"When President Theodore Roosevelt welcomed the country's most visible Black man, Booker T. Washington, into his circle of counselors in 1901, the two confronted a shocking and violent wave of racist outrage. In the previous decade, Jim Crow laws had legalized discrimination in the South, eroding social and economic gains for former slaves. Lynching was on the rise, and Black Americans faced new barriers to voting. Slavery had been abolished, but...

Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping off point for this collection of essays and poems about race, racial identity and racism.