Speaker 1: Welcome to Behind the Police, a production of I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio Welcome Back to Behind the Police, the special miniseries
Speaker 1: for Behind the Bastards, which is normally a show that
Speaker 1: I Robert Evans do about the worst people in all
Speaker 1: of history, But for these weeks and these these episodes,
Speaker 1: is a deep dive into the entire history of American police,
Speaker 1: the greatest bastards of them all, collection of them. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: My guest in this journey into the history of police
Speaker 1: stem uh is my friend Jason Petty, better known as
Speaker 1: the hip hop artist propaganda. Jason, how are you doing today?
Speaker 1: We'll stop happy Janet. The actual, the actual one day
Speaker 1: of Independence. Yes, the day that like we as a
Speaker 1: nation kind of sort of started to begin to try
Speaker 1: to live up to the promises made at our found
Speaker 1: except not for women. Um yeah, Still there's still another
Speaker 1: We're still waiting for another. Uh, there's another independence coming soon.
Speaker 1: It's been a rough couple of been a rough couple
Speaker 1: of centuries, guys. Um yeah yeah. Fun fact, the Mats
Speaker 1: page A proclamation was two years before this because the
Speaker 1: war wasn't done and still we were waiting on Texas.
Speaker 1: And still we were waiting on Texas. And in some
Speaker 1: ways still are still Yeah, as a Texan, I can
Speaker 1: I think we're still kind of waiting on Texas, so
Speaker 1: um in honor of I mean this, it won't be
Speaker 1: Juneteenth anymore when these episodes drop. But these two episodes
Speaker 1: this week, we're we're going real deep into um, the
Speaker 1: history of racism and policing. Um. That's that's what these
Speaker 1: next two episodes are going to be. And then after
Speaker 1: that we're gonna kind of get back to a broader
Speaker 1: history of policing and come up to the modern era.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about the war on drugs and cops and stuff.
Speaker 1: But but this is these two episodes are going to
Speaker 1: be more focused on something that I think is critical
Speaker 1: but not very well known to most people. You know.
Speaker 1: Usually there's there's one aspect to which kind of what
Speaker 1: we're talking about is known today, which is that if
Speaker 1: you if you wound up at a protest recently, which
Speaker 1: I assume a lot of you have, you may have
Speaker 1: heard the venerable left wing protest chant cops and clan
Speaker 1: go hand in hand. Um. And if you're a fan
Speaker 1: of Rage against the Machine, I'm sure you're familiar with
Speaker 1: their their similar lines. Some of those that workforces are
Speaker 1: the same that burn crosses. Uh and you know, uh,
Speaker 1: we we talked a bit about how, you know, the
Speaker 1: sort of story spreading about slave patrols and how that
Speaker 1: was the origin of policing and how that was you know,
Speaker 1: partly true but not entirely accurate because it was more
Speaker 1: complicated than that. This is a case where the the
Speaker 1: kind of like Pithy Chance uh and social media posts
Speaker 1: and stuff actually are really accurate like that. The that's
Speaker 1: what we're going to talk about today, so in in
Speaker 1: in a very veiled defense for everybody else that didn't
Speaker 1: have to live these realities, Like there's some realities like
Speaker 1: something like a redlining, Like I understand, I understand that
Speaker 1: there is a wide swath of people. You have to
Speaker 1: go out of your way unless you're black to know
Speaker 1: what redlining is because it doesn't affect you. You know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. So I'm gonna give you that. I
Speaker 1: don't know the script, but I know, based on what
Speaker 1: the way that Robert's leading in, I have an idea
Speaker 1: that I'm probably gonna know these stories, but I'm pretty
Speaker 1: sure you don't because they ain't affected you. You never
Speaker 1: thought about redlining because you never there was never a
Speaker 1: time that your grandparents was looking at a neighborhood and
Speaker 1: was like, we can't live here. And it's not because
Speaker 1: you couldn't afford to live here. It's because you wasn't
Speaker 1: allowed to live here, you know what I'm saying. So
Speaker 1: I understand that you don't know this. There's probably things
Speaker 1: in your life, like we could talk about some Native
Speaker 1: American heritage and stories and stuff like that that you
Speaker 1: probably would have no idea unless you went out of
Speaker 1: your way. I went out of my way to learn
Speaker 1: those things because I understand what it means to be
Speaker 1: an oppressed person. So strap in, this is about to
Speaker 1: be earth shattering for you. It's it's gonna be yes. Um. So,
Speaker 1: in the immediate wake of the war, you remember, after
Speaker 1: part one, you know, we kind of ended on slave
Speaker 1: patrols just turned in right into police departments. Um. But
Speaker 1: in the immediate way of the war, a lot of
Speaker 1: the South, which you know occupied by the United States military,
Speaker 1: the Union military, um, and millions of black men had
Speaker 1: suddenly gained the right to vote for the first time,
Speaker 1: like kind of right around that same period, and historians
Speaker 1: generally call the the time from eighteen eighteen seventies seven
Speaker 1: in the former South reconstruction, and it was a time
Speaker 1: of great hope for black Americans. Seven black men were
Speaker 1: elected to public office, including two senators and fourteen members
Speaker 1: of the House of Representatives, which when you consider that,
Speaker 1: like a huge chunk of those men had been slaves
Speaker 1: a couple of years earlier, like that's in that's maybe
Speaker 1: the rapidest turnaround from not from politically being you know,
Speaker 1: not a person, to being in power that like has
Speaker 1: ever happened. Black men and women were appointed to various
Speaker 1: government jobs during this period. Freedmen pulled their resources, they
Speaker 1: formed companies, some of them fought to receive back wages,
Speaker 1: and even tried to take land from their former masters.
Speaker 1: It was generally not successful, but attempts were made, and
Speaker 1: all across the South. Groups of freedmen also formed militias,
Speaker 1: sometimes using the rifles with which they had served in
Speaker 1: the Union Army. And obviously, um, a lot of white
Speaker 1: folks weren't happy with this. Yeah it worked. It's like,
Speaker 1: so they go, you know, we're just gonna let them.
Speaker 1: You forget that, Especially in the South, the vast majority
Speaker 1: of the population were freed slaves, so just by the
Speaker 1: sheer numbers. If you let us vote, we're gonna vote
Speaker 1: in our own people. Yeah, it's you're not going to
Speaker 1: be in charge anymore. Yeah yeah, yeah, it's so this
Speaker 1: was a pickle for um, for the white supremacists. We
Speaker 1: we we could say that fairly. Um. Yeah. And outside
Speaker 1: of the transition of slave patrols to police departments, a
Speaker 1: lot of white people just sort of on their own
Speaker 1: attempted to put newly freed black people in their place
Speaker 1: by using the law to to you know, suppress them.
Speaker 1: Laws were passed throughout the old slave states that banned vagrancy,
Speaker 1: or being out in public without a visible means of support.
Speaker 1: You might recognize this as the same tactic used a
Speaker 1: little bit later to stop union workers from organizing and
Speaker 1: other parts of the country. Um so that is kind
Speaker 1: of we can we we can see some sometimes the
Speaker 1: exact same tactic being used for very different groups of
Speaker 1: of oppressed Americans. But it is it's the same thing, Like,
Speaker 1: what don't we just make it illegal for them to
Speaker 1: be outside? Yeah? So, um, in this case, vagrancy laws
Speaker 1: were used to force black people to take employment, generally
Speaker 1: a sharecropper. So you make it illegal to be outside
Speaker 1: without a job. That forces people to take jobs, and
Speaker 1: since like you don't want to go to jail your choice,
Speaker 1: like you have to very quickly get whatever job you
Speaker 1: can get, which means people, you know, the power is
Speaker 1: in the hands of the person offering you the job,
Speaker 1: which means they can give you a job that's basically slavery,
Speaker 1: which is in fact, what a lot of sharecropping job
Speaker 1: share cropping one. Yeah, um, so again not quite slavery,
Speaker 1: but also not nearly as far from being slavery as
Speaker 1: it really ought to have been. Slavery light, Yeah, slavery light,
Speaker 1: A little bit of diet. It's like the Coke zero
Speaker 1: of enslaving human beings that one calorie. Yeah, it is
Speaker 1: better for you, but not very much better. Yeah, not
Speaker 1: very much better. Um, and it'll probably give you a
Speaker 1: brain tumor. Um. I want to I'll cut that bed
Speaker 1: out off. Coke zero wants to sponsor the podcast, I
Speaker 1: will take your money. Yeah, so I want to kick
Speaker 1: off our quotations in this episode with one from the
Speaker 1: absolutely critical book that Everybody ought to read the End
Speaker 1: of Policing by Alex Vitali. Quote anyone on the roads
Speaker 1: without proof of employment was quickly subjected to police action.
Speaker 1: Local police were the essential front door of the twin
Speaker 1: evils of convict leasing and prison farms. Local sheriffs would
Speaker 1: arrest free blacks on flimsy to non existing evidence, then
Speaker 1: drive them into a cruel and inhuman justice system whose
Speaker 1: punishments often resulted in death. These same sheriffs and judges
Speaker 1: also received kickbacks and in some cases generated lists of
Speaker 1: fit and hard working blacks to be incarcerated on behalf
Speaker 1: of employers, who would then leased them out to perform
Speaker 1: forced labor for profit. Douglas Blackman chronicles the appalling conditions
Speaker 1: of mines and lumber camps, where thousands perished, where the
Speaker 1: Jim Crow era policing had become a central tool of
Speaker 1: maintaining racial inequality throughout the South, supplemented by ad hoc
Speaker 1: vigilante such as the ku Klux Klan, which often worked
Speaker 1: closely with and was populated by local police. Good little
Speaker 1: summary of how it all went down. Yeah, yep, so
Speaker 1: the motherfucking kkk Um. Let's get into a baby. Now.
Speaker 1: We've done a whole two partter on the history of
Speaker 1: the clan, the first and the second clan at least
Speaker 1: on Behind the Bastards already, So if you want a
Speaker 1: detailed history of both of those organizations, you can check
Speaker 1: that out. It's in it's in the Behind the Bastards feed.
Speaker 1: But I'm gonna give a little bit of an overview
Speaker 1: before we dig into the cop you know, specific stuff.
Speaker 1: The KKK formed initially in Pulaski, Tennessee, in eighteen sixty six.
Speaker 1: The very first like saying Pulaski, Pulaski, Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: fun name of a town. It's a shame all of
Speaker 1: the terrorism. Anyway, the very first KKK cell was formed
Speaker 1: by a bunch of board drunk and pretty well off
Speaker 1: Confederate veterans. They dressed up like wizards, and they gave
Speaker 1: themselves absurd titles and went out at night, uh costumed
Speaker 1: as the ghosts of Confederate veterans in order to scare
Speaker 1: freed black people. One of the KKK founders happened to
Speaker 1: own the local newspaper, and he published a bunch of
Speaker 1: mysterious letters from a grand cyclops, all of which made
Speaker 1: the clan seem cool and mysterious and powerful. This early meme,
Speaker 1: and that's really what the KKK was at the start,
Speaker 1: spread very quickly throughout the South, and soon thousands of
Speaker 1: white dudes were dressing like ghosts and terrorizing black people,
Speaker 1: generally while drunk as all hell. Sometimes they wore dresses,
Speaker 1: other times they pretended to be aliens. They did this
Speaker 1: because it was fun, but also because it made their
Speaker 1: abuse more impactful, and her fantastic book Ku Klux Alain
Speaker 1: Parsons explains this in a way that I think is
Speaker 1: really important when it comes to just sort of understanding
Speaker 1: modern right wing street violence and why a lot of
Speaker 1: it seems so silly, Like a lot of the ways
Speaker 1: they dress up and act are so on that surface
Speaker 1: absurd quote ku Klux endeavored to portray victims entirely rational
Speaker 1: fear of their physical violence, as though it were superstition
Speaker 1: or gullibility. The victim, telling Lee, failed to get the joke,
Speaker 1: allowing himself to be frightened by ghosts or devils. Get
Speaker 1: the joke? Yeah, they didn't get the joke. Shot at you, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, while I'm hanging from my neck. Yeah you
Speaker 1: get it. Yeah, we hung you from a tree and
Speaker 1: we were dressed as aliens. Don't You don't get the joke?
Speaker 1: You scared of aliens? Yeah, yea, there it is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fucking fascists are always thinking yeah what Yeah, at some
Speaker 1: point you have to explain to me and one of
Speaker 1: these bastard episodes, why far right fascists are just not funny. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's because it's not funny. It's because comedy, Um, good
Speaker 1: comedy requires uh, what's the word I'm looking for here? Um? Empathy? Right,
Speaker 1: Like you have to understand other people in order to
Speaker 1: say things that are funny to them. There it is, yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you? Yeah, so um yeah, many, if not most,
Speaker 1: of these early Klansmen were former slave patrol members, and
Speaker 1: a sizeable number of these early Clansmen, in addition to
Speaker 1: being former slaver patrol members, were also current law enforcement
Speaker 1: you know, sheriffs and the like. There was also, outside
Speaker 1: of you know, even the clan, just a huge amount
Speaker 1: of vigilante violence directed against black people during this time,
Speaker 1: and it all does sort of bleed together. One Edgefield County,
Speaker 1: South Carolina military officer, like a US military officers stationed
Speaker 1: in the in the former Confederacy in eighteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: wrote this quote, Two men white had killed a Negro
Speaker 1: plus cut the ear off another the evening before about
Speaker 1: five miles left of my encampment. It is presumed they
Speaker 1: belonged to a regular organized band of guerrillas which infests
Speaker 1: that country. It is practiced among these monsters either to
Speaker 1: kill or mutilate any colored people who unluckily falls into
Speaker 1: their power. None of the colored people dared to sleep
Speaker 1: in their houses at night, but had to take refuge
Speaker 1: in the surrounding country. Some part of the peaceful, loyal
Speaker 1: white population are well acquainted with the haunts of these
Speaker 1: two predators, but dread them. Would they betray them as
Speaker 1: there is no protective power in the country. They are
Speaker 1: a terror to the loyal population at night. These ruffians
Speaker 1: besotted with drink, rave and tear like prairie Indians through
Speaker 1: the streets of the city. The civil law is powerless
Speaker 1: to protect against such desperadoes. That's interesting because it gives
Speaker 1: you an idea of how terrifying it was during this period,
Speaker 1: how these people acted. It give you also like a
Speaker 1: look into the head of sort of I guess what
Speaker 1: you'd call like a white ally who was also still
Speaker 1: really racist against Native Americans. Like yeah, I was like,
Speaker 1: there's a lot like a prairie Indian. That's what that
Speaker 1: is of all the whole sentence. That's what I caught
Speaker 1: where I was like, wait what, it's like you're you're
Speaker 1: so uh what do we talk? Yeah? I was like yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like the record skipped where I was just like yeah, man, yeah, man, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: hold up. Yeah, it's kind of like you want to
Speaker 1: be really proud of like Ulysses Simpson Grant, because you know,
Speaker 1: as flawed as he was, he beat the Confederacy, he
Speaker 1: was pretty committed to to black people not being slaves.
Speaker 1: He was committed to them having their right to vote.
Speaker 1: He did some really good stuff as present for black people.
Speaker 1: Real terrible record with the Native Americans, just like real,
Speaker 1: real bad. Yeah. Um, so you know we have we
Speaker 1: do have a couple of of of of founding members
Speaker 1: of this country that we can be comprehensively proud of.
Speaker 1: But they're pretty much just Thomas Paine actually when just
Speaker 1: basically and and John Brown. Yeah yeah yeah. John Brown,
Speaker 1: there was a neat moment in his history where he
Speaker 1: was like asked by some white folks he lived around
Speaker 1: to help them clear out a group of Native Americans
Speaker 1: from the community, and he was like, I'd rather clear
Speaker 1: your ass out of here. Yeah, good guy. John Brown,
Speaker 1: so um, civil law was often powerless to stop these
Speaker 1: kind of bands of marauding white terrorists in this insurgence
Speaker 1: really in this period of time. Um, but civil law
Speaker 1: was also often on board with this kind of violence.
Speaker 1: So it was a mix of we really have no
Speaker 1: resources to stop these people, and we also don't want
Speaker 1: to stop these people. Uh. And a good example of
Speaker 1: how this looked comes from the case of Union County,
Speaker 1: South Carolina. That town included a virulent cell of clansmen
Speaker 1: roughly organized around a local criminal named Bill Fawcett. Now,
Speaker 1: Fawcett had been a member of another anti black gorilla
Speaker 1: band known to Union troops as Slickers previously, he and
Speaker 1: his friends seemed to have slid rather seamlessly into becoming
Speaker 1: clansmen once that was the hip new way to be
Speaker 1: racist terrorists. Fawcett was repeatedly arrested for disorderly conduct and violence,
Speaker 1: but he had good connections to local law enforcement, and
Speaker 1: he and his friends were also tied heavily into the
Speaker 1: wealthy gentry in the Union County, so they never really
Speaker 1: did any hard time because they were good smugglers and
Speaker 1: they helped keep the rich people in the County well
Speaker 1: supplied with tax free liquor. One of the wealthy men
Speaker 1: who supported Fawcett and his vigilante activities was James Rice Rogers.
Speaker 1: He sold the illegal liquor that Fawcett smuggled and he
Speaker 1: was also the county sheriff in eighteen seventy. So that's
Speaker 1: back around the uh and again we're seeing kind of
Speaker 1: the same thing we are seeing in like the big
Speaker 1: you know, northern cities in this period of time where
Speaker 1: the police are intimately tied with vice, right you know.
Speaker 1: Um So, on the night of December thirty one, eighteen seventy,
Speaker 1: Union County was struck by a series of violent rates.
Speaker 1: And this kind of originated from a clash between white
Speaker 1: and black folks that still very complex. It started when
Speaker 1: two of Fawcett's and set out to deliver a barrel
Speaker 1: of illegal whiskey and they were stopped on the road
Speaker 1: by a checkpoint of black militiamen. And these guys were
Speaker 1: actually from two different black militias who had set up
Speaker 1: patrols in the area they lived because there were bands
Speaker 1: of armed clans been writing about and those clansmen had
Speaker 1: killed people recently. Um, not just black people, but also
Speaker 1: like white Republicans in this period. Um, so they yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're killing Republicans. Republican meant something different back then, Yeah,
Speaker 1: sure did so. Um, there's these bands of you know,
Speaker 1: armed klansmen running around killing people, and so black folks
Speaker 1: set up militias to protect their neighborhoods, right, so they're
Speaker 1: doing like armed community self defense. And this this group
Speaker 1: of faucets you know men start driving up to one
Speaker 1: of these uh, one of these checkpoints with a barrel
Speaker 1: of illegal whiskey. Um, and this militia holds Fawcett's men
Speaker 1: up and they demand their hand over the whiskey. Um.
Speaker 1: It's kind of unclear if they're just if they just
Speaker 1: want the whiskey because they're like, oh hey, let's get
Speaker 1: some whiskey, um, or if they're more like you guys
Speaker 1: are sketchy as hell. Um, you kind of seem like
Speaker 1: the clan dudes, because these guys were both probably klansmen
Speaker 1: who have been riding around and like, we want to
Speaker 1: see what the hell is up. And obviously these these
Speaker 1: white dudes did weren't willing to like listen to what
Speaker 1: a bunch of black militias said, and they write off.
Speaker 1: And so the black militiamen opened fire at their wagon.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote from historian A. Lane Parsons here.
Speaker 1: Perhaps it was important to the pickets or those who fired,
Speaker 1: that white men not dismissed their armed demands and drive
Speaker 1: breezily by. Such pickets were part of how power operated
Speaker 1: in Union, and to mobilize the resources to set one
Speaker 1: up only to have it dismissed might have serious consequences.
Speaker 1: Perhaps the shots were not about the whiskey at all.
Speaker 1: There is some reason to suspect that Stevens, who's one
Speaker 1: of the men driving that whiskey train, having passed through
Speaker 1: the organized group, would have headed straight to Fawcett, which
Speaker 1: might well have led to trouble, not unlike that which
Speaker 1: was caused by shooting. So like they might have been
Speaker 1: worried that these people were gonna go back to the
Speaker 1: clan and try to organize an attack on the picket
Speaker 1: and so, and trouble definitely followed, you know, them shooting
Speaker 1: at the wagon. Both the Fawcetts men immediately got out
Speaker 1: of the wagon and fled, but one of them was
Speaker 1: caught and he was executed by the militia, and his
Speaker 1: body was posed in a matter similar to how clansmen
Speaker 1: in the area had posed recently executed black men. Parsons continues.
Speaker 1: The black militia here was replicating the subculture of collective
Speaker 1: violence with which Union County ins were familiar. Picketing a
Speaker 1: road to defend one of their own from attack was
Speaker 1: conventional Union County behavior, as probably was the shakedown of Steven's.
Speaker 1: Even shooting after the retreating figures of Stevens and Robinson
Speaker 1: as they ran their picket would perhaps not have been
Speaker 1: particularly abnormal and as unhappy a culture as Union Counties.
Speaker 1: The killing of Stevens made it a much more serious matter.
Speaker 1: Of course. Militiaman, however, might have miscalibrated elite's willingness to
Speaker 1: support Fawcett's marginal men, giving Steven's limital status he was
Speaker 1: a criminal. Had the militia been composed of white members,
Speaker 1: it seems likely that the whole affair would have blown over. Indeed,
Speaker 1: when Steven's peer, Thomas Jefferson Greer had been shot just
Speaker 1: months earlier, his assailant, who was another white guy, had
Speaker 1: enjoyed widespreads public support. But again, John Sanders had been
Speaker 1: a white man. The fact that a black militia had
Speaker 1: killed a white guy was not okay to local white elite,
Speaker 1: and so large armed groups of white men formed up
Speaker 1: and started confiscating milicia weapons from black homes, disarming them first.
Speaker 1: Here we go. So so, like I get a bunch
Speaker 1: of pushback from said, you know, uh anarchists, bugaloo dudes
Speaker 1: who are like low key buggaloo, but don't want to
Speaker 1: admit it. You know what I'm saying, um saying, like
Speaker 1: I don't understand why black people don't arm themselves like
Speaker 1: you're doing all this peaceful protests. Maybe you should, like
Speaker 1: you yelling at us about being malicious coming out here
Speaker 1: heavenly armed. Maybe y'all should start heavily being heavily armed,
Speaker 1: as if we ain't never thought of that, like like
Speaker 1: I would. What makes you think we that thought ain't
Speaker 1: crossed our mind yet? You know what I'm saying, Like,
Speaker 1: do you want me to go? You did a thing
Speaker 1: on them, offered act already. You know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: We did that already. But like this what years is?
Speaker 1: What year you're talking about right now? Yeah? It's this.
Speaker 1: I'm a big I'm a supporter of of of of
Speaker 1: not just black people, members of marginalized groups, particularly as
Speaker 1: we continue to hurdle towards an uncertain future. Considering armed
Speaker 1: self defense, yes, like, yeah, that's been done a lot,
Speaker 1: and historically there's a lot more armed white people. So
Speaker 1: it's still like, it's not the solution. It's not the solution,
Speaker 1: And like, why you think we ain't thought it at?
Speaker 1: Like do you think we ain't thought of at This
Speaker 1: has been tried before and and sometimes it does work.
Speaker 1: We'll we'll actually got me talking about this a few
Speaker 1: times in this episode. It's not like like again I
Speaker 1: I'm one of the anarchists being like consider it. You know.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, I'm not saying consider it, but these people
Speaker 1: talking to me as if we never thought about you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying from the fucking beginning, From the beginning,
Speaker 1: what makes you think Like you come home, bro, and yeah,
Speaker 1: what happens? You know, the black people in Union County
Speaker 1: are organized and they are armed, and white people start
Speaker 1: going door to door and taking guns out events. Yes,
Speaker 1: and the reality of like and I love the part
Speaker 1: of that passage that was like this is not abnormal,
Speaker 1: Like what what what I wish I could run through
Speaker 1: all of the streets of America and explain is our
Speaker 1: countin American culture is violent, like we are. All of
Speaker 1: your statues are war heroes were founded on a protest.
Speaker 1: This is a violent culture. And our country, our power structures,
Speaker 1: they respond to violence. So I just don't like, I'm
Speaker 1: not telling you this is the right way. I'm just
Speaker 1: telling you. This is the ocean you swimming in. You
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. Right, we are saltwater fishies, That's
Speaker 1: where we are. We are a violent culture. So you
Speaker 1: mad at somebody else who's who's experiencing violence, right, like
Speaker 1: like it's become bit on those experience in violence to
Speaker 1: remain peaceful. Just it means like, I don't think you
Speaker 1: want to you asking me to be a fresh water
Speaker 1: fish in a saltwater ocean, Like, I just don't know
Speaker 1: what to tell you. The water is violent. So this
Speaker 1: is what's going to happen, Yeah yeah, so um yeah.
Speaker 1: So the white folks start taking all the guns of
Speaker 1: the black people who are in malicious um and they
Speaker 1: also arrest dozens of black men, many of them had
Speaker 1: whom had no ties to the malitious. Now, some of
Speaker 1: these men attempted to resist, but they ultimately decided that
Speaker 1: a gunfight would do them no good. Uh. They basically
Speaker 1: were like, hold up in a house that was surrounded
Speaker 1: by white folks, and they had the choice do we
Speaker 1: defend ourselves or do we give ourselves up? And kind
Speaker 1: of the decision was, if we defend ourselves, we will
Speaker 1: either kill or injure some of these white folks and
Speaker 1: they will be really angry when they finished killing us
Speaker 1: because there's a lot more of them, and they're gonna
Speaker 1: burn down every black house in the neighborhood right there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they like white people at this time and in this
Speaker 1: and at that time and in this time, but mostly
Speaker 1: at that time. Are thev say like you elevate the moment,
Speaker 1: like dial the eat up? You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: So these folks like give themselves up to save the neighborhood. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: For several days, the white elites in Union County debated
Speaker 1: over this list of randomly arrested black men that they
Speaker 1: had and decided, basically, we're credited aside, how many of
Speaker 1: them should can we punish and how many of them
Speaker 1: can we spare without provoking a broader race riot among like,
Speaker 1: because you know, there were like a chunk of folks
Speaker 1: in power who are like, who understood, like, most of
Speaker 1: these arrests are bullshit. But also we have to punish
Speaker 1: some black people more or less at random, otherwise the
Speaker 1: poor white folks in the county are going to go
Speaker 1: on a race riot. So there's like this big debate
Speaker 1: with the local elites, and Alice Walker, the head of
Speaker 1: a local black militia, gets arrested on his way to
Speaker 1: travel to the governor to warn him about what's happening
Speaker 1: in Union County. Now Walker hadn't been present at any
Speaker 1: of the events that had sparked this, but he was
Speaker 1: hated by the most racist of the local whites because
Speaker 1: he was the organizer of a black militia, so local
Speaker 1: law enforcement decided that his death would go really far
Speaker 1: in calming the white mob. Now Walker had supporters who
Speaker 1: were ready to rally to his defense armed, but again
Speaker 1: he told them not to um. He was innocent, and
Speaker 1: he was certain that a court case would bear out
Speaker 1: his innocence, But he never got the chance to actually,
Speaker 1: you know, do that. On January five, a huge gang
Speaker 1: of ku Kus klansmen raided the Union County jail and
Speaker 1: abducted five arrested black men, who also happened to be
Speaker 1: prominent local Republicans Parsons Rights quote. It is not possible
Speaker 1: to name many of the members of the costumed group,
Speaker 1: but because though not all of the men were on
Speaker 1: horseback and were costumed, we can imagine that many of
Speaker 1: the group's members were elites. From the size of the group.
Speaker 1: Even if we accept only a cautious estimate, it seems
Speaker 1: likely that they came from adjoining counties. There's a good
Speaker 1: deal of evidence that some of Fawcett's friends were present
Speaker 1: in a leadership role at this event, and one man
Speaker 1: who was later named by witnesses to the raid as
Speaker 1: a leader of the clan mob that abducted all these
Speaker 1: black men, was Fawcett's good buddy, Sheriff Rice Dgers. Um.
Speaker 1: So again, yeah, the ship, that's how they get into
Speaker 1: the jail is the sheriff as a klansman and he
Speaker 1: lets in. Yeah. Yeah, and you know obviously what you're
Speaker 1: expecting happens to these black men, and it's tragic, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: And it's it's possible even that, like, so, there was
Speaker 1: one of the things that did happen when the KKK
Speaker 1: showed up in this jail, is they struggled with a
Speaker 1: deputy to get the keys. Um. And it's heavily suspected
Speaker 1: by historians, including Elaine Parsons, that this was all kind
Speaker 1: of an act um and that it's likely that the
Speaker 1: deputy who struggled with the clan after giving up the keys,
Speaker 1: put on a clan costume and engaged in the raid
Speaker 1: after being robbed. Yeah, yeah, I can totally picture that, Hey,
Speaker 1: don't take my key, don't take my key. Look, I'm
Speaker 1: doing the right thing. Yeah. And it is like again
Speaker 1: a lot and this this this, I highlight this story
Speaker 1: because I think specific stories are kind of useful in
Speaker 1: getting people emotionally involved. But this is one of this happened.
Speaker 1: We will never know how many times constantly UM Like,
Speaker 1: the whole idea of a mob showing up at the
Speaker 1: jail and the officers handing over the keys or straight
Speaker 1: up just participating in the raid of the jail with
Speaker 1: clan robes on was a constant story during this period. UM. Now,
Speaker 1: as a rule, local law enforcement either again helped actively
Speaker 1: or turned a blind eye to clan violence out of fear.
Speaker 1: Watching from Washington, d C. President U. S. Grant was
Speaker 1: shocked by what seemed to be nothing so much as
Speaker 1: a resurgent Confederate movement in his you know, in his country.
Speaker 1: So when he had come to power, Granted believed that
Speaker 1: the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed black men
Speaker 1: the right to vote, would solve the problem of securing
Speaker 1: the rights of newly freed black people. He was taken
Speaker 1: by surprise by the vicious string of murders that followed
Speaker 1: black emancipation and chat Noogat Tennessee, a black man named
Speaker 1: Andrew Flowers defeated the white candidate for Justice of the
Speaker 1: Peace in an eighteen seventy election, despite the fact that
Speaker 1: this man had just been elected justice police were nowhere
Speaker 1: in evidence while klansman whipped and beat him and told
Speaker 1: him that no inward would hold office in the United States.
Speaker 1: Again common story, Yeah and again survived. Yeah again. Hey,
Speaker 1: why don't you just put black people in office? You
Speaker 1: think we ain't thought it at Yeah, you gotta deal
Speaker 1: with the problem of mass violence being done to black
Speaker 1: people in support of white supremacy, not always by white people,
Speaker 1: but in support of white supremacy. Because we'll talk next
Speaker 1: week about how how having black officers and police departments works,
Speaker 1: because it doesn't always work the way you might suspect,
Speaker 1: because white supremacy. Yeah, we talk to the first one.
Speaker 1: Whiteness is a thing. Yeah, you know what isn't the
Speaker 1: ku klux jus. No, that's not that's not what I mean. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know that's the harsh. Let's not analyze that too
Speaker 1: much right now. Let's just go through the episode one
Speaker 1: Fun the Police. It's time for an ad BK fun
Speaker 1: the Police roducts. We're back. Oh my gosh. You know
Speaker 1: what I love is being back from ADS because it
Speaker 1: means that we can talk more about the horrific history
Speaker 1: of racism and law enforcement, terror and trauma that sits
Speaker 1: inside of my DNA and passed on generationally. Yes, should
Speaker 1: have had an air horn there. So, starting in eighteen seventy,
Speaker 1: U President Grant began to lobby Congress to give him
Speaker 1: power to do something about the clan because again, local
Speaker 1: law enforcement was actively aiding and abetting the KK. In
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy and eighteen seventy one, Congress passed the Enforcement Acts.
Speaker 1: These protected the rights of black men to vote, hold office,
Speaker 1: and serve on juries and generally enjoy equal protection under
Speaker 1: the law. The Ku Klux Klan Acts, as they came
Speaker 1: to be known, allowed President Grant to call up the
Speaker 1: army to order in order to arrest and break up
Speaker 1: the bands of disguised night marauders. And we're to be
Speaker 1: like critical of law enforcement on this podcast, but we
Speaker 1: gotta be fair when it's important to be fair, and
Speaker 1: federal law enforcement did a pretty decent job on breaking
Speaker 1: up the clan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is this is
Speaker 1: where things get really complicated, prop because a lot of
Speaker 1: the credit for this goes to Amos Ackerman, the Attorney
Speaker 1: General of the United States. Ackerman joined the Republican Party
Speaker 1: after the Civil War and became one of the nation's
Speaker 1: most strenuous advocates for black suffrage. He was like, black
Speaker 1: people have the right to vote and hold office, and
Speaker 1: we will I I will make sure we enforce this
Speaker 1: with fucking rifleman if we have to. Um. Historian William S.
Speaker 1: Mcpheeley said of Ackerman that quote no attorney general before
Speaker 1: or since has been more vigorous in the prosecution of
Speaker 1: cases designed to protect the lives and rights of black Americans.
Speaker 1: And here's where things get complicated, because before he was
Speaker 1: a Republican before he was the Attorney General. Amos Ackerman
Speaker 1: volunteered and fought in the Confederate Army. People have layers
Speaker 1: of complication. People are complicated. They in them contain many Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: and this if for Amos, this seems to have been
Speaker 1: like he was. It seems to have been more a
Speaker 1: matter of, like you hear about these folks who are like,
Speaker 1: really loyal to their state for reasons I have trouble understanding. Like,
Speaker 1: he doesn't seem to have joined the Confederate Army specifically
Speaker 1: to fight for slavery, although he fought for slavery because
Speaker 1: that's what the Confederate Army fought for. But in his mind,
Speaker 1: I think it was more like, I'm really loyal to Georgia.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I can't get in ahead of that guy.
Speaker 1: But I guess if you can make that up he
Speaker 1: tried to afterwards. Um, So I want to give it
Speaker 1: to the possibility that people, uh, probably hundreds of them
Speaker 1: at the time, you know, like you said, just was like, look,
Speaker 1: we're down. Here is what we do. We're fighting for
Speaker 1: our way of life. I guess that's right. And in
Speaker 1: the middle of that, finally had this like, you know,
Speaker 1: this is bullshit, you know what I'm saying, and was like,
Speaker 1: but if you'd only this person for miles talking like this,
Speaker 1: it's probably hard to find some good community and you're
Speaker 1: probably gonna fumble, and then you become this guy to
Speaker 1: where you're like, hey, there's one thing I can do.
Speaker 1: I could probably like dismantled his clan. Thing, that's the
Speaker 1: thing to do. Yeah, if there's a thing that can
Speaker 1: make up for volunteering to serve in the Confederate Army,
Speaker 1: I guess it's dismantling the KKK. I guess. Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: that's a good that's a good, good artist. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the worst clan violence was in South Carolina, and
Speaker 1: Grant declared martial law in that state, citing a condition
Speaker 1: of lawlessness. He suspended habeas corpus uh, and numerous clansmen
Speaker 1: were rounded up by federal authorities, including Sheriff Rice Rogers,
Speaker 1: who we have been talking about a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of Sheriff Scott dropped pulled up in this. So
Speaker 1: the Senate held extensive hearings where hundreds of black victims
Speaker 1: of the clan were allowed to tell their stories to
Speaker 1: the nation under Rackerman's direction, six hundred clansmen were convicted,
Speaker 1: in sixty five of them sent to a federal penitentiary.
Speaker 1: By eighteen seventy two, the clan was no longer a
Speaker 1: meaningful force in the United States. Frederick Douglas himself said
Speaker 1: that without President Grant's actions, black Americans would have been
Speaker 1: trapped again in a condition almost identical to slavery. That
Speaker 1: is probably true, But it's also true that Grant kind
Speaker 1: of botched the landing on this one, firing Ackerman to
Speaker 1: appease his political rivals and commuting the sentences of some
Speaker 1: clansmen in a bid for reconciliation. So again, I can't
Speaker 1: stand here. You know, let's be fair, um. But also,
Speaker 1: you know, it is fair to say that Ulysses Simon
Speaker 1: Simpson Grant was probably the best presidential advocate for black
Speaker 1: rights that existed until at least FDR. That's I was
Speaker 1: going to say, like, yeah, why not to the New Deal,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, and even like even he got an
Speaker 1: asterisk next to it, yeah, a couple of yeah. So
Speaker 1: terrorism was, however, briefly out as a method of suppress
Speaker 1: of repressing Black Americans and enforcing white suprema see or
Speaker 1: at least terrorism and kind of an organized fashion, because
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about lynching later. Um. This left the
Speaker 1: law and law enforcement as the last organized refuge for
Speaker 1: white supremacists. The Black Codes had been made illegal in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty eight when the Fourteenth Amendment gave black people
Speaker 1: equal protection under the law. UM, But in eighteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: the first Jim Crow laws began to be passed, mandating
Speaker 1: separate public spaces for black and white people. Suddenly, white
Speaker 1: and black people were now expected by law to use
Speaker 1: separate schools, libraries, water fountains, and restaurants. The police could
Speaker 1: no longer arrest black men for voting, although that absolutely
Speaker 1: still happened, but they could arrest black people for entering
Speaker 1: white spaces. The clan was gone, but the police remained,
Speaker 1: and for decades they took over the hard work of
Speaker 1: enforcing white supremacy from the terrorists. In nineteen fifteen, William J. Simmons,
Speaker 1: former minister, performed a real act of resurrection and brought
Speaker 1: the KKK back to life. Now. Simmons had been a
Speaker 1: big nerd for things like the Masons and other fraternal
Speaker 1: societies that were a big part of life back in
Speaker 1: the day clubs where men would gather and dress up
Speaker 1: in costumes, do silly rituals, and generally get drunk. Simmons
Speaker 1: wanted to make a society of his own, and he
Speaker 1: decided that reviving the old KKK would be easiest because
Speaker 1: then he could cash in on the clan's name recognition
Speaker 1: and branding. Again, I cover all this in that two
Speaker 1: party that we we already did on the show. But
Speaker 1: before we move on to the cops stuff, the important
Speaker 1: thing to know is that the Second Clan was fucking huge.
Speaker 1: While the first had been a relatively small group of terrorists,
Speaker 1: the Second Clan had its terrorists, but it was largely
Speaker 1: a social club that included millions of Americans. At its height,
Speaker 1: they had a summer camp like. It was not quite
Speaker 1: the same thing. Yeah, they so branded equipment and stuff like,
Speaker 1: and in a lot of ways they were basically a
Speaker 1: pyramid scheme. Simmons engaged a pr firm to help him
Speaker 1: repackage this old terrorist group as a cool club for families.
Speaker 1: By nineteen twenty, the whole thing had gone viral nationwide,
Speaker 1: and the clan did engage in pushing racist laws. But
Speaker 1: for the folks at the top. I think more than
Speaker 1: even a force for racism. The clan was a grift
Speaker 1: right now. There were a lot of racists in like
Speaker 1: everyone in the clan was a racist still, and there
Speaker 1: were a lot of racists who were like the old
Speaker 1: clansmen kind of at the top. Making money was more
Speaker 1: the goal than anything else. Um yeah, uh so uh.
Speaker 1: In nineteen one, Simmons gave an interview to the Atlanta
Speaker 1: Journal that was basically his sales pitch to the nation
Speaker 1: for the Ku Klux Klan from a right up in
Speaker 1: the National Museum of American History website quote. While explicitly
Speaker 1: advocating white supremacy, Simmons played up his group's commitment to
Speaker 1: law and order, promoted their enforcement of prohibition, and even
Speaker 1: boasted of his own police credentials. He claimed members at
Speaker 1: every level of law enforcement belonged to his organization and
Speaker 1: that the local sheriff was often one of the first
Speaker 1: to join when the clan came to a town. Ominously,
Speaker 1: Simmons declared that the sheriff of Fulton County knows where
Speaker 1: he can get two members of the clan in a
Speaker 1: moment's called to suppress anything in the way of lawlessness.
Speaker 1: There is yeah, and he wasn't blowing hot air when
Speaker 1: he said this. In Anaheim, California, Klansman won four out
Speaker 1: of five seats on the city council, dominating local politics
Speaker 1: until nineteen four. They voted to allow officers who are
Speaker 1: clan members to patrol wearing their full KKK uniform instead
Speaker 1: of their normal police uniform. Non police clansmen were also
Speaker 1: allowed to patrol and interrogate citizens in the streets. Hey,
Speaker 1: I guess want you guys to know that anaheims where
Speaker 1: Disneyland is. So just just like let this let that
Speaker 1: sink in Anaheim, and in Anaheim and Disneyland is you
Speaker 1: want to go to downtown Disney it's Anaheim. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: City council of Anaheim, who are clansmen are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: cops can just wear their clan uniforms to do their job.
Speaker 1: It's just a club. Yeah yeah, And the clan uniform
Speaker 1: basically is the same as the police uniform. So like
Speaker 1: we're good. So I don't understand the problem. You know
Speaker 1: this This is probably something for episode five, But just
Speaker 1: like when I think to myself, like how anyone can
Speaker 1: get their brain around even at that time, after the
Speaker 1: law of change, after you fought the war. I just
Speaker 1: think at the core it's because you, like black people
Speaker 1: are just you're still just functional. You're still just a
Speaker 1: in the brain of the white supremacist at the time.
Speaker 1: And I think sometimes the stain of that's still here now,
Speaker 1: where it's like you are you're an appliance. Black people
Speaker 1: are an appliance, right, So when you can make an
Speaker 1: appliance out of our entire bodies, that slavery, right. So,
Speaker 1: and then you move that into mass incarceration to where
Speaker 1: you like, okay and segregation and stuff like that, like
Speaker 1: who wants to live in the house with their cows?
Speaker 1: Right because you're just in your washing machine doesn't have rights.
Speaker 1: It's just a washing machine, you know. So when you
Speaker 1: if you think of an entire person because of their
Speaker 1: color as just a function for yourself, and it's not
Speaker 1: even just black people, it's like even people that like
Speaker 1: if your argument against uh, you know, supporting immigrant rights,
Speaker 1: especially in the GRNTO Latin American, you know, people are like, well, well,
Speaker 1: who's going to pick our cotton or pick our strawberries?
Speaker 1: Who's gonna be you still see these people as an appliance,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying, So when I got my
Speaker 1: ten thousand new followers, that's saying support black voices. I
Speaker 1: wanted to be like, Yo, thank you for coming. Here's
Speaker 1: ten other things. I am dad. You know I got daughters.
Speaker 1: I'm lactose in tolerant. You know what I'm saying. I
Speaker 1: think butters disgusting. It's because you're still see me as
Speaker 1: and appliance, you know what I'm saying. So if if
Speaker 1: if I'm just the if I'm just the cow, if
Speaker 1: I'm just the function, So even if it's a function
Speaker 1: of you learning from me, I'm still just it's still
Speaker 1: just utility. If it's a function of y're just supposed
Speaker 1: to pick our fields. You don't get rights. Y'all live
Speaker 1: over there. And I don't understand why the damn refrigerator
Speaker 1: it to me to treat it like an equal. Do
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying, Like you're just the refrigeration,
Speaker 1: Like shut up? You know what? Man? Here, we need
Speaker 1: to figure out something to make the damn cows and
Speaker 1: pigs understand that they just cows and pigs? Do you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying? So to me, it's like if
Speaker 1: if that's where your brain goes Damn, I went on
Speaker 1: a rant. But that's where your brain goes. That's why
Speaker 1: it's so like mind boggling to this cityse Clans people.
Speaker 1: Was just like, I don't understand why these black people
Speaker 1: keep asking to sit at our tables. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's yeah. I mean like but like that that
Speaker 1: is sort of that's this is a really important thing
Speaker 1: to understand because Jim we usually talk about Jim Crow
Speaker 1: like white people usually talk about Jim Crow. I'm thinking
Speaker 1: back to like how it's talked about it like it
Speaker 1: was this terrible thing that happened that was done to
Speaker 1: black people, which it is was. It was a crime.
Speaker 1: But also what Jim Crow was is the foundation of
Speaker 1: law enforcement. Law enforcement in this country was still very
Speaker 1: much in flux and being formalized when Jim Crow started.
Speaker 1: It was really fucking new, Like the first police department
Speaker 1: had only started in eighteen thirty eight. Jim Crow starts
Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy seven. So US law enforcement and much,
Speaker 1: if not most, of this country is founded um at
Speaker 1: this like more or less at the same time as
Speaker 1: Jim Crow, which means that US law enforcement is founded
Speaker 1: in large part to keep the appliances in the eyes
Speaker 1: of the white elite, separated from the white elite like
Speaker 1: that that yeah, um so yes, important point. Um yes.
Speaker 1: So the second clan was also real popular in Oregon,
Speaker 1: maybe more popular in Oregon than it was anywhere else
Speaker 1: in the country. And Patient zero for the Oregon Clan
Speaker 1: was the southern town of Medford, which is not Bedford,
Speaker 1: which is when you Shakespeare in the Park. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: that's Ashland, which is right next to right, and and
Speaker 1: Ashland is a a very different city it is, but like, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's great tea house. I love. I actually like like
Speaker 1: Medford and Ashland are both like right next to each
Speaker 1: other and both in one of the prettiest parts of Oregon,
Speaker 1: and this one of the prettiest places in the entire planet.
Speaker 1: Like I've been all over the damn world. I haven't
Speaker 1: found anywhere. I found some places that are like up
Speaker 1: there with with that part of Oregon, but I haven't
Speaker 1: done anything that I find pretty like fucking gorgeous place.
Speaker 1: But also Medford has a real long history of straight
Speaker 1: up fascism right into the present day. Um, the mayor
Speaker 1: of the town of Phoenix, I think it was Phoenix,
Speaker 1: which is like right outside of Medford, basically a suburb
Speaker 1: of Medford. The mayor two or three days ago drove
Speaker 1: his car into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters.
Speaker 1: The mayor, yeah, so the issues go continue. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: could see my face right now. The mayor wow. So um.
Speaker 1: Medford is where Luther Powell, the klegal sent by the
Speaker 1: National Clan to establish the clan in Oregon, set up
Speaker 1: the state's first KKK outpost. He gained initial recruits by
Speaker 1: pointing to the massive bootlegging problem in nearby Jackson County
Speaker 1: and making the case that the clan could help with
Speaker 1: law and order. And I'm gonna quote now from a
Speaker 1: paper by Ben Bruce of Chapman University. Powell sold the
Speaker 1: Clan to potential followers not as a brotherhood of bigotry,
Speaker 1: but as a beacon of patriotism, cultural conservatism, and social order.
Speaker 1: According to Powell, the clan was there to uphold traditional
Speaker 1: American society against the threat of the Roaring twenties. Specifically,
Speaker 1: Pal emphasized the clan support for the enforcement of prohibition.
Speaker 1: In a matter of weeks, Pal had sworn over a
Speaker 1: hundred men into the Invisible Empire, most of who were
Speaker 1: policemen Clan expert and author David Chalmers describes the clan
Speaker 1: under Pal as being in the law and order business.
Speaker 1: Luther Powell's recruiting success in Medford cannot be quantified by
Speaker 1: lists of names on paper on membership dues alone. With
Speaker 1: his newfound support from local police officers, Paal accused Medford
Speaker 1: County of insufficient prohibition enforcement policies. He didn spearheaded the
Speaker 1: successful recall of the county sheriff. Within a month. The
Speaker 1: mayor of Medford was dressed in white robes as well.
Speaker 1: So Medford again, this is and this happens. We're talking
Speaker 1: about Anaheim and Medford, and like we'll talk about a
Speaker 1: couple of other cities, but this is happening all over
Speaker 1: the u S. We're like, whole city governments and the
Speaker 1: whole police departments are like, yeah, what if we're just
Speaker 1: klansmen too? This is fine, yea yeah. So pal success
Speaker 1: perfectly embodies what made the second clan much more successful
Speaker 1: than the first. The first KKK was literally an insurgent
Speaker 1: terrorist army. The new KKK positioned itself as a force
Speaker 1: for law and order, standing alongside the state in order
Speaker 1: to help keep white people safe. Um it was a
Speaker 1: It was again not a vigilante like terrorist organization, but
Speaker 1: instead the same kind of designated vigilante force, if you
Speaker 1: remember that from our first couple of episodes, designated plante
Speaker 1: force like the police, and that's why it was often
Speaker 1: like a lot of local clan cells were majority police officers.
Speaker 1: So Powell moved on quickly from Medford to Portland, as
Speaker 1: most people who visit Medford tend to do. Within months,
Speaker 1: the city had thousands of clansmen and it may have
Speaker 1: garnered more KKK members more quickly than any other city. Now, again,
Speaker 1: this rapid success in Portland came in part from the
Speaker 1: fact that the clan was seenis respectable. Shortly after opening,
Speaker 1: the Portland Clan chapter partnered openly with the Portland Police Bureau.
Speaker 1: Since the Portland Police Bureau only had a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty men at this point, it considered itself understaffed, and
Speaker 1: the Mayor of Portland decided to appoint a vigilante police auxiliary,
Speaker 1: and he allowed the KKK to pick the members. These
Speaker 1: men received police powers and firearms, but their names were
Speaker 1: kept hidden, effectively turning themselves into a secret police force.
Speaker 1: I should note here that during the recent protests in Portland,
Speaker 1: a commander of the Portland Police sport for sent out
Speaker 1: a directive ordering police officers to cover up their names
Speaker 1: and replace them with numbers that could only be traced
Speaker 1: back to names internally. Um, just a fun little thing.
Speaker 1: Portland Police Bureau, same force that partnered openly with the clan.
Speaker 1: Cool stuff. Oh my god, Portland's where there's where on
Speaker 1: We're on burn Side in m ok. You can go
Speaker 1: to a park of just food trucks and you can
Speaker 1: get craft like vegan waffles. That's in Portland. And the
Speaker 1: cops are claim members and the yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I've heard. I've heard a lot of cops and clan
Speaker 1: go hand in hand chants in port in the Portland
Speaker 1: streets recently. And I obviously a lot of people believe that,
Speaker 1: But I don't know if those people know that. Literally,
Speaker 1: the Portland Police Bureau had an official arrangement with the
Speaker 1: KKK and serious, you know, yeah, no, you're literally correct
Speaker 1: in a very direct way, not just in a these
Speaker 1: guys are secretly clan members. But no, no, no, like
Speaker 1: the PPB had an arrangement. Yeah, cool stuff. So a Storia,
Speaker 1: Oregon also had a major clan problem. And this is
Speaker 1: because it was the most diverse city in the state,
Speaker 1: which meant at this point didn't mean that it was
Speaker 1: the most the least lowest number of white people, and
Speaker 1: meant that it had like basically it had the most
Speaker 1: the highest number of Catholic people who came from weird
Speaker 1: parts of Europe like right and again, the second clan
Speaker 1: in this period, some historians will argue, was actually more
Speaker 1: racist and violent against Catholics and Jewish people, or at
Speaker 1: least as racist and violent as it was to black people.
Speaker 1: Like this is it is like they've broadened their their
Speaker 1: spate of hatred um and obviously it found a healthy
Speaker 1: base of resentful Protestant white people. In a story, a
Speaker 1: clan leaders brought in anti Catholic speakers to rile up
Speaker 1: the public, and they rallied themselves around enforcing vice laws
Speaker 1: that the police had not handled to their satisfaction. Primarily,
Speaker 1: they went after prohibition violators and prostitutes. On June seventeenth,
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty two, the clan sent both local newspapers and
Speaker 1: the sheriff a letter demanding that he take action against
Speaker 1: the whistle in the heart of a local bootlegging operation.
Speaker 1: Two weeks before the letter, two people had died in
Speaker 1: a drunken accident after leaving the whistle in. The clan
Speaker 1: led her to the sheriff threatened to take care of
Speaker 1: the problem if he failed to do so. On June nineteenth,
Speaker 1: the KKK sent fifty men into the whistle In. They
Speaker 1: were met by Sheriff's deputies, who had been called ironically
Speaker 1: by the bootleggers inside. The sheriff arrested both men, and
Speaker 1: the whole incident became something of a local scandal. The
Speaker 1: clan used it to petition for a recall election, which
Speaker 1: they again succeeded in getting. Their candidate won the recall election,
Speaker 1: giving them control of a story a sheriff's department, and
Speaker 1: soon after they swept local government elections too. Variations of
Speaker 1: the story repeated themselves all over Oregon, and the clan
Speaker 1: was eventually successful in electing their own candidate for Governor.
Speaker 1: Walt or In Pierce his regime passed the Oregon Compulsory
Speaker 1: School Bill, which required all children from eight to fifteen
Speaker 1: to attend public school. That sounds innocuous enough on the surface,
Speaker 1: but the purpose of the bill was to destroy all
Speaker 1: Catholic schools because those were not public. And again, the
Speaker 1: KKK really hates Catholics, and definitely the Oregon Clan is
Speaker 1: more anti Catholic than it is anti Black, but only
Speaker 1: because there's not a whole lot of black people in Oregon,
Speaker 1: right yeah, yeah, yeah, it was like it's like ninety
Speaker 1: five percent white people at this point. So that's why
Speaker 1: the KKK is so focused on although they also focus
Speaker 1: a lot on Japanese and Chinese immigrants. And like this
Speaker 1: governor that they elect pushes a bill to basically make
Speaker 1: it impossible to move to Oregon or work in Oregon
Speaker 1: as an Asian person, and you know, the both the
Speaker 1: anti compulsory bill and the anti Asians bills like those
Speaker 1: get struck down. Um, and this governor, who is backed
Speaker 1: by the clan winds up kind of turning on the clan,
Speaker 1: not because he's a good guy, but because, um, he
Speaker 1: doesn't he thinks that after he gets elected, he doesn't
Speaker 1: really feel loyal to the clan anymore. Like so anyway,
Speaker 1: it's a complicated story, but the clan, I'm just like
Speaker 1: man like y'all sin as I feel like when I
Speaker 1: the more I learned about them, I'm just like man,
Speaker 1: y'all are all over the place like where I just
Speaker 1: sometimes I can't even draw the I can't even connect
Speaker 1: the dots of their hatred, like how like how are
Speaker 1: how are we talking about Jews right now? Like where
Speaker 1: it's like when did we get to that? You know?
Speaker 1: Or I just I can imagine I would love to
Speaker 1: see a skit where somebody's trying to complain where where
Speaker 1: uh some new kids in the back of the room
Speaker 1: at the clan meeting and can't keep up with like wait,
Speaker 1: we're talking about Catholics? Now what what what they do? Wait?
Speaker 1: What what's the problem with you know what I'm saying?
Speaker 1: Like just like I can't even this is a complete tangent,
Speaker 1: but I'm just like, yeah, I just I can't keep up. Man,
Speaker 1: I'm like yeah, oh, just hey, man, at least be consistent.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, um break oh yeah we should That
Speaker 1: was smooth. Thank Yeah. Here's have a have a handful
Speaker 1: of products Buckaroo's. We're back. We have returned, and we're
Speaker 1: talking still about the Oregon Clan. So the Oregon kk
Speaker 1: hit K success in local and state politics gave them
Speaker 1: the legitimacy they needed to feel comfortable carrying out acts
Speaker 1: of violence. On April eleventh, nineteen, a twenty two year
Speaker 1: old Latino man named Sam Johnson was grabbed in the
Speaker 1: middle of the night by a group of robed klansmen.
Speaker 1: They dragged him into the forest and they hung him
Speaker 1: from a tree quote not long enough to kill him,
Speaker 1: but sufficiently long to give him a glance into eternity,
Speaker 1: according to a local paper. While he lay on the
Speaker 1: ground recovering, the mob told him that he had to
Speaker 1: leave town or they would come back and kill him.
Speaker 1: This semi lynching was again reported on in the local paper,
Speaker 1: but no arrests were made. The county sheriff, or was
Speaker 1: almost certainly one of the men who abducted Sam, called
Speaker 1: him a bad actor who just hadn't done anything serious
Speaker 1: enough to get arrested. He doesn't have a criminal record,
Speaker 1: but he was. We decided he was a criminal, so
Speaker 1: it's fine. Yeah. The sheriff accused him of bootlegging without
Speaker 1: any evidence and washed his hands of the case. On
Speaker 1: March eighteenth, a Catholic piano salesman named JF. Hale was
Speaker 1: assaulted in the same way, taking a gunpoint into the
Speaker 1: woods and then hung almost to death. This time, the
Speaker 1: demand was made that Hale drop a lawsuit against another
Speaker 1: Medford man for an unpaid debt, and that he also
Speaker 1: leave town. The sheriff said the kidnapping two was of
Speaker 1: no local interest, which it's also worth noting that there
Speaker 1: was a recent well last year a trans black woman
Speaker 1: who was murdered in the city of Portland's um and
Speaker 1: the death was written a well who died in the
Speaker 1: City of Portland. The police ruled it a suicide. There's
Speaker 1: a lot that shady about it. The family has asked
Speaker 1: for it to be investigated, and the police said that
Speaker 1: investigating it, uh further was not of local interest. Um,
Speaker 1: so that's cool, that's a cool thing. That Again, I
Speaker 1: got to point out how this never stopped and has
Speaker 1: never really even slowed down in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: This this is this playbook has ever failed these fools? Yes, yeah, uh.
Speaker 1: On April two, a black railroad worker who had just
Speaker 1: been released from jail over prohibition violation was kidnapped hung
Speaker 1: again in order to flee the town. As he ran away,
Speaker 1: he heard men shouting back at him can you run inward,
Speaker 1: while some in the crowd fired at his feet with
Speaker 1: their revolvers. By this point, local media had begun covering
Speaker 1: the clan subductions and outraged articles. One in the Medford
Speaker 1: Mail Tribune revealed that the state clan leadership had actually
Speaker 1: sent notes to individual members within the county with instructions
Speaker 1: on how to carry out these necktie attacks. The clan
Speaker 1: denied these letters since they had not been sent on
Speaker 1: official clan letterhead. Again, they had a lot of products,
Speaker 1: plan had a lot of products and services actually in
Speaker 1: this period, because it wasn't all letter hit. They sold insurance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is incredible. So klegal? H. E. Griffith, who was
Speaker 1: the guy who had taken over the Medford Clan, demanded,
Speaker 1: then your name is can you say his his title again?
Speaker 1: Just legal? Just klegal? I know, yeah, I'm just yeah,
Speaker 1: exercises that women do to keep Oh yes, yes it
Speaker 1: does sound like that. Yeah now, so h Griffith prop
Speaker 1: thank you? Hey girl, dad? You know yeah, you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. Yeah. So, um, The Medford Mail Tribune
Speaker 1: like writes a letter about how the clan is very
Speaker 1: obviously behind all this, and the guy in charge of
Speaker 1: the Medford Clan demands to that the newspaper give him
Speaker 1: a chance to respond, and the Medford Mail Tribune lets
Speaker 1: him release his statement through the paper denying any role
Speaker 1: in the semi lynchings. Gotta gotta tell both sides of
Speaker 1: the story, um Ben Bruce writes, quote Klegal h. Griffith
Speaker 1: gave an official statement denying any prior knowledge of the
Speaker 1: aforementioned eventual events as well as the clan's alleged involvement.
Speaker 1: Griffith accused the local papers of severely misrepresenting the facts.
Speaker 1: In the same article, Griffith endorsed the clan as a regular, fraternal, patriotic,
Speaker 1: and benevolent order that stands for pure Americanism, protection of
Speaker 1: pure womanhood, free speech and press, free public schools, restricted immigration,
Speaker 1: white supremacy, and law and order, and consistently assists all
Speaker 1: law officers in the performance of their duties. Um that's cool. Surprisingly,
Speaker 1: the people of Medford did not believe these denials, or
Speaker 1: at least enough of them didn't. That public outrage did
Speaker 1: force a trial, which occurred nearly a year later. Nineteen
Speaker 1: clansmen were charged with participating in the necktie parties, as
Speaker 1: they came to be known. One of the men was
Speaker 1: the former police chief of Medford, Good Lord. The main
Speaker 1: witness was JF. Hale, the piano salesman, but the state
Speaker 1: decided he was not a reputable citizen, largely because his
Speaker 1: son had been born out of wedlock. It is the twenties. Uh,
Speaker 1: It's it's cool. All charges against the klansmen were dropped.
Speaker 1: Ye oh yeah, so you remember that. You remember last
Speaker 1: year that at that um that uh anti abortion protests,
Speaker 1: where that little boy was like eye to eye with
Speaker 1: that Native American man and like the the whole picture went.
Speaker 1: Remember that. Yeah, So this that what you're just explaining
Speaker 1: explains in a lot of ways why everybody looked at
Speaker 1: that moment and saw two different things. Because the what
Speaker 1: what the terror that a lot of us are talking about,
Speaker 1: Like why this was so frustrating was because the the
Speaker 1: ambiguity of this kid's face of just being like he
Speaker 1: is just a kid. He is kind of smirking, right,
Speaker 1: And you could say, well, we didn't do anything, he
Speaker 1: didn't erupt the guy. He's just standing there looking at me.
Speaker 1: If they're at his own protests, it's fine. But when
Speaker 1: you hear stories like this, what and I can't say
Speaker 1: because I'm not in that kid's head and I wasn't there.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying when I look at it, I see
Speaker 1: the history. You're explaining the idea that you that these
Speaker 1: boys can function without any imputant what's the word I'm
Speaker 1: looking for, imputant punitive, their impunity. What's the word I'm
Speaker 1: looking for. I don't know. But the point is they're
Speaker 1: not gonna get in trouble. That's what I'm trying to say. Right,
Speaker 1: So you can always lean back and be like, what,
Speaker 1: I didn't do anything. So and I just remembered how
Speaker 1: many times in my own life recognizing that smirk, knowing
Speaker 1: that no matter what this kid did did, no matter
Speaker 1: how terrible it is, no matter how much evidence I have,
Speaker 1: he will not be punished, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: So that's the like. So, whether I know what this
Speaker 1: kid was thinking or not, it's like, this is what
Speaker 1: America saw. There was two America's one of the one
Speaker 1: side of America saw this kid has. This kid's gonna
Speaker 1: there's no matter what, he's not gonna get in trouble. Nope.
Speaker 1: And this is this is why when we finally do
Speaker 1: reform law enforcement, you know, uh, disband the police and
Speaker 1: replace it with something better. One of the federal agencies
Speaker 1: we need is a is a federal branch. That is
Speaker 1: just a groups of people who go door to door
Speaker 1: and just give people one solid punch in the face
Speaker 1: when they really deserve it, when they like they don't.
Speaker 1: We shouldn't be sending them to prison. They didn't do
Speaker 1: a prison thing. Like you were a dick and now
Speaker 1: you're gonna get hit in the face. Yeah yeah, a
Speaker 1: good slapping. Yeah yeah, somebody in the damn face. Yeah yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: I think it's back from get shipped, which is like
Speaker 1: a face in need of a fist? Is the is
Speaker 1: the direct translation? Yeah, Yeah, Sometimes people just need to
Speaker 1: get like not hard, not enough to do damage. Like
Speaker 1: we'll train these people to deliver like legally appropriate slaps
Speaker 1: and punches, but like you were a dick and somebody
Speaker 1: needs to fucking smack you, and like it should be
Speaker 1: a group of of of men and women in suits
Speaker 1: who come to your door and say, like you have
Speaker 1: been selected to get smacked in the face because you
Speaker 1: were a dick and you need to know it. That's
Speaker 1: my suggestion, um, not a bad one. Yeah. So Oregon's
Speaker 1: clan was relatively non violent, and again this totally tells
Speaker 1: you how bad the second clan was. We're calling like
Speaker 1: lynch ng's that don't kill anybody, relatively non violent compared
Speaker 1: to the clan in Oklahoma, for example, had a horrifically
Speaker 1: violent clan that also eventually wound up in charge of
Speaker 1: most a lot of the the different state or or
Speaker 1: like local cities and departments, police departments and stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: And it was also comparatively non violent when you sort
Speaker 1: of put it against the clan in Indiana for example.
Speaker 1: There in Indiana, the KKK was successful in infiltrating a
Speaker 1: local civilian law enforcement agency, the Horse Thief Detective Association. Now,
Speaker 1: this odd group got its start in the eighteen forties
Speaker 1: and it's members were basically licensed vigil aunties with the
Speaker 1: right to protect property via violence. And as you can
Speaker 1: guess by the name, they started to prosecute horse thieves. Right,
Speaker 1: law enforcement can't catch all these horse thieves. Will deputize civilians,
Speaker 1: will give them the right to like arrest and funk
Speaker 1: up people to stop horse thievery. But they also had
Speaker 1: kind of broader rights to enforce laws. Um. Now, the
Speaker 1: birth of the automobile reduced the Horse Thief Detective Association
Speaker 1: to a somewhat a relevant group. But when the KKK
Speaker 1: came to Indiana in the early nineteen twenties. They saw that, like,
Speaker 1: there was this organization that civilians who are klansmen could join,
Speaker 1: and it would give them the right to carry out
Speaker 1: violence with state backing. So they start flooding the h
Speaker 1: d t A with membership, and they also start giving
Speaker 1: existing members in the h d t A free and
Speaker 1: subsidized membership in the KKK because they see that like,
Speaker 1: this weird little organization gives them the right to enforce
Speaker 1: the law in Indiana without like having to get elected
Speaker 1: sheriff or anything or put you know, even recruit police officers.
Speaker 1: So the Indiana Clan starts pouring money into the h
Speaker 1: d t A and offering their existing members low priced
Speaker 1: in tree into the clan quote as sworn members of
Speaker 1: h d t A chapters, Clansmen in the state essentially
Speaker 1: formed an armed, officially sanctioned force that would allow them
Speaker 1: to enact their agenda under the guise of legitimate law enforcement. Now.
Speaker 1: In his work on the Clan in Indiana, historian Leonard J.
Speaker 1: Moore details membership records from nineteen twenty five that showed
Speaker 1: that over twenty of the state's eligible population white Protestant
Speaker 1: native born males belonged to the KKK, and some counties
Speaker 1: that number exceeded thirty three. In Marion County, which included
Speaker 1: the city of Indianapolis, over a quarter of eligible men
Speaker 1: belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, some twenty five thousand
Speaker 1: members in total, many of whom held dual membership in
Speaker 1: the h d T A chapter. Okay, wait, m hm
Speaker 1: uh they paid dues? Yeah, yeah, no, it was a
Speaker 1: for profit in debt. Oh yeah, I remember that, which
Speaker 1: I forgot. How lame that even makes it even more lame. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're paid paid to be in here, mom, so lame.
Speaker 1: It's pretty cool. So I'm gonna quote again from a historian,
Speaker 1: Leonard J. Moore quote, uh as horse thief detectives, the
Speaker 1: Indiana Clan came down on bootleggers, organized labor, immigrants, and
Speaker 1: African American populations, and one incident related in Elliott Jaspin's
Speaker 1: book Buried in the Bitter Waters, they helped expel black
Speaker 1: citizens from the mining town of Blandford in western Indiana.
Speaker 1: On January eighteenth, nineteen twenty three, a young girl from
Speaker 1: Blandford reported that she had been abducted and assaulted by
Speaker 1: an African American man. Within forty eight hours, several hundred
Speaker 1: white towns folk met and demanded that all black residents leave,
Speaker 1: beginning with unmarried men who were to be outside town limits.
Speaker 1: By that evening. Within a week, all black residents of Blandford,
Speaker 1: approximately fifty people had fled. That exodus was overseen by
Speaker 1: Harry Newland, the sheriff of Vermillion County and himself a klansman,
Speaker 1: along with members of the Dana h d t A
Speaker 1: and the Help Township h d t A, two of
Speaker 1: the four chapters in the area. The Help Township chapter
Speaker 1: alone included over a dozen members of the clan, including
Speaker 1: its captain. African American citizens both in Blandford and the
Speaker 1: surrounding county felt forced to comply into part in mass.
Speaker 1: As Jaspin notes, the has recorded well over two hundred
Speaker 1: black residents in Vermilion County. In nineteen thirty, that number
Speaker 1: was less than seventy. That's an active of ethnic cleansing.
Speaker 1: That's what we call ethnic cleansing. Yeah, that's what that's called. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the Indiana all the KKK was active all throughout
Speaker 1: and again, think about this, think about this civilian group
Speaker 1: with law enforcement powers enforcing white supremacy. When you think about,
Speaker 1: for example, armed members of far right Molissia's showing up
Speaker 1: to support the police at protests, Um, yeah, that's so.
Speaker 1: The KKK was active all throughout the United States during
Speaker 1: this period, eventually reaching a peak of like four million members.
Speaker 1: There exists no accurate nationwide count for how many people
Speaker 1: were forced out of their homes by the clan, how
Speaker 1: many were assaulted by them, are killed by them, just
Speaker 1: as there exists no comprehensive accounting for how often this
Speaker 1: behavior occurred, either with the consent or the enthusiastic help
Speaker 1: of the police. In either case, it maybe a mistake
Speaker 1: to even attempt to quantify the KKK's part in this specifically,
Speaker 1: because the violence of both the First and Second Clan
Speaker 1: occurred within a much broader context of mass violence against
Speaker 1: black people by white people with the express consent of
Speaker 1: law enforcement. This violence started up during reconstruction and continued
Speaker 1: all the way into nineteen fifty. We tend to call
Speaker 1: it lynching today, although it took a variety of forms,
Speaker 1: and we will never know how many black men were
Speaker 1: killed during this period. But the Equal Justice Initiative estimates
Speaker 1: sixty five hundred at the minimum. These murders occurred at
Speaker 1: a steady pace, with intermittent eruptions that were spurred on
Speaker 1: by a mix of economic recessions, war and white resentment
Speaker 1: of black success. And all that brings me to the
Speaker 1: story of the Red Summer of nineteen nineteen. Have you
Speaker 1: heard of this prop Yes, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna guess
Speaker 1: I think because of the show Watchmen. Actually a lot
Speaker 1: more white people know about Tulsa now, which we'll be
Speaker 1: talking about in part two. I don't think very many.
Speaker 1: Why I didn't know about fucking Red Summer until like
Speaker 1: a week or two ago. So four, Part four Jesus,
Speaker 1: Part four for the week, Part two for the week. Okay, well, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: the next episode we will talk about Tulsa. This episode.
Speaker 1: This is uh yeah, Red Summer nineteen nineteen. Again. This
Speaker 1: is the type of stuff that, like, like I said before,
Speaker 1: if it's not in your experience, you you'd have to
Speaker 1: go out of your way to know this, um. But
Speaker 1: if it is, it's like this is why I will
Speaker 1: always hammer like, you know, having a good strong sense
Speaker 1: of self, a sense of community, and then having relationships
Speaker 1: across communities. You know what I'm saying, So that now
Speaker 1: you don't sound like an asshole when you don't know
Speaker 1: what you're talking about because you don't know people from
Speaker 1: other places. You know what I'm saying. So this is
Speaker 1: so so yeah. So anyway, all that to say, this
Speaker 1: ship won't be in your textbooks, and it's not gonna be.
Speaker 1: It's not gonna Yeah, you're lucky if you get a
Speaker 1: paragraph on the Red Summer in a in a textbook,
Speaker 1: and not all texts. Mind sure didn't have it. It
Speaker 1: is in some textbooks because some of the articles I
Speaker 1: read on it, like we're specifically analyzing how it's covered
Speaker 1: in textbooks, but again generally about a paragraph. Now. The
Speaker 1: Red Summer is the name given by Double A CP
Speaker 1: leader James Weldon Johnson for the months in nineteen nineteen
Speaker 1: when a wave of racist riots. Race riots is often
Speaker 1: the term, I think racist riots is more accurate, broke
Speaker 1: out against black communities in Charleston, South Carolina, Longview, Texas, Bisbee, Arizona, Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. Chicago, Knoxville, Omaha, and Elaine, Arkansas. At least
Speaker 1: a hundred and fifty people were killed in the violence,
Speaker 1: and a hundred or so more lynched, but it's probably
Speaker 1: more like a thousand dead. You'll you'll hear again, we don't.
Speaker 1: We're not gonna We're never gonna get a good accounting. Um.
Speaker 1: And I hope the listeners here like as he gets
Speaker 1: into this story again, just like we said, you know,
Speaker 1: to the militia folks that are like, how come black
Speaker 1: people don't arm? And when we say, you think we
Speaker 1: ain't thought it at right now, as you read, as
Speaker 1: you listen to this story, when people say, well, how
Speaker 1: come you don't build your own businesses and support your
Speaker 1: own community and start your own capitalistic spaces, let me say,
Speaker 1: you think we ain't thought it at yeah? Yeah, yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: So obviously you know, clan members were involved with and
Speaker 1: behind a great deal of the violence of Red Summer,
Speaker 1: but not not necessarily most of it. Although in Pittsburgh
Speaker 1: the KKK chapter posted up notices around a black neighborhood
Speaker 1: which stated the war is over, Negroes, stay in your place.
Speaker 1: If you don't, will put you there, um, which is
Speaker 1: a little ironic because a lot of Red Summer involved
Speaker 1: white crowds going into black neighbors coming yeah exactly one
Speaker 1: and all business fucking a. While clansmen were regular drivers
Speaker 1: of violence during Red Summer, uniformed police officers played at
Speaker 1: least as larger role, maybe even a larger one. One
Speaker 1: of the first riots started in Chicago on July after
Speaker 1: a black child mistakenly swim him into a chunk of
Speaker 1: beach that was whites only under Jim Crow. White people
Speaker 1: on the beach saw this child, Eugene Williams, and started
Speaker 1: pelting him with rocks. Every time he would attempt to
Speaker 1: come to shore, they would throw more rocks at him.
Speaker 1: He eventually drowned. This brought a cloud crowd of furious
Speaker 1: black citizens out more rocks were thrown. A white officer
Speaker 1: showed up, observed the situation, and decided to arrest a
Speaker 1: black guy. This, for obvious reasons, helped push tensions in
Speaker 1: Chicago to a boiling point. The resulting riot led to
Speaker 1: thirty eight, mostly black deaths, and the police responded with
Speaker 1: a mix of completely neglect, often allowing the white mobs
Speaker 1: to do violence, and occasional acts of giving a ship,
Speaker 1: possibly due to the presence of black men on the
Speaker 1: Chicago p D. The most example notable example of this
Speaker 1: was probably the Chicago police holding back a white mob
Speaker 1: from burning down a hospital filled with mostly black patients.
Speaker 1: The only CPD officer to die during the riot was
Speaker 1: a black man. Red Summer actually continued into the fall,
Speaker 1: and one of its bloodiest hot spots was Phillips County, Arkansas.
Speaker 1: On September thirty, small group of black people gathered at
Speaker 1: a rural church to organize a sharecroppers union. Two police,
Speaker 1: white policemen showed up, and they had been sent there
Speaker 1: specifically to stop the union from organizing. So again we
Speaker 1: do have some interchange with what we talked about in
Speaker 1: the last episode, where the police exist to stop unions
Speaker 1: for wealthy people. Anyway, um, so they claimed they were
Speaker 1: looking for a bootlegger, and what happened next is unclear,
Speaker 1: but a gunfight broke out and one officer was killed,
Speaker 1: almost certainly in self defense by the people in that meeting.
Speaker 1: The local sheriff sent out a call for armed random
Speaker 1: white dudes to quote hunt Mr. Inward, and he did
Speaker 1: not use the in word. I mean, he used the
Speaker 1: in word, but he didn't, you know, he used the
Speaker 1: real one, hunt Mr. Inward in his lair. Hundreds of
Speaker 1: white dudes from all over the area and even from
Speaker 1: the adjoining state of Mississippi showed up in Phillips County
Speaker 1: with guns. They opened fire wildly at every black person
Speaker 1: they saw, with the enthusiastic consent and help of the police.
Speaker 1: Frank Moore, a black farmer, survived the massacre. He later
Speaker 1: recalled the white sent word that they was coming down
Speaker 1: here to kill every inn where they found. There were
Speaker 1: three hundred or four hundred or more white men with guns,
Speaker 1: shooting and killing women and children. Now, of course klansmen
Speaker 1: were involved, and some of those clansmen were likely police officers,
Speaker 1: but the violence in Phillips County was backed by state
Speaker 1: and local officials, lawmen, and business owners, not just a
Speaker 1: vigilante social club. The official death toll was eleven black
Speaker 1: men and five white men killed. The real number of
Speaker 1: murdered black people is believed to range from anywhere from
Speaker 1: one hundred to two hundred and thirty seven. At one point,
Speaker 1: the white mobs were aided by federal troops as well.
Speaker 1: Local reporters helped the government cover up the massacre by
Speaker 1: claiming the violence had been white self defense against a
Speaker 1: black uprising. One Arkansas Gazette article opened with the headline
Speaker 1: Negroes plan to kill all whites. Good lord, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: could just make it up and yo, like going into
Speaker 1: like some of these specific communities just to color, just
Speaker 1: to are some of the story. We're becoming a fluid,
Speaker 1: especially the ones in South Carolina. They were like, okay, listen,
Speaker 1: you don't want to do business with us. Fine, So
Speaker 1: we were saying it was opening banks, selling their own homes,
Speaker 1: starting their own businesses, growing their own crops. It was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: it's fine, Fine, we don't have to live together. It's fine,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. And then all of the sudden,
Speaker 1: somebody just come knock it down. It's like, what do
Speaker 1: you and you know, specifically sparked by that community share
Speaker 1: croppers in the community being like, we need to agitate
Speaker 1: together to have a better deal in a legal and
Speaker 1: constitutionally protected way. Oh now you're shooting at us. Now,
Speaker 1: now you're shooting at us. It was just like you're like, okay, wait, okay,
Speaker 1: so we're not three fist human anymore. The law applies
Speaker 1: to us. It seems like this system of sharecropping don't work.
Speaker 1: Maybe we should work together and kind of figure out
Speaker 1: a better way to I mean, I mean we we
Speaker 1: were citizens. Now we have this right all guess we
Speaker 1: don't know you're shooting us. Okay, yeah, that this is
Speaker 1: just like the oh I was in fear of my
Speaker 1: life bullshit that cops second every day they were uprising.
Speaker 1: You'll hear that again in the next episode two. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were mining their own business. I was afraid of
Speaker 1: the woman sleeping in her own house. It's it's uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not a big chairman mal fan um,
Speaker 1: but when he said political power comes from the barrel
Speaker 1: of a gun, he was not incorrect. Like, and that's
Speaker 1: what you see here, right right, That's what that's what
Speaker 1: Red Summer is. Um. Yeah, And I recognize things are
Speaker 1: getting little bit muddled here in this podcast about the
Speaker 1: history of the police visa v the difference between the
Speaker 1: vigilante violence, the KKK violence, the police violence, the police
Speaker 1: violence that is KKK violence. And that's because very real
Speaker 1: history is always muddled. And in this period police were
Speaker 1: often perpetrators and lynchings and white mob violence against black people.
Speaker 1: They also more often failed to intervene in this sort
Speaker 1: of thing, and they did sometimes fight against it, um
Speaker 1: often because there were black officers on the force, but
Speaker 1: there were in this period is important to note some
Speaker 1: very brave white officers who were like, this isn't fucking okay,
Speaker 1: and I'm not trying to erase those people, but nationwide
Speaker 1: as a coal police completely failed to defend black citizens
Speaker 1: in any organized, meaningful way during the Red Summer of
Speaker 1: nineteen nineteen. White people initiated more or less a hundred
Speaker 1: percent of the violence during this summer, and law enforcement
Speaker 1: consistently failed to protect them. In Washington, d C. While
Speaker 1: white mobs marched through black neighborhoods, firing wildly, the police
Speaker 1: response was so lackluster that the mayor was had to
Speaker 1: call in the military in order to protect the city's
Speaker 1: black citizens. The individual racism of white officers, mixed with
Speaker 1: the simple reality that police had never been intended to
Speaker 1: protect poor neighborhoods or businesses in an organized fashion, left
Speaker 1: black people with no option but to protect themselves. And
Speaker 1: to tell that story in brief, I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: from an article in teen Vogue by Ursula wolf Roca. Quote.
Speaker 1: In Knoxville, Tennessee, armed black men organized themselves to successfully
Speaker 1: repel hundreds of white rioters that who had already destroyed
Speaker 1: the county jail with a battering ram and dynamite. In Chicago,
Speaker 1: African Americans formed self defense units after days of white
Speaker 1: terror in their neighborhoods. Many of these defenders were veterans
Speaker 1: among the three hundred and seventy thousand black men inducted
Speaker 1: into the army during World War One, who hoped fighting
Speaker 1: for democracy abroad might finally secure their first class citizenship
Speaker 1: at home. The mob violence in Chicago convinced Harry Haywood,
Speaker 1: a veteran of the all black three hundred and seventy
Speaker 1: Infantry Regiment, he had made a mistake, As he explained,
Speaker 1: I had been fighting the wrong war. The Germans weren't
Speaker 1: the enemy. The enemy was right here at home in Washington. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There it is. The muddle is the I love that
Speaker 1: you said muddled, because that's the point. That's the point
Speaker 1: we're trying to make when it comes to policing in America.
Speaker 1: It is muddled. I can't I should be able to
Speaker 1: tell the difference. I should be able to go that
Speaker 1: is the clan. These are the police I should be
Speaker 1: And that's our point. I can't tell the difference. That's
Speaker 1: the point. Yep. YEP may continue that quote about black
Speaker 1: self defense during red Summer in Washington, d C. Seventeen
Speaker 1: year old Carry Johnson opened fire on men breaking into
Speaker 1: her home while a thousand white rioters laid siege to
Speaker 1: her neighborhood. In Anniston, Alabama, in December of nineteen eighteen,
Speaker 1: a black veteran sergeant Edgar Caldwell was ordered out of
Speaker 1: the white section of a street car. He refused, kicked
Speaker 1: out of the car, and set up on by the
Speaker 1: white motorman and conductor. Caldwell shot his pistol twice, killing
Speaker 1: one of his attackers, though uncoordinated, when looked at together,
Speaker 1: these hundreds of moments in and leading up to nineteen
Speaker 1: nineteen read is an awesome display of collective black agency
Speaker 1: and self preservation. So again, black arm self defense often
Speaker 1: is overwhelmed by again, this yeer number of white people,
Speaker 1: their additional resources they're backing of the state. But it
Speaker 1: also works out sometimes and it saves a lot of
Speaker 1: lives when it does. So we I don't want to
Speaker 1: be saying like it's not at tactic that succeeds it
Speaker 1: historically has um. In two thousands sixteen, city councilwoman Angelia
Speaker 1: Williams took to the stage at an in double a
Speaker 1: cp luncheon. She told the crowd that modern racists had
Speaker 1: quote taken off their white hats and white sheeted robes
Speaker 1: and put on police uniforms. Some of them have put
Speaker 1: on shirts and ties his policymakers, and some of them
Speaker 1: have put on robes as judges. This did not go
Speaker 1: over well, and she was roundly pilloried by law enforcement officials.
Speaker 1: A lot of them were like Democrats, and a wide
Speaker 1: variety of elected local democrats. Um But if Councilwoman Williams
Speaker 1: had wanted to bring up recent cases of folks who
Speaker 1: worked forces and also burnt crosses, she would not have
Speaker 1: had to google hard. In two thousand twelve, a Little Rock,
Speaker 1: Arkansas officer who had attended at least one KKK meeting,
Speaker 1: shot and killed a fifteen year old black child. In
Speaker 1: two thousand fifteen, video leaked of Anniston, Alabama police officer
Speaker 1: Joshua Doggrel delivering a speech for the League of the South. Now,
Speaker 1: the League of the South is a neo Confederate organization,
Speaker 1: and for all intents and purposes, just addressed up rebranding
Speaker 1: of the KKK that tries to look a little bit
Speaker 1: more palatable. These Motherfucker's marched with the Nazis and Charlottesville
Speaker 1: into that in seventeen. Doggerel had joined the League in nineteen.
Speaker 1: He'd been a police officer since two thousands six. He
Speaker 1: talked openly about the League of the South to his
Speaker 1: fellow officers. He advised them to join, and he held
Speaker 1: meetings at a steakhouse very close to the police station.
Speaker 1: He posted pro Confederate content on his Facebook, including pictures
Speaker 1: of early KKK leaders. Dog Rols clan affiliations were doubly concerning,
Speaker 1: giving Anniston's history. In May of nineteen sixty one, the
Speaker 1: Freedom Writers had shown up in town to protest against
Speaker 1: segregation and Jim Crow. They were assaulted by a massive
Speaker 1: klansmen who slashed their tires, broke their bus windows, and
Speaker 1: tried to light the bus on fire with them in it.
Speaker 1: The Anniston Police department was headquartered a block away from this,
Speaker 1: a little closer than the steakhouse where officer dog roll
Speaker 1: With decades later hold meetings. Annison officers failed to arrive
Speaker 1: at the scene of the crime until hours later. No
Speaker 1: one was arrested. They may have been late because a
Speaker 1: number of them probably had to change out of their
Speaker 1: robes and into their uniforms because they were there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because they were trying to burn the bus down. Yes.
Speaker 1: Now I cannot point you two in specific act of
Speaker 1: racial violence that Officer dogg Role committed while in uniform,
Speaker 1: as it is damnably hard to get good information on
Speaker 1: police misbehavior from the very best police departments, and Anniston
Speaker 1: is not one of those. But significant evidence suggests that
Speaker 1: officer dog role in his membership in what is a
Speaker 1: confederate organization is not a one off from an article
Speaker 1: in the Guardian quote. Although it is unusual to be
Speaker 1: for a police officer to be so open about his
Speaker 1: involvement in an extremist organization, for decades, anti government, white
Speaker 1: supremacist groups have been attempting to recruit police officers into
Speaker 1: their ranks. It is something a lot of folks are overlooking,
Speaker 1: says v Ta B. Johnson, an assistant professor of law
Speaker 1: at Georgetown University. Police forces are becoming more interested in
Speaker 1: talking about implicit bias, the unconscious racial biases we carry
Speaker 1: with us as Americans, but people aren't really addressing the
Speaker 1: explicit biases that are present on police forces. According to
Speaker 1: Johnson's research, there have been at least a hundred different
Speaker 1: scandals and more than forty different states involving police officers
Speaker 1: who have sent racist emails and text messages are made
Speaker 1: racist comments on social media since the nineteen nineties. A
Speaker 1: recent investor a gation by the Center for Investigative Reporting
Speaker 1: found that hundreds of active duty and retired law enforcement
Speaker 1: officers from around the country were members of Confederate, anti
Speaker 1: government and anti Islam groups on Facebook. But there's no
Speaker 1: official record of officers who are tied to white supremacists
Speaker 1: or other extremist groups. Because in the US, there's no
Speaker 1: federal policy for screening or monitoring the countries eight hundred
Speaker 1: thousand plus law enforcement officers for extremist views. The eighteen
Speaker 1: thousand or so police departments across the country are largely
Speaker 1: left to police themselves. Now, of course, Yeah that's a
Speaker 1: good call. Yeah, yeah, I have a suggestion. If they
Speaker 1: police themselves, why don't we police ourselves? I mean, apparently
Speaker 1: a system works. Yeah, what's it like? Like, I just
Speaker 1: you can't people think we you think we're making this
Speaker 1: stuff up when we say, yo, cops are racist. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to tell you it's racism over the arey. Like,
Speaker 1: what like, I just what what possible gain do any
Speaker 1: of us have accusing falsely an entire organization to be racist,
Speaker 1: Like what, like what what do you think my end
Speaker 1: game would be? There's no like I gained nothing from
Speaker 1: making this stuff up. Yeah. It's and again like people
Speaker 1: always focus on like you know, oh, well you know,
Speaker 1: that's not that many police officers, you know when you
Speaker 1: you you read them the numbers like that compared to
Speaker 1: how many there are, and it's like, well, no, that
Speaker 1: those are the ones that individual activists have for after hours,
Speaker 1: probably for each individual officer trapped down and verified, because again,
Speaker 1: the government's not looking at us. But also, let's say
Speaker 1: there's a block party that happens next to your house,
Speaker 1: right hundred people. One of those people shoots you in
Speaker 1: the arm with a handgun for no reason, and everyone
Speaker 1: else in the crowd hangs out around them and does nothing. Um,
Speaker 1: and you complain about it, and they're like, well it
Speaker 1: was only one of us that shot you. Does does
Speaker 1: that matter? Not at all? Yeah? They're kind of all
Speaker 1: pieces of ship, right you kind of all just let
Speaker 1: me later. Yeah, kind of a ship party, yeah, like
Speaker 1: you are your home. Yeah. In two thousands, seventeen, a
Speaker 1: classified FBI counter terrorism policy guide was obtained by the Intercept.
Speaker 1: I don't know how they got this, but there are
Speaker 1: actually quite a few police FBI agents who are real
Speaker 1: piste about this problem and seemed to be vigorously leaking
Speaker 1: information to the press. Um In a section focused on
Speaker 1: how the bureau lists individuals on a terrorism watch list,
Speaker 1: the author's note that quote and again the authors being
Speaker 1: the FBI domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremist, white
Speaker 1: supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active
Speaker 1: links to law enforcement officers. The FBI goes on to
Speaker 1: note that they had to alter some of their policies
Speaker 1: when dealing with local law enforcement to account for the
Speaker 1: fact that so many of them are members of extremist groups, Like,
Speaker 1: isn't too many? Yeah, we gotta, like, we've had to
Speaker 1: change how we interact with cops as the FBI because
Speaker 1: we're scared of you. Motherfucker's. Yeah. One of the one
Speaker 1: of the justifiable criticisms of of the series we're doing
Speaker 1: is that we're not really going to lean into the
Speaker 1: FBI much because I've kind of determined to focus on
Speaker 1: like cops, like like normal police law, like the folks
Speaker 1: in the street. Even though there is a very long
Speaker 1: and well worth discussing history of racism within the FBI. Um,
Speaker 1: we talk about that quite a bit, and our two
Speaker 1: part are on the bastards who killed the black panthers.
Speaker 1: Yeah we didn't. We'll get into it a bit next week. Um,
Speaker 1: but we're going to focus really on like you know,
Speaker 1: beat cops essentially, like what leads to them police departments,
Speaker 1: just because I can't. We can't do this for like
Speaker 1: ten straight weeks. Um, we both have other stuff we
Speaker 1: gotta deal with. Um. Yeah. The term ghost skins is
Speaker 1: often used by white supremacists to refer to folks who
Speaker 1: basically hide their power level to gain respected jobs in
Speaker 1: society and advanced white supremacy. Law enforcement is a particularly
Speaker 1: prized field for these ghost skins because it gives them
Speaker 1: virtually unchecked opportunities to do violence to non white people.
Speaker 1: One example of this would be a gang of officers
Speaker 1: within the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department who in nine
Speaker 1: embarked on a campaign of vandalism and the beating and
Speaker 1: torturing of black Californians. Have you heard of the Lynwood Vikings,
Speaker 1: prop Yes, I have. Yeah. The Lynwood Vikings were a
Speaker 1: violent Neo Nazi gang that committed arson and murder and
Speaker 1: torture on black Californians. And the gang was entirely made
Speaker 1: up of Los Angeles County Sheriff's officers. It was a
Speaker 1: neo Nazi gang that was all sheriff's officers. Let that
Speaker 1: sink in. Let that sink in. And now think of
Speaker 1: the young man who was recently found hung to death
Speaker 1: in Palmdale, California, and who was declared a suicide by
Speaker 1: Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, and then the Los Angeles Sheriff's
Speaker 1: Department was in a gunfight with his half brother where
Speaker 1: they old him a couple of days later, and that
Speaker 1: it is reported that the Palmdale chunk of the Los
Speaker 1: Angeles Sheriff's Department has what they called the news called
Speaker 1: cliques within it that were you might call them gangs,
Speaker 1: maybe like the Lynwood Vikings. Because this keeps happening weird,
Speaker 1: because this is not history. It's yeah, yeah, people need
Speaker 1: to know more about the Lynwood Vikings. Um yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so uh yeah, it's it's cool. We're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: John Burge in Chicago in the next episode. Um, but
Speaker 1: for right now. The intercept goes on to give a
Speaker 1: couple of other examples, and I'm gonna quote from their
Speaker 1: article again. In Cleveland, officials found that a number of
Speaker 1: police officers had scrolled racist or Nazi graffiti throughout their
Speaker 1: department's locker rooms. In Texas, to police officers were fired
Speaker 1: when it was discovered that they were klansmen. One of
Speaker 1: them said he had tried to boost the organization's membership
Speaker 1: by giving an application to a fellow officer he thought
Speaker 1: shared his white Christian heterosexual values. Now, in two thousand fifteen,
Speaker 1: to his very minor credit, FBI Director James Comey acknowledged
Speaker 1: in a speech that all of us in law enforcement
Speaker 1: must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our
Speaker 1: history is not pretty. This is about as close as
Speaker 1: you're going to get to having an actual member of
Speaker 1: law enforce enforcement admit that, in fact, the cops and
Speaker 1: the clan regularly do go hand in hand. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: so good stuff. Take a deep breath, everybody, good stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah whoo whoo. To the rest of us, Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about lynching on Thursday, Um, and we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about how the police defeated lynching by
Speaker 1: something that's arguably as bad. So yeah, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: feel wonderful right now. I am. I didn't we didn't
Speaker 1: should have maybe not schedule this recording session for June tenth.
Speaker 1: I do feel I do feel bad about that. That's
Speaker 1: the day. My emotions are all over the place right now. Nah,
Speaker 1: it's all good, you know what I'm saying, Like, you know,
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways, like like we were talking
Speaker 1: off camera or off camera off mike, like, yeah, I don't,
Speaker 1: I don't know, because it's never actually we've never had
Speaker 1: to celebrate this holiday with anybody else. So there's no
Speaker 1: actual traditions for June except where to think about what
Speaker 1: all this ship. We didn't went through the fact that
Speaker 1: we survived it, you know what I'm saying. That's usually
Speaker 1: which and then we go down to you know, crunchhaw
Speaker 1: and eat some barbecue. But I'm like, this is actually great.
Speaker 1: It's like look and and maybe we'll end it on
Speaker 1: a high note. It's like and yet we still exist, yea,
Speaker 1: and yet we still are here, you know, and like
Speaker 1: have been forcing the situation to suck less consistently for
Speaker 1: a couple of centuries of fighting like trench like the
Speaker 1: emotional equivalent of trench warfare. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah. And
Speaker 1: I guess a good tradition for white folks like myself
Speaker 1: and like Sophie is too, is to do this. It's
Speaker 1: just been June tenth going like Jesus Christ, oh good god. Um,
Speaker 1: prop you've got any plug doubles to plug before we
Speaker 1: roll out of here? Yeah, propit pop dot com. Uh
Speaker 1: got a bunch of new merge. Um. California has now
Speaker 1: required face masks, So I got some face masks there
Speaker 1: that flat earther neighbors required by state. Yeah, you got
Speaker 1: flat earther neighbors. Can we just pause for that way?
Speaker 1: I mean, statistically we all do now. Yeah, there's like
Speaker 1: I had the building make like red signs that say
Speaker 1: to wear face masks, and the elevator and Karen and
Speaker 1: Ken I don't know their fucking names. I hate them
Speaker 1: of course, of course, just walk around like deep deep deep,
Speaker 1: and then I'm like, hey, how about a face mask?
Speaker 1: And they kind of just look at me like I've
Speaker 1: said something in a language they don't understand and run away.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, so yeah, go get some coffee, Go get
Speaker 1: some face masks, got some new water flask to merge
Speaker 1: you guys, dude, thank you. And it's all earth friendly.
Speaker 1: It's all like zero waste, like that's how it works.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying, recyclable the materials recyclable, you know,
Speaker 1: is recycled material. You know what I'm saying. I'm out here.
Speaker 1: I'm out here like being a good part of Portland's
Speaker 1: or earth sensitive. Hell yeah, well that's the episode. Um
Speaker 1: go go do some stuff. Yeah. Behind the Police is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from
Speaker 1: my Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts.