I have been sent a tear sheet from West Magazine (published by the L.A. Times’), an excerpt from an interview with James Baldwin. I pass along one paragraph:
“Then there were the fabled debates with William Buckley, one at Oxford which Baldwin won hands down, with the first standing ovation accorded anyone in this century; one in New York which he lost because ‘I was trying to do what Martin (? ‘Martin’ is not mentioned in the tear sheet) was doing, I still hoped one could make people listen. But Bill’s a bully, he can’t listen, he uses weapons I simply won’t use. I said people who live in the ghetto don’t own it, it’s white people’s property. I know who owns Harlem. He said, ‘Do the landlords tippy-toe uptown and throw the garbage out the windows?’ And I tuned out. If a cat said that to me in life, I’d simply beat the hell out of him. He was saying Negroes deserved their fate, they stink. To my eternal dishonor, I cooled it, I drew back and I lost the debate. I should have beat him over the head with the coffee cup. He’s not a serious man. He’s the intellectuals’ James Bond.”
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