In most accounts of the Civil Rights Movement and the 1960s, Robert Kennedy is seen as marginal, at best, to the racial reckoning of that decade. By centering Kennedy’s public life in relationship to the Black Freedom struggle that crested in the sixties, Sullivan demonstrates how  Kennedy responded to the deep racial inequities and divisions it brought to the fore, to emerge as a transformative leader in a nationwide fight for racial justice.

Patricia Sullivan is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina. Her previous book, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (2009) is a story of how legal brilliance, grass roots organizing, Black culture and institutions, interracial alliances, and a fundamental faith in democracy built and sustained long-term struggles to uproot racism and advance justice. It is also a story of the deep and tangled roots of racism in America.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.