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.
