The Baldwin-Buckley Debate, 1965

3 min readJun 8, 2020

Here is a link to a crucial moment in a speech James Baldwin gave on February 18, 1965.

The speech was part of a debate between Mr. Baldwin and the ultra-conservative intellectual pundit William F. Buckley Jr. at Cambridge University.

Mr. Baldwin asserts, “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro…I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing…For nothing.

Mr. Baldwin was a gifted poet, writer, speaker, and gay rights/civil rights activist. His many novels include the semi-autobiographical Go Tell It On The Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, a book which took enormous risks by including gay characters and gay sex in 1956. He was also the author of many collections of essays, including Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time. It’s safe to say that he was in no mood for Mr. Buckley’s conservatism, which was merely a poorly disguised racist apologia.

Mr. Buckley was facing a gifted opponent and a hostile audience, as most of the students in attendance sympathized with the plight of the American Negro. Mr. Buckley attempted to shift the conversation by saying that he was a just a moderate (which wasn’t true and the students knew it) who wasn’t opposed to Negroes, just to proposals requiring schools to be desegregated or other dramatic social transformations.

In the 1950s, Mr. Buckley is the man who defined “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling “Stop!” at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” He spent his career supporting conservative causes with his pen, speech, and deep pocketbook. He was best known as a writer of nonfiction, including God and Man at Yale and McCarthy and His Enemies, in which defends the brutal anti-communist tactics of Joseph McCarthy. Mr. Buckley founded the still-influential conservative magazine, The National Review, and he was the host of a long-running TV show, Firing Line.

The students voted to give Mr. Baldwin the victory in the debate. Mr. Buckley admitted he was happy to leave with his dignity intact. But Mr. Baldwin was frustrated, because he felt Mr. Buckley and White society generally were not listening to what he and other Black Americans were trying to say. And indeed, that was true in 1965; in many respects, remains true today.

The Baldwin-Buckley Debate, 1965

Written by Hacklermark

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