Peniel Joseph:
Well, this whole subject is the subject of my newest book, which is called “Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution.”
And 1963, we remember it because of President Kennedy’s assassination, Birmingham and Martin Luther King Jr., the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, but it’s really a year of debate and discussion and dialogue on what does American history mean and what does American identity mean?
The bestselling book of that year is James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time.” And what that book argues is an argument that the only way America can achieve a multiracial democracy is to confront that history of racial slavery.
And it’s confronting that history not by trying to create new scapegoats in this age of Jim Crow, but by saying the exact opposite, saying that all Americans should have access to dignity and citizenship, but because Black people historically have been marginalized and have been oppressed, it’s only through Black dignity and Black citizenship that all communities of color and white people will access that dignity and citizenship.
So when we think about what President Trump is saying, he’s really saying the exact opposite. 1963 ushered in a 50-year racial justice consensus with legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that gave us the most robust multiracial democracy in world history.
What we have seen over the last 12 years, ever since the Shelby v. Holder decision ended Section 5 preclearance of the Voting Rights Act, is a post-consensus America where we see Charlottesville and tiki torches. We see the January 6 riots, which have been reinterpreted in our current context.
We see the suppression of voices that allow the United States of America to really be this transformational nation and this beacon for hope and liberty and dignity and citizenship all across the world. So we are turning back, but we have always been in these narrative wars.
When we think about the end of the Civil War, over 700,000 Americans died to create a second American republic. Instead of amplifying those voices of dignity and citizenship, we’re heading back to the old days of Jim Crow, of racial exclusion, instead of really embracing the best that America can be.
