The Fire Is Upon Us

On February 18th, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley, Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America's most influential conservative intellectual. The topic was 'the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro,' and no one who has seen the debate can soon forget it. Nicholas Buccola's 'The Fire is Upon Us' tells the full story of the event, the radically different paths that led Baldwin and Buckley to it, and how the debate and the decades-long clash between the men illuminates the racial divide that continues to haunt America today.