Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff?
Speaker 2: The podcast that it was in reruns during the holidays,
Speaker 2: But I bet you'll still like this episode even though
Speaker 2: I recorded a little while ago, because I think that
Speaker 2: the way that people look back and think about the
Speaker 2: old civil rights movement, like, wow, everything was so peaceful
Speaker 2: all the time, Well it's not true. I mean, some
Speaker 2: stuff was peaceful, and nonviolence is an important part of
Speaker 2: political strategy, but it's certainly not the only thing that happened.
Speaker 2: And so we're going to do a rerun about the
Speaker 2: armed civil rights movement. I hope you enjoy it. Hello,
Speaker 2: and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. It's
Speaker 2: a podcast. It does what it says in the title.
Speaker 2: I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is
Speaker 2: my guest, Elminique, who is a pop cultural critic and
Speaker 2: seems to do so much of everything that I have
Speaker 2: a hard time pinning her down. Joell, how are you?
Speaker 3: I'm good.
Speaker 4: You know, it's a gray morning, but in LA that
Speaker 4: counts as weather, so I'm really trying to vibe with it.
Speaker 4: You know, I got my hot tea, I'm ready to
Speaker 4: go learn about some nice people.
Speaker 2: Is it below seventy degrees there, it.
Speaker 4: Is below seventy degrees here. He's got sweaters on. I'm
Speaker 4: under a blanket currently.
Speaker 2: Oh that's nice, it's lovely. I'm in the mountains in
Speaker 2: my heat is broken. Oh no, Margaret, it's okay. I
Speaker 2: have like six backup heats horses because I'm like that.
Speaker 3: That's good. That's good.
Speaker 4: As someone who came from a snowy climate, you need
Speaker 4: multiple sources of heat at all times just in case.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, absolutely, Like my house is like like right now,
Speaker 2: I'm running electric heat space heaters, and if that breaks,
Speaker 2: I have a wood burning stove. Like it's it's fine. Yes, anyway, Joe,
Speaker 2: What's what's your favorite of your many jobs besides being
Speaker 2: a guest on the Poole.
Speaker 3: That is a really tough question.
Speaker 4: Probably like hosting live events is my favorite because it's
Speaker 4: like all the aspects of performance, but you get to
Speaker 4: like perform your ultimate self, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: It's just as an extroverted introvert, Like getting to perform
Speaker 4: all the extrovertedness, you know, for a crowd is a
Speaker 4: lot of fun and you get to, you know, get
Speaker 4: their feelings and maybe you make your guest cry, but
Speaker 4: in like a good way, you know, and like all
Speaker 4: that energy is really lovely. And then I would say
Speaker 4: writing after that is definitely a favorite.
Speaker 2: Okay, Okay, that makes a lot of sense to me.
Speaker 2: I really like performing and then going and hiding. That's like,
Speaker 2: oh no, for.
Speaker 4: Sure afterwards, Please don't talk to me. I was on
Speaker 4: set recently and we recorded for like four hours straight
Speaker 4: and then we broke for lunch and I did not
Speaker 4: leave the set and they're like.
Speaker 3: Are you hungry out? I's like no, They're like, are
Speaker 3: you okay?
Speaker 4: And I was like I just need to decompress and
Speaker 4: not talk to anyone for whatever long we have until
Speaker 4: the next take, Like I just cannot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So totally, totally, yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. We're also joined as always by our producer Sophie.
Speaker 5: Hi, Sophie, Hey, Margaret, how are you?
Speaker 2: Oh wait, that's not Sophie. Is that Sophie. It's Ian.
Speaker 5: Yes, I'm finally on the podcast.
Speaker 2: I Yeah. Ian is our audio engineer and also today
Speaker 2: our producer. How are you doing, Ian?
Speaker 5: I'm doing pretty good.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's a nice cozy, cool morning, you know, got my
Speaker 1: sweatshirt on, ready to do some podcasts and all right.
Speaker 2: So on this show we talk about cool people in history,
Speaker 2: especially cool movements, cool complicated networks of cool people who
Speaker 2: actually usually pretty complicated. But this week, well, actually this
Speaker 2: week's no different. I'm really excited to talk this week
Speaker 2: about the non violent civil rights movement the nineteen fifties
Speaker 2: and the sixties in the US South and along the way.
Speaker 2: I'm going to talk about the people who protected the
Speaker 2: non violent civil rights movement with the firearms and stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yes, they won't get violent, but we sure as
Speaker 4: fuck will. Those are my favorite people.
Speaker 2: Yep, that is today's It is exactly the people who said, oh,
Speaker 2: that's great, you're non violent. I go to protect you.
Speaker 2: I'm not nonviolent.
Speaker 5: You always need somebody who's ready to do some dirty work.
Speaker 2: Always, absolutely exactly. And I think that they don't get
Speaker 2: enough credit. And so we're going to talk about the
Speaker 2: armed wing of the non violent civil rights movement, the
Speaker 2: paradox that isn't half as much of a paradox as
Speaker 2: it might seem. We're going to talk about the Deacons
Speaker 2: for Defense and Justice, which was a non ideological but
Speaker 2: well organized collection of black people who defended civil rights campaigners.
Speaker 2: We're going to talk about the North Carolina branch of
Speaker 2: the NAACP that armed itself, and we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about all the unaffiliated groups and individuals who relied, often
Speaker 2: quite effectively on their capacity to defend themselves in the
Speaker 2: struggle for self determination and all that kind of stuff
Speaker 2: because we've been doing I mean, as anyone who's listening
Speaker 2: to the podcast, we've been covering like the Klan a
Speaker 2: bunch recently and not in the We've been talking about
Speaker 2: people who fight the Klan, not the.
Speaker 4: Good people in the clan, but yeah, yeah, people who
Speaker 4: fought the Klan, I got.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. So you all will be shocked to know this.
Speaker 2: There's been a concerted effort in the United States of
Speaker 2: America by white supremacy to disenfranchise black people.
Speaker 5: You know, you don't say really, yeah, no.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I only learned this recently.
Speaker 5: Never mind.
Speaker 2: And wherever there's oppression, there's resistance to oppression, which is
Speaker 2: the core concept of this show. And so I'm going
Speaker 2: to frame the civil rights movements of the nineteen fifties
Speaker 2: of the seventies, and the same way that I see
Speaker 2: it framed by a lot of historians and people who
Speaker 2: are there at the time, has been kind of made
Speaker 2: up of two general parts. You've got the sort of
Speaker 2: civil rights era of the nineteen fifties and sixties with
Speaker 2: a focus on non violence and sit ins and registration
Speaker 2: drives kind of most famously for my public school education,
Speaker 2: Martin Luther King, I have a dream all of that stuff.
Speaker 2: And then you've got the Black Power era of the
Speaker 2: late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, best remembered these
Speaker 2: days because of the work of the Black Panthers. So
Speaker 2: that's the classification that I've been presented with is, you know,
Speaker 2: every dichotomy is false, right, And we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about some of the ways that all these things blur together.
Speaker 2: But so people talk about it. They talk about the
Speaker 2: Civil rights era as like pacifist reformism, and the Black
Speaker 2: Power era as like all armed revolutionaries. More and more
Speaker 2: people are starting to talk about what people have been
Speaker 2: talking about a lot of along the way, But more
Speaker 2: and more and more media is paying attention to the
Speaker 2: Black Panthers, for example, also had a lot of mutual
Speaker 2: laid programs and breakfast programs and all of these other
Speaker 2: things that are part of what made them so dangerous
Speaker 2: and powerful. Yeah, and one day we're going to get
Speaker 2: into all that, but today we're going to talk about
Speaker 2: kind of the inverse. We're going to talk about how
Speaker 2: in the civil rights era it's more complicated than it's
Speaker 2: sometimes presented.
Speaker 4: When you guys do the breakfast program for the Black Panthers,
Speaker 4: have me back, and I'll try to get some stories
Speaker 4: from my dad, who's a direct beneficiary of that program
Speaker 4: on the South Side of Chicago when he was growing up.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, that would be amazing. Yeah, And that's
Speaker 2: actually one of the kind of things that's interesting is
Speaker 2: I keep like, on today's episode, I'll like look through
Speaker 2: this and I like start writing like so and so was,
Speaker 2: and then I'm like, wait, no, is uh still alive?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, these people who are fighting in the fifties, sixties, seventies,
Speaker 2: many of them are still with us, which is fucking cool.
Speaker 2: So in previous episodes, especially last week's episodes, we talked
Speaker 2: about that most famous of white supremacist organizations, the ku
Speaker 2: Klux Klinn, the and we're going to go through the
Speaker 2: super basics of them, the speed run of these fucking
Speaker 2: worst people. And well, there's so many worst people in
Speaker 2: US history, but these are some of the worst people
Speaker 2: in US history. Okay, so there's like three or four
Speaker 2: basic distinct phases of the Klin. They were founded because
Speaker 2: of frat club for piece of shit white Southern racists.
Speaker 2: In the wake of the Civil War. They decided to
Speaker 2: rely on raw terror and violence in order to fight
Speaker 2: for white supremacy after having lost a war. This fell
Speaker 2: apart in eighteen seventy one because the federal government was like,
Speaker 2: you actually can't do that, and then white racists figured
Speaker 2: out a better strategy. Instead of nighttime terror was legal
Speaker 2: disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow laws that fucked everything up
Speaker 2: really bad. That's Klan number one, and then you got
Speaker 2: Clan number two. This is the weird multi level marketing
Speaker 2: scheme invented in nineteen fifteen by some people who are
Speaker 2: basically cosplaying the old Clan. It was this huge social
Speaker 2: club for white Protestants that became the armed wing of
Speaker 2: the Prohibition movement as well as the white supremacy movement.
Speaker 2: And they had this whole anti immigrant thing that not
Speaker 2: only had them fighting against black people, but also Jews
Speaker 2: and white Catholics and basically immigrants from anywhere. They just
Speaker 2: fucking hated everyone. Last week we talked about some of
Speaker 2: the organizations that worked to stop them. They fell apart
Speaker 2: because like every financial scam, they fell into bitter infighting
Speaker 2: and disgrace and their property was repossessed and all that shit.
Speaker 2: By the end of the nineteen thirties or the Begain nineteen.
Speaker 3: Thirty time time that was I know.
Speaker 2: That, I know, I want more. Well, we're starting to
Speaker 2: see all of these modern white supremacist movements fall apart
Speaker 2: into weird infighting.
Speaker 3: And it's been really lovely.
Speaker 4: Every time I get a little update like so and
Speaker 4: SOEs go into prison, I'm like, yeah, small.
Speaker 2: Victories totally or the like I wish I had the
Speaker 2: notes in front of me about this, but there's like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, like ten years ago it like went
Speaker 2: around the anti fascist thing that some of the Nazi
Speaker 2: clan member people or whatever, like one of them killed
Speaker 2: the other because they like there was like some like
Speaker 2: incestuous like cheating that happened, Like.
Speaker 4: They're taking themselves down even yes, yeah, all the insurrectionist
Speaker 4: who posted to Instagram, it's like, oh, you made everybody's
Speaker 4: job so much easier.
Speaker 2: I know you, I know. And so that's kind of
Speaker 2: how the nineteen twenties, clan went down even though there
Speaker 2: was they were five millions strong fucking peak. Eventually everyone
Speaker 2: realized that there were a bunch of like just random
Speaker 2: pieces of shit, and people started distancing themselves from them.
Speaker 2: But the fucking clan is like a stupid racist hydra.
Speaker 2: And the third Clan popped back up pretty soon after
Speaker 2: the second Clan went down, and this time they got
Speaker 2: back to their roots, which was terrorizing black people in
Speaker 2: order to maintain white supremacy. And you know, this is
Speaker 2: kind of back when you people were like really blatant
Speaker 2: about being white supremacists. Actually, we're getting back there, We're
Speaker 2: getting back to that point. But they never reached quite
Speaker 2: the numbers of the Second Klan because they were less
Speaker 2: of like a popular organization, right, and they were more
Speaker 2: just like just fucking terrorists, right. They were really die hard.
Speaker 2: They were decentralized, and they got an awful lot of
Speaker 2: terrorism done. They also there's like arguments to be made
Speaker 2: about whether they infiltrated the police or whether they just
Speaker 2: came out of the police, you know.
Speaker 4: Mmmmm yeah, yeah, I'm on team the slave catchers into police.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think I think most people would agree
Speaker 1: with that.
Speaker 4: As we just look at their badges, it's who's happening
Speaker 4: and the current forever police lineage of just you know,
Speaker 4: active lynching. Yeah, I think they're one in the same.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So third clan has a lot of cops in it,
Speaker 2: or the cops have a lot of clan in it
Speaker 2: or whatever. We're just using synonyms. But wherever there's the
Speaker 2: bad people, there's the people trying to stop the bad people.
Speaker 2: And we're going to talk about some of those cool people.
Speaker 2: And we're going to talk today. We're going to talk
Speaker 2: a lot about some of the nonviolent organizations, right and
Speaker 2: then on Wednesday we're going to come back and talk
Speaker 2: more about a lot of the organizations that defended them,
Speaker 2: even though there was a whole decentralized defense of them
Speaker 2: that happened before that. And so we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about two of the major nonviolent organizations today. We're going
Speaker 2: to talk about CORE and we're going to talk about SNICK.
Speaker 2: There's like a bunch more than this. SCLC will come
Speaker 2: into it a lot, the NAACP will come into it
Speaker 2: a lot. But for what we're going to talk about
Speaker 2: Core and SNICK kind of where it's at the oldest
Speaker 2: one of these groups is the Congress of Racial Equality,
Speaker 2: just founded in nineteen forty two. It grew out of
Speaker 2: the Christian pacifist movement, especially a group called the Fellowship
Speaker 2: of Reconciliation. Only about a third of its founders were black.
Speaker 2: I was founded by almost half women, which for the
Speaker 2: time is better than some of the other people around.
Speaker 2: You know, a lot of the founders of this were
Speaker 2: ministers and of various Christian denominations, and that is actually
Speaker 2: something that they like. The multi faith getting together, the
Speaker 2: groups that got together a lot of different faith based
Speaker 2: organizations to do a lot of good work is like
Speaker 2: something that I think sometimes is left out of the
Speaker 2: more radical understandings of all of this history. Basically, Core
Speaker 2: started as a we like what Gandhi is doing in India,
Speaker 2: We're going to do that for anti racism in the US.
Speaker 2: And they got together. They fought against Jim Crow laws,
Speaker 2: housing discrimination, voting rights, all that stuff. They were pretty cool.
Speaker 2: They have complicated stuff that we'll get into, but you
Speaker 2: know everyone does. In nineteen forty seven, Corps sent sixteen people,
Speaker 2: eight white, eight black on a journey of reconciliation on buses,
Speaker 2: and this was kind of the first Freedom Ride about
Speaker 2: fifteen years before the freedom rides became more of a thing.
Speaker 2: And this first journey was a mix of folks that
Speaker 2: had socialists, that had religious leaders at Pacifist, it has musicians,
Speaker 2: it had just like people who wanted the world to
Speaker 2: be better, who were like, fuck it, let's go do
Speaker 2: this weird, dangerous thing where the government had just passed
Speaker 2: a law banning segregation on interstate travel, and so basically
Speaker 2: they were like, all right, we're going to go test that.
Speaker 2: We're going to go said people like basically white and
Speaker 2: black people sitting next to each other on the bus
Speaker 2: or sometimes the white people sat in the back of
Speaker 2: the bus and black people sat in the front of
Speaker 2: the bus. All this shit, and they just basically went
Speaker 2: around the South, the kind of near South, doing this.
Speaker 2: It didn't go smoothly. I don't know whether that'll be
Speaker 2: shocking to hear. It didn't take long before four of
Speaker 2: them were arrested. I mean, this is okay. This is
Speaker 2: like one of the things that's so interesting me about
Speaker 2: this right is like so much of the Civil rights
Speaker 2: era stuff was basically like the federal government like would
Speaker 2: pass a law and then people would be like, let's
Speaker 2: go see if this law is real, and then they
Speaker 2: would find out that the law is not real because
Speaker 2: the local police everywhere they go, would you know. So basically,
Speaker 2: two black men were arrested for not moving to the
Speaker 2: back of the bus, and two white men were arrested
Speaker 2: for defending the two black men who would not move
Speaker 2: to the back of the bus. All four of them
Speaker 2: ended up on segregated chain gangs. The black men got
Speaker 2: thirty days and the white men got ninety days. And
Speaker 2: specifically because the racist judge was so mad at the
Speaker 2: white people for betraying whiteness.
Speaker 4: Wow, wow, that is the deep de deep seated hate.
Speaker 4: Because it's one thing to be like, I hate black
Speaker 4: people and I punish them more harshly. It's another thing
Speaker 4: to be like and if you're a white person, I'll
Speaker 4: punish you three times. Is hard because screw you. He's
Speaker 4: including my agenda, I guess. Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like overall, like clearly including in the civil rights movement,
Speaker 2: Like it was much harder for black folks as part
Speaker 2: of the civil rights movement the wife than the like
Speaker 2: white allies and stuff. But here and there you would
Speaker 2: run across this kind of shit where like the clan
Speaker 2: would go around being like, hey, any white people, if
Speaker 2: you show up and support this, we're gonna murder you,
Speaker 2: you know, or or whatever like that. That kind of
Speaker 2: shit happened a lot. We're gonna get to some of that.
Speaker 2: So the judge, I'm not going to read the quote
Speaker 2: of what I literally can't the judge said a lot
Speaker 2: of racist shit in the sentence scene.
Speaker 3: But it and I'll do an interpretation of the No.
Speaker 5: No, I didn't.
Speaker 2: I didn't even copy and paste it in my script.
Speaker 2: It's just bad. It's just bad shit, you know.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 2: But in it he specifically called the two white men
Speaker 2: who I belil leave were not Jewish, referred to them
Speaker 2: as white Jews from or sorry, referred to them as
Speaker 2: Jews from New York.
Speaker 4: Okay, so not even doing his research, just just out
Speaker 4: here being like if they held the blacks, they must
Speaker 4: be Jews.
Speaker 5: Just lumping all that hate together.
Speaker 2: Just yeah, it's like that, like it's like the coastal
Speaker 2: elites coming here and ruining everything. You must basically be
Speaker 2: the Jews from New York and the like Jewish agenda
Speaker 2: to desegregate the United States. And it was just a
Speaker 2: slur I think for him, like I don't think he
Speaker 2: thought they were Jews. I think it's possible, and I
Speaker 2: couldn't the books I was reading about it didn't like
Speaker 2: name which of the white people were the people who
Speaker 2: got arrested. But it's completely possible they were like Christian ministers,
Speaker 2: you know, so they get arrested. They spent some time
Speaker 2: on the chain gang. And one thing of note, they
Speaker 2: intentionally went to the Near South and not the Deep South,
Speaker 2: because basically they were like, if we do this in
Speaker 2: the Deep South, we're all going to die. And it
Speaker 2: took a special kind of courage to go to the
Speaker 2: Deep South and desegregate and enroll voters, and or be
Speaker 2: from the Deep South and desegregate and enroll voters. And
Speaker 2: it's a kind of a courage that many of them found,
Speaker 2: which we'll get to later. One of the black men
Speaker 2: who serve some time on a chain gang is part
Speaker 2: of the result of this journey for desegregation. Was a
Speaker 2: guy I want to take a closer look at because
Speaker 2: he rules, or at least he did a lot of
Speaker 2: really cool stuff. Everyone's complicated. His name was Bayard Rustin.
Speaker 2: I know, it's like I'm like, yeah, this guy's awesome,
Speaker 2: and you get to like part of the like descriptions
Speaker 2: of him that you find, You're like, oh, well, you know, yeah,
Speaker 2: but like whatever womst amongst it? Like okay, So Bayard
Speaker 2: Rusting he was a black gay Quaker.
Speaker 3: Amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this this is this recurring thing on this
Speaker 2: show where somehow Quakers end up in every episode. I've
Speaker 2: never done an episode on the Quakers. They're everywhere.
Speaker 4: The Quaker is really rocked with black people, Like whar
Speaker 4: They were like, no, we're not down with this slavery thing,
Speaker 4: and we will help for you where we can't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, Like I keep running across being like and
Speaker 2: then the people who organized to get black people out
Speaker 2: of slavery were black people and some white Quakers, you know,
Speaker 2: over and over again. So Bayard Rustin he was deeply
Speaker 2: involved in Core from its founding and he was everywhere.
Speaker 2: He did everything mostly from behind the scenes because people
Speaker 2: were afraid that his homosexuality or socialism would make their
Speaker 2: movements look bad. And I want to talk about him
Speaker 2: really quick. He was kicked out of his university for
Speaker 2: organizing a strike. He sang tenor on Broadway in the choir.
Speaker 2: He sang spirituals on a ton of records. He joined
Speaker 2: the Communist Party for a little while, and then he
Speaker 2: realized that Stalin was a fuck, and so he quit
Speaker 2: the Communist Party and he became a socialist. Specifically, he
Speaker 2: was in the Communist Party until the USSR ordered the
Speaker 2: Communist Party in the US to stop working for civil
Speaker 2: rights and start working to try and get the US
Speaker 2: to join World War two. He organized a march on
Speaker 2: Washington for the desegregation of the armed forces. He went
Speaker 2: to California to fight against the racist in prison of
Speaker 2: the imprisonment of the Japanese during the war. He would like,
Speaker 2: go and try and make sure that people could hold
Speaker 2: onto their property and shit like that while they were
Speaker 2: being taken into the fucking concentration camps that the US had,
Speaker 2: because US is deeply racist. He was arrested nineteen forty
Speaker 2: two for refusing to give up his seat on a
Speaker 2: bus and that was the moment, I mean, he was
Speaker 2: arrested for being black on a bus, and that was
Speaker 2: the moment where he was like, from now on, I'm
Speaker 2: not going to hide the fact that I'm gay. Because
Speaker 2: he basically was just like, oh, I'm with the biggots.
Speaker 2: It's hard for me to like totally explain this epiphany
Speaker 2: that he had, but he talks about it and I
Speaker 2: should have put the quote in and I didn't, And
Speaker 2: he got arrested again and again for basically fighting everything bad.
Speaker 2: He fought against the colonization of India by the British.
Speaker 2: One time restled for being gay. Like one time he
Speaker 2: got a rested for rookie up with two dudes in
Speaker 2: a car. So he's clearly I know, yes.
Speaker 3: My polyamorous king, I was with that on him.
Speaker 4: I don't know if he was about that life, but
Speaker 4: if you're doing two dudes in a car at the
Speaker 4: same time, I love that for him, I know.
Speaker 2: Not talked about part of the civil rights movement like anyway.
Speaker 2: He co wrote an influential, influential passfist paper in the
Speaker 2: nineteen fifties called Speak Truth the Power, but in the
Speaker 2: end he kept his name off of it. He chose
Speaker 2: to keep his name off of it because he didn't
Speaker 2: want to sexuality discredit the paper. And he worked with
Speaker 2: Martin Luther King Junior. It was probably him that who
Speaker 2: convinced MLKA to stop carrying a handgun for self defense,
Speaker 2: which goes against the spirit of the rest of today's topic.
Speaker 5: But whatever.
Speaker 2: Everyone's different has different ideas. You know. He was heavily
Speaker 2: involved in organizing the nineteen sixty three March on Washington,
Speaker 2: the one with the I Have a Dream speech. He
Speaker 2: would have been called the director of the March because
Speaker 2: he did all of the director of the March stuff,
Speaker 2: but he was a gay socialist, so they didn't want
Speaker 2: to put his name on it. And like the fucking
Speaker 2: right wing dragged up all kinds of shit, just like
Speaker 2: the same way that people would.
Speaker 5: Do it on Twitter now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he actually was like one of the staunchests,
Speaker 2: so basically they're like, oh, this communist. He was one
Speaker 2: of the staunchest anti USSR US socialists to the point
Speaker 2: where he actually kind of verged into some right wing positions,
Speaker 2: like he supported the war in Vietnam, for example, because
Speaker 2: he hated the USSR, so he like supported the Cold War.
Speaker 2: This is why I was the beginning where I was like,
Speaker 2: I gets interesting.
Speaker 3: The complex time, and when you're yeah, you know.
Speaker 4: What I mean, Like American wars are off started because like, oh,
Speaker 4: someone is doing something terrible, and then we really go
Speaker 4: in and do horrible shit, and we're.
Speaker 3: Like, what we had to stop. This guy had to
Speaker 3: meet the mother that was so oh gosh, Yeah, you're right,
Speaker 3: MESSI Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so he gets called a conservative socialist, and he's
Speaker 2: the only term I've actually personally run us. Anyone get
Speaker 2: called a conservative socialist, and I don't really understand it yet.
Speaker 2: Funny in the eighties, as most people would be wont
Speaker 2: to do as an out gay person, he turned to
Speaker 2: gay activism in the nineteen eighties. He died in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty seven, not of HIV AIDS. He died of being old.
Speaker 3: He was born in nineteen twelve.
Speaker 2: Yeah, included a good long life, Yeah exactly. He did
Speaker 2: fine anyway, As just an aside, because I find him
Speaker 2: really interesting because people don't talk about the gay, polyamorous
Speaker 2: who fucking like organize the March on Washington, you know. Anyway,
Speaker 2: he was on a chain gang for a while as
Speaker 2: part of his work for CORE. So that's Core. What
Speaker 2: a hero, I know, And I'm sure Core could be
Speaker 2: its own two part episode. But they're going to come
Speaker 2: in and out of today of this week's Now you've
Speaker 2: got Snick. Snick is the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which
Speaker 2: is six times more radical than you might guess with
Speaker 2: a name like that. It was black youth formed and
Speaker 2: black youth led, so didn't have kind of that sort
Speaker 2: of problem that Core actually ended up dealing with fairly
Speaker 2: effectively in the mid to late sixties, where they were
Speaker 2: a little bit too white white lead, you know, for
Speaker 2: a lot of a lot of what they're doing and
Speaker 2: snick comes out of. In nineteen sixty, there were four
Speaker 2: black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, who were like, you
Speaker 2: know what, fuck all this shit, fuck this fucking white
Speaker 2: supremacist society we live in. They were freshmen at the
Speaker 2: North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, which is an
Speaker 2: HBCU historically black college or university. One of these freshmen
Speaker 2: went and tried to buy a hot dog at the
Speaker 2: Greyhound station and he was denied because he was black.
Speaker 2: Because the world's full of racism.
Speaker 3: I can't get a hot dog.
Speaker 4: Bro. Yeah, oh my guy heard die here with my
Speaker 4: ancest we had to deal with. I'm like, that is
Speaker 4: exhausting hot with my green American.
Speaker 2: Cat, there's all that shit like people talk about like
Speaker 2: what my money's no good here or whatever, like, is
Speaker 2: like this thing that still happens, Yes, for sure, and
Speaker 2: and yeah, though, like literally can't buy a fucking hot
Speaker 2: dog something so simple.
Speaker 4: We don't want to make your gay wedding cake, even
Speaker 4: though our whole business is making cakes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. Yeah, Somewhere there's a heterosexual couple named Sam
Speaker 2: and Chris who can't get a wedding cake. You know,
Speaker 2: we're like, what the hell?
Speaker 3: I move out of Indiana? Yeah.
Speaker 1: Crazy.
Speaker 2: So after getting refused service for a hot dog, they
Speaker 2: meet up back in one of their dorm rooms and
Speaker 2: they're like, all right, what the fuck do we do? Right?
Speaker 2: And there been some sit ins before where people just
Speaker 2: go and show up and be like, you know what,
Speaker 2: fuck this, I'm gonna be here whether you want me
Speaker 2: here or not. Going back to nineteen thirty nine with
Speaker 2: the Alexandria Library sit in, a lot of those cit
Speaker 2: ins had been successful, but they've been very scattershot up
Speaker 2: to that point. It'd be like every couple of years
Speaker 2: someone would do a sit in. It's an earlier one
Speaker 2: that we're gonna talk about later because I'm really good
Speaker 2: at chronology. And so the four freshmen they're like, all right,
Speaker 2: we're going to do a sit in at the FW
Speaker 2: Woolworth Company's store, which is a big department store that
Speaker 2: also was a lunch counter, and you can go buy
Speaker 2: stuff there if you're black, but you can't go to
Speaker 2: the lunch counter if you're black. So they go in,
Speaker 2: they asked to be served, and then they refused to
Speaker 2: leave when they were fused service. February first, nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: they ordered coffee and donuts, and they got both criticism
Speaker 2: and support from both white and black folks at the store, Like, obviously,
Speaker 2: most of the white people were like, fuck, you were
Speaker 2: not serving you. One white woman was like, oh, this
Speaker 2: is great what you're doing, but didn't like do anything
Speaker 2: about it. And some of the black folks were like,
Speaker 2: oh please, oh god, this is going to go really badly.
Speaker 4: I would not like to be beaten with a police
Speaker 4: baton today. You're making that probability increase.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I get it.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They weren't arrested, but they weren't served. They waited until
Speaker 2: the store closed, and they left and the store closed,
Speaker 2: and they showed up again the next day with more
Speaker 2: than twenty black students from the university. They were a
Speaker 2: few service, but they weren't arrested. They hung out all
Speaker 2: day and did their school work at the store. The
Speaker 2: next day they had sixty people, including some high school
Speaker 2: students who joined them, and this time some people from
Speaker 2: the fucking clan showed up to keep an eye on
Speaker 2: it all or whatever, right, but they didn't do shit
Speaker 2: because there was fucking sixty people there. Plant the clan
Speaker 2: is cowards is one of the main takeaways of all
Speaker 2: this research.
Speaker 3: Oh, for sure, you'd have to be.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no exactly. It's like fascism and it's.
Speaker 5: Wear masks and they only like unfair fights, so that
Speaker 5: that sounds about right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the fact that they only like unfair fights is
Speaker 2: something that we all need to fucking remember. So Day four,
Speaker 2: February fourth, there's three hundred students. They fill the entire
Speaker 2: lunch counter, including and this time a tiny handful of
Speaker 2: some white folks and white women from a nearby university
Speaker 2: show up to support as well. Day five they get
Speaker 2: their first real counter protesters, about fifty white men, three
Speaker 2: of whom were arrested. Day six, they had one thousand
Speaker 2: fucking people. They entirely filled the store. Yeah, like shit
Speaker 2: snowballs sometimes, you know. They entirely fill the store and
Speaker 2: several nearby other segregated stores. By day eight, the cit
Speaker 2: In movement spreads across the South. Within months, there's sit
Speaker 2: ins in fifty five different cities, and on July twenty fifth,
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty, boycotts had cut their income by a third
Speaker 2: and the Woolworth store world all started quietly desegregated.
Speaker 4: It's lunch counter, Yes, it's bullying where exactly.
Speaker 2: So the students they're like, all right, we should we
Speaker 2: should get organized, right, because that's that's in my mind
Speaker 2: where the magic happens is it starts with something that
Speaker 2: is spontaneous and then you figure out how to like
Speaker 2: keep that going, and that takes structure an organization.
Speaker 4: Yeah, when people see power, they are reminded of their own.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, totally totally, And you need that initial spark
Speaker 2: for people to actually see that. So in April nineteen sixty,
Speaker 2: there was a conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. The adults
Speaker 2: or the like older than students it always is referred
Speaker 2: to in history. They're like, the adults said this, and
Speaker 2: then the youth said this. And I'm like, these people
Speaker 2: are like twenty, I don't want to call them not adults, you.
Speaker 3: Know, right, right, right, you're right, the young people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So the older than students helped call for the conference. Specifically,
Speaker 2: it was Martin Luther King Junior's organization, the Southern Christian
Speaker 2: Leadership Conference or the SCLC, called for it, but it
Speaker 2: wasn't called for by MLKA. It was called for by
Speaker 2: someone I'm going to get to in a second who
Speaker 2: is like my absolute my favorite person that I'm going
Speaker 2: to talk about this week. And the SELC they weave
Speaker 2: their way throughout this episode, but they're not our focus.
Speaker 2: And so the conference was organized by the students, and
Speaker 2: it was organized by one of the most badass women
Speaker 2: to ever live, Ella Baker. Ella Baker, so like the
Speaker 2: people that I'm like pulling aside that I'm really excited
Speaker 2: about are so behind the scenes, Like yeah, it's like
Speaker 2: their fucking thing. Ella Baker worked with King in the SELC,
Speaker 2: but she was basically there to be critical of him, Like,
Speaker 2: as far as I can tell, she was critical of
Speaker 2: his hierarchical leadership and basically the concept of charismatic leadership
Speaker 2: as the way to run a movement that was like
Speaker 2: her main thing. She was like, that's not the plan.
Speaker 2: So she calls for the conference. She told the assembled students, quote,
Speaker 2: strong people don't need strong leaders. What they need instead
Speaker 2: is organization and to help each other. And they're not
Speaker 2: anti leadership, they're anti this, like you know, strong.
Speaker 4: Anti to your point, this hierarchical system that's like we
Speaker 4: all follow this one person when we're a community of
Speaker 4: people with dope, ideas and capabilities and skills. And what
Speaker 4: is the word I'm looking for?
Speaker 3: Not materials resources or people of resources?
Speaker 4: And yeah, we can absolutely just go out and accomplish
Speaker 4: these goals without needing to be told to do them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know people do need to be told
Speaker 2: to do chi. Well, it's by things capitaliz. Yay, there's
Speaker 2: some ads, and we're back and we're talking about Ella
Speaker 2: fucking Baker, who would probably hate being put on a pedestal.
Speaker 2: But what is the show but cool people? So I'm
Speaker 2: going to take an aside and talk about Ella Baker
Speaker 2: because she is my favorite cool person this episode. Sorry
Speaker 2: everyone else, I love everyone else, but just seriously, like
Speaker 2: my like whatever, I will just gush about Ella Baker.
Speaker 2: Very quickly, she she grew up listening to her grandmother
Speaker 2: or tell stories about slavery. As soon as soon as
Speaker 2: she became an activist, like with the NAACP, she started
Speaker 2: working for decentralization and against chrismatic leadership and for more
Speaker 2: democratic organizational models, and for better inclusion of women within
Speaker 2: activist organizations. So in a lot of ways, as far
Speaker 2: as I can tell, like, this is the main person
Speaker 2: I can point to and say, this is what grassroots
Speaker 2: activism like, the concept of grassroots activism has always been there, right,
Speaker 2: But the person who like worked tirelessly to make the
Speaker 2: Civil rights movement grassroots was Ella Baker. And that's my
Speaker 2: own conjecture about her being the inventor of grassroots whatever.
Speaker 2: But she traveled through the South and made direct, interpersonal
Speaker 2: connections with people. She believed that the purpose of a
Speaker 2: national organization was to support local initiatives and help local
Speaker 2: people help themselves, rather than to like see the local
Speaker 2: people as people to funnel resources from to move upwards
Speaker 2: in a pyramid. You know. She basically said, the movement
Speaker 2: made Martin Luther King. It's not that Martin Luther King
Speaker 2: made the movement, which doesn't mean that she didn't like
Speaker 2: Martin Luther King, you know, just the direction of power
Speaker 2: had to be understood. She constantly worked against infighting in
Speaker 2: the civil rights movement, including she fought against red baiting.
Speaker 2: She was like don't toss out the socialists. They've been
Speaker 2: here forever. By the end of her life, she actually
Speaker 2: was more openly a socialist, and while she organized nonviolent
Speaker 2: direct action, nonviolence was always a strategic choice for her
Speaker 2: and not a moral imperative. To quote her biography Joanne
Speaker 2: Grant quote, she had no qualms about target practice. The
Speaker 2: first organization that she worked with was the Young Negro's
Speaker 2: Cooperative League, which was a collectivist organization working to build
Speaker 2: black economic power through cooperativism, which is something that I've
Speaker 2: run across here and there, like Fanny Louhamer also got
Speaker 2: into this stuff later in the sixties and stuff like that,
Speaker 2: and it's really interesting to me, and I'm really looking
Speaker 2: forward to do more of a deep dive on cooperativism
Speaker 2: and specifically how the US concept of cooperativism was like
Speaker 2: built out of black cooperativism or like, I don't know, whatever,
Speaker 2: it's the most whatever, it's fucking cool the one day,
Speaker 2: I'm going to do a whole episode about that. But
Speaker 2: Ella Baker, when she stepped back from the movement, it
Speaker 2: was around the time that the black power stuff in
Speaker 2: the late sixties started to pick up, but it wasn't
Speaker 2: because she had a problem with that. It was because
Speaker 2: of her health. And she continued to be basically part
Speaker 2: of everything. She was part of the Free Angela Davis campaign,
Speaker 2: the Puerto Rican independence movement, the anti apartheid movement, all
Speaker 2: the while focusing on yeah, right, like just just did everything,
Speaker 2: never anything showy. She never like got herself like this
Speaker 2: is the speech or this is the martyr or.
Speaker 4: You know, this is the core of activism. And it's
Speaker 4: something we're absolutely seeing a the activist community, particularly the
Speaker 4: black activist community in America today, is very adamant that
Speaker 4: celebrity has no space in their movement, and they're very
Speaker 4: weary of anybody who comes in and trying to make
Speaker 4: a name for themselves, because if the idea is liberation
Speaker 4: and equity for everybody, then how can you center yourself, Yeah,
Speaker 4: in that biocycically opposite of the end goal. And so
Speaker 4: it's so cool to hear from a people who started that,
Speaker 4: you know, and to have that vision before anyone else.
Speaker 4: It's it's a radical concept that people can liberate themselves
Speaker 4: if they're given the tools and if they're educated about
Speaker 4: their surroundings and what's happening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no that yeah, exactly. No notes Elebaker like you
Speaker 2: know the other guy right, like complicated here and there.
Speaker 2: I'm like, Ella Baker. I have everything I've read about
Speaker 2: Ella Baker. I have not found anything negative to say
Speaker 2: about Ella Baker.
Speaker 3: You know, she's a dope woman doing dope thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So she called for this student conference and the SCLC,
Speaker 2: which was the organization she used to call for the conference,
Speaker 2: they were hoping that the students would become the youth
Speaker 2: wing of their organization. Right. They were like, ah, excellent,
Speaker 2: these young people are doing something cool. We will bring
Speaker 2: them into our organization. And Ella Baker was like, she
Speaker 2: gave a keynote speech, and her keynote speech was basically
Speaker 2: like you might want to remain atonymous and set your
Speaker 2: own goals and do your own thing. So they did,
Speaker 2: and the youth the adults who weren't the older adults,
Speaker 2: they formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It was youth led.
Speaker 2: They had a few adult advisors or whatever. I'm going
Speaker 2: to keep using the lord adult accidentally throughout the script. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Ella Baker was the primary advisor. I've read one thing
Speaker 2: that claims that the historian Howard Zinn was another one
Speaker 2: of their advisors, Wow, and I want to know more
Speaker 2: about it. He wrote a whole book about SNICK, and
Speaker 2: I haven't read it yet, so I can't say too
Speaker 2: much yet. The organizers gave Ella Baker the nickname Fundi,
Speaker 2: which was a Swahili word. To quote the site Afropunk,
Speaker 2: the word means to them as relates as to Ela Baker,
Speaker 2: an artisan who has mastered their craft and shares their
Speaker 2: knowledge freely with the community. And so SNICK organized their
Speaker 2: asses off. They went directly into the most dangerous parts
Speaker 2: of the South, where many of them were from, although
Speaker 2: more of them were urban, going into rural spots in
Speaker 2: the South, which is, as far as I can tell,
Speaker 2: almost as big of a divide as like North South divide.
Speaker 2: The urban rural divide was also very major in terms
Speaker 2: of organizing. SNICK worked together with Core and the NAACP,
Speaker 2: but unlike Core and NAACP, there were no membership cards,
Speaker 2: no membership fees, and while Core was more ideologically committed
Speaker 2: to nonviolence, SNICK, even though it was in their name,
Speaker 2: was strategically committed to nonviolence, and the field secretaries, which
Speaker 2: is what their organizers were called, had tons of autonomy.
Speaker 2: There weren't like a lot of levels of hierarchy. I
Speaker 2: mean there was RIGHT as an organization. They had different
Speaker 2: levels and tiers or whatever. Right, but like overall, the
Speaker 2: field organizers, their field secretaries were the main thing. They
Speaker 2: had a lot of autonomy. And later Snick gets involved
Speaker 2: in like everything, they get part of the broader left
Speaker 2: in the late six part of the feminist movement, anti
Speaker 2: war movement, and there also we'll get to this later,
Speaker 2: the crucible from which the modern conception of black power
Speaker 2: was formed. But we're not here just to talk about Snick.
Speaker 2: We're going to talk about the delicate and beautiful balance
Speaker 2: between the non violence civil rights movement and the people
Speaker 2: willing to use violence to defend the individuals within that movement.
Speaker 2: So we're going to talk about that. The first thing
Speaker 2: you got to understand is that in the Deep South,
Speaker 2: especially in rural areas, the gun issue was a settled issue.
Speaker 2: Black people owned guns, and they use them to defend
Speaker 2: themselves against and others against what white violence. The main
Speaker 2: book that I'm referencing a lot throughout this is a
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen book by Charles E. Cobb Junior, and the
Speaker 2: book is called This Nonviolent Stuff will get you killed.
Speaker 2: How guns made the civil rights movement possible. And this
Speaker 2: book fucking rules. It's not this like called arms right.
Speaker 2: He like very specifically talks about how he's talking about
Speaker 2: the context of the rural South in the nineteen in sixties,
Speaker 2: and it's readable, it's insightful. This is like, literally, if
Speaker 2: I could just pivot. This is not an actual ad pivot,
Speaker 2: but just like, seriously, this book rules. It's one of
Speaker 2: the best books I've ever read for this research. He
Speaker 2: was there. Charles Cobb was a field secretary for SNICK
Speaker 2: from nineteen sixty two to nineteen sixty seven, and the
Speaker 2: premise of the book, to quote him, is that the
Speaker 2: use of guns for self defense in the non violence
Speaker 2: civil rights movement was necessary and vital to the movement's survival.
Speaker 2: Writing about his own experiences, he said, quote SNICK was
Speaker 2: unusual and placing its field secretaries in rural Southern communities
Speaker 2: to work from the bottom up instead of the top down.
Speaker 2: Living among the downtrodden black men and women of the
Speaker 2: Deep South, I underwent a subtle conversion the principles and
Speaker 2: illusions I had brought with me of nonviolence, of the
Speaker 2: uniformity of the Southern Black experience were shaped by the
Speaker 2: men and women I encountered there. We and Snick were
Speaker 2: radicalized by working with people in their homes and communities
Speaker 2: much more than by ideology.
Speaker 4: It's probably practically living under the boot of oppression made
Speaker 4: you more active in your desire to liberate the people. Wow,
Speaker 4: I imagine, imagine in other words, leave your guilded cages, y'all. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: it's it's for sure different, particularly I think in the
Speaker 4: Deep South at that time. My dad talks about he
Speaker 4: his family came up to Chicago during the Great Mississipi Migration,
Speaker 4: which is a time period post slavery when a lot
Speaker 4: of black people moved from the South to the North.
Speaker 4: But he would go back to Alabama to visit his
Speaker 4: great grandmother who still lived in a slave cabin where
Speaker 4: she had been freed.
Speaker 3: Like she was freed, they weren't using it. She just
Speaker 3: stayed on the land.
Speaker 4: And I think you know, a lot of people did,
Speaker 4: which meant you're looking at dirt floors, no inner plumbing.
Speaker 4: You're restricted to what kinds of jobs you can have
Speaker 4: in the South under Jim Crow. So you're seeing a
Speaker 4: lot of people like either being porters or anning chicken
Speaker 4: and so like it's a and and then because you know,
Speaker 4: if you know, and the rules set around specific jobs,
Speaker 4: that's where we got like you can be making two
Speaker 4: dollars an hour as a waitress, and so there's like
Speaker 4: a lot of financial restrictions. And I think we saw
Speaker 4: you know, I can only imagine that if you were
Speaker 4: living there during that time, like your instinct would be like, oh, immediately,
Speaker 4: these people need access to better rights, like this is insane.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, totally. And like and there's this thing that
Speaker 2: also happens right where like people sometimes like go out
Speaker 2: into a community and he's a he's a black man,
Speaker 2: but he's from an urban environment going out into a
Speaker 2: rural environment, you know, and like coming with an ideology, right,
Speaker 2: and then immediately being like instead of like educating these
Speaker 2: these like you know, ignorant rural people, instead being like, oh,
Speaker 2: they know what's up and I should learn from them.
Speaker 2: And that was like the process that seemed to happen
Speaker 2: with snick Field organizers, and that absolutely ties into how
Speaker 2: the whole thing transformed and the whole push towards black
Speaker 2: power and the the change within the civil rights movements
Speaker 2: as far as I can tell and as far as
Speaker 2: like I've read. And yeah, I I met Charles Cobb
Speaker 2: briefly in North Carolina because he did a talk about
Speaker 2: the book, and I I went because that day i'd
Speaker 2: just been whatever the Nazis know, they doxed me. I'd
Speaker 2: just been docks by Nazis they called themselves, don't call
Speaker 2: us Nazis, were neo Confederates. I'd just been like docks
Speaker 2: by neo confederates who had like told me, like showed
Speaker 2: me pictures of my family and told me they were
Speaker 2: going to burn my house down and shit.
Speaker 3: And he sound like Nazis.
Speaker 4: I just want to know you yourself, Needo conservatives, you
Speaker 4: should move in a different direction than the Nazis because
Speaker 4: that sounds like class a Nazi bullshit.
Speaker 2: Oh, Neo Confederates. Sorry, I might as miss stake. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I said no, But I mean, it's like whatever, Neo
Speaker 2: Confederate and Nazi, Like, I don't care whether you call
Speaker 2: yourself an American Nazi or German Nazi, you're fucking Nazi.
Speaker 2: Like fuck you. They had like just doxed me and
Speaker 2: some other some other folks. And so I bought a
Speaker 2: rifle and I never owned a firearm before. I didn't
Speaker 2: particularly grow up around firearms, and like, I come from
Speaker 2: a sort of military family, but with like a liberal bent,
Speaker 2: you know. And and so I told him, I was like, hey,
Speaker 2: like your talk was really interesting and meaningful to me
Speaker 2: because I I just went and bought a rifle today.
Speaker 2: And he was like, well, how do you How do
Speaker 2: you feel about that? I was like, I feel really
Speaker 2: mixed about it, and he was like, that makes sense, you.
Speaker 5: Know for sure?
Speaker 2: And and Mike, I mostly just like talking about how
Speaker 2: much I like this guy in this book. But my
Speaker 2: copy of the book is signed from my generation to yours,
Speaker 2: and I think about it a lot.
Speaker 3: Ah, I'm gonna cry.
Speaker 4: That's really beautiful, And especially for somebody who's doing, you know,
Speaker 4: such key and important work and understands intimately the struggle.
Speaker 4: Like what a blessing to sort of be given a yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, like a passing of the baton.
Speaker 3: That's wonderful.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Uh. To quote more from this, nonviolent stuff will
Speaker 2: get you killed. The rural black culture that Snickfield secretaries
Speaker 2: encountered in the Deep South had long accepted arm self
Speaker 2: defense as legitimate, although local black people could be uncertain
Speaker 2: about when and how best to employ it. The idea
Speaker 2: itself was not subject to debate. Guns were common in
Speaker 2: southern households, used not only for hunting but for protection
Speaker 2: from white violence. The idea of removing guns from the
Speaker 2: equation was, for the vast majority of rural Southern blacks
Speaker 2: simply a non issue. Later, I'm going to talk about
Speaker 2: a bunch of the organized groups that defended the non
Speaker 2: violence movement, and those groups matter, but I think it's
Speaker 2: also worth understanding where they come from. Which what didn't
Speaker 2: just like show up like one person wasn't suddenly like,
Speaker 2: I've an idea, we can defend ourselves, right. It was
Speaker 2: built on a bedrock of people just doing it themselves.
Speaker 2: Charles Cobb describes, for example, a seventy year old woman
Speaker 2: in Lee County, Georgia named Mama Dolly. She ran a farm,
Speaker 2: and I'm under the impression maybe she was a local midwife,
Speaker 2: and a quote a student organizer stayed with her. What
Speaker 2: Snick would do is I'd send people down to like
Speaker 2: and Core would do is like people would leave and
Speaker 2: go into these rural environments and register people to vote
Speaker 2: and possibly help organize desegregation and stuff like that. Right,
Speaker 2: and they would stay with black families who would defend them.
Speaker 2: So to quote a student organizer, Mama Dolly had this
Speaker 2: big shotgun. I tried to talk her out of guarding me,
Speaker 2: but she said, Baby, I brought a lot of these
Speaker 2: white folks into this world, and I'll take them out
Speaker 2: of this world if I have to.
Speaker 5: Come on. Mama, Yes, I know.
Speaker 2: That's why I think she was probably a midwife. Sometimes,
Speaker 2: no matter what I said, this is to the quote. Sometimes,
Speaker 2: no matter what I said, she would sit in my
Speaker 2: bedroom window leg propped up with that big old gun.
Speaker 2: If you know how to handle it, way better than
Speaker 2: I did. In fact, I knew nothing about no shotgun.
Speaker 2: And everything I've read is story after story of rural
Speaker 2: farmers defending organizers, most of whom were black urban Southerners,
Speaker 2: some of whom were you know, white urban Southerners, people
Speaker 2: from all over in different backgrounds.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: But because frankly, defending these people as part of hospitality,
Speaker 2: and of course the supremacists were really fucking mad about snick,
Speaker 2: and so the bravery of these organizers matters, But the
Speaker 2: bravery of the people who took them in is at
Speaker 2: least as much. Right because the organizer might leave, but that.
Speaker 4: Family wherever and everyone knows you in all your business,
Speaker 4: and I know that some of them like lost business.
Speaker 3: You know what I mean?
Speaker 4: If you're, yeah, a black person providing a service that
Speaker 4: is available to white people, like I could put your
Speaker 4: whole livelihood in danger.
Speaker 3: That's wild.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And the Klan was during this time running around
Speaker 2: killing people, burning and bombing buildings, murdering organizers and like,
Speaker 2: people would go register to vote and they would get
Speaker 2: laughed out of the room by clerks or one case,
Speaker 2: like in I think it was Mississippi, Like literally someone
Speaker 2: just got pistol whipped because they were like, what do
Speaker 2: you mean I can't register to vote. I pulled out
Speaker 2: a gunhead hit the woman in the head. But you
Speaker 2: know what won't hit you in the head except with
Speaker 2: really good deals.
Speaker 5: No potato, that's right.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, okay, So so Joelle, one of the things
Speaker 2: that we try and do on the show is we
Speaker 2: try to be sponsored only by very good things, right,
Speaker 2: and so our perennial sponsor is the concept of potatoes.
Speaker 2: They're good for you, you can eat them cooked when you
Speaker 2: cook them first. They're cheap. And I'm wondering if you
Speaker 2: have any anything that you would like to be sponsored by.
Speaker 2: We've also been sponsored by sleeping dogs.
Speaker 5: Like I think good Comb.
Speaker 2: Yeah, good Comb was good.
Speaker 4: The laughter of children after children is great. I want
Speaker 4: to be sponsored by a rainy day with a good book.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, favorite spaith to live in.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, if I could eat. That's what heaven
Speaker 3: looks like to me.
Speaker 4: It's constantly raining, and like there's good books and hot
Speaker 4: tea everywhere.
Speaker 3: He never goes cold.
Speaker 2: All right, that is what we are sponsored by today,
Speaker 2: and possibly some other stuff that you'll hear about in
Speaker 2: a second. Okay, and we are back, and I'm going
Speaker 2: to mostly the like atrocities of what people were facing
Speaker 2: have been told at great length, and so I don't
Speaker 2: want to like specifically go through like every time that
Speaker 2: people got murdered or whatever, but one of them that
Speaker 2: impacts all of this a lot. In Mississippi, in September
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty one, a local black farmer and NAACP leader
Speaker 2: who was affiliated with SNICK. His name is Herbert Lee.
Speaker 2: He was killed in broad daylight in front of a
Speaker 2: dozen people. And he got killed by his childhood friend
Speaker 2: who was a white man, an a racist who it was
Speaker 2: like neighbors who had just like decided should had gone
Speaker 2: too far, and he'd basically been like, Hey, come over here,
Speaker 2: I want to talk to you. And then herbertly, Uh,
Speaker 2: the murderer, Yeah, the murderer was acquitted that afternoon by
Speaker 2: an all white jury.
Speaker 5: What whoa?
Speaker 2: And no one none of the witnesses felt safe coming forward.
Speaker 2: Right later, a black witness of the crime, Luis Allen,
Speaker 2: was murdered on his own property before he could testify.
Speaker 2: And that murderer was almost certainly done by the local
Speaker 2: county sheriff. And like, this is an example story, not
Speaker 2: the thing that changed everything. This is what people like, Basically,
Speaker 2: a lot of the people that I'm reading about were
Speaker 2: refer to what's happening as a war, and they're like,
Speaker 2: I am in a war against white supremacy. And that's
Speaker 2: that's some of the context, you know. So so SNICK
Speaker 2: organizers themselves, they didn't go armed because it would break
Speaker 2: the spell of what they were doing, and nonviolent organizing
Speaker 2: was a very effective strategy. And and but especially in Mississippi,
Speaker 2: their local defenders absolutely went armed. The whole thing was
Speaker 2: massively debated within the movement, but overall a lot of
Speaker 2: the debates against this sort of protection were happening far away.
Speaker 2: You know, they were the movement leaders who weren't in
Speaker 2: the shit. So I like telling stories about the clan losing.
Speaker 2: So I'm going to tell some stories about the Klan losing.
Speaker 3: Oh Yes.
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty five, Baker County, Georgia, there was a
Speaker 2: seventeen year old young woman named Shirley Miller, who, alongside
Speaker 2: other folks, integrated the local high school. The Klan burned
Speaker 2: across in her yard. More than a dozen of the
Speaker 2: focks showed up to, you know, scare her and possibly
Speaker 2: do worse. So Shirley's mother called her neighbors, who poured
Speaker 2: in armed and took aim at the clansmen, and the
Speaker 2: klansmen literally begged for their life in order to leave.
Speaker 3: Recording of bad.
Speaker 4: Could you imagine a recording of that, just playing it
Speaker 4: back and be like, yes, you assholes, that's for threatening
Speaker 4: a high school or you jerks.
Speaker 2: Yeah. In nineteen sixty four, some folks tried to register
Speaker 2: to vote and were turned away. Missus Brewer's sons were
Speaker 2: turned away, so the clan showed up at the Brewer
Speaker 2: house to teach her and her kids a lesson about
Speaker 2: trying to vote. So Jannie Brewer, missus Brewer, she armed
Speaker 2: up her kids, and she armed up her grandkids, and
Speaker 2: she armed up the Snick organizers who were supposedly not
Speaker 2: supposed touch guns, and then made a bunch of Molotov cocktails.
Speaker 2: Oh to quote Charles Cobb again. As the sheriff and
Speaker 2: the truckload of klansmen approached the farmhouse, the Brewer family
Speaker 2: members and some of the Snick workers were still in
Speaker 2: the fields with rifles and shotguns. Before the raiders reached
Speaker 2: the house, someone shone a floodlight on them, others fired
Speaker 2: into the air. Brewer stood on the front porch ready
Speaker 2: to hurl a Molotov cocktail. Everyone, including the sheriff, fled.
Speaker 2: Night riders never returned to the Brewer farm.
Speaker 3: Come through, fuck around and find out, you real.
Speaker 2: What the main thing that I keep finding And I
Speaker 2: read a book that has a bias, right to be clear,
Speaker 2: and I've read other stuff, and I have my own
Speaker 2: bias and all of that, But one of the things
Speaker 2: that kept happening was the arguments for non violence. Part
Speaker 2: of the arguments for non violence is this is a
Speaker 2: very effective strategy in the nitty gritty, and I think
Speaker 2: that's true. But part of the argument was if we
Speaker 2: arm up, they'll kill us, all right, And what the
Speaker 2: book that you know, this non violence stuff get you
Speaker 2: killed and anything else that I've read doesn't carry that out,
Speaker 2: at least in this context and time that I'm talking about.
Speaker 2: What would happen is the clan shows up, someone takes
Speaker 2: a fucking warning shot and they're like, oh god, those
Speaker 2: people have guns, even though the clan is guns too,
Speaker 2: and they never come back. That happens more times than
Speaker 2: not in what I have read. I'm not trying to
Speaker 2: make a blanket stay.
Speaker 4: Feel like no, no, no, no no, but I hear what
Speaker 4: you're saying. I think the non violent aspect was necessary
Speaker 4: to change liberal white people's minds, right, because the argument
Speaker 4: was always like, oh well not yet. People need time
Speaker 4: to adjust, so your liberty has to wait. But then also,
Speaker 4: if you react violently to whatever violence is being hurled
Speaker 4: at you, suddenly you're still the danger, which is a
Speaker 4: confusing mind game to play with a person. But there
Speaker 4: they were, and so I think that that was a
Speaker 4: you know, and similar to Gandhi, because I'm sure there
Speaker 4: were people in India also being like no, fuck, you
Speaker 4: get off my land of British people.
Speaker 2: Yes, totally, what are you doing?
Speaker 4: But in order to make the world care, you have
Speaker 4: to be like, now, I didn't do anything to defend
Speaker 4: myself and these guys were total jerks. Still I didn't
Speaker 4: do anything to piss them off. I didn't do anything
Speaker 4: to defend myself, and yet here they still come. And
Speaker 4: that's when people can sort of be like, oh, well,
Speaker 4: now I see that you're clearly a monster. There's no
Speaker 4: way you can't really twist that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, which is exhausting.
Speaker 3: It's an exhausting gauntlet to ask people to run through.
Speaker 3: But yeah, what else can you do?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I mean yeah, yeah, Like I don't know, you know,
Speaker 2: like I'm not. It's so fucking complicated, and it's something
Speaker 2: that every movement needs to determine for itself, you know.
Speaker 2: And that is actually one of the things that comes
Speaker 2: up in the book. And I don't know if I
Speaker 2: wrote in the script, maybe you hear me talk about later.
Speaker 2: A higher percentage. It was not universal. There were white
Speaker 2: people who were totally fine with violence, and there were
Speaker 2: black people who totally fine with non violence. But a
Speaker 2: higher percentage of the organizers who were coming from out
Speaker 2: who were white, were more ideologically committed to non violence,
Speaker 2: whereas more of the black organizers were strategically committed to
Speaker 2: non violence.
Speaker 3: I'm sure, yeah, and.
Speaker 2: That matters so much, especially when you're talking about like, look,
Speaker 2: I clearly I'm a white person talking about this history
Speaker 2: because I think it matters. But like, white people shouldn't
Speaker 2: fucking have anything to do with saying what should happen?
Speaker 2: Like that doesn't make any fucking sense.
Speaker 4: You know, they still weren't at a place where they
Speaker 4: were ready to recognize the power structure and its entirety, right,
Speaker 4: because if they were, then you would never ask people
Speaker 4: who were constantly being threatened to be non violent. But
Speaker 4: because they couldn't acknowledge, like, oh, we as white people,
Speaker 4: also hold power despite the fact that we want to
Speaker 4: stand with you, So we're going to ask you to
Speaker 4: not only be non violent, but it's a way for
Speaker 4: us to not have to become violent in defenses. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I can stand with you and say, oh no, I
Speaker 4: was there. I linked arms, Like, but did you take
Speaker 4: up arms which would have been much more helpful in
Speaker 4: protecting these bodies you claim to care about? Like it's again,
Speaker 4: it's a total mind fuck and a completely ridiculous gauntlet
Speaker 4: to ask anyone to have to run through. But I
Speaker 4: think at the time it was the only way to
Speaker 4: move the needle, and therefore necessary.
Speaker 3: I do totally hope that we've.
Speaker 4: Moved past that in some I don't think from on
Speaker 4: a government level we have, but I think for a
Speaker 4: very person on an individual level, I hope that we
Speaker 4: as a society are moving past this idea that passivism off,
Speaker 4: you know, is the best reaction to violence.
Speaker 3: Clearly, not right, clearly.
Speaker 2: Not yeah, exactly, and then it even strategic non violence
Speaker 2: apparently works really well paired with self defense.
Speaker 3: You know, you know, you know, but I don't want
Speaker 3: to hurt you.
Speaker 4: I don't want to you know, bomb or hurt anybody
Speaker 4: or takes someone's you know, friend, parent, whatever away from them.
Speaker 3: But don't fuck with me. Yeah, I think that's a
Speaker 3: very reasonable line to draw.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Or like, don't fuck with those non violent activists, you.
Speaker 3: Know, also, don't fuck with them, they're just here.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely so.
Speaker 2: Another one of these stories, an indigenous activist named Hunter
Speaker 2: Bear Salter was a professor at an HBCU in Mississippi
Speaker 2: called Tugala Southern Christian College, and he spent his time
Speaker 2: advising students who are sitting at lunch counter and you know,
Speaker 2: teaching and all that stuff. And he traveled armed everywhere
Speaker 2: he went, and in nineteen ninety four he said the
Speaker 2: fact that he was known to be armed is the
Speaker 2: reason he survived the era. And yeah, I have no
Speaker 2: particular doubt about that. And the student the school itself
Speaker 2: was constantly being attacked by night riders because it was
Speaker 2: an HBCU until the school formed armed groups of students
Speaker 2: and faculty to keep watch, and when word got out
Speaker 2: about that, the attacks dropped significantly. So self defense was
Speaker 2: a decentralized, impromptu and ever present part of the non
Speaker 2: violence movement until it was organized, which we'll talk about
Speaker 2: in part two. But first let's talk about you, Joelle
Speaker 2: and the things you do and the places people can
Speaker 2: find the things you do.
Speaker 4: Yes, I am on all the social media sites, but
Speaker 4: mostly Hive nowadays actu amoni. It's j O E l
Speaker 4: l E m O n I q u E. I'm
Speaker 4: the EP of Fake Doctor's Real Friends. If you have
Speaker 4: any desire to come check out a Scrubs rewatch podcast.
Speaker 4: Also have a New Girl rewatch podcast. Called Welcome to
Speaker 4: our show that I adore, and then you check out
Speaker 4: my writing all over the place. I'm doing a lot
Speaker 4: of work for The Rap Right Now and Polygon, and
Speaker 4: then I'm frequently at NPR's pop Culture Happy Hour. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and I'm hoping to bring a couple of new shows
Speaker 4: to you guys next year. So just follow me on
Speaker 4: the socials and you'll hear all about it.
Speaker 2: Awesome. I and you got anything you want to plug?
Speaker 5: Isn't there a live stream coming up?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 5: There is a life Actually I think it's this week.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's this week. As you listen to this, if
Speaker 2: you want to hear me learn about something bad from
Speaker 2: Robert Evans, the host of Behind the Bastards, you can
Speaker 2: listen to the live stream me hearing about bad things.
Speaker 2: They don't tell me ahead of time what the bad
Speaker 2: thing is, so you can watch me react in horror
Speaker 2: to the world. You can get tickets by googling.
Speaker 3: Sounds like an amazing show. I'm really excited.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The link to get tickets is a momenthouse dot co
Speaker 1: slash bTB. I think when you buy a ticket, you
Speaker 1: can also submit question for the Q and A. Make
Speaker 1: sure you get those in asap before the event this weekend.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I think that's all I've got.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, we will see you all on Wednesday. Farewell.
Speaker 2: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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