USD School of Law Presents The Fire is Upon Us: A Conversation with the Author
This event occurred in the past
Date and Time
- Friday, February 5, 2021 from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Location
Via Zoom Webinar & Remo
Cost
Complimentary
Details
Join the USD School of Law community and the Student Bar Association to explore the legacy of the Baldwin-Buckley debate with award-winning author and political scientist Nicholas Buccola, whose recent work The Fire is Upon Us has been lauded by the New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Undefeated. This event is open to the public, USD faculty/administrators, and all undergraduate, graduate, law students, and all USD alumni.
56 years ago, 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.
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.
The event will include the following interactive elements exploring how the injustices and inequities of our country’s complex racial history continue to pervade our systems and institutions:
