Baldwin–Buckley debate

In the years since several books and dramatic reproductions, along with countless articles, both academic and media, have been produced about the debate and its impact.

In the early 1960s, Baldwin and Buckley were both firmly entrenched on the American intellectual and political scene, frequently appearing in all forms of media.

For example, in 1962 Baldwin appeared in a televised debate on segregation opposite the National Review's lead on civil rights, James Jackson Kilpatrick.

[3] Baldwin was visiting the UK to promote his third novel, Another Country, and his publicist Corgi Books contacted the Union to ask if they would be interested in him addressing the chamber.

To find a suitable opponent, the committee spent a week contacting various notable segregationist Senators, before learning that conveniently Buckley was on a skiing holiday in Switzerland.

An over-capacity crowd of more than 700 students and guests of the Union were packed into the debating chamber, which is modelled after the British House of Commons.

While there were five speakers for the motion and five against, the most notable were James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, giving the debate its popular moniker.

The debate ended upon reaching the length agreed with the BBC, with the house dividing with the ringing of the division bell at 22:41.

"Rather than a traditional Union speech, something that often combines the art of intellect with wit, Baldwin delivered a sermon on the dangers of white supremacy to both the 'subjugators' and 'subjugated'.

This dehumanization manifests in the denial of the humanity of African Americans, which Baldwin argued, was a necessary precondition to justify their mistreatment.

"Upon resuming his seat at the end of his speech, Baldwin received a standing ovation lasting over a minute from the gathered members, an endorsement unprecedented in Union history at the time.

[9] Although throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Buckley opposed federal civil rights legislation and expressed support for continued racial segregation in the South, in the years preceding the debate, and potentially as a result of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, Buckley had grown more accommodating of the Civil Rights movement.

[10] Nevertheless, Buckley fundamentally disagreed with the concept of structural racism and placed a large amount of blame for lack of economic growth on the black community itself.

He argued that the challenges faced by African Americans were largely due to cultural and behavioral factors, not systemic racism.

[11] During this time Buckley was attempting to explain away his loss in Cambridge as an "orgy of anti-Americanism," that precluded any meaningful exchange of ideas.

"[12] Almost immediately on their arrival back to the United States, David Susskind invited both Baldwin and Buckley onto his program, Open End for a rematch of the same debate.

Without the formal debate structure provided by the Union to allow him to develop his argument fully, Baldwin did not perform as well this time round.

In the following years the debate has come to be seen as a significant moment in both Baldwin and Buckley's career, as well as more broadly the American Civil Rights Movement and it and its impact has been intensely studied across the English-speaking world, but especially in the USA.

It has been argued that the debate 'anticipated' the ways in which the US would address racial inequality in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and into the dawn of the era of neoliberalism in the 1970s.

"[5] Yet Buckley himself later changed his stance from that presented in the debate, stating he wished National Review had been more supportive of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

In his piece on the debate, historian Brian Balogh noted how the contemporary political divide seemed to have changed its position with respect to this question.

[21] As part of the 55th anniversary celebrations of the March on Washington, Harvard Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Canadian-American political commentator/speechwriter David Frum debated an updated motion inspired by the original, that "The American Dream Is Still at the Expense of African Americans.”[22] This reimagining came in the context of the George Floyd Protests of 2020, with Muhamed arguing for the continued relevance of Baldwin's arguments in the debate: "Baldwin's voice as a novelist, as an essayist, as a critic of the hypocrisies of the nation and its core contradictions, speaks to this moment in ways that few other writers can."