Book Panel: Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

September 25, 2025

University of Texas Scholars Mark Lawrence (Chair of the Department of History), Jeremi Suri (Professor of Public Affairs in the LBJ School and of History), and Peniel E. Joseph (Professor of Public Affairs in the LBJ School and of History, Founding Director, Center for the Study of Race and Democracy) discuss the recent book Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights with author 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. One of Freedman’s previous books, Jew vs. Jew won the National Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2001. As a result of the book, Freedman was named one of the “Forward Fifty” most important American Jews in the year 2000 by the weekly Jewish newspaper The Forward.

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. He is a board member of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Awards and member of the Journalism Advisory Council of Religion News Service and the faculty advisory board of the Center for Journalism Ethics. He has spoken at the Smithsonian Institution, Yale University, and UCLA, among other venues, and has appeared on National Public Radio, CNN, and the PBS News Hour.

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