The year 1963 opened with the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation and ended with America in a state of mourning. The months that followed brought waves of racial terror, assassinations, mass protest, and police repression that shocked the world, inspired radicals and reformers, and forced the hands of moderate legislators.
The nation was determined to imagine a new way forward. In a new book Peniel Joseph shows how the upheavals of 1963 planted the seeds for watershed civil rights legislation and renewed hope in the still unfulfilled promise and possibility of freedom.
In Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution (Basic Books, 2025), historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a narrative history of 1963, marking it as the defining year of the Black freedom struggle — a year when America faced a deluge of political strife and violence.
By the end of 1963 the murders of John F. Kennedy, Medgar Evers, and four Black girls at a church in Alabama left the nation determined to imagine a new way forward. Over one heartbreakingly tumultuous year, America unraveled and remade itself as the world looked on.
Alongside the stories of historical giants like James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph uplifts the perspectives of less celebrated leaders like playwright Lorraine Hansberry and activist Gloria Richardson (both of whom died in New York).
Peniel E. Joseph is Professor of History and Public Affairs, Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, and founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the author of The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
Upcoming Author Event
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History will host Peniel Joseph on Sunday, June 1, 2025 at 2 pm ET to discuss Freedom Season, online via Zoom. Everyone who registers will be sent a Zoom meeting link and instructions in the confirmation email. You can register here.
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