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Sharron Wilkins Conrad, "The Trinity: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Civil Rights in African American Memory" (UNC Press, 2026)
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Sharon Wilkins Conrad
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Sharon Wilkins Conrad
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Raymond Williams
Welcome, everyone. My name is Raymond Williams, and I'm a host at the New Books Network. Today we are speaking with Sharon Wilkins Conrad, author of the Trinity, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Civil Rights in African American Memory, published by UNC Press. Sharon Wilkins Conrad is a history professor at Tarrant College County College, and a senior fellow at Southern Methodist University center for Presidential History. She has been published in Time Magazine, American Quarterly, the Public Historian, and in the edited volume Mourning the Presidents, edited by Lindsey Chervinsky and Matthew Costello. Sharon Wilkins Conrad, welcome to the New Books Network.
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Sharon Wilkins Conrad
Thank you for having me. This is really exciting.
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Raymond Williams
Glad to have you here. So can you tell us a little bit about your book? What is your book the Trinity about?
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Sharon Wilkins Conrad
The Trinity is about a tradition that has existed in the African American community since 1963 of honoring President John F. Kennedy in black households. And it's not just kind of honoring President Kennedy. It's honoring him in a certain way. It's a tradition that I grew up with in the 1970s. I'm from Pittsburgh. In fact, I was born in a town called Sewickley, Pennsylvania. And in my godmother's home, she practiced this tradition, this ritual of honoring President Kennedy. The way that she did that, in the way that many African Americans did that was by hanging a image of Jesus at the top of a triangular formation with Martin Luther King off to the right and just a little below and then to the left, image of President Kennedy. And so that tradition of honoring President Kennedy alongside Dr. King and Jesus form the basis for this book. And I wanted to get at kind of why this tradition began and why it continues to show up in African American popular culture and memory today.
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Raymond Williams
How long did it take you to write this book?
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Sharon Wilkins Conrad
Well, that is a really terrific question. And the book formed the basis of my doctoral research. So I completed my dissertation in 2019 from the University of Texas at Dallas. And I would say that I started writing the dissertation in 2018 kind of seriously. Although quite frankly, I'd worked for seven years at the 6th Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which is the Kennedy assassination site in Dallas. And that's what kind of unlocked this memory of my godmother's memorial wall. And I was thinking about it for the seven years that I worked at the Sixth Floor Museum. And then when I started my doctoral studies at UT Dallas, I always had it in the back of my mind. So as I kind of pursued basically any course, I found a way to focus my research paper or whatever, culminating assignment on that project. So I was slowly but surely thinking about it, writing about it in different ways. But I would say that the actual writing of the book probably started in 2018.
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Raymond Williams
Okay, so this is kind of almost. I get the sense that it's almost sort of like your life's work in a way. Would you. Would you agree with that statement?
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Sharon Wilkins Conrad
I absolutely would agree with that. Recently a blogger asked me, you know, why did you write this book? And I answered that I wrote this book because I had to. Everything about my background, my family, the tradition kind of prepared me for it. So that when I started work at the Kennedy assassination site, I was ready to begin this. This research. And I was asking questions about it from the very beginning. And so it really has been a life's work. And I talk about the many people who contributed to this work in ways large and small, starting with my godmother, but continuing with my colleagues at the Sixth Floor Museum, and, you know, my family members, my friends, my. My peers, the people who have contrib contributed to the kind of observation of the Trinity in our popular culture. I call these folks my foot soldiers. They're always out there, always watching for me and alerting me to instances where the Trinity still appears more than 60 years after President Kennedy's assassination.
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Raymond Williams
Nice. So you mentioned early on in the book that you are using a whole host of sources to reconstruct this African American memory of jfk, lbj, civil rights. Can you talk about some of those sources that you use to paint that picture?
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Sharon Wilkins Conrad
Well, I think just beginning with my own personal story, it kind of made me ready to hear other people's stories. And so when I went to work at the Sixth Floor Museum, that museum has an incredible oral history collection. They're interviewing journalists, eyewitnesses, you know, everyday citizens, politicians, folks who have memories of President Kennedy or the assassination, who were in Dallas or on the other side of the world in 1963. And I asked the oral historian at the time, do other African Americans come in and, you know, share stories about having President Kennedy's picture up? Because I initially thought that my godmother had President Kennedy's portrait up on her wall because she was Catholic, and she was the only black Catholic I knew, like my grandmother. And we went to the Baptist church across the street from the house where I was born. So I didn't know any black Catholics. And so the fact that she had President Kennedy up in her home made me think, okay, this is something specific to black Catholics. But when I got to the museum and I started asking the oral historian about other African American who shared their stories, did they mention the Trinity? He told me, yes. And the other staff members there told me, absolutely, they've heard this is a recurring theme. So I knew that oral histories would be a great place for me to ask questions about this tradition. But then I tried to kind of focus attention on the places where African Americans make memory and share memory. Black newspapers, black magazines like ebony and jet, speeches, memoirs, artwork, films, especially films around the 50th anniversary of the assassination, 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights act, films that were created to kind of document those things, I started looking in those locations as well. And So I. My PhD is actually in humanities, not history. And it taught me to kind of think in a really interdisciplinary way. And so I'm interested in music and poetry and visual arts, film, rhetoric. And so because of my own interdisciplinary training, I was looking in all those sources and places and trying to stay creative and thinking about where I might be able to document this particular tradition.
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Raymond Williams
And it's. You know, I definitely want to pause and say, it's definitely a creative work. I. In my mind. And so in my mind, when I was first starting to read the book, you were listening to all the sources and so forth. And so in My head. I was thinking, okay, I think she's going to present this story this way. Like a chapter is going to be all about the films, a chapter is going to be all about oral histories. And then when you actually weave it all in, I was like, oh, this is a very. I like how she's doing. I have never seen any similar study kind of like this. Like you said, dip, you know, dipping and dipping in different sources like this. And they're all kind of. There's a synergy with all of them. So that's very neat.
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Sharon Wilkins Conrad
That's wonderful of you to say, because when I initially proposed this as a dissertation project, you know, once I got through my coursework and I was doing my proposal to our graduate school, I organized that proposal exactly the way that you. You described. You know, I was really kind of going at it based on different kinds of sources. But as I started to write it, and in fact, that way works from the way that my mind works. You know, just thinking about the different sources and answer asking questions of different types of sources, that was what I planned to do. But when I actually sat down to start writing it, I realized I couldn't do it that way. I had to kind of weave it all together in a more linear way, but pull in these different sources. And I believe, Raymond, you're a political scientist by training. Is that.
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Raymond Williams
Yes.
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Sharon Wilkins Conrad
I was also pouring through polling data as a way of trying to kind of provide some quantitative research and basis for the things that I was observing. That. That doesn't come natural to me, you know, but I realized that it was really important and that that information was available to me. So many times historians are looking to that kind of pulling data, and it was. It challenged me. And I was able to tap into a lot of polls that had been done the week after President Kennedy's assassination and where African American respondents were identified and their. Their answers kind of shared. That was really helpful for me as well.
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Raymond Williams
And to that point, you know, all the. All the sources that you use, I. At one point I was wondering to myself, how do you decide which ones you want to highlight? Because I'm sure there are more that you could have utilized that you couldn't because of timing and space and whatnot. But how. How did you choose which ones you wanted to focus on and. And highlight?
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Sharon Wilkins Conrad
Yes, well, it was a challenge. I mean, when I started, you know, kind of just preparing to write the dissertation, and in the book, I did what they're all good scholars are supposed to do. You read the secondary literature See what others have been writing about your topic. And one of the things that kind of became clear to me is that for the most part, historians, journalists, political scientists who've written about Kennedy's civil rights legacy, Johnson's civil rights legacy, because even though I didn't mention it at the top of this conversation, one of the kind of questions that I'm interested in is, why was John Kennedy so revered in the black community when Lyndon Johnson, who was inarguably the most kind of consequential civil rights president of the 20th century, why he wasn't honored in a similar way? So I was kind of looking at the way these two presidents have been kind of examined by scholars, and what I noted was that again and again, except for the initial years after the assassination, when most of the writing about Kennedy and civil rights was incredibly celebratory and laudatory, referring to him as at the head of the civil rights movement at the time of his death. Over time and as kind of more critical analysis of his administration and his time came out, historians began to be more critical of John Kennedy's role and began to look more to Lyndon Johnson's kind of contributions. But largely, those works were looking at kind of administration officials, kind of those who had worked directly with Kennedy and his advisors. And so those voices shaped a lot of how most of those earlier scholarly works examined both administrations. That's been shifting as more African American memoirs have come out as oral histories are available. But no one had really kind of focus exclusively on the African American source material. So that's what I did. I tried to just block out the many, many interviews with New York Times or some of the kind of popular literature I focused on, as I said, JET magazine, Ebony magazine, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, those places where black journalists are speaking to African American audiences, and they have, you know, their own interpretations of these two consequential presidents. So I focused on them as much as possible. There were times where if I couldn't find, for example, an interview with Dr. King saying something specifically about the assassination, I would turn to an interview that he did in a kind of broader journal. But I tried, whenever possible, to focus on the African American source material.
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Raymond Williams
And as you were explaining the source material, one of the parts of that story that you tell that I wasn't aware of prior to reading your book was the Campaign Workers for Kennedy. And in your first chapter, where you talk about how black people, black voters at the time, were very wary of both Kennedy and Johnson when they were running for the Presidency, 1960. And when you talked about how the black campaign workers were learning how to campaign to black voters and what they were hearing, the pushback and all of that, I was like, wow, that's interesting. I never knew, for one, that there were black campaign workers working for Kennedy in 1960. I mean, I probably should have known that, but it's not a story that's told that much. So I thought that was a fascinating insight to that, to the campaign, on that side of things.
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Sharon Wilkins Conrad
Yeah, yeah. And I think it was such an important component to Kennedy's ultimate success because. And I wanted to focus on what were the perceptions of those two candidates in 1960. You know, both men are running for the president presidency at the start of that year. And back in 1960, the campaign season was in, very collapsed. Kennedy is announcing, you know, I think in January of 1960, and then the election, of course, is in November. Everything happens within that 11 month window. Unlike today, where campaigns go on for years and years and people are, you know, kind of sharing tidbits and teasing candidacy, everything was very collapsed. And so I wanted to see how did folks respond to these two candidates. And what I found, kind of surprisingly, is that both of them were deemed suspicious in the black community. Lyndon Johnson, because as Senate Majority Leader, he has spent a good portion of his time in Congress trying to appease Southern Democrats who wanted to hold on to maintain segregation. He had a reputation for curtailing meaningful civil rights legislation. And then John Kennedy had really spent almost no time while he was in the US Congress even thinking about black voters. And then even when, Senator, the kind of pivotal moment that I think brought both of these two candidates a lot of skepticism and wariness from black voters was the 1957 Civil Rights Bill and discussions around it. John Kennedy had made certain promises to his constituents back in Massachusetts. And then he was perceived as having going back on promises to ensure that African Americans would have access to kind of federal authorities when it came to that civil rights legislation. And so in 1960, there was a lot of skepticism about both of those candidates. And as you point out, and this is kind of covered in the first chapter of the book, Kennedy in his campaign, really put together what I refer to as like a dream team of advocates, folks who had contacts in the black fraternity and sorority community, the legal community. Marjorie Lawson was brought in to kind of be a intermediary for him with those communities. You have people like Frank Reeves, who has contacts in the Democratic National Committee. You have someone like Lewis Martin, who's known as the godfather of black politics, who is plugged into every black newspaper network around the country. He's brought in and these folks are going to be pivotal in introducing Kennedy to the black community and the black community's concerns. So they're traveling with him, they're advising him. Val Phillips from Milwaukee. She will be a a one of the folks who's at the Democratic National Convention. She is going to be an alder woman in Milwaukee, but he becomes friends with her. And these are people that he, over the course of really 1960, probably a little bit before, but over the course of 1960, they are going to be his advocates, his intermediaries to the black community, just as most African Americans are getting familiar with him as a candidate.
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Sharon Wilkins Conrad
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Raymond Williams
So when he gets into the White House and, and, well, first chooses LBJ to be his running mate. And, and as y' all, you all that want that read this book will learn that black voters were. Were very scared about that at the time because of the, the 1957 bill that you mentioned and just his cozying up with segregations and so forth. But when the administration becomes. Or when they go into 1961, become president, vice president, create an administration, that weariness is still there right until about 63. And you mentioned that there in the chapter. There's a chapter, I think it's chapter three that's called the New Kennedy. So can you talk a little bit about who the new Kennedy was and how that compared to the previous Kennedy?
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Sharon Wilkins Conrad
Yes. Well, the new Kennedy is a term coined by Martin Luther King. And as you mentioned, it is kind of something that he is observing in the President by 1963, from 1961 and through 1962, and even the first portion of 1963, John Kennedy is reluctant to act on civil rights. He kind of had talked a bit of a good game during the campaign about what Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon at the time had not done for civil rights and that it would be easy for a president to make a lot of changes with the stroke of a pen, you know, using executive orders. But once he becomes president, he is hesitant to act on any of these things. For example, Dr. King and other civil rights leaders, Whitney Young and Roy Wilkins, Young of the Urban League and Wilkins of the NAACP, are pressuring Kennedy to act, to make use of his executive order power to adopt and write a second Emancipation Proclamation to honor and recognize the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. And they've been pressuring Kennedy to do something by January of 1860, 1963. Kennedy doesn't want to do that. Instead, Kennedy is relying on the first years of his presidency on symbolic actions. He is doing things like hiring folks to be around him. He hires a African American secretary. He demands that the honor guard at the inaugural parade be integrated. He is going to be appointing the first black associate White House secretary, press secretary, and Andrew Hatcher. So he's doing things that are very visible. He and his team are with Lewis Martin and others are well aware that they can communicate these things to the black press and get some level of support. But there's a lot of frustration, especially mounting frustration and militant younger activists who are on the front lines, who are integrating schools and being attacked, who are These Freedom Riders who are testing whether or not the Brown versus board is being followed. And so there's a lot of pressure on Kennedy, and yet he kind of withholds, you know, that kind of onslaught of pressure. And he is relying on symbolic actions. But by the summer of 1963, things begin to shift. And it is likely, you know, a combination of factors. His brother Robert Kennedy, then the Attorney General, has been reaching out to people like James Baldwin and others to kind of get a handle on what's going on in the country. And so there's a lot of incoming from King and others to the administration, trying to kind of make them aware. And so that, by the way, the spring and summer of 1963, between the, the attack on youth protesters, nonviolent protesters in Birmingham, Bull Connor turning fire hoses and police dogs on children in Birmingham, it comes to a head in June of 1963 when two students are following court orders and are trying to register for classes at the University of Alabama. And the segregationist Governor George Wallace is, you know, kind of his infamous stand at the schoolhouse door to try to prevent these students from, from registering for classes will prompt the Attorney General and the President to kind of act by sending kind of federal officials down to escort them to the, to the university. And it was on that same night that the President, after, ultimately the students are able to register for classes. James Hood and Vivian Malone. Ultimately, the President makes a decision that he'd been toying with to make a televised address to the nation that evening in which he speaks to the moral rationale for the civil rights movement in a very direct way, saying that, you know, it's as. It's a moral question and it is that televised address speaking to the nation. A lot of the kind of closing remarks are made extemporaneously. He's just speaking off the cuff because the speech really wasn't completed in time for his broadcast. But his ability to speak to the American people and talk about the moral aspects and rationale of the civil rights movement is going to touch a lot of African Americans. And it's that moment that Dr. King is speaking of this new Kennedy, a shift in his perspective on civil rights.
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Raymond Williams
And you highlight a film, a documentary called Crisis behind a Presidential Commitment. Had never seen that documentary. And I went and watched it after, you know, reading your description about it. And as you just laid out what happened in University of Alabama, the integration of the two students and the behind the scenes footage essentially of what's going on in the White House, what's going on with Wallace and George Wallace and all of that. So it's for those who are listening, all of these sources that Sharon is referencing in this book, you can have kind of conversations with the book and with the external sources, if you can find them. So definitely check that film out. It's about 30 minutes on HBO Max is what I watched it a couple of days ago. So, yeah. So fast forward to November of 63, and JFK is assassinated. And African Americans take that killing very hard. And so this partly. And one of the. And you talk about this earlier in the conversation, but this is when the pictures start being situated or placed on the walls in honoring the pim. But before you get into that, you tell this story about that this is a ritual that had been going on prior. JFK wasn't the first president that was honored on African Americans walls. So you can tell a little bit about the ritual of honoring certain presidents and then how the JFK example is a little different.
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Sharon Wilkins Conrad
Yes. You know, somewhere in, you know how it goes when you're in school, you're learning, you're exposed to so many different things. And I don't even remember when I first heard this phrase, but the publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier, gentleman by the name of Robert Vann. In the 1930s, when African American voters were trying to make a choice between voting for the Republicans during the Great Depression or voting for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Vance says in the Pittsburgh Courier that it's time to turn Abraham Lincoln's portrait to the wall. That debt has been paid. And I remembered that quote, and it made me wonder because essentially what he is saying is that African Americans had been aligned with Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party because Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, was a Republican. And since the time when African Americans secured the right to vote, African Americans had largely been Republican. And in the 1930s, Vance was telling black voters, it's time to turn Lincoln's portrait to the wall. And so it reminded me that there was an earlier tradition of Abraham Lincoln's portrait being on the walls as a person of honor in black households. And so I started to kind of go back and I looked at some of the WPA narratives just to see what African Americans were saying about Franklin Roosevelt. And what was fascinating is those slave narratives. Interviews with formerly enslaved men and women conducted during the New Deal during the Great Depression gave formerly enslaved people an opportunity to share their stories, their memories of what that time was like. And repeatedly in those narratives, African Americans would talk about how they honored Abraham Lincoln and some of Them would also talk about how they honored the current president at the time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And in both instances, and I found this, you know, throughout the narratives, they would talk about hanging portraits of these presidents on their walls. And so it's clear to me that African Americans have had this kind of experience of feeling a special relationship with the presidency. The person in Washington, D.C. who can somehow intercede for them is someone that they feel they can rely upon, you know, even if they're far away from the nation's capital, that there is at least one figure throughout, you know, this time period that they felt was on their side. And it would. People like Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I found one instance of a reference to Ulysses S. Grant's portrait being on the wall. But then, of course, John Kennedy. And of course, we know that African Americans feel a special relationship with Barack Obama. And so Barack Obama's portrait and Michelle Obama's portrait started to go up after his historic election as well.
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Raymond Williams
So it was a fascinating, you know, history of that. And then you, you know, for the. For the listeners, you. You have pictures to kind of reinforce that story you're showing. And that. And I remember there was a. There was one picture of a older lady, and she had, I think, FDR's picture behind her. And so. And, you know, another picture I had never seen before. So another gem of things that you will see when you get into this book.
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Sharon Wilkins Conrad
Oh, I love that portrait. And the photo was taken by the iconic black photographer Gordon Parks, you know, as he's working as part of the New Deal. And so it's just this incredible kind of connection. He clearly. I mean, of course it's Gordon Parks. So it's composed in this beautiful way, and it's showing, you know, reflections and mirrors and this woman. But the key is she is seated in her. In her bedroom, and there is a portrait of President Roosevelt hanging in her room at the time. And so it does. I'm like you. I was just over the moon when I. When I found that photograph and wanted to make sure it made its way into the book.
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Raymond Williams
Right. And you also mentioned that the Trinity concept, like, you could swap out people depending on your. Who. Whose house you were at. Right. So sometimes it was RFK instead of jfk. And then I was surprised to learn that you had an instance where it would be John F. Kennedy and Jackie O in a group or so forth. Were there any other examples that you maybe came across that surprised you about the combination of people that were displaced?
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Sharon Wilkins Conrad
Well, yes, there were you know, as you say, there's definitely John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X would show up on the wall. Sometimes it was Jesus, sometimes Jesus wasn't even in the Trinity. And so I do talk about this kind of instance of trinities and how it is incredibly flexible. Oftentimes, African Americans would tuck little snapshots of family members, beloved family members, down into the frames next to the images of King or Jesus or one of the Kennedys. And so it became just a way of honoring those who were significant in your life in some way, shape, or form. I. I think that when I look at, like, the. The kind of traditional trinity of Jesus, Dr. King and. And President Kennedy, the letters that came into the Kennedy White House after his famous speech, and of course, after his death, the condolence letters that came in from African Americans would refer to him as a. A Moses of our people. Water and dry places. You know, there were. There was a lot of religious language talking about him as the good shepherd and talking about all three of these men as shepherds for their people. And so there's certainly a sense, and this comes out in the polling data, African Americans, separate from all those other folks who are responding to polls about President Kennedy and his. His memory and what he meant to them. African Americans, unlike all other respondents, are saying that President Ken Kennedy died because of his civil rights stance. And so there's a sense that President Kennedy was a martyr to the cause and that he died for us. That language is repeated in the letters and telegrams that pour into the White House that he died for us. And that is not something that any other group is aligning his death with. There's all sorts of theories about President Kennedy's death and who may have or may not have been involved, but African Americans had been consistent since 1963 and aligning his death with his stance on civil rights.
- [39:38]
Raymond Williams
Yeah, yeah. And in line with that, I remember there was a one instance where you were saying some. In addition to he died for us, there were even some people that were saying he is the Messiah. And I was like, oh, gosh, as someone that may be a person of faith, that might seem a little. Oh, that's a little too much. But when you get into that story. Right. Or not the story, but the history of people's actual reaction. And I remember there was this quote that you have in here from Bob Ray Sanders when you said, when he says, as far as I was concerned, hope had been assassinated. He was hope, and I was. And so when you hear it from that perspective, you're like, okay, I kind of can see why someone would make that, that, that statement or pivot to that. Because if you, if you were put in a lot of your hopes and dreams, aspirations, especially in the moment we're talking about right now with what was happening in 63 and then who was coming after, right. Or you know, what you were expecting that this person would be bringing. I can see why people would have, have made that comparison and the assessment.
- [40:59]
Sharon Wilkins Conrad
Absolutely. You know, and the thing is, not everybody agreed with that. There were some like Malcolm X who, you know, definitely did not kind of fall into that category of people. Even Angela Davis, you know, was skeptical. Malcolm X, Angela Davis, even Dr. King, to a certain extent, are all kind of making noises, is saying that, you know, the reason that this is happening is the type of society that President Kennedy presided over. You know, that the violence that, you know, was permitted on his watch kind of contributed to the violent way that he himself died. And Malcolm X is going to make references to the death of Medgar Evers that June of 63 and say, you know, this is the kind of violent nation that we have. It's a disordered nation. And this is an example of that. And there are a few others who are kind of wanting to pump the brakes a bit on kind of this over the top adulation of the assassinated President. You have the head of CORE who is, is questioning whether or not we're going too far with this kind of that. You know, it's just too much for some, but nonetheless it's very real. And even President now Johnson, after the death of President Kennedy, he goes before a joint session of Congress. And in making his speech to the nation, there are a lot of African Americans that are deeply skeptical. Even more so after President Kennedy is assassinated in Johnson's home state of Texas. This when Johnson goes before Congress in the days after the funeral and basically pledges his commitment to the Civil Rights act, he does so by ceding the responsibility and the, the, the credit for the Civil Rights act to the President. President Kennedy, he says that, you know, no eulogy can honor the President any more than by passage of the Civil Rights bill for which he fought so hard. So in that statement, Lyndon Johnson, kind of the consummate political figure, he's always thinking, he realizes that this is his chance to get this passed. And he gives credit to Kennedy and a lot of African Americans. As that legislation is pushed for, fought for and signed by Lyndon Johnson. Wayne it ultimately does become law. They give Lyndon Johnson very little credit for it. They say that he had to do it because it was Kennedy's bill, it was President Kennedy's. Lyndon Johnson just went along with it. He had no choice. And so this kind of moment is just a tricky one, I think, for Lyndon Johnson to navigate because you do have a lot of people who are holding Kennedy up as this kind of like messiah like figure, even though others are questioning it. Lyndon Johnson kind of has to lean into that in order to secure passage of that important legislation.
- [44:29]
Raymond Williams
Right, right. And one, one connection with that. So, so he, he signs the civil rights law and then he signs the voting rights act of 65. And they're not really giving him. They're excited. You know, African Americans are excited about it. Some are still skeptical where they think, hey, this law was really not going to help us. You mentioned earlier about like the, the more militant younger people at the time who felt these bills are not going to help us in my economic situation. And then, you know, know the numbers of uprisings that come about later on in the late 60s. So there's still that hesitation that African Americans had with LBJ throughout, mostly throughout his term. How did they, how did they reckon with that while he's in office? And after, you know, and how we assess him today, I think, think with
- [45:36]
Sharon Wilkins Conrad
President Johnson, you know, there's constantly that comparison to his predecessor and there are those who basically are beginning to, or it comes later, to be honest, those who later acknowledge that. The truth is we needed both of these leaders. We needed kind of John Kennedy and his, as what one journalists refer to as his incandescent. But we also needed Lyndon Johnson. He was an achiever, as Lewis Martin would later state, and we needed both. And so I think that Lyndon Johnson got caught up in the skepticism around how much any law could really affect people's day to day. That was even there at the March on Washington on Kennedy's watch, where militants like John Lewis, you know, John Lewis had the youngest speaker at the march on Washington, had planned the very militant speech and was forced to kind of scale it back by the Kennedy team and others of the organizers kind of the day of that militant was there during Kennedy's time in office. And of course, Kennedy wasn't alive long enough to have to deal with kind of the shifts in the civil rights movement away from kind of Dr. King's approach. But he also wasn't there to force this legislation through and deal with the aftermath of people's disappointment that it didn't address the economic disparity, that first Civil Rights act didn't address the voting crisis in, in the South. And so John Kennedy's passing before having to deal with the kind of shifts and changes in the movement, I think made it basically Lyndon Johnson's kind of role to deal with the, the difficulties of, you know, disappointment in that legislation and kind of the growing upheaval and the violence in the cities as people were just increasingly frustrated by how little those laws actually changed their everyday lives.
- [48:08]
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Sharon Wilkins Conrad
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Raymond Williams
Na you mentioned kind of near the end of the LBJ section about that there's start and this may have been in the conclusion that there's starting to be a reassessment of him by African Americans. And some of that's just you know, we're getting more information, you know, more more retrospective looks are happening and you tell this story I remember was when former President Obama is down In I think LBJ's library if am I correct? Okay. And he's given a speech commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the voting or Civil Rights act, one of the two. Okay. And so he's kind of, I don't know if you, if you, if you would make the argument that Obama has kind of helped with that or is that just, is there more of a national change of heart kind of thing going on with him?
- [50:39]
Sharon Wilkins Conrad
I think it's, I think that the commemoration that you mentioned with Obama going to Austin and speaking at kind of like the, you know, 50th anniversary of passage of the Civil Rights act at Lyndon Johnson's library was just a reflection of how we all kind of have used these anniversaries, these pivotal kind of 50 year marks to reflect on the challenges. And I think Obama said something along the lines of, you know, that Lyndon Johnson knew that there would be a cost to, you know, his willingness to sign the Civil Rights act, his willingness to go before the joint session of Congress after the blubby Sunday in Selma and speak about the need for a Voting Rights act and even use the language of the Civil Rights movement when he says, and we shall overcome. These 50 year anniversaries are a time for reflection and reassessment. And I think that a number of books have come out to kind of look at Lyndon Johnson with fresh eyes and to kind of understand who he was and what motivated his concern about civil rights. I don't think it was something that was, it was coming to him out of nowhere just because of the death of President Kennedy. He had some concerns about these issues and questions that go back to kind of his own upbringing and his own early years as a teacher on the border teaching poor Mexican students, Mexican American students in elementary schools. And so, and those who knew Lyndon Johnson best kind of always understood that he cared deeply about these issues, but the wider public never got a chance to really see that. And some of that story is beginning to come out in more recent biographies of Johnson and his administration.
- [52:56]
Raymond Williams
So couple few more questions before we wrap up. There was a picture, and it's a cartoon that you have near the end of the book that I was just struck by. And sometimes, you know, you read a cartoon, you look at a cartoon, you don't really, you know, that has one message, but, you know, a lot of, a lot of like art is it has multiple messages. And so the cartoon is of a side by side comparison. On the left side is for those who are listening and don't have the book in front of you, but there's a older black man taking a cup of, drinking a cup of coffee or Tea. He has a trinity behind him, and it's Jesus, JFK, and Martin Luther King. And then on the right side is a white man with a assault rifle, and he has a trinity. Jesus, Donald Trump, and George Zimmerman, the man who killed Trayvon Martin. And I was just. I was very amazed at that picture because it says a lot, right? There's many, many, many things you can kind of take away from that, that image. But I made a connection to something you said earlier in the. Earlier in the book where you mentioned that from one of the polls or studies, that African Americans were more likely to incorporate national events and figures in their personal family narratives than white Americans who focus more on the family ties and so forth. And I thought, when I saw that picture, I said, this is literally telling the story of that sentence. Because. Because the. The black individual, black man in the picture has the historical figures and Jesus, and then the man in the other picture has more contemporary figures and Jesus. I don't know if you want to comment on that, but I just, I thought that that, that kind of, you know, that's. That's a separate narrative. And then, you know, but it's. It's kind of put putting the story together in a way. But I thought that was very fascinating image and how that connected with an argument you were making earlier in the book.
- [55:25]
Sharon Wilkins Conrad
As African Americans look at that political cartoon and they see the trinity, it speaks to the black community, not just as a kind of like, oh, this is a different voter in 2016, African Americans are connecting that trinity to a long history of civil rights, our connections to the presidency, and importantly, to who we think should follow the nation's first black president, what kind of character we are looking for in our national leader to follow Barack Obama. So that is kind of a way that I refer, imagining kind of the history of the 1960s and the importance of John Kennedy in a way that is very different, different than the way the historians or political scientists kind of rank John Kennedy's importance in terms of civil rights. And that's something that I really am hoping that people understand. Not to say that John Kennedy was more important than Lyndon Johnson. Both men were pivotal and consequential. But just to say that John Kennedy and his willingness to speak out on the moral dimensions of the civil rights movement, the symbolic things that he did, made a profound impact on African Americans. And that is something that continues to shape how we view the presidency and how we view that moment in our nation's history.
- [57:02]
Raymond Williams
So when I finished your book, I came to this conclusion that the way you did this book, the research and the creative way, as we talked about very early on, could be replicated to cover, I think, maybe other big focal points in black history. And the two ones that I kept coming to was the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and O.J. simpson trial. Obviously very different from what you're covering, but in some respects, it's like there's obviously these preconceived notions about what happened in each of those examples. And then as time has progressed since then, there have been, you know, when more information's come out, perceptions have changed. There are other mediums that can, you know, help tell the story. So I, you know, I think about, with Tuskegee, simpler experience. You think about the Mrs. Everboys movie. O.J. simpson had that documentary that came out maybe about 10 years ago that kind of changed black people's perception, or they were showing how black people's perception of the trial had changed since the early 90s. So, anyway, case in point. Do you see this approach or the approach that you've done in this book, your book as being able to help us understand other moments as it relates to black men?
- [58:37]
Sharon Wilkins Conrad
Oh, I hadn't thought of that. But I really do like it. And particularly as you talk about the O.J. simpson case, because I do think that there is a whole nother kind of world of interpretation around that case that is circulating in the black community and similar to the Trinity. It's not to say that African Americans have the only kind of truthful interpretation of what that trial was and meant, but it is to say that we need to be attentive to that way of looking at what. What happened, because it says a lot about the culture. And so as. As you mentioned, you know, in the films that are being done, that especially as African Americans, filmmakers and producers are more involved, you know, we are sharing our perceptions of that history in the culture. And so in the relation to the Trinity. The Trinity is showing up all over the place in films and music videos, in visual arts, in murals. It's out there. And if you're not kind of tuned into where that is coming from, it's gonna go right over your head, and you're not going to kind of take it all in. And so this is where I have to, again thank my foot soldiers, because they are attuned to the Trinity and they are paying attention to where it shows up in movies like Fences or Car Wash or slightly even in Hidden Figures or the Blues Brothers. You know, it's out there, and it's serving a purpose. And I think that when you see kind of these African American interpretations of the O.J. simpson trial and kind of continuing to look back at that trial and to interpret that moment, it's playing a role. It is serving our community in ways that are meant to kind of tell the next generation what really happened or alternate take on what happened. That I think is important. Kind of the same way that, you know, creating Ebony and Jed and black newspapers played a role in shaping and celebrating our. Our history, our path, our past, and giving the kind of future generation something to look to. And so I do think that, if anything, that I would be like, some so happy if the Trinity gave people a new lens on which to kind of interpret the way that history is being put to work in the world.
- [61:35]
Raymond Williams
Great. Amazing. And we didn't talk too much about the films, but, yeah, all the films that you mentioned, Fences, Hidden Figures, the Butler, Selma. Like, I remember seeing all those movies when they came out. And so just. Just you bringing those back. And the Help. Oh, yeah, yeah, the Help, too. Yeah, the hell. And the reference to the Trinity in that. And so just the, you know, bringing those back to my memory. And I'm sure a lot of people who will read this book probably watch those films as well, or at least a good portion of them will definitely give people a new look as to, you know, what life was like during that time. And as you said, how people revered Kennedy and other folks in the movement at that time.
- [62:34]
Sharon Wilkins Conrad
And I hope, too, they're also kind of asking the question, what purpose does it serve to continue to share that in the 21st century? It clearly is doing work for our community. And so, you know, when we see it, it's. It is a reference point, and it is there for a reason. It is serving a purpose. And I think that that is worthy of conversation, too.
- [63:03]
Raymond Williams
So what do you hope. And you kind of already probably hit on this a little bit, but what do you hope readers take away from the book after they finish it?
- [63:12]
Sharon Wilkins Conrad
I hope that readers feel affirmed in kind of their own stories and the stories that they grew up with and that, you know, you. That we're kind of looking for those moments when, you know, there are times when our community held history is different than what the scholars are saying is the history. And I think those moments are really interesting. Clearly, in the community, this is a story, this is a legacy that is continued, continually pass down. And, you know, we have to ask ourselves, why is that the case?
- [63:53]
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- [63:53]
Sharon Wilkins Conrad
What's it doing for us? And I Hope that, you know, there are other instances of this that come forward where people are not necessarily challenging the scholarly interpretations, but offering a different look at something that the larger, broader community has accepted as consensus. Like if you look. Look at C span polls of ranking the presidents over and over again, President Johnson is ranked way higher than John Kennedy when it comes to the category of pursuing justice for all. But in the black community, even in more recent polls, John Kennedy has what pollsters I think in 1966, Six said. You know, he. Basically, it's this curious anomaly that, you know, despite how many black voters voted for LYNDON JOHNSON In 1964, it's kind of. It was almost like a loveless connection to Lyndon Johnson because their hearts still belong to John Kennedy. And so it matters because it still rings true in a lot of communities. And so I think that scholars need to be attuned to that discrepancy and ask themselves, what does it mean for our politics? What does it mean for, you know, the way that we understand the past? And yeah, I hope that that is something that comes out of this book.
- [65:32]
Raymond Williams
I will agree that. That that's what came out of it for me. It was an amazing book. You. You did amazing job. As I said before, creative. It's different. It's. As someone who has never really had been involved with a lot of interdisciplinary work, it's sort of a breath of fresh air. That sounds a cliche, but it really was. It really is. Especially if you are someone like myself who may have read a lot in this area and you don't think you're gonna really learn anything new about the 60s and the presidencies at the time. You really gonna learn something new because. Because as you said before, you're highlighting this source of information from black people that in some cases may have been ignored or brushed under the rug, but it's telling this counter memory story that needs to be told, and you did a very amazing job with it.
- [66:34]
Sharon Wilkins Conrad
Well, Raymond, I can't even tell you how grateful I am for you for saying that, because I think you may be one of the first people to read the book and. Well, and since it's just come out, I just, you know, you're grateful to you for reading it so closely and for, you know, seeing it. For reading it the way that I'd intended. So thank you.
- [67:00]
Raymond Williams
Yeah, I appreciate it. I mean, I. I look at it this way. I read it closely because it's done with. If it hadn't been done well, you can't read it very closely, but I attribute that all to the author and the source of this work. You did an amazing job. So before we wrap up, one question I usually ask my guests. Are there any new books that you have read or you're looking forward to reading now that you believe our audience will enjoy?
- [67:34]
Sharon Wilkins Conrad
Ah, well, one book that I think ties to my book that I think will be interesting kind of as a counterpoint to my book is Freedom Season, where he looks at the year 19 it was, and pivotal it was for the civil rights movement. And so I think that that's a terrific book. And then the other. So, yeah, it's freedom season, how 1963 transformed America's civil Rights Revolution is a fantastic book. And then another book that came out just last year that I think is kind of related to my book in a different way. And it's just kind of the creativity that I think you expressed with regard to the Trinity is a book by author Oscar Winberg called Archie Bunker for President in which Winberg had access to Norman Lear's files and really looked at how that show all in the Family shaped American politics in the 1970s. And just very, very creative, making use of resources that hadn't been tapped into. And so I think there, those are two books that are worth a read.
- [68:54]
Raymond Williams
Okay, thank you for that. Again, you all have been listening to the New Books Network. We have been in conversation with Sharon Wilkins Conrad on her new book, the Trinity, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Civil Rights in African American Memory, published by UNC Press. Please go purchase your book wherever you purchase your books online or at your local, local bookstore or at your library. I promise you when you read this book, you will learn a lot. You will go into different little rabbit holes on other pieces of information that Sharon highlights in this work. So thank you all for listening to us in this conversation. Thank you, Sharon, for being here. And we will have another guest for you all soon. Thank you for listening thank you for
- [69:55]
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- [70:35]
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