This article was originally published by The Emancipator.
“Independence Day” is a misnomer. I’ve argued previously that the true celebration should occur on June 19, to commemorate the day in 1865 when the last enslaved Black women, men, and children were liberated in Galveston, Texas, months before Congress ratified the 13th Amendment. Still, the United States didn’t become a functional and representative democracy, in any real sense, until President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964.
If we’re to recognize those truths, then 1963 presaged the true birth of a nation.
In his latest book, “Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution,” race and democracy scholar Peniel Joseph places a magnifying glass over the events of that year — which included one of the largest public demonstrations for civil rights in world history and the murders of a sitting president, a civil rights giant, and four little girls in a Birmingham church. Just before his book debuted on May 13, Joseph sat down with The Emancipator to discuss how James Baldwin and others set the standard for public intellectuals, what it means to love America, and why we — in our own calamitous times — need to remember 1963 for much more than what happened on Nov. 22.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Jamil Smith: You ended the book on November 22nd of that year, with President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. I’d wager that it’s the event that most signifies 1963 to most Americans. How did you decide on how to structure the various events the book covers?
Peniel Joseph: I always wanted this book to be a narrative history of 1963. And so. I always wanted the Kennedy assassination to be very, very late. It’s the biggest event that, certainly, White Americans took note of that year. But for Black people and people who are on the leading edge of the freedom struggle, you had Medgar Evers. You had four Black girls who were killed in [the Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in] Birmingham. You had Malcolm X protesting against police brutality in Rochester, New York. You had the Mississippi movement that was happening in Greenwood in the winter and the spring. So, there’s all these things happening. I just wanted to show how the Kennedy assassination actually dovetails and converges with so many different things that were going on that year and becomes the linchpin of that.
More broadly, why 1963? Certainly there were other pivotal years — 1966 with the emergence of the Black Power movement, ’68 for obvious reasons. … Why ’63, and why now?
’63 kept coming up over and again in my research on Malcolm X, on Martin Luther King Jr., on Stokely Carmichael, on the Black Power movement. Even during my research for “The Third Reconstruction,” which was my previous book. If we look at the Black Panthers, Black feminism, Black Marxism, Black liberalism—it all fits in ’63. I think ’63 is the most generative year of the sixties. Most people’s books — including books that I really love — speed through ’63 because they’re doing a biography or they’re having to cover 20 years of different stuff. They really can’t give you a day-by-day, week-by-week accounting.
And from being able to do it this way, you get to see how somebody like Jimmy Baldwin could end up meeting with Bobby Kennedy. How women like Gloria Richardson and Lorraine Hansberry actually figured in and changed the course of history and changed the debates. Even before that, you really see what pivotal players they were in pushing back against notions of American exceptionalism.
You set the beginning of the book at Howard, with all those intellectuals coming to a university at the behest of a student newspaper. I’m curious to know where you feel like your scholarship lands in this moment, considering how the media is changing — and the forces working against it. How are you hoping it lands in the public consciousness, in the economy of ideas?
When I started grad school 32 years ago, [mentors] used to talk about all these interconnections. And really, it took me all these decades to do it, to get it — or at least my attempt and effort at it. It’s the whole panorama. And that’s what I was trying to get with Baldwin as an anchor, to show us that the story is much bigger. It’s a global story, but it’s got local and national roots and reverberations.
I hope it shows that ’63 echoes a lot of the partisanship and the political divisions that we have right now. I hope readers see the way in which ordinary people were able to [bring about] change.
I think Baldwin’s a great example of an artist and a writer who becomes engaged in political action. He’s got a bestseller and he could have just went on to Puerto Rico and just chilled out — but he’s in Mississippi, he’s in Los Angeles, he’s in the churches, he’s leading demonstrations in Paris. I think it gives us hope in that way.
I’ve been doing different podcasts to publicize it, bookstores still matter more than ever. Black bookstores matter, independent bookstores matter. So I’m hoping that we can get this story out in this specific landscape and to show how this period really echoes our own.
One of the things I love about your book is how it spotlights how public intellectuals, not simply politicians or other elected figures or people within that space, can effect change. It’s about how people who are trafficking in these ideas can, in fact, go beyond what they put in a book or they put in the New Yorker or what have you. What do you feel like is the role of the public intellectual nowadays, especially given the calamitous environment we’re in now?
I think the public intellectual’s role is to be a truth-teller and to speak truth to power. I think that that has dramatically changed as capitalism has evolved. Things have changed in extraordinary ways, but there are still similarities. Jimmy Baldwin could meet up with the attorney general of the United States and the President really knows who he is. You think about when [Barack] Obama was president, he knew who Michelle Alexander was.
In terms of 2025, we have a radically anti-Black administration and movement and backlash. But I still think the role of the public intellectual is to tell us a story about ourselves that we need to hear rather than one we want to hear. And that’s what Baldwin did, and he wasn’t the only one. I think sometimes people, then and now, think of Baldwin as naive.
Not at all.
I actually think that they’re wrong. When Baldwin spoke about inheritance versus birthright, we have to have this confrontation even before we can get to the policy and the political transformations. I think people think of it and misinterpret it and misunderstand it as just a call for a kind of benign love — but he’s talking about something that’s much more radical than that.
Throughout the book, it’s plain how Baldwin and other figures who were working to change America really loved America. I’ve often found my own life and work animated by what Baldwin expressed: “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” That, to me, is the essence of love. It’s about insisting upon critical thought about this country so that we can actually improve it. So it’s interesting that you say that there’s a naivete that people sense there, because to me, I think that’s the essence of what we need to change this country.
Yes. But think of Malcolm X, who greatly admires Baldwin, has a critique of that, right? And I think one of the interesting evolutions of Baldwin — and this is in the book — is that once [the Birmingham church bombing on] Sept. 15 happened, there’s something that is altered irrevocably in Baldwin and he’s really not speaking the same way he was at the start of the year. So the March on Washington [in August 1963] does become a kind of high point because Baldwin is a man on fire starting in September and is leading these national demonstrations. What’s so interesting is the way in which these folks evolve over time and just in that single year.
In terms of 1963, yes, we think of Kennedy — but we also think of other murders that we’ve talked about. Why did it feel necessary to reexamine these events? What was your impetus to recontextualize them in order to make an effective narrative in this book?
The recontextualization is really important. I greatly admire the Joy Reid book on Medgar Evers and Myrlie Evers-Williams, two of my pivotal figures in [the book]. I wanted to recontextualize Birmingham and the beginning of the year through the eyes of activists who were on the ground. I also wanted to show the real evolution. I have a chapter called about [JFK’s] three best days as president — but there’s a bunch that [the Kennedys] don’t do. I wanted to show why activists became so discouraged when they had an administration that wasn’t openly hostile — but also wasn’t embracing the civil rights struggle, the way in which people who were in charge of their legacies would try to claim later.
I wanted to show the real fear that was on the ground. These were young people who still believed fervently in this idea of multiracial democracy that had really been born out of Reconstruction. And certainly Medgar Evers is the throughline to show this. I want to show Evers’ activism before his assassination — including the televised speech he gave in Jackson, Mississippi, in which he’s talking about the global nature of the Black freedom struggle. He gives one of the most important civil rights speeches of all time, but it’s only seen locally and not nationally. This is the Medgar Evers whom we never see.
In terms of 2025, we have a radically anti-Black administration and movement and backlash. But I still think the role of the public intellectual is to tell us a story about ourselves that we need to hear rather than one we want to hear.
If that kind of speech was made today, it would be on social media almost immediately. How do you see activism changing? As young people who are trying to make a change read your book, what do you hope that they recognize beyond the tragedies that can come from speaking loudly about change?
I hope that they recognize this idea of dignity in service, of expanding citizenship opportunities. Baldwin, Malcolm X, Gloria Richardson, Lorraine Hansberry — they were convinced about this idea of human dignity, that we all have it. And Malcolm argued that citizenship was merely the external recognition of human dignity, which is why he pushed back against the need to get citizenship. But Baldwin — and Malcolm, over time — comes to realize you do need that external recognition because if you don’t have it, you’re always at risk. That’s the thing. Malcolm initially says, well, we don’t need White folks acknowledging our dignity — but we think about police and health care and political institutions, housing rights, zoning … those are all external recognitions. Even the ability to put your kids in school and birth certificates and all that stuff. So you actually end up needing both. I also wanted to get at the March on Washington as a referendum on how important this movement for Black dignity and citizenship would be for the fate of the entire world.
You alluded to the famous 1962 Baldwin essay in The New Yorker in which he wrote that “whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.” How do you reflect upon that now, after writing this book.
I think ’63 becomes a point in which White Americans begin to demonstrate a kind of acceptance of that responsibility. And even though you get better progressive legislation in the future, I actually think in certain ways you get less acceptance of the responsibility as the years go forward.
What’s so interesting about this year is that it’s really a high point of discussing and debating notions of freedom, democracy, citizenship, and dignity. It introduces that racial justice consensus. But that consensus is always vulnerable because the more it’s introduced, the more it upsets the status quo.
I have the chapter (“The Mood of the Negro”) in which there’s the first kind of data polling of Black people in ’63, in Newsweek. But in the sentiment polling of White people in the Saturday Evening Post and some other places, and you can see already in ’63, the backlash that’s coming, right? In ’63, you had some White people saying Black people were treated too wel l— and this is before the Civil Rights Act. Before any meaningful desegregation of public schools. And that’s the kind of rhetoric we’re hearing 62 years later. The echoes are really all around us. It’s a fascinating year to look at and a very instructive year to look at for all of us right now.
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