Russel B. Swensen Lecture
When Civil Rights Won the White House: Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey, A Philip Randolph and the Breakthrough of 1948
Between 2024 and 2026, America will be marking the 60th anniversary of three landmark laws -- the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act. While all of these laws were direct outgrowths of the Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King, and while all required the political brilliance of President Lyndon Johnson to be enacted by Congress, the road to them starts in many ways in 1948. In that year, with the memory of a global war against fascism still vivid in the collective memory, the Democratic Party for the first time vigorously supported civil rights and a presidential candidate won election as an outspoken advocate for civil rights. Three men played essential roles in that political and moral breakthrough: President Harry Truman; the civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph; and Hubert Humphrey, the idealistic young mayor of Minneapolis. This lecture will tell that story.
Samuel G. Freedman
Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning author, columnist, and professor. A former columnist for The New York Times and a professor at Columbia University, he is the author of the ten acclaimed books. The most recent of them, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, won the 2024 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, an award previously bestowed on such authors as John Hersey and Isabel Wilkerson.
Freedman’s previous books include Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School (1990); Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church (1993); The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (1996); Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (2000); Who She Was: My Search for My Mother’s Life (2005); and Letters To A Young Journalist (2006); and Breaking The Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Game and Changed the Course of Civil Rights (2013).
Small Victories was a finalist for the 1990 National Book Award and The Inheritance was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. Upon This Rock won the 1993 Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. Four of Freedman’s books have been listed among The New York Times’ Notable Books of the Year. Jew vs. Jew won the National Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2001 and made the Publishers Weekly Religion Best-Sellers list.
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.
A tenured professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Freedman was named the nation's outstanding journalism educator in 1997 by the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2012, he received Columbia University’s coveted Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. Freedman’s class in book-writing has developed more than 110 authors, editors, and agents, and it has been featured in Publishers Weekly and the Christian Science Monitor. Freedman holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which he received in May 1977. He lives in New York with his wife, Christia Chana Blomquist.
Students in the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences gain Experience Points for attending this lecture. Learn more about Experience Points.