Title: How 1963 Defined the Civil Rights Movement

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. University of Texas historian Peniel Joseph is with us with his new book, Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution. While it's a book about 1963, it also has relevance for today. Some of you know Peniel Joseph's other books, including The Sword and The Shield about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century, and others for which he's been on this show. Peniel, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Peniel Joseph: Great to be here, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Why 1963 in 2025?

Peniel Joseph: Well, 2025 has many echoes and 1963 vibes, for good and bad, happening all throughout our country and our world. 1963, I argue, is really the most important year of the 1960s. It's the year that sets up a 50-year racial justice consensus between 1963 and ending with the Shelby v. Holder decision in 2013 that sets up the most opportunities that Black Americans, but also women of color and other historically marginalized groups have ever had in the history of the United States.

You get the most wealth created, the most K-12 graduates, the most higher education graduates, the most elected officials, the most women and people of color who become heads of corporations and corporate boards and presidents of universities in the history of the country. You see that progress is juxtaposed against still structural racism, mass incarceration, all those negatives.

'63 to 2013, you don't only just get the rise of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, but Hillary Clinton, Dolores Huerta. So many different groups who are coming from historically marginalized communities finally get access to dignity and citizenship. '63 and the work that was done by Black activists, but also coalitions of communities, people who were Hispanic, who were Jewish, who are queer, to transform America into a multiracial democracy. That's why sometimes we call it America's second reconstruction.

Brian Lehrer: You cited 2013 as the end of that era, citing Shelby v. Holder. Remind people, that's the Supreme Court decision that rolled back the Voting Rights Act. Right?

Peniel Joseph: Absolutely. That ends Section 5, preclearance of the Vote Voting Rights Act. More importantly, it really ends the Democratic advantage, the multiracial coalition that got Barack Obama in, that had won the 2008 and 2012 elections. It really transforms the electoral algorithm. Even though you get one more Democrat who wins in 2020, when we think about states like Ohio and states that had early voting. Texas was part of the Voting Rights Act starting in 1975. All that ends in 2013.

What's so interesting is that I document in Freedom Season the way in which people like James Baldwin were in Selma in October of 1963, trying to give food and water to people standing on line to try to register to vote in Selma, Alabama, and how they were prevented from doing that. This is just a residue of the Jim Crow system. We still have now in places like Texas, you can't give food and water to people standing in line to vote in Florida for 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 hours so you see the echoes of '63 in our present political situation.

Brian Lehrer: At least two things from 1963 loom so large in American history that they still get talked about a fair amount today. The Martin Luther King I have a Dream speech and the rest of that march on Washington in August of that year, remembered as a defining civil rights era moment, and the assassination of President Kennedy in November of '63. How do you treat the assassination and its impact in the book?

Peniel Joseph: Well, the assassination comes late. What I wanted people to see throughout the book, because the book is divided into four seasons, winter, spring, summer and autumn, is that the assassination is very, very unexpected.

I wanted us to see the evolution of the Kennedys, the evolution of people like Medgar Evers and Myrlie Evers, the evolution of King and Malcolm, but also the way in which an activist like James Baldwin really transforms that year, not just through his literary production and the best selling The Fire Next Time, but through his speeches and his preaching in a prophetic tradition that really calls upon Americans to confront the legacy of racial slavery and the terror of Jim Crow and to really see each other as estranged kin that can actually build this grand aspirational republic that's committed to multiracial democracy if they learn to see each other's pain and trauma, see past that pain and trauma and see each other as human beings.

Which is really remarkable because Baldwin's moral reframing of this period and this year is global in scope. He's leading demonstrations in Paris. He's leading not just a conversation, but a reckoning about what is freedom, dignity, democracy and citizenship mean. It's really remarkable to see. The Kennedy assassination, we think of this as a fait accompli, that November 22nd was always destined to happen but when we watch the year unfold in a day-to-day, what we find is it's a year where America is unraveling and coming together at the same time.

In that coming together, you see the creation of this racial consensus that, yes, there's tragedy that year, but there's real triumph and there's triumph beyond the march on Washington. We look at the Walk for Freedom in Detroit. Look at the activism of Gloria Richardson in Cambridge, Maryland, who's a Howard University graduate who is leading a beautiful struggle for racial justice in the border state of Maryland.

She becomes the Lady General of the civil rights movement, they call her, in '63. She's negotiating with Bobby Kennedy. She's inspiring Malcolm X. Malcolm X leads a standing ovation for her at the King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit in November of that year. I also show the way in which activists like Lorraine Hansberry, who's a writer and playwright and a radical international feminist, are influencing the politics and the discourse that year.

In certain ways, that May 24th meeting with Bobby Kennedy in New York in the chapter The Summit, really shows you the panoramic nature of that year where the Attorney General of the United States is meeting with Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Lorraine Hansberry and a young civil rights activist named Jerome Smith to gain the pulse of what's happening in the Black community. It's a very contentious meeting, but it's going to be a very worthwhile meeting because you see so many different people from different ideological perspectives who are willing to meet and talk about these issues in really bold and brave and courageous ways.

Brian Lehrer: That is one of the really interesting things about the book that MLK and Malcolm X are so remembered and so talked about but there were other people who are really important. You mentioned some of the other names who you write about. You really centered James Baldwin. To help you make that point, I hope this is a good representative clip that you can talk about. We pulled a clip of him from 1963. This is from GBH, the public television station in Boston, their educational foundation, from a program called A Conversation with James Brown. I think he's going to make one of the points that you were just alluding to. Let's listen.

James Baldwin: I think the one who's got to find some way of putting the present administration of this country on the spot, one has got to force somehow from Washington a moral commitment not to the Negro people, but to the life of this country. It doesn't matter any longer and I'm speaking for myself, for Jimmy Baldwin, and I think I'm speaking for a great many other Negroes too. It doesn't matter any longer what you do to me. You can put me in jail, you can kill me. By the time I was 17, you had done everything that you could do to me. The problem now is how are you going to save yourselves?

Brian Lehrer: How are you going to save yourselves? That starts to lean into the point you were making, I think.

Peniel Joseph: Well, absolutely. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin, it's a real meditation on racial slavery, on citizenship, dignity, American history and our humanity, but he talks about, by the end of that book, ending the racial nightmare and achieving our country. This idea of achieving our country, sometimes people accuse Baldwin of being naive, but that's the last thing he is. He really believes in this idea of multiracial democracy based on the way in which historically, Black people have reimagined and reframed the very core precepts of the nation and the nation state.

From that perspective, he says that what racial slavery, and then the afterlife of racial slavery in terms of Jim Crow segregation, but also the lies that Jim Crow segregation is based on, the lies of demonization of Black people, dehumanization of Black people. Baldwin argues that that impacts all of us. It impacts white people, it impacts other people of color, it impacts our institutions. The only way we can be that grand American republic is to confront those things and to have this moral reimagining.

John F. Kennedy says as much on June 11, 1963. Yesterday was the 62nd anniversary, and that's Kennedy's finest moment as president. I document the three best days of the presidency, domestically at least, which were June 9th, 10th and 11th, which is the Honolulu racial justice speech, the American University speech, which we all remember, and the June 11 civil rights speech. All of those things connect to a moral reframing.

One of the best lines of Kennedy's speech on June 11 is that he says, live before the nation, "We preach freedom around the world," and then he pauses and he says, "And we mean it." What he means by that, Brian, is he's being pushed by people like King but certainly Baldwin, to connect what the United States claims it represents to the reality, right? The reality is much shabbier, much seedier. He's saying, we've got to not have that hypocrisy and those juxtapositions. We actually have to walk the talk.

Baldwin becomes the most eloquent spokesperson and public intellectual. What's so exciting about Baldwin is that he's willing to talk to anybody including, and especially those he disagrees with. You can see the coming William F. Buckley debate in 1965. They're circling each other in 1963. You could see the disagreements with his then friend, Norman Podhoretz of Commentary Magazine. You can see Jimmy is willing to talk to Bobby Kennedy.

What's so interesting about this year is the way in which people weren't looking for safe spaces, they were looking for courageous spaces where they could actually talk about citizenship, multiracial democracy. They could talk about freedom. They talked about liberation in such expansive ways that when we think about African decolonization and the decolonization that's happening across the Third World, the United States civil rights movement is influencing that movement, but that movement is also influencing the United States.

Brian, before our George Floyd, Breonna Taylor reckoning of 2020, there was 1963, over a thousand civil rights demonstrations, hundreds of thousands, millions of people in the streets, which is why John F. Kennedy says on June 11, there's a revolution happening, a revolution that can be violent or peaceful. The president himself says it cannot be stopped by repressive police action, which is what's happening in the United States right now as we speak. He says those who do nothing invite shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly recognize right as well as reality.

Brian Lehrer: To tie it to today, your book is called Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution. I want to take a brief detour to 1965. I told the listeners before you came on that we're going to play a clip of President Johnson from that year. That was the last time that a president called out the National Guard over the objection of a state's governor. Obviously the context was so different. It was over the objection of the segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace. As you will hear in this clip of LBJ in 1965, he'll say he did it to protect the protesters.

President Johnson: It is not a welcome duty for the federal government to ever assume a state's government's own responsibility for assuring the protection of citizens in the exercise of their constitutional rights. It has been rare in our history for the governor and the legislature of a sovereign state to decline to exercise their responsibility and to request that duty be assumed by the federal government. Governor Wallace and the legislature of the State of Alabama have now done this.

Brian Lehrer: President Lyndon Johnson on March 20, 1965. We credit the UVA Miller Center, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum. Have you written about that in any of your books, Peniel?

Peniel Joseph: Oh, absolutely. I write about that in The Third Reconstruction. What President Johnson did there was in the context of the Selma to Montgomery demonstrations and the state-sanctioned violence against over 500 peaceful demonstrators, including the late Congressman John Lewis on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. That was really an extraordinary situation where there has to be some intervention to help American citizens.

As the President says in that March 15th State of the Union address, that joint special address to Congress, he compares the demonstrators in Selma to the American revolutionary patriots in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. You see the fusion of the civil rights movement into the lexicon of American democracy and patriotism, something that Martin Luther King Jr. had started in 1963 in a huge way in Letter from Birmingham Jail, which is King's theory of justice, where he places the young people who are being incarcerated in April and May of 1963 within a larger pantheon of American democracy.

King predicts correctly, that one day those young people will be remembered as heroes. The great quote from Letter from Birmingham Jail is for bringing the nation back to those great wells of democracy that were dug deep by the founding fathers.

Brian Lehrer: It's telling in that clip that he said it, he just said it explicitly that he was deploying the National Guard to assure the protection of citizens in the exercise of their constitutional rights. He wasn't deploying them so much to police the marchers as to protect them. Obviously a contrast to what's going on right now.

Also King and the movement maintain the image of nonviolent protest. That's being, at least, debated today around LA. Even though the reporting indicates that it's very little violence, there is still some violence. Any lesson for the protest movement or how historians or the media might view them in the context of today?

Peniel Joseph: Well, I say, Brian, there was always some aspect of violence during the 1960s. Certainly, King led a nonviolent movement, but there were people who weren't committed to the discipline of nonviolence, the training of nonviolence. Even in Birmingham, the first urban rebellion happens Mother's Day in 1963. The way in which the media of '63 recognized and could critically think about that violence was to say that no, the civil rights demonstrators were peaceful, but there were flare ups of violence by people who weren't formally connected to these peaceful demonstrators and that peaceful movement.

I think it's all about how you frame what's happening today because obviously, overwhelmingly these demonstrations have not been violent. When it comes to violence, sometimes those folks are agitators who are not even from the groups they pretend to be. This happened in 2020. There was deep reporting on violence at demonstrations that at times were other different groups who were pretending to be BLM groups. We have to get to the bottom of who's causing this violence.

I'd say that overall this has not been a violent movement and it becomes, how is the media going to frame this? I give the media credit. In 1963, largely, it was able to follow the story correctly and frame what was happening all across the United States as this peaceful revolution that, yes, it included civil disobedience, but it was not a violent movement, far from it. I think the challenge today in our own age, which is both similar but very, very different because there's so many different media scapes where one gets the news, is to frame what's actually happening as truthfully and as objectively as critical thinkers as possible.

Brian Lehrer: Peniel Joseph holds the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values at the LBJ School of Public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the founding director there of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. His new book is called Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution. Thank you very much for coming on and connecting 1963 to 2025.

Peniel Joseph: Always great speaking with you, Brian. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More to come.

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