FREEDOM SEASON

A cogent argument for considering 1963 as the central year of the modern Civil Rights Movement.

A historian at the University of Texas affiliated with the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, Joseph opens his narrative with the compelling figure of a young James Baldwin, who was traveling to Mississippi to look at the voting rights initiative firsthand. Baldwin, “the leading cultural figure of the age,” had committed an act of daring in turning some of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier rhetoric toward civil rights, confronting the liberal establishment and forcing JFK and brother Bobby to pay more than lip service to the cause and move instead to “pragmatic action.” Kennedy did so, if perhaps reluctantly at first, unquestionably influenced by Baldwin’s arguments that racial segregation adversely affected not just Black people but all Americans. Baldwin was also, Joseph argues, a figure who could move between camps: cocktail parties in New York, political sessions in Washington, the poorest hamlets in the Mississippi Delta. Alongside him, as Joseph notes, emerged a constellation of like-minded activists and writers, among them Lorraine Hansberry and Medgar Evers. While many actors central to the civil rights struggle figure in Joseph’s account, including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., the latter of whom “became the first Black Time magazine Man of the Year” at the end of 1963, Baldwin stands firmly at the moral center of the movement: “He loved America enough to retain a battered faith in its capacity to change.” Lyndon Johnson, too, receives his due as far less diffident than the Kennedys in pressing for civil rights reforms, although it was Kennedy’s assassination that served as stimulus for “the most consequential legislation that would be passed during America’s Second Reconstruction.”

Timely reading in an era of social and legislative backsliding that threatens to erase many civil rights gains.