The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
Peniel E. Joseph, Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution
In this episode, I chat with historian Peniel E. Joseph about his latest book, Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution.
Joseph's storytelling prowess brings James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jn., President Kennedy, and Boobie Kennedy to vibrant life, not as static icons but as complex humans navigating treacherous terrain.
Particularly fascinating is Joseph's exploration of the forgotten women who shaped the movement—Gloria Richardson, Lorraine Hansberry, Diane Nash—who confronted both racial oppression and patriarchal limitations within activist circles. Their stories provide crucial context for understanding today's intersectional movements.
What resonates most powerfully throughout our conversation is how the struggles of 1963 remain eerily familiar six decades later. As we witness contemporary battles over voting rights and historical memory, Joseph reminds us that reconciliation can only emerge through confronting difficult truths about our past, a lesson America is still struggling to learn.
Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution, Peniel E. Joseph
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to Episode 295. 195. Peniel E Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and Distinguished Service Leadership Professor and Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author and editor of eight award-winning books on African American history, including the Third Reconstruction and the Sword and the Shield. He lives in Austin, texas. Hi, peniel, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you for having me, Mandy. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1:I learned a lot about American history from reading your latest book, freedom Season how 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution. I've lived in the US since 1983 and am constantly learning about American history. Freedom Season not only taught me a lot about 1963, but it also gave me hope. So thank you for that. It is much needed and it's an extraordinary book.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1:You have written and spoken about how your love of history was built upon conversations with your mother. Where did her passion and curiosity for history derive?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, it really came because she grew up in Haiti. She came to the United States when she was around 25, and she was a hospital worker at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, local 1199. But she had always been a prodigious reader and writer. From a young age. In Haiti she was able to be educated, she spoke and could write in French and Haitian and English and Spanish.
Speaker 2:So she was very, you know, she just was very, very, you know, prodigious in terms of her intelligence and even as a young person talking to her, she was very intellectually curious. So you had a bunch of history books African-American history, haitian history but she had books of philosophy in the house. She was a Christian who was interested in religion and other religions, so she had books about Judaism and other things in the house and the Hebrew prophets, but she had books about space exploration in the house. She was really interested in science. She was a lab technologist and she did the blood work for people who had all kinds of illnesses and challenges. So she just was hugely intellectually curious and that started it all for me.
Speaker 1:Yes, I think one of the best gifts we can give our children is the gift of conversation and the gift of books. Children are naturally curious, so if there's books around fiction or nonfiction they will pick them up and they will learn.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And in our house we just had a lot of intellectual conversations, mandy. So it was that kind of house. It was a house where we talked about history and music and politics and elections, so it was really a great education. I learned only later that not everybody grows up in a house like that right. So we really talked about everything under the sun and were encouraged to explore and do more research and study, and those are the days of Encyclopedia Britannica, and we had all of that at our fingertips. We would go to the local public library all the time and we just were a household that was very much interested in ideas and put those ideas into action too.
Speaker 1:And, as parents, it's wonderful witnessing your children growing up with that curiosity and that love of conversation and that love of learning. Looking back, were there any pivotal classroom moments or assignments or teachers who made you realize history could be a tool for activism?
Speaker 2:Oh, yes. So I went to a local Catholic school, st Joachim and Anne, in New York, queens, new York, and we had great teachers who showed us Eyes on the Prize, who showed us different films and documentaries during the 1980s. I think certainly the most practical thing was my mom was part of a union that had demonstrations and pickets, and when they were on strike we would come to the city and my older brother and I and her and man the picket lines, and so that was a very, very exciting and open example. And so I didn't grow up in New York City. Ed Koch was mayor.
Speaker 2:There were things like Eleanor Bumpfist there's a new book out who was a 66-year-old grandmother who was killed by the police in 1984 when I was not yet even 12 years old. I remember reading that story because we read multiple daily papers every day in our household, because we read multiple daily papers every day in our household. And when I was a freshman in high school in 1986, a young man, black man, michael Griffith, was really murdered by a mob of people in Howard Beach, queens, who chased him and he ran out into a highway to escape and was hit by a car. And that happened in December of 1986. And you know those are things that were very much shaping and indelible. And then there were cool things like pop culture, like Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. That came out in 1989. School Days came out in 88. But Do the Right Thing was 16 years old when that came out.
Speaker 2:That was really, really important. You know, set in the hottest day of the year in Brooklyn, new York, and race relations, blacks, italians, segregation, you know, citizenship, dignity, democracy, that was all there. And then, a few years later, the Malcolm X film came out in 1992. And certainly the rise of. You know, I was Generation X, I was born in 1972. So hip hop was a huge, huge part of growing up. I was somebody who was going all around the city doing a lot of stuff and listening to music. Listening to, you know, run DMC, but Tribe Called Quest, public Enemy, poor Righteous Teachers, native Tongues, krs-one. So all that was really effective and impactful for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the arts are a great way to research history. What's sad to me is in the United States, there seems to be a disconnect around supporting the arts and creative people. This country is full of fantastic creative people the music, the artwork, the dance, the theater, the literature and poetry. It's exceptional, and yet it's not supported by a government, which is tragic, and it's extremely difficult to get grants now because of the budget cuts. When I look back at history, one of the main things I discover it is often artists who fight for change. I mean, look at the music from 1963.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think, in fact, the period that we're talking about 63, is the period that inaugurates the most public support of art and literature and culture in American history, with the inauguration of the National Endowment for Humanities, national Endowment for the Arts, public broadcasting, pbs and giving, and really the major investments in higher education, in universities, for research and technology and different investments for funding. So, yeah, I mean it's a very revolutionary time in that sense and probably since the 1980s we've gone back on those investments, which are very, very negative, and I also think the arts reflected the activism of the time, right. So sometimes people think the artists are ahead. I think what's going on is that, even like James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, they're reflecting the social movements of the time, you know. So that's what's going on, because certainly artists impact history, but I do think that history impacts all of us more than we're able to impact it.
Speaker 1:When we look at 1963, which global events do you think had the greatest psychological impact on people living in the United States? And also, I guess, the lead up to 1963, towards the middle and end of 1962, there was a lot happening.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely so. When we think about 63 and the early 60s, it's really a revolutionary time globally. There's African decolonization, there's movements for dignity and citizenship happening all across the world and, in a lot of ways, the civil rights movement which really predates even the Brown decision in 1954, there's these struggles for dignity and citizenship that come out of the Great Depression and the Second World War. And during World War II there was a double V campaign that Black activists created victory against fascism abroad and victory against racism at home, and that was the double V campaign. And you have a very robust circulation of Black newspapers like the Chicago Defender, the New York Amsterdam News, los Angeles Herald, dispatch, california Eagle, pittsburgh Courier. It's just all over. And so when we think about the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, it's initially a more constrained movement because of the Cold War. So the Cold War is what really marginalizes people like Paul Robeson, web Du Bois, two of the leading figures of the book James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry are very much impacted by the Cold War. Lorraine Hansberry is a Marxist who is, you know, she's a student of Paul Robeson and WEB Du Bois and Esther Cooper Jackson and all these Black internationalist left women who somebody like Maya Angelou was going to become a part of in the 60s, but James Baldwin. Really, when the Cold War hits he's in Paris and initially he's more in the Ellisonian individualist camp, right in the late 40s, early 50s, publishing with Partisan Review being funded by really center-right literary voices, right. And so by the time we see 1962, 63, what's happened is that the civil rights movement and the Black freedom struggle that has already existed has been able to, through the Black church with King and the Montgomery Improvement Association, but also labor leaders like A Philip Randolph and ED Nixon. They've been able to create a moral framework to push back against racial segregation and also prevent themselves from being too tainted with the slur of being a communist right and so things like the.
Speaker 2:By 1960, the sit-in movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, is founded by Ella Baker in North Carolina and that comes out of a February 1st 1960 sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, north Carolina. That is now a civil rights museum and those four students grow into over 60,000 students the spring of 1960, including white students who are demonstrating in sympathy in New York and Los Angeles and other places to desegregate public accommodations all across the United States. By 1961, there are freedom rides between May and December and those freedom rides go into the Deep South. There had been a Supreme Court ruling that segregation on interstate travel was illegal and they go to test those cases and John Lewis and others are bombed in Anniston, alabama, may 4th 1961. And that becomes a crisis for the Kennedy administration and they're brutalized.
Speaker 2:The whole deal and the Freedom Rides which are sponsored by CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, had actually first happened in 1947 through the Upper South, with Bayard Rustin, who's Black queer, the organizer of the March on Washington that year, in 63, had been imprisoned as a conscientious objector but also, because of his homosexuality, had constantly been fired from jobs and shunned and humiliated, arrested, all these different things. So when we think about 63, by fall of 62, james Meredith becomes the first Black student at University of Mississippi, in Oxford, mississippi, and there's three days of rioting. The Kennedy administration has to send 500 US marshals to escort him. Two people die.
Speaker 2:So it's a huge thing. It's a huge thing happening. And then, along the way, you have James Baldwin, in November of 1962, who publishes the longest essay in the history of the New Yorker, wallace Shawn's New Yorker up until that time, called A Letter from a Region in my Mind which becomes the bulk of the Fire Next Time January 31st, 1963., 1963, and and so all those things are are are happening and stewing in the air. So 1963 is a very portentous year, and the final thing I'll say is that it also happens to be the centennial of the emancipation proclamation as well and it's strange to think about this now, but there was that hotline between the president's desk and r.
Speaker 1:It's interesting how circumstances and relationships between world leaders change so quickly.
Speaker 2:Well, kennedy asked for that hotline at the American University speech. So that hotline is going to be created, and that's after. One thing I didn't say happened in 62. In October of 62 is the 13-day Cuban missile Crisis. The world is on the brink of a nuclear catastrophe between the United States and the Soviet Union over placing missiles in Cuba, and so, yeah, it's a very, very dangerous time, but it's also a very, very hopeful time as well.
Speaker 1:It sounds familiar, doesn't it? During the research and writing process for Freedom Season, what new traits did you discover about each character meaning Baldwin, malcolm X, martin Luther King, jfk and Bobby Kennedy, and do you see James Baldwin as the glue that held these men together?
Speaker 2:Oh, certainly, I think Baldwin is a through line to the characters in the book and creates a moral and ethical framework, very passionately, for these ideas of dignity, citizenship, multiracial democracy and freedom. Oh yeah, I discovered many new traits in all these characters. I think I've worked on King and Malcolm before and I think what I discovered with them looking at them through 1963, was just the evolution. I was able to look at them, you know, day by day and week by week, and you're able to see the evolutions, the strengths, the weaknesses. With King, you're really able to see him coming more into his own voice in 63, and he's becoming more and more combative letter from Birmingham jail. You're able to see what a deaf political operator he is really, especially outside the halls of power.
Speaker 2:And what I mean by that is that when he's meeting with the president, when he's meeting with NAACP leaders like Roy Wilkins, he's mostly silent, right. He doesn't like confrontation. He really is able to shift those institutions and those power centers once he leaves the meeting and is articulating from his perspective, purposely, what happened and what did that meeting mean. And when he's articulating these events, he's always the leader and the protagonist, right. And that's what you know, one of the reasons Roy Wilkins hates him Because you know he's going to be silent mostly throughout the 90-minute White House meeting and as soon as the press comes he's saying. Here's what I said.
Speaker 1:Gosh, that's really interesting.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, so he's immensely interesting. When it came to Malcolm, I think you saw Malcolm just further. Traits that humanized Malcolm. Malcolm's different from King in the sense that Mandy, the chemistry and the charisma is there always, so it's never off. People can have a cup of coffee with him and they're wildly impressed. One thing, too, is that Malcolm has a wicked sense of humor. That's never off as well.
Speaker 2:Right, so he's an immensely powerfully charismatic man, not just when he's speaking on stage. Right, he's, you know, and unlike King, he's not this, he's not this private man in the sense of there's really not a Janice face with Malcolm. Right, he's able to let his guard down because he's telling you everything or a lot about himself, because he articulates his time in what he calls the American wilderness of racism, where he was a criminal and he was somebody who was taking drugs and doing bad things. Right, and so with him, he's a very interesting person because once he joins the Nation of Islam and becomes a Muslim, even though he leaves the Nation of Islam and becomes an Orthodox Muslim he's a Muslim for 16, 17 years. There's really nothing. He's running and hiding from right. So he's not drinking, he doesn't smoke, he doesn't have extramarital affairs. So he's very liberated in that sense. But it was interesting. It's interesting to see how, in 63, how he's becoming much more powerful and much more visible and the more that happens, the more alienated he becomes from the Nation of Islam.
Speaker 2:In 63. And I show that you know too. But you see him being photographed by Richard Avedon. You see him on the same show as Baldwin and King. You see him, he's at the March on Washington. He goes to Washington DC and becomes the head of the Muslim Mosque number four there. So he's an extraordinary figure. But in 63, I wanted to show how he's impacting the narrative and the politics of the time and how the politics are impacting him. So you see, I think, a much more vulnerable Malcolm X than you would think With the Kennedy brothers. I think what was great about slowing it down to 1963 was seeing their evolution right, their moments of doubt, their reluctance, but then their moments of boldness and courage right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So we get a better portrait of the Kennedys, I think in Freedom Season, for my money than any other previous book, because I think what books tend to do is either valorize or demonize them right. So books tend to say they were the greatest thing since sliced bread about the civil rights movement. That's not true. Or that they absolutely did nothing in support of civil rights, and that's not true. And so you're able to really see, and their evolution is incomplete the spring of the speeches of the president and the March on Washington. But then they're not great. After the six children are murdered in Birmingham and I show that that's the whole thing I think for their own posterity they should have went to those funerals, right.
Speaker 1:Yes, definitely.
Speaker 2:And again it's politics be damned. But they don't know it at the time. The president doesn't know he's going to be assassinated in November 22nd, 63. Bobby doesn't know he's going to be shot on June 5th and die June 6th of 68, right. But it becomes civil rights, does become the beating heart of that administration, reluctantly, right. And then there's people like Gloria Richardson and Lorraine Hansberry who I thought was very, very interesting to see their evolution.
Speaker 2:Gloria Richardson is an activist from Cambridge, maryland, who's a Howard University graduate, who's trying to desegregate the city of Cambridge and is very, very powerful, very, very no-nonsense. And she's facing all this sexism. She's facing all this deep skepticism about women and their leadership. She's unimpressed by the Kennedys and has to go. She meets JFK at the White House. She negotiates with Bobby Kennedy the so-called Treaty of Cambridge. Malcolm X leads a standing ovation for her at King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit in November of 63, and they go on to have a professional relationship.
Speaker 2:So I think she's endlessly fascinated. She was called the Lady General of the Civil Rights Movement. And Lorraine Hansberry is really, really important because she's just so unbelievably brilliant and she was a radical before. James Baldwin was a radical and they were friends, she's six years younger than Baldwin. I mean, what's so interesting is the age of people. Baldwin was born in 1924, malcolm and Bobby Kennedy in 1925, lorraine Hansberry in 1930, gloria Richardson is about 42 at the time, so 1921. Jack Kennedy 1917. People were very, very young here. You know, william F Buckley is 36, 37, 38. It's a very fascinating period because so many of the leaders are so young and the protagonists are so young.
Speaker 1:I love the way you wrote the book. It's a storytelling of the events that happened in 1963, not just short snippets of facts and figures. There are stories around these people and you bring out their humanity, which I enjoy about your writing. Was there a particular moment where Baldwin's voice felt especially central or prophetic to you?
Speaker 2:Oh many you know. So I think Baldwin and it's not just the Fire Next Time I think one of the things I wanted to show and I'm working on another Baldwin project now was to show how he becomes an activist. He calls himself a witness, but he's in Louisiana and North Carolina and Mississippi at the start of the year with Medgar Evers and then he does a West Coast tour of Los Angeles and Sacramento and San Francisco and he's speaking before 7,000, 8,000, 9,000 students at Berkeley, standing room only in gymnasiums in Stanford. So there's a great picture of him at Berkeley in the book too. So this is really unbelievable. The impact that Baldwin has is unbelievable. I think he's unbelievably prescient about Birmingham and what that means for the country both times, both in the spring of 63, but also after the six children are killed. And one thing I tried to do is to show Baldwin and Baldwin with the young people, and I want to just say their names. The young women who are killed is Carol Robertson, addie Mae Collins, cynthia Wesley, denise McNair, and the young boys are Johnny Robinson and Virgil Peanut Ware, and throughout the book I named them.
Speaker 2:And Baldwin is very prescient in saying that by the time of the Kennedy assassination. The country mourns Kennedy collectively, but we mourn these Black children separately and we mourned Medgar Evers separately. So he's extraordinary about wanting us to. He's got these aspirations for this grand American republic, but he wants us to get there through confrontation with the original sin of racial slavery, the aftermath of Jim Crow, segregation, but also and this is very prescient for our own time in 2025, mandy. He wants us to go beyond the lies that rationalized and justified Jim Crow and slavery and contemporary inequality In 1963, he's saying that, let alone 62 years later, where folks right now are actively trying to erase and efface American history and ban books and prevent us from talking about all these things.
Speaker 2:And again, it's paradoxical because we are living in the world right now where, in the history of the recorded world, we have the most resources to disseminate information and knowledge. But unfortunately, we also have the most resources to disseminate information and knowledge, but unfortunately, we also have the most resources to disseminate misinformation and untruths and falsehoods as well.
Speaker 1:I just want to circle back to the children who died in Birmingham and a quote from James Baldwin Carol Robertson, addie Mae Collins, cynthia Wesley, denise McNair and the two boys Collins, cynthia Wesley, denise McNair and the two boys Johnny Robinson and Virgil Peanut Ware, on page 118, I think it's you're in May in 1963, you share an eloquent quote by James Baldwin those who bear the greatest responsibility for the chaos in Birmingham are not in Birmingham and while that quote was for everyone to hear, do you feel it was directed toward the Kennedys and do you feel that quote of Baldwin's resonates today through causes like Black Lives Matter and the political unrest within the United States today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think he's aiming it at the Kennedys, but he's also aiming it at the George Wallaces and the conservatives. He's a vociferous critic of J Edgar Hoover and the FBI because of their hypocrisy and their lack of defending civil rights activists, and he knows their surveillance of the movement. He's not aware of the depth and the lengths of them. So he's aiming it at that whole group of folks and certainly that continues today, because wherever we see violence, wherever we see impoverishment, where we see political division and polarization, the folks who are really truly responsible are not in those locales themselves. Right, it's going to be folks who are misinformation oligarchs and tech titans who are and they're political cronies, who are orchestrating these things. And we've already seen it in terms of this administration and the tech folks who are connected to this administration and what's going on with our both domestic and foreign policy. So he's right on there and the positive of 63 is that a lot of people are listening to him and he's eventually able to get at least a sit-in with some of the biggest people who are in the corridors of power.
Speaker 2:And Baldwin is part of the moral shaming of these folks, alongside of the movement that's going to compel Jack Kennedy into action and again, people like Bobby Kennedy when we think about sort of the legend of Bobby Kennedy and I'm somebody who actually admire Bobby Kennedy but Baldwin shows us you know, when they have the summit and you know Kennedy is unleashing the FBI on folks after the summit, including King's attorney Clarence Jones, and that's how the FBI is going to find out about Martin Luther King Jr's extramarital affairs that Baldwin is really about a deeper truth. Bobby was never able in his lifetime to admit and apologize for the stuff he did to the Baldwins and the Kings and all that right. So the only way we could get to reconciliation, baldwin argued, is to admit all those mistakes and those lies. And so you could only get to reconciliation. The road to it was truth and justice.
Speaker 1:I'm sitting here soaking in all your words. There's so much in what you've just said that I need to pause and think about for a moment. What do you wish more people knew about Medgar Evers? That gets overlooked in mainstream civil rights narratives.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So with Medgar, it's really how brilliant he was. And the speech he makes in May of 1963, and what's so interesting about that speech is is responding to Mayor Thompson of Jackson, mississippi, saying that Negroes are treated well, everything here is fine. And what Medgar says in that speech is he talks about being a veteran of the Second World War fighting Hitlerism and fascism. He talks about being a native Mississippi, generationally going back to racial slavery, so he's not an outsider. And he says that the folks in Mississippi, black folks, love the country. They're patriotic, just like he is, and they're fighting to transform the country. But they understand what's happening in Africa and the decolonization movements and the freedom movements around the world. So it's a panoramic, brilliantly cosmopolitan and globally international speech.
Speaker 2:And so what we don't get and I say it's a very undersided speech in the annals of the civil rights movement is that we don't get Medgar Evers alive as an activist who's helping to transform what's going on in Mississippi. And see and I think we do in Freedom Season, see that even shortly before his death he's profiled in the New York Times. People know who he is. He's a star and we're getting to see how intelligent he is. The relationship between him and Murley, his wife, his three kids, the way in which he builds coalitions, including with the white and indigenous professor John Salter, who's right there at Tougaloo sit-ins. And I show Salter and Joan Trumpower, who I've actually met and interviewed in real life, who's a white activist who goes to Tougaloo 21 years old, blonde, blue-eyed, petite and just so courageous and so resilient and indefatigable. And so you know, when we think about Medgar Evers, we have to see all of that before just putting him down as a martyr, right so, 37 years old, a former football player, a veteran of war, but this unbelievably courageous figure, who Martin Luther King Jr knows and admires deeply James Baldwin meets in 63 and deeply admires who's just a linchpin. The students admire him. You know students like Dave Dennis and Bob Moses, and the students who are part of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Masonic Temple in downtown Jackson, mississippi. Medgar is the editor of his own paper, the Mississippi Free Press, a four-page mimeograph. So just truly a remarkable figure. Not just somebody who we say, oh, field secretary of the NAACP who was assassinated in the early hours of June 12th. So much more than that.
Speaker 2:I wanted us to feel that too and feel how the Black community reacted to his assassination too. I wanted us to feel that, because Medgar becomes this global figure and you see Murley on the cover of Life magazine and stuff and John Kennedy saying the morning after he's killed that this has become everything. Civil rights has become everything right. And I wanted us to see, from the start of the year to June 11th, 12th, that for Black activists it had already been everything right. This was their lives.
Speaker 2:And it takes all these series of escalating crises and these public humiliations, because, remember, birmingham's a public humiliation for the United States because it's a different America, only 18 years after the Second World War. It's America that can still be shamed, right. It's the America that Henry Luce, the publisher of Time Magazine, says it's going to be an American century, the American century. Right, we're going to bring peace and prosperity to the globe, and so it's important for us to see that. I think to feel that the shape and texture of that in 63.
Speaker 2:And again, there's an arrogance to American power, because, even as John F Kennedy is hosting Murley and two of her children at the White House, he can't imagine that he's going to be assassinated. That's the power and the privilege. Right? He can't imagine it. Bobby Kennedy can't imagine it. It's going to happen, but they can't. They feel they're protected. They're not, bobby Kennedy. Both those brothers are going to be killed, right, both of them? But they feel they're protected. They feel they've got it right, you know, but they don't right, and Black people are trying to tell them and ring the alarm. None of us are protected and that's why Malcolm X says chickens coming home to roost's the intimate way in which you've written that scene.
Speaker 1:It's heart-wrenching and it brings that death and everyone else who has died for a cause right back home, right back to us. You spoke earlier about Gloria Richardson and Lorraine Hansberry, women who paved the way for the next generation of female civil rights activists. Women who paved the way for the next generation of female civil rights activists. Can you speak about one or two women who reshaped your understanding of how leadership functioned?
Speaker 2:during that era. Oh, absolutely, they do pave the way. And I show Diane Nash, who's part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and also Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who's one of the architects of the Nashville Freedom Movement of 1960-61, but also of the Selma demonstrations that are going to happen in 65, how she's so, so pivotal Diane Nash. Ella Baker, who's the founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, is in this book. Fannie Lou Hamer, who's a sharecropper turned civil rights activist. Fannie Lou Hamer, who's a sharecropper turned civil rights activist, who's going to be, who's beaten in Winona, mississippi, during this time, but who's going to be at the Democratic National Convention in 64, the credentials committee and have her testimony live broadcast where she famously says is this America where we are home of the free land of the brave, where we're beaten for wanting to exercise our rights as free citizens? So yes, they absolutely do pave the way. And what I wanted to show especially we see how Black women were not allowed to make a full speech at the March on Washington was just to see their activism, but then also the constraints, because you're being active within a patriarchal context and within a patriarchal context where there were some other Black women who acceded and believed in that patriarchal context, who believed that liberation meant having Black patriarchy that was at the same level of white patriarchy. That was the paradigm and the framework.
Speaker 2:So it's very, very complicated, right, it's very, very complicated. Some people are going to evolve past that and say, no, it's going to be. We're going to be co-equal architects of this new America. Some people remain there. Some people remain there even to this day, right, some people remain there and we've seen that where you know, two women have tried to run for president and both of them have not received the majority of women's votes, neither of them in 2016 and 2024. So I think the story of Black women here is very, very key in how they were pushing for fundamental change and how we can reimagine these notions of citizenship, dignity, democracy and freedom.
Speaker 1:Can you talk about the Black Americans in 1963 who perhaps thought I don't want to rock the boat, we can live here, this is where we've been allocated and let's just stay here. I don't want to rock the boat. Do you think they ever thought? You know, segregation is never going to happen, so let's just cool it.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely Absolutely. There were moderates and people who were pragmatists, who didn't want to invite that violence. One of the things I show is that with Medgar Evers, before his assassination, there are Black neighbors of his who are upset about the notoriety he's receiving because they don't want their homes bombed, they don't want their kids endangered. And look, medgar Evers was assassinated. But what if somehow a random innocent bystander? He was innocent too, but so, no, a lot of people felt that way, a lot of people. And then there was also a black nationalist critique of racial integration, really most eloquently articulated by Malcolm X, mandy, who's saying why are we putting ourselves in danger for these people? And that's what's so interesting, because Malcolm is always for Black dignity, but until his last year he's skeptical of the idea of citizenship. And remember, citizenship is merely the external recognition of dignity. That's what citizenship is. So when you think about passports, when you think about voting rights, when you think about what is citizenship, it's really the external recognition of dignity to the extent that you get formal, legal and legislative institutions to ratify what is already yours, mandy. That's what it is, you know, it's a ratification of what is. And that's why Malcolm X is always skeptical, because he's saying, if we're going to fight for this citizenship, he is skeptical of white America's integrity in ensuring that that citizenship would be permanent and institutionalized equitably and fairly right. And what's so interesting about how we perceive that critique of Malcolm X? It shifts over time.
Speaker 2:In 2008, when Obama was elected, people would say Malcolm got it wrong. You know like, look, we've got Barack Obama in Grant Park. And he was. He was Barack Obama's election victory was in Grant Park, almost 40 years to the day of activists, interracial activists, being routed by the Chicago PD. And this is happening live on television Mandy, at the Democratic National Convention and outside.
Speaker 2:And the slogan, the chant that they start saying is the whole world is watching. And the slogan, the chant that they start saying is the whole world is watching. And that chant becomes a global chant about the hypocrisy of American imperialism. And there are senior citizens there too who are being handcuffed for protesting, using their free speech rights, protesting against racism, the Vietnam War, and they're being brutalized by the Chicago PD. Dan Rather is brutalized live on television. Walter Cronkite calls the Chicago PD a bunch of thugs live on television, right. And so the whole idea of the whole world is watching. Forty years later, barack Obama's president. So people think, hey, we've won, we've broken the arc of history. Right Now you ask people about that Malcolm X quote and perspective in 2025, they're going to have a whole different perspective.
Speaker 1:In his election victory speech, did Obama talk about what had happened in Grant Park 40 years before?
Speaker 2:He didn't speak about Grant Park. He didn't speak about that. That happened, but in the context of the campaign he did speak about, you know, selma and civil rights and suffragists, but yeah, no, he didn't speak about that.
Speaker 1:On page 46 of Freedom Season you talk about the summit and I'm wondering what does the lack of a recording say about the level of trust among those gathered at the summit? Because I was trying to figure out, and I did some research about whether there was a reporter or anybody there taking notes, but I didn't see anything.
Speaker 2:No, we don't know. We don't know. We only have recollections of the meeting. But it doesn't seem like that meeting was recorded and if it was, it's been lost to history.
Speaker 1:Tell us a bit about the summit. Who was there, and can you expand on Bobby Kennedy's request to have J Edgar Hoover and the FBI explore some of the attendees?
Speaker 2:Well, the summit is really, really an amazing meeting, a three-hour meeting. That happens May 24, 1963, at the behest of Bobby Kennedy, who had had breakfast with James Baldwin at his estate, hickory Hill, which, by the way, had been Jack Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy's estate in the 1950s after marriage. And they actually sold that to Bobby and Ethel after they had a little girl who was born stillborn, who's buried with President Kennedy. And so they have a breakfast meeting. It doesn't last very long because of their busy schedules.
Speaker 2:But Kennedy says he's going to be in New York and if you can gather a list of folks who are in the pulse of the Negro community, the Black community, and so Baldwin gets together Harry Belafonte, lena Horne, lorraine Hansberry, kenneth Clark, who's the most famous Black psychologist in America, very famous for the doll test with the Brown decision, where he showed that the little Black girl wanted the white dolls over the Brown decision, where he showed that the little black girl wanted the white dolls over the black dolls, and talks about the effects of racial segregation. And Earl Warren cited Kenneth and Mamie Clark's research in the Brown decision. And then they get, you know, david Baldwin, jimmy Baldwin's brothers there they have some. You know the actor Rip Torn might be there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was fascinated that Rip Torn was there.
Speaker 2:Rip Torn. It was one of Jimmy Baldwin's best friends, rip Torn and Shelley Winters, you know, for those of us who remember these actors, you know he was, you know, yeah, so he's very good friends with them and Jimmy used to hang out at the actor's studio in the 1950s People don't, you know really incredible person. And so all those folks are there and Jerome Smith becomes the key person who's a friend of Jimmy, 25 year old black man who is an organizer with the Congress of Racial Equality in Louisiana.
Speaker 1:And he's quite outspoken in the summit.
Speaker 2:Very outspoken about what the Kennedys are not doing and about how he's so skeptical of the country because of the mistreatment of civil rights workers. So it's a three hour back and forth. Bobby's thinking it's going to be a valediction and they're going to love and sweat the Kennedys and they're saying the exact opposite. And then both sides later leak their versions of the meeting. Bobby's very, very upset and really has all of them, the big names investigated by the FBI. So you start to see Baldwin's, j Edgar Hoover, everybody's right on Baldwin, but so Clarence Jones and others too. But that meeting does become part of Bobby's evolution. Both sides are going to leak their versions of the meeting. They don't understand enough. Baldwin's going to say you know well, he's still hopeful, but Bobby still is unable. It was Bobby and Burke Marshall, his special assistant in the Civil Rights Division. Baldwin's going to say they can't recognize Black humanity. That's the fundamental gap. They can't recognize Black humanity. They don't see. Even later in the oral histories Bobby says there was a kid there and he's talking about Jerome Smith and they all looked up to him like a hero or something. But he's not able to recognize himself in Jerome Smith. That's the most a group of Black people ever mistreated Bobby Kennedy or yelled at Bobby Kennedy and that's why I say that in the book that that's the closest he ever comes to being in a room with Malcolm X, because he's got these radicals who are who are letting him know. And what's so interesting about the Kennedys and their misunderstanding of the movement is that they can't stand the young people of SNCC. They think of SNCC and this is 63, mandy, like SNCC is the Black Panthers. That's how they think of SNCC and SNCC is. You know, these are young patriotic. Some of them are going to become radicals and revolutionaries, stokely, carmichael, all these people. But I'm saying SNCC was a champion of the new frontier, sncc was a champion of the most soaring rhetoric of the Kennedy administration until seeing the huge gap between rhetoric and reality.
Speaker 2:And we see that in freedom season in Greenwood, mississippi, where instead of coming to the rescue in Greenwood, they make a deal, even after the assassination attempt on Bob Moses, and get all the people out of jail, but to stop the movement for voting rights that they had been the ones who had been pressuring SNCC to be a part of through the Voter Education Project, the VEP, and saying stop all the sit-ins, just try to vote. But there was even more violence once people tried to vote. And I show that with Selma too. Selma, before we get Selma with MLK, we see Selma with SNCC, and James Baldwin goes down there and you know he tells his first biographer, fern Ekman, that you know he's seeing Sheriff Jim Clark and he's got all these violent fantasies against Sheriff Jim Clark and says this guy's despicable and deserves to die Right.
Speaker 2:And now it's very interesting and I wanted to show that that you know Malcolm X is not the only one who's passionate about this Right. Baldwin is very much enraged by what he sees and I think we have a right to be. You know, obviously Baldwin is never violent, but we, he, he, he has a right to be. Obviously Baldwin is never violent but he has a right to be. What he sees none of us should ever have to see.
Speaker 1:In the book you write that Malcolm X was at the March on Washington. Were there any other times when Malcolm X, james Baldwin and Martin Luther King were in the same room together?
Speaker 2:So the three of them being in one venue, so the three of them being in one venue, that would have been it, the March on Washington. When it comes to Malcolm and Baldwin, they were in multiple venues, especially in the early 60s. Malcolm is the one who sets up the meeting at Elijah Muhammad's house that becomes the set piece for the fire next time Malcolm and Martin are together. Basically three times the March on Washington. Meaning you know, like at the march he's not on the podium. Meet together on March 26, 1964 at the U9th Armory, in the audience, sitting next to Andrew Young, who's one of King's most famous lieutenants, now mayor of Atlanta and a United Nations ambassador and a big eminence who's still alive. Malcolm is in the audience and later talks about it while King is being fetid coming back from Europe and the Nobel Prize, and they're both in London for one day at the same time, in December of 64 as well.
Speaker 1:And they were never in the same room having a discussion.
Speaker 2:Not a discussion. They're at the US Senate and they say a few words to each other, but no.
Speaker 1:When you think about it, that's extraordinary.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely, people have written plays about it.
Speaker 1:Gosh, they might be my three picks for an imaginary dinner party.
Speaker 2:Oh man, absolutely yes, that'd be a great dinner conversation.
Speaker 1:Okay, Peniel, what are you currently reading?
Speaker 2:You know I'm reading right now, really kind of rereading Jason Roberts's Every Living Thing. I'm also reading some of Ryan Holliday's stuff from the Daily Stoic on Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius and all those things. I'm working on a couple of things as well, yeah.
Speaker 1:You and I are going to be in conversation in Santa Barbara on Thursday, august 14th, at the Santa Barbara Club for the Lunch with an Author Literary Series event Tickets are available at mandyjacksonbeverlycom forward slash events. I am really looking forward to that event.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm looking forward to that too.
Speaker 1:Peniel, thank you so much for being a guest on the show.
Speaker 2:Peniel, thank you so much for being a guest on the show. I highly recommend Freedom. Never did a book with so many, like you know, presidential characters. Like we didn't get a chance to talk about LBJ, but he's there and Buckley's there and the book I'm working on is 63 and I got the Carnegie for it. It's really just going to be Baldwin it's called Witness and James Baldwin 63, but I'm also going to bring him to 2025 too.
Speaker 1:Well, you have to come back and talk about that one too. Thank you again, peniel, for being on the show.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much, Mandy, and for the Bookshop podcast, and for all of the support and your encouragement of just writers and reading, because we really need that now more than ever. So, thank you.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to my conversation with Peniel E Joseph about his new book Freedom Season how 1963 transformed America's civil rights revolution. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly on X, instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the Bookshop Podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, mandy Jackson Beverley, theme music provided by Brian Beverley, executive assistant to Mandy Adrian Ohtohan by Brian Beverly, executive assistant to Mandy Adrian Ohtohan, and graphic design by Francis Farala. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.