JAMES BALDWIN DEBATES WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY @ CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY 

 “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro,” James Baldwin declared on February 18, 1965, in his epochal debate with William F. Buckley Jr. at the University of Cambridge. Baldwin was echoing the motion of the debate—that the American dream was at the expense of black Americans, with Baldwin for, Buckley against—but his emphasis on the word is made his point clear. “I picked the cotton, and I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing,” he said, his voice rising with the cadences of the pulpit. “For nothing.” The packed auditorium was hushed. Here was a clash of diametrically opposed titans: in one corner was Baldwin, short, slender, almost androgynous with his still-youthful face, voice carrying the faintly cosmopolitan inflections he’d had for years. He was the debate’s radical, an esteemed writer unafraid to volcanically condemn white supremacy and the anti-black racism of conservative and liberal Americans alike. In the other corner was Buckley, tall, light-skinned, hair tightly combed and jaw stiff, his words chiseled with his signature transatlantic accent. If Baldwin—the verbal virtuoso who wrote moving portraits of black America and about life as a queer expatriate in Europe—stood for America’s need to change, Buckley positioned himself as the reasonable moderate who resisted the social transformations that civil-rights leaders called for, desegregation most of all. Some of the students in the audience knew him as nothing less than the father of modern American conservatism.

SUN RA: “THE BLACK MAN IN THE COSMOS" (1971 BERKELEY LECTURE)

We’re not sure about you, but if Sun Ra had been our university lecturer, school would have felt like a totally different place. In 1971, UC Berkeley became the epicenter of the Sun Ra universe. And thanks to a secret recording of a session he gave one semester, you now have the chance to enter it as well. As you can hear, the results are unsurprisingly diverse and out-there in equal measure. Serving as the university’s artist-in-residence, the legendary pioneer of cosmic jazz and the force behind the burgeoning afro-futurist movement led a spring class in African American Studies. The class came to be known as “Sun Ra 171”, “The Black Man in the Universe” or “The Black Man in the Cosmos” lectures. The semester was brimming with the musician’s characteristic fusion of autodidactic occultist philosophy, Egyptology, writings from the radical black tradition and theology. Sun Ra’s intellectual curiosity shines through as he races through close but deeply idiosyncratic readings from sources as diverse as The King James Bible to jazz history. Recordings of his courses were banned, and members of the Arkestra even prowled around the room to remove tape recorders. Fortunately for us, however, they missed someone.

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