Radical Empathy: Civil Rights and The Humanist Ideas That Changed Two Nations

In February 1965, James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. faced each other across a packed Cambridge Union, debating whether "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro." Baldwin won the vote by a landslide. But that famous moment was one flashpoint in a much wider struggle. Across the United States and here in Britain, activists, writers and thinkers were challenging injustice, confronting systems of power, and asking fundamental questions about equality, dignity and how we ought to live. Many looked to humanist ideas of reason, shared humanity, and a vision of ethics grounded in human experience. 

This episode traces the humanist threads that ran through the civil rights movements on both sides of the Atlantic, from Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry in the United States to the Windrush generation, the 1965 Race Relations Act, and the Black British radical tradition of C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones and Darcus Howe.

Guests:

Dr Nicholas Buccola, Dr Jules K. Whitehill Professor of Humanism and Ethics at Claremont McKenna College, and author of The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America (Princeton, 2019). nicholasbuccola.com

Dr Angelina Osborne, British historian, researcher and heritage consultant, and co-author with Patrick Vernon of 100 Great Black Britons (Robinson, 2020). 100greatblackbritons.co.uk

For all references to people, places, and events in this episode and the full series, visit heritage.humanists.uk/podcast

Join Humanists UK: humanists.uk/join

Discover more Humanist Heritage: heritage.humanists.uk

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Unholy Histories is produced by Humanise Live a production agency creating values-led podcast content. Start podcasting today at humanise.live

Music: Small Things by Simon Folwar

Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

Transcript

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Welcome and introduction

Andrew Copson 0:01

Welcome to Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage Podcast brought to you by Humanist UK. I'm Andrew Cobson, Chief Executive of Humanist UK.

Madeleine Goodall 0:09

And I'm Madeline Goodall, head of the Humanist Heritage Project.

Andrew Copson 0:13

We're the hosts of this new podcast series where we will be speaking with experts about Britain's humanist history.

Madeleine Goodall 0:18

Uncovering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped both humanist thought and our national life. In 1965, a packed hall at Cambridge University watched as James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. clashed over race, justice, and the meaning of freedom. But that moment was just one flashpoint in a much larger struggle. Across the United States and here in Britain, activists, writers and thinkers were challenging injustice, confronting systems of power, and asking fundamental questions about equality, dignity, and how we ought to live. Some drew on religious traditions, but many others looked instead to humanist ideas, to reason, to shared humanity, and to a vision of ethics grounded in human experience rather than divine authority. In this episode of Unholy Histories, we explore the connections between civil rights movements on both sides of the Atlantic and the humanist ideas and thinkers that help to shape them. And to explore this transatlantic story, we're joined by Dr. Nicholas Bacola, the Dr. Jules L. Whitill Professor of Humanism and Ethics at Claremont-Mackennah College, and author of The Fire is Upon Us, James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the debate over race in America. And Dr. Angelina Osborne, British historian, researcher, heritage consultant, and author whose books include A Hundred Great Black Britons, a celebration of the extraordinary contribution of key figures of African or Caribbean descent to British life. And as always, I'm joined by my co-host, Andrew Cobson.

Andrew Copson 1:55

Hello. Well, thank you very much for joining

Nicholas Buccola on Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin

Andrew Copson 1:58

us. I thought we could start with each of you telling us a little bit about your work and research and what it was that drew you to those areas of study. Let's start with you, Nicholas.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Yeah, I teach American political thought as my broad area of study. And I spent most of the first part of my career as a scholar studying Frederick Douglass. So I my dissertation and eventually my first book was about the political thought of Frederick Douglass. And I was really interested in Douglas as a kind of liberal thinker, somebody who's primarily concerned about uh liberty first and foremost. But I was especially interested in how Douglas thought about the responsibilities we have to each other, the sort of responsibilities we have to stand up for one another's liberty. And fast forward a few years, um my work really shifted to James Baldwin. Um as you mentioned, uh I've thought a bit about Baldwin by way of his debate with William F. Buckley. That project allowed me to think about the civil rights and conservative movements together, which is something I've continued to do. My last book was about Martin Luther King Jr. and uh Senator Barry Goldwater as leaders of freedom movements. And I have another book uh about Baldwin, uh sort of Baldwin in Love is my theme in my next book, and that'll hopefully come out early next year. So those are that's some of the things I've been thinking about lately. And what was it that drew you to Baldwin in particular? I had always, you know, want knew I needed to read more James Baldwin. Like a lot of people, I read a little bit as an undergraduate, a little bit as a graduate student, and then just kind of stumbled into an invitation to write about the debate, or write about Baldwin, and then I stumbled into the debate. And once I really got into engaging Baldwin, I couldn't stop. Baldwin, to me, is just one of the most wise and insightful humans ever to have lived. And so the key thing would be I really find really compelling how Baldwin can take, you know, any moral, political, even aesthetic question. He can dig through to that grave question of self that sort of lies beneath. And I feel like that to me really struck me as true in terms of my experience in the world. And so that's really what drew me to Baldwin and still has a hold on me.

Angelina Osborne on Black British history and the West India Committee

Andrew Copson 4:02

Angelina, what about your work and why you ended up studying what you're studying?

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Well, I started uh working for a small social enterprise called Every Generation. We were really interested in exploring sort of hidden histories, particularly the histories around Black British history and the history of the African presence in the UK. And while there had been lots of work being done, certainly in the academy, there was lots of work that's being done on this issue. There was nothing that was sort of really being communicated to sort of wider audiences. And so started looking at that research, doing work in this social enterprise, as I call that every generation. And then in 2010, I decided to do my PhD in history. Three years before that, uh, I had been involved in what was known then as the sort of bicentenary of the acts to abolish the trade and trafficking in African people, the act that the British government, British Parliament passed, I should say rather back in 1807. And I was sort of interested in the fact that there was so much that was quite celebratory and backslapping and on the part of the government. It was actually the government, their government at the time, who sort of pushed this through, actually, ostensibly, in my view, to really sort of show the humanitarian positioning of government. And I was curious about that. I kept thinking about a quote by the great Trinidadian historian Eric Williams, who kept saying in my head, the reason it feels like the reason that Britain invented slavery was to abolish it. And I kept thinking that we're not hearing about enslavement and what it actually involved, what it meant, how Britain benefited from it. So I actually researched an organization called the West India Committee. They were a very influential lobbying group in the 18th and early 19th century, really working, using all of their resources to prolong enslavement and to uh prevent emancipation from happening. So I wrote my thesis on that organization. Uh, since then I've just been continuing to work really sometimes at universities and most of the time with community organizations researching different elements around Lat British history, uh Caribbean history. That's what I do currently.

Andrew Copson 6:27

So, what drew you to it was that, as you say, the unwritten nature of it, the underexplored or unexcavated nature of it.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

Yeah, the underexplored nature of it and the one-sidedness of it, that we're of how there's this continuous kind of narrative that we're supposed to adhere to, which is that Britain is this great liberator, this great anti-abolitionist. And yes, the British people were very instrumental in campaigning to abolish enslavement, but what we're not hearing about often is what the enslaved people were doing themselves to end enslavement. And I was interested in that, and I was interested in what the black British people were doing in that period as well, and subsequent forward going forward. It's a narrative that continuously is being distorted, and so I try to bring both views into light.

Madeleine Goodall 7:23

As always, there's so much there in both of those answers that I feel like we could go into and pull out. Our kind of overarching theme of of this episode is civil rights and the civil rights movement and that how it manifested, how it operated on both sides of the ocean.

Defining civil rights across the Atlantic

Madeleine Goodall 7:39

So I guess to start with, it might be useful to kind of define what we mean when we're talking about civil rights in that concept. Nicholas, I don't know if you want to set us up there.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

So often in the US, we say that the civil rights movement and identify that era. But I think that a lot of historians have pointed out rightly that this is like one phase in a long, long struggle. And we can think about the civil rights movement or civil rights movements throughout history, of course. But I would say the way I would think about the concept generally is the sort of pursuit by way of activism, you know, equal recognition and dignity in the political sphere and the economic sphere and the social sphere. That's just a really broad sweep. But I think that part of what we see going on in this era that I've been thinking about in these last two books is this attempt to, of course, pursue particular citizenship rights, opportunities to participate in politics and a lot of the sort of formal ways we often think about, like the right to vote, but also really an attention to the ways in which economic injustice has manifested itself in ways that have marginalized people throughout, in my case, studying American history and trying to figure out ways in which there's this intersection between the political rights and economic dignity. And so I think that's kind of the way I tend to think about it. And then of course, the one last thing I'd say is that that thing about that social piece is that certainly, you know, in this last book about Martin Luther King, I was thinking a lot about the ways in which, you know, sort of interactions in the social sphere are also relevant to one's feeling of equal standing in a society. And so that's kind of how I think about the sort of concept of civil rights generally.

Madeleine Goodall 9:26

Do you

Britain's 1965 Race Relations Act and MLK's UK visit

Madeleine Goodall 9:27

feel like that's that kind of maps, Angelina, onto your research, your writing about the context in Britain?

SPEAKER_01 9:35

In some ways, yes. Britain passed the first race relations act in I think it was 1965, I believe. And that was a culmination of significant campaigning by different organizations that actually operated under an umbrella organization called the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination. And essentially what this organization did, it was not just about, it was about all people of African and African Caribbean heritage, also of South Asian heritage, because they were all experiencing racism and discrimination in dissimilar ways. So they got together. And actually, it's what's interesting is that um when Martin Luther King was on his way to uh Sweden to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in late 1964, he actually visited some of the members of CAD and they sort of sought uh you know advice from him saying, How do we campaign? Give us some benefit of your experience. And that was in late 1964, which he did. It was a very short visit. He was here probably maybe one night and met with these individuals, amongst whom was Claudia Jones. Claudia Jones was one of the people who were present at those meetings. And the sad thing about Claudia Jones is that a few weeks later, it's literally maybe weeks later, a couple of weeks later, she was dead. She had died in her sleep, uh late 1964. So she wasn't able to even see uh the fruits. I mean, she saw, of course, why she was living some of the fruits uh campaigning, but she sadly passed away in late 64, not long after that meeting.

Madeleine Goodall 11:13

I think I've heard you talk before about Claudia Jones and that that concept of somebody burning so brightly, you know, having this enormous impact and then being really cut off far too early in the case of Claudia Jones. I think as well, it's really interesting to me that there were these interactions between, I mean, it's natural. Um, and certainly we see it in the the history that we look at in the kind of, you know, in humanism and non-religion, this crossover and kind of interplay between people in the US, people in the UK, learning from each other, visiting each other. I'm thinking about somebody like Islander Robeson, I know spoke at Comey Hall, for example, and and again that was very much in the context of the experience in America and what could be learned and shared.

Andrew Copson 12:00

And

The 1911 Universal Races Congress in London

Andrew Copson 12:01

I guess that started even earlier with the humanist movement because we had in 1911 when the what was then called the Ethical Union, which is what Humanist UK used to be called, organized in 1911 a global anti-racism congress in London, which uh a quite a large number of US activists traveled to, didn't they, Muddy?

Madeleine Goodall 12:20

Yeah, including W.E. Du Bois. So he was very inspired by the concept of the first universal racist congress, which was this idea of getting people from all over the world together in the light of science to better understand each other, to foster better communications and understandings between countries. And yeah, Du Bois wrote about that in his own paper when he got home about how it was this, you know, incredibly bold, brave thing that unfortunately was both the first and the last of those congresses because of the outbreak of the First World War. So, yeah, I guess there is that history, and like Nicholas was saying earlier, that idea of these different generations of activists building on the work of others that came before them, being kind of inspired often by those people that that came before.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

I was just thinking about Islander Robson, Paul Robson's wife, when they came and they stayed in England quite a lot during the 1930s because Paul Robson was filming here, like Sanders of the River and a couple of other quite significant movies that he was in. And I'm thinking about the fact that Britain, centre of empire, drew many people from its empire to London, to the centre. And it's actually, I'm suggesting that Paul Robeson and his wife were pretty much influenced by the meeting. I mean, he met John O'Kanyata, because Jom Okanyatta was in one of the movies that he was played in the chief, an African chief. And uh he was very much influenced by these ideas, these uh anti-colonial pan-Africanist ideas. I'm suggesting that Paul Robson was very much sort of influenced, his interactions with these individuals. I'm not sure if he met C. L. R. James, but he was very much influenced by the experience that he had talking to these different people, these different thinkers that coalesced in London, the centre of empire, which is kind of ironic, I think, you know, given Britain's sort of colonial positioning back in the 1930s, that they would come to England and Padmore than others to talk about and consider what needs to be done. It would also be the seeds of independence that was sown in the 30s at that time.

Andrew Copson 14:37

And obviously, when they came here, they found progressive spaces in which they could speak. I mean, like we were saying, Islander Robson spoke at the Humanist House, Conway Hall, in London. So I guess another reason is just, although it seems ironic, is I guess London was just also full of a lot of progressive venues, progressive people.

Madeleine Goodall 14:56

And universities.

Andrew Copson 14:57

Yeah, exactly. So these are heady days, the early 60s, aren't they? We're talking about 1965. That was the year, of course, Islander Robeson died, and also some of the other people we've been talking about with a lot going on in the early 60s. It is obviously heady days,

1965 Cambridge Union Baldwin Buckley debate

Andrew Copson 15:10

and one specific event that we want to talk a little bit about because of your work on this, Nicholas, is the in 1965, the Baldwin-Buckley debate. So tell us a little bit about, first of all, the background to this debate.

SPEAKER_00 15:22

February 18, 1965, uh James Baldwin ends up at the Cambridge Union. The union had just celebrated its 150th anniversary um to square off against William F. Buckley. And the the motion before the House was resolved. Uh, the American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro, and it was the motion the students had proposed. And so the story behind the debate was something that nobody had really written much about. So my students and I tried to track down some of the students who were back in the day hosted the debate. And so, you know, essentially Baldwin was on a book tour in the UK promoting the paperback release of Another Country, his third novel. And his publicist called the Cambridge Union, and they they said, Well, you know, we're a debating society, so we can't come here for an author event, but if he'll debate, we can host him. And so one thing led to another and a lot of twists and turns in the the one of the students had met this guy, William F. Buckley, who was the perfect person to play the role of you know, an opponent for Baldwin that night. And so, you know, it's a really dramatic moment. You have the BBC is there, you know, it's gonna end up being, you know, filmed and people see it around the world. It's the sort of right in the midst of the summer campaign for voting rights. And so it's at this really important moment in that phase of the civil rights revolution. And and there's Baldwin, you know, as Malcolm X would call him, the poet of the revolution, squaring off against uh William F. Buckley, who was really the poet of the counter-revolution. He was the leading, and besides Barry Goldwater, who just you know lost the uh campaign for the presidency as a conservative Republican candidate in 1964. Buckley was really the most recognizable conservative in the States. And so he was, you know, this leading polemicist. He had been opposed to the civil rights movement at every turn. Um, and so it was really uh, you couldn't have dreamt up a more sort of fitting matchup between two people who had radically different life experiences and radically different worldviews. So they were there that night for some intellectual uh fireworks.

Competing visions for society and freedom

Andrew Copson 17:17

So, what were those competing visions of society that were being advanced at this point? I mean, and because we're interested more in humanist history, you can focus more on the good one, the James Baldwin one, if you want to. But what were these two visions really?

SPEAKER_00 17:30

I love the way Baldwin begins his speech. I mean, interestingly, in thinking about these questions in both a, you know, sort of humanist register and a kind of theological register, he announces that he's there as a kind of Jeremiah, you know. So he's, you know, Baldwin was uh raised in Harlem storefront churches and became a young minister when he was a teenager, and then you know, he left the church at age 17. And Baldwin would often say, But, you know, the people tell me that I left the church at 17 but remained forever a preacher. So he's there to preach a particular kind of gospel. And I think that in a broad sense we can call it a humanist gospel, you know, in a sense, because he's there to, you know, really describe, you know, what he calls different systems of reality that allow us to engage the world in different ways. And so part of what I think Baldwin does so beautifully in his speech at Cambridge, and I think this is like reflective of the vision that he brought into the debate that night was he, you know, he talks about the ways in which the doctrine of white supremacy has its sort of obvious victims. And so he talks about the catalog of disaster, the millions of details of every day that communicate to um African Americans that their lives don't matter as much. And he he sort of implicates Buckley in a lot of what he's done without saying it directly that, you know, it's sort of in maintaining that structure of white supremacy. But Baldwin also talks about the ways in which the doctrine of white supremacy um undermines the dignity of its would-be beneficiaries. He talks about the ways in which, you know, you know, he talks about essentially how pathetic it is that somebody like Sheriff Jim Clark, who's this Alabama law enforcement officer who's in that moment being seen on international, you know, on televisions around the world and newspapers around the world brutalizing men, women, and children in the streets of Alabama. Um, Baldwin says, you know, think about the moral life of somebody like Jim Clark. What has happened to a man with, you know, that he can do that to one of his fellow human beings. And so um Baldwin, I think those are, you know, a couple of the big, you know, kind of themes of human dignity he raises in the in the in the debate. Then the one other thing I would mention is that, you know, the idea, the way the motion was framed is this idea of expense. Um, Baldwin, I think, really powerfully in the debate draws attention to the sort of legacy of um economic and racial exploitation throughout history and talks about this idea of the ways in which that history is present in all that we do. And so one of the most famous moments in the debate is when Baldwin says, you know, I mean this quite literally. I picked the cotton, I built the railroads. And so I think part of what he's doing for the audience is just trying to say that's not history, something that happened in the past. I'm not asking for your guilt for something, you know, earlier generations, crimes earlier generations may have committed. What I'm asking for is your responsibility for the present, because that history is here and in all that we do.

Andrew Copson 20:12

James Baldwin really was a darling of humanists in the UK. I remember one of the people who at the time was a young woman in the mid-20th century, the Cambridge Cambridge Humanists, which at the time was the biggest humanist society in the in the UK, Ian Forster was their president, it was incredibly large, talking about how when James Baldwin was in Cambridge, he came round to her and her husband's house for dinner with a committee of Cambridge Humanists, but it wasn't just on that face-to-face level. He was an intellectual inspiration of the humanist movement generally in the UK. And it's not difficult to see why when you describe his sort of basic worldview and the way that he the vision that he laid out in that speech. And I

Baldwin's "superhuman empathy"

Andrew Copson 20:49

think one of the things that is and he's uncompromising, but he also displays, I think, what you've called a superhuman empathy for those who are caught in the grips of the delusions that he's arguing against. I think you say those who caught in the I'm just gonna read this book because it's so good. He displays an almost superhuman empathy for those caught in the grip of delusions like white supremacy. I think that's part of why he's inspirational for humanists who are engaged in a struggle of liberation too, because he really is understanding what he's up against and he's treating everyone as human beings, not just the people that he's arguing for, but like you say, the victimizers who are themselves brutalized.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that in the moment, you know, in the debate, when, you know, as I mentioned with Sheriff Jim Clark, I mean, he says to the audience, you know, it would be easy to just treat Jim Clark as if he were a monster, right? But, you know, then Baldwin has a relatively light moment in the debate, but has a really serious point when he says, you know, I'm sure Jim Clark loves his wife and his children. I'm sure Jim Clark likes to get drunk. Um and the students, of course, get a laugh out of that. But I mean, Baldwin really does want them to recognize that, like, you know, Clark is a human being, he says, Clark is a human being just like me, right? And so part of what, you know, I think Baldwin is always doing is trying. Trying to dig through to these questions of identity. You know, he says Jim Clark, you know, essentially has been taught his whole life to believe that his value is attached to the color of his skin and that his role in the world is to maintain this fortress of white supremacy. And that's where he finds, you know, his sense of meaning and value. And, you know, essentially says, like part of this Baldwinian love, like this love of confrontation. It's a love of radical confrontation and radical empathy, is that we need to confront, you know, um, this when we see it. And he says it may not be possible to save Jim Clark, but perhaps we can save his children, right? And and saving them not in a patronizing way, but save them, like allow them to like liberate them from that so that they can live a truly fulfilling and from Baldwin's point of view, moral human life.

Madeleine Goodall 22:46

There's so much to take from that. And I love the idea both of this radical empathy, but also this real framing that, like you say, Baldwin's really consciously framing the civil rights struggle as a as a moral one. I think him and am I right in saying him and Lorraine Hansbury went before Kennedy and kind of asked him to consider it as such. And I'm I'm

Windrush and the shock of Britishness denied

Madeleine Goodall 23:08

interested, I guess, in whether um Angelini, you also see that in the the UK context. Is there also that idea of this being a fundamentally a moral thing, or is it what are the arguments that are being made in the UK at the time?

SPEAKER_01 23:24

There's an interesting one because I can think, again, there are so many similarities, but also some a lot of differences. People from the Caribbean, for example, people came over. So, first of all, we know that there's been a continuous African presence since the 16th century, right? Maybe even before Roman times, right? And but if we're talking about the phase of migration that people like to sort of like center and mythologize as the time when that people suddenly appeared in the UK, is Windrush, right? It's 1948, June 1948, shit walks up and everybody gets out. Well, 492 people, but actually it's more than that, probably about a thousand. But they would say 492. But the thing is, with that narrative, those individuals, those men, women and children that arrived at that particular point in time, those were British citizens. Yeah, they were British citizens. The Caribbean was part of the British Empire. And so when they arrived here, their assumption was that they were British citizens moving from one British space to another. Okay. And in with that assumption came that one, if I leave Trinidad, if I leave Jamaica, if I leave Barbados, and I move to Manchester, London, Leeds, wherever I settle, they will know who I am. They will be recognized as British. And there will be, I imagine, some growing pains, some adjustments. I'm moving from across the Atlantic. So there will be some adjustments. I will be with majority white people, but we will adjust because I'm British. Okay? And that's what the British Nationality Act told everybody, not just Caribbeans, but also people lived there. Australia, South Africa, Canada, they were all British subjects. So the shock is quite profound that when you arrive here, that a British people, ordinary quote unquote ordinary British people have no idea of their empire. They are an idea that people of different ethnicities and races live among them, but they do not see these people as British. They see them as interlopers, encroachers, or aliens. Okay. The assumption that they would be able to scene into society without any problems and realizing that it was essentially quite terrible. An absolute shock for those men and women and children that arrived here. And so it's about the sort of identity, the British identity that when they arrived here, they couldn't reconcile that they were British and yet they were being treated in so appallingly. You know, difficulties in all areas, difficulty finding housing, difficulty finding a job, the violence. You know, we talk about the Notting Hill so-called riots of 58 and the Nottingham riots of 1958. These were very alarming instances that people really couldn't get their head around. So the difference between sort of the United States and Britain was that the presence of African Americans has been sort of hundreds of years in one place, right? They're in the south primarily, but they were moving up to northern towns in the early 20th century. But also, there was a significant presence in the UK. Throughout the 19th century, in the 20th century onwards, then there was also a colour bar as well. There was a significant colour bar. You know, people weren't allowed to go into restaurants, they weren't allowed to go to pubs, they weren't allowed to find accommodation, and there was an activism that was going on there as well. I would say it's a it was about belonging, the rights. They felt that they were rights that br that these citizens had from the Caribbean. And so they were really campaigning for civil rights. They were campaigning for the civil rights as British citizens, that they believed that they were owed and that they were they deserved and that they expected. I guess I can't really sort of express how the shock, the absolute shock of people, because you know, I say the shock because that's the education you received in the Caribbean. You received the British education. You didn't study the Africanness, the African people at school. Never. You would have never learned anything about your heritage as an Africa. You would have learned about Shakespeare, you would have learned about Henry VIII, you would have learned about everything British Industrial Revolution. You would have learned all of that. So your identity is completely tied up with British history and heritage.

C.L.R. James, Darcus Howe and Black British radical thought

Madeleine Goodall 28:10

I guess somebody like C. L.R. James is a kind of interesting example of that, maybe, in their in what he did, what he wrote about, and how he figured out identity.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

C. L.R. James, probably Darkest Howl, and others, they would have gone to an equivalent of a type of public school system, like Queen's College. In the different Caribbean countries, they had these kind of public school equivalents and Stuart Hall as well. They would have passed a very tough exam to be received the best education on their respective ideas. And that education would have been a British education. As I said, they would have learned nothing about Bus's Rebellion or the Baptist Rebellion or anything around Africanity. So you carry this little Britain inside of you, and you go over and you're like, I'm British too. I've learned about Britain just like you, because we're British. And you're told you are not British. You do not belong here. And I believe that the impact of that must have been so profound. The impact of knowing that you do not, you are not British, despite having a British education, despite learning about British culture, you are not that thing.

Andrew Copson 29:31

Do you see people who had this British education and people like CLR James? I mean, that wasn't his wasn't one of his first books published by Leonard and Virginia Wolf, I think. I mean, it had lots of connection points with, you know, as it were, elite humanists, you know, in in their same sort of the social circles that they would have been in if they were white British people. Dark as Howe, CLR James, Stuart Hall. These are people who then end up, is what you're saying that they end up then arguing for equal treatment? And is that why the race relations are actually sort of framed in terms of equal treatment? Because what they see themselves as deserving is that same citizenship and that same treatment as every other British person has. And is that slightly different then from this sort of competing moral vision of society that someone like James Baldrin is laying out for America? In Britain, these people from the Caribbean are largely seeking an equal stake in Britishness as it already exists.

SPEAKER_01 30:27

Yeah, I would say that is correct, yes.

Andrew Copson 30:30

That's an interesting difference, isn't it? Nicholas, I don't know whether that inspires any thoughts for you, that difference.

SPEAKER_00 30:35

A lot of what Angelina said struck me as really fascinating and important. And I think that, you know, one of the things that came to mind is like this idea that, you know, I would connect to what Baldwin says at the debate, is that, you know, he sort of talks about this idea of like we're not asking for something that isn't already ours, right? He basically says, My ancestor's blood is in the soil. Like we've been here for hundreds of years, you know, we've fought in these wars, we've, you know, we've built the economy in so many different ways. You know, he says, How is my freedom and citizenship possibly a question now? And so I think this idea of that, you know, Baldwin had is that like we've paid our dues, is like the way Baldwin would often phrase it. And this sort of idea, like I'm he said, I'm not a ward of of America. I am not an object of missionary charity. I am one of the people who built the country. And so that that idea is is, I think runs through Baldwin's thought. He's not asking somebody like William F. Buckley or somebody like Robert Kennedy for something that he doesn't already deserve. The other line about that's really fascinating is, you know, in the debate is that Baldwin has this a line about Robert Kennedy. Like, so Baldwin is there to challenge people, like conservatives like Buckley and liberals like Kennedy, who hadn't quite, from Baldwin's point of view, come around to a fully just view yet. And, you know, Baldwin says, you know, Robert Kennedy said recently that uh we could have a black president in 40 years. And, you know, Baldwin says, you know, that was treated as a very emancipated statement by most white people, but they weren't in Harlem barbershops when that statement was heard, you know, where this the reaction is like, Robert Kennedy just got here yesterday. We've been here for hundreds of years, and he's telling us that, you know, one day if we're good, we can be president too. So I think that there's a kind of way in which, you know, the I think the the some of the language Angelina used as well really struck me as something that that Baldwin says, like that sense of shock, right? He says during the debate, it comes as a great shock as a young person, he says as a kid, to recognize that the you know the country to which you have pledged allegiance has not pledged allegiance to you. So there's something about that really resonated with me as I heard Angelina describe the situation in the UK.

Madeleine Goodall 32:42

And um

Black freethinkers, atheism and identity

Madeleine Goodall 32:43

Baldwin won the debate by a big landslide, shall we say, and the backlash then, the shock that that Buckley then felt. I again was reading that this, you know, afterwards he kind of explained this away or would, you know, had this narrative about it about how the vote was so lopsided because Baldwin was black and he hated America, he was a religious skeptic and a homosexual. Like all of these things that were like this person does not belong. For one thing, it really resonated with me. Um, and Andrew will know this because it's really similar to what um Mary Whitehouse said when the gay humanist group was set up in the aftermath of her taking gay news to trial for blasphemy. And she said that the backlash against her um when she was ultimately successful was because of a homosexual humanist intellectual lobby, this like imagined kind of collective conglomeration of everything that that was seen to be, you know, evil or or bad to her. And this idea that Buckley has about, you know, why Baldwin won and how it was kind of stacked against him because uh from the start, because of you know, all these things that that he was or all of these elements. And it's interesting as well that he does draw on this idea of him being a religious skeptic, as though, again, that is a a kind of attack on American values, on the kind of civilization itself, which again I find quite maybe this is another thing between a difference that seems to appear, whether fairly or not, between the kind of narratives in the UK and the US. I feel like quite a lot of really great scholarship has taken place by people like Anthony Pinn, Christopher Cameron, people like that about these black free thinkers in the US, including people like Douglas, including people like Baldwin, also major civil rights leaders like A. Philip Randolph and um and people like that. But we haven't quite done that so successfully or so clearly, maybe in in the UK with those figures. It's like we don't, and I'd be really interested, Angelina, in in what you think about this, because I was thinking recently, looking at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, who they mark people or they assign people, you know, to various religions and things. And it's really amazing how many figures on the ODMB, lots of people that we've spoken about already, Olive Morris, CLR James, Claudia Jones, Adelaide Hall, Darkus Howe, Stuart Hall, don't have any religion against them, but they similarly don't have anything like agnostic, atheist, humanist, free thinker, or anything. And I wonder if that is that seen as just less important. Is it the case that, like, I know somebody like CLR James, he's been described before as almost politics being his religion, a little bit similar to somebody like I think Claudia Jones has sometimes been referred to that as well. It's kind of an open question, really.

SPEAKER_01 35:35

It's a big one. Somebody like Darcas Howe, Darkus Howe was an atheist. I would say that he probably operated a really strong, unwavering secular commitment to the cause. Like his uncle, C. L. R. James. C. L. R. James was also an atheist. And even though Darkus Howe's father was an Anglican priest, he grew up within the religious tradition. Darkus Howe was so committed that he comes from the next phase. So you had like, you know, the people who came over in their 40s, right? The 1940s, their children were completely different. Those children became radicalized. Those children became understood and became very angry at the rejection. So they didn't care. They weren't even interested in about Britishness. They were more interested in like blackness. And Darkas Howe was kind of part of that. So Olive Morris as well. You know, they were really part of a radical black tradition. And I think that Darkus Howe, in his work as a journalist, as a writer, he published Race Today, which where it was really gathering information about sort of all the sort of inequalities and thinking about black thought, black British thought, intellectual thought. You know, those are the people that would be Darkus Howe, it would be Olive Morris, although she didn't write as much. Certainly Claudia Jones and people like John LaRose. John LaRose was writing a lot about this, and sort of George Cadmore, who's also was uh an atheist as well. I I don't know if they would have described themselves as humanists, I don't know that. But they were certainly Howe was dedicating his life to racial injustice. And during the mangrove trial, he and Althea Jones LeCoyne, they defended themselves. They didn't have lawyers, they cross-examined the police in that case, and and quite successfully so, to the point that the judge was saying there he said there was animosity, racism on both sides. But they got off, they were found not guilty for a fray, which is a very serious offense. They were part of the Black Panther, the Black British Panther Party, along with many others. I mean, even and also through art as well. So people like Linton Quasi Johnson, who was a Black Panther as well, he used poetry, used sub poetry to kind of express what the youth were experiencing in the 70s and 80s, very powerfully, I think.

Andrew Copson 38:06

Nicholas, are we romanticising? You know, Maddie said, and I think we do often think this in the UK, oh, there's lots of very explicit free thinking and humanist and secular figures in in US, African-American history, and liberation, but not so much in the UK. Is that true, or are we romanticizing in the the grass is always greener? I mean, I I know it's not just Baldwin, it's you know, there's the half, at least half the Harlem Renaissance as well, you know, who are of our way of thinking. But is this an accurate description when you hear us from Britain saying things like this about the American movement?

SPEAKER_00 38:34

I wouldn't claim to be an expert on, you know, sort of like humanist movement, free thinking in the US, but I find in my own work like it's been really interesting to think about Douglas and you know, Baldwin and King as my like three people I've spent the most time with. And obviously they're very different, especially on some of these questions, thinking about like King and Baldwin, for example, as I was getting ready to have this conversation today. I mean, it's really it's interesting to think about him in this register because he's such a complicated figure. And of course, it totally makes sense to me that like the Cambridge humanists would host him and he would be, you know, a hero. Um, of course, you know, I think he's sort of always, you know, grappling with these questions, you know, from his childhood, you know, forward, he's really grappling with a lot of these big questions about, you know, about theology and the intersection between theology and morality and politics. And so, yeah, I mean, when I when I think about you know, sort of Baldwin and this register, I think about like the conversations with Malcolm X, for example, that happened in 1961, that folks can listen to audio recordings of those. And I would definitely recommend people do that because it's I think it's it's Baldwin at his like kind of religious skeptic best, I think, in some ways, because he's there's a wonderful moment when he goes back and forth, you know, with Malcolm for a while. And basically, you know, Baldwin says, from my point of view, you know, all theologies are suspect. You know, he says the nation of Islam is just as suspect as the rest of them. But, you know, he basically says, I want to present the audience with this reckless idea of like confronting, you know, I want to confront the world as myself, of not having to rely on something that ultimately has to be believed. And so there's something about this sort of to me fits baldwin perfectly in this tradition. And then there's, you know, other moments that I would just highlight like his speech that he gives in July 1968. You know, he's the keynote speaker at the World Council of Churches, and he's invited to speak there because their initial keynote speaker, the first person they invited was King, and he had been assassinated in April of 68. And so I find that speech really fascinating because Baldwin is there before all these ministers, kind of reflecting on his relationship to Christianity writ large, and you know, essentially, you know, delivers a very like religious speech, you know, about and basically makes the case that Jesus of Nazareth is one of the most betrayed human beings in world history. So I yeah, I find that like there's definitely a really interesting, you know, and robust tradition here. And then there's within that tradition, as far as I've engaged it, there's all this really, there's this, this, uh, this complexity that I find both fascinating intellectually and also just important, you know, um politically and also just humanly, you know, as we all try to figure these things out ourselves.

Madeleine Goodall 41:11

Yeah, I'm really uh just so struck by all of what you were saying, but partly also it comes back, I think, right back to what Angelina was kind of um saying at the very beginning about being more honest in when we do history um and when we explore these figures um and not trying to, you know, show them as one thing or another, not trying to claim them for one identity or another, particularly when their whole lives and you know their activism was so intertwined with those questions and with often challenging those assumptions or kind of simplistic labelling and things. But at the same time, it it does really fascinate me how they did have these different, again, often very complex relationships with things like the church institutions like that. And I know that, you know, in the certainly in the the British context, there's a huge amount of that that's very bound up with community and with identity in terms of how you're raised and and where your kind of networks are. Did we see any of those figures? I mean, people like say Olive Morris, Claudia Jones, Dark as Hell, obviously you mentioned, did they reflect on, challenge, work, were they working out their relationship with the church or with religious ideas in similar ways, or was it just not something that was so front and center?

SPEAKER_01 42:33

I don't know that it was, but I did find a quote from Darkest Hell that I thought was quite interesting. But he said, I have left Christianity behind, but I have brought with me the liberal notions that it gave me. My God was only generous, and my radicalism is the radicalism of Christ. And I sort of thought about what that meant. And I was kind of thinking about sometimes we know how Christ is represented and how today, okay, certainly in his lifetime, he was not considered to be divine. He was considered to be a rabble rouser, a troublemaker, walked around with 12 other guys, and they were and nobody liked him very much. And then I think about he keeps saying, I wonder, I mean, I don't want to upset some people there, but I wonder about his message, and he says the kingdom of heaven. He's he say it's all inside of you. Yeah, everything that you need is in is within. Yeah, you don't need a list of like a 10 commandments to tell you how to be a decent human being. That's how I understand that. So I think that's what perhaps Darkest Howard is saying. He wants people to be decent, right? Be a decent human being. Stop discriminating both people, stop being violent against people. That's essentially that's what he was working towards, and that what he was campaigning for. The campaigning for was ultimately hoping at the end goal would be that people would stop being. Violent in all ways that a person can be violent. So I think I that's how I understand that statement.

Madeleine Goodall 44:08

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And just living living the values. I think it's interesting too that somebody like, you know, you can talk about Christ and the the example of the Leicester Secular Hall, for example, you know, built by these secular secularist radicals in the 19th century, has a bust of Jesus Christ on the front of it. There was that recognition that whether you're taking that as a divine inspiration or not, as clearly they weren't, there is still that, you know, those fundamental concepts of how to live, how to be good, how to be decent, um, as you say. And that does seem um to come back again, or Baldwin seems to come back to that as well, Nicholas, in terms of the um, yeah, just goodness, empathy, kindness.

SPEAKER_00 44:56

Yeah. I mean, I I think with both, um, I would say with you know, Douglas and Baldwin, the way I, you know, one of my major, you know, kind of conclusions, and I don't think this is original to me, but about about the way they thought about religion was, yeah, that their fundamental question was how does your belief system lead you to treat other human beings in the world? You know, in a sense, like of course they're like engaging with actual religious traditions and all sorts of interesting and complex ways, but like for me, like their religion, you know, was justice, you know, so trying to figure out. So when Baldwin, you know, says, you know, things like, you know, if if God doesn't make us more free, if your conception of God doesn't make you more free and more loving, then it's time we got rid of that conception of God. That doesn't mean necessarily, I think, for Baldwin, that he wants to get rid of all conceptions of God altogether. Maybe some, you know, he finds to be more, more useful and possibly more believable. But, you know, he saw so much, I mean, so much of what he's doing in a book like The Fire Next Time is pointing out all the ways in which these, you know, ideas have been used to oppress people, right? And so, and Douglas did the same thing. I mean, if you look at Douglas's most famous, you know, so that's Baldwin's most famous book, and think about Douglas's most famous speech, his speech on July 5th, 1852, reflecting on what to the slave is the fourth of July. I mean, a huge portion of that speech, a portion of the speech that's often cut out when it's excerpted in all the anthologies is an attack on American religious institutions for protecting uh the institution of slavery or ignoring the institution of slavery. And um, so Douglas sees this deep uh hypocrisy and from his point of view, you know, a deeply profane, you know, kind of use of religious ideas in order to um support oppression. And so I think that, yeah, that to me is I think really essential to Baldwin and to Douglas. And then of course, you know, with the work I've been doing on King is is you know different, you know, he's a minister, right? And he's definitely a minister. And so I've been, you know, thinking, you know, in sort of a different along different lines lately about how these ideas can be can be thought about in relation to civil rights. But yeah, I think that's the big thing is like I think for Douglas and and for King in a different way, and and for Baldwin, I mean, justice is really has to be at the core of the belief system for it to have what they think is you know real value in the world.

Lessons for today

Madeleine Goodall 47:17

This is probably uh almost seems obvious, but um what what do you feel like the relevance? What what can we take from these figures today, any of them? What's the kind of what's the lessons for now?

SPEAKER_01 47:32

You know, where where are we now? Not quite where we are, how religion is being used, how it's being weaponized. They're saying issues are they're still very much present. They want to use religion to stop women's rights, reproductive rights, keeping people divided. We're not doing really great at the moment, if even of how religion is being utilized to enact more violence on people.

SPEAKER_00 48:00

Yeah, I mean, certainly I mean I'll just stick to to Baldwin's relevance. I mean, I think that yeah, now um in the US, you have this toxic melange, you know, of you know, Christian nationalism and these other forms of nationalism that have been ascendant in this country. You know, when Baldwin saw in you know the 1980s, as he was, you know, nearing the end of his life, he saw the rise of the religious right. Um, you know, he wrote, these men, you know, people like Jerry Falwell and others, like they do not know the man from Galilee. You know, I mean Baldwin sort of accused them also of of weaponizing a kind of set of beliefs to advance a particular agenda. And so I think right now it just feels like you know, somebody like Baldwin and his engagement with these ideas is is so so relevant, you know, because he's again going to draw our attention to the ways in which ideas can be can be used in a, you know, these traditions can be mobilized to a variety of different ends. And we have to recognize that people will often weaponize traditions in order to advance an agenda that has nothing to do with what Baldwin takes to be the best in those traditions. And so I think that, you know, one of the things I love about what, you know, sort of, you know, sort of while watching Baldwin or or thinking about Baldwin's engagement with various right-wing figures of his day is that he would, you know, he would often call them out, Buckley included and others like uh the segregationist James Jackson Kilpatrick comes to mind, where he'd say to these guys, like, you you claim to be conservatives and attempting to conserve something like quote unquote Western civilization or American civilization. And Baldwin would reveal all the ways in which they were, you know, failing to conserve the things of value in those traditions. And in fact, he would reveal them to be interested in conserving their own power more than anything else. And so I think that's a lot of what we see going on. I don't think, you know, these Christian nationalist movements that we're seeing in the US right now, you know, that's what it's about. It's about figuring out ways to rationalize the oppression of other people. It's not about any deeply felt religious conviction as far as I can tell. Um I can't see into people's souls yet, but that's fine.

Favourite Humanists And Further Reading

Madeleine Goodall 50:08

Thank you. Uh so we always end this the podcast by asking if you have a favorite atheist or a favorite humanist from history, whether somebody we've mentioned already or somebody else that you want to kind of give a shout out to at the end. I think I have to say Eslander or Essie Robeson. So we did mention her briefly before. I'm just going to give her another shout out. She was a really accomplished anthropologist, but also um an activist uh writer, just an all-round amazing person, very committed to humanitarian action, to anti-colonialism, to anti-racism on both sides, again, of the Atlantic. She spent a lot of time in London and studied at the LSE, and so was connected very much to the British movement as well as the American movement for civil rights and indeed for international human rights all over the place. Um and I really like there was a quote about her by somebody who'd worked with her who after Islander Robson died said that she had loved life and loved humanity. And I think that kind of captures a lot of what we've been talking about, all of the figures really, and what they were working for ultimately.

Andrew Copson 51:22

Mine has to be CLR James. I mean, what an amazing writer, what an incredible life, the people he met, the people he inspired. Um, and apparently he was an incredible speaker. I've never actually heard him speak, maybe there's a recording out there somewhere, but anyway, he's my favourite of the ones that we've talked about so far.

SPEAKER_01 51:37

I think I will also choose CLR James because I love his work, not only as an important sort of Marxist thinker, but also because he was a fantastic historian as well. In 1938, he wrote The Black Jacobins. And the Black Jacobins, he wrote that. I remember him actually being seen a footage of him being interviewed. Actually, it might well have been by Stuart Hall back in the maybe the early 80s, late 70s, where he said, The reason I wrote this book is because I wanted African Caribbean people and people generally to know about this amazing event, this amazing occurrence that took place in the late 18th century, where enslaved Africans in Haiti beat the French, they beat the Spanish and the British. They were able to by this extraordinary, amazing accomplishment. And the work that he did, him and um the work that he did actually going to French archives and you know trying to translate for a lunch to translate or by getting somebody to translate from what an amazing piece of work, what an amazing legacy. If anything, if that was the only thing that he'd done, he would have been like this amazing individual. Him and Walter Walden, of course, that did a similar thing. You know, so yeah, I would say yeah. CLO, James.

SPEAKER_00 53:04

Yeah, um, this is a tough one. I mean, I I think in part, as I've indicated throughout the conversation, yeah, I definitely think of you know, sort of Baldwin as having, you know, a big part of Baldwin being in this tradition and then maybe some complexities at the margin. So but I've talked enough about Baldwin. Um, I guess somebody who else who I, you know, would think of as you know, one of Baldwin's collaborators, friends, rider dies, is Lorraine Hansbury, who came up a little, you mentioned uh, you know, Lorraine a little bit earlier, Maddie. And I I don't know exactly if you know Lorraine identified as a humanist in this sense, but I I think that she seems to fit, you know, and I think that many ways in which Lorraine was this, you know, radical figure who lived, you know, she lived such a short life, but in that short life, um, she would just did so many powerful things artistically and politically. And I yeah, I think of you know Lorraine as being somebody who's fundamentally committed to this idea of human dignity and trying to utilize storytelling in order to, you know, um, to bring uh real human lives to the stage and allow people to see themselves on the stage maybe for the first time and uh and to start you know utilize art in order to bring about social change. And I so I love that aspect of Lorraine's legacy. And then, you know, just the more directly, you know, sort of explicitly, you know, political engagement of Lorraine Hansbury. Um, you know, you mentioned the famous meeting in May 1963 when Baldwin calls out the Kennedy administration by way of you know a telegram for failing to take a proper you know stance on civil rights in the midst of the Birmingham campaign. And Lorraine Hansbury, Baldwin and several other artist intellectuals are invited to meet with Kennedy and the Kennedy apartment overlooking Central Park. And it's in that moment that I think that you just see this, this really, you know, I would call a radical humanism of Lorraine Hansbury, you know, on display, where she's you know, sitting there with the Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, the brother of the president, and just you know, really calling him to account, telling him that their failure, if they, you know, that they're unwilling to really hear the words of somebody like the activist Jerome Smith, who's in the room, who bears you know, scars on his body from the civil rights struggle. If the Kennedys are unwilling to listen to him and to understand his experience, then there isn't much hope for the country. And so she says, you know, to Kennedy at the end of that meeting, you know, this isn't about, this isn't a you know, quote unquote Negro problem. This isn't about, this isn't a kind of problem that has anything to do with the people in this room on this side of the table. This is a problem of American civilization. She says, I'm very concerned about the civilization that can produce photographs like the ones we're seeing out of Birmingham with, you know, law enforcement officers with their feet on people's necks. And so I think there's something about that kind of radical humanism, this radical willingness to call the powerful to account. So I've choose uh Lorraine Hansbury as my as my favorite humanist today.

Madeleine Goodall 56:03

Great example. I will also think, and it's a whole other episode to talk about this, but Bears saying, because you kind of mentioned it, the role of writers, poets, creatives, artists in, as you say, laying humanity bare, showing people as they are, exploring the power of empathy, of imagination, of all of those things. Um yeah, exploring so many of these ideas. Um was it Malcolm X who called James Baldwin the poet of civil rights? This idea of how you communicate these things, both you know, in speeches, in political activism, but also in art and lectures. And I'm thinking of people like Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes and you know, so many other um amazing writers and artists who were again all part of this um the struggle and the making, the laying bare of it. Thank

Where to find our more

Madeleine Goodall 56:57

you both so much. It's been just really incredibly interesting, lovely to meet you, e meet you both, and to discuss some of these things. Last but not least, I'll just ask you to let people listening to this know where they might be able to find out more about your your work.

SPEAKER_01 57:13

I don't know, I could hardly say this. I do, I write a lot of stuff and then I just put it up on LinkedIn. That's where I put my stuff.

SPEAKER_00 57:21

I guess I have a website. Um shout out to Nikki Terry who did all the work on that. But um, yeah, so it's just www.nicholasbucola.com. And yeah, I it's got, you know, sort of a lot of you know essays I've written and links to the books, and um, you know, I haven't done a good job updating the events thing. But yeah, I'm out there on the road sometimes, and hopefully I'll get back to the UK with this book or the next book. Um, so uh yeah, it's been wonderful to speak with both of you.

SPEAKER_01 57:47

Yep, a real pleasure.

Andrew Copson 57:48

Thank you for listening to Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage Podcast, brought to you by Humanists UK. To join, support, or find out more about Humanists UK's campaigns and services, visit humanists.uk or you can follow us on social media at Humanists UK. This podcast was produced by Humanize Live. Find out more about creating content for compassionate communities at www.humanize.live.

Madeleine Goodall 58:12

And you can find out more about the rich history and influence of humanism on the humanist heritage website at heritage.humanist.uk, the thing.