through the media with deadly force. We thought her play was ‘middle class’ in that its focus seemed to be on ‘moving into white folks’ neighborhoods … We missed the essence of the work—that Hansberry had created a family on the cutting edge of the same class and ideological struggles as existed in the movement itself and among the people

A mea culpa of sorts, Baraka retracts his earlier criticism of Raisin in the Sun, acknowledging Hansberry’s radical politics in tandem with those of Malcolm the fire prophet. Although Malcolm X and Lorraine Hansberry came from very different backgrounds, they circulated in overlapping circles, developing a shared understanding of the transnational dimensions of the struggle for economic and racial self-determination. Both used the image of the burning house as a metaphor for revolt against the structures of racial capitalism—calling for building a house of your own in a system that connects citizenship rights to property

The panelists turn to discussing what the moderator Nat Hentoff calls the “desire for equality within the white value-structure” and the urge to assimilate. Hentoff asks: “Has there been enough questioning of this in Negro writing?” Baldwin and Hansberry are indignant and incredulous, recognizing how much Black literature has questioned the urge to assimilate—something that Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay “The Negro and the Racial Mountain” explicitly explored Baldwin’s response ended up in The Fire Next Time, as he himself questions Hentoff, “Equal for what … What makes you think I want to be accepted?” His response rejects not just the white value-structure, but also hetero-normativity, as he and Hansberry finish each other’s ideas and sentences, functioning as a “marvelous tag team, their ideas bouncing back and forth, rapid-fire,” as Imani Perry says in her Hansberry biography

“Into this?” says Lorraine Hansberry.

“Into this,” affirms Baldwin.

“Maybe something else,” says Hansberry.

“It’s not a matter of acceptance or tolerance,” says Baldwin, “We’ve got to sit down and rebuild this house.”

“Quickly,” says Hansberry.

“Very quickly,” says Baldwin, “And we have to do it together.

The discussion centers on the insight of Black writers into the realities of American life—and the lack of reverse consciousness in white literature—imbuing Black art with its inherently political nature (“a consequence of structures of racism that have historically marginalized access to the means of cultural production”) Elaborating on this (double) consciousness in Black art and literature, the Jewish literary critic Alfred Kazin talks about the values of freedom and equality that the U.S. purports to espouse versus the reality of how American society is actually structured. Kazim calls it an “enormous comedy of American pretentions” regarding its “ideal moral purpose.” This hypocrisy is “the central fact about our moral history. And the conflict in the American heart … comes out of a constant tension between what this country is ideally supposed to mean and what it actually has been as such. The problem has become more and more catastrophic and dangerous because of the growing world anxiety about possible world annihilation. Suddenly you begin to realize that people who don’t treat their fellow-citizens well are, in a sense, building up a bonfire for everyone else, as is likely to happen in Africa before our generation. Like the other panelists, Kazin connects struggles over economic and racial inequality in the US to global struggles for decolonization in Asia and Africa—a bonfire of inequalities fueling revolutionary movements.

For Hansberry, a student of Du Bois, this insight of Black writers into the hypocrisies and paradoxes of American life is a political consciousness stripped of its falseness, imparting a certain truth value into literature, partly through faithful representation of the realities of Black life—in marked contrast to the mainstream of white cultural production This, argues Hansberry, is the prerequisite for any kind of serious writing. She cannot imagine “a contemporary writer any place in the world today who isn’t in conflict with his world … if he was any kind of artist, he had to be.” But Black writers and artists are “doubly aware of conflict because of the special pressures” they face in America This double consciousness about the realities of life in the United States, the panelists argue, makes not just great Black art, but great art—as they give examples from literature, drama, and music. Good art, says Hansberry, is informed by “social awareness, social intelligence … social passion. And one must not ever try to divide the two.

The panelist frame the social intelligence of double consciousness through a class analysis of the “masses and the mainstream,” “high” and “low” art, the white, bourgeois public sphere and the Black counterpublic. They are attuned to economic struggle at the heart of these modes of cultural production—with regards to questions of ownership of intellectual property, but also of the means of production: presses, journals, publishing houses, and theaters. (This part of the discussion is cut out of the transcript published in CrossCurrents, bur remains in the audio. Hansberry, who had worked for Paul Robeson’s journal Freedom, studied at the Communist affiliated Jefferson School for Social Science with Du Bois, and joined the Communist Party and the Labor Youth League, was attuned to class struggle over property ownership—something that was at the core of A Raisin in the Sun—and connected to anticolonial struggle through the character of the Nigerian student Joseph Asagai Langston Hughes himself was accused of being a communist and forced, in 1953, to testify before Senator Joseph McCarthy, saying to the committee that, at one point in his life, he “believed in the entire philosophies of the left … including socialism, communism, Trotskyism. The panelists refer to class struggle between the masses and the mainstream, as Langston Hughes quotes at length from Julian Mayfield’s essay “Into the Mainstream and Oblivion” that itself drew directly on language from the Marxist journal Masses and Mainstream published in New York between 1948 and 1963. In Mayfield’s essay, he observes that the Black writer can see through “the vacuity of the American mainstream … the fac¸ade of the American way of life [that] is always transparent,” because of the special “insight of the stranger in the house, placing him in a better position to illuminate contemporary American life as few writers of the mainstream can. This alienation should serve also to make him more sensitive to philosophical and artistic influences that originate beyond our national cultural boundaries. In the WBAI panel, Hughes quotes at length an excerpt from Mayfield’s essay:

The Black writer is being gently nudged toward a rather vague thing called ‘the mainstream of American literature’… but before plunging into it he owes it to the future of his art to analyze the contents of the American mainstream to determine the full significance of his commitment to it. He may decide that, though the music sweet, he would rather play in another orchestra … the Negro writer may conclude that his best salvation lies in escaping the narrow national orbit—artistic, cultural, and political—and soaring into more universal experience

Coded into this conversation about Black literature and Black art is a wider discussion about other modes of identification with the African diaspora, Third World struggles against economic exploitation, and the Communist international. Mayfield himself was a member of the Communist Party and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts—and wrote about Cuba as the solution to the race problem in Fair Play for Cuba—connecting the struggle for racial justice to revolution and anti-imperialism in Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, and Puerto Rico Mayfield was already living in Puerto Rico with his wife Dr. Ana Livia Cordero and being surveilled by the FBI, and would later go into exile in Ghana. He originally presented “Into the Mainstream and Oblivion” at the First Negro Writers Conference in 1959, where Hansberry, Hughes, Sarah Wright, John Hanrik Clarke, and John O. Killens also presented, among others. (Clarke and Killens would co-write the charter of the Organization of Afro-American Unity with Malcolm X in 1964.) The conference was organized by the American Society of African Culture, envisioned as a stateside instantiation of the Congresses of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris (1956) and Rome (1959). The AMSAC conference brought together what Mary Helen Washington characterizes as “an embattled internationalist Left … determined to advance black cultural and political self-determination. Only days before the Broadway premiere of Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry delivered the conference keynote, though it would not be included in the collected essays The American Negro Writer and His Roots (1960), but was later published in The Black Scholar through her husband and executor Robert Nemiroff

Black art and literature, Mayfield argues in his essay, is able to illustrate the paradoxes and hypocrisies of the American dream (versus the reality “lived by the masses”) from the vantage point of the “stranger in the house,” or what he calls an “alien” of his nation. “The dream has proved elusive,” he writes. The Black writer “sings the national anthem sotto voce and has trouble reconciling the ‘dream’ to the reality he knows,” words that anticipate Black Lives Matter protests against pledging allegiance to the flag A Raisin in the Sun dramatizes what Langston Hughes calls “a dream deferred,” in his 1951 collection Montage of a Dream Deferred. The play’s title refers to his poem “Harlem,” that is included as the epigraph of A Raisin in the Sun:

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun? …

Or does it explode

Malcolm X would later call this an America nightmare in his March 1962 debate at Cornell with James Farmer, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, a debate that was published in the journal Dialogue in May 1962. Malcolm X said: “What to them is an American dream to us is an American nightmare, and we don’t think that it is possible for the American white man in sincerity to take the action necessary to correct the unjust conditions that 20 million black people here are made to suffer morning, noon, and night. The nightmare became an integral part of Malcolm’s rhetorical tools, an image that he used in speeches at Harvard, in his “Ballot or the Bullet” speech, and at the University of Ghana Malcolm X’s language of the American nightmare riffed on Hughes’s and Hansberry’s “dream deferred,” as well as Mayfield’s language of the reality of the elusiveness of the American dream. Malcolm’s language of the American nightmare would go mainstream with the publication of James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind” in The New Yorker on November 17, 1962 only a few months after the debate between Malcolm X and James Farmer. Just as Baldwin would weave Hansberry’s words into his writing, so he did with Malcolm X’s words: “The American dream that has become something much more closely resembling a nightmare on the private, domestic, and international levels. He closes the essay calling “to end the racial nightmare … and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy … No more water, the fire next time!”—words that would become the title of his book The Fire Next Time

King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March in Washington was most likely formulated in response to these conversations about the American dream. Though both Malcolm X and Baldwin would attend the March on Washington, neither were allowed to speak. Malcolm X’s Autobiography, published just after his assassination in 1965, opens with “The Nightmare,” the title of the book’s opening chapter that describes his earliest memory: his own house burning down as emblem of the reality of the racial nightmare in America. “Suddenly snatched awake into a frightening confusion of pistol shots and shouting and smoke and flames … Our home was burning down around us.

Culture: “An Indispensable Weapon in the Freedom Struggle”

The transnational solidarities between the Black liberation movement and anticolonial freedom struggles was a political perspective that Hansberry and Malcolm X shared. (Malcolm X talked about the Black liberation movement coming together “in the spirit of Bandung” at the Harlem Freedom Rally in summer 1960. The comment about the burning house, and Hansberry’s tribute to the new wave of Black nationalism, suggests that she had tuned in to Malcolm X’s rhetoric—and may have been listening to him in his own appearance on WBAI a few months earlier or reading his articles published in the New York Amsterdam News In his 1957 “God’s Angry Men” articles, published in the New York Amsterdam News just after the police beating of Johnson Hinton, Malcolm X wrote about how God would destroy the slave master with an “unquenchable fire,” but would save “His People from the lake of fire. A few months later, in the Los Angeles Herald-Dispatch, he wrote about Islam as “sweeping through Black America like a ‘flaming fire,’ under the Divine Guidance of Messenger Elijah Muhammad.

Malcolm X conceptualized the class dimensions of racial oppression in dialogue with Elijah Muhammad, but also in close conversation with the radical activists and intellectuals of his day—ones who saw economic equality as the path to racial justice. Hansberry’s comment about the “burning house” connected “politically conscious Black nationalist intellectuals” to struggles for independence, decolonization, and revolution—linking “black nationalism with Pan-African internationalism in a way that pointed straight toward Black Power. This is something Hansberry talked about in her keynote speech at the First Negro Writers Conference in March 1959: “the ultimate destiny and aspirations of the African people and twenty million American Negroes are inextricably and magnificently bound up together forever. Both Hansberry and Malcolm X were students of W.E.B. Du Bois. Hansberry’s critique of integration evoked the Black nationalist separatism of the Nation, but also that of Du Bois and his later embrace of political, economic, and cultural independence, communism, and decolonization. Malcolm X himself read Du Bois in prison and would later visit Shirley Graham Du Bois, Mayfield, Sylvia Boone, and Maya Angelou in Ghana Malcolm X used Du Bois’s language of a “nation within a nation” in his speeches, language that would also appear in Elijah Muhammad’s speeches and writings, including Message to the Blackman in America (1965)

Malcolm X also developed close relationships with activists and radicals like Robert F. Williams, Julian Mayfield, Max Stanford, and labor leader A. Philip Randolph. Malcolm X invited Williams to speak at Temple #7 in 1959 and raised funds for his work as head of the NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina Williams had secured the release of a seven and a nine-year-old boy convicted for kissing a white girl in Monroe’s “kissing case” (1959); helped desegregate the Monroe pool (1961); provided refuge for the Freedom Riders (1961); and did armed battle with the KKK when the police refused to provide protection. Mayfield joined Williams in Monroe and worked closely with him—and they both fled into exile in 1961 after being accused of kidnapping a white couple they had given refuge to in the midst of the Freedom Rides—Williams to Cuba and Mayfield to Ghana. (In summer of 1961, Randolph invited Malcolm X to be a part of a “Working Committee for Unity of Action.”) The connections between these intellectuals and activists and “the decolonizing nationalisms of the Third World—and with Cuban socialism in particular—illustrate the ideological richness of the African American Left,” writes Rafael Rojas in his own analysis of their relationship

Mayfield appears to have met with Malcolm X and Hansberry at Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee’s house in Mount Vernon while he was a fugitive, sometime in October or November of 1961, before going into exile (He would not return from exile until after Malcolm X’s death.) Davis describes the meeting as taking place before 1962, while his play Purlie Victorious was showing on Broadway (between September 28, 1961 and May 13, 1962), a meeting that included John O. Killens and Sidney Poitier. “Malcom somehow managed to come to see a matinee. He came by himself. And I think he sort of sneaked away because Elijah Muhammad probably wouldn’t have wanted him to show up at the theater. Davis recalls Hansberry rebuking Malcolm X for an article he wrote criticizing her and other Black leaders for their interracial relationships, an article published in the inaugural issue of Muhammad Speaks on October 1, 1961 Mayfield acquired his passport in New York City on September 11th and a visa from the Ghanaian Consulate in New York on November 8th Malcolm X closely engaged these literary figures and civil rights leaders long before his break with the Nation, working in tandem with them to secure fugitive justice for Mayfield and Williams. When he visited Ghana after this break with the NOI, Malcolm X may have been paying tribute to Mayfield’s own critique of the American dream in a speech presented at the University of Ghana, “For the twenty million of us in America who are of African descent, it is not an American dream; it’s an American nightmare.

Malcolm X’s relationship with artists, intellectuals, and activists was “an unlikely alliance,” writes Peniel Joseph in Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour, rooted in “a long history of black radicalism” and an understanding of “artistic rebellion as the cultural arm of a political revolution. Despite Elijah Muhammad’s ambivalent attitude toward cultural production, Malcolm developed an agenda for the politics of cultural reproduction—one that planted seeds of the Black Arts Movement, seeds rooted in the organizing, activism, and writings of the leftist intellectuals of his time. Malcolm’s “friendships with popular artists and musicians in the 1940s made him comfortable around cultural and literary figures,” writes Joseph in The Sword and the Shield, “His outreach to New York City’s leading black artists and intellectuals stretched the limits of acceptable behavior within the Nation. He not only attended Purlie Victorious and met with Harlem Writers Guild intellectuals at Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee’s home, but he also met with Maya Angelou and Rosa Guy after they protested Patrice Lumumba’s assassination at the UN; debated James Baldwin and hung out with him; talked on the phone with Paule Marshall; and visited Shirley Graham DuBois, Sylvia Boone, Mayfield, and Angelou in Ghana Formal alliances developed after Malcolm X severed ties with the Nation of Islam in 1964, when he formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), whose charter Malcolm X wrote with Harlem Writers Guild pioneers John Henrik Clarke and John O. Killens. The document’s last section is devoted to outlining the role of “Culture” and “cultural revolution to un-brainwash an entire people” as a means of liberation from “the bonds of white supremacy.” The document calls for the establishment of a cultural center with workshops in the arts, film, creative writing, painting, theater, music, and Afro-American history. “Culture,” the charter says, “is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle.

The Fire Next Time and The Master’s House on Fire

Only one week after the WBAI panel discussion, Lumumba was assassinated in the newly independent Congo with the help of the CIA, retribution for an alliance struck with the Soviet Union to defend against Belgian supported secessionists. When the news of Lumumba’s assassination broke a month later, a coalition of Black leftist organizations planned a demonstration at the United Nations, disrupting Adlai Stevenson’s inaugural address as U.S. representative. Joining the protests were writers, artists, intellectuals, and activists like Sarah E. Wright, Calvin Hicks, Robert F. Williams, Maya Angelou, Abbey Lincoln, Rosa Guy, Daniel Watts, Rolland Snellings, and LeRoi Jones from the Harlem Writers Guild, On Guard for Freedom, the Umbra Workshop, the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage, and the Liberation Committee for Africa. Snellings and Jones first met at the protest, forming key alliances that brought together an informal coalition of Black leftist organizations catalyzing the emergence of the Black Arts Movement, fostering “new links between a disparate group of New York-based intellectuals, activists, and artists.

The month after the WBAI panel, Baldwin quoted Hansberry in an article in the New York Times Magazine about the demonstrations at the UN protesting the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. In the article about the protests—and about decolonization in the Congo, Cuba, the US, and the UN—Baldwin revisited Hansberry’s questions about the necessity of integrating into a burning house, structuring his argument around her two main examples: the influence of the Cuban revolution and decolonization movements on the Black freedom movement. The article, “A Negro Assays the Negro Mood,” was published in The New York Times Magazine and it explicitly invoked something that Hansberry had implicitly evoked: the intellectual power of black nationalism and the Black Muslim Movement. The article laid out what would become Baldwin’s main arguments in The Fire Next Time, connecting the Muslim movement to larger transnational struggles for racial and economic justice Drawing on the WBAI discussion, Baldwin quotes Hansberry without naming her—just as he would in “Letter from a Region in My Mind”: “’I am not at all sure,’ states one prominent Negro, who is not a Muslim, ‘that I want to be integrated into a burning house.’ Only twelve days after the publication of Baldwin’s article about the Black Muslims, Malcolm X would rework his earlier image of the “house of bondage,” talking about it catching on fire. “This wicked old house,” he said at the Harvard Law School on March 24, 1961, “is going to collapse or go up in smoke.” In the speech, he used Marxist imagery of Christianity as an opiate of the masses, saying: “The black masses are shaking off the drugs, or narcotic effect of the token integration promises. And he characterized Elijah Muhammad as a leader of these black masses, “the lowly, uneducated, downtrodden and oppressed masses, among the lowest element of America’s 20 million ex-slaves.” He also drew on Du Bois’s language of Black America as a “nation within a nation,” ideas Du Bois developed in his later advocacy of Black political and economic independence that got him expelled from the NAACP

Baldwin and Malcolm X appeared together in two back-to-back appearances on radio and television the following month. One of these was also on WBAI radio, an April 25, 1961 discussion of the sit-in movement versus the Black Muslims. The other was a panel discussion on the television show the Open Mind about the Black Muslim movement, an appearance that led Elijah Muhammad to invite Baldwin to his home in Chicago, the meeting that became the central focus of “Letter from a Region in My Mind.” In May of the following year, Malcolm X developed the image of the burning house in a speech delivered after the police shooting of Ronald Stokes and six other member of Muhammad’s Mosque #27 in Los Angeles. In the speech, he said: “If the white man is not ready to clean his house up, he shouldn’t have a house. It should catch on fire. And burn down. Baldwin’s essay “Letter from a Region in My Mind” published only a few months later, developed the burning house imagery of both Hansberry and Malcolm X, again directly quoting her without citing her: “Hence the question: Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?

The Fire Next Time analyzed the Nation and Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan. But Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad also adapted language from The Fire Next Time. Message to the Blackman in America, published after Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965, talks about “the warning of destruction of the wicked world by fire the next time is made clearer to those whom that fire will destroy. The month The Fire Next Time was published (in January 1963), Malcolm X used the image of the master’s house on fire as an analysis of the class dynamics of racial oppression in U.S. society, between the Black bourgeoisie and the Black masses. In two main speeches, one at Michigan State University on January 23rd and the other at the University of Pennsylvania on January 25th, he recounted the parable of the “house Negro and the field Negro” that would become one of his fiercest rhetorical interventions—an image that has circulated widely

When the house started burning down, that type of Negro would fight harder to put the master’s house out than the master himself would. But then you had another Negro out in the field … the masses—the field Negroes were the masses. They were in the majority. When the master got sick, they prayed that he’d die. If his house caught on fire, they’d pray for a wind to come along and fan the breeze

He delivered this speech in East Lansing, Michigan, where his own family home burned down. In The Autobiography, Malcolm (or Alex Haley) remembers recounting this childhood memory of his house burning down to the Michigan State audience in East Lansing that day in January 1963 But the story Malcolm X told in the speech was not of his own house burning down, but the parable of the master’s house catching fire—the life story mingling with the parable and vice versa The memory of his mother famously brought Malcolm X’s life story tumbling out of him, in “stream-of-consciousness reminiscing” that removed subconscious blocks on his mind and led him to reconnect with her after twenty-five years, bringing her home from the asylum where she had been institutionalized

Malcolm X revisited the parable of the master’s house on fire numerous times over 1963 in some of his most famous speeches: “Message to the Grassroots” in Detroit in November and “God’s Judgment of White America” in early December—just after the March on Washington, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, and John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In “God’s Judgment of White America,” delivered less than two weeks after JFK’s assassination, he pays direct tribute to the gospel refrain in The Fire Next Time.

Like the flood in Noah’s day, revolution drowns all opposition, or like the fire in Lot’s day, the black revolution burns everything that gets in its path. America is the last stronghold of white supremacy. The black revolution, which is international in nature and scope is sweeping down upon America like a raging forest fire. It is only a matter of time before America herself will be engulfed by the black flames, these black firebrands … Here in America, the black revolution (the ‘uncontrollable forest fire’) is personified in the religious teachings, and the religious works, of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

Malcolm X deploys the apocalyptic imagery of his earlier speeches to talk about decolonization and “the black revolution (the ‘uncontrollable forest fire’) … the real black revolution that has already swept white supremacy out of Africa, Asia, and is sweeping it out of Latin America … and is even now manifesting itself also right here among the black masses. But he also talks about the revolution in terms of the Capitalist world versus “the Communist world and the Socialist world—Eastern world and Western world—Oriental and Occidental world—dark world and white world.” It is the end of time for the Western, European, Christian world, with God preparing a lake of fire to cast the wicked oppressors into the burning flame. During this time, James Baldwin and Malcolm X were spotted by the FBI hanging out around town in New York—at the apartment of Baldwin’s sister’s husband Frank Karefa-Smart, from the Sierra Leone mission to the UN Malcolm X forged personal and political ties with these intellectuals before his break with the Nation, incorporating some of their language and ideas into his speeches and writings, even as they incorporated his language and writings into theirs. In the midst of these speeches, Andrew Hill would record his jazz album Black Fire, the title Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal would use for their 1968 anthology of Black writing Black Fire. It was language the jazz musician Archie Shepp similarly used in his 1965 album Fire Music that included the elegy “Malcolm, Malcolm Semper Malcolm. These speeches and this imagery helped give expression to the “passion and rage and rebellion and love … [of] the young Black intellectuals and revolutionaries of that time”—in music and poetry

The call and response between Hansberry and Malcolm X played out in public and private: in her WBAI comments about politically conscious Black intellectuals and Black nationalism, in his critique of her in Muhammad Speaks, and in their meetings at Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee’s house. Malcolm X developed his own class critique of the structures of racial inequalities through the image of the master’s house on fire, connecting it to the concept of Black revolution spreading across the world like a wildfire. He took up elements of Hansberry’s critique, demonstrating how “black women radicals shaped Malcolm X’s trajectory … [and] also contributed to his understanding of black internationalism,” as Ashley Farmer remarks in her article “The Many Women Mentors of Malcolm X. Malcolm X’s vast cultural impact on cultural production, music, poetry, drama, and scholarship, is indisputable, directly impacting the Black Arts Movement both before his assassination and after it. As James Smethurst writes in an article about Malcolm X’s relationships with Black artists, “Malcolm X provided a model of how one might be an intellectual and an artist (especially an artist with language) and a political radical, he presented a vision of black freedom linked to generations of black radicalism … and to new liberation movements and the new independent nations of Africa and Asia. But the leftist intellectuals and writers of Malcolm X’s time clearly impacted his own revolutionary philosophy, in ways sometimes overtly at odds with Nation of Islam policy. Only weeks before his assassination, Malcolm X would attend Lorraine Hansberry’s funeral, paying tribute to her in both life and death.

Black Fire & Black Art

The imagery of Black fire became one of the most salient images threaded through the cultural production of the Black Arts Movement. In The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka talks about how Malcolm’s “cold class analysis” in the parable of the master’s house on fire “dug into me, cutting both ways,” giving voice to things he had “not even thought, but felt.” “What it meant to my life immediately was words in my head coming out of my mouth. Throughout his career, Baraka’s work paid tribute to Malcolm X, calling the contributors to Black Fire the sons and daughters of Malcolm X from the generation that came up after Jimmy Baldwin Among these sons and daughters were Rolland Snellings who, like Jones, would convert to Islam, changing his name to Askia Muhammad Tour,e after one of the rulers of the Songhai empire in West Africa. Both poets would play catalytic roles in the emergence of the Black Arts Movement and also, the first Black Studies program at San Francisco State. They first met at the protest against Lumumba’s assassination at the U.N., a moment that brought together disparate activist intellectual circles that would coalesce as the decentralized organizations and coalitions of the Black Arts Movement. Tour,e’s poem “Song of Fire” was published just after Malcolm’s “God’s Judgment of White America” speech, its refrain “(Fire!)” evoking the speech’s apocalyptic tone and imagery.

Allah

will send his flaming sword a ’whistling through the ‘chosen land’…

(Fire!)

will cauterize the Racist Plague

The poem’s dedication to Africa, Asia, Latin & Afro-America also directly references the language of Malcolm X’s speech. “Song of Fire” was published just after another poem Snellings wrote “Floodtide,” the two poems in tandem referencing Baldwin’s—and Malcolm’s—imagery of flood and fire. In an article analyzing the poem, the literary critic Lorenzo Thomas argues that the image of fire is always used “in the sense of greater knowledge being awakened in us. Histories of the Black Arts Movement situate its emergence in the aftermath of Malcolm X’s assassination when LeRoi Jones moved uptown to Harlem to found the Black Arts Repertory Theater School (BARTS). Others, like Thomas, argue that its roots are earlier—in a longer genealogy—extending back to the Umbra Workshop (of which Snellings was a member) and the Harlem Writers Guild, of which Hansberry and other Malcolm X confidantes, like Mayfield, John O. Killens, John Henrik Clarke, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Maya Angelou, and others, were members Only weeks before his own assassination, Malcolm X attended Hansberry’s funeral, approaching Davis for an introduction to Paul Robeson. In her dissertation Black Arts Activism, Rebeccah Welch describes Hansberry as a “historical bridge between two generations of black radicals often deemed distinct.

After Malcolm X’s assassination, Snellings published an essay about Malcolm X in Liberator, calling him “Malik, the Fire Prophet, God’s anger cast in glowing copper, burning the wicked of the earth with his flame. “Song of Fire” would later be included in Black Fire, along with other poems like Marvin X’s “Burn, Baby, Burn” about the Watts riots that explicitly references the parable of the slave master’s house on fire “Burn, Baby, Burn” became the chorus of Jimmy Collier and Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick’s civil rights anthem “Burn, Baby, Burn,” a song that explicitly references The Fire Next Time, but also the idea of the American nightmare: “If I can’t enjoy the American dream, won’t be water but the fire next time. Stokely Carmichael sang this song while starting a small bonfire in his hotel room. In Paris for an anti-war conference, he was on the cusp of deportation, just stripped of his passport for having traveled to Cuba

The anthology Black Fire brought together the epistemological foundations of the revolutionary tradition in Black literature, as a body of intellectual treatises by thinkers, writers, activists, and poets. The pieces were assembled from a myriad of important publications and publishers from the time, growing out of earlier anthologies like For Malcolm (1967) and Anthology of Our Black Selves (1966), but also the earlier American Negro Writer and His Roots (1960) They helped establish the field of Black studies as “an invitation to create, think, and struggle [that] is nothing less than a modality of revolt and is at best a catalyst for remaking/unmaking the world.

Lorraine Hansberry is at the heart of these insurgent epistemologies, as one of its roots among this pantheon of intellectual greats who put their hearts into their politics and into their art. She helped foster a call and response between thinkers, poets, and activists that connected earlier struggles in the Harlem Renaissance to more recent ones in the Black Lives Matter movement. Reiterating the image of integrating into a burning house in a new introduction to Black Fire, Baraka situates the anthology in the long struggle for Black liberation and what he calls “the BLM in overview historically and yet it focuses on aspects of the struggle still very much in evidence today.” The book represents a united front “against white supremacy & submissive ‘integration into a burning building’ (as Malcolm and Dr. King both told us) … as Mao sd we could be politically revolutionary and artistically powerful. The image of integrating into a burning house would circulate widely through the Black Lives Matter protests, as emblematic of the problems inherent in the white value structure, police brutality, and racial terror—but always attributed to Baldwin, King, and Malcolm X

This article traces the roots and routes of the metaphor of the burning house, how it circulated as an eschatological emblem of the American nightmare, a “prophetic prelude to the fiery black awakening of the 1960s,” and as an emblem of revolution, retribution, and regeneration It charts an “insurgent genealogy” of the leftist poets and intellectuals that laid the foundation for a “creative, liberation-focused and generally radical political-intellectual practice,” a “black fire” articulated in BAM essays, poetry, drama, music, and art Though Hansberry was one of the roots of this flourishing, one that flowered over time through a myriad of different branches of Black radical thought and creative expression, her seminal contribution has been eclipsed by other figures. The critique of integrating into a burning house conceptually shaped the long struggle for Black liberation, in debates over integration and separation, nonviolence and self-defense, civil rights and black nationalism.

The idea of burning down the house became a central point of reference in the public debate between King and Malcolm X, in the parable of the master’s house burning down, but also in their dialogue about the American dream and the American nightmare. It was part of a larger dialogue about the aims of the civil rights movement versus black nationalism. But it also allegorically described revolution, class conflict, and the tensions between the working class and the bourgeoisie, the propertyless and the propertied—and how this directly pertains to citizenship rights in a racial capitalist democracy that is more capitalist than democratic From the sit-in movement, protests against the CIA’s role in Lumumba’s execution, and Williams’s Monroe campaign in 1960–61; the police shooting of Ronald Stokes in 1962; the Birmingham campaign, March on Washington, and bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963; the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, and King; and the violence against Black lives protested by the BLM movement, the image of the “burning house” has had enduring salience as an expression of these struggles in the long Black liberation movement. Baldwin himself talked about the burning house in the immediate aftermath of King’s assassination, but attributed the comment to Stokely Carmichael. Asked about integrating into a burning house in an interview with Esquire, he bitterly remarks: “I think Stokely’s right when he says that integration is another word, you know, the latest kind of euphemism for white supremacy. No, I don’t want to be integrated into this house or any other house, especially not this burning house. I don’t want to become … like you. You, the white people. I’d rather die than become what most white people in this country have become. During the Ferguson uprisings, the NOI newspaper the Final Call published an article “Integrating into a Burning House,” with Jineea Butler writing: “Burning house? What was the burning house Dr. King was referring to? Does the burning house resemble Ferguson, Mo.?

Coda: “Setting Fires, Laying Flowers”

An outpouring of books, writings, and performances pay tribute to and reference Baldwin and The Fire Next Time, like MeShell Ndegeocello’s performance tribute to Baldwin No More Water and Jesmyn Ward’s The Fire This Time dedicated to Trayvon Martin “and the many other black men, women, and children who have died and been denied justice for these last four hundred years. The poet Amir Sulaiman’s 2020 visual poem “Laying Flowers, Setting Fires” is an elegy for victims of police brutality, and for George Floyd in particular. The poem/film opens with three overlapping, connected samples. The first is audio of James Baldwin from the WBAI panel discussion, saying that “to be a Negro in this country is to be in a constant state of rage.” The second is the “After Civil Rights: Black Power” interview in which King calls for “a revolution of values in our country,” saying that “the dream that I had has in many points turned into a nightmare.” He asks, “what advantage is there being integrated into a burning house?”—but attributes the comment to James Baldwin The third is Dave Chapelle talking about the 8 minutes and 46 seconds Derek Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck. Sulaiman’s juxtaposition of these interlocking riffs speaks of the ongoing nightmare of racial terror and connects it to earlier struggles for justice through Black art and Black protest. By sampling these earlier critiques, Sulaiman creates a feedback loop that draws on these earlier voices even while speaking to a different context. Drawing on Hansberry’s language, sampled by Baldwin, Malcolm X, and King, Sulaiman envisions a revolution of values, paying tribute to and laying flowers for creative ancestors, even while setting fire to the architecture of structural racism (rather than using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, as Audre Lorde would say) Though the Black feminists would fiercely critique Malcolm X, they also envisioned what Angela Davis calls “the political descendants of Malcolm”—like Baraka, Sulaiman, and so many others—who have transformed his legacy into “a forward-looking impetus for creative political thinking.” But she also reflects on “some possible feminist implications of his legacy. This article traces the call and response between Hansberry and Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King, but also how Black fire became a defining image of Black protest against the structures of racial and economic injustice. Their own dialogue with Black women artists and intellectuals like Hansberry is, in this case, more than just a footnote in this history.

Funding

This article is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.