Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Abergen.

Now this is the third episode in our week of conversations about Black History Month and this larger question that we're trying to explore about how Black history has been understood and changed and shifted over the years.

So today, February 17th, we're going to focus in on a series of debates that took place around

this time in 1965, debates between two of America's most notable public intellectuals. and Now this date in specific was one of the key debates which took place on this day in 1965,

the title of which was The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.

So here to discuss the Buckley versus Baldwin debates what they say about how we think

about black history and American history are as always Nicole Hammer of Columbia and

Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there.

Hello Doty. Hey there. And our special guest for this

episode is Nick Buchola professor at Linfield University and author of the book

title is The Fire is Upon Us, James Baldwin, William F Buckley Jr and the debate over race in America

so Nick thank you so much for doing this yeah thanks so much for having me excited to be here

with all you so as I've sort of started to get my head around these debates,

I mean one really interesting thing is kind of trying to explore

who was trying to get what out of the debates.

And so I'm curious if you can just talk a little bit about Baldwin and Buckley and

like what their goals were and then we'll talk about the sort of substance and so forth but it feels like there's

a lot of parallel and weirdly intersecting goals for even taking this on.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I mean, just to give folks a sense of the context, it's February 18th,

1965, we're in the midst of the Selma campaign for voting rights.

...