A Cold Fire Burning — Nathan C. Heard

A Cold Fire Burning brilliantly depicts an interracial love story amidst the political changes of the early Seventies. Shadow is a working-class black man in the ghetto of Newark, NJ. An affair with Terri, a liberal white woman who works at a storefront drug rehab center, begins to throw his sense of the world into turmoil. When the racial and psychosexual tensions inherent in their relationship finally reach the boiling point, Shadow rejects Terri and everything she represents to him and winds up the leader of a rag-tag band of would-be black nationalist urban guerillas. Tragedy ensues when Shadow tries to transform their revolutionary rhetoric into reality on the harsh streets of Newark