Olivia: In 1963, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy walked into a meeting with some of the nation's most brilliant Black artists and intellectuals, thinking he was there to talk policy. Jackson: Three hours later, he walked out, shaken, reportedly calling them ungrateful. What happened in that New York City apartment wasn't a policy debate. It was an emotional reckoning that changed him, and the conversation about race in America, forever. Olivia: And that explosive encounter is the heart of Michael Eric Dyson’s award-winning book, What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America. Jackson: Dyson isn't just a historian; he's a sociologist and an ordained minister. He brings this incredible blend of academic rigor and moral urgency to the story, which is probably why the book was so highly acclaimed, winning the Southern Book Prize, but also seen as controversial by some for its sharp, unflinching tone. Olivia: Exactly. He uses this one meeting to unpack a conversation America is still struggling to have. And it all starts with a clash of two very different worlds in a moment of national crisis.

Jackson: Okay, so set the scene for us, Olivia. Why did this meeting even happen? What was going on in the country that made the Attorney General feel he needed to call James Baldwin, of all people? Olivia: It was May 1963, and the country was on fire. The Birmingham campaign was in full swing. The whole world had just seen the images of Bull Connor's police dogs and fire hoses turned on Black children. The Kennedy administration was scrambling. They were trying to manage the crisis, but they were doing it from a distance, through a political lens. Jackson: They were treating it like a PR problem to be solved. Olivia: Precisely. So, Robert Kennedy, the pragmatist, the problem-solver, decides he needs to understand what’s happening in the North. He reaches out to James Baldwin, the literary giant whose essays were dissecting America's racial sickness with surgical precision. The idea was to have a "frank exchange of views." Jackson: I have a feeling it was a little more frank than RFK was bargaining for. Olivia: You have no idea. Baldwin didn't just come alone. He brought a handpicked group of what Dyson calls "witnesses." Not just activists, but artists: the legendary singer Lena Horne, the actor Harry Belafonte, and the brilliant playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote A Raisin in the Sun. And most importantly, he brought a young man named Jerome Smith. Jackson: Who was Jerome Smith? He’s not as famous as the others. Olivia: And that's the point. Smith was a 24-year-old Freedom Rider. He was an activist with CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. He wasn't a celebrity; he was a soldier from the front lines. He had been beaten, jailed, and brutalized in the South for the crime of trying to register people to vote. He carried the physical and emotional scars of the struggle. Jackson: So he was the reality in the room, not the theory. Olivia: He was the truth. The meeting starts, and RFK does what he does best. He talks policy. He lists the administration's accomplishments: appointing Black judges, desegregating interstate travel. He's essentially saying, "Look at all the things we're doing for you. We're on your side." He’s looking for validation, for a thank you. Jackson: And I'm guessing he did not get one. Olivia: He got Jerome Smith. Smith, looking exhausted and speaking with this raw, quiet intensity, basically tells the Attorney General of the United States that he is so sick and tired of the violence and the government's failure to protect its Black citizens that he wouldn't even serve in the army. He said, and this is a direct quote, "I’m close to the moment where I’m ready to take up a gun." Jackson: Wow. To say that to the Attorney General's face... that's not a political statement, that's a soul crying out. What must it have felt like for Kennedy to hear that? He's used to political debate, not this raw, existential pain. Olivia: He was stunned. And then he got defensive. He couldn't comprehend it. His family were immigrants who had fought for their country. To him, Smith's statement was unpatriotic, it was ungrateful. The room got incredibly tense. Kennedy was looking around at the other famous people in the room, expecting them to rein Smith in, to say he was being too extreme. Jackson: But they didn't. Olivia: They did the opposite. The great Lorraine Hansberry, a woman of immense intellect and grace, looked at Kennedy and said, "You’ve got a great many very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General. But the only man you should be listening to is that man over there." She pointed right at Jerome Smith. Jackson: That gives me chills. She was telling him that the most important voice in the room wasn't the celebrity or the intellectual, but the person who was actually living the struggle. Olivia: Exactly. She was forcing him to witness. Baldwin later said that Kennedy couldn't understand that the problem wasn't about giving kids in the ghetto a few more "packages." The problem was a deep, sinister moral rot in the country itself. The meeting ended in what was, by all accounts, a disaster. Kennedy felt they were irrational. They felt he was dangerously naive. Jackson: But Dyson argues it wasn't a failure at all, right? It was a beginning. Olivia: It was a necessary explosion. It was the moment that planted a seed of doubt in Kennedy's mind. It forced him to realize that policy spreadsheets and legal briefs couldn't capture the sound of truth. The truth sounded like Jerome Smith's weariness and Lorraine Hansberry's righteous anger. And that sound, that truth, would haunt him and ultimately, begin to transform him.

Jackson: It's fascinating that Baldwin didn't just bring politicians or activists to that meeting. He brought artists—Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Hansberry. What does that tell us about the role of the artist in this fight? Olivia: That's the second major theme Dyson unpacks, and it's so powerful. He talks about the "burden of representation" for the Black artist. A white artist gets to create art. A Black artist, whether they want to or not, is always seen as representing their entire race. Their work is never just a story; it's a statement. Jackson: So, a white director makes a movie, it's just a movie. A Black director makes a movie, and it's suddenly a statement on all of Black America? That sounds exhausting. Olivia: It is. And it creates this dangerous intersection where art and politics are inseparable. Dyson uses two incredible, contrasting examples to show the high stakes: Paul Robeson and Harry Belafonte. Jackson: Two absolute legends. But with very different stories. Olivia: Very different. Paul Robeson was a genius—a star athlete, a lawyer, a world-famous singer and actor. And he was fiercely political and uncompromising. In the 1940s and 50s, he spoke out against lynching, colonialism, and American hypocrisy. He was an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union. Jackson: That was a dangerous position to take during the Cold War. Olivia: It was career suicide. The US government came for him. They blacklisted him. They revoked his passport, cutting off his ability to perform internationally, which was his main source of income. They hounded him, smeared him as a communist, and effectively silenced him. He died a broken man. He was the battering ram, as you might say. Jackson: He broke down the door but got crushed in the process. So how did Harry Belafonte approach it differently? Olivia: Belafonte saw what happened to his mentor, Robeson, and learned from it. He was just as committed to the cause, but he was strategic. He used his immense charm and mainstream appeal as a weapon. He became one of the biggest stars in the world, and then he used that platform. Jackson: He was the spy who slipped through the cracks to unlock it from the inside? Olivia: That's a perfect way to put it. Belafonte became a close confidant and a major fundraiser for Martin Luther King Jr. He used his money to bail out activists, including King himself. He refused to play stereotypical "Uncle Tom" roles in Hollywood. He insisted on producing projects that showed Black people in all their dignity and complexity. He was playing the long game. Jackson: So it's not about which strategy is "better," but that both are necessary parts of the struggle. You need the uncompromising truth-teller like Robeson, and you need the strategic insider like Belafonte. Olivia: And Dyson argues this legacy continues today. You see it in Jordan Peele's Get Out. On the surface, it's a brilliant horror movie. But underneath, it's one of the most searing critiques of white liberalism ever put on film. It's a Trojan horse. Or look at Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton. He took the story of America's founding and told it through the language of hip-hop, with Black and brown actors in the lead roles. He was, as Dyson puts it, "retrofitting the American dream" for people who had been written out of the original script. Jackson: It's about reclaiming the narrative. And that's what Baldwin and Hansberry were doing in that room with Kennedy. They were using their artistic sensibility to reframe the entire problem. Olivia: They were telling him, "This isn't a problem you can solve. It's a truth you have to witness." And that brings us to the core dilemma that runs through the entire book.

Olivia: This tension between direct confrontation and strategic action brings us right back to the central conflict of the book: the activist's dilemma. Do you work for policy change from within, or do you bear witness to the moral rot from the outside? Jackson: The RFK vs. Baldwin-and-friends-in-a-room dilemma. Olivia: Exactly. And Dyson shows how this exact same drama played out over 50 years later, in a 2015 meeting between Hillary Clinton and Black Lives Matter activists. It's almost a perfect echo. Jackson: What happened there? Olivia: The activists, much like Jerome Smith, weren't interested in a list of policy proposals. They challenged Clinton on a moral level. One activist, Julius Jones, asked her what had changed in her heart that would change the country. Jackson: That's a Baldwin-level question. He's not asking about her 10-point plan. He's asking about her soul. Olivia: And her response was pure RFK. She said, "I don’t believe you can change hearts. I believe you change laws." She was offering policy, the allocation of resources. The activists were demanding witness, a confession of the nation's sins. It was the same fundamental disconnect. Jackson: And this isn't just a philosophical debate. Dyson points out that this tension has massive, real-world consequences, especially at the ballot box. Olivia: It absolutely does. He dives into the 2016 election, where some prominent Black intellectuals, like Cornel West, were deeply disillusioned with Clinton's "neo-liberal disaster," as he called it. They argued there was no real choice between her and Trump's "neo-fascist catastrophe." Jackson: The argument being, why participate in a corrupt system? Why choose the lesser of two evils? Olivia: Right. And the result? Dyson cites the data: Black voter turnout dropped nationally by 4.7 percentage points from 2012 to 2016. In key battleground states, it was over 5 points. That's a huge number. While it wasn't the only factor, that dip, combined with other shifts, played a significant role in the election's outcome. Jackson: So the pursuit of ideological purity, of not wanting to get your hands dirty, may have inadvertently helped elect the very person who would do the most harm to the communities they cared about. Olivia: That's the tragic irony Dyson points to. And he contrasts it with another, less-known story. In 2014, in Mississippi, the Republican senator Thad Cochran was in a runoff against a far-right, Tea Party challenger. Cochran's campaign realized that because of Mississippi's open primary rules, Black Democrats could vote in the Republican runoff. Jackson: Wait, so they got Black voters to support a conservative Republican? Olivia: They did. Because those voters were pragmatic. They knew Cochran wasn't perfect, but he was far better for their interests than the extremist alternative. They showed up and provided his margin of victory. Dyson's point is that Black voters are often far more politically savvy and pragmatic than intellectuals give them credit for. They understand that sometimes you have to make a difficult choice to protect your community. Jackson: It's the difference between an abstract principle and the concrete reality of who's going to be in charge of the Justice Department or appointing federal judges. Olivia: Precisely. It’s the messy, complicated, and unfinished work of democracy.

Jackson: So after all this, Olivia, after exploring the meeting, the artists, the activists... what is the 'truth' that Dyson says we're still not hearing? Olivia: I think the truth Dyson is pointing to is that you can't solve a moral problem with a policy spreadsheet. The truth isn't a set of facts and figures that can be debated. It's a sound. It's the sound of Jerome Smith's exhaustion in that room in 1963. It's the sound of Lorraine Hansberry's defiant voice. It's the sound of protesters chanting in the streets today. Jackson: It's the human experience behind the political issue. Olivia: Yes. And the conversation is 'unfinished' because, as Dyson shows, we are still asking the powerful to do the one thing that is hardest for them: to simply stop talking, stop solving, and just listen. To witness the truth of others' pain without getting defensive. RFK eventually learned that lesson, but it took a tragedy to get him there. The book is a powerful argument that we can't afford to wait for tragedy to force us to listen. Jackson: It makes you wonder, in our own lives, when are we the ones offering policy solutions when what's really needed is for us to just sit and witness someone else's truth? Olivia: A question to carry with you. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.