A kaleidoscopic narrative history of 1963, the pivotal moment in America's long civil rights movement-the year of the March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," and the assassinations of Medgar Evers and John F. Kennedy
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.
One of our preeminent historians of race and democracy argues that the period since 2008 has marked nothing less than America's Third Reconstruction
In The Third Reconstruction, distinguished historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a powerful and personal new interpretation of recent history. The racial reckoning that unfolded in 2020, he argues, marked the climax of a Third Reconstruction: a new struggle for citizenship and dignity for Black Americans, just as momentous as the movements that arose after the Civil War and during the civil rights era. Joseph draws revealing connections and insights across centuries as he traces this Third Reconstruction from the election of Barack Obama to the rise of Black Lives Matter to the failed assault on the Capitol.
America's first and second Reconstructions fell tragically short of their grand aims. Our Third Reconstruction offers a new chance to achieve Black dignity and citizenship at last-an opportunity to choose hope over fear.
This dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding of the twentieth century's most iconic African American leaders.
To most Americans, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. represent contrasting ideals: self-defense vs. nonviolence, black power vs. civil rights, the sword vs. the shield. The struggle for black freedom is wrought with the same contrasts. While nonviolent direct action is remembered as an unassailable part of American democracy, the movement's militancy is either vilified or erased outright. In The Sword and the Shield, Peniel E. Joseph upends these misconceptions and reveals a nuanced portrait of two men who, despite markedly different backgrounds, inspired and pushed each other throughout their adult lives. This is a strikingly revisionist biography, not only of Malcolm and Martin, but also of the movement and era they came to define.
An acclaimed chronicler of the Civil Rights Movement, Peniel Joseph presents this sweeping overview of a key component of the struggle for racial equality-the Black Power movement. This is the story of the men and women who sacrificed so much to begin a more vocal and radical push for social change in the 1960s and 1970s.
