Transcript
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
This week marks 100 years since the birth of James Baldwin. His first novel, "Go Tell It On The Mountain," is still on shelves. It was the story of a teenager growing up in Harlem during the Great Depression, as James Baldwin did. Every great writer has their own voice, meaning a distinctive writing style, and Baldwin also had a distinctive actual voice. During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, he spoke out as a public intellectual who analyzed the civil rights movement on stage and also in TV appearances that are hard to imagine happening today. This morning, we hear one of Baldwin's appearances in England in 1965.
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NORMAN ST JOHN-STEVAS: Now we have Mr. James Baldwin, the star of the evening, who has been sitting, listening attentively, getting a wonderful reception here in the Cambridge Union.
INSKEEP: The Cambridge Union was and is a debating society. Cambridge students and Baldwin himself were discussing this question, as spoken by a TV announcer.
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UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: Subject - has the American dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?
INSKEEP: Some participants said no. Baldwin argued yes.
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JAMES BALDWIN: When I was growing up, I was taught in American history books that Africa had no history and neither did I, that I was a savage about whom the less said, the better, who had been saved by Europe and brought to America. And, of course, I believed it. I didn't have much choice. Those are the only books there were.
INSKEEP: Baldwin was speaking in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement. In the United States, the Civil Rights Act had been passed only the year before. Many states were still resisting integration. And he offered his view of history, that Black labor had helped to make the United States what it was. We're going to hear some of his argument, as well as a response to it.
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BALDWIN: Let me put it this way - that from a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports and the railroads of the country, the economy, especially of the Southern states, could not conceivably be what it has become if they had not had - and do not still have, indeed, and for so long, so many generations - cheap labor. I am stating very seriously - and it is not an overstatement - that I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing - for nothing.
INSKEEP: Now, we said this was a debate. Along with the students, James Baldwin took turns with another public intellectual - William F. Buckley. He was a conservative writer, the founder of National Review and that year a candidate for mayor of New York City. Buckley took the opposite side of the question. He disagreed that the American dream came at the expense of Black people.
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WILLIAM F BUCKLEY: Their best chances are in a mobile society. And the most mobile society in the world today, my friends, is the United States of America. The most mobile society of the United States - in the world is the United States of America, and it is precisely that mobility which will give opportunities to the negroes which they must be encouraged to take. But they must not, in the course of their ordeal, be encouraged to adopt the kind of cynicism, the kind of despair, the kind of iconoclasm that is urged upon them by Mr. Baldwin in his recent works.
INSKEEP: Years before this event, William F. Buckley had sided with Southern segregationists. But by the time of this debate, he was beginning to change his mind. And listening back now, you don't really hear him contradict James Baldwin's view of the past. At one point in the debate, someone in the audience shouted out for Black voting rights in the South.
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UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: One thing you might do, Mr. Buckley, is let them vote in Mississippi.
BUCKLEY: I agree. I agree.
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BUCKLEY: I couldn't agree with you more and for...
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BUCKLEY: ...Except, lest I appear too ingratiating, which is hardly my objective here tonight, I think actually what is wrong in Mississippi, sir, is not that not enough negroes are voting, but that too many white people are voting.
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INSKEEP: This is what television was sometimes like in the 1960s. James Baldwin was the star of that evening, speaking with what the TV announcer referred to as the voice of actual experience.
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BALDWIN: It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you. The disaffection, the demoralization and the gap between one person and another. only on the basis of the color of their skins, begins there and accelerates throughout a whole lifetime to the present when you realize you're 30 and are having a terrible time managing to trust your countrymen.
INSKEEP: And Baldwin maintained that the American dream would not last unless it included everybody.
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BALDWIN: Until the moment comes when we, the Americans, we the American people, are able to accept the fact that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and Black, that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other and that I am not a ward of America. I'm not an object of missionary charity. I am one of the people who built the country. Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it. And if that happens, it is a very grave moment for the West. Thank you.
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INSKEEP: The American writer James Baldwin in 1965. Friday marks his 100th birthday.
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ST JOHN-STEVAS: The whole of the union standing and applauding this magnificent speech of James Baldwin - never seen this happen before in the union in all the years that I have known it. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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