In Freedom Season, acclaimed historian Peniel Joseph offers a stirring narrative history of 1963, marking it as the defining year of the Black freedom struggle—a year when America faced a deluge of political strife and violence and emerged transformed.
The year 1963 opened with the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation and ended with America in a state of mourning. The months in between brought waves of racial terror, mass protest, and police repression that shocked the world, inspired radicals and reformers, and forced the hands of moderate legislators. By year’s end, the murders of John F. Kennedy, Medgar Evers, and four Black girls at a church in Alabama left the nation determined to imagine a new way forward. Alongside the stories of historical giants like James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph uplifts the perspectives of less celebrated leaders like playwright Lorraine Hansberry and activist Gloria Richardson.
Over one heartbreakingly tumultuous year, America unraveled and remade itself as the world looked on. Freedom Season shows how the upheavals of 1963 planted the seeds for watershed civil rights legislation and renewed hope in the promise and possibility of freedom.
Peniel Joseph holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the director of the LBJ School's Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, which he founded to promote engaged research and scholarship focused on the ways issues of race and democracy affect people's lives. In addition to being a frequent commentator on issues of race, democracy and civil rights, he is the author of many books, including The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr; Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America; and Stokely: A Life, which has been called the definitive biography of Stokely Carmichael.
Laurence Ralph is a professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and previously a professor at Harvard University. His research explores how police abuse, mass incarceration, and the drug trade make disease, disability, and premature death seem natural for urban residents of color, who are often seen as disposable. He is the author of Renegade Dreams, recipient of the C Wright Mills Award, and The Torture Letters. His many honors include fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Research Council of the National Academies. His writing has been featured in many outlets including The Paris Review, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and Foreign Affairs.
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