Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
Speaker 1: It's a podcast. It does what it says in the title.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is
Speaker 1: my guest Joel Monique, who is a pop cultural critic,
Speaker 1: and it seems to do so much of everything that
Speaker 1: I have a hard time pending her down. How are you?
Speaker 1: Um good? You know, it's a gray morning, but in
Speaker 1: l A that counts as weather, so I'm really trying
Speaker 1: to vibe with it. Um, you know, I got my
Speaker 1: hot tea. I'm ready to go learn about some nice people.
Speaker 1: Is it below seventy degrees there? It is below seventy
Speaker 1: degrees here, sweaters on. I'm under a blanket currently. Oh
Speaker 1: that's nice, it's lovely. I'm in the mountains and my
Speaker 1: heat is broken. Oh no, Margaret, it's okay. I have
Speaker 1: like six backup heats sources because I'm like that, that's good.
Speaker 1: That's good someone who came from a snowy climate. Um,
Speaker 1: you need multiple sources of heat at all times, just
Speaker 1: in caith. Yeah, no, absolutely, Like my house is like
Speaker 1: like right now, I'm running electric heat space heaters, and
Speaker 1: if that breaks, I have a wood burning stove, like
Speaker 1: it's it's fine. Yes anyway, Joel, What's what's your favorite
Speaker 1: of your many jobs besides being a guest on this post?
Speaker 1: That is a really tough question. Probably like hosting live
Speaker 1: events is my favorite because it's like all the aspects
Speaker 1: of performance, but you get to like perform your ultimate self,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. It's just as an extroverted introvert,
Speaker 1: like getting to perform all the extrovertedness, you know, for
Speaker 1: a crowd is a lot of fun, and you get
Speaker 1: to you know, get their feelings and maybe you make
Speaker 1: your guests cry, but in like a good way, you know,
Speaker 1: and like all that energy is really lovely. And then
Speaker 1: I would say writing after that is definitely a favorite. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: that makes a lot of sense to me. I I
Speaker 1: really like performing and then going and hiding. That's like,
Speaker 1: oh no, for sure. Afterwards, Please don't talk to me.
Speaker 1: I was on set recently and we recorded for like
Speaker 1: four hours straight and then we broke for lunch and
Speaker 1: I did not leave the set, and they're like, are
Speaker 1: you hungry? I was like no, They're like, are you okay?
Speaker 1: And I was like, I just need to decompress and
Speaker 1: not talk to anyone. For whatever long we have until
Speaker 1: the next take, like I just cannot ye, so totally,
Speaker 1: totally yeah. Absolutely. We're also joined as always by our
Speaker 1: producer Sophie. Hi, Sophie, Hey, Margaret, how are you? Oh
Speaker 1: wait that Sophy, it's the end. Yes, I'm finally on
Speaker 1: the podcast. Yeah. Ian is our audio engineer and also
Speaker 1: today our producer. Um, how are you doing, Ian? I'm
Speaker 1: doing pretty good. Yeah, it's a nice, cozy, cool morning,
Speaker 1: you know, got my sweatshirt on, ready to do some
Speaker 1: podcasts and all right. So on this show we talked
Speaker 1: about cool people in history, especially cool movements, cool complicated
Speaker 1: networks of cool people who actually usually pretty complicated. But
Speaker 1: this week, well actually this week is no different. I'm
Speaker 1: really excited to talk this week about the non violent
Speaker 1: civil rights movement the nineteen fifties and the sixties in
Speaker 1: the US South and along the way. I'm going to
Speaker 1: talk about the people who protected the non violent civil
Speaker 1: rights movement with firearms and stuff. Yes they won't get violent,
Speaker 1: but we sure will. Those are my favorite people. Yep,
Speaker 1: that is that is today's It is exactly the people
Speaker 1: who said, oh that's great, you're non violent. I'm got
Speaker 1: to protect you. I'm not nonviolent. You have somebody who's
Speaker 1: ready to do some absolutely exactly, and I think that
Speaker 1: they don't get enough credit. Um. And so we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about the armed wing of the non violent civil
Speaker 1: rights movement, the paradox that isn't half as much of
Speaker 1: a paradox as it might seem. We're going to talk
Speaker 1: about the Deacons for Defense and Justice, which was a
Speaker 1: non ideological but well organized collection of black people who
Speaker 1: defended civil rights campaigners. We're going to talk about the
Speaker 1: North Carolina branch of the a c P that armed itself.
Speaker 1: And we're gonna talk about the all the unaffiliate groups
Speaker 1: and individuals who relied often quite effectively on their capacity
Speaker 1: to defend themselves in the struggle for self determination and
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff. Because we've been doing anyone
Speaker 1: who's listening to podcast, we've been covering like the Clan
Speaker 1: a bunch recently and not in the We've been talking
Speaker 1: about people who fight the clan. M not not the
Speaker 1: good people in the clan, but people who fought the Clan.
Speaker 1: I got yeah. Um, So you all will be shocked
Speaker 1: to know this. There's been a concerted effort in the
Speaker 1: United States of America by white supremacy to disenfranchise black people.
Speaker 1: You don't say, yeah, yeah, I only learned this, never mind.
Speaker 1: And wherever there's oppression, there's resistance to oppression, which is
Speaker 1: the core concept of this show. And so I'm going
Speaker 1: to frame the civil rights movements of the nine fifties
Speaker 1: of the seventies in the same way that I see
Speaker 1: it framed by a lot of historians and people who
Speaker 1: are there at the time as being kind of made
Speaker 1: up of two general parts. You've got the sort of
Speaker 1: civil rights era of the nineteen fifties and sixties, with
Speaker 1: a focus on non violence and sit ins and voter
Speaker 1: registration drives Um kind of most famously for my public
Speaker 1: school education, Martin Luther King. Um, I have a dream
Speaker 1: all of that stuff. And then you've got the black
Speaker 1: power era of the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: best remembered these days because of the work of the
Speaker 1: Black panthers. Um. So that's the classification that I've been
Speaker 1: presented with is, you know, every dichotomy is false, right,
Speaker 1: And we're going to talk about some of the ways
Speaker 1: that all these things blur together. But so people talk
Speaker 1: about it, they talk about the Civil rights era as
Speaker 1: like pacifist reformism, and the Black power era as like
Speaker 1: all armed revolutionaries. More and more people are starting to
Speaker 1: talk about what people have been talking about a lot
Speaker 1: of along the way, but more and more and more
Speaker 1: media is paying attention to the Black Panthers, for example,
Speaker 1: also had a lot of mutual aid programs and breakfast
Speaker 1: programs and all of these other things that are part
Speaker 1: of what made them so dangerous and powerful. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: one day we're gonna get into all that. Today we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about kind of the inverse. We're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about how in the Civil Rights eara it's more complicated
Speaker 1: than it's sometimes presented. When you guys do the breakfast
Speaker 1: program for the Black Panthers, have me back, and I'll
Speaker 1: try to get some stories from my dad, who's a
Speaker 1: direct beneficiary of that program on the South Side of
Speaker 1: Chicago when he was growing up. Yeah. No, that would
Speaker 1: be amazing. Yeah, And that's actually one of the kind
Speaker 1: of things that's interesting is I keep like on the
Speaker 1: Today's episode, I like look through this and I'll like
Speaker 1: start writing like so and so was and then I'm like, wait,
Speaker 1: now is still alive? Yeah? You know, these people who
Speaker 1: are fighting in the fifties, sixties, seventies, many of them
Speaker 1: are still with us, which is fucking cool. So in
Speaker 1: previous episodes, especially last week's episodes, we talked about that
Speaker 1: most famous of voice supremacist organizations, the Ku Klux Klan,
Speaker 1: the and we're gonna go through the super basics of them,
Speaker 1: the speed run of these fucking worst people. And well,
Speaker 1: there's so many worse people in you with history, but
Speaker 1: these are some of the worst people in its history. Okay,
Speaker 1: So there's like three or four basic distinct phases of
Speaker 1: the clan. They were founded because of frat club for
Speaker 1: piece of ship white Southern racists. In the wake of
Speaker 1: the Civil War. They decided to rely on raw terror
Speaker 1: and violence in order to fight for white supremacy after
Speaker 1: having lost a war. This fell apart in eighteen seventy
Speaker 1: one because the federal government was like, you actually can't
Speaker 1: do that. And then white racists figured out a better
Speaker 1: strategy instead of nighttime terror was legal disenfranchisement and the
Speaker 1: Jim Crow laws that sucked everything up really bad. That's
Speaker 1: Clan number one, and then you got Clan number two.
Speaker 1: This is the weird multi level marketing scheme invented in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifteen by some people who are basically cosplaying the
Speaker 1: Old Clan. It was this huge social club for white
Speaker 1: Protestants that became the armed wing of the prohibition movements
Speaker 1: as well as the white supremacy movement. And they had
Speaker 1: this whole anti immigrant thing that not only had them
Speaker 1: fighting against black people, but also Jews and white Catholics
Speaker 1: and basically immigrants from anywhere. They just fucking hated everyone.
Speaker 1: Last week we talked about some of the organizations that
Speaker 1: work to stop them. They fell apart because like every
Speaker 1: financial scam, they fell into bitter infighting and disgrace, and
Speaker 1: their property was repossessed in all that ship by the
Speaker 1: end of the nineteen thirties, I know that, I know
Speaker 1: I want more. Well, we're starting to see all of
Speaker 1: these modern white supremacist movements fall apart into weird infighting,
Speaker 1: and it's been really lovely. Every time I get a
Speaker 1: little update like so and so I was going to prison,
Speaker 1: I'm like small victories or the like. I wish I
Speaker 1: had the notes in front of me about this, But
Speaker 1: there's like, I don't know, like ten years ago they
Speaker 1: like went around the anti fascist thing that some of
Speaker 1: the Nazi clan member people or whatever, like one of
Speaker 1: them killed the other because they like there was like
Speaker 1: some like incestuous like cheating that happened, like they taking
Speaker 1: themselves down, even inctionists who posted to Instagram. It's like
Speaker 1: he made everybody's job so much easier, I know, and
Speaker 1: so us kind of how the nineteen twenties clan went
Speaker 1: down even though there was they were five millions strong
Speaker 1: at their fucking peak. Uh, Eventually everyone realized that they
Speaker 1: were a bunch of like just random pieces of ship
Speaker 1: and people started distancing themselves from them. But the fucking
Speaker 1: clan is like a stupid racist hydra. And the third
Speaker 1: Clan popped back up pretty soon after the Second Clan
Speaker 1: went down, and this time they got back to their roots,
Speaker 1: which was terrorizing black people in order to maintain white supremacy.
Speaker 1: And you know, this is kind of back when you
Speaker 1: people were like really blatant about being white supremacists. Actually,
Speaker 1: we're getting back there, We're getting back to that point.
Speaker 1: But they never reached quite the numbers of the Second
Speaker 1: Clan because they were less of like a popular organization, right,
Speaker 1: and they were more just like just fucking terrorists right,
Speaker 1: they were really die hard, they were decentralized, and they
Speaker 1: got an awful lot of terrorism done. Um. They also
Speaker 1: there's like arguments to be made about whether they infiltrated
Speaker 1: the police or whether they just came out of the police,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, yeah, I'm on team the slave catchers
Speaker 1: turned into police. Yeah yeah, I think I think most
Speaker 1: people would agree with that. It is we just look
Speaker 1: at their badges and who's happening and the current forever
Speaker 1: police lineage of just you know, active lynching. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think they're one in the same. So third clan has
Speaker 1: a lot of cops in it, or the cops have
Speaker 1: a lot of clan in it or whatever. We're just
Speaker 1: using synonyms. But wherever there's the bad people, there's the
Speaker 1: people trying to stop the bad people. And we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about some of those cool people. And we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk today. We're going to talk a lot about, um,
Speaker 1: some of the non violent organizations, right uh, and then
Speaker 1: on Wednesday we're going to come back and talk more
Speaker 1: about a lot of the organizations that defended them, even
Speaker 1: though they're a whole decentralized defense of them that happened
Speaker 1: before that, and so we're gonna talk about two of
Speaker 1: the major non violent organizations today. We're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: CORE and we're gonna talk about SNICK. There's like a
Speaker 1: bunch more than this. SCLC will come into it a lot,
Speaker 1: The Double A CP will come into it a lot.
Speaker 1: But for what we're going to talk about Core and
Speaker 1: SNICK kind of where it's at. The oldest one of
Speaker 1: these groups is the Congress of Racial Quality, just found
Speaker 1: in ninety two. It grew out of the Christian pacifist movement,
Speaker 1: especially a group called the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Only about
Speaker 1: a third of its founders were black. I was founded
Speaker 1: by almost half women, which for the time is better
Speaker 1: than some of the other people around. You know, a
Speaker 1: lot of the founders of this were ministers and of
Speaker 1: various Christian denominations, and that is actually something that they like.
Speaker 1: The multi faith getting together, the groups that got together
Speaker 1: a lot of different faith based organizations to do a
Speaker 1: lot of good work is like something that I think
Speaker 1: sometimes it's left out of the more radical understandings of
Speaker 1: all of this history. Basically, course started as a we
Speaker 1: like what Gandhia is doing in India, We're going to
Speaker 1: do that for anti racism in the US and they
Speaker 1: got together. They fought against Jim Crow laws, housing discrimination,
Speaker 1: voting rights, all that stuff. They were pretty cool. They
Speaker 1: have complicated stuff that will get into but you know
Speaker 1: everyone does. In Core sent sixteen people, eight white, eight
Speaker 1: black on a journey of reconciliation on buses and this
Speaker 1: was kind of the the first freedom ride, about fifteen
Speaker 1: years before the freedom rides became more of a thing.
Speaker 1: And this first journey was a mix of folks that
Speaker 1: had socialists, that had religious leaders at pacifists as musicians,
Speaker 1: that had just like people who wanted the world to
Speaker 1: be better, who are like, fuck it, let's go do
Speaker 1: this weird, dangerous thing where the government had just passed
Speaker 1: a law banning segregation on interstate travel. And so basically
Speaker 1: they were like, all right, we're gonna go test that.
Speaker 1: We're going to go said people like basically white and
Speaker 1: black people sitting next to each other on the bus
Speaker 1: or sometimes the white people sat in the back of
Speaker 1: the bus and black people sat at the front of
Speaker 1: the bus. All this ship and they just basically went
Speaker 1: around the South, the kind of near South doing this. Um,
Speaker 1: it didn't it didn't go smoothly. Uh, I don't know
Speaker 1: whether that will be shocking to hear. It didn't take
Speaker 1: long before four of them were arrested. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is okay. This is like one of the things that's
Speaker 1: so interesting me about this right is like so much
Speaker 1: of the Civil rights era stuff was basically like the
Speaker 1: federal government like would pass a law and then people
Speaker 1: would be like, let's go see if this law is real,
Speaker 1: and then they would find out that the law is
Speaker 1: not real because the local police everywhere they go would
Speaker 1: mm hmm. You know. So, basically, two black men were
Speaker 1: arrested for not moving to the back of the bus,
Speaker 1: and two white men were arrested for defending the two
Speaker 1: black men who would not move to the back of
Speaker 1: the bus. All four of them ended up on segregated
Speaker 1: chain gangs. The black men got thirty days and the
Speaker 1: white men got ninety days. And specifically because the racist
Speaker 1: judge was so mad at the white people for betraying whiteness. Wow,
Speaker 1: that is the deep, deep, deep seated hate. Because it's
Speaker 1: one thing to be like, I hate black people, and
Speaker 1: I punish them more harshly. It's about the thing to
Speaker 1: be like and if you're a white person, I'll punish
Speaker 1: you three times. It's hard because screw you voting my agenda.
Speaker 1: I guess. Wow. Yeah, like overall, like clearly, including in
Speaker 1: the Civil rights movement, Like it was much harder for
Speaker 1: black folks as part of the Civil Rights movement the
Speaker 1: white than the like white allies and stuff. But here
Speaker 1: and there you would run across this kind of ship
Speaker 1: or like the clan would go around being like, hey,
Speaker 1: any white people, if you show up and support this,
Speaker 1: we're going to murder you, you know, or whatever like that.
Speaker 1: That kind of ship happened a lot. We're gonna get
Speaker 1: to some of that. Um. So the judge, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to read the quote of what I literally can't
Speaker 1: the judge said a lot of racist ship in the sentence,
Speaker 1: but of it, and I'll do an interpretation of the No. No,
Speaker 1: I didn't. I didn't even copy and paste it in
Speaker 1: my script. It's just bad. It's just bad ship, you know. Um.
Speaker 1: But in it he specifically called the two white men
Speaker 1: who I believe were not Jewish, referred to them as
Speaker 1: white Jews from sorry, referred him as Jews from New York. Okay,
Speaker 1: so not even doing his research, just is out here
Speaker 1: being like if they helped the blacks. They must be Jews,
Speaker 1: just slumping all that hate together specifically. Yeah, it's like that,
Speaker 1: like it's like the coastal elites coming here and ruining everything.
Speaker 1: You must basically be the Jews from New York and
Speaker 1: the like Jewish agenda to desegregate the United States. Um.
Speaker 1: And it was just a slur I think for him,
Speaker 1: Like I don't think he thought they were Jews. I
Speaker 1: think it's possible, and I couldn't the books I was
Speaker 1: reading about it didn't like name which of the white
Speaker 1: people were the people who got arrested. Um, But it's
Speaker 1: completely possible they were like Christian ministers, you know, so
Speaker 1: they get arrested. They spent some time on the chain gang.
Speaker 1: And one thing of note, they intentionally went to the
Speaker 1: Near South and not the Deep South because basically they
Speaker 1: were like, if we do this in the Deep South,
Speaker 1: we're all going to die. And it took a special
Speaker 1: kind of courage to go to the Deep South and
Speaker 1: desegregate and enroll voters and um or be from the
Speaker 1: Deep South and desegregate and enroll voters. And it's a
Speaker 1: kind of a courage that many of them found, which
Speaker 1: we'll get to later. One of the black men who
Speaker 1: served some time on a chain gang as part of
Speaker 1: the result of this journey for desegregation was a guy
Speaker 1: I want to take a closer look at because he
Speaker 1: rules um or at least he did a lot of
Speaker 1: really cool stuff. Everyone's complicated. His name is Bayard Rustin.
Speaker 1: I know. It's like, I'm like, yeah, this guy's awesome.
Speaker 1: And you get to like part of the like descriptions
Speaker 1: of him that you find, you're like, oh, well, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: but like whatever booms amongst it, Like, okay, So Bayard Rustin.
Speaker 1: He was a black gay Quaker. Yeah. And this there's
Speaker 1: this recurring thing on this show where somehow Quakers end
Speaker 1: up in every episode. I've never done an episode on
Speaker 1: the Quakers. They're everywhere. The Quakers really rocked with black people,
Speaker 1: like way early they were like, no, we're not down
Speaker 1: with this slavery thing, and we will help for you
Speaker 1: where we can. Yeah, exactly, Like I keep running across
Speaker 1: being like and then the people who organized to get
Speaker 1: black people out of slavery were black people and some
Speaker 1: white Quakers, you know, over and over again. Um So
Speaker 1: Baird Rustin. He was deeply involved in Core from from
Speaker 1: its founding, and he was everywhere. He did everything mostly
Speaker 1: from behind the scenes because people were afraid that his
Speaker 1: homosexuality or socialism would make their movements look bad. And
Speaker 1: I want to talk about him really quick. He was
Speaker 1: kicked out of his university for organizing a strike. He
Speaker 1: sang tenor on Broadway in the choir. He sang spirituals
Speaker 1: on a ton of records. He joined the Communist Party
Speaker 1: for a a while, and then he realized that Stalin
Speaker 1: was a fuck, and so he quit the Communist Party
Speaker 1: and he became a socialist. Specifically, he was in the
Speaker 1: Communist Party until the USSR ordered the Communist Party in
Speaker 1: the US to stop working for civil rights and start
Speaker 1: working to try and get the US to join World
Speaker 1: War two. He organized a march on Washington for the
Speaker 1: desegregation of the armed forces. He went to California to
Speaker 1: fight against the racist in prison of the imprisonment of
Speaker 1: the Japanese during the war. He would like go and
Speaker 1: like try and make sure that people could hold onto
Speaker 1: their property and shoot like that while they were being
Speaker 1: taken into the fucking concentration camps that the US had,
Speaker 1: Because US is deeply racist. He was arrested ninety two
Speaker 1: for refusing to give up a seat on a bus.
Speaker 1: And that was the moment, I mean he was he
Speaker 1: was arrested for being black on a bus, and it
Speaker 1: was that was the moment where he was like, from
Speaker 1: now on, I'm not going to hide the fact that
Speaker 1: I'm gay. Because he basically was just like, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: with the bigots. I it's hard for me to like
Speaker 1: totally explain this epiphany that he had, but he talks
Speaker 1: about it. I should have put the quote, and I didn't,
Speaker 1: and he got arrested it again and again for basically
Speaker 1: fighting everything bad. He fought against the colonization of India
Speaker 1: by the British. Uh. One time he also got arrested
Speaker 1: for being gay. Like one time he got arrested for
Speaker 1: rooking up with two dudes in a car. So he's
Speaker 1: clearly I know, yes, my polyamorous king, I would put
Speaker 1: that on him. I don't know he was about that life.
Speaker 1: But if you're doing two dudes in a car at
Speaker 1: the same time, I love that for him. I know,
Speaker 1: not talked about part of the civil rights movement, like anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he co wrote an influential, influential pastivest paper in the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties called Speak Truth the Power, but in the
Speaker 1: end he kept his name off of it. He chose
Speaker 1: to keep his name off of it because he didn't
Speaker 1: want to six sexuality discredit the paper. And he worked
Speaker 1: with Martin Luther King Jr. It was probably him that
Speaker 1: who convinced MLK to stop carrying a handgun for self defense,
Speaker 1: which goes against the spirit of the rest of today's topic.
Speaker 1: But whatever, everyone's different, it has different ideas. You know.
Speaker 1: He was heavily involved in organizing the nineteen sixty three
Speaker 1: March on Washington, the one with the I Have a
Speaker 1: Dream speech. He would have been called the director of
Speaker 1: the March because he did all of the director of
Speaker 1: the March stuff, but he was a gay socialist, so
Speaker 1: they didn't want to put his name on it. Um
Speaker 1: And like the fucking right wing dragged up all kinds
Speaker 1: of ship, just like the same way that people would
Speaker 1: do it on Twitter now. Yeah, and he actually was
Speaker 1: like one of the staunchest so basically they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: this communist. He was one of the staunchest anti us
Speaker 1: S are U S socialists to the point where he
Speaker 1: actually kind of verged into some right wing positions, like
Speaker 1: he supported the war in Vietnam, for example, because he
Speaker 1: hated the U. S S. So he like supported the
Speaker 1: Cold War. This is why I was the beginning where
Speaker 1: I was like, I get interesting the complex time, and
Speaker 1: when you're you know what I mean, Like American wars
Speaker 1: are often started because like, oh, someone who's doing something terrible,
Speaker 1: and then we seek really going and do horrible ship
Speaker 1: and we're like what we had to stop? This guy
Speaker 1: had to meet the mother. It was so oh gosh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right messy. Yeah, And so he gets called a
Speaker 1: conservative socialist and he's the only term I've actually personally
Speaker 1: run across. Anyone get called a conservative socialist and I
Speaker 1: don't really understand it yet. Funny in the eighties, as
Speaker 1: most people would be want to do as an out
Speaker 1: gay person, he turned to gay activism in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: He died seven not of HIV r AIDS. He died
Speaker 1: of being old. He was born in nineteen twelve. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a good long life, Yeah exactly. He did find anyway
Speaker 1: as just an aside because I find him really interesting
Speaker 1: because people don't talk about the gay polyamorous too fucking
Speaker 1: like organized the March on Washington, you know. Anyway, he
Speaker 1: was on a chain gang for a while as part
Speaker 1: of his work for CORP. That's Core, what a hero,
Speaker 1: I know, And I'm sure Core could be its own
Speaker 1: two part episode, but they're going to come in and
Speaker 1: out of Today's of this week's. Now you've got Snick.
Speaker 1: Snick is the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee, which is
Speaker 1: six times more radical than you might guess with a
Speaker 1: name like that. It was Black Youth formed and Black
Speaker 1: Youth lead, so it didn't have kind of that sort
Speaker 1: of problem that CORE actually ended up dealing with fairly
Speaker 1: effectively in the mid to late sixties, where they were
Speaker 1: a little bit too white, white lead, you know, for
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of what they're doing, and
Speaker 1: Snick comes out of. In nineteen sixty, there were four
Speaker 1: black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, who were like, you
Speaker 1: know what, funk all this ship? Fuck this fucking white
Speaker 1: supremacist society we live in. They were freshmen at the
Speaker 1: North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, which is an
Speaker 1: HBCU historically black college university. One of these freshmen went
Speaker 1: and tried to buy a hot dog at the greyhound
Speaker 1: station and he was denied because he was black, because
Speaker 1: the world's full of racism. I can't get a hot dog,
Speaker 1: bro yea, oh my guy here on my answers. We
Speaker 1: had to deal with them like that is exhausting, my
Speaker 1: green American cat. There's all that ship like people talk
Speaker 1: about like what my money is no good here or whatever,
Speaker 1: like it is like this thing that still happens. Um, yes,
Speaker 1: and and yeah though like literally can't buy a fucking
Speaker 1: hot talk something. So sim we don't want to make
Speaker 1: your gay wedding cake even though our whole business is
Speaker 1: making cakes. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Somewhere there's a heterosexual couple
Speaker 1: named Sam and Chris who can't get a wedding cake.
Speaker 1: You know, like, what the hell? I move out of Indiana. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so after getting refused service for a hot dog, they
Speaker 1: meet up back in one of their dorm rooms and
Speaker 1: they're like, all right, what the fund do we do? Right?
Speaker 1: And there's been some sit ins before where people just
Speaker 1: go and show up and be like, you know what
Speaker 1: funk this? I'm going to be here whether you want
Speaker 1: me here or not. Going back to nine with the
Speaker 1: Alexandria Library sit in, a lot of those sittings have
Speaker 1: been successful, but they've been a scatter shot up to
Speaker 1: that point. Would be like every couple of years someone
Speaker 1: would do a sit in. It's an earlier one that
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about later because I'm really good at chronology.
Speaker 1: And so the four freshmen they're like, all right, we're
Speaker 1: gonna go sit in at the F. W. Woolworth Company store,
Speaker 1: which is a big department store that also was a
Speaker 1: lunch counter and you can go buy stuff there if
Speaker 1: you're black, but you can't go to the lunch counter
Speaker 1: if you're black. So they go in, they asked to
Speaker 1: be served, and then they refused to leave when their
Speaker 1: refused service. February one, nineteen sixty they ordered coffee and donuts,
Speaker 1: and they got both criticism and support from both white
Speaker 1: and black folks at the store, Like, obviously most of
Speaker 1: the white people were like, fuck you, we're not serving you.
Speaker 1: One white woman was like, oh, this is great what
Speaker 1: you're doing, but didn't like do anything about it. And
Speaker 1: some of the black folks were like, oh please, oh god,
Speaker 1: this is going to go really badly. I would not
Speaker 1: like to be beaten with a police baton today. You're
Speaker 1: making that probability increase. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: weren't arrested, but they weren't served. They waited until the
Speaker 1: store closed, and they left and the store closed, and
Speaker 1: they showed up again the next day with more than
Speaker 1: twenty black students from the university. There were a few
Speaker 1: service but they weren't arrested. They hung out all day
Speaker 1: and did their school work at the store. The next
Speaker 1: day they had sixty people, including some high school students
Speaker 1: who joined them, and this time some people from the
Speaker 1: fucking clan showed up to keep an eye on it
Speaker 1: all or whatever, right, but they didn't do ship because
Speaker 1: there was fucking sixty people there. Clan the clan is cowards.
Speaker 1: Is one of the main takeaways of all this research.
Speaker 1: For you'd have to be yeah, no, exactly. It's like
Speaker 1: fascism and it's mass and they only like unfair fights.
Speaker 1: So that the yeah, the fact that they only like
Speaker 1: unfair fights is something that we all need to fucking remember.
Speaker 1: So day four, February four, there's three hundred students. They
Speaker 1: filled the entire lunch counter, including and this time a
Speaker 1: tiny handful of some white folks and white women from
Speaker 1: a nearby university show up to support as well. Day five,
Speaker 1: they get their first your counter protesters about fifty white men,
Speaker 1: three of whom were arrested. Day six, they had a
Speaker 1: thousand fucking people. They entirely filled the store. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: ships snowballs sometimes, you know. They entirely filled the store
Speaker 1: and several nearby other segregated stores. By day eight, the
Speaker 1: sit in movement spreads across the South. Within months, there're
Speaker 1: sit ins in fifty five different cities, and on July,
Speaker 1: Boycott's had cut their income by a third, and the
Speaker 1: Woolworth store World I'll started quietly desegregated its lunch counter. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's bullying, We're exactly. So the students they're like, all right,
Speaker 1: we should, we should get organized, right, because that's that's where,
Speaker 1: in my mind, where the magic happens is. It starts
Speaker 1: with something that is spontaneous and then you figure out
Speaker 1: how to like keep that going, and that takes structure
Speaker 1: an organization. Yeah, when people see power, they are reminded
Speaker 1: of their own right. Yeah, totally totally, And you need
Speaker 1: that initial spark for people to actually see that. So
Speaker 1: in April nineteen sixty, there was a conference in Raleigh,
Speaker 1: North Carolina. The adults or the like older than students.
Speaker 1: It always just referred to in history. They're like, the
Speaker 1: adults said this, and then the youth said this, And
Speaker 1: I'm like, these people are like twenty, I don't want
Speaker 1: to call them not adults, you know, right right, right right?
Speaker 1: The young people. Yeah, So the older than students helped
Speaker 1: call for the the conference. Specifically, it was Martin Luther
Speaker 1: King Jr's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the SCLC,
Speaker 1: called for it, but it um, it wasn't called for
Speaker 1: by MLK. It was called for by someone I'm going
Speaker 1: to get to in a second who is like my absolute,
Speaker 1: my favorite person I'm gonna talk about this week. And
Speaker 1: the s c l C they weave their way throughout
Speaker 1: this episode, but they're not our focus. And so the
Speaker 1: conference was organized by the students, and it was organized
Speaker 1: by one of the most asked women to ever live,
Speaker 1: Ella Baker. Ella Baker, so like the people that I'm
Speaker 1: like pulling aside that I'm really excited about are so
Speaker 1: behind the scenes, like and that's like their fucking thing.
Speaker 1: Ella Baker worked with King in the SCLC, but she
Speaker 1: was basically there to be critical of him, Like as
Speaker 1: far as she was critical of his hierarchical leadership and
Speaker 1: basically the concept of charismatic leadership is the way to
Speaker 1: run a movement. That was like her main thing. She
Speaker 1: was like, that's not the plan, So she calls for
Speaker 1: the conference. She told the assembled students, quote, strong people
Speaker 1: don't need strong leaders What they need instead is organization
Speaker 1: and to help each other. And they're not anti leadership,
Speaker 1: their anti this, like, you know, to your point, this
Speaker 1: hierarchical system that's like we all follow this one person
Speaker 1: when we're a community of people with dope, ideas and
Speaker 1: capabilities and skills, and um, what is the word I'm
Speaker 1: looking for? Not materials but resources? People with resources? And yeah,
Speaker 1: we can absolutely just go out and accomplish these goals
Speaker 1: without needing to be told to do them. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: you know what people do need to be told to
Speaker 1: do too, Well, it's by things. There's some ads, and
Speaker 1: we're back and we're talking about Ella fucking Baker, who
Speaker 1: would probably hate being put on a pedestal. But what
Speaker 1: is the show about cool people? So I'm going to
Speaker 1: take an aside and talk about Ella Baker because she
Speaker 1: is my favorite cool person this episode. Sorry everyone else,
Speaker 1: I love everyone else, but just seriously, like my like whatever,
Speaker 1: I will just gush about Ella Baker very quickly. She
Speaker 1: she grew up listening to her grandmother tell stories about slavery.
Speaker 1: As soon as soon as she became an activist, like
Speaker 1: with the double a CP, she started working for decentralization
Speaker 1: and against charismatic leadership, and for more democratic or ganizational models,
Speaker 1: and for better inclusion of women within activist organizations. So
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways, as far as I can tell, like,
Speaker 1: this is the main person I can point to and say,
Speaker 1: this is what brought grassroots activism. Like, the concept of
Speaker 1: grassroots activism has always been there, right, But the person
Speaker 1: who like worked tirelessly to make the civil rights movement
Speaker 1: grassroots was Ella Baker um. And that's my own conjecture
Speaker 1: about her being the inventor of grassroots whatever. But she
Speaker 1: traveled through the South and made direct, interpersonal connections with people.
Speaker 1: She believed that the purpose of a national organization was
Speaker 1: to support local initiatives and help local people help themselves,
Speaker 1: rather than to like see the local people as people
Speaker 1: to funnel resources from to move upwards in a pyramid,
Speaker 1: you know. She basically said the movement made Martin Luther
Speaker 1: King it's not that Martin Luther King made the movement,
Speaker 1: which doesn't mean that she didn't like Martin Luther King,
Speaker 1: you know, just the direction of power had to be understood.
Speaker 1: She constantly worked against in fighting in a civil rights movement,
Speaker 1: including she fought against red baiting. She was like, don't
Speaker 1: toss out the socialists. They've been here forever. By the
Speaker 1: end of her life, she actually, uh was more openly
Speaker 1: a socialist. And while she organized non violent direct action,
Speaker 1: non violence was always a strategic choice for her and
Speaker 1: not a moral imperative. To quote her biography Joanne Grant quote,
Speaker 1: she had no qualms about target practice. The first organization
Speaker 1: that she worked with was the Young Negroes Cooperative League,
Speaker 1: which was a collectivist organization working to build black economic
Speaker 1: power through cooperativism, which is something that I've run across
Speaker 1: here and there, like uh, Fanny lew Hammer also got
Speaker 1: into this stuff later in the sixties and stuff like that. Um,
Speaker 1: And it's really interesting to me, and I'm really looking
Speaker 1: forward to do more of a deep dive on on
Speaker 1: cooperativesm and specifically how the US concept of cooperativism was
Speaker 1: like built out of black cooperativism. Or like I don't know, whatever,
Speaker 1: it's the most whatever, it's fucking cool the one day,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do a whole episod about that. But Ella Baker,
Speaker 1: when she stepped back from the movement, it was around
Speaker 1: the time that the black power stuff in the late
Speaker 1: sixties started to pick up. But it was it wasn't
Speaker 1: because she had a problem with that. It was because
Speaker 1: of her health. And she continued to be basically part
Speaker 1: of everything. She was part of the Free Angela Davis campaign,
Speaker 1: the Puerto Rican independence movement, the anti apartheid movement, all
Speaker 1: the while focusing on yeah, right, like just just did everything,
Speaker 1: never anything showy. She never like got herself like this
Speaker 1: is the speech or this is the martyr or you know,
Speaker 1: this is the core of activism. And it's something we're
Speaker 1: absolutely seeing a the activist community, particularly the black activist
Speaker 1: community in America today, is very adamant that celebrity has
Speaker 1: no space in their movement, and they're very weary of
Speaker 1: anybody who comes in and trying to make a name
Speaker 1: for themselves, because if the idea is a relation and
Speaker 1: equity for everybody, then how can you center yourself in that?
Speaker 1: By it's complete opposite of the end goal. And so
Speaker 1: it's so cool to hear from the people who started that,
Speaker 1: you know, and to have that vision before anyone else.
Speaker 1: It's it's a radical concept that people can liberate themselves
Speaker 1: if they're given the tools and if they're educated about
Speaker 1: their surroundings and what's happening. Yeah, no, that yeah, exactly. No.
Speaker 1: Notes Ell Baker like you know the other guy right,
Speaker 1: like complicated here and there. I'm like Ella Baker. I
Speaker 1: I have everything I've read about Ella Baker. I have
Speaker 1: not found anything negative to say about Ella Baker. You know,
Speaker 1: a dope woman, do a dope thing. So she called
Speaker 1: for this student conference. Uh and the s CLC, which
Speaker 1: was the organization she used to call for the conference,
Speaker 1: they were hoping that the students would become the youth
Speaker 1: wing of their organization. Right. They were like, ah, excellent,
Speaker 1: these young people are doing something cool. We will bring
Speaker 1: them into our organization. And Ella Baker was like, she
Speaker 1: gave a keynote speech. Her keynote speech was basically like
Speaker 1: you might want to remain autonomous and set your own
Speaker 1: goals and do your own thing. So they did, and
Speaker 1: the youth, the the adults who weren't the older adults.
Speaker 1: They formed the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee. It was
Speaker 1: youth led. They had a few adult advisors or whatever.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna keep using the lord adult accidentally throughout the script. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Ella Baker was the primary advisor. I've read one thing
Speaker 1: that claims that the historian Howard's Inn was another one
Speaker 1: of their advisors, and um, and I want to know
Speaker 1: more about it. He wrote a whole book about about SNICK,
Speaker 1: and I haven't read it yet, so I can't say
Speaker 1: too much yet. The organizers gave Ella Baker the nickname Fundi,
Speaker 1: which was a Swahili word. To quote the site Afropunk,
Speaker 1: the word means to them as as relates to um,
Speaker 1: as to Ella Baker, an artisan who has mastered their
Speaker 1: craft and shares their knowledge freely with the community. And
Speaker 1: so SNICK organized their asses off. They went directly into
Speaker 1: the most dangerous parts of the South, where many of
Speaker 1: them were from, although more of them were urban, going
Speaker 1: into rural spots in the South, which is, as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell, almost as big of a divide
Speaker 1: as like North South divide. The urban world divide was
Speaker 1: also very major in terms of organizing. SNICK worked together
Speaker 1: with Core and then Double A CP. But unlike Core
Speaker 1: and Double a CP, there were no membership cards, no
Speaker 1: membership fees, And while Core was more ideologically committed to
Speaker 1: non violence, Snick, even though it is in their name,
Speaker 1: was strategically committed to non violence. And the Field secretaries
Speaker 1: which is what their organizers were called, had tons of autonomy.
Speaker 1: There weren't like a lot of levels of hierarchy. I
Speaker 1: mean there was right as an organization. They had different
Speaker 1: levels and tears or whatever, right, but like overall, the
Speaker 1: field organizers um, their field secretaries were the main thing.
Speaker 1: They had a lot of autonomy. And later Snick gets
Speaker 1: involved in like everything, they get part of the broader
Speaker 1: left in the late sixties, part of the feminist movement,
Speaker 1: anti war movement, and they're also we'll get to this later,
Speaker 1: the crucible from which the modern conception of black power
Speaker 1: was formed. But we're not here just to talk about Snick.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about the delicate and beautiful balance
Speaker 1: between the non violence civil rights movement and the people
Speaker 1: willing to use violence to defend the individuals within that movement.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna talk about that. The first thing you
Speaker 1: got to understand is that in the Deep South, especially
Speaker 1: in rural areas, the gun issue was a settled issue.
Speaker 1: Black people owned guns and they used them to defend
Speaker 1: themselves against and others against one white violence. The main
Speaker 1: book that I'm referencing a lot throughout this book by
Speaker 1: Charles E. Cob Jr. And the book is called this
Speaker 1: non Violent Stuff Will Get You Killed. How Guns made
Speaker 1: the Civil Rights Movement possible. And this book fucking rules.
Speaker 1: It's not this like called arms right. He like very
Speaker 1: specifically talks about how he's talking about the context of
Speaker 1: the rural South in the nineteen sixties, and it's readable,
Speaker 1: it's insightful. This is like literally, if I could just pivot,
Speaker 1: is not an actual ad pivot, but just like, seriously,
Speaker 1: this book rules. Um, It's one of the best books
Speaker 1: I've ever read for this research. He was there. Charles
Speaker 1: Cobb was a field secretary for Snick from nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: two to nineteen sixty seven, and the premise of the book,
Speaker 1: to quote him, is that the use of guns for
Speaker 1: self defense and the non violent civil rights movement was
Speaker 1: necessary and vital to the movements survival. Writing about his
Speaker 1: own experiences, he said, quote Snick was unusual and placing
Speaker 1: its field secretaries in rural Southern communities to work from
Speaker 1: the bottom up instead of the top down. Living among
Speaker 1: the downtrodden black men and women of the Deep South,
Speaker 1: I underwent a subtle conversion. The principles and illusions I
Speaker 1: had brought with me of non violence, of the uniformity
Speaker 1: of the Southern Black experience were shaped by the men
Speaker 1: and women I encountered there. We and Snick were radicalized
Speaker 1: by working with people in their homes and communities much
Speaker 1: more than by ideology. It's probably practically living under the
Speaker 1: boot of oppression made you more active in your desire
Speaker 1: to liberate the people. Wow, I imagine, imagine in other words,
Speaker 1: leave your guilded cages, y'all. Yeah, it's it's It's for
Speaker 1: sure different, particularly I think in the Deep South at
Speaker 1: that time. Um My dad talks about he his family
Speaker 1: came up to Chicago during the Great miss Migration, which
Speaker 1: was a time period post slavery when a lot of
Speaker 1: black people moved from the South to the North, but
Speaker 1: he would go back to Alabama to visit his great grandmother,
Speaker 1: who still lived in a slave cabin where she had
Speaker 1: been freed. Like she was freed, they weren't using it,
Speaker 1: just stayed on the land. And I think you know
Speaker 1: a lot of people did, which meant you're looking at
Speaker 1: dirt floors, no inter plumbing. Um, you're restricted to what
Speaker 1: kinds of jobs you can have in the South under
Speaker 1: Jim Crow, So you're seeing a lot of people like
Speaker 1: either being porters or an chicken and so like it's
Speaker 1: an and and then because you know, if you know,
Speaker 1: and the rules set around specific jobs, that's where we
Speaker 1: got like you can be making two dollars an hour
Speaker 1: as a waitress, and so there's like a lot of
Speaker 1: financial restrictions. And I think we saw you know, I
Speaker 1: can only imagine that if you were living there during
Speaker 1: that time, like your instinct would be like, oh, immediately,
Speaker 1: these people need access to better rights, like this is insane. Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: And like and there's this thing that also happens, right
Speaker 1: where like people sometimes like go out into a community
Speaker 1: and he's a he's a black man, but he's from
Speaker 1: an urban environment going out into a rural environment, you know,
Speaker 1: and like coming with an ideology, right and then immediately
Speaker 1: being like instead of like educating these these like you know,
Speaker 1: ignorant rural people instead of being like they know what's
Speaker 1: up and I should learn from them. Um. And that
Speaker 1: was like the process that seemed to happen with snick
Speaker 1: Field organizers. And that absolutely ties into how the whole
Speaker 1: thing transformed and the whole push towards black power and
Speaker 1: the the change within the civil rights movements. As far
Speaker 1: as I can tell and as far as like I've
Speaker 1: read UM and yeah, I uh, I met Charles Cobb
Speaker 1: briefly in North Carolina. UM, because he did a talk
Speaker 1: about the book, and I had UM. I went because
Speaker 1: that day I had just been whatever the Nazis, No,
Speaker 1: they docked me. I'd just been docks by Nazis, they
Speaker 1: called themselves, don't call us Nazis, were neo confederates. I've
Speaker 1: just been like docks by neo confederates who had like
Speaker 1: told me, like showed me pictures of my family and
Speaker 1: told me they're gonna burn my house down and ship
Speaker 1: and he sound like Nazis. I just want to know you,
Speaker 1: how are you telling the conservatives you should move in
Speaker 1: a different direction than the Nazis, because that sounds like
Speaker 1: class a Nazi bullshit, neo confetti it. Sorry, I might
Speaker 1: have misspoken. Yeah, you know, but I mean it's like whatever,
Speaker 1: Neo Confederate and Nazi, like, I don't care whether you
Speaker 1: call yourself an American Nazi or German Nazi, You're fucking Nazi.
Speaker 1: Like fuck you. They had like just docked me and
Speaker 1: some other some other folks. And so I bought a rifle.
Speaker 1: And I never owned a firearm before. Um, I didn't
Speaker 1: particularly grow up around firearms, and like I come from
Speaker 1: a sort of military family, both like a liberal bent,
Speaker 1: you know. And and so I told him, I was like, hey,
Speaker 1: like your talk was really interesting meaningful to me because
Speaker 1: I I just went and bought a rifle today. And
Speaker 1: he was like, well, how do you how do you
Speaker 1: feel about that? It's like I feel really mixed about it.
Speaker 1: And he was like that makes sense, you know. And
Speaker 1: and Mike, I'm mostly just like talking about how much
Speaker 1: I like this guy in this book. But my copy
Speaker 1: of the book is signed off from my generation to yours,
Speaker 1: and I think about it a lot. That's really beautiful,
Speaker 1: and especially for somebody who's doing, you know, such key
Speaker 1: and important work and understands intimately the struggle like what
Speaker 1: a plussing to sort of be given, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: like a passing of the baton. That's wonderful. Uh. To
Speaker 1: quote more from this non violent stuff will get you killed.
Speaker 1: The rural black culture that snick Field secretaries encountered in
Speaker 1: the Deep South had long accepted arm self defense is legitimate,
Speaker 1: although local black people could be uncertain about when and
Speaker 1: how best to employ it, the idea itself was not
Speaker 1: subject to debate. Guns were common in southern households us
Speaker 1: not only for hunting, but for protection from white violence.
Speaker 1: The idea of removing guns from the equation was, for
Speaker 1: the vast majority of rural Southern blacks simply a non issue. Later,
Speaker 1: I'm going to talk about a bunch of the organized
Speaker 1: groups that defended the non violence movement, and those groups matter,
Speaker 1: But I think it's also worth understanding where they come from.
Speaker 1: Which what didn't just like show up like one person,
Speaker 1: wasn't suddenly like I have an idea, we can defend
Speaker 1: ourselves right. Um. It was built on a bedrock of
Speaker 1: people just doing it themselves. As Cobb describes, for example,
Speaker 1: a seventy year old woman in Lee County, Georgia named
Speaker 1: Mama Dolly. She ran a farm and I'm under the
Speaker 1: impression maybe she was a local midwife, and to quote
Speaker 1: a student organizer, stayed with her. What Snick would do
Speaker 1: is they send people down to like and Core would
Speaker 1: do is like people would leave and go into these
Speaker 1: rural environments and register people to vote and possibly help
Speaker 1: organized desegregation and stuff like that. Right, and they would
Speaker 1: stay with black families who would defend them. So, to
Speaker 1: quote a student organizer, Mama Dolly had this big shotgun.
Speaker 1: I tried to talk her out of guarding me, but
Speaker 1: she said, baby, I brought a lot of these white
Speaker 1: folks into this world, and I'll take him out of
Speaker 1: this world if I have to come on. Yes, that's
Speaker 1: why I think she was probably a midwife. Um, sometimes
Speaker 1: no matter what I said, this is to the quote, Sometimes,
Speaker 1: no matter what I said, she would sit in my
Speaker 1: bedroom window, leg propped up with that big old gun.
Speaker 1: Do you know how to handle it way better than
Speaker 1: I did. In fact, I knew nothing about no shotgun.
Speaker 1: And everything I've read is story after story of rural
Speaker 1: farmers defending organizers, most of whom were black urban Southerners,
Speaker 1: some of whom were you know, white urban Southerners, people
Speaker 1: from all over in different backgrounds. Right. But because frankly
Speaker 1: defending these people as part of hospitality. And of course
Speaker 1: the supremacists were really fucking mad about Snick and so
Speaker 1: the bravery of these organizers matters, but the bravery of
Speaker 1: the people who took them in is at least as
Speaker 1: much right because the organizer might leave, but that family
Speaker 1: still wherever and everyone knows you all your business, and
Speaker 1: I know that some of them like lost is you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're a black person providing a service
Speaker 1: that is available to white people, like I can put
Speaker 1: your whole livelihood in danger. That's wild. Yeah. And the
Speaker 1: clan was during this time running around killing people, burning
Speaker 1: and bombing buildings, murdering organizers and uh like, people would
Speaker 1: go red a stirt of vote and they would get
Speaker 1: laughed out of the room by clerks or one case
Speaker 1: like in I think it was Mississippi, Like literally someone
Speaker 1: just got pistol whipped because they were like, what do
Speaker 1: you mean I can't register of vote. I pulled out
Speaker 1: a gunhead and hit the woman in the head. But
Speaker 1: you know what won't hit you in the head except
Speaker 1: with really good deals potatoes, that's right. Oh yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So so Joel. One of the things that we try
Speaker 1: and do on the show is we try to be
Speaker 1: sponsored only by very good things, right, and so our
Speaker 1: our perennial sponsor is the concept of potatoes. They're good
Speaker 1: for you. Um, you can eat them cooked, to cook
Speaker 1: them first. They're cheap. Uh. And I'm wondering if you
Speaker 1: have any anything that you would like to be sponsored by.
Speaker 1: We've also been sponsored by, um, sleeping dogs, like I
Speaker 1: think like comb, Yeah, good, comb was good. The laughter
Speaker 1: of children after children is great. I want to be
Speaker 1: sponsored by a rainy with a good book. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: my favorite space to live in. Oh my god, if
Speaker 1: I could. That's what heaven looks like to me. It's
Speaker 1: constantly raining, and like there's good books and hot tea everywhere.
Speaker 1: He never goes cold. All right, that is what we're
Speaker 1: sponsored by today, and possibly some other stuff that you'll
Speaker 1: hear about in a second. Okay, and we are back,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna mostly the like atrocities of what people
Speaker 1: were facing. I've been told at great length, and so
Speaker 1: I don't want to like specifically go through like every
Speaker 1: time that people got murdered or whatever, but one of
Speaker 1: them that impacts all of this a lot. In Mississippi,
Speaker 1: in September, a local black farmer and n double a
Speaker 1: CP leader who was affiliated with SNICK. His name is
Speaker 1: Herbert Lee. He was killed in broad daylight in front
Speaker 1: of a dozen people, and he got killed by his
Speaker 1: childhood friend who was a white man who in a
Speaker 1: racist who he was like neighbors, who had just like
Speaker 1: decided should have gone too far, and he'd basically been like, hey,
Speaker 1: come over here, I want to talk to you, and
Speaker 1: then murdered Herbertlely. Yeah, the murderer was acquitted that afternoon
Speaker 1: by an all white jury whoa and no one none
Speaker 1: of the witnesses felt safe coming forward. Right later, a
Speaker 1: black witness to the crime, Luis Allen, was murdered on
Speaker 1: his own property before he could testify. And that murderer
Speaker 1: was almost certainly done by the local county sheriff. And like,
Speaker 1: this is an example story, not the thing that changed everything.
Speaker 1: This is what people like, Basically, a lot of the
Speaker 1: people that I'm reading about or refer to what's happening
Speaker 1: as a war, and they're like, I am in a
Speaker 1: war against white supremacy. Um, And that's that's some of
Speaker 1: the context, you know. So so SNICK organizers themselves, they
Speaker 1: didn't go armed because it would break the spell of
Speaker 1: what they were doing, and non violent organizing was a
Speaker 1: very effective strategy. And but especially in Mississippi, their local
Speaker 1: defenders absolutely went armed. The whole thing was massively debated
Speaker 1: within the movement, but overall a lot of the debates
Speaker 1: against this sort of protection were happening far away. You know. Um,
Speaker 1: they were the movement leaders who weren't in the ship.
Speaker 1: So I like telling stories about the clan losing, So
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell some stories about the clan losing. Oh. Yes,
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty five Baker County, Georgia, there was a
Speaker 1: seventeen year old young woman named Shirley Miller, who, alongside
Speaker 1: other folks, integrated the local high school. The clan burned
Speaker 1: across in your yard. More than a dozen of the
Speaker 1: fox showed up the you know, scare her and possibly
Speaker 1: do worse. So Shirley's mother called her neighbors, who pulled
Speaker 1: it in armed and took him at the klansmen, and
Speaker 1: the klansmen literally begged for their life in order to
Speaker 1: be let leave. Oh could you imagine a recording of
Speaker 1: that just playing it back and be like, yes, you assholes,
Speaker 1: that for threatening a high school or you jerks, yea.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty four, some folks tried to register to vote,
Speaker 1: and we're turned away. Mrs Brewer's sons were turned away,
Speaker 1: so the clan showed up at the Brewer house to
Speaker 1: teach her and her kids a lesson about trying to vote.
Speaker 1: So Jennie Brewer, Mrs Brewer, she armed up her kids,
Speaker 1: and she armed up her grandkids, and she armed up
Speaker 1: the Snick organizers who were supposedly not supposed touch guns,
Speaker 1: and then made a bunch of Molotov cocktails oh too,
Speaker 1: to quote Charles Cobb again. As the sheriff and the
Speaker 1: truckload of klansmen approached the farmhouse, the Brewer family members
Speaker 1: and some of the Snick workers were still in the
Speaker 1: fields with rifles and shotguns. Before the raiders reached the house,
Speaker 1: someone shown a floodlight on them, others fired into the air.
Speaker 1: Brewer stood on the front porch ready to hurl a
Speaker 1: Molotov cocktail. Everyone, including the sheriff, fled. Night riders never
Speaker 1: returned to the Brewer farm. Come through, suck around and
Speaker 1: find out what the main thing that I keep finding.
Speaker 1: And I read a book that has a bias right
Speaker 1: to be clear, and I've read other stuff and I
Speaker 1: have my own bias and and all of that. But
Speaker 1: one of the things that kept happening was the arguments
Speaker 1: for non violence. Part of the arguments for non violences
Speaker 1: this is a very effective strategy and the nitty gritty,
Speaker 1: and I think that's true. But part of the argument
Speaker 1: was if we arm up, they'll kill us, all right, um,
Speaker 1: and what the book that you know, this non violence
Speaker 1: stuff get killed and and anything else that I've read
Speaker 1: doesn't carry that out, at least in this context and
Speaker 1: time that I'm talking about. What would happen is the
Speaker 1: clan shows up, someone takes a fun and warning shot
Speaker 1: and they're like, oh god, those people have guns, even
Speaker 1: though the klan has guns too, and they never come back.
Speaker 1: That happens more times than not in what I have read.
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to make a blanket. I feel like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no no, But I hear what you're saying. I think
Speaker 1: the non violent aspect was necessary to change liberal white
Speaker 1: people's minds, right, because the argument was always like, oh,
Speaker 1: well not yet. People need time to adjust, so your
Speaker 1: liberty has to wait. But then also, if you react
Speaker 1: violently to whatever violence is being hurled at you. Suddenly
Speaker 1: you're still the danger, which is a confusing mind game
Speaker 1: to play with a person. But there they were. And
Speaker 1: so I think that that was a you know, and
Speaker 1: similar to Gandhi, because I'm sure there were people in
Speaker 1: India also being like, no, fuck you get off my
Speaker 1: British people, what are you doing? But in order to
Speaker 1: make the world care, you have to be like, now,
Speaker 1: I didn't do anything to defend myself, and these guys
Speaker 1: were total jerks. Still I did do anything to piss
Speaker 1: them off. I didn't do anything to defend myself, and
Speaker 1: yet here they will calm. And that's when people can
Speaker 1: sort of be like, oh, well, now I see that
Speaker 1: you're clearly a monster. There's no way you can't really
Speaker 1: twist that, which is exhausting. It's an exhausting gauntlet to
Speaker 1: ask people to run through. But what else can you do? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, yeah, like I don't know, you know,
Speaker 1: like I'm not. It's so fucking complicated, and it's something
Speaker 1: that every movement needs to determine for itself, you know.
Speaker 1: And uh, And that is actually one of the things
Speaker 1: that comes up in the book. And I don't know
Speaker 1: if I wrote in the script, maybe you hear me
Speaker 1: talk about later a higher percentage. It was not universal.
Speaker 1: There were white people who are totally fine with violence,
Speaker 1: and there were black people are totally fine and non violence.
Speaker 1: But a higher percentage of the organizers who were coming
Speaker 1: from out who are white were more ideologically committed to
Speaker 1: non violence, whereas more of the black organizers were strategically
Speaker 1: committed to non violence. I'm sure, yeah, And that matters
Speaker 1: so much, especially when you're talking about like, look, clearly,
Speaker 1: I'm a white person talking about this history because I
Speaker 1: think it matters, But like white people shouldn't fucking have
Speaker 1: anything to do with saying what should happen? Like that
Speaker 1: doesn't make any fucking sense. You know, they still weren't
Speaker 1: at a place where they were ready to recognize the
Speaker 1: power structure and its entirety. Right if they were, then
Speaker 1: you would never ask people who were constantly being threatened
Speaker 1: to be non violent. But because they couldn't acknowledge like, oh,
Speaker 1: we as white people also whold power. Despite the fact
Speaker 1: that we want to stand with you, so we're going
Speaker 1: to ask you to not only be non violent, but
Speaker 1: it's a way for us to not have to become
Speaker 1: violent in defensive I can stand with you and say,
Speaker 1: oh no, I was there. I linked arms, like, but
Speaker 1: did you take off arms? Switch would have been much
Speaker 1: more helpful in protecting these bodies you claim to care about. Like.
Speaker 1: It's again, it's a total mind funck and a completely
Speaker 1: ridiculous gauntlet to ask anyone to have to run through.
Speaker 1: But I think at the time it was the only
Speaker 1: way to move the evil and therefore necessary. I do
Speaker 1: hope that we've moved past that in some I don't
Speaker 1: think from on a government level we have, but I
Speaker 1: think for a very personal and individual level, I hope
Speaker 1: that we as a society are moving past this idea
Speaker 1: that passivism off you know is the best reaction to violence. Um,
Speaker 1: clearly not clearly not yeah, exactly. And then it even
Speaker 1: strategic non violence apparently works really well paired with self defense.
Speaker 1: You know, you know, you know, but I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't want to hurt you. I don't want to you know, bomb,
Speaker 1: or hurt anybody or take someone's you know, friend, parent,
Speaker 1: whatever away from them, But don't work with me. I
Speaker 1: think that's a very reasonable line to draw, or like,
Speaker 1: don't funk with those non violent activists. You know, also
Speaker 1: don't sunk with them, they're just here. Absolutely another one
Speaker 1: of these stories. An indigenous act vist named Hunter Bear
Speaker 1: Salter was a professor at an hbc U in Mississippi
Speaker 1: called Tugala Southern Christian College, and he spent his time
Speaker 1: advising students who are sitting at lunch counters and you know,
Speaker 1: teaching and all that stuff. And he traveled armed everywhere
Speaker 1: he went in he said, the fact that he was
Speaker 1: known to be armed is the reason he survived the era.
Speaker 1: And yeah, there's I have no particular doubt about that.
Speaker 1: And the student the school itself was constantly being attacked
Speaker 1: by night riders because as an HBCU, until the school
Speaker 1: formed armed groups of students and faculty to keep watch.
Speaker 1: And when word got out about that, the attacks dropped significantly.
Speaker 1: So self defense was a decentralized, impromptu an ever present
Speaker 1: part of the non violence movement until it was organized,
Speaker 1: which we'll talk about in part two. But first let's
Speaker 1: talk about you, Joel and the things you do and
Speaker 1: the places people can find the things you do. Yes,
Speaker 1: I am on all the social media sites, but mostly
Speaker 1: Hive nowadays, actual Monique, it's j l E L E
Speaker 1: M O N I q U e uh and the
Speaker 1: EP of Fake Doctor's Real Friends. If you have any
Speaker 1: desire to come check out a Scrubs rewatch podcast. Also
Speaker 1: have a new girl rewatch podcast called Welcome to Our
Speaker 1: Show that I adore. And then you can check out
Speaker 1: my writing all over the place and doing a lot
Speaker 1: of work for the Rap Right Now and polygone Um.
Speaker 1: And then I'm frequently at MPRS pop Culture Happy Hour. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'm hoping to bring a couple of new shows
Speaker 1: to you guys next year. So just follow me on
Speaker 1: the socials and you'll you'll hear all about it awesome
Speaker 1: and you've got anything you want to plug? Uh? Isn't
Speaker 1: there a live stream coming up? There is a live
Speaker 1: I think it's this week. Yeah, it's this week. As
Speaker 1: you listen to this, if you want to hear me
Speaker 1: learn about something bad from Robert Evans, the host of
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards, you can listen to the live stream
Speaker 1: me hearing about bad things. They don't tell me ahead
Speaker 1: of time what the bad thing is, so you can
Speaker 1: watch me react and horror to the world. You can
Speaker 1: get tickets by googling. It's like an amazing show. I'm
Speaker 1: really excited. Yeah. The link to a tickets is a
Speaker 1: moment house dot co slash bTB. I think if when
Speaker 1: you buy a ticket you can also submit question for
Speaker 1: the Q and A make sure you get those in
Speaker 1: asap before the event that this week. And uh yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's all I got. All right, well, we
Speaker 1: will see you all on Wednesday. Farewell. Cool People Who
Speaker 1: Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
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