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Author: Peniel E. Joseph

In Conversation with Laurence Ralph

Historian Peniel E. Joseph, joined in conversation by Laurence Ralph, presents "Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution." Registration requested, not required.

About the Book (from the publisher):

In "Freedom Season," acclaimed historian Peniel E. 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.

Nineteen sixty-three 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. 

In Conversation:

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 at the LBJ School of
Public Affairs, and distinguished service leadership professor and professor of history at
the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author and editor of eight award-winning
books on African American history, including The Third Reconstruction and The Sword
and the Shield. He lives in Austin, Texas.

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Laurence Ralph is a professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and previously a professor at Harvard University for nearly a decade. Ralph earned his Ph.D. and Masters of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Science degree from Georgia Institute of Technology. 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. His first book "Renegade Dreams" (University of Chicago Press, 2014), received the C Wright Mills Award. His second book, "The Torture Letters" (University of Chicago Press, 2020), explores a decades-long scandal in which hundreds of Black men were tortured in police custody. He has received fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the National Research Council of the National Academies. His writing has been featured in The Paris Review, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Chicago Review of Books, Boston Review, and Foreign Affairs.

Presented in partnership with the Princeton Theological Seminary and with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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