What are Baldwin's specific doubts and criticisms of the Nation of Islam?

Initially Baldwin feels remote from Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam movement simply because he, Baldwin, does not see himself as a religious believer. Baldwin, though brought up in a strict Christian home, has rejected organized religion as an adult, and he does not feel the urge to convert to Islam, as many other African Americans have done.

However, Baldwin's criticisms of the Nation of Islam go further than this. He sees the separatism of the movement as another form of prejudice. Baldwin himself does not wish to reject white people as a whole and believes to do so would be to fall to the same level as the whites who have oppressed and marginalized African Americans. Furthermore, he regards the Nation of Islam's separatist agenda as simply unworkable. It does not seem realistic to Baldwin to think that African Americans can create a separate society or, as Elijah Muhammad planned, a new country for themselves on American soil. Even if they could do so, Baldwin does not see this as a form of progress for black people.

Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time at a point in history when the Civil Rights Movement had only recently begun in earnest. He was prescient in seeing that an equal, multiracial society was, in fact, possible, and one can only hope his vision will be completely realized some day, since, as many would acknowledge, there is still some distance to go.

What are Baldwin's key observations and conclusions about the Nation of Islam's theology in The Fire Next Time?

Baldwin was horrified by the Nation of Islam's beliefs, but not surprised by them. In The Fire Next Time, he regarded them as an inverted version of white supremacy that borrowed the many racist canards that white supremacists aimed at non-white people and simply reversed them and applied them to white people.

Baldwin saw that most of the Nation of Islam's converts were either prisoners or black people fleeing from the openly racist South to the covertly racist North. Both were being taught by the NOI to see whites as outright devils disguised as humans, invented in a lab by a mad scientist and sent and controlled by Satan himself. For Baldwin, he feared this was the same sort of dehumanization that Nazis had done to Jews and racist white Americans did to African Americans and others.

Baldwin wanted a response from marginalized groups to the hate they were facing that was based on shouldering the burden of love for all. Instead, he saw the NOI as simply a twin version of white supremacy based on debasing another race.