[music]
Narrator: 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, M.P: Well, 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. It rarely... I don't think I have ever
seen the union so well attended. There are undergraduates everywhere.
They're on the benches and on the floor and 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 has 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 must stress a conservative in the American sense. Author of a book
called "Up from Liberalism" and editor of the "National Review." One of the early
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 will take his chair, and the debate will begin.
[applause]
President: The motion before the house tonight is "The American Dream is at
the Expense of the American Negro." The proposer, Mr. David Heycock of
Pembroke College, and our opposer, Mr. Jeremy Burford of Emmanuel College.
Mr. James Baldwin will speak third. Mr. William F. Buckley Jr. will speak fourth.
Mr. Heycock is the ear of the house.
[applause]
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, 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 at Yale."
[laughter]
Since then, he has devoted himself to the secular, and this has included
Norman Mailer, Kenneth Tynan, Mary McCarthy, and Fidel Castro, none of whom
have come out of their confrontations unscathed.
[laughter]
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.
[applause]
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
and end it as president.
A society in which all men are free in every sense of the word. 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 a 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 a chance for fulfillment or realization
of his innate potentiality. That one man in nine cannot promise his
children a secure future and unlimited opportunities. Imagine this Mr. President
and you have, what is in my opinion, the bitter reality of the American Dream.
A few weeks ago Martin Luther King had to hold a non-violent 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 negros in prison
with me than there are on the voting rolls." When King wrote that letter,
335 out of 32,700
negros in Dallas had the vote. One percent of the Dallas population.
After a mass march to the courthouse, 237 negros,
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.
[laughter]
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 of them spent the night on a cold cement floor. The following
day, the demonstrations spread to Marion, Alabama. In Marion, negros
outnumber whites by 11,500 to 6,000 people
and yet, only 300 are registered to vote. Negros in Marion were anxious
to test the public accommodations section of the civil rights law. They entered a
drugstore and there they were served with Coca-Cola laced with salt and were
told that hamburgers had risen to $5 each. After the arrest of 15
negros for protesting against this treatment, 700 negros
boycotted their classes the 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 sung
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 am concerned, it has never felt fit to
give the American negro a fair deal; and for this reason Mr. President,
I will beg leave to propose the motion that the American Dream
is at the expense of the American negro.
[applause]
- I now call Mr. Jeremy Burford of Emmanuel College to oppose the motion.
[applause]
Narrator: Now, we have Mr. Jeremy Burford of Emmanuel College who
is the first undergraduate opposing the motion.
Jeremy Burford: 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.
[laughter]
Thank you, sir. Come and collect your fee afterwards.
[laughter and applause]
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 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 twenty 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 of what was called "The Freedom Pamphlet,"
so I should imagine that if he has any bias at all, it is in favor of the negro.
He's 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 negro in America is treated
fairly--but at the same time, the average per capita income of negros in America
is exactly the same as the average per capita income of people in Great Britain.
Now, I found that absolutely amazing. [laughter]
I understand that some of you do as well.
So I've got the reference here from the United States News and World Report
of July the 22nd 1963, in which it points out--
This will have to be the last interruption I take because time is running short.
- Mr. President, on a point of information, is this speaker
talking of real income or money income?
- I'm talking of money income. [applause]
I am 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 negros who are very poor indeed, such as the...
Such as the old gentlemen in the south
who was talking about some of his wealthier brethren
and he was saying "Yes, sir, some of these rich negros,
they put on airs, they're like the bottom figure of a fraction,
the bigger they try to be, the smaller they really are."
I would repeat Mr. President, sir, in the last minute I have, that this debate
is not whether civil rights should be extended to American negros 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 both 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 motion.
[applause]
- It is now with very great pleasure and a very great sense of
honor that I call Mr. James Baldwin to speak third to this motion.
[applause]
Narrator: Now we have Mr. James Baldwin, the star of the evening, who has been
sitting, listening attentively and getting a wonderful reception here in the
Cambridge Union.
From members, enthusiasm from all sides of the house for
Mr. Baldwin, who has been listening to the arguments.
Now will bring the voice of actual experience to the debate.
James Baldwin: Good evening.
[laughter]
I find myself, not for the first time, in 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.
I quarrel with some other things he has to say. The other, deeper, element of
a certain awkwardness I feel 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, and I would put it
that way, is the American Dream at the expense of the American negro,
or the American Dream is at the expense of the American negro,
is a question hideously loaded, and that one’s response to that question,
one’s reaction to that question, has to depend on effect and, in effect,
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 to be scarcely aware of them.
A white South African or a Mississippi sharecropper or
Mississippi sheriff, or a Frenchman driven out of Algeria, all have, at bottom,
a system of reality which compels them to, for example, in the case of the
French exile from Algeria, to defend French reasons for having ruled Algeria.
The Mississippi or the Alabama sheriff, who really does believe, when he’s facing
a 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. Of course, to
such a person, the proposition of which we are 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 here call the Western or
European system of reality. What white people in the world--
white supremacy, I hate to say it here, comes from Europe.
That's how it got to America. Beneath then, whatever one’s reaction to this
proposition is, has to be the question of whether or not civilizations can
be considered, as such, equal, or whether one 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 the moment you
are born, since you don’t know any better,
every stick and 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 5, or 6, or 7, to
discover 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 discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you
were rooting for Gary Cooper, that 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,
evovled 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
skin, begins there and accelerates-- accelerates throughout a whole lifetime
to the present when you realize you’re thirty and are having a terrible
time managing to trust your countrymen. By the time you are thirty,
you have been through a certain kind of mill. And the most serious effect
of the mill you’ve been through is, again, not the catalog of disaster,
the policemen, the taxi drivers, the waiters, the landlady, the landlord,
the banks, the insurance companies, the millions of details, twenty four
hours of every day, which spell out to you that you are a worthless
human being. It is not that. It’s by that time, you’ve begun to see
it happening in your daughter or your son, or your niece or your nephew.
You are thirty by now and nothing you have done has helped you to
escape the trap. But 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 from meeting the same disaster and not
impossibly coming to the same end. Now, we’re 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 Southern states, could not conceivably be
what it has become, if they had not had, and do not still have,
indeed, for so long, so many generations, cheap labor. I am stating very
seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked the cotton,
and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads under
someone else’s whip for nothing. For nothing.
The Southern oligarchy, which has until today 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 watched 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 a landlord, or a landlady 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 a 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 because she won’t talk to you, you have
to wait for a while to get your telegram. OK, 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 helplessly believe,
that no matter how terrible their lives may be, and 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 in
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, you know, 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 ghastly.
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, a word we won’t examine
too closely, with a certain kind of social coherence, which calls itself a
civilized nation, and which espouses 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 Harlem, which is another terrible
place, has to say to himself, in spite of what the government says,
the government says we can’t do anything about it, but if those were
white people being murdered in Mississippi work farms, being carried
off to jail, if those were 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 where an amendment, we have
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 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, and in the
same way, the moral life of Alabama sheriffs and poor Alabama ladies,
white ladies, 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
the Americans abroad, and these are my countrymen, and I do
care about them, and even if I didn’t, there is something between us.
We have the same shorthand, I know, if I look at a boy or a girl 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 except
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 were some great new
conundrum. The problem in America is that we have been integrated for
a very long time. Put me next to any African and you will see what I mean.
My grandmother was not a racist. What we are not facing...
is the results of what we've done.
What one begs 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 afterall which can be used against another person
who has absolute power over that person.
It seemed to me when I watched Americans 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 this particular woman, this particular man,
though they spoke another language and had different manners
and ways, was a human being. And they walked over them with the same kind
of bland ignorance, condescension, charming and cheerful with which
they’d always patted me on the head and called me Shine and were upset
when I was upset. What is relevant about this is that whereas forty 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, of ever
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.
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.
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, whiter, richer, safer
than where you are. They collect the garbage. People obviously can
pay their life insurance. Their children look happy, safe. 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 War, that there’s been a
counter-image in the world. And that image did not come about through
any legislation or part of any American government, but through
the fact that Africa was suddenly on the stage of the world, and 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 has 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 were dealing, essentially,
with something exotic, bizarre, and practically, according to human laws,
unknown. Alas, it is not true. We’re also mercenaries,
dictators, murderers, liars. We are human too.
What is crucial here is that unless we can manage to accept, establish
some kind of dialog between those people whom I pretend have 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
is what concerns me most. We are sitting in this room, and we are all,
at least we’d like to think we are, relatively civilized, 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 ex-attorney-general Mr. Robert Kennedy
said that it was conceivable that in forty years, in America, we might have
a negro president. 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 will never hear the laughter
and the bitterness, and the scorn with which this statement was greeted.
From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barbershop, Bobby Kennedy
only got here yesterday, and he’s already on his way to the presidency.
We’ve been here for 400 years and now he tells us that maybe
in forty years, if you’re good, we may let you become president.
What is dangerous here is the 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 is saying.
And one can’t blame them. You watch what has happened to them in less than
twenty years. It seems to me that the city of New York, for example, this is
my last point, has had negroes in it for a very long time.
If the city of New York were able, as it has indeed been able, in the last fifteen
years to reconstruct itself, tear 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 negroes. And of course, negroes hate it.
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 are gonna be thrown out into the streets.
Which is what it does mean now. This is not an act of God. We’re
dealing with a 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 its population is beneath them. 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, 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 am 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.
[loud applause]
Narrator: Tremendously 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 delighted by his reception, tremendously moved by it.
[applause]
President: I am now very grateful and very pleased to be
able to call Mr. William F Buckley Jr. to speak fourth to this motion.
[applause]
Narrator: Now we have Mr. William Buckley, who will need all his skill to
establish ascendancy over his audience, which has clearly been so deeply
moved by the eloquence and personal experience of the preceding speaker.
William Buckley: Thank you Mr. President, Baldwin, Heycock, Burford, gentlemen.
It seems to me that of all the indictments Mr. Baldwin has made of America
here tonight and in his copious literature of protest, that the one that is most
striking, involves, in effect, the refusal of the American community 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 a kind of unction, of a kind of satisfaction at posturing
carefully for his flagellations 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 is black is utterly irrelevant to the
arguments that you raise, or the fact that you sit here as is your
rhetorical device and lay the entire weight of the negro ordeal on your
own shoulders is irrelevant to the argument that we are here to discuss.
The gravamen of Mr. Baldwin's charges against America are not so much that our
civilization has failed him and his people. That our ideals are
insufficient or 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
noxious experiment we are engaged in. Thus, Mr. Baldwin can write his
book "The Fire Next Time," in which he threatens America. He didn't
in writing that book speak with a British accent that he used
exclusively tonight, in which he threatened America with a
necessity for us to jettison... for us to jettison our entire
civilization, the only thing that the white man has that the negro should
want, he said, is power, and he is treated
from coast to coast of the United States with a kind of unctuous...
[Narrator speaking over him: inaudible]
... that goes beyond anything that was ever expected from the most
servile negro creature by a southern family. I propose to pay him the honor
this night of saying to him, 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. 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 humiliations which I join
Mr. Baldwin in believing are the very worst aspects of this discrimination.
You found it a source of considerable mirth to laugh away the statistics
of my colleague, Mr. Burford. I don't think they are insignificant. They
certainly are not insignificant in a world which attaches a considerable importance
to material progress. It is in fact the case that seven-tenths of the white income
of the United States is equal to the income that is made by the average
negro. I don't think this is an irrelevant statistic, ladies and gentleman. It takes
the capitalization of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen thousand dollars per job in the
United States. This is capitalization that was not created exclusively as a result
of negro travail. My great grandparents worked 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 to please
not to belie 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, than that that is enjoyed by 95% of the other peoples of the human
race. But even so, to the extent that your withering laughter 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
if there 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 crow flies, to use the fleeted phrase of Professor Oakshock, but rather to consider
what in fact is it 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. Heycock and
Mr. Burford. What in fact is it we ought to do, for instance, to avoid
due humiliations mentioned by Mr. Baldwin as being a part of his own experience
during his lifetime. At the age of twelve, 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." Fifteen, twenty years later he goes in
and asks for a scotch whiskey at the airport at Chicago and is told by the
white woman that he is obviously underage and under the circumstances, can't be
served. I know. I know from your faces that you share with me the feeling of
compassion and the feeling of 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 barman? How are we going to avoid the kind of humiliations
that are perpetually visited on members of the minority race? Obviously, the first
element is concern. We've got to care that it happens. We've got to
do what we can to change the warp and woof 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--[laughter]
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
governors of the United States, the situation would change overnight.
I am prepared to grant this as a form of courtesy, Mr. 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. [audience member yells out] You cannot go to a
university in the United States, a university in the United States presumably
also governed by the lord 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 any time
anywhere in the history of the world in which the problems of the 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, but let me just
say finally, ladies and gentlemen, this. 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.
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 Glazer,
also co-author of the "The Lonely Proud" a prominent Jewish intellectual who
points at the fact that the situation in America where the negros are concerned
is extremely complex as the result of an unfortunate conjunction of two factors.
One is the dreadful efforts to perpetuate discrimination by many individual American
citizens as a result of their lack of that final and ultimate concern which some
people are truly trying to agitate, the other is as a result of the failure of the negro
community itself to make certain exertions 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 Glazer considers as relevant. 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, as has been suggested by Mr. Heycock and also by
Mr. Baldwin implicitly. "No," says Professor Glazer. There are a great many
medical schools who by no means practice discrimination, who are anxious to recieve
the trained negro doctors. There are scholarships available to put them
through, but in fact that particular energy which he remarks was so noticeable
in the Jewish community and to a certain and lesser extent in the Italian and
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. The people who can best do it most effectively
are negros 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 negros. 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 read carefully for instance the words of
Mr. Bayard Rustin, toward some sort of a procrustean 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 negros are illegitimate
as of whites. This is a problem. How should we address it? By seeking out laws
that encourage illegitimacy in white people? This unfortunately tends to be
the rhetorical momentum that some of the arguments are taking.
- One thing you might do Mr. Buckley is let them vote in Mississippi. [applause]
Buckley: I agree.
I couldn't agree with you more and for... 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 negros are voting but that
too many white people are voting.
[laughter]
Booker T. Washington said, "That the important thing where negros are
concerned is not that they hold public office, but they be prepared
to hold public office. Not that they vote, but that they be prepared to vote."
What are we going to do with the negros having taught the negros
in Mississippi to despise Barnett, Ross Barnett, shall we then teach
them to emulate their cousins in Harlem and adore Adam
Clayton Powell 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...
[applause]
I say, then, that what we need
is a considerable amount of frankness 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 do all over the world to
protect their own vested interests, who have as all the races in the entire world
have and suffer from a kind of racial narcissism which tends always to
convert every contingency in such a way as 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 a 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 world is the United States of America, and it is
precisely that mobility which will give opportunities to the negros 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 because
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 idealism, 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 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 and told that
the only alternative to the status quo is to overthrow that civilization
which we consider to be the faith of our fathers, the faith indeed of
your fathers. This is what must animate whatever meliorism 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 indistinguishable so far as I can see
from the European way of life, 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 and 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 whites but also for negros.
[long applause]
President: Will the tellers take their places please? They voted
in favor of the motion, the motion being that the American Dream is at 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, I declare the house
to stand adjourned. [applause]