Freedom Season: 1963 and Its Lessons for Democracy in America Today
1963 was a crucible of hope, rage, and rebirth—when Baldwin, King, and countless others reshaped America’s moral imagination and built a fragile but lasting foundation for multiracial democracy.
By Peniel E. Joseph
At a moment of crisis for America’s multiracial democracy, I found myself thinking about how history offers vital lessons for the contemporary challenges we face. My new book, Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution, offers a panoramic history of the year that transformed the decade of the 1960s.
1963 ushered in a fifty-year racial justice consensus in American history, one that, despite its many imperfections, opened up unprecedented new doors of opportunity, achievement, and citizenship for Black Americans and other historically marginalized and oppressed groups, including women and women of color.
In popular culture, Americans of a certain generation remember 1963 as a year of violence, triumphs, and tragedy that unfolded in the triptych of three indelible images: peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham attacked by German Shepherds and pummeled by firehoses powerful enough to strip the bark off trees; the gloriously triumphant image of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking to the Washington Mall against the backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington that summer; and the tragic assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas that November.
But these dramatic images obscure as much as they reveal.
Americans from all backgrounds spent the year debating the merits of citizenship, dignity, freedom, and democracy. Not all the moments were dramatic and epochal, although cumulatively they produced a hinge year in American history. The cast of historical characters, in addition to bold faced names such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, JFK, and Bobby Kennedy, included less heralded activists and artists such as Gloria Richardson, the maverick civil rights organizer from Cambridge, Maryland, and Lorraine Hansberry, the brilliant and radical Black international feminist and author of the 1959 Broadway smash play, “A Raisin in the Sun.”
The most surprising aspect of the year might be the pivotal role played by James Baldwin, the Harlem-born, queer Black writer whose bestselling classic, The Fire Next Time, turned him into more than just a literary celebrity and public intellectual. That year, through his friendships with the young activists who joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Baldwin emerged as what he called a “witness” to an unfolding political revolution. Baldwin’s network proved kaleidoscopic; he counted King, Malcolm X, Commentary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz, and Lorraine Hansberry as friends. Baldwin’s stature traveled beyond America’s borders to Europe, Africa, and the world. The Kennedys noticed that Attorney General Bobby had invited the writer to his Hickory Hill home to discuss the state of race relations over a breakfast of bacon and eggs. Baldwin, who had just appeared on the cover of Time Magazine shortly before the visit, signed a copy for Bobby’s Negro maid.
Baldwin emerged as the year’s moral avatar, perhaps on an even greater level than King, in contrast to popular memory. From the start of the year, where he flew from New York to Jackson, Mississippi to meet with civil rights leader Medgar Evers, toured southern colleges in North Carolina and Louisiana in support of CORE, and delivered book talks that doubled as sermons on the health of American democracy, Baldwin emerged as the most passionate voice advocating Black humanity of his generation. He was joined in this quest by Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam spokesman whose fame crested that year as he rose to be the most eloquent critic of King and the movement, even as it inspired him and enlarged his political ambitions.
Baldwin became a conduit for conservative and liberal civil rights critics, including National Review editor William F. Buckley, who labeled him an “eloquent menace” and his friend Norman Podhoretz, who penned an essay, “My Negro Problem and Ours,” that challenged his interpretation of the fundamental crisis underpinning American race relations.
Like Roosevelt’s man in the arena, Baldwin emerged bruised but unbowed from a dizzying array of encounters with supporters, adversaries, and critics who spanned the political spectrum from the far right to the far left that year.
The May 24th meeting with Bobby Kennedy, which featured luminaries such as Harry Belafonte, Lorraine Hansberry, Lena Horne, and a young civil rights activist from Louisiana named Jerome Smith, turned into a decisive, bittersweet confrontation. Bobby Kennedy defended the Kennedy civil rights record against an onslaught of passionately aggrieved critics.
By the following month President Kennedy, in no small part due to the Baldwin meeting as well as proliferating civil rights demonstrations around the nation, experienced his finest three days as president, delivering a trio of speeches on June 9, 10, and 11 that placed racial justice, human rights, and an expansive notion of American citizenship and dignity as the beating heart of an experiment in multiracial democracy. Kennedy’s speech before a conference of mayors in Honolulu, his commencement address at American University, and his televised civil rights message recognized the existential threats and opportunities of the moment. Inspired by the language of Baldwin and King, Kennedy called the unfolding demonstrations a “revolution” that could not be halted by “repressive police action” or by pleas of ignorance or innocence. Racial justice, the president explained, was in fact “a moral issue,” one as “old as scripture and as clear as the Constitution.” Kennedy announced his intention to send the 1963 Civil Rights Act to Congress, a move King had been pleading for almost three years.
Yet even Kennedy’s soaring eloquence could not quell the violent impulses and actions that spurred the forces of a counterrevolution organized by a diverse range of white supremacists. A few hours after his bravura June 11 speech, Medgar Evers, Jimmy Baldwin’s friend, was assassinated outside of his carport by Byron de la Beckwith, and died in front of his wife, Myrlie, and their three children.
The March On Washington, August 28, represented the coruscating high point of a crucible filled with triumph and tragedy. It was the third, and largest, consecutive gathering of coalitions of civil rights leaders and supporters that year, beginning with a May 26 civil rights demonstration that attracted 35,000 in Los Angeles, the June 23 Walk For Freedom in Detroit that drew more than 125,000 and the March On Washington for Jobs and Freedom that witnessed a quarter of a million people come to support the movement for equality. Martin Luther King Jr. keynoted all three events.
But the March On Washington was a capstone to America's new racial justice consensus. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” written that spring during the Birmingham Crisis, outlined a new theory of justice that castigated white liberal for moral cowardice, shamed racial segregationists and unpatriotic, and linked the young schoolchildren being arrested by Bull Connor’s authorities back to “those great wells of democracy dug deep by the Founding Fathers.” In essence, in Birmingham and the nation’s capital, King placed the civil rights movement in the annals of the nation’s scarred past to forge a more democratic future. But King outlined more than a simple dream of interracial brotherhood at the march. He extolled a vision of multi-racial democracy forged in the fire of a nation mature enough to admit and rectify the original sin of racial slavery and its afterlife in Jim Crow segregation, police brutality, wealth gaps, and the mistreatment and scapegoating of a tenth of the population.
John Kennedy was so impressed that he greeted King at the White House with a beaming smile and the words, “I have a dream.”
But our story does not end here. On September 15, six Black children were killed in a single day in Birmingham, a grim death toll that turned James Baldwin into a prophet of confrontation and searing Old Testament-style truth. The murders of Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church (the same church attended by the family of future Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice) transformed Baldwin. That same day, Johnnie Robinson was shot in the back by police, and thirteen-year-old Virgil “Peanut” Ware was murdered by two young white teenagers who shot him off a bicycle.
Baldwin and Bayard Rusting, the brilliant organizer of the March On Washington and former mentor and advisor to King (whose career was filled with a series of setbacks owning to prosecution and persecution of his homosexuality and radical politics) organized a series of fiery demonstrations in support of the slain children that included plans for a Christmas boycotts.
President Kennedy refused to attend any of the funerals, behavior that disappointed King and greatly angered Baldwin.
Baldwin appeared at two conferences in the nation’s capital that fall, both at Howard University, one shortly before Kennedy’s assassination and just after. Baldwin went further than Malcolm X in his description of the Kennedy assassination. Malcolm’s words, on December 1 in New York, that Kennedy’s death was a case of “chickens coming home to roost,” hastened his departure from the Nation of Islam as journalists interpreted his words as mocking or cheering the president’s death. In truth, Malcolm meant to suggest that Kennedy had been a victim of some of the same violent forces unleashed by American imperialism.
Baldwin, at Howard University, warned against mythologizing Kennedy’s contributions to the civil rights struggle. Yet he remained a steadfast believer in the future of American democracy, even as he grew increasingly despairing of the nation’s ability to achieve the maturity that would allow us “to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”
My research on Freedom Season reveals three essential lessons that can help us today.
First, ideas matter. 1963 proved to be a time when people were willing to debate, argue, and confront each other passionately about the future of citizenship, dignity, democracy, and freedom in America. They did this in ways that transcended political, racial, and partisan divides. Baldwin stood at the center of these roiling debates, which took place in private homes, universities, churches, synagogues, and mosques, and in libraries, community centers, coffee shops, and the floor of the U.S. senate, House of Representatives, the White House, and in thousands of communities, city halls, and masonic lodges across the nation.
Second, coalitions matter. The molding of consensus that year took great time and care. Only through seeing one another as estranged kin, as suggested by Baldwin, could we ever get close to King’s notion of a Beloved Community. Black people led this fight, but needed more than just allies. They demanded a community that saw them as fellow citizens in the unfolding drama to build a new world and create another country by redeeming America’s soul.
Third, we need a moral framework to envision and understand how leadership, civic ideals, dignity, and multiracial democracy can manifest in our nation and our lifetime worldwide. When Kennedy proclaimed in his June 11 speech, “We preach freedom around the world,” pausing before adding, “and we mean it,” he was answering the moral challenge posed by civil rights demonstrations, articulated by Baldwin and King, and seen around the world as the Achilles Heel of the American project. Freedom Season illuminates how the search for equality and justice was, in fact, global in scope. Liberation movements in Africa, the Third World, Asia, the Americas, and globally forced the United States to move beyond the strictures of Cold War logic and embrace calls for freedom emanating domestically and internationally. The nation responded to these pleas imperfectly, but did manage to institutionalize a democratic age between 1963 and 2013 (ended by the SCOTUS 5-4 Shelby v. Holder decision that ended the most powerful features of the 1965 Voting Rights Act) that, in our post-consensus present, we look back upon fondly.
Ultimately, 1963 proved to be a year of miracles and tragedies, when America remade itself after coming perilously close to falling apart. There is a legacy of profound hope in the multiracial democracy forged in the biblical passions unleashed by a civil rights movement that asked all Americans to see themselves and their stories in the Black faces who James Baldwin rightfully recognized as representing the beating heart of the American experiment.
Peniel E. Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, and Distinguished Service Leadership Professor and professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an internationally recognized scholar, author, speaker, and editor of eight award-winning books. His most recent book is: Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution.