What James Baldwin and 1963 Teach Us About Building Consensus Today

With Professor Peniel E. Joseph

A fight for equality with long odds. An entrenched, bigoted, and powerful right wing. Liberals resistant to critiques from the left. The year wasn’t 2025, but 1963.

In Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution, Professor Peniel E. Joseph traces the ups and downs of that pivotal year through the eyes of James Baldwin and other key figures. Baldwin was on a mission to find out “what really got us where we are,” so we could chart a new path forward. Professor Joseph and I explore what lessons Baldwin’s push for a national reckoning—and the initial reluctance of leading Democrats to join him—can offer us today.

Professor 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.

A condensed transcript, edited for clarity, of our conversation about Freedom Season is below. You can also listen to us on the Skipped History podcast:

Release the Lincoln tapes

Ben: Let's begin with some biographical information. Can you talk about James Baldwin’s upbringing and his political awakening?

PEJ: Baldwin was born and raised in Harlem, New York. He was one of nine children, and a prodigy, but also queer and Black in the 1930s and ’40s, Depression-era New York. There was no context to allow somebody like Jimmy Baldwin to flourish.

He worked in wartime industries in New Jersey, where he got into fights and arguments over racism. He was battling himself in many ways. He finally fled to Paris around 1948, and it's in Paris that he began to embrace the life of an artist as his full-time profession, despite the poverty and the obstacles that might come with it.

From France, he visited the U.S. several times, including for journalistic assignments like profiling Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for Harper's Magazine in 1959. He grew more and more interested in civil rights, and became close with people like Lorraine Hansberry.

Ben: —the author of A Raisin in the Sun, among other things, and a prodigy in her own right.

PEJ: Yes, and a radical Marxist feminist.

As we approach 1963, Baldwin earned more and more national attention for his writing. When he published “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” a 20,000-word essay that appeared in The New Yorker in November of 1962, the issue sold out. Afterward, Baldwin really became the moral, political, and intellectual voice of the Black freedom struggle.

Ben: Baldwin turned “Letter from a Region in My Mind” into The Fire Next Time, one of his most famous books. How did the book deepen his role as the voice of the freedom struggle?

PEJ: So The Fire Next Time came out on January 31st, 1963. It consisted of two essays. The first was a letter to his nephew (later inspiring Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me), and the second was the long New Yorker essay. The Fire Next Time was the bestselling nonfiction book of the year and catapulted Baldwin into the stratosphere of global celebrity.

He was the world’s best-known writer that year, a public intellectual, somebody who was an incubator for so many different conversations among the left, the right, moderates, revolutionaries, ultra-conservatives. He really got the kind of status that I don't think any other writer ever has before or since.

Ben: You write, “Baldwin emerged as the one figure in 1963 who could effortlessly cross boundaries and borders and be accepted by all sides as an emissary.”

PEJ: Yes, Baldwin went on a speaking tour around the country. In Berkeley, over 9,000 students came out to hear him, like they were going to a rock concert. At Stanford University, several thousand students turned out. He sold out stadiums and theaters in San Francisco, North Carolina, and Louisiana. He spoke at Black churches, on public television, and on public radio. Life Magazine did a major story on him. He was on the cover of Time Magazine.

It really became a remarkable period in his life and the life of the nation. You can see and feel the electricity with Baldwin talking about Blacks and whites as estranged kin, as part of this American family needing to mature and confront the legacies of racial slavery and white supremacy.

Ben: In his words, he was on a mission “to find out what really happened here… what really got us where we are.”

PEJ: And so many people were interested in joining that quest.

Ben: You discuss Baldwin's criticisms of the Kennedys, which dovetailed with his criticisms of liberalism. Can you talk about the summit with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1963?

PEJ: Baldwin had a strong critique of the Kennedy administration and white liberals, along the lines of Martin Luther King Jr.'s critique in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” that liberals were much more comfortable with an unjust peace than the chaos that came with searching for full equality.

The Kennedy meeting occurred on May 24th at an apartment in New York. Baldwin brought people like Lorraine Hansberry and singer Harry Belafonte. But the person who was really willing to speak out the most was Jerome Smith, a 25-year-old activist who had been beaten just like John Lewis—cracked in the skull in Louisiana.

Kennedy went to the meeting expecting a very polite, diplomatic session filled with praise for him and his brother and what they’d been doing on behalf of the Movement. But really, he received a three-hour dressing down. It was the first time—and as far as I know, the only time—that he just listened to a room full of mostly Black people.

They told him that the Kennedys had been moral cowards on the issue of civil rights and human rights. Hansberry said she was worried about the soul of the nation. There had just been a picture buried in The New York Times, rather than on the front page, of a cop putting his knee in the back of a Black woman in Birmingham. Less than two weeks earlier, President John Kennedy mobilized the military to be on guard for Black people rebelling there, but not for when Black people were being attacked and assaulted with fire hoses.

And Bobby was apoplectic. He came away from that meeting very, very upset. He had the FBI pull files on everybody. The people in that room stripped him of his hypocrisy, and he didn’t like it.

Ben: This was before, as you talk about in the book, Bobby had an about-face on race following Jack’s assassination. Bobby is venerated today more for his later views on civil rights, not for the views he held during 1963.

PEJ: Yes. In a way, Bobby was the stand-in for white liberals who, even if they thought they were being helpful, had not even scratched the surface of the inequality in the country and their own role in perpetuating that inequality.

For Bobby, his brother was killed in the most shocking way possible. No president has been killed in American history quite like that, even Lincoln. There’s no Zapruder film on Lincoln, we’re not able to see the angle where John Wilkes Booth got him in the back of the head, right?

Ben: Well, maybe there is footage, and RFK Jr. will release the tapes for us.

PEJ: Oh my God.

Ben: It’s all coming full circle!

PEJ: My point is, it shouldn’t have taken his brother being killed in the most shocking and violent way imaginable for RFK to have real empathy about the struggle for Black dignity. That’s one of the things the book shows, I think, in a detailed way: both the evolution of Bobby Kennedy and Jack Kennedy, but also the flaws that remained.

Ben: Let's talk more about the extraordinary violence of that year. Baldwin, you say, curdled “against a mean season of violence, death, and backlash.”

PEJ: When we think about 1963, it's a triumphant and hopeful year. It’s the year of the March on Washington, for example.

At the same time, 1963 was a very violent and tragic year. Martin Luther King Jr. spent Easter Sunday in jail. Thousands of kids were jailed and put up at Boys and Girls Clubs and 4-H clubs that served as prisons for them. We see an extraordinary amount of state-sanctioned violence by state and local forces, including in Selma, and later in the year, the murder of four children in Birmingham. Medgar Evers, a really extraordinary figure, known as the person who publicized Emmett Till’s assassination, was assassinated himself.

And that tragedy was also imbued with hope, because Myrlie Evers and two of her children met President Kennedy, and he told them about civil rights legislation he was proposing and saying her husband didn’t die in vain. These were some of his finest moments, but of course, he would also die before the end of the year.

So there are all these martyrs, and Jimmy was heartbroken. He remained a believer, though not in the same optimistic and euphoric way that had marked the earlier parts of the year. He grew bitter. Certainly, JFK, who had done so well after Evers’ death, was nowhere to be seen after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, which killed the four girls in Birmingham in September. And Bobby Kennedy was absent as well. They were fearful of a political realignment that might sink Kennedy's reelection victory.

Ben: In your words, JFK’s death in November, “sudden, unimaginable, and irreversible—temporarily opened the American conscience in ways that the deaths of Medgar Evers and the four children in Birmingham did not. Jimmy would never forgive the country he both loved and sometimes loathed for that, ever. But he still considered America's residents to be disconnected kin.”

PEJ: Yes. Consider the impact of 1963: how a consensus formed over racial justice and reckoning being at the beating heart of American democracy. There were sharp disagreements on how we achieve that goal, but consensus over its need lasted for 50 years, up until the Supreme Court dismantled key parts of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

So 1963 holds lessons for how you organize, rally, and build consensus around the idea of multiracial democracy. It reminds us, too, that ideas matter. Sometimes, now, we think just power and money and influence and platforms do. But you can see how ideas about dignity and citizenship were debated and injected into conversations around the world, on the left and the right, in 1963.

Coalitions also matter. At the March on Washington, and the Walk for Freedom in Detroit on June 23, 1963, which attracted 125,000 people, and also Los Angeles in May of 1963, which attracted over 35,000 people, you see these coalitions that cross labor and business and religious and civic and prisoners and ex-cons and felons and poor people. Women played a vital role, and three of the biggest activists of the year were queer—Hansberry, Rustin, and Baldwin.

All of these lessons are important today in the context of what’s going on with immigrants; with antisemitism and Islamophobia; with trans and queer folks and people who are disabled.

Ben: You conclude, “Baldwin reminds us that freedom is a two-way street, a precious responsibility based on personal reckoning in service of public truth. He loved America enough to tell the entire nation a story it needed, rather than wished, to hear. That story remains a wellspring of hope if we are willing to listen.”