Annotations for Speakers: Peniel Joseph

Oh, it's my pleasure, Jeremi. Thank you.

Oh, absolutely. It was, you know, as a fellow writer, the older we get, the more introspective we get. And we're also trying to flex different muscles. So I think putting in memoir and writing in a different way was really exciting, in addition to the historical and the political analysis. So I'm really excited about the book in that way.

Well, no, thank you. I think it's like me and you have had these conversations for really two decades now, and I think the further you become a student of history, the past, the more it enables you to understand the present. So I think when we think about Barack Obama, and Zachary's great poem was just about Obama, but also people like John Lewis or Fannie Lou Hamer, and then we think about the movement for Black lives, and then we think about Trump and MAGA and the Tea Partiers and the birther movements. The way in which I argue in the book that we should make sense of January 6th, both the white riot, but also the hearings and the debates about it.

Justice Ketanji, you know, Jackson. How do we make sense of all the things that are happening around us? And I think Reconstructionists versus Redemptionism is really what has framed American democracy from 1865 to the present. And I think there are times when Redemptionists win and are winning that debate, and there are times when Reconstructionists are winning that debate. And I think Obama was so important, and I argue that he's the first hinge point for the third Reconstruction, because you look at how that affected Zachary, how that affected all of us.

It affected generations of people, both in the United States and globally, because it made people think that we could be a multiracial democracy for real. You know, France doesn't have a Black prime minister. The UK doesn't seem like it'll ever get a Black prime minister or even a South Asian prime minister, whether they're conservative, whether they're Tories or liberals, right? It's a real big deal.

And so I think that when we see and frame it, Reconstructionists versus Redemptionists, we're able to say a lot about not just race, but about American democracy, big government versus small government, reproductive rights, gay marriage, and like you were alluding to, really citizenship and dignity, and how is that going to look, even in Austin, Texas, our own beloved Austin, Texas, or Madison, Wisconsin, because even in liberal and progressive states and cities and paradigms, you have Redemptionist inclinations that frame when we discuss school choice or we discuss climate change and environmental racism, segregation, when we discuss political power or wealth and equity.

So I think it gives us a good conceptual tool to understand why Charlottesville, but also why Obama, right? And Obama in Richmond, Virginia, and how did that happen? In the Capitol of the Confederacy and the night before the election, he's in tears and there's over 100,000 people there, predominantly white. And so people would say, well, wow, that's amazing. How did that happen? And I think this gives us a framework in the history that's told here, a way for us to conceptualize both the past, the present, and hopefully the future.

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.

And it makes sense that during that period, people thought that Obama's victory was sort of going to be a capstone. But as we see, and I try to delineate in the book, especially when I talk about Obama and BLM and sort of that creative tension, Obama was really not just the end of one era, but it was also the beginning of a new period of reconstruction where you were going to see that kind of backlash against everything that Obama represented, because he represents so much.

Well, I think that those two ideals can exist in the same person, but part of it is how we tell the narrative and the story about Barack Obama and also American history. I think one of the most powerful aspects of all three periods of Reconstruction is the narrative power, the narrative power, both by Redemptionists and Reconstructionists. So in the first Reconstruction, the narrative that wins is the Lost Cause Redemptionist narrative, over and above the Emancipationist narrative, the abolition democracy narrative of W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells.

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.

And I think in the third Reconstruction, what we've seen is really two narratives budding together, really at least three narratives truthfully budding together. One is the Obama narrative, America is a place where all things are possible. Really what he reiterated to us, he iterated the first time at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and then in 2008 throughout the whole campaign, 07-08, but certainly in Grant Park in November 4th, 2008, where he's saying America is a place where all things are possible. And in some levels, he says his election proves it, but also just that multiracial crowd proves it. 40 years earlier, that place had been a site of real political catastrophe for the country and the Democratic Party when the Chicago police brutalized nonviolent, peaceful, anti-war protesters.

And those protesters shouted, the whole world is watching. And they were really mocking the United States. They were mocking the notion of American democracy because in certain ways, when we look at 1968 in Chicago, they were saying the whole world is watching that American democracy is a sham. We are being beaten and brutalized, including there were grandmothers being beaten by the Chicago PD in the summer of 1968. You flash, you fast forward 40 years later and it's a peaceful demonstration with really a couple of hundred thousand people in Grant Park celebrating a president-elect who many thought was an impossible dream. That's really, really powerful. So that narrative seems to be winning.

And then we see the birther narrative, the Tea Party narrative, and really the Trumpian MAGA narrative is really the first narrative, I would argue, since the Reconstruction era. So I think Trump and MAGA, the narrative is even more powerful than George Wallace. t's more powerful than Reaganism. It's more powerful than Goldwaterism, right? Because it goes back to that 19th century, that idea that Black success was going to repudiate white privilege and white supremacy and had to be stopped at all costs. So we are locked into this narrative war.

And then BLM, Black Lives Matter, has another narrative. And their narrative is a narrative of really radical and revolutionary abolition democracy. And what Du Bois meant by abolition democracy was this idea of a world after slavery that was free of systems and institutions of punishment and marginalization and death and anti-Blackness. And that was going to be a multiracial democracy where all people were going to have positive outcomes and aspirations and opportunities. And I think when we look at those different narratives, the 1619 Project versus the assaults on so-called critical race theory, we see how important the power of storytelling is.

So I still think Barack Obama, hugely important. I admire him a whole lot. But what I show in the book, the narrative that Black Lives Matter was articulating was really equally important because it was a narrative of Black dignity from below, people who perhaps Barack and Michelle Obama never would have met in their lives, people who are incarcerated, people who are on the margins, people who are disabled mentally and physically, and that those people mattered and that the president didn't understand their suffering at the level that the people who were experiencing it understood.

And that's why I have a part in the book where in December of 2014, he has a meeting, Obama has a meeting with Black Lives Matter activists in the White House, and they're going back and forth on change. And I say that Obama at that meeting never could have imagined a Donald Trump presidency. And the juxtaposition is that the Black Lives Matter activists, the Ferguson activists, absolutely could. And they were warning him in that meeting, this is coming, this is coming. And he absolutely refused to believe it until 2020.

One thing I show is that the optimism of 2004 and 2008 is replaced in 2020 with one of the darkest speeches Obama ever gives during COVID at the Democratic National Convention, which is, of course, on Zoom at that point because nobody can be there in person. And Obama says that democracy is in peril. This is the person who's absolutely the most optimistic leader of any race of his entire generation. He switches because he sees the coming storm that I think BLM had already witnessed.

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.

So what I mean by that specifically is that, you know, Obama needed to tell us about not just the beauty but the bitter parts. And I know that's not great for campaigns. I completely understand that that's not great for campaigns, but it's super important for us to have a narrative that can talk about histories of racial slavery, anti-Semitism, discrimination against women, queer folks, Latinx folks, Asian-American, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous, disabled people, just the whole gamut, but also talk simultaneously about the activists of all colors, of all backgrounds, who've pushed back against that, who've dreamed of a different, reconstructed America, a multiracial democracy, an abolition democracy, and have pushed all of us into getting Labor Day, Memorial Day, rights for veterans, rights for poor people, who want to end homelessness and racism and anti- Semitism, who really want to build that beloved community and make this country a shining city on the hill.

So I think that that story is what's so necessary. That's why I'm a supporter of the 1619 Project. I think, like anything, it can be criticized. Nothing is completely perfect, but I like the idea of this new origin story for American history that looks at the good, the bad, the ugly, but also the beautiful parts of American history. And once we provide people those parts of American history, it makes them stronger. It makes our democracy more stronger. It makes people more patriotic. It makes people love the country more once they understand all that we've been through, and it makes us try to change, as James Baldwin says, to achieve our country for the first time. So Obama didn't give us all the benefit of the doubt. I think we're all stronger than politicians ever assume. I think we're smarter than politicians ever assume. I think we're more resilient, and we have more empathy and compassion than politicians ever assume.

So you could talk about the bad that happened during the first, second, and third Reconstructions, but like I do in this book, I also talk about the good and the promise and the potential. That's the whole thing. So what we have to say is that, yes, we can be the greatest country ever on the face of the earth. We're not quite there yet, but there's many people who have strived to make us that golden, that shining city on a hill. And I think Obama starts to do that really starting in 2015 when he's not facing any elections. He starts to do more of that.

A great speech on history at Selma, a great speech towards the NAACP about mass incarceration. He starts to knit together a much more humanistic story where he's more comfortable talking about the flaws of the country, because if we just keep on talking about American exceptionalism, we can't explain the gun violence in the country, the racism, the police brutality, by saying all we're doing is constantly perfecting our union. It's a bedtime story, but it doesn't mean we can't have this positive feeling and this love of country, but we have to love the country enough to criticize the country.

Yeah, I think that's the test and the challenge. And I think part of it is laying bare the most important parts of our history. I think you can see why from a redemptionist perspective, there's been such an assault, not just on the critical 19 project, but calling any kind of effort to have a more complex, truthful American history, critical race theory that is somehow anti-white and going to brainwash our kids. You could see that from a redemptionist perspective because stories are really the most important part of all of this. And I know you agree, the stories we tell each other, the stories we tell our families, the way in which I tell my daughter, you tell Zach, it's so important, the stories we tell.

So the 1619 project and the way in which so many hundreds of thousands of teachers were using that and continue to in certain states that are allowed to use it, that was important because I think when you tell a deeper story of American history, it means that the newer generations, people who are the sons and daughters of those who are in power are going to be much more receptive to the idea of power sharing. Because yeah, we can legislate this, we can come up with policies, we can come up with nonprofits, but then at the end of the day, the institutions are us. We are the institutions, right? And so we have to have a baseline understanding of American history.

I think these three reconstruction periods are really the most important parts of our history. So I think the more in which we're able to craft a narrative that's inclusive, a narrative that lets people see themselves in that story, but also understand what happened with Tulsa, what happened with Japanese internment camps, what happened with the long and bitter history of anti-Semitism here in this country, what happened with what we've done to our Latinx, our Hispanic population, what we've done to indigenous folks, what we've done to AAPI folks and queer folks, the better off they're able to understand how we can build that beloved community and really the sacrifices that are going to be called for. Because we've embedded a system of unequal power relations and when people hear this word equity, they become frightened because they think their kid's not going to get to the right school and have the right outcomes, or they're not going to any longer have access to the same neighborhoods.

But power sharing means not that you're going to be diminished, but everyone is going to be, or more people are going to be elevated. And I think part of that, the central part of this is the story we tell about America and us and our place within America.

Well, I think that's a great question. I think, one, we have to be willing to speak truth to power, because there are structures and systems that have oppressed folks and continue to. I think, two, we have to learn and listen to each other's stories. So I make it a point of reading, obviously, not just African-American history, but histories of, we see the late Barbara Aaron Reich just passed away, histories of white working class, histories, think about Tommy Orange and They Are There, history of Native people, histories. I read Julian Zeller's great book on Rabbi Heschel, histories of Jewish Americans, just histories of the whole multiracial component of the United States.

It's important to read that. But we also have to acknowledge that the core feature of American democracy, one that I think has been a stain on our democracy, but also has been unifying, especially for redemptionists, and in certain contexts for reconstructionists, is really anti-Blackness.

And so anti-Blackness is what creates the racial caste system that Isabel Wilkerson and others talk and write about, that hierarchy. You think about the caste system as a ladder with Blackness at the bottom, whiteness at the top, and other racial groups in between trying to figure and oscillate between both of those poles where they fit in. So I would say, Zachary, there are oppressors. It doesn't mean that somehow all white people are that. But systemically, there is a system of white supremacy in the country that goes back to the founding of the country. But in 1865, we actually had a way out through Freedman's Bureau, reparations, through land and equity for African-American farmers. We actually had a way out of white supremacy.

And what we see through the history of the Third Reconstruction, the First Reconstruction, and I write about it in this book, is that it was violently repudiated. It wasn't just policies and Black codes and convict lease system. This was organized systematic terror. When we think about January 6th, 2021, January 19th of 1871 is when Congress launches the official investigation into Klan violence. And by March of 1871, there's going to be public congressional hearings that lead to the enforcement acts during the Grant Administration.

So this is big news. Thaddeus Stevens is saying colored people are being slaughtered by the thousands in the South. That's what Thaddeus Stevens is saying, the venerable congressman from Pennsylvania, who is one of the stalwart abolitionists and reconstructionists of the time period. So we have to be courageous enough to call that out, especially now because we're facing a backlash that really happened very quickly after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and has really been congealed in legislation, but a backlash against that kind of truth-telling. But we have to listen and learn about each other's stories, Zachary. I would say that's the biggest thing.

We have to listen and learn about each other's stories. And sometimes people will say, well, my group suffered, your group suffered. The organizing principle of the suffering actually has been anti-Black. And it's important for us to understand that. That's why the struggle for Black equality and Black citizenship and dignity is a universal struggle. It's just universal and Black, because if we get that, no other group is going to somehow be isolated and suffer because anti-Blackness has been the organizing principle of the racial caste system, both in the United States and globally.

So part of it is courage. Part of it is listening. Part of it is going to be struggle. It's going to be struggle because it takes White people who are in solidarity with anti-racist movements to really help us push forward. And in certain ways, I think 2020, one of the most optimistic aspects was the number of White people who were out in the streets alongside of Black and other people of color during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the summer. And we had never seen that level of outrage or commitment in either of the first two periods of Reconstruction. So that still gives me hope.

I think we look at it simultaneously. I think labor is a great example because I talk about SCIU 1199. My mom was part of a labor union for 40 years at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. So that's very near and dear. In a lot of ways, my politics were shaped by labor and labor movements and reading about labor movements.

Labor is a complicated issue. On the one hand, when we think about labor movements, a lot of times we always leave out enslaved Black people as part of labor movements. I think the work of Robin Kelly and Saidiya Hartman and other scholars have really gone a long way towards rectifying that. So we've got to think about labor capaciously. Then at the same time, we've got to be truthful about both labor that has been anti-racist, even in the 19th century.

You think about the Wobblies, the international workers of the world versus the Knights of Labor. You think about the CIO versus the AFL, Congress of Industrial Organizations versus the American Federation of Labor. You think about Eugene Debs' socialism versus Hubert Harrison's socialism. So we have to be very cognizant of the pitfalls of just saying, oh, we can have Black, white, unite, fight kind of slogans. But one thing I'll say, Zach, when we think about contemporary labor, it's become much more multicultural and much more multiracial. Bus riders unions, justice for janitors.

1199, SCIU is the most multiracial union in the country. So we have to tell that complete story. The story of Black people forced to be so-called scabs because they weren't allowed in labor unions, but also the story of utilizing the United Auto Workers and the Detroit Dodge Revolutionary Union movement, DRUM, and the different revolutionary union movements coming out of Detroit and wildcat striking against the UAW so that Black folks could be foremen and have dignity on the shift line and on the worker line.

So we have to tell that whole story. And I think telling that whole story now, when we think about labor and so many immigrant laborers, in terms of we've got 11 million undocumented in the country. So many of those are Spanish speakers, but there's also from West Africa, from the Caribbean. And how does that shape the labor movement, especially household labor? Most of us, me and your dad are generation X. If we live long lives, we're going to have Caribbean and Spanish- speaking home health aid workers, because unless you're somehow healthy until you're 100 years old, you don't need anybody. I mean, maybe that could be your dad. He's going to be fine, right? I hope so. I hope so.

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.

I think you think about the president and the student loan forgiveness and when people were pushing back, the White House was tweeting out all the PPE loans that conservatives had gotten from the government and not paid back. Millions and millions of dollars, but they were upset over these 10 and $20,000 loan forgiveness. So we have to be ready to speak truth to power.

And I think in certain ways, because of the times we live in, sometimes people think it's going to be easy. Like you saw George Floyd, you saw the millions of people in the streets, but that didn't translate into the policy at the federal level that a lot of people thought or assumed. So there's been no George Floyd Justice and Policing Act passed. There's been no For the People Expansion of Voting Rights Act passed. There's been no John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act passed. So part of it is we have to be in it for the long haul, Zachary. We have to be in it for the long haul because the backlash is right here. It's thick. It's among all of us, especially us.

We live right here in Texas, even at the University of Texas. The backlash is here. And this is the point in our history where you can see it's a time for choosing and actually living up to your commitments and principles becomes the hardest thing to do in this time rather than in 2020 or 2008. It's easy in 2008. It's very easy to say you're on the right side of history. You've got 69 million people backing you up. It's harder when you're in that minority, and we have to, again, be principled enough to live up to our commitments at this point.

No, thank you, Jeremi. Yes, my mother, Germaine Joseph, 83 years young, still lives in Queens, New York. Really my biggest teacher and the most influential person on me intellectually, politically, morally, the whole works.

Haitian immigrant who came to United States in 1965, worked at Mount Sinai Hospital for 40 years. I was on my first picket lines in elementary school and really somebody who encouraged me and my older brother to read and to write and to think, but also to be active, to be active citizens. If you believed in something, she was fine with you going out and demonstrating that belief.

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 the final president there, initially when we checked it out was Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter was the president. Reagan had not been elected yet. And so they had Jimmy Carter's 1977 and they had a dash. And I remember that book, right? And that's how I memorized the first 39 presidents of the United States. So she's been my biggest champion, but also my biggest teacher.

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.

I think the more you're out there in the world trying to help and do good, the more hopeful you feel because you're not just reacting and sitting back on the couch and woe is me and you're actually rolling up your sleeves and getting into the arena. And it's important for us to do that. And I think my mom did that just through example of going to work every day, very, very long commute from Queens Village to East 92nd Street every day, sometimes six days a week, like I write.

So it's really, you know, our parents worked harder than us. And as you know that better than me, Jeremy, and, you know, it's really important for us, all of us who are so privileged to be able to read and write and study, to remember that there were generations who absolutely worked harder than us, suffered more than us, right. And were more resilient than us.

So the only thing we can do is try to match their courage and that resilience because we have given, been given so much privilege in our lives, right. In our lives, we're never going to work as hard as they did. We're never going to have to go to another country, learn another language on the fly like they did, right. I mean, this is extraordinary. So they're the role model. So really we have no right to complain personally. And I don't mean politically, but I mean personally. So the example that she set and the discipline that she exemplified is really something that I, that lives within me to this day. And so the book is really dedicated to her and, and, and these, these Black and really other women, all women who've, who've shaped so many of us men who've been fortunate enough to be at their, at their, the stool by their feet, just taking in their wisdom.

Oh, thank you. Thanks to you and Zachary. Thanks for reading it. And I really enjoyed this conversation.

Thank you for having me, Zachary and Jeremi.

Well, Birmingham is very interesting because, as I show in Freedom Season, there were other hot spots and sites that might have become Birmingham, including Greenwood, Mississippi and Jackson, Mississippi.

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.

And what's interesting about 1963 with Birmingham, there's two competing governments by May of 1963 in Birmingham. Birmingham is shifting to a mayoral system from a three-person commissioner system. And one of those commissioners is Eugene Bull Connor, who's the rabid, not only racist, but anti-communist, who's a former radio sports broadcaster who gets his nickname for his expertise at shooting the bull, Eugene Bull Connor.

And what's so interesting about Bull Connor's Birmingham is that there's going to be an election. There's going to be a new mayor, Albert Boutwell, who's really sort of an elegant segregationist. But for a while, like during the first Reconstruction period, there's going to be two competing governments in the city of Birmingham who are both claiming that they are the official government.

But what Bull Connor does as city commissioner, not police commissioner, but city commissioner who has authority over law enforcement, is that he unleashes fire hoses through the fire department that are powerful enough to strip the bark off of trees. And they also unleash canine units and German shepherds that route peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham in April and in May of 1963. So really, Birmingham, even more so than the Freedom Rides in 1961, attracts global attention.

And even more so than the Freedom Rides in 1961, and even more so than the Meredith admission to Ole Miss University of Mississippi in September of 1962, because that's a concentrated episode. It's over three, four days. There's going to be a couple of people who are dead.

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.

We start to get hundreds of reporters in Birmingham, including reporters from as far away as Sweden and France and other places who are reporting. And we start to see Birmingham become front page news in The New York Times, especially when children as young as seven, eight and nine years old are arrested in Birmingham.

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.

And Jimmy Baldwin, James Baldwin, the writer, is a big part of this. Jimmy Baldwin is an extraordinary figure in the book, but also just in American history. Born in Harlem in 1924, one of nine children, young, gay, Black writer born in poverty who flees to France in November of 1948 and really unleashes his literary genius in a series of novels and books.

Go Tell It on the Mountain is his first novel, and then Giovanni's Room and Another Country. And his nonfiction is really regarded now in the 21st century as he's the best essayist that I think America has ever produced, irrespective of race. Notes of a Native Son.

And what we get published on January 31st, 1963, is a book called The Fire Next Time, which is really this extraordinary book that is comprised of two essays. The shorter essay is called My Dungeon Shook, which was a letter to his nephew in commemoration of the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which comes out in the December issue of The Progressive, which is coming out of Wisconsin and Madison and Fighting Bob LaFollette, founded in 1909. And the second longer essay, which is the really even more well-known essay, is an essay called Down at the Cross, which was published in the November 1962 issue of The New Yorker as, under the title, A Letter from a Region in My Mind.

And that's a 21,000 word essay about race, democracy, slavery, memory, love, citizenship, dignity. Really the best essay ever written about race in many ways, I think. And The Fire Next Time becomes an immediate bestseller, and it really catapults Jimmy, who's already famous for Another Country.

Another Country is a massive bestseller. It's a novel about interracial relationships and romance, suicide, queerness. It's really his blockbuster novel in terms of its popularity, sells more than a million copies.

It is major. And sometimes we forget about that. And so when we think about Jimmy Baldwin in 1963, he is the most well-known writer, irrespective of race, in the United States and globally.

His books are selling in London, in France. He's in Istanbul, Paris. And the Kennedys come to know Jimmy Baldwin.

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.

And what's interesting, Jeremi, about Jim Baldwin is that what Jimmy is, he's the incubator and a conduit. Everyone is talking and approaching his ideas and debating. That's William F.

Buckley, that's Norman Poderitz, it's the Kennedys, it's Black leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Gloria Richardson, Lorraine Hansberry. So he becomes the key figure and the key thought leader that politicians and literary salons and the New York Times and Mademoiselle magazine and the New Yorker and the progressive, but Black nationalists and Pan-Africanist and Marxist and Republicans and Democrats, they're all wrestling with Jimmy Baldwin, which is extraordinary. And that's going to inspire Bobby Kennedy as the spring progresses to actually want to meet Jimmy Baldwin and to hear him and listen to him.

So you're seeing these writers become political figures who are connecting high politics with the quotidian.

Well, the March on Washington is an unbelievable high point, and I think the longest chapter in Freedom Season is the chapter 11 called The Language of Human Joy. Which really does an in-depth examination of the March on Washington, but it tries to look at it from different perspectives of people like Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, the Kennedys, Howard Zinn, a very, very famous professor and author of A People's History of the United States.

But one of the key adult advisors, young adult, 41 years old to SNCC activists, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a mentor to somebody like Marian Wright Edelman, Spelman College professor, really extraordinary figure. I would say the March on Washington is a high point because of the previous seven months, seven and a half months, almost eight months of activism and debates and conflicts and deaths, but also triumphs that occur. So the start of the year, Jimmy Baldwin flies to Mississippi to meet with James Meredith, who's the first Black student to enroll at Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi, and he meets with Medgar Evers.

And really through the first half of the book, Medgar Evers is alive. He's the field representative, field secretary of the Jackson, Mississippi NAACP, a former military veteran with the Red Ball Express and providing supplies to our American soldiers in Normandy during the invasion, a football hero, a married father of three to Murley Evers. He's got three children, a nine-year-old son, an eight-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son.

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.

John Salter is the half Native American, half white professor at Tougaloo, who's getting arrested and beaten and brutalized alongside Medgar Evers. And so what's going on in Jackson, Mississippi, I also look at what's going on in Greenwood, Mississippi in April of that year, where people like Bob Moses are being brutalized and arrested. Somebody tries to assassinate Bob Moses in April of 1963.

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.

And Moses, of course, wears the sharecropper overalls of local people in the Mississippi Delta. And that becomes SNCC's de facto uniform of blending in. And Moses does it in a completely ego free manner.

He's one of the most humblest people you could ever meet. He's since passed away. But with such deep humility, Greenwood for a while is on the front pages of The New York Times because of the brutality that's going on.

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.

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.

We see A. Philip Randolph, who is 74 years old and the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, is the titular head of that march. We see Bayard Rustin, who is his lieutenant, former member of the Young Communist League, a socialist, a socialist and a social democrat who spends years in prison in Louisbourg as a conscientious objector, around the same time that Elijah Muhammad is in prison as a conscientious objector.

You see all these different stories coming together. Ossie Davis, who's a friend of Malcolm X's, is the master of ceremonies. And we, of course, remember Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech. And it's a 17 minute speech. We remember it as I have a dream speech. But he begins that speech with the words, now is the time to make real the promise of democracy.

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.

And I want us to remember the electricity that's in the air that day, but that entire year. And in Freedom Season, I have John F. Kennedy telling his favorite White House staffer, who's part of his personal staff, his butler, Bruce, how he wishes he could be out there.

John F. Kennedy is telling the activists after they come in and these leaders, you know, that he's proud of them. LBJ is there as well.

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.

And their names are Carol Robertson, Addie Mae Collins and Cynthia Wesley, who are all 14 years old. And then Denise McNair, who's just 11, are all killed in that blast. And two other Black children are also killed that day.

One is a 13-year-old who's riding his bike named Virgil Peanut Ware, who was shot by two white Eagle Scouts who tell the police and the authorities later that they wanted to see what would happen if they shot a Negro. And he's shot and murdered. One of the boys serves six months in juvenile detention and is released, and the other boy is let go and released.

And there's a 20-year-old, Johnny Robinson, who's shot and killed in the back by Birmingham police in the aftermath of a melee where people are protesting against the bombing that has just happened at the 16th Street Baptist Church. So those six deaths really impact James Baldwin. And I show, as we continue the narrative, how Baldwin is leading demonstrations and efforts at a Christmas boycott and a real searing critique of what kind of country are we that allows these six children to die.

And, you know, John F. Kennedy doesn't go to any of the funerals. And he's implored by Martin Luther King, Jr. in the White House to attend. And we have the tapes and he doesn't go to the funerals. So it's really an extraordinarily disappointing moment as well. Right.

And so the interregnum between the 16th Street Baptist church bombing, September 15th, and the Kennedy assassination, November 22nd, you see folks like James Baldwin who are getting a lot angrier and a lot more bitter about, and realizing what the stakes are, right? Real, real criticism. And so by the time of the Kennedy assassination, the Kennedy assassination provides a context for mourning, but it also provides the context to, and Merle Evers does this, James Baldwin King does it too, is to place Kennedy as one of the martyrs, like the martyrs of this movement.

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.

Oh, I think that Lyndon Johnson is really the right person who steps into history at that moment. I don't know if another vice president would have been able to take command in the same way. I think that trying to make Kennedy's assassination and his death, trying to leverage that for the passage of legislation, I think most people would have tried to do.

And I think it's important for us to remember in the context of the time of 63, 64, 65, LBJ needs Black votes where he can get them. And we're thinking about states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and of course, not the South. And he needs to hold on to a coalition that now has venerated the slain President Kennedy, and who's now this very, very iconic figure.

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.

So there's a kind of lack of confidence that Kennedy has, that really the polling disputes, right? He's a very, very popular president. I mean, really, in 63, at his lowest, I mean, he's still in the 60s, can you imagine, right, in terms of popularity?

And people want to see people want to listen to Kennedy. So there's a kind of underestimation of what he's capable of doing through the bully pulpit in a way that LBJ really embraces in the immediate aftermath of the assassination.

Well, I think there's three lessons to take from the book, at least three. One is this idea that really becomes universal in 1963, is that America must strive to be a multiracial democracy. And I think you see that throughout the course of the year in 1963.

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

We had a 50-year racial justice consensus that was imperfect, but provided the most opportunities for historically marginalized groups to have access to building wealth, to becoming elected officials, to being educated at some of the best universities in the country, to being in corporate America, so on and so forth. And that means African Americans, but it also means women. It means South Asians. It means people who are Latino, just the whole gamut, which is extraordinary.

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.

They were interested in listening and learning from, but also debating with people who held different views than they did, but they were all interested in good faith advancing the country. So this idea of coalitions is very, very important. And then finally, I would say this idea of ideas and actions mattering.

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.

William F. Buckley calls him an eloquent menace, and others say, no, he's this prophetic figure. Izzy Stone, I.F. Stone says he speaks with the passion of a Hebrew prophet. And so ideas matter, words and rhetoric matter, and I think we can see that right now in 2025, because I think there was a feeling before our current situation that if you had presidents who rhetorically supported civil rights, that that wasn't enough. And I understand that that isn't enough, but just the act of saying it actually was a much more positive thing for the country than somebody who's saying the exact opposite and belittling people and discriminating against people. So words really matter, and ideas matter, and placing those words and ideas into action matters.

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.

And that impacts the kind of civic nationalism that really comes to a high point in 63, really the most important year of America's second Reconstruction, if we look at those years as 1954 to 1968 as the high points, 63 is the turning point, and it takes all those, not just deaths, I mean, there's also these triumphant moments. So I hope it's a hopeful story as well, because I got a lot of hope from being with Baldwin and being with all these folks, and I got a lot of hope from having a presidency and administration that, even with their flaws, really wanted to do the right thing, and at times actually did.

Hey, thank you, Zachary. I really enjoyed it. And Jeremi, this is wonderful. And thank you for both of you for the work that you continue to do in these challenging times.