- [Announcer] Support for "Overheard of Evan Smith" comes from Hillco Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stewart, Christine and Philip Dial, and the Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation and public affairs communication.

Ellergroup.com.

- I'm Evan Smith.

He's one of the leading historians of black power as well as an acclaimed author whose latest book is "Freedom Season" How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution".

He's Peniel Joseph.

This is "Overheard".

A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

You really turn the conversation around about what leadership should be about.

Are we blowing this?

Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving in to the attention junkie?

As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else.

Thank you.

This is "Overheard".

(soft music) (audience applauding) Pineal Joseph, welcome.

- Thank you for having me.

- Good to see you.

Congratulations on this book, which is such a great read.

You know, I've asked you this question before.

I'm not gonna pretend I haven't, but I always want to ask it because I think it's important.

Why 1963?

Why not 1964?

I've always been conditioned, and I'm an amateur, you're a professional historian of the Civil Rights Movement, that 1964 is this monumental year, but you've chosen to focus on '63.

Why?

- Well, '63 kept coming up in my research on my other books.

This is the eighth book that I've done.

- [Evan Smith] Right.

- And I always found fascinating stories in 1963.

For most of that year, John F. Kennedy is alive, Bobby Kennedy's Attorney General.

- Right.

- Martin Luther King Jr. and Birmingham and the March on Washington.

But then there were also these stories of people like Gloria Richardson, black woman, who was an activist in Cambridge, Maryland.

- Right.

- Lorraine Hansberry, who's the playwright, "Raisin in the Sun", and a big, big activist, James Baldwin, the writer and activist in "The Fire Next Time".

So I found all these interesting tidbits and I could never, because I would write books that had longer timeframes.

- [Evan Smith] Right?

- I would have to leave 1963 to 1964 and '65, Civil Rights Act, voting Rights Act.

- Right?

- And I saw '63 sort of as a George Floyd moment, a Breonna Taylor moment before we had those things where there's so much tumultuous activism, there's so much tragedy, but there's also so much triumph and there's so much hope.

So I thought there was, it was a real hopeful year.

And for me, it's the year that really jump starts the entire decade of the 60s.

- It, it's kind of an arc of a year.

I mean, I do think that point is critical.

You say in this book, this was the year that America came undone.

- Yeah.

- And remade itself.

There was an enormous amount that was bad.

And a lot of things, there's a long list of really bad things that happened.

The four girls murdered in Alabama, you know, the murders of Medgar Evers and of JFK.

The March on Washington is that year, the letter from Birmingham Jail is that year, the year begins with the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Like it's a, it's a consequential year from the standpoint of history.

But by the end, there is actually something to be hopeful about going forward, right.

Like we come out of it.

- Absolutely.

- Yeah.

- Paradoxically, it's a very, very hopeful year.

And I think it's hopeful because people are finally talking publicly and openly on shows like this about the values of dignity, citizenship, democracy, but freedom, which is why it's called "Freedom Season".

And the book is divided into four parts, winter, spring, summer and autumn.

And we we're able to see the evolution, the evolution of JFK, the evolution of Bobby Kennedy.

- Yeah.

- We're able to see how in certain ways the right viewed freedom and dignity and citizenship.

William F. Buckley, we're able to see liberals like Norman Pot Horowitz and Commentary Magazine and how they viewed what was going on.

- Yeah.

- And certainly Baldwin in a lot of ways is the heart and soul, because what Baldwin reminds us, he's got this vision of a grand aspirational republic that is committed to multiracial democracy through the crucible of confronting the nation's original sin of racial slavery.

So when Baldwin writes in "The Fire Next Time", at the end of it to, to end the racial nightmare and finally achieve our country, he's being serious.

He actually believes-- - Right.

- In this idea that we are a strange kin.

That we are a strange family.

- Right.

- And the only way we can get to reconciliation and reunion-- - Right.

- Is through truth and justice, which requires a confrontation.

- Well, and there's this description of Baldwin who I've said to you again before today, other conversation we've had that in some ways, this is a book about Baldwin.

- Yes.

- As much as anybody.

- Although I'm writing a book about Baldwin.

- But you are writing a Baldwin book, but that's the next book.

We'll have you back for that book.

But this idea that Baldwin it is said, loved America enough that he had a battered faith in its capacity to change.

I love that phrasing.

He had a battered faith in its capacity to change.

I mean, he was hopeful despite the fact that he was also hyper realistic about how things were.

- And I think that's one of the most.

Yeah, absolutely.

One of the most hopeful aspects of the book is the deep love of country that you see people have here.

- Right.

- People are fighting for America, they're fighting for a version of the American dream that is as expansive as possible, and they're willing to risk their lives.

They're, you know, not just in Birmingham, Alabama, but in Greenwood, Mississippi and Jackson, Mississippi, but not just there in Brooklyn, New York, in California, in Austin, Texas.

People felt a surge of electricity that year.

And it just builds and builds and builds.

And when we think about the March on Washington, the chapters called, and it's a phrase from Baldwin, the language of human joy.

- Right.

- The March on Washington is an extraordinary gathering.

And there had been these gatherings, LA, 35,000 people came out.

Detroit, 125,000 people came out.

Washington DC, 250,000 people came out.

- Right.

- And it was so successful, Kennedy brings all the March leaders and he serves them sandwiches, and they're drinking coffee, and they're just saying, this is a great historic American day.

And Kennedy speaks to his, and this is a great phrase, his favorite White House butler, Bruce, and he tells him, I wish I could be out there.

- Yeah, I wanna ask you about JFK in a second, but I wanna come back to something you said.

Well, you're welcome to applaud, applaud.

Applauding is fine.

(audience applauds) I wanna come back to something you said about love of country.

- Yeah.

- I have this sense that there were people at the time who view the protests on behalf of civil rights, human rights, as not patriotic.

Right, there was some question about the patriotism of the people who took to the streets.

You sort through some of that in this book, don't you?

- Absolutely.

Medgar Evers is a great example of this.

A military hero, war veteran.

- Right.

- Native of Jackson, Mississippi, native of Mississippi, but living in Jackson, Mississippi with his wife and three children.

- Right.

- And he's constantly saying, I am an American citizen.

I love this country, and I'm gonna stay and live in Mississippi to transform this country.

- Yeah.

- And he gives a great speech in May of '63 where he says he battled Hitlerism and fascism, these are his words, overseas, and he's gonna make sure that Mississippi has justice and the United States has justice domestically.

So it was a hugely patriotic struggle.

And to your point, what Dr. King does in "Letter from Birmingham Jail", because what we have to think of letter from, and I teach that every semester, I teach "Letter from Birmingham Jail" no matter what I'm teaching.

Because what that is is America's best, I think, theory of justice.

It's a theory of American justice where King says that he's unwilling to believe in immoral laws from this point forward.

So even though the clergy, white clergy has told him, why are, why are you doing these Birmingham protests?

It's bad timing.

King says, we can't wait because this is destroying the soul of everybody who's here, right?

- Right.

- And in that speech, in that letter, rather, he says, the young people who are being arrested in Birmingham are one day gonna be regaled as heroes.

And he was right.

And he said, but he says, the quote is "for bringing this nation back to those great wells of democracy that were dug deep by the founding fathers".

Right.

- Right.

- So when we think about patriotism, and then Lyndon Johnson's gonna use that in his, we shall overcome speech in March 15th, 1965, where he compares the protestors in Selma on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, who are being routed by 600 Alabama state troopers.

He compares them to American revolutionaries in Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts.

But it's King who gives us the, the, the lexicon to think of the Civil Rights movement as the most patriotic movement in American history since the founding.

- Yeah.

I'm glad you brought up LBJ.

So I came into this book, I mean, I've read Robert Caro and I, you know, I, I feel like I'm at least dangerous at a cocktail party.

That's my level of knowledge on this stuff, right?

(audience laughs) But, but I actually came away thinking that it was a, an interesting point of tension.

JFK or LBJ in terms of who, through his words and through his deeds, was more committed to the movement.

%Did did, did you come away in this book with a sense of how each measured up on this?

- Yeah, I think they were working in tandem.

I think that obviously JFK's assassination allows the vote, the Civil Rights Act to be passed quicker than it would've-- - Right.

- If he had simply been reelected.

- Right.

- Right?

And so I think when we think about their commitments, JFK's commitments grow over time.

By the spring of '63, he is fully committed, still not at the level that civil rights activists want, because the role of a president is different from a social movement leader or activist.

Right?

And when we think about LBJ, LBJ had a complex relationship with, with race, right?

On one level, he's pro underdog, Cotulla, Mexican students.

Mexican American students, a New Dealer.

So he's right there.

On another, he's a product of his time in the South.

And there are people like Richard Russell and different mentors who are overt racists, right?

And so when we think about why did he champion civil rights, he also knew that politically, it was what he needed to do.

- Right.

- By 19-- - Which despite the consequences.

- Despite the consequences.

- Which he famously said.

- He says, by the time they signed the Voting Rights Act-- - Right.

- He said, we've lost the South for a generation.

- Right.

- Right, and in fact, you know, they've lost the South for more than one generation because of political realignment, right.

- Right.

So when we think about LBJ, I think what LBJ does, and he understands better than Kennedy, and he says this, and I have it in the book with a, with a, a dialogue, a conversation with Ted Sorenson.

He understands the power of the bully pulpit of the presidency.

- Yeah.

- LBJ understands that being president means taking risks and leading this kind of moral charge that's being inspired from the grassroots.

By '63, we can see that there's a moral re-imagining happening.

And we could see it at the March on Washington, right?

Even though Birmingham happens less than three weeks later, March on Washington is the first mass church meeting in American history.

That's what that day was.

It's a day of all of us going to this secular church.

And America really refashions through King, but also through John Lewis, through Joaquin Prince and the other speakers, we really refashion a new civic religion where we say that racial justice is the beating heart of a multiracial democracy.

And we create a consensus in 1963 that lasts for the next 50 years all the way to the Shelby v Holder decision.

- Yeah.

I mean, it occurs to me that the presidency, I mean yeah, the bully pulpit, I mean, I might sort of cast it differently, rhetorically the presidency exists as a permission structure for the country to get behind movements like this.

And I think that both JFK and LBJ in different ways were material right to progress.

But it was the rhetoric of support as much as anything that they individually did.

Now, obviously, signing the Voting Rights Act to the Civil Rights, all of that was critical.

But I kind of think almost more important was, was the validation that they provided.

- Oh, absolutely.

After Kennedy does the June 11th speech.

- Yeah.

- We get so many telegrams, the State Department globally, there is such a sigh of relief.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- And people are really lauding his leadership.

Now that next day, Medgar Evers has been assassinated in Mississippi.

So we can see the level of the crisis, but Kennedy's calling it a moral issue.

- I wanna pivot to talk about Malcolm X. I am low key obsessed with Malcolm X right now.

100th anniversary of Malcolm X's birth, 60th anniversary of Malcolm X's death.

- Yes.

- His assassination.

There are a number of books, yours, our mutual friend Mark Whitaker's book-- - Yes.

- About Malcolm X in circulation right now.

You've written about Malcolm X before.

You'll presumably write about Malcolm X again.

Malcolm X is enjoying a moment right now.

- Yes.

- And I think that Malcolm X's legacy and reputation is not fully understood.

I think people have associated things ascribed things to Malcolm X-- - Yeah.

- Or associated things to Malcolm X that may not entirely tell the story.

So give us your Malcolm X elevator speech, his role in this moment.

- Well, in '63, this is the last year he's with the Nation of Islam.

- [Evan Smith] Right.

- And when we think about Malcolm X, born in 1925, same year as Bobby Kennedy, he becomes the biggest avatar and articulator of what I've called radical black dignity during this time period.

- Yeah.

- And by big dignity, Malcolm defines dignity as something that's God-given and intrinsic.

And it's the self-love and self value we all have for ourselves, or at least we should.

- Yeah.

- In the context of racial segregation, he argues it's very, very hard for black people to have dignity.

He uses himself as a negative example.

He talks about how he was a criminal, how he was a hustler.

He served 77 months in three different prisons in Massachusetts.

- Yeah.

- Before coming to Islam in 1949, 1950, and for the rest of his life.

And so when we think about Malcolm X, what's so critical in 1963 is he's one of the biggest critics of Martin Luther King Jr. - Right.

- He's one of the most eloquent critics of the Kennedy administration.

At the same time, he's drawn to the movement, right.

At the same time he attends the March on Washington.

He says, just as an observer, he attends the March on Washington.

And what's so fascinating to me about Malcolm in '63 is that we find a, a person who's, who's losing one aspect of his, his religion and his belief in the nation of Islam, and gaining both wider secular belief in, in a human rights movement and a human rights revolution.

And also gaining this understanding.

And this is where I think King and him have a nice interplay, that we do need citizenship.

I said Malcolm, with this radical black dignity, I've said that King's notion is radical black citizenship.

And for King, citizenship is not just the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.

For him citizenship, and we see it with the poor people's campaign, is a living wage.

- It's full participation.

- Full participation.

- Right.

- It's decent housing.

- Right.

- It's the, it's a cessation of violence.

By '67 King is gonna come out against the Vietnam War.

Famously, he says, there comes a time where silence is betrayal, right.

And so when we think about Malcolm by '64, and he's on his way in '63, he starts to see we need dignity and citizenship.

- I wanna pivot over from "Freedom Season" to Unfreedom Season, which some would say is 2025 in this country, Unfreedom Season.

I think about race in America as this kind of, you know, evolutionary thing.

A narrative thread that cuts through the last whatever the number of years is.

And we make progress, we make gains, but we also retreat from gains.

So where do we, what is the situation as it relates to race in this country right now?

we've decided that diversity, equity, and inclusion institutionally, we don't like that.

So we're gonna eliminate the use of diversity and equity in hiring in public entities.

We're going to decide, it no longer applies in the case of college admissions.

We're gonna remove anything that's looks like DEI from our public schools now in some places.

We're gonna decide what can and can't be taught, what history can and can't be taught.

We're gonna decide what books can and can't be put on shelves, and we're gonna undermine the entire infrastructure of civil rights and the rule of law that has existed as a protection.

And it occurs to me that the dismantling of the Department of Education is a great example of how we're really kind of coming after what was institutionally the protections put in place specifically to protect many of the people who will now lack that.

You know, the civil rights component of the Department Of Education was really the impetus for the Department of Education to be, to be created as a standalone agency.

I just wonder if your battered faith in our capacity to change has remained intact in the face of Unfreedom Season.

- Yeah, no, that's a great question.

I think we're in a post consensus period in American history.

- Say, say more about that.

- And so by post consensus, I think what '63 does, and that's why it was so important for me to write this book.

And I think there are echoes of '63 in 2025, and we could, we can discuss both negative and positive.

But I think '63 creates the consensus, 50 year consensus.

And remember, civil rights is always about more than just black people.

- Right.

- It's always about more than just queer people, disabled folks, Latinos, Asians, whoever is marginalized.

Eventually civil rights always expands opportunities for everyone.

- Right.

- And in fact, when you think about things like Affirmative Action, we have the data on this.

White women benefited more from Affirmative Action than African Americans.

The reason they did so was that they had more access to higher education.

They had more access to corporate America.

They had more access once the doors started to open up to be quote unquote qualified.

- Right.

- To come in.

- Right.

- Because remember, Affirmative Action also so limited, many, many people never had access to Affirmative Action.

Many, many people never had access to the corporate America or higher ed.

- You mean the, to the mechanism of it?

- To the mechanism of Affirmative Action.

So when we think about where we at in terms of post consensus, what '63 does is produced 50 years where even though you talked about progress and setbacks.

Yes, there were setbacks including mass incarcerations and negative things.

But '63 to 2013, empirically provide the most access for black people, for women, for women of color.

- Right.

- For historically marginalized groups to build wealth in the United States, to have employment in the United States, to have homes in the United States, to be connected to K through 12 and higher education, including elite higher education context in the United States, to send their kids to great schools.

- Right.

- To do all these different things in the history of the Republic.

2013, really, we see the end of that, I argue, through the Shelby V Holder, five/four Supreme Court decision, which really ends the most robust enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, including having Texas under the Voting Rights Act, thanks to Barbara Jordan, who co-sponsored the 1975 seven year extension of the VRA.

- Right.

- That placed Texas and parts of the southwest within the VRA.

So now we're in a post consensus America, and we're, we're getting back to the pre-modern Civil Rights racial exclusion, prejudice, bias, racism of that period.

Can, can we create a new consensus?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

That's gonna take coalition politics.

- Right.

- It's gonna take organizing and doing what Baldwin and other people wanted us to do.

See other people's problems as vital as your own problems, right?

And that causes you to what, when Baldwin said we're really a strange kin, what he meant was finding beauty in other people's children and other people's lives in the same way you do with your own family, right?

And when we think about the heroic period of the Civil Rights movement with '63 being a, a real high point, that's what was so extraordinary about that period.

I narrate when you look at the March on Washington, so many different people came from Cleveland and California and the New Yorks and the South.

Some people skated all the way to DC.

Some people took bikes to DC, train cars where they were listening to jazz players who came just to come to the March on Washington.

So people saw themselves in each other, right.

And there's, there's something I wanna read from here too.

And when we see ourselves in each other, it's something that's so powerful, it changes history and it changes institution.

And for a time it actually did change hearts and minds.

But democracy is not linear.

Progress is not linear.

We have to fight and struggle and organize for that every single day.

And it's up to us to be personally vulnerable, but also intellectually curious about other people's stories, Evan.

- Right so what, so what is it gonna take though, Peniel, to get back to that?

Because if I accept your premise that there was a 50 year period from '63 to 2013-- - [Peniel Joseph] Yes.

- In which there was enormous progress, something has happened to turn some of that at least around.

- Oh, absolutely.

- In the, in the intervening 12 years.

And so my question is, what's it gonna take to get it back?

- I think we're all searching for that answer.

I think part of, I think part of answering that question is learning some lessons from '63.

One lesson that I've learned from 1963 is that ideas matter, right?

So when you look at this year, ideas about freedom, dignity, democracy, citizenship, people were debating those openly, and they really mattered and eventually helped to change institutions.

The other is, in '63, we were willing to talk to each other in bold and brave and courageous ways that's really, really very important.

People here weren't necessarily looking for safe spaces.

They were looking for courageous spaces where they could articulate what they were talking about.

One thing I will say between left and right axes in '63 is that for the most part, people were arguing with each other in good faith.

There were still far right conspiracy theories, Bircher rights that came up here.

But there were others who were really interested in multiracial democracy, but had differences of opinions on how to get there.

- Yeah.

- How were we gonna get there?

Right?

- Yeah.

- And what, what did inclusion and fairness actually look like?

And what were the mechanisms to get there?

But the other is coalitions matter.

What we see are deep coalitions.

Baldwin's very key here.

Baldwin is willing to speak to anyone.

He's, he's like you, Evan.

He's willing to speak to anyone.

He becomes this incubator where, left, right, far left, moderates, reformers.

He's willing to be in those rooms and publicly speak, debate.

- Right.

- Council.

- But but also crucially, he didn't change his message in the sense that he didn't become a different person in those rooms.

- No, no.

- He was the same person he was outside of those rooms.

- No, he's a truth teller.

- He's a truth teller.

- He's a truth teller.

And he's, he's passionate about this idea of, of America.

- We have two minutes left, Peniel, tell everybody what you're working on now.

You mentioned that you're working on a Baldwin project.

Say what you can about that.

And I know you're also thinking about Malcolm X.

Say what you can about that.

- So I've got a Baldwin book called "Witness", which is James Baldwin's 1963, which really focuses on Baldwin and '63.

But also the now, in 2025.

- If you really love the Baldwin part of this book, you're really gonna love.

- You're really gonna love "Witness".

- Yeah.

- But I have another book that should be out next year called "The Last Revolutionary", which looks at Malcolm X's last year and really makes an argument for Malcolm X as this human rights advocate-- - Yeah.

- And avatar.

And by following him all across and around the world, I was able to go to Ghana for this book.

I was able to go to the UK and Oxford and go to the Oxford Library, the Oxford Union, where he debated in 1964.

- Right.

- So it's been a really, really invaluable experience.

And then finally, I'm working on something on Martin Luther King Jr. called "The Fierce Urgency of Now", which really it looks at King, what King means historically, but the King we need to hear for this time.

Because I think King is such a compassionate figure, and empathetic figure, but a figure who's willing to take great risks in service of that compassion.

- I wanna come back to what I said about the way we've moved away from telling stories and complete histories to our kids in schools.

This kind of work, the three books you described, actually go a long way to hopefully filling in those gaps.

And we need these histories so that we fully understand what came before.

Because as the old saying goes, don't know where you're going unless you know where you've been.

- And history is-- - And you're filling in that part.

- And history is never about the past.

It's always the stories we share and tell with each other always about the present and the future.

- Good.

Okay, Pineal Joseph, thank you so much for being here.

Congratulations on the book.

Good to see you, man.

Good.

Pineal Joseph, thank you.

Good.

(audience applauds) - Thank you.

- [Evan Smith] We'd love to have you join us in the studio.

Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests and an archive of past episodes.

- We are the beneficiaries of the March on Washington.

We are the beneficiaries of people who risked it all, Bloody Sunday and, and Freedom Summer, right.

We are the beneficiaries of, of allies who were, who were, who were black and white, and Jewish and Hispanic, and Asian, who, who marched all together.

- [Announcer] Support for "Overheard of Evan Smith" comes from: Hillco Partners, Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stewart, Christine and Philip Dial, and the Eller Group specializing in crisis management, litigation and public affairs communication.

Ellergroup.com.

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