To mark the 60th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, award-winning author Samuel G. Freedman, professor of journalism at Columbia University, and Norman Sherman, who served as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary during Lyndon Johnson’s administration, will delve into a bit of history that bears remembrance to this presidential election year. Together, Freedman and Sherman will examine Humphrey’s efforts — in tandem with African American leader A. Philip Randolph — to advance civil rights in the 1940s, which set the stage for what President Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Humphrey accomplished in the 1960s.   

Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning author, columnist, and professor at Columbia University. He is the author of 10 books, including Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights (2023). Historian Jon Meacham hailed the book as “a compelling and important account of Humphrey’s critical role in the freedom struggles of the mid-20th century.”  

Freedman’s previous books include Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School (a finalist for the 1990 National Book Award), Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church (winner of the 1993 Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism), and The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize).

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 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.

Norman Sherman, a native of Minnesota, enjoyed a long career as an advisor and speechwriter for many of Minnesota’s progressive political figures, including Orville Freeman, Eugene McCarthy, and Walter Mondale. In addition to serving as Humphrey’s press secretary and close aide, he also edited Humphrey’s autobiography, The Education of a Public Man (1976). From Nowhere to Somewhere: My Political Journey (2015) is Sherman’s firsthand account of national politics in the 1960s. He currently lives in Coralville and, at age 96, still writes a weekly column for the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

This event is co-sponsored by League of Women Voters of Johnson, UI Political Science Department, UI School of Journalism & Mass Communication, UI Afro-American Cultural Center, UI Hawkeye History Corps, Black Voices Project, Delta Sigma Theta, Iowa City Public Library, and County, TRAIL of Johnson County. 

This in-person presentation and Q&A session will also be livestreamed. 

For questions, please contact:
Caroline Tolbert, Professor, Department of Political Science, caroline-tolbert@uiowa.edu
Rebecca Conard, LWVJC Education Committee, rebeccaconard@gmail.com