“Nicholas Buccola brilliantly illuminates the American dilemma of race in the context of the early sixties, as well as now... How forcefully the past is past, but also so present in the hands of a superb scholar.”
On February 18, 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 is the first book to tell the full story of the event, the radically different paths that led Baldwin and Buckley to it, the controversies that followed, and how the debate and the decades-long clash between the men continues to illuminate America's racial divide today.
“With flair and grace, Nicholas Buccola provides the unforgettable backstory to a momentous debate—a clash of antiracist and racist ideas—over the very meaning of the American dream. It is a debate that still resonates today. A vital read.”
— Ibram X. Kendi,
National Book Award winning author of,
Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist
