'Freedom Season' argues the events of 1963 transformed the civil rights movement
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. There's that meme that goes like, I really wish I wasn't living through a major historical event right now. And I get the sentiment. There are years that feel like everything is happening all at once. Take 1963. That year is the subject of the new book by scholar Peniel Joseph titled Freedom Season, How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution.

And in it, he argues that the events of that year paved the way for the next 50 years of American history. He talks here in Scott Tong about what the public reaction was like to all these historical events happening around them. That's coming up. This message comes from Sony Pictures Classics with the new romantic comedy Jane Austen Wrecked My Life. A woman dreams of becoming a successful writer and experiencing true love while at a Jane Austen writer's residency, now playing only in theaters.

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1963 was a watershed year in the civil rights struggle. Widespread protests on streets and at lunch counters and violent responses to those protests. Children killed in a church bombing. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech at the march in Washington. And President Kennedy and his brother, the Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, pushed Congress to take action. And then, of course, the president was assassinated in November of 1963.

In the end, the turmoil of that year did bring change, new laws on civil rights and on voting rights. Peniel Joseph writes about this in his new book, Freedom Season, a 1963 transformed America's civil rights revolution. He's a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, and founder of its Center for Race and Democracy. Peniel Joseph, welcome back. It's great to be here, Scott.

Before going into the key moments of 1963, which you wrote about, I'd like you to distill your main argument, if you would. Why, in your view, was 1963 the year that transformed the civil rights movement?

So 1963 becomes a hinge moment in American history, and it ushers in a 50-year racial justice consensus followed by not just the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, but by many different transformations in institutions, higher education, corporate America, so many different things.

That without 1963, that 50-year consensus period, which ends in 2013 with the Shelby v. Holder decision that ends enforcement in large part of the Voting Rights Act,

63 is that moment where you have massive civil rights demonstrations from coast to coast. You have a best-selling author in James Baldwin, who's a through line through the whole year. You've got Malcolm X leading anti-police brutality marches in Rochester, New York, but also in Washington, D.C. You've got King, even before the March on Washington, pushing for a moral reframing of the nation. But you also have local leaders like Gloria Richardson in Cambridge, Maryland,

who is really communicating a different message of civil rights militancy and goes toe-to-toe with Bobby Kennedy. You've got different black leaders meeting with Bobby Kennedy. So it's just a tremendous, triumphant, and also tragic year. The decade we think of as the 1960s is impossible without looking at 63. Mm-hmm.

And you introduce us to so many of these kind of varied voices on civil rights that don't always agree. And I want to ask you about James Baldwin, of course, the famous black writer. Let's take a listen to him speaking in September of 1963. Now, if we had the economic weight to line the track and dam the rivers and hoe the cotton and also raise the children, we can now use that weight.

for the first time for ourselves and for the liberation of this country. Why was he a critical voice? So Baldwin really is the brilliant black writer, Harlem born, 1924, flees to Paris, becomes an expatriate by 1948.

By the late 1950s, he becomes really intrigued by the civil rights struggle and pours himself into that struggle, does a profile for Harper's Magazine on Dr. King, and in 1962 publishes the then longest essay in the history of The New Yorker

called A Letter from a Region in My Mind, a 20,000-word essay on race, democracy, racial slavery, historical memory, American exceptionalism. It's just a defining work of art. And that becomes the main essay in The Fire Next Time. And that becomes an instant blockbuster national global bestseller. And so what Baldwin is doing is making an argument that Americans—

across the racial divide are estranged kin. He talks about an inheritance versus a birthright, that Americans have an inheritance

of land of the free, home of the brave. But the birthright for Black people is this demonization and dehumanization and denigration. And he is convinced that before we can get to any kind of policy or rapprochement or reconciliation, we have to confront the original sin of racial slavery and Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy, and also confront why we continue to lie about it.

And so that little clip that you played, that's from the aftermath of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing when six black children are killed in one day, four young girls and two boys. And Baldwin becomes –

profit on fire. And he's saying that what we need to do is understand what black people have done to produce citizenship and wealth in this country. And they need to see that dignity for themselves. So he becomes this instrumental figure who meets with Bobby Kennedy and whose work is being debated among conservatives, among liberals, among blacks, among whites, among people of color globally. Yeah.

Let me ask you about Birmingham, because a lot happened in Birmingham, Alabama that year. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested, of course, wrote a famous letter from a Birmingham jail in April. A month later, the city saw some of the largest civil rights demonstrations. A notable image from a newspaper photographer was police using attack dogs on peaceful protesters. And I want to ask you, why was that a key moment?

Those German shepherds being used against peaceful demonstrators, Scott, becomes a key moment. Combined with the fire hoses that are powerful enough to strip the bark off trees, the fire department, as ordered by the city commissioner, Eugene Bull Connor, these images are going to be really, really terrible images that really shame and humiliate the United States, even as they were designed to shame and denigrate the demonstrators.

You mentioned Bull Connor, the commissioner in Birmingham, ardent segregationist. We have some sound from him speaking June 1963, just before the University of Alabama was desegregated. You know, those candidates, a fan Washington, that little old Bobby Sox and his brother, the president, they'd give anything in earth if we had some trouble here.

If we don't have any trouble, we can beat them at the old game. What is Bull Connor saying here, and what is he representing?

Well, Bull Connor represents the face of massive resistance against racial integration, against the very idea of black dignity and citizenship. What Bull Connor is saying there was they were afraid both Governor Wallace, who famously said segregation then, segregation now, segregation forever. They were afraid that U.S. marshals were going to racially integrate the University of Alabama.

And eventually that did happen. Wallace does his famous stand at the schoolhouse door on June 11th, 1963, the same day that John F. Kennedy does his famous civil rights speech. So it becomes a states' rights conversation and discussion and debate, this idea that white folks in Birmingham have a right of freedom of association and don't want any discrimination.

federal intervention, but that denies black dignity and citizenship and human rights. Speaking of President Kennedy, as you write in the book, he began the year speaking less directly, more tentatively on civil rights, and then things changed. June 11th, he addresses the nation in what you call one of his finest moments. Let's listen. One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves of

Yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free.

until all its citizens are free. Until all its citizens are free. The president goes on a call on Congress to enact legislation protecting voting rights, legal status. What was the public reaction? What was the impact of the speech?

The public reaction was powerfully in favor of that speech. Civil rights activists were very, very pleased. Medgar Evers listened to that speech before he dies, 1 o'clock the next morning from an assassin's bullet. Right at the end of YCP activists, Medgar Evers, yeah. From Mississippi. In Jackson. In Jackson. And so it's a tremendously powerful speech. It's a tremendously effective speech. It's the best speech by an American president on civil rights issues.

since Lincoln's second inauguration. And he says the revolution can be violent or peaceful. He says those who do nothing invite shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly recognize right as well as reality. We know, of course, what happens in November of that year, President Kennedy is assassinated. And days after, the new president, LBJ, President Johnson,

Tells the country the best way to honor Kennedy's memory is for Congress to pass the civil rights bill. In the end, why do you think the legislation passes?

Well, the Kennedy assassination is a shock. Baldwin and Murley Evers, who's Medgar Evers' widow, they put Kennedy within the pantheon of the slain black civil rights martyrs of that year. They're saying he was slain because of the atmosphere of violence that's rooted in racial hatred. What LBJ does is say that we've got to listen to our better angels. And within the context of that, America...

And that political climate, that actually works. And you're going to see the Civil Rights Act passed by July 2nd, 1964. And then, of course, it still takes some time to pass the Voting Rights Act, August 6th, 1965. And that's going to be because of Selma to Montgomery. But we've got James Baldwin in Selma in October of 1963. And we sort of see that as a prelude to what's going to happen in 1965.

Peniel Joseph is a professor of history and public affairs and founder of the LBJ School Center for Race and Democracy at the University of Texas, Austin. We've been talking to him about his new book, Freedom Season, a 1963 transformed America's civil rights revolution.

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