On February 18, 1965, an overflow crowd packed the Cambridge Union, to watch a televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America’s most influential conservative intellectual. The subject was “the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.”
Through his new book, The Fire is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr. and the Debate Over Race in America, Nicholas Buccola will revisit that historic debate, the radically different paths that led Baldwin and Buckley to it, the controversies that followed, and how it and the decades-long clash between the two men continues to illuminate America’s racial divide today.
About the Author
Nicholas Buccola is the author of The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass and the editor of The Essential Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and Liberal Democracy. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, and many other publications. He is the Elizabeth and Morris Glicksman Chair in Political Science at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, and lives in Portland.