Excellent essay (and a letter to his nephew) that continues to be relevant today, over 56-years later. So many of the reflections provide greater depth and understanding into our collective past as well as our collective present where much work remains to bring equality and understanding to American society.

A few quotes from the book that I appreciated:

Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
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I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross. I am, then, both visibly and legally the descendent of slaves in a white, Protestant country, and this is what it means to be an American Negro, this is who he is -- a kidnapped pagan, who was sold like an animal and treated like one.
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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves and totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, stepless, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one out to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: it is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come into which we shall return.
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The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks – the total liberation, in the cities, and the towns, before the law, and in the mind.