One of the nation’s leading civil rights historians, Raymond Arsenault is a specialist in the political, social, environmental and civil rights history of the American South. He’s the author of several acclaimed and prize-winning books including, most recently John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community, published in January.
“It was (Lewis’) key concept of trying to bring us into a beloved community — all human beings, not just African Americans, but everybody,” Arsenault told WGCU, Southwest Florida’s NPR affiliate.
Arsenault, the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History emeritus at the University of South Florida, will speak at 3:30 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy for the African American Heritage House’s Week Eight installment of the Chautauqua Speaker Series.
“You can’t really understand American History without understanding African Americans within that,” Arsenault told WGCU. “I mean, it’s the central dilemma of American history — slavery leading to Jim Crow and racism. When Blacks were oppressed and pushed down, whites were pushed up.”
Over the course of his career, Arsenault has taught at the University of Minnesota, Brandeis University — where he earned his Ph.D. in American History — the University of Chicago, the Florida State University Study Abroad Center in London and the Universite d’Angers in France, where he was a Fulbright Lecturer. His work has garnered the Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award of the Southern Historical Association, and the 2006 PSP Award for Excellence Honorable Mention History & American Studies.
Among Arsenault’s other books are Arthur Ashe: A Life, and Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. The 2011 PBS American Experience documentary “Freedom Riders,” based on that book, won three Emmys and a George Peabody Award. He’s also the author of The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America, and later served as a consultant on the 2022 PBS American Masters documentary “Marian Anderson: The Whole World in Her Hands.” Anderson, a celebrated contralto, performed before an integrated crowd of more than 75,000 (and a radio audience of millions) on April 9, 1939, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Anderson also gave a concert on Chautauqua’s Amphitheater stage in 1957, five years before her 1963 performance — also on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial — for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Lewis, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1987 until his death in 2020, was one the 13 original Freedom Riders in 1961; in 1955, he closely followed Martin Luther King’s bus boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama. Those boycotts, Arsenault wrote, deeply impacted Lewis.
“It was really a display of the social gospel, another way of looking at religion,” he said on an episode of “Florida Matters” on WUSF, West Central Florida’s NPR station. “And not just pie in the sky and talking about what will happen to you in heaven, but reforming and revolutionizing things down on Earth.”
The social gospel, Arsenault said, was “a deep, passionate commitment that informed everything that (Lewis) did.”
In his interview for “Florida Matters,” Arsenault described the concept of Beloved Community as a world “in which there is no division, … where you love your enemies as much as you love your friends. I suppose in the real sense of the Beloved Community, there are no more enemies. It’s a way of peace and justice. John Lewis and the others knew they probably would never see anything like that. But fighting for it was what they were all about.”
Lewis, Arsenault said on “Florida Matters,” was “unquestionably the most unusual person that I ever had the pleasure to know and to meet. Almost certainly the greatest person in a fundamental sense of decency.”
“And as one of his colleagues in Congress said, ‘He gave us everything and asked for nothing.’ That was kind of, I think, the best way to sum him up,” Arsenault said. “I just don’t know if we’ll ever see his likes again.”
