Peniel E. Joseph Author Event - FREEDOM SEASON

Join us for a night with author Peniel E. Joseph as he discusses his new book, FREEDOM SEASON. Peniel will be in conversation with the Professor of History at Southwestern University, Melissa K Byrnes.

If you would like a copy of FREEDOM SEASON when attending this event, please choose the ticket option that comes with a copy of the book. We cannot guarantee how many extra copies we will have on site.

ABOUT THE BOOK: 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. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 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.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR: Melissa K Byrnes is Professor of History at Southwestern University, where she currently chairs the International Studies program. She teaches classes on French, European, and world history, exploring themes that include nationalism, race, and human rights. Her own research expertise is the history of France and the French empire, with a focus on migration, welfare, activism, and political resistance. Her book, Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon, was published by the University of Nebraska Press as part of their “France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization” series in January 2024. She co-edited a volume, Fertility, Family, and Social Welfare between France and Empire: The Colonial Politics of Population, with Margaret Andersen, published by Palgrave
Macmillan as the first of their “New Directions in Welfare History” series in December 2023. She has published articles in French Politics, Culture & Society, French Cultural Studies, Cold War History, French History and Civilization, and The World History Bulletin. Since 2016, she has also been a regular contributor to the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog.