60 years on since Baldwin v Buckley at Cambridge
The debate took place at the height of the civil rights movement in the United States with Black political figures fighting for equal rights in the country calling itself the land of the free.
By Toby Bakare and Marcia Mascoll
60 years ago today one of the most electrifying and significant debates in the history of the Cambridge Union took place. It was between literary sensation James Baldwin and the conservative thinker William Buckley – two Americans.
The proposition:
“The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.”
The BBC paid to televise the debate at the time. And it is now regarded as a critique of racial politics in America.
Baldwin spoke in favour of the motion saying:
“It comes as a great shock around the age of five or six or seven to discover the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you.”
Baldwin goes on to passionately argue that being Black in America is to be excluded.
“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 demoralisation and the gap between one person and another, only on the basis of the colour of their skins, begins there and accelerates, accelerates throughout a whole lifetime.”
The debate took place at the height of the civil rights movement in the United States with Black political figures fighting for equal rights in the country calling itself the land of the free.
A week after the debate, Malcolm X was assassinated.
Today’s event at Cambridge Union sees Lord Simon Woolley, principal of Homerton College and previously a leader in the Operation Black Vote movement to increase voter participation, chairing a discussion on the impact of the debate. Lord Woolley is the first Black head of Homerton College.
Baldwin back then drew laughs when he talked of a Black president within 40 years at the debate. It turns out he was roughly accurate with the tongue-in-cheek prediction. Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. Now in 2025 with the second Trump presidency underway, the discussion in government is more about rolling back on diversity and inclusion.
Lord Woolley sees parallels with today’s political climate.
“How to persuade people, how to win hearts and minds? He was a master of that, but more importantly, the issues we raised, about systemic inequality, about the poisoning of minds, both in the Black community and the white community, the parallels are chilling … I think we’ve had ten years from the last government that has demonised diversity and equity.”
But Lord Woolley is hopeful that the audience at the union today believe in the importance of diversity, inclusion and equity, and Baldwin’s argument.
