1963 was a pivotal year in American history. It marked 100 years since Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation but teemed with persistent evidence of racial terror and violence, including the murders of four Black girls at an Alabama church and the Dallas assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
It’s an era that’s long captured the attention of author and UT Austin Professor Peniel Joseph, Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values at the LBJ School and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.
Joseph’s latest book is “Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution.” Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity.
Texas Standard: Your previous work includes deep analysis of the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and a biography of Stokely Carmichael, but this book is different. Why is it the story you wanted to write next?
Peniel Joseph: Well, I think through doing those previous works, I really always felt that 1963 was the pivotal year of the most pivotal decade of the 20th century in many ways, the 1960s. And I wanted to tell a story that could panoramically look at the debates and the movements, the high points from multiple perspectives. So, the Kennedys, Malcolm and Martin, but also Gloria Richardson, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin and others.
And so, ’63, just a narrative history of the entire year became my focus. And I uncovered just so many interesting things, and not just the big moments like Birmingham, which is covered, and the 16th Street Baptist Church, but really the story of Medgar Evers throughout the spring of ’63, what’s going on in Greenwood, Miss. – James Baldwin meeting up with Medgar Evers at the start of the year.
There’s just so much, it’s such a rich year. And even the Kennedy assassination is not until November and very unexpected. So I wanted to watch that year unfold and see the way in which part of that era echoes our own.
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You used the word “panoramic” there, and I think that’s apt. Another word that’s been used to describe this is “kaleidoscopic,” because it’s just moving. Could you explain that a little more?
Yeah, so this is a year, at the start of the year, civil rights is not on the agenda of the Kennedy
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy speaks before a crowd protesting low minority hiring in his Justice Department, June 14, 1963.
administration, but certainly it’s on the agenda of people like Dr. King and certainly people like Baldwin. So what you see is there’s so many different things that are happening.
The book starts with the Howard University conference in the fall of 1962 that attracts people like Sidney Poitier and Malcolm X. So you see a ferment of Black intellectuals and celebrities and artists and political figures all debating what freedom means for them. So that’s really the theme throughout the whole book.
And then you see the Kennedys, from top down, trying to assess what is the best thing they can do in this realm of freedom. But then you also see people like George Wallace and Barry Goldwater and others who have their own definitions of what freedom might mean.
In certain ways, Baldwin becomes an incubator for all of this. But other people do too – Gloria Richardson, the civil rights activist from Cambridge, Md., Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright.
And so it really tells this huge story – Lyndon Johnson’s in this, the vice president for most of the year – of how people are debating this idea of freedom. And even the big set pieces like the March on Washington, which Baldwin describes as the language of human joy, we get it from a different perspective and panoramic perspectives.
Lorraine Hansberry speaks before an audience.
You’ve mentioned Lorraine Hansberry a couple of times, and that was one story that struck me. I think there are people who might think, we know about MLK and Malcolm X and James Baldwin, but there are these characters that you’ve sought out and lifted up their voices more than they may have been before.
Could you tell us a little more about Lorraine Hansberry in particular?
Oh, certainly. So Lorraine Hansberry is really this protean figure of the 20th century – from Chicago, a Black genius playwright, radical activist, mentored by Paul Robeson and other figures coming out of the Great Depression, Second World War…
Somebody who writes the play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” which is produced in 1959, which becomes the first production by a Black woman ever produced on Broadway that becomes a dazzling success. And it’s turned into a film in ’61 and it stars Sidney Poitier.
But Hansberry is really interesting because she’s friends with James Baldwin but, politically, she’s really further to the left than somebody like Baldwin and more of a veteran of different political struggles. She’s a Marxist, she’s an internationalist, she’s a radical feminist, and she’s at what Baldwin calls “the Summit,” the May 24, 1963 meeting with the attorney general that Baldwin organizes. So she’s very, very interesting and important because she gives us a different lens of seeing ’63.
We see ’63 through the lens of Black women, through her, who are impatient with the level of progress that’s happening, who think about the freedom struggle as global in scope. So not just Birmingham, but South Africa and Ghana and Nigeria. And these are places that she had traveled around the world and gone to international women’s conferences.
So she becomes this very interesting figure, even though she’s going to die of pancreatic cancer prematurely in 1965. And Malcolm X attends her funeral.
So it’s just a really interesting environment. And it shows us a ferment of women and men who are not so different from those of us who are around today.
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President Lyndon B. Johnson (center) meets with civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young, and James Farmer, January 1964.
Texas’ LBJ takes center stage, as we know, as he’s placed in the position of president after the assassination.
But, as you say, that role doesn’t really begin until very late in 1963. JFK was killed November 22. Does LBJ make an impact that year nonetheless?
He does. “Freedom Season” documents LBJ’s, really his finest moment as vice president, I argue, which is his Gettysburg speech in May of 1963, where he really, in a way, becomes a stalking horse for the Kennedy administration, talking about freedom, democracy, dignity, and citizenship.
And that Gettysburg address is so well received that the Kennedy administration, which has always put LBJ a little bit on the outer circle of their of their core group, he comes to become a pivotal advisor on civil rights in the lead up into the March on Washington. And you can see LBJ is giving the Kennedy administration advice.
We’ve got a great scene where he’s talking about James Baldwin, he’s taking about how Kennedy can use the presidency as a bully pulpit. And in many ways, you could see Johnson anticipating how he’s going to use the presidency as a bully pulpit on the issue of civil rights and voting rights.
So it’s really extraordinary to see how he’s coming into his own in 1963 after, really, a couple of very, very rough years as vice president. And I show some of the conflicts between him and Bobby [Kennedy] in that realm as well.
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It follows for you another book that’s more about an era than any individual. You’ve called the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement the Third Reconstruction. Was it then natural for you to revisit the Second Reconstruction?
Well, yeah, in many ways, this book comes out of that book to the extent that I really wanted to examine the most pivotal year of the Second Reconstruction, which is 1963. So being able to look at the entire year really offers us a different perspective on not just the 1960s, but our own period of time as well.
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