The Tom Cassidy Lecture presents New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie — The Civil Rights Movement Today: A Second Redemption?

Fifty years ago, the civil rights movement won its biggest victory—the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. Three years later, after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, it won a second major bill—the Fair Housing Act, and the future looked bright for Black Americans. To an extent it was—for the first time, America saw a large and vibrant Black middle class. Black professionals rose through the ranks, and Black politicians won office. In 2008, America elected a Black president. But each step for progress brought a backlash, from limits on affirmative action policies to a slow eroding of key civil rights laws, culminating in the Supreme Court's decision in Shelby v. Holder, which gutted a key section of the VRA. The last expansion of civil rights before the 1960s, Reconstruction, had also seen a backlash, called “Redemption.” The shape of that backlash is similar to the one we have now. Is the present period a second Redemption? And what does that mean for our future?

Jamelle Bouie, a columnist for The New York Times and former political analyst for CBS News, covers US politics, public policy, elections, and race. Bouie’s political instincts provide audiences with unique insight on the past, present, and future of our national politics, policy, and the state of race relations. As he did while writing for Slate and The Daily Beast, Bouie shares eye-opening perspectives on issues concerning issues at play in America today.

Bouie has appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation, and his writings have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, TIME, and The New Yorker. Named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30 in Media” in 2015, Bouie is a leading voice who takes audiences to the front lines of the nation’s most significant news events, from civil unrest to political partisanship. With his ability to stimulate provocative, much-needed thinking on critical issues, he helps audiences analyze current events through the lens of human history and in the age of social media and deftly illustrates how the past reveals itself in the present and how policymakers, citizen activists, and cultural influencers can seize the power of information to make a difference.

In 2021, Bouie received the Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism. In 2022 he was inducted into the Society of American Historians, and in 2024 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Sponsored by the Tom Cassidy Lecture Fund in association with the Viewpoint Exchange Series.

For more information, contact Jenn Berube Lord at jberube@bowdoin.edu or 207-725-3928.
Open to the public free of charge.
A livestream of this talk will be available on Bowdoin's live events website: https://www.bowdoin.edu/live.