The topic of the debate called to mind an especially provocative sentence in The Fire Next Time : “The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power,” Baldwin had written, “but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream.” The motion put up for debate was this: “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” The phrase American dream was one that Buckley seldom, if ever, used except ironically, but he would now be forced to defend it.
Baldwin began by saying that, in terms of the Black experience, American dream was an all but meaningless expression. “Let me put it this way,” he said in what became the most famous words spoken that evening:
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, for many generations, cheap labor. I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement, that I picked the cotton, and I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing, for nothing.
The custom at Cambridge Union debates was for audience members to address questions to the speaker, even interrupting to demand a reply. But Baldwin’s words were as much sermon as argument—“a highly refined version of soapbox speech,” one of Baldwin’s biographers later wrote—even as his description of the capitalist uses of slavery was grounded in historical fact. In 1965, structural racism was a new idea, certainly for this audience, which had been stunned into silence. Hardly anyone stirred. When Baldwin finished, after almost half an hour, the ovation lasted a full minute. “The whole of the union standing and applauding this magnificent speech of James Baldwin,” St. John-Stevas excitedly told the BBC audience. “Never seen this happen before.”
All the while, Buckley had been sitting by, writing notes on his yellow pad, thinking, as he later recalled, “Boy, tonight is a lost cause.” For years to come, he would maintain that the debate had contrasted his exercise in high logic with Baldwin’s emotionalism. But many present that day thought otherwise. Baldwin had been careful not to say a word about Buckley, not even to utter his name. He had stood at the podium and spoken as if in a kind of reverie. But Buckley, when his turn came, “stalked the center debating table like a panther,” The New York Times reported. “He began in a low monotone, almost a snarl.”