Historian Peniel E. Joseph on How 1963 ‘Cracked Open and Remade’ America
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From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim. Coming up on Forum, as America finds itself in a politically volatile and polarized state, we take a closer look at another time when, quote, America came undone and remade itself. 1963, according to historian Peniel Joseph, who calls it the defining year of the civil rights movement, quote, a year of miracles and tragedies, progress and setbacks.

So how did America find the courage to transform? We learn more from Joseph, whose new book is called Freedom Season, after this news. Mina Kim here. We've got a short pledge break going on right now. So you on the Pledge Free stream or podcast or nighttime replay get a little bonus that I like to call behind the scenes.

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Welcome to Forum. I'm Ina Kim. As President Trump's backsliding on civil rights threatens the movement's gains, we look back at the year that historian Peniel Joseph says was pivotal in planting the seeds for landmark civil rights legislation, 1963. 1963 is not an end, but a beginning.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech at the March on Washington was one of the defining moments of that year, a year that saw the murders of four black girls at a church in Alabama and the assassination of a president, a year of deep political and racial division and immeasurable violence. And yet America found the strength to move forward.

What lessons can we draw from the events of 1963? Peniel Joseph joins me now. He's Barbara Jordan Chair in Political Values and Ethics, Distinguished Service Leadership Professor of History, and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas at Austin. Peniel, welcome to Forum. Thank you for having me, Mina. So Peniel, what was the mood of the country like at the start of 1963?

Well, at the start of the year, the mood was restive, restless in the Black community. James Meredith had become the first Black student to enroll at Ole Miss in September of 1962, which required mobilization on the Kennedy administration's part. There were days of rioting there in Oxford, Mississippi. Meredith was deciding whether or not to continue at the University of Mississippi.

The Kennedy administration was really applying a sort of hands off policy on civil rights, even though 1963 was the centennial, the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. For Jack and Bobby Kennedy, civil rights spelled a lot of trouble that might sink their legislative agenda, which that year at the top of it was actually a massive tax cut.

And for civil rights activists beyond King and Malcolm, who are part of the story, but people like the journalist William Worthy, the playwright and public intellectual and feminist Lorraine Hansberry, and the grassroots activist from Cambridge, Maryland, Gloria Richardson, they were in the mood for organizing and action in a way that would really transform the entire country. But at the start of January,

Many people would not have expected the way in which 1963 unfolds as what I think is the pivotal, most important year of the 1960s. Yeah, there are so many people that you highlight who made this year a pivotal year. But as you say, MLK was the most prominent civil rights organizer at the time, and he really is...

almost confrontational at the start, right? Marking the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st, 1963, and really kind of challenging Kennedy. He is. When we think about King in 1963, King is trying to take his organizing and mobilizing to a different level. When we think about Dr. King, we have to think of him as somebody who views nonviolent civil disobedience as something that's coercive,

powerful and muscular. So King believed in a beloved community, but he felt we were gonna have to struggle together for that beloved community. At the March on Washington, he says we're gonna have to go to jail to build that beloved community. But when we think about his letter from Birmingham jail,

Even before we get to the letter from Birmingham jail, he's pushing and prodding the Kennedy administration. And in his meetings with Jack and Bobby, he's saying, you're not doing enough. And what he's trying to convince them, which isn't going to occur until the spring, is

is that not only is civil rights a moral issue, but it's fundamental to making multiracial democracy work in the United States. And there's going to be global reverberations. So when we think about King, he really serves as a mobilizer, but also a theoretician, a political theorist of a certain vision of justice. And that's what Letter from a Birmingham Jail, that letter

is a theory of justice, but it's a confrontational theory of justice that critiques

white liberals as being catastrophically immoral by standing by and wanting more order than they want justice. And in that letter, King announces publicly that he will no longer obey immoral laws, which gets him into a lot of trouble with conservatives, small C conservatives who say, well, what do you mean you're not going to obey the law? You're a lawbreaker and you want us to support justice.

court, but he's saying that segregation is immoral and we have to stand up against immorality. But he also says in Letter from Birmingham Jail that

the protests happening in Birmingham are in the tradition of the American Revolution. So the quote he uses is that the young people who are being arrested in Birmingham, he says, one day they're going to be celebrated for bringing us all back to those great wells of democracy that were dug deep by the founding fathers. So what King does in rhetorical sleight of hand is connect this cutting edge movement for multiracial democracy of a kind that the founding fathers

or mothers of the era could have scarcely imagined. And he says, this is the most patriotic vision that we can have together in 1963. So it's really extraordinary. And some people agree with what he's saying. Some people reluctantly follow. Many are saying, no, this is coercive. He's a communist. This is subversive. And we're not going to be on board with this. What do you think of the state of that political calculus situation?

Today, do you think it still exists strongly today? Or is it in tatters that really protest fighting for racial justice is perhaps the most patriotic of the patriotic traditions that the nation idealizes?

Well, I think it still exists today. I think what we see in 1963 is the dawn of a 50 year racial justice consensus that ends with the Shelby v. Holder decision in June of 2013, a 5-4 decision that eviscerates really some of the most important aspects of the Voting Rights Act.

But in that 50 years, even though it's imperfect, Black people and indigenous folks and queer folks and women and women of color are going to have the most access to political power, to wealth, to education, to employment, to living wherever they want to live in the history of the republic.

That's imperfect because side by side with that is mass incarceration. Side by side with that is instances of violence and terror and oppression. But it is this huge progress that without 1963, we wouldn't have the context to understand why we're living in a post-racial justice world.

consensus society and how do we get that back? And I think this year, especially when we move beyond King and Malcolm, so important, we'd love to talk about them, but the intricacies of this year is the way in which so many ordinary people, the Black quotidian and at times the white quotidian and

people who are Asian American and indigenous and Hispanic and others came together to really transform the world at the local, national, and global level. And so it's really a remarkable story.

I want to invite listeners in. What do you remember from 1963? Did you or relatives participate in the civil rights movement at the time? Share that story. Or what are your questions about the year? As you listen, what parallels do you notice between 1963 and now or connections? You can email forum at kqed.org. You can find us on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram.

Instagram or threads at KQED Forum. You can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. We're talking with Peniel Joseph, author of Freedom Season, How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution. And, you know, we're coming right up on a break, but I do just want to ask you if you could describe what Birmingham was like at that time, the time that there was the desegregation campaign going on, the time that King was placed in jail there.

Birmingham was a decaying industrial city, the citadel of the old Confederacy, a dying steel town, rigidly segregated, black folks having no access to decent housing, health care, quality education, but really on the move through the help of a local activist named Fred Shuttlesworth, who was part of the Alabama Christian Human Rights Movement,

after the NAACP was outlawed, really on the move to bring small-D democracy to Birmingham or to die trying. We'll learn more right after the break. Stay with us. This is Forum. I'm Mina Kim. That's it!

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Learn more at sfopera.com. Support for Forum comes from Rancho La Puerta, a wellness resort in Baja, California, just an hour from San Diego. Three-, four-, and seven-night summer packages include fitness classes, hiking, live music, mindfulness, and culinary adventures, featuring fruits and veggies straight off the vine.

Special rates and offers are available for summer stays and first-time guests. Savor summer at Rancho La Puerta, rancholapuerta.com. You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking this hour with Peniel Joseph.

Author of Freedom Season on How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution. And you, our listeners, are welcome to join the conversation with your questions about what happened that year, what you remember from 1963, whether you had, you yourself or had relatives participate in the civil rights movement and in the issues of that particular year and the events of that particular year.

As you listen to Peniel Joseph, tell us what parallels or connections you draw between 1963 or today by calling 866-733-6786, emailing forum at kqed.org, or finding us on our social channels at kqedforum. So, Peniel, who made up the most prominent opposition to racial justice? You know, there was the violent sort of law enforcement opposition and also the political and radical opposition, if you will. So who were they all?

Well, certainly they are made up of a confluence and a convergence of groups. On some levels, the most voluble segregationist in 1963 was George Wallace, unquestionably the governor of Alabama who vows that segregation now, segregation then, segregation forever. So he becomes this iconic figure.

But it's really, you know, you think about the Arizona, the courtly Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater on his way to the 1964 Republican nomination at the Cal Palace in San Francisco. You think about Sheriff Jim Clark, who's a local face of white supremacy in Selma, Alabama. And there is a great scene there with James Baldwin in October of 1963 and Jim Forman and others

trying to register black people to vote before Selma to Montgomery demonstration of '65. And you also think of someone like William F. Buckley, and he is the founder of the National Review and gives, you know, he's the foremost Northern white apologist for racial segregation and anti-black racism and violence. And in '63, he's still an unapologetic,

a person who's not a believer in reconstruction, really a redemptionist. And you also think about liberals who are wavering. You know, Jimmy Baldwin's good friend, Norman Podhoretz of Commentary Magazine and the great essay, "My Negro Problem and Ours,"

But our Negro problem. And yeah. And so in that essay, he's pushing back against Baldwin's The Fire, The Fire Next Time. And he's really saying, well, you know, Black people I grew up with in the Lower East Side, there were all kinds of Black people and I didn't think they were really victims. I was bullied by Black people.

So, you know, he's on his way to becoming a foremost neoconservative voice. So there's a lot there. And of course, there's the John Birchers. The John Birchers are there. Real right wing extremists, including the head of the Bircherites, who's saying that Eisenhower is a communist.

The Birch Rites are saying that JFK, John F. Kennedy is a communist and he's going to bring 10,000 troops from the Congo, Africans, to invade Texas. And they really believed this 62 years ago before QAnon. So there's a huge opposition of Dixiecrats in the Senate and in the House who are against any kind of civil rights legislation. But part of this, Mina, is just the average American. Newsweek does sentiment polling online.

for the first time in extensive way in black communities, but they also do stuff in white communities and Newsweek, Saturday Evening Post. And, you know, many whites are white Americans are fine with racial segregation. And in 63, this is before the Civil Rights Act, before the Voting Rights Act in 1963, under, you know, very vicious apartheid conditions. There are white Americans who are saying, you know,

struggles for black dignity and citizenship are actually reverse racism. And there are white Americans in '63 saying black people are treated too good. So there's a large context and a large variety of opinion. I think what's important here is the way in which these ideas about freedom, democracy, citizenship, and dignity

are gonna be debated in 1963 from all these different corners. And they're gonna culminate when you follow the entire year. And this is why this project was so exciting for me. I'd never written a book about just a single year. You're able to let that year breathe and to see the twists and turns

And certainly nothing that occurs in that year from Medgar Evers' assassination to the murders of the four girls, Black girls, Carol Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair, and two young Black boys that same day on September 15th, 1963 in Birmingham, Peanut Ware and Johnny Robinson,

to JFK's assassination, none of that is expected. So it's important for us to, when you really relive the year, these are all very shocking moments. Nobody expects these things to happen the way they do. And they all have a pivotal impact on the nation. And then there are real triumphs, you know, the March on Washington, you know, James Baldwin calls it, you know, what he's witnessing, the language of human joy. And I've got a chapter titled that.

is really extraordinary, you know, and and even though there's gonna be critics most famously Malcolm X, Malcolm attends the what March on Washington. That's how big of a deal it is He's there and we never think of the March on Washington as something being an event that King speaks at that but that Malcolm X actually is is right there in the center of things so

It's really an extraordinary year and the way in which ideas take hold to transform politicians and political leaders, both in the United States, but also globally, because we think about what's happening in Africa and Ghana and other places with the anti-colonial movements and movements for decolonization. So Kennedy and the movement

are speaking to a global audience about freedom. For the most part, Kennedy speaks more eloquently about freedom abroad than at home until the spring of that year. Right.

And I do really want to get into the tragedies and the triumphs, but just listening to you talk about the political divisions, even within the racial opposition, just really felt like both a reflection of sort of the contemporary political polarization we're seeing today and also the seeds of it, too.

Absolutely. The polarization that we see today really echoes what we saw in 1963. The difference is we had a different presidential administration and we had different norms of debates. And what's so interesting about '63 is how rough and tumble the debates are, but in certain ways how serious those debates are and the way in which people have much more tolerance

for people who are really opposed in certain ways to their existence. Right? But there's a tolerance there. A great example of this, Mina, is that the top two most popular college speakers in 1963 are, number one is Barry Goldwater and number two is Malcolm X.

Wow, incredible. Yes, you know, one of the people that you also really center this book around is James Baldwin. And when you think about the kind of worlds that he could move through and the kinds of things that he was saying, and as you say, the ability...

to give him a stage and a place to say it, as well as his insistence on creating one for himself, is really pretty remarkable. I actually want to play a clip of him from a 1963 documentary that was actually produced and directed by KQED called Take This Hammer, where he's really calling out President Kennedy. What is really crucial is whether or not the country, the people in the country, the citizenry, are able to recognize that there is no moral distance

No moral distance, which is to say no distance between the facts of life in San Francisco and the facts of life in Birmingham. There is no moral distance, which is to say no distance between President Kennedy and Bull Connor because the same machine put them both in power. Talk about...

James Baldwin, and why, you know, you center chapter one, for example, on his perspective, the epigraph of your book is him saying, once I was able to define my role as distinguished from my quote, place in the extraordinary drama that is America, I was released from the illusion that I hated America.

Yeah, so Baldwin is really key and in this book I use him as a through line for the book and I'm working on another project on Baldwin as we speak.

in 63 as well, but it's going to be more discreet about Baldwin himself. When we think about Baldwin, very, very key protean figure. Baldwin becomes the heart and soul of that year because he helps us come to think about the United States of America as an imagined community that is an aspirational community that doesn't really exist yet. He tries to

allow all Americans of all backgrounds to see behind the myths and the lies and the fantasies about America and American democracy and and he makes this argument that we're really estranged kin, but we have to understand that the original sin of racial slavery has turned our politics into

and our institutions into something quite grotesque and catastrophic. But it doesn't mean that we are grotesque and we are catastrophic, which is why he's always imploring all Americans to achieve a kind of political maturity where you can actually find out the entire history of the nation, including settler colonialism, including racial slavery, including anti-Semitism, including

misogyny and sexism and queer phobia and all these different things and come to create something that's really beautiful by recognizing the inherent flaws in the inability to face and confront

why we're in the jam we're in in 1963. And he does this in a very beautiful way in The Fire Next Time, which comes out January 31st of 1963. But the longer essay in that, it's comprised of two essays, a letter to his nephew, who's also named James after Jimmy, and

uh down at the cross which is the very very long essay and that was published originally as a letter from a region in my mind in the november 1962 new yorker uh issue and that issue quickly sold out it was over 20 000 word essay and became at that point the longest essay ever run in the history of the new yorker and in the fire next time

Baldwin really has this intense exploration of race and racism and slavery and democracy and history and memory. And what does it mean to be a human being? And what does justice and love look like in public life?

It's really an extraordinary essay and it becomes a national bestseller, really a global bestseller. Baldwin is in Istanbul and Paris and London and Mississippi and Los Angeles and New York and Washington, D.C. that year. And he's organizing and mobilizing. He's our American Jeremiah. He's an American prophet. He's speaking in the prophetic voice of

of not just the black church, he's in a way a lapsed Christian who always remains a believer. He believes and has a faith

in human beings and he has a faith and a belief in the evidence of unseen things. And so for him, where he says at the end of the fire next time to finally end this racial nightmare and achieve our country, what he means by that, by achieving our country is

is very, very sobering because some people accuse Baldwin of being naive and being a reckless optimist. But Baldwin is anything but naive, even though there is optimism there. What he means by finally achieving our country is something different than the founders had planted because they didn't believe in multiracial democracy. Baldwin actually believes that the young people who are part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who call themselves SNCC,

are the real heroes of the story, the folks who are sitting in lunch counters, predominantly Black, but there's white ones too, like Joan Trumpowers talked about in this book and the professor John Salter, who's white and native in Mississippi, who are doing this heroic work of bringing people together. But they're also unmasking and taking the varnish off of a vision of American exceptionalism that

That is predicated on continuing a never ending lie to the country and its people about themselves. So what Baldwin does that year is tell everybody what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear about America and American democracy and America's place in the world. Let me go to caller Amy in Berkeley, who's on the line. Hi, Amy, you're on.

Hi, Mina and Professor Peniel Joseph. Thank you for an amazing show. I'm just really, I'm so excited to get your book and get many copies for my whole family because this also connects to our family's experience as Jewish folks here. My, kind of like an uncle to me, my father's best friend, Alex Weiss, was a

a refugee from fleeing the Nazis when he was a kid and went on to be a freedom rider and spent time, significant time in Parchment Penitentiary. And we still have the letters that he wrote to my dad from jail in code so he could really talk about, you know, they developed the code beforehand.

And also then my father followed in his footsteps. There were following 1963 Freedom Summer, there were significant demonstrations here in San Francisco. And my father, Jackson, was one of the 226 protesters at various car dealerships.

that were protesting the discrimination in hiring and also charging more for cars to black people than to white people for the same cars. And he also spent significant time in jail, in fact, more so because, as the judge said, he was older and he should have known better.

And my parents lost custody of me due to these kinds of things. And, you know, my sister and I spent time in foster homes. And so these really had a ripple out effect. But we're so proud of what our parents and my uncle did in solidarity and to stand up. And we treasure these letters. These are our most prized family possessions. And your book will now become part of informing us even deeper about that time. Thank you.

Now they're our parents and my uncle is gone, or my father is gone. Well, Amy, thank you for telling us about him. On a related comment, Peniel, the Cisner writes, I was a child in 1963, but I recall a lot of Jews and Jewish organizations involved in the civil rights movement. Can your guest speak about this and what other groups and organizations were in the civil rights battle?

Well, certainly, 1963 is a high point of Black and Jewish coalitions in support of dignity and citizenship for all people. So we think about Rabbi Joaquin Prince, who's representing the American Jewish Congress, who speaks at the March on Washington and says, "To know freedom, we have to free ourselves." And so today we join hands with our fellow Negro citizens in their own drive to win equality for themselves.

We think about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who first meets King in '63 at a religious conference, and they're going to have a friendship that lasts until Dr. King's assassination in 1968. So yes, this is occurring less than two decades after the Nuremberg trials and the horrors of genocide that are exposed.

within that context and there are real real um strong ties there uh the the professor howard zinn uh at spelman college is a part of this book's narrative um um

And there's also going to be division. I mean, Norman Podhoretz is a great example who's going against the grain and against the tide there. But when it comes to this period, Jewish Americans are one of the key allies and different groups are going to reprint King's letter from Birmingham jail during this period. So they are absolutely one of the key allies in 1963.

The Cisner writes, I remember walking into an Iowa City bus station bathroom and becoming aware of segregated bathrooms as a 10-year-old child in a highly racist South Dakota. Most adult male conversations around race or sex was nothing short of violent and ugly, and my own shift was later. I remember celebrating the murder of JFK. Much of the northern country's Bible Belt was devoid of black people, which meant the lens of what people understood about race was mitigated via the media, which meant almost nothing at that time.

We'll have more about 1963 with historian Peniel Joseph after the break. Stay with us. I'm Mina Kim.

Support for Forum comes from San Francisco Opera. Experience the soaring highs and heartbreaking lows of bohemian life this summer in John Caird's beloved production of La Boheme. Puccini's most adored opera transports us into the heady bohemian world of 19th century Paris as we follow a circle of starving artists falling in and out of love, living for the moment. La Boheme runs June 3rd to 21st. Learn more at sfopera.com.

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You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking about the year 1963, the defining year of the civil rights movement and why its events are so relevant today with Peniel Joseph, who's written a book called Freedom Season, How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution.

Benil is a professor of history and founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at UT Austin. And you, our listeners, are joining the conversation with your questions and reflections on 1963 at 866-733-6786 at the email address forum at kqed.org.

and also on Blue Sky Facebook, Instagram, or threads at KQED Forum. The sister writes, I grew up in San Francisco. My second grade teacher was married to a minister who was in Selma in Montgomery. The color in her face would completely drain every time the phone on the wall in the classroom rang. When someone asked why, she just said her husband was supporting Dr. King. So, Peniel, you were talking about, you know, the...

the debates within the movement, the right with its bircherites and also with William Buckley and with the apologists and just the whole range. Where did all of this leave Kennedy, essentially? How did he evolve? Well, I think Kennedy has evolution in 63, but he also has fault starts and setbacks. That's why it's a very, very poignant story in that sense. He does evolve throughout 1963 from being this very,

very, very reluctant, reticent president to talk about race matters to really, there's a chapter here called Kennedy's Finest Moment. I think the three best days of his presidency domestically of the entire presidency are June 9th, 10th, and 11th. Globally, it's going to be the speech day

in Bonn and Berlin, the Ich bin ein Berliner speech, but that's later that same month. So I think June of '63 is the best month of his presidency. But on June 9th, he does a fabulous speech in Honolulu at a conference of mayors where he finally robustly talks of and advocates for racial justice. On June 10th, he does the very famous American University speech

which is about nuclear non-proliferation. But he's got a great line in there saying that even though he's not going to agree with the Soviets, we have to make the world safe for diversity. And it really is the first time an American president has used that word on the national stage.

in that way. And he's talking about human rights. And then June 11th is the civil rights address where he says that civil rights is a moral issue. It's as clear as the scriptures and the Old Testament. He says those who do nothing invite shame as well as violence. Those who act

Act boldly, recognize right as well as reality. And in that 17 minute speech, he talks about rates of we were then called Negroes, rates of Negro infant deaths. He says we're not just asking whites only to go to Vietnam. So he talks about black military service and patriotism.

He says that the United States can't say that there is no caste or class, second class citizens or master race, except with respect to Negroes. He says that there's a revolution happening, one that can be violent or peaceful. And he says that, yeah.

violent police repression won't solve their problems. And it's a national problem, not a sectional problem. So those three days, Kennedy really for the first time, uh, fuses civil rights, race, democracy, and human rights, uh, in, in these three very, very important speeches that for me represent, um,

his civil rights legacy in a way that I don't think is, is acknowledged. But there are setbacks, you know, one thing that the narrative shows is that by September 15th and the, the,

the evisceration and the assassination of these six black children in one day, people like Jimmy Baldwin, it's not that they lose hope, but certainly he loses faith in Kennedy. Kennedy does not go to the funerals of those children. That's a moral mistake that's forever.

So there's no there's no fixing that. There's no fixing that. And Jimmy Baldwin, really, God bless him, says that repeatedly until the end of the year, even in the aftermath of Kennedy's assassination. But before Kennedy's assassination, the next week, Baldwin and Bayard Rustin, who's one of the real key figures of the book to organize these demonstrations against.

in support of the lost children, but they're trying to organize a Christmas boycott. They're trying to get civil rights legislation passed. And they're also asking the nation the question, what kind of nation can exist that murders

these six black children in one day and call itself a Christian nation. And they're saying this in 1963. It's truly extraordinary. So we never look at the aftermath of Birmingham day by day, week by week.

And again, when we think about presidents and big political figures and their evolutions, including Bobby Kennedy, who undergoes an evolution himself, Kennedy doesn't do what he should have done after Birmingham. It's not enough. It's disappointing. And some people are going to be disillusioned, especially

Kennedy had done those great speeches. He had hosted Medgar Evers' widow, Merle Evers, and two of their three children in the White House. So there was, at times, a depth of compassion there. But then when that happens in Birmingham, it's almost like he doesn't want to face up to the...

The grim reality, and I have some quotes from him taken from presidential tapes where he's saying, you know, Birmingham's just a hard case. It's a tough case. But again, if you're a president, that's the reason you want the job for the toughest, hardest cases. Right. Being president is in about three hundred and sixty five easy days a year.

It's going to be something different than that, right? So the narrative really shows the setbacks and the evolution is never linear. And people may be disappointed by that, but I think that's how life is, right? It's not. And that's why we're constantly trying to work on ourselves because

The changes we make, the progress we make, it's never definitive because you always have tomorrow to either mess up or to live up to what you're, you know, to walk the talk of whatever your perspective philosophy is. And the person who really emerges there in a really rich way is Baldwin.

Beautifully imperfect, but so morally principled. And he thinks about morality, not in a cheap way of of backbiting or rumors, but the morality of of loving children who are not your own as if they were your own. And that's the litmus test for all of us.

Well, speaking of the jarring nature of progress, the back and forth, I mean, I was struck by remembering from reading your book that right after Kennedy gives that big civil rights speech where he's echoing the kinds of things that so many activists have tried to instill and to

you know, create in the American conversation, you immediately get the assassination of Medgar Evers. Then a couple of months later, the bombing of Birmingham 16th Street Baptist Church. And then you also, of course, get the assassination of President Kennedy. Noelle on Discord wonders if Kennedy had not been assassinated, would the civil rights legislation still have passed in your view?

Yes, I think the civil rights legislation would have passed. It's a matter of when that civil rights legislation would have passed. The Civil Rights Act is passed July 2nd, 1964. Voting Rights Act is passed August 6th, 1965. I think that there was enough...

there was enough momentum. When we think about '63, we have to think of it as a year that's very similar to 2020 and the year of George Floyd, even though there's not 25 million people out in the streets. But for '63, there's thousands of different demonstrations. There's hundreds of thousands of people, not just at the March on Washington, really over a million people out in the streets demonstrating. And

it's really gripping the national and global soul. So there was gonna be some movement, but certainly Kennedy's momentum and then Lyndon Baines Johnson's political expertise, very, very strategic, is able to pass the civil rights legislation. And in terms of LBJ, I have LBJ here, his best moment as vice president is May of 1963, where he does a fabulous speech.

at the Gettysburg in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on the centennial of the Gettysburg address and anniversary. That really becomes a proof of concept for the president to talk about racial justice in more robust ways.

So in one of President Trump's executive orders last month, he directed the government to stop a key tool in the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, essentially using the disparate impact test, no longer okay. Remind us what that was and how worried are you about those kinds of

undoings, backsliding. - Disparate impact is the idea of whether a law or not is overtly racist, if it has disparate impact on different groups,

can have racist outcomes that weren't necessarily originally in the architecture of the law. So by not thinking about disparate impact, we're thinking about the politics of racial domination well into the 21st century. And part of Trump's executive orders and really the new rhetoric

of the neo-Confederacy and the new 21st century white supremacist really flies in the face of what Baldwin tried to remind us, even to the point where people accused him of being naive, is that Baldwin tried to remind us that we were all...

We were family, you know, and we were family not in a way where we were just gonna because Norman Podhoretz gets this wrong We're just gonna love each other and everything was gonna be better Baldwin thought that love was what justice looked like in public and from that perspective Baldwin wanted us to understand That we had to live in this world together so he says that in

It's not that Negroes have to liberate themselves, they have to liberate the United States from white fear. Because white fear is what produced slavery and what produced Jim Crow and racial segregation and white terror and the Klan and peonage and sharecropping and convict lease systems and all these horrible ways to punish people who are just human beings, who are actually just your fellow human beings.

Baldwin wants us to really wrap ourselves around that before we can produce and design the political system that would get us out of this mess. So Baldwin's very, very interesting figure, a very profound figure, a very misunderstood figure in certain ways, too, because at times the profundity was too deep for the times.

Right. And so in a way, Baldwin 63 becomes his high point of popularity, not necessarily of creative genius, but he's going to die in 1987 in relative obscurity because the conservative resurgence has no room for Baldwin. So so people who had once lauded Baldwin by the 1970s and 80s.

The same white establishment that in the 40s, 50s and up to 63 lauded him is saying things like he he became too political. I love his early writing. He became too emotional. Right. It's it's it's really a way of saying he told the truth.

And he exposed too many lies and we no longer like him. And so Baldwin doesn't get the Pulitzer. He doesn't get the Nobel Peace Prize, doesn't get any of that, dies at 63. But there's been this huge comeback. Last year was in last August was his 100th birthday. If he had been been alive and there's global celebrations of Baldwin now because the profundity of the words, you know,

For my money, the best American writer of essays ever is so profound that there's whole new generations that are discovering Baldwin as if for the first time. But in 63, millions of Americans discovered Baldwin. And not just on the written page. He was active online.

Congress of Racial Equality tours in the South, but in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. The Take This Hammer, you know, I've got the dates when Take This Hammer was actually filmed here. And also organizing a demonstration in Paris before the March on Washington, organizing the celebrity contingent of the March on Washington, and just meeting with Bobby Kennedy and

And really excoriating the attorney general when the attorney general wanted a pat on the back. And he's saying, you know, you don't deserve it, you know, and we're not going to lie. We're going to stop the lies. And that's part of what eventually helps to change Bobby Kennedy, because it's really going to be certainly that and the assassination of Jack that turns Bobby Kennedy into really somebody different, a crusading person.

a person who's a crusading advocate for multiracial democracy and human rights before his assassination. Well, let me remind listeners, you are listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. So because those ideas of Baldwin and others endure, we also have a listener who writes, compared to long-term expatriate Baldwin, I'd rather hear more about Bayard Rustin and his work in the Black Freedom Struggle in 1963. Does that give you, does the fact that Baldwin

Those ideas that that reintroduction, that revitalization with regard to racial justice that you see in pockets or places, does that, I don't know, give you give you hope for this moment that we're in now, this volatile moment that we're in now and the direction it could move?

Oh, no, absolutely. I think that one of the things that 63 reminds us is to be resilient, to have courage, to speak truth to power, to be relentlessly optimistic because we are doing the work of reconstruction. And that's the work of

multi-racial democracy, the work of abolition democracy, abolishing not only slavery, but all forms of injustice wherever they may exist. And so much of the opposite of that and the antagonisms are based on the opposite of truth and based on

myths and lies, but also wanting to prevent people from speaking and discussing these issues and prevent people from understanding American history and the verities that are connected to American history. So what's so interesting about 63 and the work of Baldwin, but also Lerone Bennett and Before the Mayflower, the work of people like Amiri Baraka and

Lorraine Hansberry and Gloria Richardson is that there's so much truth telling and such a bigger, expansive understanding of American history that that leads to change. So part of the book banning right now, part of the anti-DEI, the anti-woke banning,

Using those words is another word for racial slurs is really to prevent the kind of transformative change we need. But like Baldwin always reminds us, there's something very, very humanistic about that change because what Baldwin wanted was all of us to be recognized as human beings. And that takes a recognition of dignity and citizenship. So dignity is God given. It's what we're all born with.

But citizenship is the external recognition of that dignity by institutions and other people who live within the republic or the democracy or the nation state with us. And so you always need both. And Malcolm and Martin had debates over this. But Baldwin, I think,

in a very beautiful eloquent way is able to establish why that is so necessary and he continues to be active organizing for this but he never has quite the same hopes that he did that that really peak in the first part of 63 and probably peak at the March on Washington before being exploded

on September 15th, but he still retains a diligent faith that things can get better. But even if we create what Baldwin called a new Jerusalem, it's not going to be perfect, right? It's never going to be perfect. But despite that,

He he talks about courage and resilience. And I think in our contemporary moment, we need the courage and resilience to study the past in order to make arguments about the present and the future, because the the arguments and the debates over history are never about the past. They're always about how we're living now and how can we create and co-create together either a very, very positive future or or negative ones.

And so the statement you would make about the present, what would that be? And we just have 30 seconds, Peniel. Well, I think in the present and, you know, in the epilogue, I have Jimmy Baldwin saying that it

In that new Jerusalem, the martyrdom of Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy and Birmingham's children would no longer inspire shame and wonder over how such grotesque misfortunes could have befallen them. Instead, with a shock of indignant recognition, the nation would finally ask the question that Baldwin and the entire freedom movement had demanded all along of its fellow citizens. How could we have done this to us?

Peniel Joseph, the book is Freedom Season. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mina. Thank you, Caroline Smith and Brian Vo, for producing this segment. Thank you, listeners, for your questions and comments. You've been listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

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