Moderator: The following program is from NET, the National Educational Television Network. Debate, James Baldwin, versus William Buckley. Subject has the American dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro. This debate was held recently at the Cambridge Union, Cambridge University England, and was recorded for use by NET.

Norman St. John-Stevas: Here we are in the debating hall of the Cambridge Union, hundreds of undergraduates and myself waiting for what could prove one of the most exciting debates in the whole 150 years of the Union history. I didn't think I've ever seen the Union so well attended. They're undergraduates everywhere, they're on the benches, they're on the floor, they're on the galleries, and there are a lot more outside clamoring to get in. Well, the motion that has drawn this huge crowd tonight is this, that the American dream has been achieved at the expense of the American Negro. The debate will open with two undergraduate speakers, one from each side, and then we shall have the first distinguished guest, Mr. James Baldwin, the well-known American novelist who's achieved a worldwide fame with his novel, Another Country. Then opposing the motion will be Mr. William Buckley, also an American, very well known as a conservative in the United States. I'm the stressor conservative in the American sense, author of a book called Up From Liberalism, and editor of the National Review, one of the earliest supporters of Senator Goldwater. Well, this is the setting of the debate, and at any moment now the president will be leading in his officers and his distinguished guests, he'll take his tower, and the debate will begin.

Moderator: Thank you very much.

Norman St. John-Stevas: The motion before the house tonight is, the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro. He proposed to Mr. David Heycock of Pembroke College, and I'll pose to Mr. Jeremy Berford of a manual college. Mr. James Baldwin will speak third, Mr. William Buckley Jr. will speak fourth, Mr. Heycock is the heir of the house.

David Heycock: Mr. President Sir, it is the custom of the house for the first speaker in any debate, to extend a formal welcome to any visitors to the house. I can honestly say, however, that it is a very great honor to be able to welcome to the house this evening, Mr. William Buckley and Mr. James Baldwin. Mr. William Buckley has the reputation of possibly being the most articulate conservative in the United States of America. He was a graduate of Yale, and he first gained a reputation for himself by publishing a book entitled, God and Man and Yale. Since then he has devoted himself to the secular, and this has included Norman Meyler, Kenneth Tyner, Mary McCarthy and Fidel Castro, none of whom have come out of their confrontations unscathed. At present, his principal occupation is editing a right-wing newspaper in the United States entitled The National Review. Mr. James Baldwin is hardly in need of introduction. His reputation, both as a novelist and as an advocate of civil rights, is international. His third novel, another country, has been published as a paperback in England today. Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Buckley are both very welcome to the house this evening.

Moderator: Thank you very much.

David Heycock: Imagine, Mr. President, a society which above all values freedom and equality, a society in which artificial barriers to fulfillment and achievement are unheard of, a society in which a man may begin his life as a rail splitter at the end of his president, a society in which all men are free in every sense of the world, free to live where they choose, free to work where they choose, equal in the eyes of the law and every public authority, and equal in the eyes of their fellows, a society in fact in which intolerance and prejudice are meaningless terms. Imagine, however, Mr. President, that a condition of this utopia has been the persistent and quite deliberate exploitation of one-ninth of its inhabitants, that one man in nine has been denied those rights, which the rest of that society takes for granted, that one man in nine does not have the chance for fulfillment or realization of his innate potentialities, that one man in nine cannot promise his children a secure future and unlimited opportunities. Imagine, Mr. President, and you have what is in my opinion for bitter reality of the American dream. A few weeks ago, Martin Luther King had to hold a nonviolent demonstration in Selma, Alabama, in his drive to register Negro voters. By the end of the week of his demonstrations, he was able to write quite accurately in a national fundraising letter from Selma, Alabama, jail. There are more Negroes in prison with me, but there are on the voting rolls. When King wrote that letter, 335 out of 32,700 Negroes in Dallas had the vote, 1% of the Dallas population. After a mass march to the courthouse, 237 Negroes, King among them, were arrested. The following day, 470 children who had deserted their classrooms to protest against King's arrest were charged with juvenile delinquency. 36 adults on the same day were charged with contempt of court for picketing the courthouse while state-circuit court was in session. On the following day, 111 people were arrested on the same charge despite their claim that they merely wanted to see the voting registrar. 400 students were arrested and taken to the armory where many often spent the night on a cold cement floor. The following day, the demonstration spread to Marion, Alabama. In Marion, Negroes outnumber whites by 11.5,000 to 6,000 people, and yet only 300 are registered to vote. Negroes in Marion were anxious to test the public accommodation section of the civil rights law. They entered a drug store, and there they were served with Coca-Cola-laced assault, and were told that hamburgers had risen to $5 each. After the arrest of 15 Negroes for protesting against this treatment, 700 Negroes boycotted their classes next day, and marched in orderly fashion to the jail. There they sang civil rights songs until they were warned by a state trooper that they would be arrested if they sung one more song. Of course they sang another song, and of course all 700 were arrested. American society has felt fit to use Negro labor. It has felt fit to use the blood of the Negro in two world wars. It has felt fit to listen to his music. It has felt fit to laugh at his jokes. And yet, as far as I'm concerned, it has never felt fit to give the American Negro a fair deal. And for this reason, Mr. President, I would beg leave to propose the motion that the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.

Norman St. John-Stevas: I now call Mr. Jeremy Berford of a manual college to oppose the motion. Now I have Mr. Jeremy Berford of a manual college who is the first undergraduate opposing the motion.

Jeremy Berford: James Baldwin is well known as one of the most vivid and articulate writers about the Negro problem in America. Mr. Baldwin had a difficult childhood and he has personally himself suffered discrimination and ill treatment in the South of America. And I would like to say at this time that it is not the purpose of this side of the house to condone that in any way at all. It is not our purpose to oppose civil rights. It is our purpose to oppose this motion. Thank you, Sir. Come and collect your fee afterwards. This side of the house denies that the American dream has in any way been helped by this undoubted inequality and suffering of the Negro. We maintain that, in fact, it has hindered the American dream. And if there had been equality, if there had been true freedom of opportunity, the American dream would be very much more advanced than it is now. If the American dream has made any progress and I think it has, it has been made in spite of the suffering and inequality of the American Negro and not because of it. Now it is also a implied from this motion that the American dream is encouraging and worsening the suffering of the American Negro. This is emphatically not the case. The American dream, the American economic prosperity and respect for civil liberties has been the main factor in bringing about the undoubted improvement in race relations in America in the last 20 years. And Professor Arnold Rose, who is the author of the Negro in America, which is perhaps the definitive work on the subject, who is also a contributor to what was called a freedom pamphlet. So I should imagine that if he has any bias at all, he is in favor of the Negro. He said that this improvement in race relations will be seen in years to come as remarkably quick. And he has put it down to three main causes, increased industrialization and technical advance, the increased social mobility of the American people and the economic prosperity. And I would put it to this house that that industrialization and economic prosperity are two of the main ingredients of the American dream. And at the same time, again, I do not want to say that the American, the Negro in America is treated fairly, but at the same time, the average per capita income of Negroes in America is exactly the same as the average per capita income of people in Great Britain. Now I found that absolutely amazing and I understand that some of you do as well. So I have got the reference here from the United States News and World Report of July the 22nd, 1963, in which it points out that this will have to be the last one to rupture I take as time is running for.

Moderator: Mr. President, on a point of information is this speaker talking of real income or money income?

Jeremy Berford: I'm talking of money income. I would not wish to disguise that. I would also say that in terms of this, there are only five countries in the world where the income is higher than that of the American Negro. And they do not include countries like West Germany and France and Japan. Now, there are in America 35 Negro millionaires. There are Negro 6,000 doctors and so on. Now, I do not by saying this, wish to emphasize that the Negro is fairly treated. I merely wish to try and convey a more realistic and objective account of the situation of the Negro. I agree that there are Negroes who are very poor indeed, such as the old gentleman in the South who was talking about some of his wealthier brethren. And he was saying, yes, some of these rich Negroes, they put on airs, they like the bottom figure of a fraction, the bigger they try to be, smaller they really are. I would repeat, Mr. President, in the last minute I have, that this debate is not whether civil rights should be extended to American Negroes or not. If it were, it would be a very easy motion to argue for and a very easy motion to vote for. The debate tonight concerns whether the American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro. That is, whether the American Negro has paid for the American Dream with his suffering or whether the American Dream has furthered Negro inequality. And I would deny those two precepts. I would say that Negro inequality has hindered the American Dream. And I would say that the American Dream has been very important indeed in furthering civil rights and in furthering freedom for the American Negro. Mr. President, sir, I beg to oppose the movement.

Norman St. John-Stevas: It is now with very great pleasure and a very great sense of honor that I called Mr. James Baldwin to speak third to this motion. 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, Julian, tremendous enthusiasm from all sides of the House, Mr. Baldwin, who has been listening to the arguments. Now we'll bring the voice of actual experience to the debate.

William F Buckley: Good evening.

James Baldwin: I find myself not for the first time and the position of a kind of Jeremiah. For example, I don't disagree with Mr. Burford that the inequality suffered by the American Negro population of the United States has hindered the American Dream. Indeed it has. Our quarrel with some other things he has to say. The other deeper element of a certain awkwardness I feel has to do with, it has to do with one's point of view, I have to put it that way. One's sense, one's system of reality. It would seem to me the proposition before the House, for it that way, is the American Dream, at the expense of the American Negro, all the American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro? Is a question, it is loaded, and that one's response to that question, one's reaction to that question, has it depend on the effect, an effect on where you find yourself in the world, what your sense of reality is, what your system of reality is. That is, it depends on assumptions which we hold, so deeply, as it be scarcely aware of them. A white South African, or a Mississippi share crop, or a Frenchman driven out of Algeria, all have, at bottom, a system of reality, which compels them to, for example, the case of the French exiled from Algeria, to defend French reasons of having ruled Algeria. The Mississippi of the Alabama Sheriff, who really does believe, when he's facing an Negro boy or girl, that this woman, this man, this child, must be insane to attack the system to which he owes his entire identity. Our cause for such a person, the proposition of which we're trying to discuss here tonight does not exist. And on the other hand, I have to speak as one of the people who've been most attacked by what we must now hear call the Western or the European system of reality, what white people in the world. But the white, the white supremacy, I hate to say it here, comes from Europe. That's how it got to America. Beneath them, whatever one's reaction to this proposition is, has to be the question, whether or not civilizations can be considered as such, equal, or whether one's civilization has the right to overtake and subjugate and in fact to destroy another. Now, what happens when that happens, leaving aside all the physical facts which one can quote, leaving aside rape or murder, leaving aside the bloody catalog of oppression, which we are in one way, too familiar with already, what this does to the subjugated, the most private, the most serious thing this does to the subjugated is to destroy his sense of reality. It destroys, for example, his father's authority over him. His father can no longer tell him anything because the past has disappeared, and his father has no power in the world. This means, in the case of an American Negro born in that glittering republic, and in the moment you are born, since you don't know any better, every stick in stone and every face is white, and since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose that you are too. It comes as a great shock, around the age of five or six or seven, to discover the flagged which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, as not pledge allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover the Gary Cooper killing off the Indians when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, but the Indians were you. 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 humoralization, 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. In the present, you realize you are 30, and having a terrible time, managing to get trust, you are countrymen. By the time you are 30, you have been through a certain kind of mill, and the most serious effect of the mill you have been through, is again, not for catalog of disaster, the policeman, the taxi drivers, the waiters, the landlady, the landlord, the banks, the insurance companies, the millions of the tales, 24 hours of every day, which fell out to you that you are worth this human being. It is not that. It is by that time you begin to see it happening in your daughter or your son or your niece or your nephew. You are 30 by now, and nothing you have done has helped you to escape the trap. What is worse than that is that nothing you have done, and as far as you can tell, nothing you can do, will save your son or your daughter, for meeting the same disaster and not impossibly coming to the same end. Now, we are speaking about expense. I suppose there are several ways to address oneself to some attempt to define what that word means here. 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 seven states, could not conceivably be what it has become, if they had not had and do not still have indeed, and for so long for many generations, cheap labor. I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement, that I picked the coffin, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads, under someone else's whip, for nothing, for nothing. The seven-hour gargé, which has until the day so 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, and the home of the brave, and no one can challenge that statement, it is a matter of historical record. In another way, this dream, and we'll get to the dream in a moment, is at the expense of the American Negro. You watch this in the deep south in great relief, but not only in the deep south. In the deep south, you are dealing with a sheriff, or landlord, or a land lady, or the girl of the Western Union desk, and she doesn't know quite who she's dealing with, by which I mean, that if you're not part of the town, and if you are a northern nigger, it shows in millions of ways. So she simply knows that it's an unknown quantity, and she wants to have nothing to do with it. So she won't talk to you, you have to wait for a while to get your telegram. Okay, we all know this, we've been through it, and by the time you get to be a man, it's very easy to deal with. But what is happening in the poor woman, the poor man's mind, is this. They've been raised to believe, and by now they help us, they believe, that no matter how terrible their lives may be, their lives have been quite terrible. And no matter how far they fall, no matter what disaster overtakes them, they have one enormous knowledge in consolation, which is like a heavenly revelation. At least they are not black. Now I suggest that of all the terrible things that can happen to a human being, that is one of the worst. I suggest that what has happened to white southerners is in some ways after all much worse than what has happened to Negroes there. Because Sheriff Clark and Selma Alabama cannot be considered, you know, no one can be dismissed as a total monster. I'm sure he loves his wife, his children, I'm sure that no, he likes to get drunk. You know, after all, one's got to assume, and he is visibly a man like me. But he doesn't 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, for example. What happens to the woman is gasoline. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse. This is being done after all. Not a hundred years ago, but in 1965, in a country which is blessed with what we call prosperity, or where we want to examine too closely, with a certain kind of social coherence, which calls itself a civilized nation, in which it spouses the notion of the freedom of the world. And it is perfectly true from the point of view now simply of an American Negro. Any American Negro watching this, no matter where he is, from the vantage point of hall, which is another terrible place, has a say to himself, in spite of what the government says, the government says we can't do anything about it. But those white people being murdered in Mississippi, work farms, being carried off jail, those are white children running up and down the streets. The government would find some way of doing something about it. We have a civil rights bill now. We had an amendment, the 15th amendment, nearly a hundred years ago. I hate to sound again like an Old Testament prophet. But if the amendment was not honored then, I don't have any reason to believe that the civil rights bill will be honored now. And after all, one's been there since before, you know, a lot of other people got there. If one has got to prove one's title to the land, isn't 400 years enough? 400 years, at least three wars. The American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors. Why is my freedom or my citizenship or my right to live there? How is it conceivably a question now? And I suggest further that in the same way, the moral life of Alabama sheriffs and poor Alabama ladies, white ladies, that their moral lives have been destroyed by the plague called color, that the American sense of reality has been corrupted by it. At the risk of sounding excessive, what I always felt when I finally left the country, found myself abroad in other places. And watched Americans abroad. And he's all my countrymen. And I do care about them. And even if I didn't, there was something between us. We have the same shorthand, I know. And I look at a girl or a boy from Tennessee, where they came from in Tennessee. And what that means. No Englishman knows that, no Frenchman, no one in the world knows that. It's like another black man who comes from the same place. One watches these lonely people denying the only kin they have. We talk about integration in America as though it was some great new conundrum. The Apollo of America has been integrated for a very long time. Put me next to any African. And you will see what I mean. And my grandmother was not a rapist. What we are not facing is the results of what we've done. What one breaks the American people to do for all our sakes is simply to accept our history. I was there not only as a slave, but also as a concubine. One knows the power after all, which can be used against another person who you got absolute power over that person. It seemed to me when I watched America's in Europe, that what they didn't know about Europeans, was what they didn't know about me. They weren't trying, for example, to be nasty to the French girl or rude to the French waiter. They didn't know they hurt their feelings. They didn't have any sense that this particular woman, this particular man, though they spoke another language and had different manners ways, was a human being. And they walked over them with the same kind of bland ignorance, condescension, charming cheerful, with which it always patted me on the head and called me shy. And we're upset when I was upset. What is relevant about this is that whereas 40 years ago when I was born, the question of having to deal with what is unspoken by the subjugated, what is never said to the master. Never having to deal with this reality was a very remote possibility, it was in no one's mind. When I was growing up, I was taught in American history books that Africa had no history and neither did I. But 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. Everyone else seemed to agree. If you walk out of Harlem, ride out of Harlem downtown, the world agrees what you see is much bigger, cleaner, wider, richer, safer than where you are. They collect the garbage, people obviously can pay their life insurance, the children look happy, say, you're not, and you go back home. And it would seem that, of course, that it's an act of God that this is true, that you belong where white people have put you. It is only since the second world of war that there's been a counter image in the world and that image not come about to any legislation on the part of any American government, but through the fact that Africa was suddenly on the stage of the world and the Africans had to be dealt with in a way they'd never been dealt with before. This gave an American Negro for the first time a sense of himself beyond a savage or a clown. It is created and will create a great many conundrums. One of the great things that the white world does not know, but I think I do know, is that black people are just like everybody else. One has used the myth of Negro and the myth of color to pretend and to assume that you are dealing essentially with something exotic, bizarre, and practically according to human laws are known. And last, it is not true. We are also mercenaries, dictators, murderers, pliers, if we are human too. What is crucial here is that unless we can manage to establish some kind of dialogue between those people whom I pretend has paid for the American dream and those other people who have not achieved it, we will be in terrible trouble. I want to say at the end, the last, is that that is what concerns me most. We are sitting in this room and we are all, we still like to think we are, but until we symbolize, and we can talk to each other at least on certain levels, so that we could walk out of here assuming that the measure of our enlightenment or at least our politeness has some effect on the world, it may not. I remember, for example, when the Exeterny General, Mr. Robert Kennedy, said that it was conceivable that in 40 years in America we might have a Negro president. And that sounded like a very emancipated statement, I suppose, to white people. They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard, and did not hear, and possibly we will never hear, the laughter and the bitterness and the scorn which the statement was greeted. From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barbershop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday, and now he is already on his way to the presidency. We have been here for 400 years, and now he tells us that maybe in 40 years, if you are good, we may let you become president. What is dangerous here is that turning away from the turning away from anything any white American says. The reason for the political hesitation in spite of the Johnson landslide is that one has been betrayed by American politicians for so long, and I am a grown man. And perhaps I can be reasoned with, I certainly hope I can be, but I don't know. And neither does Martin Luther King, none of us know how to deal with those other people whom the white world has so long ignored who don't believe anything the white world says, and don't entirely believe anything I or Martin say. And one can't blame them, you watch what has happened to them in less than 20 years. If it seems to me that the city of New York, for example, this is my last point. He said, New York is in it for a very long time. If this city of New York were able, that's it hasn't been able. In the last 15 years, reconstruct itself, check down buildings and raise great new ones, downtown and for money. And has done nothing whatever except build housing projects in the ghetto for the new girls. And of course, Negroes hated. Presently the property does indeed deteriorate because the children cannot bear it. They want to get out of the ghetto. If the American pretensions were based on more solid, a more honest assessment of life and of themselves, it would not mean for Negroes when someone says urban renewal that Negroes simply going to be thrown out into the streets is what it does mean now. It's not an act of God, it's dealing with society made and ruled by men. If the American Negro had not been present in America, I am convinced that the history of the American labor movement would be much more edifying than it is. It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of his population is beneath him. And until that moment, 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, my answer is 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 world of America. I am not an object of missionary charity. I am one of the people who built the country. Until this moment, there is scarcity and hope for the American dream because the people who are denied participation in it. By their very presence, we will wreck it. And if that happens, it's a very grave moment for the West.

Moderator: Thank you.

Norman St. John-Stevas: Namely, moving moment now, 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. Baldwin smiling, obviously, alive nearby his reception, tremendously moved by it.

Moderator: I am now very grateful and very pleased to be able to call Mr. William F. Buckley, Jr. to speak forth to this motion.

Norman St. John-Stevas: Now we have Mr. William Buckley, who will need all his skill to establish a sentence here over his audience, which has clearly been said deeply. I give Mr. Bradley eloquence and all personal experience, the preceding speaker.

William F Buckley: Take out Mr. Reverend, gentlemen. It seems to me that of all the indictments Mr. Baldwin has made of America, are here tonight and in his copious literature of protest. The one that is most striking involves, in effect, the refusal of the American community, or to treat him other than as a Negro. The American community has refused to do this. The American community almost everywhere he goes treats him with the kind of action, or the kind of satisfaction at posturing carefully for his flagulations of our civilization that, indeed, quite properly commands the contempt which he so eloquently showers upon us. It is impossible in my judgment to deal with the indictment of Mr. Baldwin, unless one is prepared to deal with him as a white man, unless one is prepared to say to him the fact that your skin in his black is utterly irrelevant to the argument that you raise. The fact that you sit here as is your rhetorical device, and lay the entire weight of the Negro or deal on your own shoulders, is irrelevant to the argument that we are here to discuss. The bravaman of Mr. Baldwin's charges against America are not so much that our civilization has failed him or and his people that our ideals are insufficient, but that we have no ideals. That our ideals rather are some sort of a superficial coating which we come up with at any given moment in order to justify whatever commercial and a noxious experiment we are engaged in. Although, Mr. Baldwin can write his book, The Fire Next Time, in which he threatens America, he didn't in writing that book speak with the British accent he used exclusively tonight, in which he threatened America with a necessity for us to, for Juddison, for us to Juddison our entire civilization, the only thing that the white man has that the Negro should want is that he is powered and he is treated from coast to coast. The United States, Mr. Baldwin, with a kind of argument, doesn't choose to give away the interrupt amount and he has done that. The interrupt has now set out. It goes beyond anything that was ever expected from the most servile Negro creature by us other family. I propose to pay him the honor this night of saying to Mr. Baldwin, I am going to speak to you without any reference, whatever, to those surrounding protections which you are used to, in virtue of the fact that you are a Negro. And here we need to ask the question, what in fact shall we do about it, Mr. President? What shall we, in America, try to do, for instance, to eliminate those psychic humiliation, which I join Mr. Baldwin in believing are the very worst aspects of this discrimination. Are you found that a source of considerable mirth to laugh away the statistics of my colleague Mr. Rifford? I don't think they are insignificant. They are certainly not insignificant in a world which attaches a considerable importance to material progress. It is, in fact, the case of that seven tenths, that seven tenths of the white income of the United States are equal to the income that is made by the average Negro. I don't think this is an irrelevant statistic, ladies and gentlemen, where it takes a capitalization of $15,000, $16,000, $17,000 per job in the United States. This is a capitalization that was not created exclusively as a result of Negro Traveo. My great grandparents work too, presumably yours worked also. I don't know of anything that has ever been created without the expense of something. All of you who hope for a diploma here are going to do that at the expense of a considerable amount of effort. And I would thank you, please not to belive, of the fact that a considerable amount of effort went into the production of a system which grants a greater degree of material well-being to the American Negro, or the nada that is enjoyed by 95% of the other peoples of the human race. But even so, to the extent that you are withering laughter, are suggested here that you found this a contemptible observation. I agree. I don't think it matters that there are 35 millionaires among the Negro community, or if they were 35, if there were 20 million millionaires among the Negro community of the United States, I would still agree with you, that we have a dastardly situation. But I am asking you not to make politics as the pro-flyers, to use the heated phrase of Professor Oakshot, but rather to consider, what in fact is that we Americans ought to do? What are your instructions that I am to take back to the United States, my friend? I want to know what it is that we should do, and especially I want to know whether it is time, in fact, to abandon the American dream, as it has been defined by Mr. Hickach, Mr. Birford. What in fact is that we ought to do, for instance, or to avoid due humiliation mentioned by Mr. Baldwin, as being a part of his own experience during his lifetime. At the age of 12, you will find on reading his book, he trespassed outside the ghetto of Harlem, and was taken by the scruff of the neck by a policeman on 42nd Street, Madison Avenue, and said, here, you nigger, go back to where you belong. Or 15, 20 years later, or he goes in and asks for a scotch whiskey at the airport at Chicago, or and is told by the white woman that he is obviously underaged and under the circumstances cannot be served. I know, I know from your faces that you share with me, the feeling of compassion and the feeling of our outrage that this kind of thing should have happened. What, in fact, are we going to do to this policeman, and what, in fact, are we going to do to this woman? How are we going to avoid the kind of humiliation that are perpetually visited on members of a minority race? Obviously, the first element is concerned. We've got the care that it happens. We have got to do what we can to change the warp and roof of moral thought in society in such fashion as to try to make it happen less and less. Let me urge this point to you, which I can do with authority, my friends, the only thing that I can tonight. And that is to tell you, that in the United States, there is a concern for the Negro problem. Now, if you get up to me and say, well, if you get up to me and say, well, now, is there the kind of concern that we students of Cambridge would show if the problem were our own? All I can say is I don't know. It may very well be that there has been some sort of a sunburst of moral enlightenment that has hit this community. So, as to make it predictable, that if you were the governor's of the United States, the situation would change overnight. I'm prepared to grant this as a form of courtesy to the United States president. But meanwhile, I am saying to you, that the engines of concern in the United States are working. The presence of Mr. Baldwin here tonight is in part a reflection of that concern. You cannot go to a university in the United States. A university in the United States presumably also governed by the Lord's spiritual, as you are, in which Mr. Baldwin is not the toast of the town. You cannot go to a university of the United States in which practically all other problems of public policy are preempted by the primary policy of concern for the Negro. I challenge you to name another civilization anytime, anywhere in the history of the world, in which the problems of a minority, which have been showing considerable material and political advancement is as much, a subject of dramatic concern as it is in the United States. Let me just say finally, ladies and gentlemen, there. There is no instant cure for the race problem in America. And anybody who tells you that there is is a charlatan, and ultimately a boring man, a boring precisely because he is then speaking in the kind of abstractions that do not relate to the human experience. The trouble in America where the Negro community is concerned is a very complicated one. I urge those of you who have an actual rather than a purely ideologized interest in the problem to read the book Beyond the Melting Pot by Professor Glaser, also co-author of the Lonely Crowd, a prominent Jewish or intellectual, who points at the fact that the situation in America where the Negroes are concerned is extremely complex as a result of an unfortunate conjunction of two factors. One is the dreadful efforts to perpetuate discrimination by many individual American citizens' result of their lack of that final and ultimate concern which some people are truly trying to agitate the other, or is as a result of the failure of the Negro community itself to make certain existence, which were made by other minority groups during the American experience. If you can stand a statistic not of my own making, let me give you one which Professor Glaser considers as relevant. But he says, for instance, in 1900, there were 3,500 Negro doctors in America. In 1960, there were 3,900, an increase in 400. Is this because there were no opportunities? Has been suggested by Mr. Heycock and also by Mr. Baldwin implicitly? No, as Professor Glaser. There are great many medical schools who are by no means practice discrimination who are anxious to receive and to train Negro doctors. There are scholarships available to put them through, but in fact that particular energy of which he remarks was so noticeable in the Jewish community and to a certain and lesser extent in the Italian Irish community for some reason is not there. We should focus on the necessity to animate this particular energy, but he comes to the conclusion which strikes me as plausible that the people who can best do it, who can do it most effectively on Negroes of themselves. Let me conclude by reminding you, ladies and gentlemen, that where the Negro is concerned, the dangers far as I can see at this moment, is that they will seek to reach out for some sort of radical solutions on the basis of which the true problem is obscured. They have done a great deal to focus on the fact of white discrimination against the Negroes. They have done a great deal to agitate a moral, concern, but where, in fact, do they go now? They seem to be slipping. If you will read carefully, for instance, the words of Mr. Bayard Rustin, toward some sort of a pro-Prussian formulation which ends up less urging the advancement of the Negro than the regression of the white people. Fourteen times as many people in New York City born of Negroes are illegitimate as of whites. This is a problem. How shall we address it? By seeking out laws that encourage illegitimacy and white people, this, unfortunately, tends to be the rhetorical momentum that some of their arguments are taking.

Moderator: One thing you might do, Mr. Buckley, is let them vote, Mississippi. I agree. I agree.

William F Buckley: I couldn't agree with you more than for... Well, except, unless I appear to ingratiating, which is hardly my objective here tonight, I think, actually, 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.

Moderator: Oh, my God.

William F Buckley: Booker T. Washington said... Booker T. Washington said that the important thing when Negroes are concerned is not that they hold public office but they'd be prepared to hold public office. Not that they vote, but that they'd be prepared to vote. What are we going to do with the Negroes having taught the Negroes in Mississippi to despise Barnett? Rose Barnett, shall we then teach them to emulate their cousins in Harlem and a door, Adam, Clayton, Barlow, Jr.? It is much more complicated, sir, than simply the question of giving them the vote. If I were myself a constituent of the community of Mississippi at this moment, what I would do is vote to lift the standards of the vote so as to disqualify 65% of the white people who are presently voting. Not simply to give them the... I say then that what we need is a considerable amount of practice that acknowledges that there are two sets of difficulties. The difficulties of the white person who acts as white people and brown people and black people are due all over the world or to protect their own vested interests or who have as all of the races in the entire world have and suffer from a kind of a racial narcissism which tends always to convert every contingency into such a way to maximize their own power. That, yes, we must do. But we must also reach through to the Negro people and tell them that their best chances are in the mobile society and the most mobile society in the world today, my friends, is the United States of America. The most mobile society in 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 or the kind of despair, or the kind of iconoclasm that is urged upon them by Mr. Baldwin in his recent works. Because of one thing, I can tell you, I believe with absolute authority that where the United States is concerned, if it ever becomes a confrontation between a continuation of our own sort of ideal, or the private stock of which granted, like most people in the world, we tend to lavish only every now and then on public enterprises, reserving it so often for our own irritations and pleasures. But the fundamental friend of the Negro people in the United States is the good nature and is the generosity and is the good wishes, is the decency, the fundamental decency, that do lie at the reserves of the spirit or of the American people. These must not be laughed at. And under no circumstances must they be laughed at, and under no circumstances must America be addressed or and told that the only alternative to the status quo or is to overthrow that civilization which we consider to be the faith of our fathers or the faith indeed of your fathers. This is what must animate whatever meteorism must come, because if it does finally come to a confrontation, a radical confrontation, between giving up what we understand to be the best features of the American way of life, which at that level is in distinguishable, so far as I can see from the European way of life. But then we will fight the issue, and we will fight the issue not only in the Cambridge Union, but we will fight it as you were once recently called to do on beaches and on hills and on mountains and on landing grounds, and we will be convinced that just as you won the war against a particular threat to civilization, you were nevertheless waging a war in favor of them for the benefit of Germans, your own enemies, just as we are convinced that if it should ever come to that kind of a confrontation, our own determination to win the struggle will be a determination to wage a war not only for heights, but also for neighborhoods.

Norman St. John-Stevas: Will the tellers take their places, please? They are voted in favor of the motion of the motion being of the American dreams of the expense of the Negro. They voted in favor of that motion 544 persons and against 164 persons. The motion is therefore carried by 380 votes and declared the House to stand adjourned.

Moderator: Thank you.