Annotations for Lbj: Civil Rights

And of course, every family is personal. Look, I think the biggest problem in the United States is this hundred year old hole in our memory, as I talk about in the book, between the end of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I was fortunate, I grew up in the South, although I know you don't hear it. My parents were from the North, but my mother was very active in the civil rights movement in Atlanta. So I'm kind of a civil rights kid. That was the you know, that was the atmosphere that I grew up in. But nobody talked about history. Everybody was much too focused on the present, you know, focused on getting rid of segregation.

And, you know, it was a time, Zachary, you're fortunate to have had your young political consciousness formed by, you know, an African-American president of great integrity and intelligence. When I was young, we couldn't imagine it. We couldn't even imagine a black cabinet member at that point.

So the focus was on the present and the future. People were not talking about the history. At least white people certainly weren't. And I rather think black people weren't either. They knew more of it, of course, than white people did, but it wasn't a focus of attention.

So we tended to think, OK, there was slavery. Slavery was terrible, but then we fought a war in order to end it. That was still the line, you know, that I learned mostly. And then there was Jim Crow, I think Jim Crow is a terrible expression.

I'm on a minor campaign to snap it out because it's a euphemism. It prettifies what Bryan Stevenson calls the age of racial terror, which I think is a much more accurate expression.

Yeah. And the words Jim Crow allow us to think, OK, there were racial stereotypes, there was racist prejudice. But, you know, We we don't know about the web of legal continuation of various things that have been called neo-slavery.

The way in which ordinary behavior, if carried out by African-Americans, was criminalized, the way in which there was actually a deliberate turn from, you know, thinking of African-Americans as stupid and lazy, which was the stereotype during slavery days, to thinking of them as criminals. All the way through, you know, redlining and the ways in which people of color were barred from getting mortgages, were barred from getting Social Security.

So and and, of course, in the background, lynching as a real instrument of terror to intimidate people of color. So, you know, we we tended to think that all of that was more or less so. We think, OK, it was, you know, it was too bad that there was segregation, but then we had the civil rights movement and it wiped it out.

There's a second issue that I'm only going to mention because I know we don't have time to go into it. I think we are still living in a time where the Cold War has cast its shadow over American history, which is why great, you know, civil rights activists like Paul Robeson [are] almost forgotten, which is why we don't talk about Hiroshima and we don't talk about Vietnam. But that's a question for a podcast in itself.

Nuclear warfare, the threat of nuclear warfare and annihilation in that way, hung over them. And I think you can see that fear on almost every page of the Port Huron statement. And just a concern that there was a lot of apathy about the way that the government was running things in the United States, about the United States' role in the world, and the lack of democracy extended to groups like African-Americans in the South.

Members of SDS criticized the Southern Democrats, the so-called Dixiecrats, for resisting civil rights actions and resisting a response to the large numbers of citizens who felt disempowered within the political structure. And then also the concerns about inequality, economic inequality, both of which you mentioned so well.

And do you think that this argument and the case that was made so eloquently in the Port Huron statement, did it contribute to the civil rights movement?

I think that went hand in hand. I think the civil rights movement was part of the new left umbrella term or new left umbrella movement, that social movement. And the students for democratic society, mostly white students from the North at first, but they became more aware of what was going on in the South with the Jim Crow laws and threats to voting rights there and denials of voting rights and human rights in the South.

And so when they started to see some of this coverage on the news in the late 50s or read about it in newspapers, hear it word of mouth, this was shocking to them that in this country where they grew up and they actually used this language in the opening of the Port Huron statement, we heard that we're a land of liberty and freedom and justice for all.

And yet we grew up and we noticed these contradictions, these glaring problems that didn't live up to those values. And so they saw this as an inspirational moment, the civil rights movement making momentum in the South and gaining traction there.

Well, if you want to follow the split back beyond this mid-20th century period we're talking about, it was a fairly significant thing that Theodore Roosevelt led his followers to bolt from the Republican Party in 1912 and to form the Progressive Party. That was really a gateway for a lot of them to leave the Republican Party altogether and to bring their kind of urban middle-class progressivism into the Democratic Party. But I think another significant development was when Franklin Roosevelt came to power, representing those old progressives and his uncle, to some extent, and also then enticing away a large percentage of the African-American electorate into the Democratic Party again, because the African-American voters mostly had stayed with the party of Lincoln, the party that freed the slaves. But the Democratic Party spoke more to their material interests and concerns and gradually over time became the more pro-civil rights party, though the Republican Party, like I said, still retained a lot of that civil rights awareness and heritage.

But one of the major turning points in the evolution of conservatism was the formation of the sort of new conservative movement under William F. Buckley, Jr., with the foundation of National Review Magazine in 1955. That really became the intellectual flagship and the organizing principle for the conservative movement to come. And that also led to Barry Goldwater's receiving the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. Barry Goldwater, the senator from Arizona, who was a deep libertarian conservative, and that libertarianism led him to vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, bucking the considerable majority of the rest of his party. And that led Barry Goldwater to win votes really only in the Deep South, where people had voted Dixie Crap in 1948 for Strom Thurmond's breakaway party. And that gradually over time led to the incorporation of these Southern, at least somewhat reformed, segregationists into the Republican Party, particularly with Richard Nixon's Southern strategy in his 1968 presidential campaign.

You know, it's an interesting question as to how Reagan thought of himself in racial terms. I think he felt that he believed in equal opportunity for all, but at the same time, I don't think he much concerned himself with the situation and the plight of minorities in this country, and particularly with African Americans. To some extent, there was a kind of indifference toward racial issues that came to displace the older Lincolnian sense of the importance of civil rights, and particularly equal opportunities for African Americans. But as I said, that was not really a conscious attitude on the part of Reagan. It was just a kind of approach that came to permeate the larger party. But on the other hand, yeah, go ahead.

You know, this relates very closely to the discussions of how people feel about the Tea Party and the Trump movement. Is it simply racial resentment that was being catered to on the part of white voters in both of these movements, or was it, to some extent, rooted in economic and other kinds of cultural grievance? And I've always come down with the answer being that it was some of both. If times are not hard, I do believe that the racism which is in place in people is simply less manifest. They're more willing to see others prosper, thinking that their gains are not coming at their own expense. But when demagogues such as Trump and others can really play on these racial grievances, then obviously they do come to the fore, particularly in harder times.

And if we go back in time right, we can go back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Voting Rights Act of 1965. If we're only talking about the number of yeses being more than the number of noes, then you don't have to have particularly broad conversations among senators to figure out what wording actually works for enough of them to pass the thing.

It's a great point. And you can see that certainly, with the civil rights legislation that you mentioned going back to the ‘57 [Civil Rights] Act, that Lyndon Johnson, as Senate majority leader, muscles his way through. And then, of course, the ‘64 Civil Rights Act and the ‘65 Voting Rights Act. What's striking about those examples, Sean, which are terrific examples, is that, you're right, the legislation gains more permanence from having to go through the filibuster threshold.

But historians, I think, would argue, [it] took much longer to get that legislation. And Jim Crow, and of course, before that, slavery, last a lot longer than they might have otherwise because of the filibuster, so you can see both sides. Would you agree with that?

Oh, absolutely, right. So in part of the arguments that we're hearing today is that the filibuster should ultimately be revoked from the rules of the Senate, for perhaps most importantly, because of its racist past. Right?

So we don't get legislation on civil rights until the late 1950s and 1960s, in part because of the filibuster and in the power of the super majoritarian requirement in the Senate. That there was no way that you could [a] get sufficient number of senators to pass something, even though there might have been fifty-one votes much earlier.

Lyndon Johnson faced a different situation. And I'd say what was most important for him were two factors. One was the civil rights movement, which before he came into office, it just created an atmosphere where a status quo that did nothing on race and on other issues was no longer acceptable. And they put pressure from the bottom up in ways that made the conservatives feel as if they were on the defensive. And after 1964, LBJ is reelected against Barry Goldwater in a landslide election.

Kennedy had reacted largely to the crisis of civil rights. He wasn't proactive at all. He was trying, in fact, to tamp down the Civil Rights movement because it exposed not only the nation but to the world to the worst of American apartheid at a time when, as I mentioned, we were trying to compete for hearts and minds across the world with the Soviet Union. That made us look bad, like we weren't living up to our ideals as a nation.

Absolutely, Jeremi, and you and I have talked about this, how Kennedy was so reactive on this, but eventually, he sees the crisis brewing in Birmingham where Martin Luther King had brought his campaign, the most segregated city in America. He finally realizes he's got to go on TV to ensure that George Wallace, who is standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama trying to prevent its integration, does not get the headline that night, does not get the lead story on the 6 o'clock news. He is encouraged by his brother Bobby to go and speak to the issue of civil rights on television.

Ted Sorensen, his speechwriter, tells Kennedy he doesn't have enough time, in eight hours, to write a presidential primetime speech, but Bobby encourages his brother to go on anyway and to speak from his heart. This very iconic speech about civil rights is largely extemporaneous from Kennedy, who had the courage to go on national television and speak his mind about the issue of civil rights, and in so, he calls it a moral issue, elevating the cause of civil rights to a moral issue for the first time in our history, and it is a turning point in the struggle for civil rights.

He began his career writing some of the cutting-edge scholarship on the Black Power movement, then went on to write about Stokely Carmichael and Barack Obama, and now, of course, this really great book on The Third Reconstruction. I should also mention, I almost forgot, his wonderful and really groundbreaking book on Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, as well as The Sword and the Shield. And now, as I said, we have The Third Reconstruction. Before we go to our discussion with Dr. Peniel Joseph, we have, of course, Zachary Suri's scene- setting poem. What's your poem titled today, Zachary?

Right, and you see a cycle, right? I mean, in some ways, you're doing your own cycles of American history here, right? You see these cycling through these moments of Reconstructionist promise, the first one after the Civil War, the second one after the Second World War, reaching its pinnacle with the Civil Rights Movement and the third with Obama. And you see also in each case a pushback or a backlash, as you call it, right?

Absolutely. I think we are in these unhappy patterns of history and we can see it in all three periods of Reconstruction. I think the reason why we usually focus more in the second Reconstruction than the first is because it provides us with a context to get to Barack Obama. And like I say in the book, it's not just Barack Obama, though. That second Reconstruction really configures a social justice, racial justice consensus for the next 50 years. And that's how we get Hillary Clinton. That's how we get John Ossoff. That's how we get really the most wealth and power and equity that people of color have ever had, and women, in the whole history of the republic. It's from 63 to 2013.

When you look at our republic before then, you don't have as many people of color and women who are elected officials, who are businesspersons and entrepreneurs, who are successful, fabulously successful, who are able to create wealth, who are able to become leaders in so many different industries, not just acting and pop culture and sports, but in the sciences and at universities. I mean, me and you are examples of that. So I think that period is hugely, hugely important.

In the second Reconstruction, the narrative that wins is going to be King's narrative, the I Have a Dream narrative, John F. Kennedy's narrative, the narrative that it's a moral issue of civil rights and human and political rights.

You know, one of the things I talk about in the book, and I think me and you agree with this, Jeremi, is that we need to move beyond American exceptionalism, but that doesn't mean we don't need a positive story of America, right? And I'll say that again. We need to move beyond American exceptionalism, but it does not mean we don't need a positive, consensus-building, aspirational story of America. Martin Luther King Jr. called it building the beloved community.

Most people, millions across the United States are going to need them. So I would say this requires courage because yeah, you have to remember Dr. King pissed people off. Obama pissed people off. Jesse Jackson, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker. You're not always going to get the standing ovation when you tell people what they need to hear instead of telling people what they want to hear.

But one of the things King says in his speech, a drum major, for the drum major speech is that he's not interested in molding some kind of phony consensus. He says, I'm a builder and I'm going to shape consensus through my organizing. That means you tell people what they don't want to hear. So part of this, it requires courage on us, really. And again, it requires a lot of study and listening and patience because yes, the story is complicated, but there are some really robust truths that we should all be willing to articulate. And I think at our best, we do.

Certainly, she wanted you to be careful, but to demonstrate that belief. And so she's been hugely, hugely important. The history of Haiti and the Haitian revolution, which I discuss and its connection to Black American history, the connection between Black feminism and these different social movements, but also just American politics and history. She's a big fan and reader of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy alongside of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Really loved reading books on not just the Haitian revolution, but Theodore Roosevelt and the American presidents. I remember getting my first book on the American presidents and kindergarten with her from the local public library in Queens. And that was a book that we used to always check out, check back in, check out, check back in.

And she, again, throughout the book, I look at these different Black activists, a lot of them Black women like Ida B. Wells, Angela Davis, Tamika Mallory, but she's been my biggest example. And she does provide me a measure, a large measure of hope. And hope really is a discipline. It's a faith and it's a discipline and it's a belief. And it's a discipline based on our practice. I think sometimes people who don't feel hopeful are really not out there in the world trying to help and do good.

Well, for some Birchers and Birch supporters, it meant Brown versus Board of Education. It meant that Warren deserved to be impeached, because he had trampled on states' rights, and he had basically destroyed what they called the right, the freedom, to segregate by race in their states, in their towns. But to other people, also, it meant they did not like Warren's jurisprudence on banning prayer in schools, giving rights to criminal defendants. All of the kind of what we think of today as these sort of cultural hot-button issues. And impeach Earl Warren could encompass all of these pieces. And some were motivated by one piece, and others another. And it really was, I think, a powerful and memorable‚ and also Warren himself, apparently, was not a fan of this movement.

And they have a sense of a lost America, right, an America that had vanished. And it had vanished in part because of the growth of the welfare state, the encroachment, as they saw it, of civil rights, judicial intervention and overreach, and also the liberal internationalism, right, American engagement in the world.

You know, even Ronald Reagan, for example, and George W. Bush, right, they signed renewals of the Voting Rights Act or civil rights laws. They, you know, when Reagan said, well, you know, Martin Luther King will know in 25 years if he was a communist. Well, he had to backtrack and he apologized for that.

It goes beyond that. And because in the 1960s, the criticism, one of the criticisms lodged at the Birchers was that they were alien, right? As I think one senator at the time said, they're a weird presence in America. And, you know, my argument is no, actually they're not. They're deeply, they're kind of endemic to the country and to its traditions. They're not necessarily the majority of the country, but they're a powerful tradition. And I think it's a tradition that since, especially the New Deal and then the Great Society and civil rights movement that many people have thought, many, especially liberals, but also some conservatives too, a tradition had thought had really just been marginalized, right?

A couple things. One is American institutions, government institutions, mass media, but also civic society, right, the NAACP, Americans for Democratic Action, most importantly the Anti-Defamation League. A lot of folks, a lot of groups, worked to constrain the Birchers, to really push them out in the fringes, to make them toxic in the political culture.

Absolutely, and I think just to underline one of the many excellent points you just made, Matt, I think for me one of the big takeaways from your research and your writing is how important organizations that care about democracy, that care about inclusion, grassroots organizations, how important they are. One of the heroic organizations in your book is the Anti-Defamation League, known to many as the ADL. I don't want to give away the whole book, but I encourage those who are interested to read those sections of the book where you talk about a number of measures, including spying undertaken by these organizations to help federal authorities and help state authorities deal with the threats of hatred and violence, and there's a lot to learn from that, I think.

I think that's exactly right, and the thing is, too, in mid-20th century America, even in the 1960s, you know, J. Edgar Hoover and others in law enforcement were more interested in trying to ferret out alleged communists in American society. They were less interested in going after, you know, far-right groups that may have promoted racism and anti-Semitism, and so it was even more important then for a group like the ADL to fill that gap, right, because it was a real void, and today, I think fortunately, at least under the Biden administration, for example, we have seen a Justice Department that has taken white supremacy and neo-Nazis and those threats seriously after January 6th, of course, and, you know, there are a lot of insurrectionists who are sitting in jail right now.

And again, it's not the only argument that Christians are making, but for people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, who I mentioned, and Hal Lindsay, this is the way they decide to try to activate the broader Christian community. And it's so striking that no more than 15 years before that in the 1960s, you can get quotes from people like Jerry Falwell who are making the exact opposite argument when it comes to the civil rights movement, which is that, he has a famous sermon called, what is it called? Ministers and Marchers. And he basically makes the call that no pastor should ever be found in a civil rights march. Because it goes back to that separation of the church and the world. And yet 15 years later, he's making the opposite argument, which is, you better find the pastors in the pro-life march, because of this threat of secular humanism.

 He's the author of, many articles and two really important books. The first, "The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South," and then, more recently, "The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights," a book that puts the March on Washington, which everyone has heard of, especially because of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

 Will's book puts the March on Washington in the context of labor history as well as civil rights history, which is really important. Will, thank you so much for joining us today.

 The UAW also played a really critical role in the civil rights movement. It was one of the unions that, you know, provided consistent funding for the major campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. The UAW sent money to help support the Montgomery Bus Boycott. They sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the March on Washington. The president of the UAW, Walter Reuther, spoke at the March on Washington, you know, just before Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. So this, these are institutions that have really been vital to American democracy and to the sense of sort of creating a more egalitarian United States.

As you said, I'm the last of 12 children of Ike and Fanny Stubblefield who, like most of their era in the rural South, were consigned to work farms as sharecroppers. So when I was born, we lived on a plantation which had, perhaps, as much as 100 families living on the land and working the fields.

And the crop, the principal crop, was, of course, cotton. So it was fortuitous that I was the last because, as you might imagine, the oldest children were the heaviest workers. They were consigned to toiling in the fields to bring in crops.

And since that was the most important thing that they could do, they sacrificed school in order to be able to work the farm. And that meant, frankly, that the older children in my family did not have the opportunity to graduate from school. It was too far away and the work itself called.

So the younger members of the family were able to go to school because we moved away when I was seven years old. And when we moved away from the farm, we were required to go to school. And that was what saved me, really, that I could get an education.

So in spite of that, I would say that for all of my childhood up to my graduation from high school, we had a very bare existence as, again, most of that era and of that economic station had. We lived, we moved to Houston in Fifth Ward, and it was really a very poor community at the time with laborers principally and maids occupying the meager opportunities for employment in Houston at the time. So my father became a janitor when he moved to Houston and my mother was a maid.

Growing up, I understood in the racial environment of that moment that I was not to have the hope for a different kind of life because, as Zachary said, hope was illegal in that era, certainly for blacks. So the aspiration to do something significant with my life simply didn't exist. I was going to follow in the footsteps of all the women I knew who were maids.

It was only the fact that I was able to go to school and to be inspired by teachers and to love learning that I began to see a way different from what I was supposed to do. And that was through the good graces of teachers who inspired me, who encouraged me, and who did the most miraculous thing, and that is they were able to dream of a different future from the one we lived in at the moment.

And I often say that had it been up to us, we would never have anticipated that life would change so dramatically, and therefore we wouldn't have worked toward that end. But because they were not mired in that reality, they could dream of a future for us different from what we knew, and it was their dreams that made possible our aspirations.

We had, this is before the civil rights gains. This was before Jim Crow was definitively eliminated. This is before really any robust integration.

So here we are isolated in our community, told that we could not achieve, told that we were worthless and should not expect much of life, and so on. And yet, here are these individuals who are guiding us to a place that's very different and instilling in us aspirations that go far beyond what we understand to be our limitations.

But I should also say that I fell in love with learning, the power of learning, because it was the antidote that I needed to remove me from a sordid world. And by that, I mean, by reading, I could escape the Texas of the 40s and 50s. I could read about foreign environments and imagine worlds that were very different from the world that I lived in.

And learning about the existence of other environments rescued me and allowed me to believe that quite possibly there were other worlds that I could inhabit at some point. So I would say that by the time I was in high school, I was already enthralled with this, the power of education. Because, although, they could tell me that I couldn't go into a department store, or I couldn't go to a particular university or school, or I couldn't enjoy the full benefits of citizenship, they could tell me that, but they could not control what I put in my mind.

And it occurred to me as a young person that learning was the most powerful thing I could do, because it gave me absolute control over what I could know. And so, in a way, I would say that's what fueled my journey in education.

The fact that it was so important to me, that it rescued me, that it gave me hope, that it propelled me beyond what I thought I'd ever be able to do. I was absolutely sold on the idea that education was the most powerful thing that we could offer young people, and I wanted to be associated with it for the rest of my life.

How did you make that transition, especially from Dillard to Harvard, going from what had been, through most of your life, largely African-American environments, to a world where there were not many other African-Americans in roles such as yours? How did you make that transition?

The one thing I knew I could not ever tolerate was to have the same narrowness of mind that had subjected everybody I loved to the worst possible consequences. And so I didn't want to be a racist. I wanted to be open to differences of all kinds.

And Humphrey himself said that supporting the Vietnam War was the biggest mistake of his life. But all this completely effaces this valiant part, earlier part of his political career, starting as mayor of Minneapolis, going through the Senate, and really his first one or two years as LBJ's vice president, when he was essential to the passage of these key, and in fact, landmark civil rights laws in 64 through 66.

Right. I mean, he's central to the story of civil rights in post-war America, though largely forgotten. Your book focuses almost exclusively on that, taking us really from Humphrey's birth in the early 20th century through 1948, through the Democratic Convention in 1948, which is really your crescendo, Humphrey's speech at the convention calling for civil rights. How does a young man like Humphrey, who's born in South Dakota, has a very difficult early life that I knew very little about until I read your book. You talk about how he had to leave college during the Great Depression because he couldn't afford to stay at the University of Minnesota. He then goes back as an older undergraduate. How did he come to be a proponent of civil rights from a rural South Dakota background?

Here's another example of the conventional wisdom not being quite right, that when people talk about or even rhapsodize about and sometimes even overly romanticize the Black Jewish Alliance, they think of it as being a product of that mid-1950s to mid-1960s civil rights movement. They think about Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great rabbi, marching next to Dr. King in Selma. They think about Cheney and Schwerner and Goodman becoming martyrs together in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

All of a sudden, now the Soviet Union and global Marxist-Leninism is seen as the enemy. It's not that the Cold War competition with Stalinism wasn't real, but that it had an effect on domestic issues of shoving civil rights to the side, of shoving a lot of elements of liberalism to the side. That's part of the reason why it's not until 1963 and 64 that the process of legislating for civil rights that began in 48 can be picked up by Lyndon Johnson as president, by Dr. King in the mass movement, and by Hubert Humphrey then in the Senate.

It's not a theoretical response, it's a visceral response, and that remains in him up to the point he breaks cover as a civil rights supporter as president. With Truman, who is descended from Confederate soldiers and from slaveholders, what gets to his heart is a series of attacks on returning Black GIs, because the second V in Double V doesn't come through. The Black GIs come home, and instead of being rewarded with the national movement against segregation, there are multitudes of incidents of Black GIs in the uniform of their country being beaten, being killed, being denied service, and in the case of this particular army sergeant named Isaac Woodard, being yanked off an interstate bus, thrown in South Carolina jail, and having his eyes gouged out by the sheriff. And Walter White of the NAACP, who did incredible, brave work investigating white terrorism, brings this case to Truman's attention, and Truman cannot bear the idea of people who serve the country being assaulted this way.

It's interesting how important these personal experiences are. The same could be said for Ulysses Grant, whose experiences during the Civil War with African American soldiers transform him. It was startling to me when I was writing about this in a recent book I wrote. I mean, how much you see this in Grant's correspondence, these personal experiences coming out to shape political viewpoint. It's also interesting, Sam, how politics pushes against that at times. What you're describing in the 1948 Democratic Convention is pretty similar to the 1964 Convention, where Johnson refuses to seat the Mississippi Free Democrats. How does Humphrey push through? How does he get through the resistance that's obviously there?

Ironic because when Humphrey used that phrase, it was right when he announced his candidacy in 1968. In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, in the midst of the horrible Vietnam War, and it sounded totally tone deaf. It was one of the times when Humphrey badly misread the mood of the country. And yet his idea that politics should have a joyful element is maybe now being redeemed because coming out of a period of time that has felt so bleak for a lot of us, so at times such despair and real dangers to democracy, that the idea that there could be something positive and exalting about the work of protecting democracy is really appealing to people. And this goes to other examples we've seen of leadership, of whether it was Fiorello La Guardia as mayor of New York during the depression, reading the funnies over the radio mic, or whether it was FDR's great orations about nothing to fear, but fear itself. These were people speaking into bleak times, but also saying that there was reason to see something positive on the horizon.

And Houston, however, is a bit of an outlier. This is why I think she was uniquely poised to make this stand and to succeed. It's because Houston had been a hotbed of activism for Black voting, and this goes back to the 1940s and I described this movement that was led by her Minister, the Reverend Albert Lucas, who worked with Thurgood Marshall. Reverend Lucas was head of the statewide NAACP, and he and Marshall, together really forged not just a court case, but a social movement behind what the case that became, Smith V. Allwright, and so Lucas was one of the first civil rights leaders who used the church to educate ordinary Black people about political issues and to use the pulpit as a means of political education and political mobilization.

So as you can see, it's a kind of constellation of forces. She's an extraordinary individual. But there's a movement among, now, you have Black voters joining forces with liberals and labor to try and create a coalition to elect more liberal Democrats. It's a one party state, after all, (right, right) into office. So when Jordan is running now, okay, the obstacle of the White primary has been removed. But the there are other obstacles to voting. There are other forms of disfranchisement that still exist: the poll tax, for example. But the most terrible one for her, from her perspective, was malapportionment. This is before the Voting Rights Act, and so you have a terribly malapportioned Texas State Legislature. And in her case, the Senate was an institution where all of Houston with a million people had one senator, and then you had rural districts with only a few 1000 people, had a senator too.

And so because of a series of court cases, beginning with Baker V. Carr, liberals and other activists brought lawsuits that challenge the malapportionment and forced a redistricting of the Texas Senate, and eventually the House, but that comes later. So when Jordan is running in '62 she loses. She loses again in '64. And really this is a result of not just so much losing votes, but also a reluctance of people, of Whites, to vote for a Black woman candidate, and then not having an appropriate district to run in. When she gets that district in 1966, finally Houston has four senators now. So this is new. And the way the lines are drawn, the way it was explained to me, it was, it was not drawn with her in mind. That suit was brought to bring greater power to labor and to urban populations, but the way the district was drawn, it was just simply that it was slightly a Black majority, just not quite even, I would say, a Black majority, but it was favorable to her.

I do. I do. Thank you, Jeremi. Yeah, this is, and I don't think it's just her, like, this is when the movement is moving from the streets to the State House. This is Bayard Rustin's vision, right? From protest to politics. How can we be effective in making the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement real? And this was her quest, (yes) you know, this was really her goal, (yes) to do that. And no one knew how to do it, right? It hadn't been done before. (yes) And this is, you know, Rustin is good, like in theory, all of this coalition should work, but as we see over time, coalitions are complicated and messy, and everyone has their own agenda. How do you get people to work together who don't really have a long history and sometimes their goals clash, so people have to give and take, (right, right) and it's a hard thing. And, so, but this, I do think that she, and many others, Julian Bond, for example, we forget about him running and succeeding in the Georgia State Legislature in 1965. (right, right)

We all know that part where she says, 'My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; It is total.' "My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; It is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution." But what we don't remember is what she said before that line where she says, 'when this document was completed in 1787, I was not included, but now through the process...' And then she lays out all the ways that the Constitution can be amended to, right, Because through that process of judicial review, right, and additions, I am now included in "We the People." And here she's talking specifically about the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, and the Voting Rights Act. So now I am included in the protection of this great document, and that is why it is so important that I fight for it, and that is why I believe in it so completely.

So, for example, with Robert Byrd, she introduces him at a party convention, at a mini convention (powerful senator from West Virginia) correct, who is going to play a very important role in the Voting Rights Act extension, she develops a kind of not, it's not a quid pro quo. It's never that bald, you know, but it's an understanding (yes) that, hey, here's somebody who represents the growing Black vote. This is the other thing that Jordan is never just about herself. A lot of her power, the perception of her power, comes from what she represents, which is with the Voting Rights Act, more and more Black people are registering to vote, and they're participating in primaries. And this is a new thing that Democratic, White Democratic politicians have to now take account of and Jordan is somebody who can explain this to them. (yes, yes) So, in terms of how she's perceived, I think it's quite mixed, actually, on one hand, the public perceives her very positively. On the other hand, people within Houston are still, and Austin, are still quite perhaps puzzled about how she was able to go so far so fast, and they are suspicious of her relationship with the power structure.

Hmm. Well, she always acknowledged, and you can see this in her testimony against Robert Bork, for example. She always acknowledged the importance of court cases and protection of Black voting for the success of Black politicians. This was one reason she was so against Robert Bork's confirmation (Yes) to the Supreme Court (Yes) because he had said he had opposed those cases. He didn't think Baker v. Carr had been properly decided, et cetera. And she, that just appalled her (Mm-hmm) because she said, 'Well, if, if his way of thinking had persisted, I would not be here.' Right. 'I would never have been able to run and to win.'

So I mean, it was that "virtuous circle." Now, I will also say that, and, and this is something I'm working on another book, and I have a whole sort of chapter on that part, is the important role that Radio Liberty did for the Jewish emigration. (Yes, yes.) It was instrumental in sort of, what was then called refuseniks, Jews who had wanted to emigrate to Israel or the West. They were denied the emigration visa, which you needed, but they also were fired from work, so they were in this no man's land in the Soviet Union. And that story is very much part of the Radio Liberty broadcast.

Medgar Evers was the first field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. He was a very prominent activist in the late 50s and early 60s in Mississippi, particularly around school integration and university integration. And he was shot, assassinated by a member of the KKK at his house in Jackson, Mississippi, which we visited a couple of years ago.

That's a question that's relevant back then and today too because we see over and over again people in the lower reaches of the class structure as voting against what we would think or others would think were their self-interest. They will support in many cases the oligarchs and what they stand for. I try to make the distinction, I do make the distinction in the book between class politics in which a struggle goes on for the distribution of resources, are we to spend the collective goods on more investment funds for the planters or making life better for the poor farmers and poor laborers later on as time went on or are we to fall for the status politics situation in which I feel better than somebody else and that's all that matters. So you see that in racism. Racism was about, and white supremacy in particular, that form of racism in which the whites benefit and the blacks don't from the status allocations, not just class, it's status.

And so they called them bourbons. And they were the bourbon faction of the Democratic Party and the populist faction of the Democratic Party that struggled for a long period of time. In fact, did so throughout the history of the South up until the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

That's well said. Bryan, one of the one of the key moments in your book is the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It's an important part of what you talk about toward the end of the book. First of all, why was the Voting Rights Act so important?

So the Voting Rights Act made a marker of when Jim Crow ended. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act made sure that the South could no longer use laws to segregate Blacks from whites, to keep Blacks from having the same rights as whites. So these laws are just enormously important.

And unfortunately, much of the Voting Rights Act has been struck down by the Roberts Court, taking away some of the mechanisms that were used to break out white monopolies in the voting rights. So you're finding that over since 19, or 2011, is that right? With the Shelby County decision in Alabama again, that struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, there has been another fall off in Black voting because of the actions of whites passing laws and ordinances that gets in the way of Black voting. So then...

Well, yeah, the ID laws, that's not the worst thing, but most of the problems are in registration. You file up your registration form or something like that, or you move and people forget to... There's a lot of what some of my colleagues call bureaucratic burdens, administrative burdens that are put in the way that affect Blacks more than they do whites.

So what you do is you try to keep this oligarchy together through these status-based systems, the bourbon rule, as the populists call it. So you're absolutely right. This is absolutely deeply about that form of government and how Jim Crow kept that in place legally for 75 years, at the end of the period of populist revolution to 1965.

And we know a lot about the Civil Rights Movement and how that got broken up, and I write about that in the book. We know very little about the populist period in which we almost broke it up. We almost got an interracial political class division back then in which the oligarchs had to contend with both whites and Blacks.

You talk about George Wallace, Governor George Wallace, who is a populist and himself a Democrat, but becomes someone who defends, obviously, segregation. And you talk about this moment in March 1966 at the University of Alabama, where you were a student. Foster Auditorium, I think, is where this occurs, where both George Wallace and Robert Kennedy come.

When Kennedy said that Negroes must be as free as other Americans, not because it is economically advantageous, not because the law says so, but because it is right, we, and I think you mean all the students who were there at the University of Alabama, we cheered lustily. As he left the auditorium, students reached out to grasp his hand. I did so as well. It really felt like a chapter was closing in Alabama, with the state joining the nation in unity. Boy, was I wrong. Why were you wrong then?

And the resentment comes out. And who is the resentment directed at? These days, it's blacks, browns, immigrants in particular. We find somebody to hate. And George Wallace found that. And other demagogues in the South, George Wallace spread it nationally. And I think that was the start of our troubles. But we have to remember there's more people who these days, not like Alabama in 1966, but these days, I think there are more people that object to that system than support it. But the coalition, the interracial coalition that failed in the populist period that we thought won in 1965, we just have to be honest with ourselves and say we didn't. But if it doesn't get organized again, we're stuck with that kind of white supremacist regime for a while. And I don't want that to happen.

In Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution, Professor Joseph argues that 1963 marked the first critical successes and several important but tragic losses of the civil rights movement that would transform American democracy. 1963 was, he writes in the book, quote, "the defining year of the black freedom struggle." And because of the importance of this year and one of the documents it produced, a letter from Birmingham Jail by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., instead of a poem this week, we will be hearing Dr. King read a section of that speech and he will read what is perhaps one of the most famous sections.

So, Professor Joseph, Birmingham and this letter play a central role in the story that you tell. It's the site of some of the most brutal televised police crackdowns on peaceful protesters in 1963. It's where MLK is arrested and writes this letter, of course. Why Birmingham? Why were the events there in the spring of 1963 so critical to the cause of civil rights and to the history of our democracy?

But Birmingham becomes such a huge global site of struggle for dignity and citizenship in 1963, primarily because of the brutality that is experienced by peaceful demonstrators and over time by really thousands of young Black students who were called Negro students in the context of 1963, unless Malcolm X was speaking about them. And what's so interesting, Zachary and Jeremi, about Birmingham is that so Birmingham is a dying steel town. It's the citadel of the old Confederacy.

Meredith is going to be escorted by over 500 federal marshals. But there's also going to be National Guard and others deployed. In the spring of 1963, it's a slow rolling crisis that continues to build and build.

For the Kennedys, one of the things I wanted to show in the book, Jeremi, was the evolution of Bobby and Jack Kennedy on race matters. And it's not always a complete evolution. It's not always a linear evolution, but both of them really have their finest moments vis-a-vis civil rights in 63 during that, the course of that year.

And so for the Kennedys, who are very reticent about not allowing civil rights to upend the administration and especially the administration's legislative agenda, which is the state of the union, as I show early, they want a tax cut. They want a big tax cut so that they can get portions of what become the Great Society past, including Medicare. That's what they want.

And they don't want the the coalition that they need, which includes Southern segregationists or Dixiecrats, to be so concerned about civil rights that they block the president's agenda. And Bobby Kennedy, who really serves as a kind of domestic and international prime minister, certainly the the second most powerful politician in the country to President Kennedy, is very wary of anything that might taint his brother's presidency. And what we're going to see over the course of the spring is the Kennedy brothers collectively, almost symbiotically coming to the conclusion that they have to lead in the context of this crisis and not just lead from behind, but to take some risks.

Bobby Kennedy had met him in 1962, already at a White House function. And throughout 1963, Jimmy is on tour, not just for his new books, but also for the Congress of Racial Equality. And he's going to historically white colleges and Black colleges, speaking about the need for civil rights.

And he's really calling for a reckoning, a confrontation over America's original sin of racial slavery. But Baldwin also wants us to really wrestle with the lies and the cover up. He talks about a crime has been committed, but what's worse for him is the cover up, the lies vis-a-vis American exceptionalism and the lies that everything is fine, we're all good.

There's nothing for us to wrestle with around racial segregation, around violence and terror and inequality and injustice in the United States. And so Baldwin really hammers at the Kennedys. He says he admires the Kennedys, but he's deeply disappointed in the Kennedys.

Jack Van Dyke and Rena Denise is his daughter, and Darrell Kenyatta is his oldest born, middle name Kenyatta, named after Jomo Kenyatta, who becomes the first leader of Kenya December 12th, 13th that year in 1963. So Medgar Evers is this extraordinarily courageous and heroic and upright figure who I think we all know in popular culture because of his assassination. And I wanted us to see Medgar Evers in Mississippi, to hear him deliver speeches, to see the organizing that he's doing in Jackson, Mississippi, and also the constraints he's under because Roy Wilkins, who's executive director of the NAACP, is a very cautious, pragmatic civil rights leader.

He's a civil rights leader who's very competitive with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., constantly feels the NAACP is losing credit to competitors that don't put as much skin in the game, financially at least, as the NAACP does. And Medgar Evers is really at the center of these concentric circles, which include Roy Wilkins, which includes Martin Luther King, Jr., who's a friend of Medgar Evers, which includes young student activists who are connected to the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who want the NAACP to be a much more direct action centered civil rights organization, getting arrested, boycotting, being in the scrum. And we see Medgar Evers as somebody who's under the constant threat of death. I show the way in which there are white activists like Joan Trumpauer, who's still alive, who's getting arrested alongside of Medgar Evers at sit-ins.

And Bob Moses is the Hamilton College graduate, philosophy major, mathematician, who later is a MacArthur Genius Award winner and author of the book Radical Equations, who is really one of the single most influential student activists of the 1960s. He goes to Macomb, Mississippi and influences and inspires people like Tom Hayden, who follows him into Macomb. And Moses writes that famous letter from a prison in Macomb, Mississippi, about SNCC activists being in the middle of the iceberg.

And the iceberg is a metaphor for the racial subjugation and the white supremacy that they're under. And Moses vows to resist nonviolently, to resist. And he becomes this figure who attracts really hundreds and then thousands of students.

So when we look at the March on Washington, the March on Washington is a culmination of one, a very brutal winter where civil rights activists are hoping against hope and organizing that the federal government is going to be on their side and that President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy will lead. They are very disappointed, perhaps none so as much as James Baldwin. But by the spring, Birmingham and the crisis in Birmingham gives civil rights activists an entree into compelling, coercing, shaming the administration into taking a moral stance.

Jimmy Baldwin sends the Kennedys a public telegram saying what's happening in Birmingham. It's their responsibility. This is a human rights movement, a human rights campaign.

And over the course of that spring, especially after the Mother's Day bombing in Birmingham, which is an assassination attempt on Martin Luther King Jr. at the A.G. Gaston Motel, you start to see the Kennedys respond and do more. And Malcolm X, who's in Washington, D.C., uses Birmingham as an entree to really become in 1963 a national figure. It's very interesting to watch all these different stories unfold, but they intersect, which makes them so even more interesting.

That makes a lot of sense. Of course, 1963 was also defined by two other tragedies in September of 1963, the church bombing in Birmingham that killed four little girls and the assassination of JFK in November of that year. What affected these tragedies? Also, obviously, public televised, what effect did they have on the movement and how in particular did the JFK assassination help change public sentiment around around civil rights?

Well, I think I want to stick for a second, Zachary, with the March on Washington just to talk about what happens that day, August 28th. I think 250,000 people come to Washington, D.C. and what's so powerful is the coalitions we're seeing of labor, labor movements, different social justice movements, political, religious movements. You've got Jewish and Christian organizations and secular organizations that come together. But you also have the left that gets in there, too. There are people who are socialist and Marxist and feminist at the march.

And so the march is really extraordinary in showing a kind of solidarity publicly in front of a global audience, including the Kennedys. The Kennedys invite the march leaders to the White House afterwards and they spend 75 minutes there. And what's so extraordinary about the March on Washington is that it's a generational march.

And in that speech, he talks about reparations. He says, we come here to cash a check, a check that has been stamped insufficient funds, but we refuse to believe that the Bank of American Justice is bankrupt. So it's an extraordinary day.

So it's really an extraordinary day and moment, not just for the movement, but for really the idea of multiracial democracy in that sense. And that's important because it's a real high point that year because, Zachary, by the time Birmingham happens, the second act of Birmingham, which is the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on September 15th. And there's four girls who are murdered that day.

So it's, and Baldwin says this at Howard University, November 30th, 1963, he says, we mourned separately the deaths of Medgar Evers and the children of Birmingham, and now we're collectively mourning JFK because Black Americans were bereft at the Kennedy assassination because they were his most enthusiastic supporters as that administration went on. So it becomes really interesting. JFK becomes part and the most well-known martyr of America's second reconstruction, but for much of the year, it doesn't seem as if we're ever going to mourn collectively any of the fallen heroes in this struggle for citizenship and dignity.

Peniel, at the end of your wonderful book, you connect, of course, the moment you've just described to the rise of Lyndon Johnson and how in this terrible, violent, chaotic moment, Lyndon Johnson, who was a largely ignored vice president by the Kennedys, comes into office and is able to create, as you say, a more powerful bully pulpit than any president had really had before, at least not in recent memory. And is the progress that's made, particularly in 64 and 65, the Civil Rights Act of 64, the Voting Rights Act of 65, where so many of us focus our attention, was that a necessary outcome of Kennedy's death? Would another vice president ascending to the presidency have done the same thing, or was there something particular about Lyndon Johnson?

So in a lot of ways, being pro-civil rights was also pragmatic. There was no way to hold on to that coalition through cautious deliberation in the immediate aftermath of the president's assassination. So his instincts are correct.

LBJ had great instincts. And I think what's interesting about LBJ in 63 is that even months before the assassination with his Gettysburg address, his Tufts University commencement speech, him receiving an award by the National Association of Black or Negro Journalists. They're giving him an award.

LBJ had really, really stepped up on civil rights in very public ways, to the point where he became at least a part of some of the Kennedy private deliberations on civil rights, and was speaking to Ted Sorensen. The tension with Bobby Kennedy is always there, and with the assassination only amplifies. But he's in the White House on June 22nd, when Dr. King has both a private meeting with Bobby Kennedy and Burke Marshall, and then the very famous private walk through the Rose Garden with Jack Kennedy, and then being surrounded by the 28 or 30 civil rights leaders. LBJ is there, and he's speaking, and he's upright. He's there when they meet after the March on Washington. But he's also telling Ted Sorensen, and he mentions James Baldwin, that President Kennedy should use the presidency as a bully pulpit.

He admires Kennedy's June 11th speech, which I get in depth in, in Freedom Season, in the chapter, Kennedy's Finest Moment, but feels Kennedy should constantly use that bully pulpit. So he was much more willing to use, and much more understanding about the way in which the presidency, in and of itself, it provides a kind of ballast for whatever political situation you're in, because people are really looking towards the president, especially, I think, at this time period, 1963, than Kennedy. So I think Kennedy, and you could see it in hearing some of the White House tapes, Jeremi, with the ADA, Americans for Democratic Action, Kennedy's saying, and Arthur Schlesinger's in the meetings with him, saying, well, FDR's fire chats, he never gave more than four a year, and I don't have FDR's velvet voice.

And what's so important is that by 1963, in the aftermath of the March on Washington and the Kennedy assassination, we get a rough consensus by the aftermath of JFK's death, led by Lyndon Baines Johnson, that multiracial democracy has to be the beating heart of the republic. That's very, very important. And I think for at least the next 50 years until the Supreme Court's decision, Shelby v. Holder, 5-4

So I think that idea of multiracial democracy is really important, and the idea of building consensus around that. It's not unanimity. There's going to be disagreement of how we get to it, but consensus around the idea of multiracial democracy. The other lesson is about coalitions and coalition building. So I think throughout freedom season, you see the way in which civil rights leaders from the grassroots all the way to those who could have the privilege of meeting with President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy and meeting with governors and leaders really were interested in coalitions.

So what's so interesting about 1963 is the way in which words and rhetoric and their ability to persuade people mattered. I think Martin Luther King Jr. is who we always look at, but it's Malcolm X, it's Gloria Richardson, Lorraine Hansberry, and then certainly it's Jimmy Baldwin, where Baldwin's words are so extraordinarily profound. You've got the right wing, the left wing, the middle of the country all trying to grapple with him.

So there's an intellectual praxis that happens in 1963 that is massive and national and monumental, and it's really global in scope, because there are students who are part of the Peace Corps and Crossroads who are going into Africa, who are going into Latin America, and those countries are also looking at the United States, and people are trying to walk the talk. They're trying to live up to their social, political, cultural, moral, religious ideals, which is really extraordinary to see. They don't always succeed, but the very fact that in good faith they're trying to live up to those ideas, it's really important to see.