Speaker 1: Wo Zone media.
Speaker 2: Before her children even knew their mother had been killed,
Speaker 2: the federal government was already busy rewriting the story of
Speaker 2: her death. She had lived a good life.
Speaker 1: Though not a long one.
Speaker 2: She was happily remarried after a divorce, and despite the
Speaker 2: demands of motherhood, she went back to school in her thirties.
Speaker 2: People who loved her described her as a Christian woman,
Speaker 2: a devoted mother, and someone who believed passionately in loving everyone,
Speaker 2: so much so that she put that belief into action.
Speaker 2: And as the FBI commandeered the investigation into her death,
Speaker 2: her grieving spouse was left trying to explain what had
Speaker 2: happened to her children. Her youngest was just six years old.
Speaker 2: She had both hands on the steering wheel when she was.
Speaker 1: Shot in the head.
Speaker 2: She was dead before her car came to a stop,
Speaker 2: crashing not far from the spot where her killer had
Speaker 2: fired at her. The person she was traveling with that
Speaker 2: day was miraculously not hit. There should have been no
Speaker 2: way to spin it. The investigation revealed the shooter and
Speaker 2: his motive almost immediately, but federal officials seated doubt, planning
Speaker 2: stories in the media that she was sexually immoral that
Speaker 2: she neglected her children, that her spouse was a person
Speaker 2: with questionable associates, she was an extremist, an outside agitator,
Speaker 2: she had dangerous left wing politics, and she might even
Speaker 2: be a communist. She was sick, degenerate, and she brought
Speaker 2: this on herself. Of course, the FBI director spreading these
Speaker 2: lies about her knew they weren't true. But in March
Speaker 2: of nineteen sixty five, Jay Edgar Hoover was desperate to
Speaker 2: distract from the fact that one of the clans man
Speaker 2: who killed Viola the USO, was on his pay room.
Speaker 2: I'm Molly Conger, and this is We're gude of guys.
Speaker 2: This is not the story I promised you last week.
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry. I'm sure you already guessed that. I know.
Speaker 2: I ended last week's episode with a teaser for something
Speaker 2: fairly specific, and I will write that episode.
Speaker 1: I will.
Speaker 2: It's poor form to complain about a job I do
Speaker 2: in my pajamas, but it's not easy writing what is
Speaker 2: essentially a twenty five page research paper on a new
Speaker 2: topic every week. The only way it works is to
Speaker 2: write about something.
Speaker 1: I'm genuinely.
Speaker 2: And I'm so lucky that I get to do that,
Speaker 2: but my heart's got to be in it, and this
Speaker 2: week my heart was troubled. I usually finished writing pretty
Speaker 2: late on a Monday night Tuesday morning, if we're being
Speaker 2: specific about it. My editor Rory really only gets about
Speaker 2: a day and a half with the file to clean
Speaker 2: it up, put the music in it, and bed the
Speaker 2: audio clips and work whatever magic that he does that.
Speaker 1: Makes it sound good.
Speaker 2: And the edit I listened to on Wednesday afternoon is
Speaker 2: the one you hear Thursday morning. It's a tight timeline,
Speaker 2: so I really have to lock in on what I'm
Speaker 2: going to research and write about pretty early in the week.
Speaker 2: And obviously I knew what I was going to be
Speaker 2: working on for this week's episode because it was a
Speaker 2: continuation of the story from last week's.
Speaker 3: Episode until it wasn't On Tuesdays, I've usually been up
Speaker 3: most of the night, so I don't get a lot done.
Speaker 2: I try to run all my errands for the week
Speaker 2: on Wednesdays, but by Thursday I'm already starting to feel
Speaker 2: like I'm running out of time and it's way too
Speaker 2: late to change my plans. I've got to lock myself
Speaker 2: in my office and focus on the topic I've chosen.
Speaker 2: I was supposed to be writing about that Nazi serial killer.
Speaker 2: I promised you, But this past week we all watched
Speaker 2: a woman die on Wednesday, and I still ran my errands.
Speaker 2: It's the only day I have time for it. But
Speaker 2: I went about my business in kind of a daze,
Speaker 2: and I wept for her, for her wife, for her children,
Speaker 2: for all of us, for the world we have to
Speaker 2: live in. But we all still had to get up
Speaker 2: and go to work the next day. So on Thursday
Speaker 2: and I sat at my computer and I kept taking
Speaker 2: notes for the episode I was trying to write. On Friday,
Speaker 2: more video of that murder came out.
Speaker 1: I watched it.
Speaker 2: Maybe you did too. If you didn't, you don't have to.
Speaker 2: There's no moral requirement for you to bear witness in
Speaker 2: that way.
Speaker 1: I promise you.
Speaker 2: But I did because I always do. And it hit
Speaker 2: me pretty hard for the obvious reasons. Right, I was
Speaker 2: watching a murder. I find myself doing that not infrequently
Speaker 2: in this line of work, and it never gets easier,
Speaker 2: and if it does, I'll quit. But something in particular
Speaker 2: was stuck rattling around in my head. In the moments
Speaker 2: before a federal agent shot and killed Renee Good, she
Speaker 2: smiled at him, and she said, that's fine, dude, I'm.
Speaker 1: Not mad at you.
Speaker 2: That's a striking moment, even just on its own. She
Speaker 2: really wasn't angry. You can see her face. She's brave,
Speaker 2: she's determined, but she's telling the truth.
Speaker 1: She isn't mad.
Speaker 2: Her presence there wasn't out of anger but love. She
Speaker 2: isn't mad at this particular man. She's doing her part
Speaker 2: against an injustice that's bigger than either of them. This
Speaker 2: isn't a show about current events. This isn't a show
Speaker 2: about the news. This isn't an episode about Renee Good.
Speaker 2: That's not what I write about, and that's not what
Speaker 2: you're here to listen to. But it isn't my fault
Speaker 2: that history rhymes. I wish it didn't. I wish the
Speaker 2: decade I've spent writing about white supremacist violence wasn't increasingly
Speaker 2: relevant in the way I think about current events.
Speaker 1: But it is.
Speaker 2: And when I watched that video, I didn't just see
Speaker 2: Renee Good. I saw Viola Luzo. And when I heard
Speaker 2: Renee Good speak her last words, I didn't just hear her.
Speaker 2: I heard Michael Schwerner. Michael Schwerner, James Cheney, and Andrew
Speaker 2: Goodman were field workers with the Congress of Racial Equality,
Speaker 2: and on June twenty first, nineteen sixty four, they were
Speaker 2: murdered by a mob of klansmen that included members of
Speaker 2: the local sheriff's department. When Alton Wayne Roberts pulled Michael
Speaker 2: Schwerner from his car, he asked him, are you that
Speaker 2: N word lover? The two men were face to face,
Speaker 2: just inches apart. The klansmen had both of his hands
Speaker 2: on Schwerner's shoulders, having spun him around to look him
Speaker 2: in the eye, and Schwerner, a twenty four year old
Speaker 2: Jewish social worker from New York City, looked back at
Speaker 2: that clan and he said, Sir, I know just how
Speaker 2: you feel. He was calm, he wasn't angry. He was
Speaker 2: trying to start a conversation.
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 2: I guess we can't really know what kind of dialogue
Speaker 2: he was trying to have, because that's as far as
Speaker 2: he got. The klansman still had one hand on one
Speaker 2: of Schwerner's shoulders when he used his other hand to
Speaker 2: draw his gun, and he shot Michael Schwerner point blank
Speaker 2: in the chest, killing him instantly. And I thought, too
Speaker 2: of Margaret Ann Nott, who was just sixteen years old
Speaker 2: when she was killed in Butler, Alabama, in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 2: She was sitting on the ground with her eyes closed
Speaker 2: in silent prayer when she was hit by the car
Speaker 2: that rammed into the permitted protest she was participating in
Speaker 2: that morning. As Margaret lay on the ground dying, she
Speaker 2: repeated over and over again, I died for freedom.
Speaker 1: I died for freedom.
Speaker 2: And I thought too of Talisian non Kai Mech, who,
Speaker 2: along with Ricky John Best, was one of two men
Speaker 2: who died trying to protect two teenage girls on a
Speaker 2: train in Portland in twenty seventeen. A Somali immigrant, a
Speaker 2: young black Muslim girl wearing her hyjab, was being threatened,
Speaker 2: and those strangers gave their lives to stop a neo
Speaker 2: Nazi from hurting her. And after Tualisian was stabbed, as
Speaker 2: he lay there bleeding out in the lap of a
Speaker 2: stranger on the floor of the train, his last words were,
Speaker 2: tell everyone on this train, I love them. I'm not
Speaker 2: mad at you. I know just how you feel. I
Speaker 2: died for freedom. Tell everyone on this train, I love them.
Speaker 1: I'm not mad at you. I'm not mad at you.
Speaker 1: I know just how you feel. I'm not mad at you.
Speaker 2: Their words, all of them, the last words of people
Speaker 2: killed by Nazis and klansmen and agents of the state
Speaker 2: who served the same ends as those Nazis and those clansmen,
Speaker 2: were drowning out my own thoughts. And I was reading
Speaker 2: and writing and trying to do my silly little job,
Speaker 2: trying to think my own thoughts. But I couldn't hear
Speaker 2: my own thoughts over the sound of the blood pounding
Speaker 2: in my head. And it sounded like Renee Good. It
Speaker 2: sounded like Michael Schwerner.
Speaker 3: It sounded like.
Speaker 2: Delesian and Margaret and Ricky and Viola and Heather Higher
Speaker 2: and so many people who woke up on a day
Speaker 2: they didn't know as their last, and they did something brave,
Speaker 2: not because they were angry or violent, but because they
Speaker 2: loved the very idea of love so much.
Speaker 1: And I didn't write a word that day.
Speaker 2: On Saturday night, I was sitting in my office with
Speaker 2: a book in my lap and thirty eight browser tabs
Speaker 2: open on my computer, still trying to figure out how
Speaker 2: I'm going to write six thousand words about anything this week.
Speaker 2: And I saw a video of a vigil for Renee
Speaker 2: Good held on a rainy Friday evening in New Hampshire.
Speaker 2: Rob Hirschfeld, the Bishop of the Episcopal Church of New Hampshire,
Speaker 2: must have spent the day hearing the same inescapable litany
Speaker 2: of names that was pounding in my own head, because
Speaker 2: he reminded the crowd in New Hampshire of Jonathan Daniels,
Speaker 2: a New Hampshire native who died in a corner store
Speaker 2: in a tiny town outside Montgomery, Alabama, in August of
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty five. Daniels was a seminarian, still a year
Speaker 2: away from finishing his studies before he could pursue ordination,
Speaker 2: and he'd spent the spring semester of nineteen sixty five
Speaker 2: working in Selma, Alabama. He returned to Alabama during his
Speaker 2: summer break that year to register voters, tutor children, and
Speaker 2: help black families get to church. He went back to
Speaker 2: Alabama that summer to do what he felt God had
Speaker 2: called him to. When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee staged
Speaker 2: a protest outside of a whites only department store in
Speaker 2: Fort Deposit, Alabama. He was one of thirty protesters who
Speaker 2: were arrested. After six days in jail. The whole group
Speaker 2: was released, but they were left stranded in the middle
Speaker 2: of nowhere. While they were waiting there for the ride
Speaker 2: back to town, the group decided to send a small delegation
Speaker 2: to a nearby corner store to buy some cold sodas
Speaker 2: they'd all spent six days sweating in an Alabama jail
Speaker 2: and this was one of the only stores in the
Speaker 2: area that would serve black customers. Jonathan Daniels and father
Speaker 2: Richard Morris Row walked to the store with Joyce Bailey
Speaker 2: and Ruby Sales, two black teenage girls, both activists with
Speaker 2: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Ruby Sales, just seventeen years
Speaker 2: old that summer, reached the door first. She recalled that
Speaker 2: afternoon in an interview for a PBS documentary two decades later.
Speaker 4: And so when we got to the store, as we
Speaker 4: approached a store and began to go up the steps,
Speaker 4: suddenly standing there was Tom Coleman that at that time
Speaker 4: I didn't know his name. I found that out later,
Speaker 4: and I recognized that he had a shotgun, and I
Speaker 4: recognized that he was yelling something about black bitches. But
Speaker 4: in some real ways, with that confrontation, my mind kind
Speaker 4: of blinked, and I wasn't processing all that was happening.
Speaker 4: And so as I was trying to process the meaning
Speaker 4: of this, suddenly I fell a tug because I was
Speaker 4: in front and Jonathan was behind me, and I fell
Speaker 4: a tug and someone and the next thing I knew,
Speaker 4: there was this blast and I had fallen down, and
Speaker 4: I remember thinking, God, this is what it feels like
Speaker 4: to be dead. I thought I was dead, And just
Speaker 4: as I was trying to sort of deal with being dead,
Speaker 4: I heard another shot go off.
Speaker 1: But she wasn't dead.
Speaker 2: The shot Ruby heard as she was lying on the
Speaker 2: ground contemplating her own apparent death was meant for Joyce,
Speaker 2: but Father Morris Row had wrapped himself around her as
Speaker 2: he turned to run.
Speaker 1: Only Joyce got away.
Speaker 2: The priest was shot in the back, leaving him unable
Speaker 2: to walk for several years. The first blast from the
Speaker 2: deputy's shotgun, the one aimed straight at Ruby, hadn't touched her.
Speaker 2: The tug, she felt. The force that knocked her to
Speaker 2: the ground, where she now lay covered in blood, had
Speaker 2: been Jonathan Daniels pushing her out of the way, and
Speaker 2: the blood pooling around her was his. He'd taken the
Speaker 2: full force of the shotgun blast point blank, killing him instantly.
Speaker 2: In the video of that rainy vigil in New Hampshire,
Speaker 2: Bishop Hirschfeld shared the story of Jonathan Daniel's death to
Speaker 2: make it inescapably clear how serious he was as a
Speaker 2: man of the cloth. Thoughts and prayers are sort of
Speaker 2: his stock in trade. At a vigil like that one,
Speaker 2: that's all anyone really expects of him. His thoughts and
Speaker 2: his prayers, that's all anyone really has to offer after
Speaker 2: a tragedy. But the Bishop opened his remarks by wondering
Speaker 2: whether the time for eloquent words had passed. Thoughts and
Speaker 2: prayers are beautiful, but they aren't moving the needle. Jonathan
Speaker 2: Daniels didn't fight for civil rights with a strongly worded
Speaker 2: letter or a signature on a petition, or a beautiful
Speaker 2: sermon from the pulpit. He pressed his body into the
Speaker 2: barrel of a shotgun.
Speaker 5: I have told the clergy of the Episcopal Dioceis of
Speaker 5: New Hampshire that we may be entering into that same witness,
Speaker 5: and I've asked them to get their affairs in order.
Speaker 6: To make sure they have their wills written, because it
Speaker 6: may be that now is no longer the time for statements,
Speaker 6: but for us, with our bodies, to stand between the
Speaker 6: powers of this world and the most vulnerable.
Speaker 2: I watched that video on Saturday night, and I thought
Speaker 2: about what it means to live in a world where
Speaker 2: his words are frightening and comforting to me an equal measure.
Speaker 2: I hope the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of New
Speaker 2: Hampshire don't die the way Jonathan Daniels died. But more
Speaker 2: than that, I wish we did not live in a
Speaker 2: world where a shotgun is pointed.
Speaker 1: At a child. But we do, and they might.
Speaker 2: And while we try to untangle the factors that led
Speaker 2: to the loaded gun aimed the most vulnerable among us,
Speaker 2: maybe the best we can hope for is the courage
Speaker 2: to absorb some of that pain. I woke up Sday
Speaker 2: morning and the first thing I saw on my phone
Speaker 2: was the news that a synagogue in Mississippi had burned.
Speaker 2: Terrible news, the kind of news I will definitely follow
Speaker 2: up on eventually. Whoever would do something like that as
Speaker 2: almost certainly the kind of guy I write about or
Speaker 2: will one day.
Speaker 1: I wasn't quite.
Speaker 2: Awake yet, but I recognized the name of the synagogue. Impossible. Really,
Speaker 2: I'm not Jewish, and I've never been to Mississippi, but
Speaker 2: beth Is Reel Congregation and Jackson, Mississippi, sounded so familiar
Speaker 2: because it was bombed by the Klan in nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 2: Everything old is new again. There's nothing new.
Speaker 1: Under the sun.
Speaker 2: And I was running out of time to write something
Speaker 2: for this week's episode, and it felt like history was
Speaker 2: demanding to be acknowledged. I stared at my computer for
Speaker 2: a while, and on Sunday afternoon, I went to a
Speaker 2: vigil for Renee Good. It was held in a little
Speaker 2: park downtown. Hundreds of people filled the park, spilling out
Speaker 2: onto the sidewalks. I saw friends and neighbors and strangers,
Speaker 2: babies and strollers and old women pushing walkers. I saw
Speaker 2: the pastor of a church in my neighborhood wearing a
Speaker 2: rainbow scarf and a warm smile. I saw the man
Speaker 2: running to be my congressman, standing quietly in the crowd,
Speaker 2: not campaigning, just present. People had homemade signs. Some of
Speaker 2: them were impressive works of art, and others were hastily
Speaker 2: repurposed from the last protest. I saw a child wearing
Speaker 2: a cardboard box painted white. It was a little ice
Speaker 2: cube costume with third graders against ice scrawled on the
Speaker 2: back in pink marker. And I saw an older woman
Speaker 2: carrying a single sheet of plain printer paper with a
Speaker 2: phrase written on it in a black marker. It said,
Speaker 2: you can't kill us all. That's what one of Renee's
Speaker 2: neighbors shouted at the ice agents, trying to chase off
Speaker 2: the crowd that gathered at the scene after she was
Speaker 2: shot and killed. Instead of running away from the sound
Speaker 2: of gunfire, a crowd formed, bearing witness and demanding justice.
Speaker 2: Before her body was even cold. They had just witnessed
Speaker 2: an execution, and their answer was you can't kill us All.
Speaker 2: Those words spoken by an ordinary person in an extraordinary circumstance,
Speaker 2: traveled halfway across the country to be there on that sign,
Speaker 2: a sign carried by another entirely ordinary person, an ordinary
Speaker 2: person who recognizes that she too, now finds herself in
Speaker 2: an extraordinary circumstance. Normally I make careful notes of what
Speaker 2: was said and who spoke. But I just paced, walking
Speaker 2: laps around that two hundred square foot patch of grass,
Speaker 2: feeling like the weight of history would crush us all.
Speaker 2: Walking home afterwards, I knew I wouldn't write another word
Speaker 2: that day. I don't have to walk down Fourth Street
Speaker 2: to get home, but I always do. It's been almost
Speaker 2: nine years since a woman I never met was killed there.
Speaker 2: There's a purple bow tied around the post holding up
Speaker 2: a no parking sign. Closest to the spot where she died.
Speaker 2: The brick wall of the neighboring office building is covered
Speaker 2: in chalk messages. I guess it's mostly sheltered from the
Speaker 2: rain somehow, because it isn't derotating changing set of messages.
Speaker 2: It's a monument. Maybe it's never rained at an angle
Speaker 2: in that narrow street. I don't understand it. There are
Speaker 2: thousands of little men messages scrawled on the walls on
Speaker 2: either side of Fourth Street, but the biggest one reads.
Speaker 1: Gone but not forgotten. And I know that.
Speaker 2: One's been untouched for at least eight years.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's older than that.
Speaker 2: But the first time I remember seeing it was when
Speaker 2: I stopped by on her birthday, May twenty ninth, twenty eighteen.
Speaker 2: Heather Hier would have been thirty three that day if
Speaker 2: she hadn't been dead for a year. So after the
Speaker 2: vigil for Renee Good, I stopped on the street where
Speaker 2: Heather Higher was killed, and I stood in the street
Speaker 2: where she died with tears in my eyes.
Speaker 1: Until a car came.
Speaker 2: And then I remembered that we all still have to
Speaker 2: live in the world and go about our business. So
Speaker 2: what I mean to say is, as I'm writing this,
Speaker 2: it's Monday. I do most of my writing on Mondays.
Speaker 2: It's a bad habit, but usually when I'm writing on Monday,
Speaker 2: I've spent all week researching and taking notes, and I
Speaker 2: kind of have an idea what the words will be.
Speaker 2: But I woke up this morning and I started over.
Speaker 2: Because every time I sat down to research and take
Speaker 2: notes and plot out the story I was supposed to
Speaker 2: write this week, I cried. I cried for Renee and
Speaker 2: for Heather, and for Michael Schwerner and James Cheney and
Speaker 2: Andrew Goodman and Mayola Luso and Talisian and Ricky and
Speaker 2: Margaret and Jonathan, and for all the martyrs of the
Speaker 2: struggle for freedom whose stories we don't know, not yet.
Speaker 2: I couldn't write a regular episode of my show because
Speaker 2: my heart demanded something else. I know this isn't a
Speaker 2: serious job. I make an entertainment product. I'm a journalist
Speaker 2: and a researcher, and I take my work very seriously.
Speaker 2: But I'm not delusional. This is a podcast. It's in
Speaker 2: your ear on your way to work, while you wash dishes,
Speaker 2: walk your dog. But if I didn't believe just a
Speaker 2: little bit this was important, I would have given up
Speaker 2: by now. I wouldn't work this hard to write these
Speaker 2: stories if I didn't think there was some value in
Speaker 2: understanding the history of writing political violence, in fitting those
Speaker 2: pieces together to show the connections between these allegedly isolated,
Speaker 2: random acts of violence. As bewildering and terrifying and overwhelming
Speaker 2: as things seem right now, I want to help you
Speaker 2: see that these are not unprecedented times.
Speaker 1: They are, in fact, very.
Speaker 2: Precedented, and the precedents are pretty dark, but there are
Speaker 2: things we can learn from the past, and there's comfort
Speaker 2: in knowing we aren't the first ones to walk into
Speaker 2: this darkness. So I didn't write the story I promised
Speaker 2: you last week. And I can't tell you anything you
Speaker 2: don't already know about what's in the news today. But
Speaker 2: I can tell you a little bit about a story
Speaker 2: that rhymes. I can tell you about the day Viola
Speaker 2: le Uso died. On March twenty fifth, nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 2: marchers poured into Montgomery, Alabama. The front of the march
Speaker 2: reached the capitol steps around noon, but the crowd of
Speaker 2: more than twenty five thousand stretched out over two miles long,
Speaker 2: and the end of the march didn't arrive until more
Speaker 2: than an hour later. A program from the event lists
Speaker 2: more than a dozen speakers. There were speakers from the
Speaker 2: Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress for Racial Equality, the NAACP.
Speaker 2: John Lewis spoke on behalf of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Speaker 2: Nobel Peace Prize winner and New and Under Secretary General
Speaker 2: Ralph Bunch gave a speech. A Philip Randolph spoke the
Speaker 2: march from Selma to Montgomery had been hard fought. It
Speaker 2: took nineteen days to cross those fifty four miles. On
Speaker 2: the first attempt, the march didn't even make it out
Speaker 2: of Selma. It ended the very day it began, a
Speaker 2: day that quickly became known as Bloody Sunday. Dozens of
Speaker 2: marchers were injured and seventeen were hospitalized after brutal beatings
Speaker 2: from the police waiting for them on the other side
Speaker 2: of the Edmund Pettis Bridge. The second attempt was quickly
Speaker 2: foiled by a court injunction. Hours after the march was
Speaker 2: called off, a white mob attacked three Unitarian ministers who
Speaker 2: were in town for the march. James Reeb died from
Speaker 2: his injuries. By the time the march to Montgomery started
Speaker 2: for the third time, the stakes were clear. A minister
Speaker 2: had been beaten to death. The chairman of the Student
Speaker 2: on Violent Coordinating Committee had been struck over the head
Speaker 2: with a billy club, fracturing a skull. They'd been beaten
Speaker 2: and tearcass and run down with horses and dogs. They
Speaker 2: knew they would face violence, they understood they may face death.
Speaker 2: And when they finally reached Montgomery, the main event that
Speaker 2: afternoon was a speech from doctor Martin.
Speaker 1: Luther King Junior. You may not know this one, at
Speaker 1: least not as well as you know.
Speaker 2: Famous speech is like I have a dream from the
Speaker 2: march on Washington, or I've been to the mountaintop from
Speaker 2: the Memphis sanitation worker strike. But I think you know
Speaker 2: one of the final lines of this speech.
Speaker 7: I contemplated this afternoon. I have a difficult moment. I
Speaker 7: have a substrate in Vialla it will not be, because
Speaker 7: truth pressures will rise again. A long not long it
Speaker 7: cause no lie can near frail. A long not law alone.
Speaker 7: It calls you shall read what your soul A long
Speaker 7: way on the scaffold, long way up on the thing
Speaker 7: that's just that scaffold, sway the future behind the dim
Speaker 7: unknown standard, God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
Speaker 4: A long not law of the moral.
Speaker 7: Universe is long, but it ben towards the outside.
Speaker 2: The art of the moral universe is long, but it
Speaker 2: bends towards justice. That's one of doctor King's more famous lines.
Speaker 2: And I think there's a reason I've only ever heard
Speaker 2: it out of context. Why I never really thought about
Speaker 2: it having been spoken on the afternoon of March twenty fifth,
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty five, from the steps of the Capitol Building
Speaker 2: in Montgomery, Alabama, flanked on either side by civil rights
Speaker 2: activists with fresh bruises on their faces. When you neatly
Speaker 2: cut around those words and you lift them out of
Speaker 2: that speech, carving away the context of the bloody fifty
Speaker 2: four miles between Selma and Montgomery, you might think moral
Speaker 2: arcs just spend that way, that the natural shape of
Speaker 2: such an ark just tends to angle in the direction
Speaker 2: of justice, that if you wait patiently, that gentle curve
Speaker 2: will end, and there at its tip will be justice.
Speaker 2: But the moral arc of the universe doesn't bent.
Speaker 1: It is bent.
Speaker 2: It is pushed and pled and molded and hammered and kneaded,
Speaker 2: and it disgreased with our blood.
Speaker 1: It doesn't bent.
Speaker 2: We have to bend it. It is not enough to
Speaker 2: observe its shape. You have to throw your body against it.
Speaker 2: You have to look back at that long arc and
Speaker 2: remember who toiled and struggled and cried and bled before you.
Speaker 2: That arc bends because you were not the first person
Speaker 2: who wished that it did, because we are not the
Speaker 2: first generation to put our shoulder to it and push.
Speaker 1: Viola Luzo knew that.
Speaker 2: She was there that afternoon in Montgomery. She heard doctor
Speaker 2: King give that speech just a few hours before she died. Now,
Speaker 2: normally I would have at least skimmed most of the
Speaker 2: biographies that have been written about her. There are a
Speaker 2: couple books about her life, and I would try to
Speaker 2: sort of suss out the angle that each of the
Speaker 2: authors was approaching the story with and cross reference the
Speaker 2: details that didn't quite match with newspaper articles and interviews
Speaker 2: with people who were there. That's my normal approach. Normally
Speaker 2: I work on an episode all week. As I said,
Speaker 2: I started this morning, so he didn't quite have time
Speaker 2: for the normal process. So forgive me if her life
Speaker 2: story is a little lighter on the details. What I
Speaker 2: did read, though, was the chapter on Viola written in
Speaker 2: a book by Reverend Jack Mendelssohn. He published a book
Speaker 2: of stories about civil rights martyrs in nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 2: so the interviews he had with people who knew Viola
Speaker 2: were fresh. He was writing this just a few months
Speaker 2: after she died, And of course I also read Jay
Speaker 2: Edgar Hoover's frantic and furious memos as he cooked up
Speaker 2: his smear campaign against this dead mother. Yola was born
Speaker 2: in Pennsylvania nineteen twenty five, the daughter of a school
Speaker 2: teacher and a coal miner. Her father lost a hand
Speaker 2: in a mining accident during the Great Depression, so the
Speaker 2: family relied on income from short term teaching positions. Her
Speaker 2: mother took anywhere she could find them. They moved often,
Speaker 2: but Viola spent much of her childhood in the South.
Speaker 2: At eighteen, she married a much older man, her boss
Speaker 2: at the restaurant where she worked. When they divorced six
Speaker 2: years later, she kept custody of their two daughters. In
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty one, she married Anthony Luzo, a business agent
Speaker 2: for Teamsters Local two forty seven, and the couple had
Speaker 2: three more children together. After she died, those who wanted
Speaker 2: to minimize her death would say that she was mentally ill,
Speaker 2: she had a criminal record, she was a bad mother,
Speaker 2: she was crazy, and her interest in civil rights was
Speaker 2: a recent flight of fancy, perhaps a symptom of her
Speaker 2: erratic mind. Now, I would argue that even someone with
Speaker 2: a criminal record and a mental illness can have a
Speaker 2: firmly held belief in the value of civil rights and
Speaker 2: make their own decision to participate in a political protest,
Speaker 2: and either way it certainly isn't a reason to kill them.
Speaker 2: But in Viola's case, I think the people repeating those
Speaker 2: things are being unfair on purpose. I think they know
Speaker 2: they're lying. Now, it is kind of true that she
Speaker 2: had a criminal record. She'd been cited for failing to
Speaker 2: send three of her children to school. In nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 2: she kept them home for forty days to protest a
Speaker 2: school policy that allowed teenagers to drop out of school.
Speaker 2: Without parental permission. I don't fully understand the logic of
Speaker 2: the protest, but the cause makes perfect sense. She told
Speaker 2: the Detroit Board of Education that she regretted leaving school
Speaker 2: at fourteen, and she wished the law had kept her
Speaker 2: in school. She believed that requiring children to stay in
Speaker 2: school until eighteen would protect them from being exploded. She
Speaker 2: was charged with violating the state school compulsory age law,
Speaker 2: the one she was protesting. Years later, her daughter Penny
Speaker 2: explained to author Mary Stanton that it wasn't some hysterical,
Speaker 2: unreasonable thing. It was a carefully considered, active protest. She
Speaker 2: was trying to get publicity and draw attention to what
Speaker 2: she thought was a dangerous law that would hurt children.
Speaker 2: A few weeks after her arrest in June of nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty four, maybe in an effort to just blow off
Speaker 2: some steam, she took off on an impromptu road trip
Speaker 2: without telling her husband. This, coupled with the arrest, provided
Speaker 2: the pieces for the narrative that she was irrational and
Speaker 2: mentally disturbed. Newspapers seized on this line from an FBI
Speaker 2: memo about how she disappeared to Canada and her husband
Speaker 2: had to report her missing, but they lived in Michigan.
Speaker 2: Canada is just kind of the next town over. It
Speaker 2: does appear that her interest in civil rights came on suddenly.
Speaker 2: She never brought it up before nineteen sixty four. But
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty four was as good a time as any
Speaker 2: for a housewife in Detroit to become interested in the
Speaker 2: civil rights movement. She didn't just wake up one day
Speaker 2: and drive to Selma. She had been involved in the
Speaker 2: Detroit chapter of the NAACP for a year leading up
Speaker 2: to her death. Honestly, I think it might be more
Speaker 2: unusual for a white housewife in Michigan to be outspoken
Speaker 2: about segregation earlier than this.
Speaker 1: It makes perfect sense that she.
Speaker 2: Would develop an interest in the civil rights movement at
Speaker 2: the height of the civil rights movement. I don't understand
Speaker 2: why this is meant to be suspicious. It was bloody
Speaker 2: Sunday that finally spurred her to greater action. She was
Speaker 2: active locally, but the footage of the violence on the
Speaker 2: Edmund Pettis Bridge and March of nineteen sixty five was
Speaker 2: too much. Her husband recalls the tears streaming down her
Speaker 2: face when she saw it on the evening news. When
Speaker 2: James Ree was murdered a few days later. She attended
Speaker 2: a memorial service for him at her local Unitarian church.
Speaker 2: Later that week, she marched with a few hundred students
Speaker 2: from Wayne State University to show their solidarity with the
Speaker 2: marchers in Selma. At that rally, she heard several students
Speaker 2: who'd been down in Selma speak about their experiences. They
Speaker 2: described the way the deputies laughed and sneered at them
Speaker 2: on bloody Sunday, saying those cops were just like the
Speaker 2: men who murdered James Reeb, except they'd been deputized by
Speaker 2: the state to do it. After that march, she called
Speaker 2: her husband. She'd made up her mind and she was
Speaker 2: going to Selma. That's not unreasonable. That's not something you
Speaker 2: would only do if you were on drugs or in
Speaker 2: the grips of a serious psychiatric episode. It doesn't even
Speaker 2: seem that surprising to me. She wasn't the only person
Speaker 2: who did this. She'd been interested in the civil rights
Speaker 2: movement for a year. She was involved with the NAACP
Speaker 2: and the Unitarian Church. She marched in Detroit in solidarity
Speaker 2: with Selma, and she heard the impassioned pleas for help
Speaker 2: from the people who'd been there. They wanted more people
Speaker 2: to go back down to Alabama with them to join
Speaker 2: the march to Montgomery. So she did, that's not crazy.
Speaker 2: I can see myself doing something like that. I think
Speaker 2: a lot of us can. It's not your fight, her
Speaker 2: husband told her, but she disagreed. She told her family
Speaker 2: it's everyone's fight. Viola spent six days in Alabama, the
Speaker 2: last six days of her life. She got in touch
Speaker 2: with organizers at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and they
Speaker 2: put her to work shuttling people back and forth between
Speaker 2: Selma and Montgomery. When the march began, Viola march too.
Speaker 2: She walked across the Edmund Pettis Bridge, just two weeks
Speaker 2: after sobbing on the couch at home in Detroit watching
Speaker 2: the news of bloody Sunday. The night before the march
Speaker 2: reached Montgomery, Biola was volunteering with the medics at Saint
Speaker 2: Jude's Catholic Church just outside the city. She spent the
Speaker 2: evening gently dressing the bloody feet of marchers who'd walked
Speaker 2: barefoot on this pilgrimage. Father Timothy D. C offered her
Speaker 2: one of the cots in the church basement. She said
Speaker 2: there were people who needed it more than she did,
Speaker 2: and she slept alone in her car. On the morning
Speaker 2: of March twenty fifth, she asked Father d C if
Speaker 2: there was anywhere she could go to get a good.
Speaker 1: Look at where they were headed.
Speaker 2: So he took her up to the church bell tower,
Speaker 2: and together they looked out over the landscape, and they
Speaker 2: could see the line of marchers already streaming from Saint
Speaker 2: Jude's heading out for the four mile walk to the capitol.
Speaker 2: Howl Dec says she got pale and anxious, and she
Speaker 2: turned to him and she said that suddenly she felt
Speaker 2: very sure that someone would die that day. But they
Speaker 2: prayed together and that seemed to ease her fears. And
Speaker 2: as she walked away from Saint Jude's that morning, she
Speaker 2: slipped off her shoes so she could make the final
Speaker 2: leg of the march into Montgomery barefoot. That evening, she
Speaker 2: was back at Saint Jude's. Leroy Moten, a local actor
Speaker 2: of us she'd been working with all week, took her
Speaker 2: car from the church and drove back into Montgomery to
Speaker 2: pick up a group of marchers who needed a ride
Speaker 2: back to Selma. Biola called her husband and her children
Speaker 2: every night during that trip, and this night was no different.
Speaker 2: One of her daughters later recalled hearing the sounds of
Speaker 2: celebration in the background when her mom called that last time,
Speaker 2: everybody was celebrating the march.
Speaker 1: Had been successful.
Speaker 2: She must have been calling from Saint Jude's. After the
Speaker 2: march was over, but before she got into her car
Speaker 2: for the last time, Biola told her husband she'd be
Speaker 2: leaving very soon, and she asked him to wire her
Speaker 2: fifty dollars for the trip home. On the way to Selma,
Speaker 2: in the car with Leroy Mowten, another car tailgated them aggressively.
Speaker 2: She'd been warned this was a possibility. There were white
Speaker 2: men driving around just looking for any car that had
Speaker 2: both black and white people in side, particularly cars with
Speaker 2: a white woman and a black man. Viola seemed unbothered
Speaker 2: by the tailgating, though, and she joked with Leroy about
Speaker 2: how she'd like to come back to visit Alabama again
Speaker 2: one day if she didn't get killed. In the meantime,
Speaker 2: after they dropped off the first batch of passengers in Selma,
Speaker 2: Leroy and Viola took a break for dinner. They ate separately,
Speaker 2: but they were both back in Viola's car a little
Speaker 2: after seven pm, heading back to Montgomery to pick up
Speaker 2: more people who needed rides to Selma. The car full
Speaker 2: of klansmen spotted them in a red light near the
Speaker 2: Edmund Pettis Bridge. It was clear almost immediately that they
Speaker 2: were being followed. FBI informant and klansman Gary Rowe claimed
Speaker 2: that she evaded them with surprising speed, getting her oldsmobile
Speaker 2: up to ninety miles an hour a few times. During
Speaker 2: this twenty minute pursuit. Leroy Moten recalls that she hummed,
Speaker 2: we shall overcome as she concentrated on the road, speeding
Speaker 2: down the dark highway, trying desperately to make it back
Speaker 2: to Montgomery with this carful of white men in hot pursuit.
Speaker 2: Roe claims it was klansman Collie Wilkins who fired at
Speaker 2: Biola when they finally caught up to her. She was
Speaker 2: hit twice in the head. She was almost certainly already
Speaker 2: dead when the car skidded into a ditch. Leroy Moten
Speaker 2: was injured in the crash, but he'd not been shot.
Speaker 2: He ran for three miles before he was picked up
Speaker 2: by another vehicle ferrying marchers back to Selma. All four
Speaker 2: klansmen from the car were arrested the very next day.
Speaker 2: It was hardly a mystery to the FBI who'd done it.
Speaker 2: Gary Rogue called Hiss FBI handler Liter that night.
Speaker 1: And told him.
Speaker 2: The two later met in a parking lot and the
Speaker 2: gun Roe gave his hand that night was never admitted
Speaker 2: into evidence. President Lyndon Johnson announced the arrest of Collie Wilkins,
Speaker 2: Gary Rowe, William Eaton, and Eugene Thomas on TV the
Speaker 2: very next day, but only three of them were charged.
Speaker 2: FBI informant Gary Rowe testified against the other three klansmen.
Speaker 2: All three of those clansmen were charged with murder by
Speaker 2: the state courts in Alabama, and in a separate federal case,
Speaker 2: they were indicted on charges of conspiracy to interfere with
Speaker 2: civil rights. Those federal charges notably said nothing about murder.
Speaker 2: The murder charges were just in the state courts in Alabama,
Speaker 2: and a white jury in Alabama wouldn't convict a klansman.
Speaker 2: Eaton ultimately died of a heart attack before he faced trial,
Speaker 2: but Eugene Thomas was acquitted. Collie Wilkins, the man Row
Speaker 2: accused of firing the fatal shot, was tried twice. The
Speaker 2: first time, the all white jury voted unanimously against convicting
Speaker 2: Wilkins of murder, but they were close to a conviction
Speaker 2: on manslaughter.
Speaker 1: It was ten to two.
Speaker 2: Newspaper reports say the two holdouts that saved Wilkins from
Speaker 2: prison told reporters that they just couldn't trust the testimony
Speaker 2: of a man like Gary Rowe, not because he was
Speaker 2: an admitted paid government informant, but because he was an oathbreaker.
Speaker 2: He'd broken the oath he took as a klansman and
Speaker 2: as klansmen themselves. That's something they took very seriously.
Speaker 1: Wilkins got a hung jury the first.
Speaker 2: Time around, and he was outright acquitted when they tried again.
Speaker 2: When it came time to testify against his friends in
Speaker 2: the federal trials, Roe was playing hard to get. I
Speaker 2: don't know what was going on in his head, but
Speaker 2: maybe he knew he had the FBI over a barrel here.
Speaker 2: With the state murder trials ending without convictions, the federal
Speaker 2: civil rights trial was the only way to lock anyone
Speaker 2: up for this murder. They had put an FBI informant
Speaker 2: on the stand to testify that he was there when
Speaker 2: it happened. So it would be awfully shameful if everybody walked.
Speaker 1: In November of.
Speaker 2: Nineteen sixty five, a series of increasingly frantic FBI memos
Speaker 2: sent directly to j Edgar Hoover outlined the problem. Gary
Speaker 2: Rowe wanted more money, a lot of it. He wanted
Speaker 2: thousands of dollars of debt paid off, unpaid alimony to
Speaker 2: his wife, overdue power bills, months of delinquent rent on
Speaker 2: his apartment, a few thousand for a failed business venture.
Speaker 2: Pretty typical kinds of debts. But three grand and unpaid
Speaker 2: bills in nineteen sixty five is more like thirty thousand
Speaker 2: dollars today. Roe was in deep but when they put
Speaker 2: him on the stand, they would have to admit that
Speaker 2: he was a paid informant, which makes the records of
Speaker 2: any payments made to him for that work relevant evidence
Speaker 2: that they would have to produce. And it wouldn't look
Speaker 2: great if they paid him thousands of dollars right before
Speaker 2: a trial. And he didn't just want money. He wanted
Speaker 2: a new life. He wanted to be relocated with his family.
Speaker 2: He wanted the government to promise him not only that
Speaker 2: he'd never be prosecuted for anything ever, but they'd never
Speaker 2: make him testify again about anything.
Speaker 1: Never.
Speaker 2: As the trial date approached, the memos got weirder. In
Speaker 2: late November, his handler described him as highly emotional, distraught,
Speaker 2: and tearful during a meeting. He'd previously agreed to testify,
Speaker 2: but now he's trying to back out, saying he felt
Speaker 2: let down by the FBI and he no longer trusts
Speaker 2: his handler. He alternated between saying that maybe they wouldn't
Speaker 2: even want him to testify because he couldn't guarantee that
Speaker 2: what he was going to say would be helpful, almost
Speaker 2: implying that he planned to lie. And then he said
Speaker 2: he just wouldn't go, that they'd have to subpoena him,
Speaker 2: and even then they'd have to use physical force if
Speaker 2: they wanted to get him back into a courtroom in Alabama.
Speaker 1: And then he started bargaining again.
Speaker 2: If the government could make him a series of promises,
Speaker 2: he'd do it, but they had to promise that he
Speaker 2: would never have to testify again, not about anything, not ever,
Speaker 2: and he wanted a massive severance. He wanted his entire
Speaker 2: family relocated, including his elderly parents, which would mean that
Speaker 2: his father would have to be financially compensated for the
Speaker 2: loss of employment that relocation would cause. Had It went
Speaker 2: on and on, and some of them were pretty absurd,
Speaker 2: But one thing he wouldn't budge on was he wanted
Speaker 2: a job. Specifically, he demanded that the FBI get him
Speaker 2: a job as a Border Patrol agent. In the end,
Speaker 2: he got almost everything he asked for. After the three
Speaker 2: clansmen were convicted on the federal civil rights charge, the
Speaker 2: FBI paid Gary row ten thousand dollars, the equivalent of
Speaker 2: over one hundred thousand dollars to day. He was given
Speaker 2: a new identity and a job. He didn't quite get
Speaker 2: his dream job with the Border Patrol, but he worked
Speaker 2: for some time.
Speaker 1: As a U. S Marshal.
Speaker 2: A decade later, when Wilkins and Thomas were finally out
Speaker 2: of prison, they went on a national news program to
Speaker 2: accuse Gary Rowe of being the real trigger man. They
Speaker 2: both passed polygraph exams or whatever that's worth to you,
Speaker 2: and additional witnesses came forward, including two policemen who testified
Speaker 2: before a grand jury that Roe had bragged about being
Speaker 2: the one to kill Liuzou. The prosecution was halted by
Speaker 2: a federal injunction. He'd been granted immunity. It didn't matter
Speaker 2: how many witnesses came forward and gave sworn testimony that
Speaker 2: they knew for a fact that he was the killer,
Speaker 2: that they saw him do it, that there was evidence
Speaker 2: that he'd done it, that he admitted to them that
Speaker 2: he'd done it, that he bragged about it.
Speaker 1: It didn't matter.
Speaker 2: The FBI had given him complete and total immunity in
Speaker 2: exchange for the testimony he gave that put three other
Speaker 2: men in prison for a murder that he at the
Speaker 2: very least participated in. The gun he gave his FBI
Speaker 2: handler the night of the murder was never examined as evidence,
Speaker 2: and the FBI had every reason to cover up the
Speaker 2: possibility that they'd paid thousands of dollars to a murderer.
Speaker 2: It wouldn't be the first time they'd done it or
Speaker 2: the last. So to distract from the involvement of a
Speaker 2: federal informant with a documented history of violence, the FBI
Speaker 2: dragged the.
Speaker 1: Victim through the mud.
Speaker 2: They played up her arest record and called her a
Speaker 2: terrible mother. They drew up an FBI memo claiming that
Speaker 2: an examination of the body revealed needle marks on her arms,
Speaker 2: and then they intentionally leaked the fake memo to the press,
Speaker 2: never mind that the actual autopsy report made no such
Speaker 2: finding and there were no drugs in her system. Her
Speaker 2: husband and children were harassed, a cross was burned in
Speaker 2: their yard in Detroit the week of her funeral, and
Speaker 2: they reported receiving obscene phone calls for months. If Hoover
Speaker 2: had his way, Biola Luzo would not be memorialized as
Speaker 2: a loving mother who felt moved to fight for civil rights.
Speaker 2: She'd be shamed as a lunatic who abandoned her children,
Speaker 2: shot up heroin, and had adulterous inner racial sex, and
Speaker 2: then was quickly forgotten. The clan killed Biola Luzo, but
Speaker 2: the FBI tried to kill her memory. And it's really
Speaker 2: the same as it ever was. As I'm writing this,
Speaker 2: I just saw New York Times headline from today, Monday,
Speaker 2: January twelfth, twenty twenty six. FBI inquiry into Ice shooting
Speaker 2: is examining victims possible ties to activist groups. They're investigating
Speaker 2: the victim because they already know everything they need to
Speaker 2: know about the killer.
Speaker 1: He's on their payroll. If you've been to a.
Speaker 2: Protest anytime in the last fifty years or so you've
Speaker 2: heard this chant.
Speaker 7: Think cop, thinkin non im, thinkin hend then hard.
Speaker 2: I think plank no man. Cops and clan go hand
Speaker 2: in hand. The earliest mention of that exact phrase being
Speaker 2: used as a protest chant that I could find was
Speaker 2: in a newspaper article from nineteen seventy six. But I
Speaker 2: really only spend a few minutes looking, and I'm certain
Speaker 2: it predates the late seventies. I'm sure it was something
Speaker 2: Black Southerners said quietly to one another for a long
Speaker 2: time before it was ever chanted at a protest.
Speaker 1: But what does it mean.
Speaker 2: I've heard it chanted at local cops, sheriff's deputies, state police,
Speaker 2: National guardsmen. I've heard it at clan rallies and school
Speaker 2: board meetings. I've shouted at myself with lips that burned
Speaker 2: with the taste of pepper spray.
Speaker 1: But what does it mean?
Speaker 2: I never really gave it a lot of thought. It's
Speaker 2: just one of those things that makes perfect sense to
Speaker 2: me and doesn't merit further consideration. But it could mean
Speaker 2: a lot of things.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's just an.
Speaker 2: Abbreviated way of expressing that law enforcement and organized white
Speaker 2: supremacist groups that engage in extra judicial violence exist along
Speaker 2: a spectrum of racial violence, meeting out that violence on
Speaker 2: subjugated groups with varying degrees of legitimacy and public approval.
Speaker 2: Or maybe it's meant to be commentary on the historical
Speaker 2: evolution of modern policing and the way that it grew
Speaker 2: out of Antebellum slave patrols, thus quite literally positioning cops
Speaker 2: as the modern successor to groups of violent racist vigilantes.
Speaker 2: I've been an actual clan rallies where it seems to
Speaker 2: be a cry of frustration that the police are clearly
Speaker 2: serving and protecting the interests of the actual clan at
Speaker 2: the expense of the community, and in ways that result
Speaker 2: in violence towards those who oppose the clan. Or maybe
Speaker 2: it's even further removed from the words themselves. Maybe it's
Speaker 2: a metonomy where cops refers to the state in general,
Speaker 2: and clan is any sort of extra judicial enforcement mechanism
Speaker 2: of the darker whims of that state. That's probably broad
Speaker 2: enough to hold all possible meanings. Maybe it's all of
Speaker 2: those things or none of them, but it doesn't actually
Speaker 2: matter because it's literal. It's not a metaphor, it's not hyperbole.
Speaker 2: It's not taking liberties. It's not a joke. It is
Speaker 2: the literal, factual, historical truth. Cops and clan do indeed
Speaker 2: go hand in hand. When Caesar cow said, James Waller,
Speaker 2: William Evan Simpson, Sandra Nilie Smith, and Michael Nathan were
Speaker 2: gunned down in the streets of Greensboro, North Carolina, there
Speaker 2: was a police informant in the car with the klansmen
Speaker 2: and the Nazis who shot them, And there was a
Speaker 2: police informant at the clan meetings where their murders were planned.
Speaker 2: When Yola Luza was shot in the head in Selma, Alabama,
Speaker 2: there was an FBI informant in the car with the
Speaker 2: clansmen who killed her. When the Birmingham police found out
Speaker 2: the Freedom Riders were coming in nineteen sixty one, they
Speaker 2: conspired with the clan to attack buses full of civil
Speaker 2: rights activists. Bull Connor told the clan they had fifteen
Speaker 2: minutes of free reign. A police captain told the clansmen
Speaker 2: on the FBI's payroll, you can beat them, bomb them,
Speaker 2: Maimon kill I don't give a shit.
Speaker 1: There will be absolutely no arrests.
Speaker 2: And the FBI knew, and the FBI didn't stop it.
Speaker 2: They didn't warn anyone about what was coming. When the
Speaker 2: mob of klansmen firebombed those buses and beat the fleeing
Speaker 2: passengers with pipes and bats and chains, it was the
Speaker 2: FBI informant himself leading the mob. When Michael Schwerner, James Cheney,
Speaker 2: Andrew Goodman were killed in Nishaba County, Mississippi, it was
Speaker 2: a lynching coordinated and planned by local police who discussed
Speaker 2: the plan not at their police station, but at their
Speaker 2: clan meetings. When the clansmen who murdered four little girls
Speaker 2: in a church basement in Birmingham was finally prosecuted, he
Speaker 2: went to his grave insisting that he'd only purchased that
Speaker 2: dynamite and it was his friend, the FBI informant, who
Speaker 2: placed it beneath the steps at the sixteenth Street Baptist Church,
Speaker 2: killing Addie May Collin, Cynthia Wesley, Carroll Robertson, and Carroll
Speaker 2: to niece McNair. He was never made to answer for
Speaker 2: that accusation, but he was the same FBI informant who
Speaker 2: later admitted to murdering a black man whose name he
Speaker 2: couldn't even remember. When klansmen rioted in Myrtle Beach in
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty, and one of their own was killed by
Speaker 2: friendly fire as that crowd of masked races fired hundreds
Speaker 2: of bullets into a black owned bar. They took their
Speaker 2: fallen brother to the hospital, and when they stripped the
Speaker 2: white robe off his dead body, he was still wearing
Speaker 2: his policeman's uniform underneath. For decades, the federal government paid
Speaker 2: klansmen to do their dirty work. They've used klansmen and
Speaker 2: neo Nazis and right wing extremists of all stripes to
Speaker 2: disrupt progressive movements. They've ignored credible intelligence about murders and
Speaker 2: bombings they could have stopped, and they looked the other
Speaker 2: way when their informants participated in violence against people they
Speaker 2: thought posed a greater threat to the status quo. And
Speaker 2: they've always thought liberty, equality, freedom, tolerance, diversity, and civil
Speaker 2: rights were far more threatening than bombs in church basements
Speaker 2: and lynchings on dark, abandoned highways.
Speaker 1: The comps the clan have.
Speaker 2: Always worked hand in hand to share the burden of
Speaker 2: violently enforcing white supremacy, whether the klansman's FBI checks or
Speaker 2: off the books, or the fascist foot soldier is getting
Speaker 2: a W two from DHS. The violence is the same,
Speaker 2: the goal is the same. They're doing what they've always done,
Speaker 2: and so will we. I don't know exactly how long
Speaker 2: this moral arc of the universe is, but never forget
Speaker 2: you aren't the first to throw your shoulder into it,
Speaker 2: determined to see it bent towards justice.
Speaker 1: Read Little Guys as a production of Cool Zone Media
Speaker 1: and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me Molly Conger.
Speaker 1: Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
Speaker 1: show is at a by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
Speaker 1: The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
Speaker 2: You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at
Speaker 2: gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
Speaker 2: probably won't answer.
Speaker 1: It's nothing personal.
Speaker 2: You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
Speaker 2: listeners on the Weird Little Guys Subreddy. Just don't post
Speaker 2: anything that's going to make you one of my Weird
Speaker 2: Little Guys.