At the time, James Baldwin was well-established as a prominent writer and civil rights figure, having published
Notes from a Native Son ten years previously. Buckley was the still-young editor/founder of
National Review,
still to become the “father of modern conservatism,” thanks to his
famous proclamation in his own magazine that, “A Conservative is a
fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!' He’d prominently
come out against desegregation in the pages of his own magazine in 1961.
At the Cambridge event, after some introductory arguments from a couple of the fellows, Baldwin delivers his remarks. The
video
is worth watching in its entirety to appreciate, at least visually, the
size of the deck that seems stacked against him. The entire audience is
white, looking very much like…William F. Buckley, who sits in his
famous reclined nonchalance, that could and maybe should be read as
arrogance.
Baldwin delivers his
remarks
slowly, somehow seeming both passionate and cool, like jazz. He is
mesmerizing, as shown by the camera cutaways to the audience that sits
rapt.
It almost seems unfair, a distortion, to excerpt Baldwin’s remarks
because as a work of rhetoric, it surpasses even the best of Martin
Luther King or JFK. In the opening, he acknowledges the trap of
segregation for the segregationists, that what he is discussing is a
fundamental inequality born of an unjust system in which individuals are
only actors:
“The white South African or Mississippi sharecropper or Alabama
sheriff has at bottom a system of reality which compels them really to
believe when they face the Negro that this woman, this man, this child
must be insane to attack the system to which he owes his entire
identity.”
He then makes deft use of the 2nd person in order to draw a circle around the experience of being black in 1960s America:
“In the case of the American Negro, from the moment you are born
every stick and stone, every face, is white. Since you have not yet seen
a mirror, you suppose you are, too. It comes as a great shock around
the age of 5, 6, or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have
pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged
allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing
off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the
Indians are you.”
A small ripple of laughter coursed through the Cambridge fellows at that moment. A laugh not of amusement, but recognition.
Baldwin shifts to the first person, reminding the audience that the man in front of them is indeed part of this “you”:
“From a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports and
the railroads of the country--the economy, especially in the
South--could not conceivably be what they are if it had not been (and
this is still so) for cheap labor. I am speaking very seriously, and
this is not an overstatement: I picked cotton, I carried it to the
market, I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing. For
nothing."
The Southern oligarchy which has still today so very much power in
Washington, and therefore some power in the world, was created by my
labor and my sweat and the violation of my women and the murder of my
children. This in the land of the free, the home of the brave.”
Baldwin hammers the “I” in his delivery in the first part. The final
lines of this passage are delivered in some combination of sorrow and
disbelief.
Baldwin then returns to his theme that black America is not the only group being destroyed by this system:
“Sheriff Clark in Selma, Ala., cannot be dismissed as a total
monster; I am sure he loves his wife and children and likes to get
drunk. One has to assume that he is a man like me. But he does not know
what drives him to use the club, to menace with the gun and to use the
cattle prod. Something awful must have happened to a human being to be
able to put a cattle prod against a woman's breasts. What happens to the
woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways
much, much worse. Their moral lives have been destroyed by the plague
called color.”
Baldwin finishes with this:
“It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the
notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. Until the
moment comes when we, the Americans, are able to accept the fact that my
ancestors are both black and white, that on that continent we are
trying to forge a new identity, that we need each other, that I am not a
ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of
the people who built the country--until this moment comes there is
scarcely any hope for the American dream. If the people are denied
participation in it, by their very presence they will wreck it. And if
that happens it is a very grave moment for the West.”
Baldwin received a standing ovation from the very white, very British
audience. The announcer says in the video that he’s never seen such a
reaction at these events before.