The Fire in the Flint

Set in the Jim Crow South following World War I, The Fire in the Flint follows Dr. Kenneth Harper, a young, sometimes naive Black physician and war veteran. After graduating from a Northern medical school, he returns to his hometown of Central City, Georgia to start a practice. He arrives believing he can avoid discrimination by simply not getting involved with the town’s racial affairs—but he quickly finds out otherwise, and must confront the reality of living in a place where systemic racism and the Ku Klux Klan run rampant. The Fire in the Flint, published in 1924, is American civil rights activist Walter White’s debut novel. Written during the height of the Harlem Renaissance—a period where African American literature flourished—White sought to promote anti-racist themes and showcase the oppression Black people faced in the early twentieth-century.