Book Discussion | The Week That Changed American Politics: The 1948 Democratic Convention and the Rise of Civil Rights

Award-winning professor Samuel G. Freedman discusses his latest book, Into the Bright Sunshine with Julian E. Zelizer, New York Times bestselling author and award-winning historian.

During one sweltering week in July 1948, the Democratic Party gathered in Philadelphia to struggle over its future. The question was not whom the party would nominate for president — the incumbent, Harry Truman, was the presumptive candidate — but rather whether the Democrats would finally embrace the cause of civil rights. Even under Franklin Roosevelt, the party had dodged the issue in order to hold a bloc of Southern segregationists in the New Deal coalition. But with liberal Democrats like Hubert Humphrey pushing for civil rights from within the convention, and the labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph leading protest marches outside of it, Truman and his party had to make a choice. And for their part, the so-called Dixiecrats were threatening to walk out of the convention and run their own candidate for president. The outcome of that turbulent week — which recently marked its 75th anniversary — has shaped American politics today.

About the Speakers
Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning professor, columnist, and author of nine acclaimed books. Freedman was a staff reporter for The New York Times from 1981 through 1987. From 2004 through 2008, he wrote the paper's "On Education" column, winning first prize in the Education Writers Association's annual competition in 2005. From 2006 through 2016, Freedman wrote the "On Religion" column, receiving the Goldziher Prize for Journalists in 2017 for a series of columns about Muslim-Americans that had been published over the preceding six years. Freedman has contributed to numerous other publications and websites, including The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Daily Beast, New York, Rolling Stone, USA Today, and more. As a professor of journalism at Columbia University, Freedman has been named the nation's outstanding journalism educator by the Society of Professional Journalists and received Columbia's coveted Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching.

Julian E. Zelizer has been among the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, a CNN Political Analyst, and a regular guest on NPR’s Here and Now. He is the award-winning author and editor of 25 books including, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the Best Book on Congress), Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 (co-authored with Kevin Kruse), and Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party. His most recent books are Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement, The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment, which he edited, and Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends About Our Past, co-edited with Kevin Kruse.