A lesson learned from FREEDOM SEASON: HOW 1963 TRANSFORMED AMERICA'S CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION, by Peniel Joseph

 Tolerating hatred and violence against anyone degrades your entire society.

    The JFK era has long been an historical era that has fascinated me, partly because my grandparents were all loyal Kennedy people, and also because I truly believe that with all of JFK's deep flaws, that he was the last thing we had to anything resembling tremendous presidential leadership (it was a sad realization I recently had that for most of my lifetime, the best of American society has not actually lead us, a symbol of just how broken how country has become). The 1960's were an era of great tumult in general, and the fact that so few of that era's great leaders actually survived it undoubtedly played a major role in the overall decline of our national leadership in the coming decades. Peniel Joseph's excellent new book Freedom Season examines in detail the crucial year of 1963, which was a year of wrenching change for the nation that was filled both with some of our most inspiring historical events, and some of our greatest historical tragedies. In the end, the book emphasizes just how much toleration of injustice degraded our nation, even eventually those who were ostensibly privileged and in positions of power.

    Joseph's book primarily focuses on a group of the era's most famous leaders: the black writer and philosopher James Baldwin (who's probably the closest the book has to a main character); MLK; Malcolm X; the Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers and his wife Myrlie; the Kennedy brothers; sidelined black female leaders Fannie Hamer and Gloria Richardson. Through all of these voices, Joseph examines the great events of 1963: MLK's famous campaign in Birmingham (which I examined in a previous book int his blog); the federal government's confrontations with the racist governor George Wallace; the Kennedy brothers finally breaking and realizing how badly new national civil rights laws were needed; the March on Washington and the famous Dream; and finally, some brutal assassinations that shook the nation and the faith of even the most optimistic people that we could ever have real national healing. The book is breezy, informative, and filled with diverse voices and perspectives on this peak year of the Civil Rights Movement, and everything it was and was not accomplishing in changing the daily lives of the nation's long-oppressed black population.

    Throughout the book, there was one main lesson that stuck with me, and that was in how a ruling society's toleration of any violence and injustice against innocent people eventually backfires on everyone and degrades society as a whole. By the early 1960's, African-Americans had endured nearly 100 years of repressive laws and failed promises of liberation following the collapse of the Reconstruction efforts following the Civil War (indeed, the book opens with the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and all the ways America had failed to properly promote and maintain freedom in the ensuing decades). The Civil Rights Movement was born out of the black experience in World War II, where hundreds of thousands of African-Americans had rallied to the war effort and the promise of defeating global oppression, only to return to the same racist laws back home they had always endured. Medgar Evers was one of those WWII veterans, and indeed used his hardened combat mentality to help civil rights groups challenge the Jim Crow system of Mississippi, what was then one of the closest things to a police state that had ever been seen in the United States. Evers' brutal assassination in the summer of 1963--killed in front of his family home while his kids played inside--traumatized America's black community, and the failure of white Americans to understand its impact depressed and angered black people who had felt so hopeful following the massive success of the March on Washington just a few weeks earlier.

    Evers' death was partly overshadowed by the assassination several weeks later of JFK, a national trauma that in some ways continues to haunt us. One of the most famous reactions to JFK's assassination was Malcolm X's, who celebrated it and gave the famous quote that "the chickens are coming home to roost." It was a deeply upsetting and insensitive comment that got him exiled from his Nation of Islam supporters, but it was also one of those shock quotes that hid a larger and more intriguing philosophical argument; Malcolm X was basically saying that white Americans had tolerated such violence against black Americans for decades, and they were now seeing the consequences of that in thousands of white supremacists who were willing to use brutal violence to maintain their supposed superiority, potentially even if it meant killing off presidents. Contained in Malcolm X's words is a larger lesson that is deeply relevant to our modern chaotic world; when we other our political opponents and supposed enemies, and we justify that any action against them is for a greater good, then we are helping to ferment a national mood that is increasingly willing to tolerate horrific violence as long as it is against "them." And in that type of society, we all eventually lose. Today people openly talk about how we could benefit from a "civil war," forgetting that the last one killed 700,000 people and traumatized an entire generation for decades. We could all learn from studying the hope and dreams of 1963, and how some of those went down in flames because of a national culture of violence that not enough people had dared to challenge.

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