It Could Happen Here Weekly 46

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
can make your own decisions. Welcome Today can happen here

(00:28):
a podcast about fighting your bosses? Uh, this is this
is your house. Christopher Wong and with me today to
talk about fighting bosses and bosses doing incredibly illegal stuff,
bosses doing incredibly shady stuff and why you should fight
them more is Tori Tamblini, who was a partner organizer
from Pittsburgh Starbucks Workers United and was fired from Starbucks

(00:50):
like very illegally, under very sketchy circumstances. Tory, Welcome to
the show. Thanks so much. I'm excited to be here. Yeah,
I really really happy to have you here. Um. Okay,
So I I guess I guess we should start with
the whole you were denied, you were you were, you
were denied your leagual of rights and then fired presumably

(01:11):
for union organizing thing. Yes, absolutely so starting from the beginning,
and there was like I was so a month ago
my store manager sat me down, and I like, he
asked me to come downstairs for a conversation. So I
brought a witness with me and we went downstairs, and
I found out that I was being investigated because there

(01:31):
was one day that I had written down my weekday
start time instead of my weekend to start time. They
just recently changed things at my store so that we
opened at we start opening shifts at five thirty on
the weekends and five on the weekdays. And this is
a recent change up. I had been there for three years,
so I out of habit one day had written five

(01:54):
in the book instead of five thirty. Um, a couple
of months later, it seems like everything has blown over.
They accept of the fact that it was just an
innocent mistake. I really wasn't trying to steal thirty minutes
of time, which comes out to like what six dollars
after that, Like, yeah, I was really desperate for that
six dollars. So I figured they just they knew it
was an innocent mistake, and it wasn't going to be

(02:16):
a further issue until I saw two managers in my store.
One of them was my store manager, the other one
was Her name is Brittany. And what Starbucks has done
recently is that they've created this new position in the company.
From my understanding, it's called support manager, and they're basically
like an assistant district manager, and they go around two
stores where there's any sort of union activity and they

(02:38):
try to talk about strategies to squash it. So it's like, basically,
the store manager that did the most harsh union busting
at their own store gets promoted to this position. So
in my district, the person's name is Brittany, and I
saw her in my store, which is always a bad sign.
And um, at one point they asked me to have
a seat for a conversation. So I sit down own,

(03:00):
and well, before I sit down, I say, is this
a disciplinary conversation? And the manager said the one manager
said to me, yes, this is solely a disciplinary conversation.
And I said, I would like to invoke my wine
button rights. I'm going to go out to the floor
and bring somebody back as a witness. And they said,
you can't do that today. And basically what they did
is they like held up a piece of paper like
with a wall of text on it, like this far

(03:21):
from my face, and they're like, it says right here
that we can't we don't have to do that for you.
And I was like, that's really illegal and I'm not
comfortable having this conversation right now at all. And they said, well,
we're going to hand this to you anyway, and handed
me a notice of termination. Um. Yeah, So I walked

(03:41):
out and walked back to the front of house and
I said a little bit loudly, definitely not like shouting,
but kind of loudly. I said, I just got fired,
And is it okay if I swear to quote my friend? Okay? Cool.
So my best friend Kim was working at the time,
and she loudly said, right in front of our new
store manager, what the fuck? And I just kept walking

(04:03):
because I was so upset and I didn't want the
managers to see me cry. So I walked to the
front of house or walk outside, and Kim follows me
and she was like, we're going to fix this. I'm
gonna go ask relieve early and I'll drive you home
and we'll talk about this Kim goes back inside, looks
at my assistant manager and says, I'm a question permission
to leave early. And the assistant manager literally couldn't even

(04:24):
look her in the eye and told her Kim go
have a seat in the back, and they fired Kim
as well. Jesus. Yeah, yeah, And I think when everything
about the story I think is worth talking about is
that like when when it comes to union busting, it
literally does not matter how good of an employee you are,

(04:45):
unblessed like you not being there will literally cause everything
to collapse. But yeah, I don't talk about like you
were really good at this, and they were still just
like no, fuck you. Yeah. So I was voted by
everybody at my store. I was voted Partner of the
Order in spring of I was also promoted a shift

(05:05):
supervisor within that same week, and later that year, I
participated in a Barista competition for my store and I
won Barista Champion for my store level, and I also
tied at the district level for Barista Champion for the district.
So um. And then in addition to that, I had
dealt with a situation where somebody like leaning against the

(05:28):
front of my store had overdosed on heroin and I
gave him an arcam and basically saved the guy's life,
and then like a month or two later they fired me.
So yeah, which, like I'm trying to think of if
like any other way you can possibly go like above
and beyond what anyone could reasonably require you, that is

(05:49):
more than I saved a dude's life. It's like, okay,
like you're welcome, guys. Someone would have died inside your
store if I wasn't there, but okay, by I guess. Yeah.
I wanted to talk a little bit about about that,
specifically in about sort of the conditions at this store,
because one of the things that seems really clear from

(06:13):
from listening to you talk about it and from reading
stuff about it is that it's not just I mean,
even if you were just like you know, doing kind
of regular issue service like service workers stuff, this would
be unaccessable. But it's also like there's there's this way
in which you and your co workers have sort of
been turned into social workers and are being sort of

(06:33):
are being forced to like deal with just all of
the people who sort of capitalism to say of just
like spat out. Yeah, and sort of like fill in
the gaps of just the collapse of American social services.
And yeah, I wanted, Yeah, I wondered if you could
talk a little bit about the stuff that you've been
having to do and what that's like. Yeah. Absolutely, So.

(06:56):
Something I've noticed in the market square is that it
feels like there were some sort of resources for the
unhoused community that existed before the pandemic. That's straight up
just don't exist anymore. So a lot of that that
work to be done, like falls on the Starbucks employees.
Most of us are completely unqualified for that, Like I
have a degree in psychology, but sometimes that's just not

(07:19):
really enough. Most of us are film students at Point Park,
so none of us are all equipped to deal with
any situations where somebody is under the influence of something
and maybe becoming aggressive, or somebody is having a mental
health crisis, or there are people that are sleeping in
the cafe and we're asked to pick them out if
they're sleeping. But that feels really really bad because there's

(07:41):
not a ton of other resources, especially during the day.
I know, the shelters closed, so when it's like winter
or it's like ninety degrees outside and someone is just
trying to get like a tiny little bit of sleep,
it feels really bad to kick them out. Um. So
we dealt with a lot of situations that we are
just completely unequipped to handle. And Starbucks was send us
de escalation training, but most of the de escalation training

(08:03):
revolved around if a customer isn't happy with their drink
and they're shouting at you, So it doesn't even begin
to cover like any of the stuff that we deal
with at Market Square. We had like we've we've seen
a lot of customers having mental health crisis in the cafe,
Like what do you do? Like I don't want to
call the police. That's definitely not going to help. UM.
In the situation where I had to narcan somebody, the

(08:25):
we had called for an ambulance and twenty minutes later
the ambulance still wasn't there, And they were even managers
at the surrounding businesses calling and calling and calling trying
to get an ambulance to Market Square and it ended
up like being me that had to give them a narcan. Um. Overall,
like something that we are pushing for with Union, the
main thing that we were pushing for was better training like,

(08:47):
we want Narcan to keep in the stores and we
want all the ships to be trained on how to
use that, and that doesn't have to be through Starbucks.
There are I know of a lot of organizations throughout
Pittsburg that would be happy to train our staff on that. UM,
we need like better resources. I know at one point
we were falsely promised a social worker that would sit
in our cafe for at least one day every two weeks.

(09:08):
UM never got that. And yeah, I feel like my
staff just deserves better, community deserves better, and it shouldn't
be Starbucks's job. But until we have something better, I
think that we should be a little bit more equipped
to handle situations that frankly, we do have to deal
with at some point, just by the nature of our
work and our location. I also think something really funny

(09:29):
to mention here is that we got a new store
manager at the UM. I want to say at the
beginning or like mid June, we got this new store manager.
Her name was Sarah, and she has already transferred to
a different store because she felt so unsafe working up
Market Square. She got her first Market Square a death
threat and was like I'm out, So even the store

(09:50):
manager can't deny that our working positions are bad. So
the fact that they're still fighting against the union even
though management is well aware of how terrible our conditions are.
Just like, yeah, okay, I want to I want to
take a second and go back to something that you said,
which is your first market square death threat? How common
is this? Um? I think I received a total of

(10:12):
four to five and um. Then I received my very
last one the day that my store went on strike,
and I was sitting at the picket line and I
was like, wow, it's just like the little days before.
But yeah, market squares a lotless land. Yeah, And I like,
I don't know, Like I feel like this is like
every time I do this is like a recurring thing.

(10:32):
Every time I do a labor story, it's like, oh,
this is a labor story. Was like, no, But it's
also the story of a bunch of like a bunch
of people whose job this like isn't who just wind
up having to deal with all of the ship that
the state doesn't want to do, that corporations don't want
to do. And it's like the the fact that Starbucks

(10:53):
employees have to be the like the Starbucks union has
to be the group in like in this place that
is trying to get people to get in dark hand
training is nuts, like just just like just any like
sort of just macro taking a step back level, Like
what on earth is going on in the society we
could have been thinking a lot about lately. Like I
think a lot of journalists and reporters have asked me,

(11:16):
like why do you think that the younger generation is
the one like leading this? Like why are unions making
a come back now? And why is this younger generations
like so ready to lead this. I think it's because
we've spent our entire lives watching politicians on TV like
all these promises and continuing to do absolutely nothing, and
we're all sick and tired of it. We are all

(11:37):
ready to take it into our own hands and fix
it in any way that we see that we can. Yeah, yeah,
it makes a lot of sense. I mean, like I
my you know, my my first ball o case, my
first political member was the Rock War. But like I
was like a little baby child, but like like you know,
like I remember, like the thing I grew up on
was like yeah I was Obama, it was it was hope,
it was changed and then it was like you look

(11:59):
at the world now and it's like it's like, oh,
it's it's even bleaker that it was in two eight,
which is like, yeah, absolutely crazy. Yeah, I think that
makes a lot of sense. And I think also just
like like the last two years have been so brutal. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,

(12:20):
And I was wondering, Yeah, I wondering, did you can
talk about like what affects the UM, what effect the
pandemic had on Yellows workers, and what effect that had
on union organizing. Yeah, absolutely so. Um. I think that
it really pulled the mask off the company, which ironically,
well everyone is putting the mask on coming out Starbucks

(12:43):
because they always really pretended to be this really awesome
progressive company, and it really revealed how performative the company
is because they gave us all these COVID benefits for
like two three months and then took them right away
from us, like before, obviously the pandemic isn't even over now,
definitely wasn't over back in I think it was October

(13:03):
they took away like ours exactly, and right around that time,
we were also watching our CEO are now former CEO
Kevin Johnson get like a forty million dollar raised while
they had just taken away our hazard pay and there
are free food benefits even though we were all still struggling.
So then I think that us seeing those benefits being

(13:26):
taken away and realizing that the company doesn't care about
us in that sense made us start looking harder at everything,
Like the company doesn't want to increase our pay, they
don't want to give us credit card tipping, they don't
want to make our stores safer, um and every other
reason that any store could see to unionize. Like it
really highlighted all of those reasons and all the ways

(13:46):
the company doesn't care about us as much as they should,
and how they really do just see us as a number.
So I think that's what really really pushed us all
towards unionizing. It's like, if the company doesn't care about
us and the people in our stores, then we're going
to rely on each other to care about us, and
UM push reunions so that we can take matters into
urrow and hands. Yea and yeah, And I think there's

(14:08):
there's a lot of the stuff that you've been talking
about that highlights how important that is, which is that
like you know, you have this combination of management, either
like do the management immediately above you understanding what's happening
and being like we'll just throw you guys at it
will just literally bail and run away from how bad
it is. And then you have the layer management like
above you, which is it's a bunch of bureaucrats who

(14:28):
like couldn't find their ask if you drew the map
and you know, or like oh hey, here here's your
d escalation training. It's about person mad about drink and
it's like I am getting multiple death threats. It's like
it's I don't know. We literally had a like someone
from I think you're either regional management or maybe a
level higher than that, like area management. Humandour store the
other day, like as a customer and there was something

(14:51):
going on. I'm not sure if it was like somebody
shouting in the cafe or like two customers were fighting,
but this like upper level manager who should know about
our store said one of my briefs, does um so
is this like a high incident store? And we were like,
I don't know, isn't it your job? Like really like wow, yikes, yeah,

(15:14):
that's something that like you know, it's not like I learned,
Like it's something like you learned intellectually and then you
just see like and then yeah, so it's only you
learned intellectually, and then you just sort of viscerally begin
to understand. When you know you're doing work and you're
watching what your managers do, it is it's that like, yeah,
like the people who actually knows how the production process

(15:37):
works and how the stuff actually goes and what's happening
on the shop floor, like are the people are the
workers there? And it's like everyone above them is just
doing some other ship. They're just making everyone's lives worse,
and it's just literally curating. It starts that nobody the
reason we need a union. And I tell people this
all the time whenever I'm going into new stores, nobody
knows your store better than youbody knows, like the inner

(15:58):
workings of it, how busy you are with the needs
of the store, are better than the people that are
there forty hours a week. And so another thing we
talked about a lot in like our our citywide meetings
is like what do the managers even do on it?
Like what is their job? What are they working on?
Like what manager do all day in her bushy little

(16:19):
corporate off I guess you're just union busting now, even
that they're delicating another manager below them, So yeah, apparently. Yeah,
did you ever see the fake tweets, the fake Workers
United tweets that Starbucks published? No ill to email you
a copy of them, but they literally made this hand

(16:42):
out with a list of fake tweets from Workers United
and like the company's responses to them. But if you
look up the company's Twitter account, um, it just doesn't exist.
And the tweets from Workers United that they printed out
all these hand outs also don't exist. And I think
maybe three copies of that got handed out to my
store where we all made so much fun of my boss,

(17:05):
Like so, um, I guess that's my boss's job. I
will I can show these towdeos. I keep them on hand.
But this is this is like it's the biggest energy
of like, oh, I thought of the perfect arguments seven
hours later, so they didn't even the argument isn't even real,
like they're they're just making up a guy to argue with. Yeah,

(17:28):
and he didn't even try that hard because these were
handed to me back in April. It says that these
all of these tweets were posted on June one, so
the day that they claimed that this was tweeted hadn't
even happen. Whenever I received their rand out, I mean, hey,
if you if y'all have access to a time machine,
I I have some work I need to do. Yeah. Yeah,

(17:49):
they say things like, in collective bargaining, you start with
everything you have and negotiate for more from there from
Starbucks workers united right there, and then the company's responsive
I know literally as um and then though we are
one Starbucks account said in collective bargaining, everything is up
for negotiations if you have more, the same, or less.

(18:09):
And once you negotiate a contract, you locked in, which
which is also funny because it's like like, okay, you
are looking at that like you think that that is
actually like a thing that makes you look good and
not like a super villain. It's like, no, no, no,
if you try to negotiate with us, we will make
everything worse for you. It's like really because it makes
it looks good. You know, they try so hard union

(18:33):
busts and they just kind of stuck at it. Yeah,
it's been it's been comical to watch. It's very funny.
Which is really funny because like I remember, like I
didn't know the super well, but like I remember I
knew some people who were doing starbic union organizing like
way about like like two thousand, like six or something,

(18:54):
and they were like, you know, and it was like
they were kind of better at it, like they were
willing to just like throw resources at it in a
way that like they don't seem to be able to know.
I think maybe just because like there there's so many organizations,
so many organizing efforts happen happening at once, that it's
harder to sort of just like throw all of their
stuff at one store. But yeah, it's just it's like

(19:14):
incredibly funny watching them just sort of like flail and
like you know what I mean. I guess like like
all all corporations that you need bust eventually resort to
break the law because you know the law, and yeah,
it's designs for rich people. My district manager um came
into my store screwdriver in hand to personally make repairs

(19:37):
at my store. It would the funniest thing I have
ever seen. It's probably my favorite union busting story. But
she was like, yeah, I'm here to cover up the
electrical outlets in your bathroom and we're like cool, why
and she was like, so that the homeless people can't
like plug in their electric shavers and shaven there. We
were like, wow, we've seen we've seen people do a
lot of weird things in the bathroom, and that's like

(19:59):
not even one of them. You are so out of touch.
Oh my gosh, it's been hilarious to watch, Like, wow,
that was really some efforts, but really, you know, absolutely
not immediately now, there's nothing I wanted to talk about
that Starbucks is you talked a bit about earlier about

(20:19):
Starbucks sort of like having this image as like like
progressive organization and okay, like one of the things they've
been big on sort of recently is like portraying themselves
as just like pro l G, B t q I,
A plus like thing. And I think, like, okay, so
there's something that like traditional media has finally discovered because

(20:42):
they haven't covered labor organizing in forty years and they
suddenly started doing it again, and they were like, oh
my god, all of the union organizers are queer. And
it was like anyone who's ever organized a union or
anyone who knows anyone who's ever been in the Union
could have told you this like thirty years incredible stuff
is like, wow, congratulations you've discovered this. But yeah, I
wanted to ask about of I don't know that this

(21:04):
kind of bind that like I feel like we're people
doing organizing are in right now, which is that Like Okay,
so on the one hand, you have like in you know,
in the last sort of year or so, this like
incredible increase in rampant homophobia, but then simultaneously, like so
you know, you have to fight that fight, and then
simultaneously you have these corporations who are trying to you know,

(21:26):
like yeah, they're like nominally on our side, and that
they're not well I mean they are, they are, they
are funding the rampant homophobus, but like publicly they don't
you know publicly their supportive, but also you know that
like their supporter because they're trying to sell our identity
as a brand. And then you know when queer people
are like, hey, can we like have stuff that lets
us live there? Like no, And I was wondering how
you've been sort of navigating that. Yeah, so that's been

(21:48):
really tough because um, a lot of our queer partners
in Pittsburgh get get their health insurance through Starbucks, get
care through Starbucks. And the biggest union busting tactics is
our cuts. And if you cut someone's hours, then they're
not eligible for healthcare. So they're really just like dangling
the carrot on the stick in front of our faces, like, oh,

(22:10):
if you unionize, then we're going to cut your hours
and then you can't get your gender affirming health care.
So that's like, that's really really sucked. Um. In addition
to that, UM, there have been now four people about
to be five. Um, we think one of one person
is going to be fired one of these back from vacations.
But out of all of us that are fired or

(22:31):
about to be fired, we are all queer people. So UM,
I think that really shows how much store books your partners.
And since I've started organizing, in addition to like homophobia
and like discrimination against the rare community, I've also heard
just rampant stories about microaggressions and racism. UM. I've actually

(22:53):
met a UM a partner that was fired from a
store in Virginia. I want to say she was I believe,
for my understanding, she was the only black woman that
worked at her store and she was fired for aggressive behavior.
And when I heard that, I was like bidding me.
So just like and also that support manager that I

(23:14):
was talking about, I've heard rumors that like she was
transferred from one store to another because she was like
caught being racist at the first store. She instead of
being fired, she was transferred and now she got she
was promoted to store manager. And then she fired a
trans partner at her store and now she's our support
manager and fired me. So just like it's homophobia. Yeah, yeah,

(23:37):
it's like it's it's the Catholic church for racist homophobes.
Well okay, the Catholic Church for racist homophobes, but corporate
and well okay, I I I am not going to
make a claim on the air that they're not also
doing this with sexual assault, because I they had like
there's no way that they're not. But yeah, that is

(24:00):
that that that's incredibly bleak. And I would go back
a second to sort of the gender affirm and care
stuff because like, yeah, that stuff, it's like, like, Okay,
the thing that they are doing is just like we
we are holding the genocide button over you. It's like, yeah,
if if you if you don't comply with us, and
you don't like accept the like absolute ship and scraps

(24:23):
that we give you, we are going to try to
kill you. And that is just indescribably horrific. Absolutely. Yeah, Um,
I know it's something that partners up. There's at least
one partner at my store that's dealing with that right now.
She's twenty five about and she is trans and I
know that she's on her parents insurance at the moment,

(24:43):
but in less than a year she'll have the insurance elsewhere,
most likely through Starbucks. And it's something that really got
her into organizing. I know that for sure. Um. Yeah,
it's it's been a really scary moment for her, Definitely
something she's worried about. Yeah. Yeah, just the risk of
being fired, the risk of having your hours cut and
stop being eligible for benefits. It's awful, and like she

(25:08):
doesn't feel like she can get a job like anywhere
else just because Starbucks is one of the like Starbucks
offers like decent health insurance. So it's like I'm kind
of trapped here until I can get out, until I
can get another job with insurance benefits. Yeah, and you
know that's incredibly it's incredibly hard, especially right now. I mean, yeah,
I don't know, it's I mean, it's not really surprising

(25:32):
that they're doing this, but it's yeah, it's it's really
depressing and it sucks. And the fact that they're you know,
like sending sending racist to do homophobias like hm, it's yeah,
it's like dystopian like this happened, and been like is
this real life? Like this is crazy? And um, they

(25:55):
just fired another black clear organizer infits were just yesterday
and trying to make it look like he resigned, um,
but really they gave him like a couple like options
like you need to have at least one weekend day available,
or you need to demote yourself, or you need to
transfer to a different store. And they were like, I

(26:16):
can't really do any of those options, like none of
those work for me. And then the company said like, oh, yeah,
Jimmy resigned, Like we totally didn't fire them, but they
just resigned and sorry, you get to peel it because
you resigned by yeah, it's a real we didn't fire you.
We simply forced you out by making utterly impossible demands. Yep.

(26:40):
It's like it really reminds me of like it's the
kind of stuff a country does when they want to
go to war, where it's like, yeah, we're gonna we're
gonna give you a bunch of demands that it is
literally physically impossible for you to comply with, and that
because you don't comply with him, we're getting invade. M hmm, yeah, exactly, exactly,
Like oh um, although I did find out some good

(27:01):
news today. So there's this one bar where most of
the union organizers hang out all the time, and they
message just on Twitter today and they want to throw
a queer dance party and fundraiser for like our solid
strike fund. It was like literally the most us thing
I can mostly think of, like a queer dance party

(27:22):
fundraiser at our favorite bar. Like the bathroom attendant from
the bar like showed up to our strike at my
store and friends of the bartender there. It was like
the best Twitter DM ever. It was like, that's so funny.
I'm literally going there with the other person that got
fired from my store like tonight. So we're very excited

(27:44):
for that. Yeah, And I guess that means that something
else I wanted to talk about, which is um, Yeah,
do you want to talk a little bit about like
what happened after you got fired and the support you've
been getting in the like the backing from other unions
that you've been getting. Totally. Yeah. So my store is
actually just like a block away from the United steel

(28:05):
Workers head twitters, which is incredible because anytime we have
any sort of direct action, we get like forty steel
workers store. Yeah. The day after I was fired, I
I have this very funny picture that's on my Twitter
um of me just standing like with like forty steel
workers sitting behind me and the found like the two
biggest dudes like setting on each side of me where

(28:29):
I started a safer and in the protest. This is
my new favorite picture of myself. So that was day one.
We had a rally. We had really good turn out
with all the steel workers and a bunch of other
community allies are Symphony UM. Symphony musicians have a have
a labor union to to the library workers UM. They
all came out for the first day of the rally

(28:50):
at Market Square and my city wide organizing committee was
actually able to pull together a total of four strikes.
What happened within the course of two days. The planning
happened in like basically under twenty four hours. So yeah,
I got fired. Wednesday. Thursday was the rally at my

(29:11):
store with all the steel workers. Friday, the East Carson
Store in the South Side of Pittsburgh went on strike.
The East Side store in the Bloomfield store all went
on strike for the full day. Um. The south Side
store continued the strike into Saturday, and then um, Sunday,
my store went on strike finally. So um it was incredible.

(29:34):
We had We have a labor choir in Pittsburgh which
is in trouble. It's just like a dude with a guitar.
He's my favorite person ever. Um. So we had the
labor choir out at all of our events. And um
we had, like I said, the library workers, the steel workers,
the Symphony Union. Um, we have UE. We have d

(29:56):
s A, which is Democratic Socialists of America. We have
the part you for Socialism and Liberation or really strong
allies to us. And we had like a lot of
the regular my my favorite customers showed up at my
store of course, which made try. One of my customers,
one of my favorite customers who comes in multiple times
a day, said you shouldn't be standing out here on
the on the sidewalk, you should be back there behind

(30:18):
the counter making coffee. And I was like, I know,
thank you. Um. We had a couple of our regulars
changed their mobile order name to Tori and Kim, so
that every time he orders a drink to my store,
they have to call out the name Tory and Kim.
That's great, And we set up a go fund me
and we received way more donations than we thought that

(30:40):
we would get. So um for all the workers at
my store that went on strike, in addition to the
seventy pay that we received from the union for the day, UM,
we were able to pledge twenty dollars to each of
them to try to make their paychecks pole and cover
some of their last tips. That was incredible and really
just a demonstration of how much support we have in

(31:01):
our area. You know, they say Pittsburgh as a union town. Yeah,
it really is. It turns out, yeah, and it's really
cool to see. I don't know, I like one of
one of the things that I keep seeing is this
sort of like like one of one of the sort
of right wing tactics that have been like just inundated
within the last like a couple of years has been

(31:24):
like trying to separate out like oh, here are these
people who are workers, but like, oh, they're not workers
because they're like oh, they're like doing cultural stuff for
They're like oh, they just like serve drinks and like
you know, you look at actual labor. It's like that's no,
like none of this, none of this, none of these
divisions things are real, like people showing from each other.
It's always get worried that people will be like judgmental

(31:46):
about that. Like I'm always kind of like surprised when
the steel workers show up. I'm like, I know, I'm
not the steel worker. I don't make steel, I don't
work at a factory or anything. Just make coffee. But um,
everyone is so supportive and they are always so willing
to stand in solidarity, which is really cool. But it's
something I'm always like worried about, Like I know it
doesn't feel like I'm a real worker, but like union,

(32:07):
I mean, I'm in a podcast union, so like talking
about yeah, I I have I have like arguably like
if if if if if you're going to use the
really silly like like I don't know, sort of like
cultural analysis of what a worker is like a podcast.

(32:27):
Union is like the silliest union every and it's great. No,
it rules. It turns out where workers we go fight
for other people to other people fight for like the
the when when when we when we were trying to
get union recognition, like the NFL Players Association was like, hey,
you guys need to recognize this if we were like yeah, yeah, yeah,

(32:50):
just um, we've been going to a lot of rallies
for the Planned Parenthood union and yeah, which I didn't
I didn't actually know that they existed that Yeah, I actually,
well it wasn't Pittsburgh, but I I was just talking
actually probably well I don't know what or these are
gonna err in, but like yeah that I just talked
to people from Oh my gosh. Yeah they were cool.
I got to the labor choir there again. I was Yeah,

(33:12):
solidarity all around. I love to see it. Oh yeah,
that's that's really cool. M hmm. Yeah, lots of unions
in Pittsburgh A good time. I met a lot of
really cool people. I feel like all the people I've
met since I've been involved with union stuff have been
like really cool. For the first time I talked anywhere,

(33:33):
it was at the Pennsylvania a f l C i
OH convention and um whatever. I was told that when
of our I talk, my speech was supposed to end
with brothers and sisters, can I count on your support?
Because they were passing a resolution for us. But one
of my briefstas told me it would be funnier if
I said, can I get a hell yeah? So I
said some very serious words to this room full of

(33:55):
serious look at people, and then I said, on behalf
of all of our partners at the Market Square Starbucks,
can I get a hell yeah? And they all were
so happy, and I was like, cool, I found my people.
That was like the first time I talked anywhere. That
was funny. That's awesome. Yeah, this is and and and

(34:18):
another reason to unionize. You get to beat a bunch
of really cool people and then they show up for
you and it's just incredible experience. Yeah. On my last
kid vissing trip, we went out in Games of two
when when when we reconvened at the end of the
night for dinner and we were like, oh, we should
stop at our one store that we visited again, like
all four of us, and I was like, yeah, we
should like go in and be like, look, guys, I

(34:39):
joined the union and I made three whole friends. Yeah. Also,
just talking at the UM, I was on a panel
at Women's Labor School, which was really awesome. It was
at Penn State University, and that was a really really
cool experience. I met all the all the female union
leaders are really great. Then overall, it's really cool people

(35:02):
involved here. Hell yeah, I love unions, good stuff. Absolutely.
They got a cool pin that says labor women get
in good trouble and I was like, yeah, that's what
I'm doing. Yeah, absolutely, hell yeah. Yeah. So these days
I'm just working with UM some other stores in the
Greater Pittsburgh area helping get them filed. I won't be

(35:23):
too specific about this, but we are going to see
some stores picking up in DC, which is really really exciting.
We've been doing some canvassing trips out there well. At
Starbucks Workers United, we call it a clean play because
in Starbucks, what a clean play is is that one
day a week, UM, all the closing crew is scheduled
for an extra two hours at the end of their
shift deep clean the store. And they call that a

(35:43):
clean play. So we like to take Starbucks playing. So
we feel like our little canvassing blitzes clean plays. So
for the DC Clean Play, we've been I've been out
there twice. Um, we visited a ton of stores. Definitely
some interests there. Seems like the union bust has been
really tough, but we have we have one store that's

(36:03):
and you'll see it in the news soon. Hell yeah,
I'm very proud. It was like one of that was
one of my DC leads. Um, they've reached out to
us on our website for an organizing request and um,
they've just been like super strong leaders and they've been
incredible and union investing really hasn't faced them at all

(36:24):
and they're going to be there. I'm very proud of them.
A little bit proud of myself, but they they can
have all the credit for that. They they really like
stay strong for the union busting. Do have good stuff.
It's scary to be the first store in your area too,
to actually make moves. Like my friend Jake Welsh, he
was the first store in Pittsburgh. His store was the
first in Pittsburgh. And I know that's like really scary,

(36:47):
and I'm glad that it's happening because it feels like
once the one store goes, then the dominoes starting to fall.
So once we see that one store in DC file
for the union election, we're going to see a lot
more go down there. Um, are you able to talk
at all about what the search of organizing process has
been like? And you know, if you can't talk about

(37:08):
like what it's been like as an organizer, just like
what it was like at your store and what it's
been like going to other stores, totally. So at my store,
we started we had heard a little bit about what
Buffalo was doing, and we started very casually talking about
it at my store, like, yeah, if any store needs
the union, it is the store. Like we are an

(37:29):
absolute shit show here, so we could definitely usunize. That
would be awesome. UM. Really had no idea how to
get started though, until a couple of weeks later. I
get a panicked phone call from one of my baristas
and she was like, Tori, this weird guy came into
the store when I was on a register today and
he started asking me questions about unions, and I know
he wasn't a barista, and I think he was a

(37:51):
corporate spy. And we were like, oh okay, so we googled,
the guy started to like like get some information. We
found like his LinkedIn or his coworkers LinkedIn account, and
we were like, okay, they seemed trustworthy, We're still not sure,
so we emailed the guy from a Burner email account
the fake name. I think the fake name was like
Darren or something. You know, though, like our names are

(38:12):
like Tor and Kelly and Kayla. So we emailed them
from a fake name and a Burner account and eventually
got in contact with Daisy Pickens, who is now our
national campaign director, but at the time she was working
mainly in Pittsburgh and from there she she taught us
everything we know about organizing. We built an organizing committee

(38:32):
consisting of me, Kelly, and Kayla because like the three
of us were pretty good friends, and we got cards signed.
We were able to get one of people want my
store to sign a card, and we filed unanimously. Yeah. So, um.
Something that stores do right before they file is they
write a dear Howard letter. And you might have seen

(38:53):
these on Twitter. If you haven't, you didn't find them
on the Starbucks Workers United like national official Twitter. They
always post those there. So we wrote our dear Howard
we turned in our cards to the n l RV office,
and right after I finished turning in the cards to
then l RB, I walked right back to my store
and I had printed out a physical copy of our
Dear Howard, and I handed it to my store manager, Joe.

(39:14):
I wanted you to hear it from me, and he
was like okay. UM. From there, the union busting started.
We had captive audience meetings, which I believe, to my understanding,
the company has stopped doing because they were kind of
declared illegal. Or maybe it was just that the information
they were sharing was so misleading, but it was declared illegal.
But they handed us like a bunch of really really

(39:38):
misleading handouts saying things like withdrawn petitions. If Workers United
thinks that you're going to lose lose your union election,
they will withdraw your petition and abandon you, which is crazy.
Another thing was that like if if the union thinks
that you're going to vote no, they're going to try
to talk you out of voting. But Starbucks is the

(39:59):
one that we really cares about your voice, and we
wanted to make sure everyone has a voice. We're like, literally,
you can look objectively at this, you can see what
Starbucks has done to try to prevent you from voting,
like they were pushing for in person stores or in
person elections in stores where most of the partners don't
have cars, are um busy with other things, have second jobs,

(40:21):
and just couldn't feasibly vote in person. UM. They challenge
ballots left and right, they think. I think they challenged
a little of nine ballots at my store, including Kelly's ballot,
even though Kelly was literally like working at the time
of our ballot count She was literally behind the counter
and like you can see her like in the zoom
call when people as she came out to watch the

(40:43):
ballot counts on her break, they tried to challenge her ballot,
claiming that she didn't work there. So there's just like
hard evidence that the company is the one that doesn't
want people to vote. So we got through the union busting.
It was it was tough, it was an uphill battle,
and eventually we won our election eight to one on May.

(41:03):
So after that, I became an intern with Workers United
UM for the Summer Solidarity internship program, and that's when
I started really getting into helping other stores file. So
there was one out in out in the Pittsburgh suburbs,
like the Greater Pittsburgh area. Peters Township was the first store,
like my first really solid lead that I ever took on. UM,

(41:25):
they filed, I helped them write their Dear Howard letter.
We were interviewed by the Washington Post. Super cool. So
they have their ballot count on August eighteen. Very excited
for them. I have my stores in DC that I'm
working with, and a lot of other stores throughout Pittsburgh
and UM going on a lot of Queen Play trips,
whether it's a big one to Washington, d C. Or

(41:46):
smaller local one. But we'll go out in teams of two,
visit as many stores as we can possibly get to
in one day, and we wear our Star Wars Workers
United shirts, so immediately people know why we're there. Basically,
just go up as if we're going to order a
drink and be like, hey, so we heard about what
we're doing in downtown Pittsburgh. We're like the stores in
Buffalo that unionized you, so like, what do you guys

(42:06):
think of that? And typically our approach is to find
the gayest looking person. Yeah, we gotta trying to find
like the young like maybe like twentysomething person with like
dyet hair and a septom piercing. It's always the septom piercings.
Let me tell you. They're always the leader, the ring
leaders at their store. I don't know why, but it's

(42:26):
been funny. So yeah, try to find the gayest person
and be like, hey, so what do you think about unions?
And that's how we brought a new store. Yeah, and
we've been pretty successful with it. A lot of people
either don't know what a union is or they really
like their boss, and that seems to be the company's
best union tactic union busting tactic because by having good bosses,

(42:49):
because we always say that sometimes the best organizer is
the boss. So sometimes the stores where they're like, we
love our boss, our boss takes such a good care
of us, I'm like, darn it. Um, Like good for
you guys, but you should unize anyway. Yeah. I would
also yeah, like like I would say, it's like I
really liked my boss and I am also still on
the union because yeah, trying to explain to them too.

(43:11):
Sometimes those stores where they say that they're hard to
talk into it, but I always tell them what happened
at my store, and what happens that we had the
same store manager for I believe like five years. He
was great, We loved him, he was cool, and when
we unionized, it wasn't about him. It was about the
working conditions at our store and that upper management had
been giving us false promises, and the things that needed

(43:32):
to be changed at our store were kind of out
of my store manager's hands, like that was like above
his vagode, so he couldn't do much about it. And
we made it clear, like Joe, it's not about you.
You're great, we love you. Um gotta do it, do
you though, Sorry, buddy. Um. Then we got even though
we loved Joe, we got a new store manager in
mid June, and she was a little bit less awesome.

(43:53):
And you know, you never know when things that your
store can change. And even if you love the store
manager you have now, they could They could leave tomorrow.
So you gotta like, the only thing that's guaranteed, your
store manager isn't guaranteed to be at your store forever.
What is guaranteed is a contract, and that's something that's
really important. Sometimes it's hard to get people to see
the long term of it though, UM, otherwise we're normally

(44:15):
pretty successful. UM. We uh typically try to get phone
numbers at every store, reach out to them within the
next two days, and then we'll hold like an intake meeting.
So whenever we have an intake meeting, we tell them
make a spreadsheet of every partner at your store, what
shift they work, what their job is like if they're
strip supervisor or barista, and assign one person on your

(44:38):
organizing committee to talk to that person. So every person
at your store should have an organizing committee member assigned
to them. From there, once they have a plan for
who's going to talk to who, we get cards to
them and they can be either physical cards like my
store did or digital cards, and then they start getting signatures,
having little conversations like hey, here's what do you mean
is here's why we're doing this. If you agree, sign

(45:01):
this card. Once they have sent cards signed, then we
take it to the on l RV and say hello,
we would like to do a union please, and then
hopefully they get a ballot count date. And the company
always pushes for in personal elections. We always push back.
We pretty much always win, and um we always want
mail in ballots because we do, like, really genuinely want

(45:23):
everybody to be able to vote. Whenever I was organizing
at my store, I told everyone my best possible outcome,
best case scenario is that every single person here votes
and votes. Yes. My second best possible outcome is that
everyone here votes and some of you vote. Now, like
I I want everyone to vote. I want every single
person here to vote. I don't want to be like,

(45:45):
there is one store in my district that did end
up winning their union election, but out of there I
think fifty to sixty partners, only twelve people voted, and
although they won, like, that is not the way we
wanted to get you want everyone to have a day, yeah,
which I think is interesting on sort of two levels. One,
it's like you can see the exact moment at which

(46:06):
corporations start carrying about prince are pretending to care about democracy,
which is like, oh wait, hold on, our workers are
doing stuff. Oh no, we have to care about Yeah.
Suddenly we're like this incredible pro democratic force. We don't
want everyone to have to say. It's like, okay, it's funny.
They actually just came out with This happened after I
got fired. This happened the past two weeks, but they

(46:29):
came out with I believe it's an app where partners
can share their feedback and share their experiences. Um. So
they are trying to be so democratic, like look at
them just really listening to us. Um. Yeah. They also
did this really fun thing where even though hours are
being cut across the company, people are having their hours

(46:51):
drastically cut because this poor little billion dollar corporation can't
afford to schedule us any more hours or properly staff
their stores. We were all scheduled an extra hour for
one of our shifts during the week so that we
could sit down and watch an hour long speech by
Howard Shoulder and do a survey about how much we
like our job, which was funny. That Wow, that was

(47:16):
like a kind of a new load for Starbucks. Like, wow,
there's two people working on the floor right now, one
person like making drinks and one person on register and
they're getting slammed out there. It's so glad you guys
had the had the labor hours to be able to
schedule me to sit here and watch this Howard speech. Great. Thanks,
And like I think, like just the scheduling stuff, like

(47:37):
everyone being consistently understaffed. It's like this is something I
was talking to the plant Parenthood people about two, which
is like like there too. It's like you get you
get these managers who are like, wow, okay, we need
to cost cutting we're doing, and you know the price
of cost cutting is we're going to just make all
of our people work can possibly hard because we refused
to put enough people in the store. And then you know,

(47:59):
we're we're not gonna let you work long enough, like
we're not gonna let you work long enough to actually
get benefits. And then yeah, it's like the worst combination. Yeah,
but but it's like you know, okay, know like like
they have the buddy, they can't schedule you. It's like, yeah,
what I mean like like you know, I think like
it ideally, in a society that wasn't just like like
not even not even like a perfect society, in a
society that was not like entirely based on cruelty and violence,

(48:21):
it wouldn't even be able to do this at all.
Everyone would just have a fixed schedule. Yeah, just like exactly,
because it's so it sucks so much because it's like
I barely get to go to work even though I
asked for a full time I'm scheduled seventeen hours a week,
but I am there. I'm like so freaking stressed because
there's just not enough people to make the number of
drinks that need made and all the customers are super

(48:43):
piste off because they've been waiting ten minutes for their drink,
and like corporate is just watching this happen. I'm sure
that they have to be getting bad reviews. Like there's
no way people aren't calling corporate to complain about the
weight times because there's only two of us working on
a Sunday morning, and like they're really just shooting themselves
in the foot, just all around, all around, shooting themselves

(49:04):
on the foot. Yeah, but I think also like there's
a part of this which is just like like they
are insulated from this, like you know, I don't know,
it's like the managers don't have to deal with this ship.
And it's like, yeah, they're gonna they're just gonna throw
all of the angry customers, Like people who are angry
because of decisions of management do they throwte you? And
it's like this is this is fucking bullshit, Like yeah,
it's like here's a cupe on for a free drink.

(49:26):
Go Bull, the brist does again. Yeah. Yeah, it's like Michelle,
my district manager doesn't have to come in and deal
with like forty angry customers staring at her while she
tries to frantically make drinks. Like yeah, it's like, I
don't know, Like there is definitely a part of me

(49:47):
that is, like, I mean, okay, like I know, on
the one hand, this isn't true because there have been
a lot of terrible corporate people. There's been a lot
of like I don't know, like terrible world leaders who
actually had to work real jobs. But like, okay, a like,
like some part of my soul still holds onto the
belief that if like these people actually had to work
in these conditions like consistently, that it wouldn't be like

(50:11):
this because they wouldn't be completely insulated from just the
absolute horror they're inflicting an iPhone And it's yeah, you
can see whenever my store manager is scheduled to be
on the floor, like scheduled for a coverage shift, which
means that they're required to be out on the floor
making drinks and doing register, they were always very fully staffed.
Whenever whenever the scheduled for coverage, there's always at least

(50:33):
five other people on the floor. But whenever it's like
me on a Sunday morning opening the store and there's
like a Steelers game and a convention in town and everyone,
like the city is packed and all the hotels around
around my store are packed. Everyone's gonna want coffee. There's
like three of us, which is just like it's really
frustrating to sort of like on a political level, it's

(50:54):
like every job that I've ever worked, It's like if
it was literally just us running this and there was
no manage, everything would work on hunter Ties better. Yeah,
And it's like yeah, yeah, it's like okay, Like at
a certain point you have to just be like get
rid of these people, like why why why are we
doing this? Our new new store manager since our recent

(51:18):
new one quit because working visions are so bad. Our
new new one is an outside hire who doesn't know
how to ring in drinks, don't know how to make drinks,
doesn't know anything, and they just put him in my
store as a store manager. And my roommate is also
a barista, and she's been like having to coach him
every day, which is a really awkward situation because she's
not even a supervisor. She's like a barista, and she

(51:40):
has to be like, hey, there's a difference between Nitro
coold Brew and regular coold Brew, Like keep putting the
wrong button. Very frustrating when they sent this guy into
run my store. Meanwhile, like he probably knows less than
everybody else that works there. Yeah, definitely knows us. And
you do like, yeah, definitely knows less than me. It's
so funny. Since I've been fired, I still like every

(52:00):
time there's an emergency at my store, my barristas called me.
It's wild. Like I got a call at five in
the morning the other day from one of my favorite
barristas and he was like, hey, Tori, I know you
don't work here anymore, but sal was supposed to open
and he's not here yet and I'm locked out of
the store. What do I do? Or Like another barrista

(52:21):
called me when I was in d C and he
was like, Tori, I just shrote up for work and
the store is closed. What do I do? And I
was like, I don't know that. I was like, I
can do my best to help you, but I there's
not much I can physically do. I don't have keys anymore. Sorry, Yeah.
And it's it's really like, you know, one of one

(52:41):
of the things that I mean, I guess you get
this in both sort of like like when I want
to like so I went to the verse of Chicago,
and you know, it's like, okay, so these are the
people who infamously produced all of the terrible economics that
make the world suck, right, and it's like okay, well
you take econ classes there and it's like everything is
about sort of like I like, you're doing all of
this because I like, okay, so like the you're you're

(53:05):
doing all of this under the assumption that if you
let corporations run into free market, they will do everything optimally,
and they will produce the lowest prices, and they will
produce everything as efficiently as possible. It's funny because like
you see this in like Marxist theory too. And then
it's like you look at like any store place and
it's like no, no, no, they're firing their most competent
workers and hiring people who are incompetent because like because
the thing that they actually like care them most about
even more than efficiency, even more than like making more

(53:27):
money is maintaining their power, and it's like it's something
that like is really obvious when you're working, but somehow,
like the people who write about this stuff has like
deluded themselves into not being able to understand. Yeah, that's

(53:47):
no idea. It's like it feels like they almost don't
want the experienced workers to say I've seen, like so
part of my internship project is keeping a database of
the fire and partners in the anti union firings, which
is d of ironic because I was like, well, gotta
add myself to this spreadheet now, But I've seen I
seen people must freadheet who worked the company for five years.

(54:08):
There's one person on there who worked for the company
for seventeen years. But we don't get raises or anything
for a seniority or anything like that. There's actually a
cap on how much you can make in each state
from Starbucks because they don't they don't want you to
work there forever because then the frustrations start to come through,
and then new the new unionized, and it feels like

(54:30):
they the high turnover feels really intentional. Sometimes I think
it is like I think that that's that's like a
pretty common, like Amazon Justice too, where it's like their
whole their their whole business strategies is intentionally on working
every one so hard as they quit so I can
get a new group of people, and so people don't
organize and it's yeah, yeah, it's really brutal and horrific

(54:52):
and I hate these people. Yeah same, It's like if
I see this person here for ten years and make
this look like it's a sustainable career, then then we
have to make it a sustainable career. And I don't
want to do that. So bourse people out after like
two or three so very frustrating, which I think I
guess also helps them with the sort of like like

(55:13):
the way that people look at like I mean minium
wage workers and also just service workers in general, where
they're like, oh, well, yeah, you know, we don't need
to raise minium wages a bunch of teenagers, Like these
people don't need like good wages because this is like,
you know, you're not actually supposed to be doing this,
This is like a transition thing. It's like that's not
how any of this works, Like it's just not that's
just you're you're you're making excuses for corporations doing exploitation. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, Yeah.

(55:38):
And it also seems like another thing they're doing is
that we've seen a lot of really high manager turnover too,
And I think that also is really intentional because they
had to even though the storm manager that ultimately fired
me was new, like she couldn't she didn't even have
the heart to do that. She had to bring in.
They had to bring in a support manager to like

(55:59):
actually of the words like you're fired, here's a termination notice.
And it feels like the reason they're making the manager's
anniverse so high is so that the managers don't like
form those relationships with the staff of the store because
it doesn't feel as bad to fire them. Like I
don't think this ever would have happened to me if
my original store manager, who had been there for five
years and like knew me personally, was still at my store,

(56:21):
I don't think this would have happened. And I think
that's why they're doing this big manager shuffle right now,
at least, I mean, I'm sure it's happening in other places.
It's definitely happening a lot in Pittsburgh. I think there
are very few stores in my district that had the
same manager that they had three months ago. It feels
like they're intentionally shuffling them around so they don't form
like personal relationships or any sort of emotional tie to

(56:43):
the partners at their store, and they don't feel guilty
firing them. Yeah, it's like it's community is really dangerous
to them. M absolutely, Like I think I talked about
this like some number of episodes ago, but like yeah,
like this is this is the thing that's really common
with Like I'm just I'm just gonna straight up called

(57:05):
Starbucks dicatorial organization because it is like it is just
a dictatorship. It's like the tatorships do this a lot
where like yeah, like communities are really dangerous to them.
Communities with any kind of strong bonds with each other
really dangerous because people will fight for each other, and
you know, you can't for example, like I don't know,
it's it's really really hard to support someone who has

(57:25):
a strong community around them that will fight back. But
if you can isolate those people, if you can like
like physically isolate them, if you can like socially isolate them,
if you can make sure that they don't have these
support networks, then you can then you can you know,
do whatever you want to them. And that seems yeah,
it seems like it's it's a very deliberate like and
didn't even think it was, like you know this also

(57:45):
like this just makes everyone's life worse, right, Like, did
you see what happened in Seattle with the new Starbucks
Heritage District. I think I've vaguely heard about it, but yeah,
so in Seattle, the three like origin I leave, it's
the three original Starbucks stores, like first ever Starbucks stores
to open, the three in Seattle. Um, they've made it

(58:07):
so that you don't the partners there don't have a
specific store that they're assigned to. They're assigned into the
district and can be scheduled at any store at any time.
So you're not working with the same people all the
time and you're not forming those relationships. And if you
were to somehow forming of relationships to start organizing, UM,

(58:28):
you wouldn't be able to vote as a store. You
have to vote as a district, which is just a
lot more logistically difficult, And there was a lot of
pushback that happened, but unfortunately those stores hadn't file up
for an election yet. And um weren't really able to
do much about it, but we're definitely scared of that
happening like in Pittsburg and like at other Starbucks stores
around the country, that they're going to make it so

(58:48):
that you work for the district on the specific store
and that's kind of terrifying. So yeah, I mean, and
I think that that's not everything where it's like okay
that they have to have to weigh efficiency versus like
they're power and they're going to choose their own power
every time. Like there's just like an aspect of that too,
where it's like they're just incredible dehumanization of it. Yeah,

(59:11):
it's just totally it's like really careless, like you don't
know what someone's transportation situation looks like. Um, you don't know,
like if they feel comfortable working with like different groups
of people, Like I don't know, I know that like
a lot of people at UM. So this is just
reminding me of something that happened at the store in
my area. So at Penn Center East, the Penn Center

(59:32):
East Starbucks, they are Union store. They decided they were
closing Penn Center East for like a for an entire
week and gave them the option to work at three
stores that were like an hour away from them, and
of course, like they were only giving the option to
work at other stores that were unionized, they weren't going
to send the union people into the non unionized store
potentially influenced them. So one of the partners, the one

(59:54):
that was actually fired yesterday, it was like, I do
not feel comfortable working at this store because I worked
at this or one time and I faced a lot
of discrimination from the from the manager there, from the
partners there, and I don't want to be put in
that situation again. There's like a customer at this other
store that said or that called me a racial slur,
and I don't want to be in this area. I don't.

(01:00:16):
I don't want to go out to these stores. And
it just like exposes partners to like a lot more
like situations that they're potentially not comfortable with there, with
new managers that they don't have like a good rapport
with yet, and it makes everything just a lot more difficult.
Like just let everyone work at their own store, Like
we all have friends. All the partners that like my
store at least were very very close. I know a
lot of the stores are the same way. It just

(01:00:38):
makes work worse to not be working with your friends.
I don't think anyone would work in market Square if
we weren't all really close with each other. Um overall
just work situation. Yeah, And I don't know, hope, hope,
hopefully they're not able to do that on a large scale,
because yeah, that would be It's feels like a disaster,

(01:01:01):
especially since I mean there's a lot of Starbucks stores
like concentrated in cities, but I know, like the Penn's
Center East Starbucks was kind of out there in the suburbs.
And another big issue that they faced was that, like,
we don't have some of us don't have cars, and
we just can't get to like the city Starbucks stores
because our parents drive us to work, to our parents

(01:01:23):
drive us to work every day because we're in high
school and we just don't have like a means of transportation.
There's nowhere to park there, and it just puts them,
It just makes them face a lot of issues that
they weren't really planned on dealing with, planning on dealing with,
and aren't really prepared to. And they probably chose the
store that they currently work at because, like they didn't
just pick it at random. They picked becuse it was

(01:01:43):
community to get to. They like vibes there and it
was like a good fit for them, and forcing them
to work at other other stores where there are a
lot less comfortable. Not a good decision. Just feels shady,
very dehumanizing for sure. Yeah, and so I guess I do.
I do have phone lessing to ask, which is if
people want to support you and if people want to

(01:02:03):
find you in places, where can they do that? Oh? Yeah,
so my Twitter is Tory Underscore Timbolini and that's my
personal Twitter. We also have a Pittsburgh Starbucks Workers United
Twitter account. Um, if you want to support me and
Kim specifically, there is a link to our go funds
me there. There's a link in my bio and somewhere

(01:02:23):
in the Pittsburgh account as well. We also just released
a National Solidarity fund um through a coworker, but I'm
actually not quite clear on how people can donate to
that yet. I can. It's very new, So I can
send you an email with a link to that. Yeah cool. Yeah,
well we'll put all the links in the show notes. Awesome,

(01:02:45):
Thank you so much, Yeah, thank you, thank you so much.
For joining us is Yeah, it was really good. Yeah,
thank you so much for sharing my story. I I
feel like there's a lot of fired partners fired partners
across the country and like we all kind of need
to stand together there. And I like people hear my
story and hear about how like the union has supported
us and there's been a lot of community support. And

(01:03:07):
you know, as soon as I was fired, I was
immediately hired by Workers United. You know, they're really willing
to take care of us. And if I had like
anything to kind of like like any advice to give
the partners who are trying to organize, like the union
has your back, don't worry too much about losing your job.
Probably won't happen. If it does, the union has your back,
and all the other fire partners have your back as well. Thanks.

(01:03:30):
Hell yeah. Yeah. And on that note, yeah, fight your
bosses together. You can beat them. Uh yeah. Go out
into the world and make havoc for people who do
bad stuff, cause problems on purpose. Welcome to it could

(01:04:01):
happen here a podcast that I've could and yeah, well welcome.
We'll welcome to the inaugural podcast where it's just Christopher
and Andrew. I'm your house, Christopher Wong, and I got
I got Andrew with with me today to cast the pod. Okay, yes,
I have Tony age from Thank you for that. UM.

(01:04:26):
I had to sacrifice you for that one, because I
was not gonna gonna do it myself. UM. Welcome to
the first in a two part exploration of the New
African revolutionary known as Kasi Balacoon. He's one of the
most recognizable black and archaic radicals of the whole black

(01:04:47):
and radical tradition. UM. Recognized for his constant struggle, UM,
for his political journey, and for his insights in the
cause of you know, black freedom in the US. And
so I think it's his very layered journey is one
I believe that more people should explore, and I hope

(01:05:10):
that more people would come away with this episode and
the following episode, the second part, with a recognition of
what an inspiring person is and what we can can
learn from his life. Hell yeah, I'm excited. He's super cool.

(01:05:34):
Yeah yeah, for many reasons. As I think we will
start at the very beginning, as most humans do. I
don't think we know of anybody who just kind of
plopped onto the youth fully formed. His quasi bo lagoon
was not his original name, was his chosen name. He
was born Donald Wims in the major majority black community

(01:05:54):
of Leland in Prince George's County, Maryland and December twenty second,
n six, So I'm sure he got like his Christmas
presents and his birthday presents like combined. That was a laugh.
It's thinking my one of my oh I think it's

(01:06:18):
my my uncle or something has his birthday is, yeah, December, Yeah,
one of my uncle's bothday is I think, and my
girlfriend's birthday is the twenty. Yeah. That's that's some That
is some rip stuff there. Yeah. I mean I try
not to like add to that, so I try and

(01:06:39):
get two separate gifts, but um, you know, it's a
it's a challenge. And then talk of that like you
can't really do much for your birthday because everybody has
always been like last minute stuff. Yep, yep. Thankfully I
was born in the best month. So anyway, the experiences
prepared young Donald Williams to become an activist who would

(01:07:03):
militantly resist white supremacy and unjust authority. He was particularly
inspired by his own parents struggle um during the Cambridge
Protest of is he his dad had worked in the
US Printed Office, and his mom had worked at Fort

(01:07:25):
Meade in Maryland, and so they, he and his sister
were very much cared for. He and his two sisters
rather very much cared for. He think he was the
youngest of the family and loved and they really showed
um that sort of drive to provide and care for

(01:07:50):
for for their children. Um in those work environments they
would have seen, he observed, and he watched it. He
observe of his parents, observing the effort that they put in,
and the fact that they surpassed the skill and experience
of a lot of the white folks who came into

(01:08:11):
their type of work. But then those said white folks
who just go on ahead and climb the ladder and
you know, get these promotions and get these raiss while
they themselves had to like slowly and painfully drag themselves
forward and fight to get ahead. Also that their children
could have their food and clothes and everything that they needed.

(01:08:33):
So the Cambridge Right the ninety three were led by
a young one by the name of Gloria Richardson, who
was a key figure in the civil rights Movement UM.
Their struggle had he moved as part of the Civil
Rights Movement UM and the local chapter of the Student
Tern VIOLENTCE Coordinating Committee. There was fighting against segregation in

(01:08:57):
the area, organizing sit ins and so on and so forward.
But after they had organized against a movie theater that
was expanding its discriminatory practices, UM the movement started to
push back and they marched, and the demands were unmet,
and the police were called and Richardson and others were

(01:09:19):
arrested for disorderly conduct, and there was a whole pattern
of protests and arrests and boycotts and harassed when they
just went on and on and on. After some youths
both a few years old were charged with disorderly conduct
for being arrested and were arrested for pretting peacefully outside
of a segregated facility. Even more marchers were organized, and

(01:09:45):
eventually the protests escalated and some white owned businesses we
set on fire. Then gunfire was being exchanged between whites
and African Americans, and of course martial law was declared
and National Guard was deployed, and eventually a treaty had

(01:10:09):
to be negotiated between UM Glory Richardson and the white
power structure. The Gambridge movement is recognized by the Nation
of Islam as one of the marcom x as one
of the examples of a developing black revolution, and so
that militancy in that movement is well inspired and impressed

(01:10:32):
the young Donald Williams would later become quest. Probably another
formative point in his in his life was when he
had joined the U. S Army after graduate in high
school and were stationed in Germany after receiving some basic trina.
Of course, like most black people in the military, he
experienced a lot of racism and physical attacks from white officers,

(01:10:54):
and eventually he and others formed the association known as
the Legist Leaders, basically based on like messing up racists
and making sure that they couldn't like interfare with them
any longer. Yeah, he prided himself in his ability to

(01:11:16):
exact revenge on racist war suits while in Europe. He
was in London at one point and he connected with
Africans and African descendants, and he saw his experience and
learn that it's basically like a natural tonic like it's
something that clicked in his head and he realized the
interconnections between African descendants across the globe. Um as he

(01:11:40):
grounded himself more in in black consciousness and culture, he
stopped processing his hair while it is natural hair style
and became basically more committed to black liberation than he
had been before. After being honorably honorably discharged the ninety seven,
after three years of servant primarily in Germany, he returned

(01:12:01):
home to Lakeland, UM and then he moved to New
York City, where his sister Diane had lived. And in
New York he got involved in wrench strikes and became
parts of a tenant organizing movement for the Community Council
of Housing. One of the principal leaders of this of
this movement was a hulum rend strike organized so called

(01:12:23):
Jesse Green, and he used the rhetoric of like militant
Black nationalism to recruit lieutenants for his activist campaigns. His
his militancy when you know, pull it back, and he
connected with the militantcy that Donald was already feeling drawn
to is what it really pushed him to get into

(01:12:44):
that cause. And so I think it makes me think
as I'm you know, going through his journey about like
I mean, his commitment to the struggle began from very
early on, from seeing his parents and the things they
had to do with from seeing the Cambridge riots, from
seeing his experience in the army, from connecting with UM,

(01:13:04):
with black folks in London, with UM his tenant organizing.
And it makes me think of the political journeys of
people today and how all these little points and larger
points in a Pererson's life kind of combined to create

(01:13:26):
the sort of tapestry of a person that they are
and a tapestry of political beliefs that they wuld. I
think a lot more people have been drawn to like
militant radical politics, left rack of politics than we give
them credit for. The more people have that basis than

(01:13:47):
we necessarily um want to accept. I think the issues
we just don't have the outreach and please do you know,
help them get across the finish line and get to
a place where the actively you know, working for these courses. Yeah,

(01:14:13):
it seems like there's a lot of I mean, partially
burned out and partially just sort of I don't know.
You you get these you get periods where sort of
just like specific movements ends and a bunch of people
just kind of fall out, and it's like, it's not
that they haven't done this stuff, it's that they just
sort of, I don't know, the movement to the thing
they were in is over and now they're sort of
just off doing something else. And yeah, and that reminds

(01:14:38):
me of um well, rhymes of a script that I
was working on the other day about demands. And one
of the arguments people have made against making demands, you know,
as a movement is that once demands are met, it's
sort of what concessions even made. It's SAPs the momentum

(01:15:00):
out of a movement and SAPs its potential because if you,
you know, accept concessions, if you accept that, you know,
when whatever you receive and you know, you go back
in your loyalty, you don't reach the climax of what
you could have achieved as a movement compared to if

(01:15:22):
you've just kept going. Of course, I have critiques of
the anti demand position, but it's something that they frequently
consider when I look at a lot of these social
movements that have based on specific projects, based on specific focuses,
and what happens when these movements get you know, coopted,

(01:15:44):
When these movements get compromised, and the way that the
potential and the share manpower of some of these movements
compared to like what they've actually achieved is a massive discrepancy.
You know. Yeah, and this I was thinking about. Um

(01:16:07):
it was something in The Bastard's episode a long time
ago about um. The the name of the treaty was Ampo,
wh just like there was this huge mobilization in Japan
in the sixties to stop this treaty with the US.
Was a military treaty they're doing there, and they hit
a whole bunch of stuff in it. Like I think
there was a closet let the US like invade Japan

(01:16:29):
if there was like a civil disturbance or something stuff
like that, and they, you know, they had this huge
movement like people people stormed the parliament like multiple times,
like you know, I think, I think. I think afterwards
the historians determined that like a third of the total
population of Japan had been involved in this movement. And
then they lost because the whole movement had been about

(01:16:50):
stopping this treaty and the treaty gets signed that they
can't do anything about it, and then it just sort
of like fizzles and it kind of becomes the Japanese
New Left. But like you know, you have this like
incredible high water mark of like like you you have
you have so many from the then even the Japanese
you left like dissipeate. Yeah, yeah, and they they it implodes,

(01:17:13):
like yeah, you go from like like Nixon, like was
it Nixon you tried to visit And I think that
there's been a couple of US presidents you tried to
You tried to visit Japan and couldn't leave the airport
because the bob was too large outside of it, And
he's like it went from that too. You know, everything
is sort of once once, once once. They're sort of
like immediate rallying, like here's our demand, there's our goal,

(01:17:33):
like like disappears. Everything just sort of splinters into these
like weird fragment groups and you get like a bunch
of Japanese Marxists just like shooting each other over nothing
in the mountains, and the whole thing sort of just implodes.
And yeah, I mean even if you look at like
like say Fridays the Futures and an example or like

(01:17:54):
extension rebellion, no George Floyd protests, and you can sit
and just sit and think about the shant numbers involved
into his movements, the potential of that large mobilization, a
mobilization effort, compared to what comes out of them. You know,

(01:18:16):
like what other than a few minor policy changes, what
has you know, say extinction, rebellion or frids the future
achieved when you know these massive co operations are still
actively fights in every step of the way, and these
movements are not yet willing to do what it takes

(01:18:38):
to you know, accomplished. It needs to be accomplished. Not
even talking about violence. I'm not talking about violence. I
am not talking about violence. What I'm talking about is
the efforts involved, the work that goes into social revolution,

(01:19:02):
that goes beyond the sort of flashy, easily recognizable march
and the street kind of activities, because there's a lot
of stuff that goes behind the scenes. A lot of
institutions need to be built from the bottom up, a
lot of institutions need to be transformed from the inside out.
And you know, without that basis in place, which is

(01:19:22):
spinning on top in mud. But back to weams like
me in his generation, he was ready to join an
uncompromised movement for black freedom and human rights. He joined
Jesse Gray and protesting the conditions and New York housing,
particularly infestation of rats and public housing. In fact, and

(01:19:44):
this is probably one of my favorite stories of his
entire you know, like lifetime as an activist, a's no organizer.
In n Jesse Gray, Donald Wellims, his sister to Diane,
and two other ternant activists were arrested for disorderly conduct

(01:20:05):
in Washington, d C. When they unannounced, an uninvited attended
a session of Congress and brought the cage of rats
to the assembly to highlight the uvan hosing condition. Hell yeah,
I wish I could have been a fly on the

(01:20:25):
wall or something to have witnessed that. Yeah, Like I mean,
it's it's such an impressive thing, even just on a
sort of like just like a logistical level of where
did they get this cage of rats from? I mean
clearly they got the rats from the housing. The housing
was so bad. They had the rats run around everywhere,
imagining like they we're we're not going to use kill trap,

(01:20:48):
We're gonna use like capture traps. Specifically, sweet drop these
rats on Congress like these rules. It's perfect. It's perfect,
is that sort of energy that you helped him to
create that group the legislators while he was in the army,
you know. But what I mean because they you know,

(01:21:09):
dropped some rats in Congress and they got arrested. The
c h UM lost It's the Community Council learn Housing
lost its funding, and Jesse Gray losssibility to pay his organizers.
And just that line Alane just kind of stood out
to me. Um that movement that is because these movements,

(01:21:33):
you know, back in the day, they were serious about
getting changed done, and they recognized that to get changed done,
you need to have people who are full time involving
getting that change done. It can be a part time thing.
And so you know, these movements had these groups, they
had like staff that you know, appaid to like put
in the work, who could focus all their efforts and
energy in it. And of course that took fundraise, and

(01:21:55):
that took donations, that took support from their local communities
to get that sort of of support that they needed
to get things done. Um. I think right now we
have is a lot of groups that often fizzle out
to burn out before they could even get started because
they don't have the resources to support their kind of

(01:22:18):
effort that they will need to get things done when
everybody is working one to three jobs. Everybody's booms out
and re stressed out. And this was my organizing experience
at least. Um, it's very hard to get stuff done
when everybody's tired all the time. It's very hard to
get things off the ground when everybody is busy all

(01:22:40):
the time. I think there's another kind of interesting thing
here too, which is like, it's like, well because so
like now we do have organizations where you can get
paid to be full time staff, but it's it's it's
NGO if yeah, it's NGO stuff. And and the thing
I think is it's it's it became this question of
sort of I mean a personally, it's about legal structures

(01:23:02):
of how you could have like part part of I think, yeah,
it's about the sort of legal requirements about who can
actually have and what kinds of organizations and what you
have to do to like have an organization that has
a bank account for example. And then also I think
there's this there's just kind of traffic traft people fill
into where Okay, so you need funding, right, and you

(01:23:25):
know the places you can get funding from usually tend
to be either you're spending your entire time doing donation
tribes or you're doing these grant stuff, and it's like, well, okay,
the problem with like both of these basically a giant
strings attached to them, and so like it sort of
falls away from the like, hey, we're you know, sort
of like paid revolutionary organizers and just degrades and some

(01:23:46):
more enteo stuff exactly exactly, and the incentive structure completely changes.
And of course they also potodynamics involved and you know,
pervoices and paid organizers and that sort of thing. But
I mean, if if, if you know, these these liberal
organizations and getting all this fund and getting all these support,

(01:24:08):
they're able to sustain themselves and keep pushing their cause,
and all radical movements and militant movements are floundering. Again,
where are we going with this? You know? Yeah. But afterwards,
with the loss of funding, Weems left the cciege and
then he joined the Central hallm Communitee for Self Defense

(01:24:31):
and Solidarity the student protests and Columbia University. That committee
would bring food and water to the students who occupy
the buildings in the Columbia campus. And that's another important
things to pointing to when I was talking about the
less flashy work that goes into it. Because people are
talking about general strike, because they have this vision of

(01:24:51):
this general strike that everybody's you know, standing out in
the streets and this big crowds out in the streets
and we all refused to work, and it's rude, whe
it's wonderful. But a general strike can only be pulled
off if there's a strike funding place, if there's a
a strike banking place where resources are available for people

(01:25:13):
to draw from. Doesn't a strike, contrary to some perspectives
or I guess some misled approaches, it's not when you
tell your boss, hey, let me get a day off.
It's like a grunge strike real quick. A strike is
you refusal to work. It is unpaid. It is a

(01:25:35):
risky endeavor. You don't just walk out without organized support
from your fellow co workers at the very least. And
part of what makes a strike successful, part of what
makes a protest or a sitting or any kind of

(01:25:55):
movement successful is having a network of care work instituted.
So you see that the Central Hall and Community for
Self Defense in solidarity with another movement, brought food and
water to the students who are occupying the buildings, and

(01:26:15):
because they brought food and water, those students are able
to continue occupying, occupying those buildings and continue struggling for
the causes they were struggling for. I don't think they're
enough people, and not to just count people that are.
If it doesn't fall in your garden, you don't after
watch it. I think there needs to be more people

(01:26:36):
who are going into that care work, which is marginalized
because it's just alsociated with women and non men really,
but it's it's something that we need to account for, something,
it needs to be one of the principal arms of
our strategy. Like like when I was doing tenant organizing,

(01:26:58):
is like I did was like, what did I do?
The tenant organized? Was like, well, okay, so I went
around to put signs up on move chairs around, I
took care of people's kids, like that was like feeling
most of it. There's just a lot of like I
don't know, I mean stuff like childcare like that, that
kind of stuff. Like he's a vital part of any

(01:27:18):
If if is a vital part of any political movement
that's actually going to succeed, that you're trying to run
and nobody wants to talk about or do it because
it's not the like exciting like we're throwing a brick
at a cop or whatever. Stuff. Yeah, exactly, I sat
no more postal notes. And this is the part where

(01:27:39):
he changes his name. Not a Beams would associated himself
with the Yoruba Temple in hard just organized by Nana
Sir Jimani. The Detroit boone at Offumi was initiated in
Cuba in the Lukumi Rights of the Ruba urgin. And
he saw the West African religious and cultural heritage as

(01:28:00):
a means of cultural self determination and peoplehood for African
and science the United States. Recently there was a Netflix
documentary about the ways that Euroban traditions have been kept
alive across the quote and quote New World. And so
you will see um in Cuba and in Brazil and
in trying to be a goole, and in the US,

(01:28:22):
the Uba practices and cultural components have just and sustained.
And so when as who may established the Oruba Temple
in New York, Starry in Detroit was the Detroit New
York in Detroit, Um, I would say Detroit. He so

(01:28:46):
it has an institution two, a naturalistic institution meant to
advance the cause of the civil rights movement and liberation.
Black liberation movement. You sort of African nines everything, you know,
names and hats and clues and clubs and churches and
so a lot of people in Beam generation and so

(01:29:08):
you see people like like Malcolm X adopting a new monica.
They rejected, you know, these European names and adopted African
or Arabic names. So when we're gonna see to the
Urban Temple, he would no longer be Donald Weems. He
took an away day name Kuasi meaning mail born on

(01:29:28):
a Sunday, and the urban name Blagoon meaning wallord. And
so that again ties into his whole passion for militancy
because he is basically a wall lord born born on
a Sunday. I don't know what she would as a
kind of a metal Yeah, it's like now great to fight,

(01:29:56):
fresh out the room, all kind of thing, but pretty
sick exactly exactly. But you know, along with finding his
cultural beer in the Uruba Temple, he got his Black
pap politics of revolution black nationalism from the Black Paul
movement the nineteen sixties. Black Pole movement. They realized that,

(01:30:21):
you know, black liberation is not possible without the overthrow
of the US constitutional order and capitalist economic system. And
they also recognized and a significant number of black Milton's
sixties Black Power movement recognized that the classical Marxism Leninism
was not a free work that they identified with. It

(01:30:42):
is something that all of them did adopt an adapt
but it's not something that they just consumed whole sale.
And I think that's honestly some nuance that is often
obscured when people take this sort of blindly nonstylegic approach
to pass you know, movements. Because even even back then,

(01:31:07):
even in the early stages Black Power movement, there was
you know, political diversity in terms of the aims and
intentions and beliefs, um different perspectives, even within the same
political philosophy, um different approaches. The the West Coast Black
Panthers and the East Coast Black Panthers took different approaches.

(01:31:28):
The West Coast Black Panthers were more class focused, whereas
the East Coast Lack Panthers were more Pan Africa and
the approach, and that honestly caused a lot of tension
between the two of them them were inspired you across
the board, but the influence of Marxism, the Chinese and
Cuban revolutions, by other national liberation movements in Africa, Asia
and the America's because this was a time of course

(01:31:51):
where a lot of movements, a lot of countries were
getting independence from Britain and France and all together colonized US.
This is also a time where more and more people
were you know, building their criticisms and the racism present
in the old Left, and so they wanted a theoretical

(01:32:12):
vehicle that that gave them the self determination, the ideological
self determination that they needed. Like they were with the
whole civilrights movement, they were fighting within it, but they
wanted more than what the civil rights movement was offering.
They wanted more than just civil rights between within a
settler colonial state. And they would not going to sit

(01:32:33):
back and just be satisfied with non violence as a
way of life. All of them sold the civil rights
movement as well as as something integrationists or something pro assimilationist,
whereas they wanted something more insurgent, more revolutionary, and so
you know, they brought together all these different things, um,

(01:32:54):
Black nationalism and self determination, Marxian critiques of capitalism and
a direct action proved that was you know, in the
civilrights movement from the beginning, and so Blagoon became a revolutionary.
He began to read literature by the autobiography of Malcom

(01:33:14):
X and Robert Williams, spoke negroes with guns, and he
also learned from the leaders that surrounded him, like the
leader of the n c c UM and the leaders
of of you know, the Black Panthers. What do you

(01:33:35):
recognized someone long inspired by militancy is a black liberation
only come about through protracted gorilla warfare. I don't think
you have to go over like the origins of Black
Panthers and detail um. But just to summarize, the Black

(01:34:00):
Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California in response to
the abuses of the police UM upon residents of Oakland,
and so after Huey Newton, when the founders a Black
Panther Party and one of his comrades got on a
shootout with the Oakland Police Department and survived UM and

(01:34:23):
one of the officers actually got fatally wounded. Newton basically
became a national hero to the only England black youth
who you know, like you can't even conceive that this
guy fought the state and won. He had like a
small win, but he won. And so that's when you

(01:34:46):
see like the whole Free Huey movement kickoff, because you know,
he was charged with phrase murder for his name the
cop he shot, and Free hue was the Irallian cry,
Black Pole and La circles. Eventually, BPP came to New
York in some of the nine and I mean people

(01:35:10):
try to kick off Black Panther Party New York beforehand
in sixty six, but it didn't work out. So this
new Black Panther Party in New York kicked off and
began to build support in the hundreds. The same month
that Dr King was assassinated, he had a lot of

(01:35:32):
members of the b PP coming together two sort of
figure out a direction because although they may have been
critical of the Souf Rights movement, the lost Dr King
was a major blue to everyone because even if they
disagree with him, he was still an inspiration. So Bobby

(01:35:54):
CeAl and Cathain Cleeveld came to New York and they
appointed eighteen year old, eighteen year World ESSENCC member Judon
Ford as acting Captain of Defense of the BPP. And
that's another thing a lot of people forget, like these
people are young, really young. Fred Hamilton died when he
was twenty one, assassinated, of course, and so it's like

(01:36:20):
an inspiration honestly, and also like a rallying cry for
all young people who feel disimportant, disenchanted, disheartened by all
the different aspects of collapse that us surrounded us, you know,
like we can stand up and fight back. But anyway,
so Judon Ford became the acting Captain Defense of the

(01:36:42):
BPP of the East Coast and he was soon joined
by David Brothers and they found the the BPP in Brooklyn.
In National leadership of the BPP also sent Ron penny
Well to give directions to New York Chapter, and so
Pennyell was there and he was involved, and he became
a captain in the ranks, and he was very grassroots

(01:37:06):
in his approach. The Harlem branch of the New York
Chapter will be founded by Blue Bomber Shakur, who was
the son of Malcolm X associates Suladin Shaku, and that
same Saladin Shako was He served as a mentor and
a servid father for many of the members of the
New York of New York's Black Panther Party, and you know,

(01:37:30):
all these different people and all these different groups and
stuff for mixing and molding and melding and getting together.
And eventually the New York chapter the BPP would grow
to become among the largest, if not the largest, in
the entire organization, but approximately five hundred members. So went

(01:37:50):
Bytagoon found out the BPP was organized in New York.
He went and he joined. He felt, you know, like
empowered by the Black Panther Party's ten point program. And
for those who don't know, the ten point program was,
you know, a pretty straightforward. One. We want freedom. Two
we want full employment. Three you want an end to

(01:38:12):
the robbery by the white man of our black community.
Four we want decent housing. Five want education that exposes
the true nature of this decadent American society, teaches us
a true history, not rule in present day society. Six
you want black men to be exempt from military service. Seven.
We want an immediate end to police brutality and mood

(01:38:34):
of black people. Eight you want freedom for all black men.
Helen federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails nine,
you want all black people to be brought to child
to be tried in a court by a jury of
their peers from black communities because at the time, and
I still exists today UM and even affected UM during

(01:38:56):
tours in being tried for these things and some as
single black face, and the entire jury it's entirely white,
middle class upper class three members. And lastly ten, we
want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And
so Balagoon was drawn to this. He's identified with the

(01:39:21):
organization's Maoist axiom that political power comes from the barrel
of the gun um and was inspired by you know
the way us that the Chinese Revolution inspired the Black
Panther Party. However, the structure from the beginning, the structure

(01:39:41):
of the Black Panther Party did pose some challenges for
Balagoon and it really only got worse from there to
The Black Panther Party was structured with the National Center
Community the n SEC as the highest decision making body
and the entire organization across the entire country. Even though

(01:40:03):
the New York chapter was the largest in the entire
UM Party, the ant C was concentrated in Oakland, which
is where you know, the party was founded, and so
most of the body was associated with people who knew
Hugh Newton. There was a whole chain of command and

(01:40:27):
like I said, that whole style and structure of governor
speaking a factor and Baltagoon's attraction to anti authority in politics.
And of course he was not alone in being critical
of the structure of the party. John Cox, Shanty Allston
learned to come to it and many others but also
developed similar critiques, drawing them from a similar direction. Because

(01:40:49):
Bagon had this experience organized and beforehand, and he recognized
the good that you know, the party was doing, but
he also taken issue with how the party was structured.
So when he got involved, you know, he was ready
to participate and work with oppressed black communities and around

(01:41:10):
these basic issues. Um For example, in September nine, the
Black Panther Party members participating in a community take over
of Lincoln Hospital, which at the time was dilapidated and
disinvested and was not able to save the predominantly black
and Latino residents. As all Bronx and so the BPP

(01:41:31):
in New York would work with the Puerto Rican Young
Lords and the Professional Government of the Republic of New
Africa to take over and reform the detox program at
Lincoln Hospital. And that boldness again so inspirational, because how
many of us are willing today two just like so
boldly this walking and take over these broken institutions, to

(01:41:54):
put them in the hands of the community, to make
them whole, hopeful institutions for the people. I think we
need more of that boldness. So New York Panthers were
prey much involved in tennant organizing as well, which is
right up Ballagoon's alley. Um oh, I guess we could
call him rat catcher um. And they were also involved

(01:42:20):
in fights for community control over the school system and
the police. Eventually, Baldagoon and another Panther, Richard Harris, would
be arrested in February nine on bank robbery charges in

(01:42:41):
New York, New Jersey. On April second, n sixty nine,
less than one year after the founding of the New
York chapter of the b PP, twenty one Panther leaders
and organizers, including Balagoon and Harris, were united twelve arrested
and conspiracy charges and a thirty count indictment and of
was This case became known as New York Panther one.

(01:43:03):
The charges included conspiracy to bomb the New York Botanical
gardens and police stations and two assassin police officers. And
after the arrest, mostly defendants were released on a hundred
tho dollars bail, but Blagoon was held without bail. So
they were being charged for this like claim that they
were going to ambush New York police. Um based on

(01:43:27):
the testimony of one nineteen year old Panther member, Juan Byrd,
who had been beaten by the police in order to
you know, make a statement that was favorable to the prosecution,
like beaten as an her mom pulled up to the
police station to hear her daughter screaming visibly beaten with

(01:43:49):
a black eyes, swollen lip, bruises on her face, everything,
and so um Ballagoon and the other person who was
be in charge with this attempt to ambush the police,
who was a guy named Odinga, and he had escaped
and went under ground, but Laguna Dot but then ended

(01:44:15):
up going fleeing the United States, settling down in Algeria
and all that jazz. But Blagoon not only was he
charged with all the others were charged with, but he
was separated from the others and face charges in New Jersey.
All the others where in New York as and he
was split in behind bars for two years. The other

(01:44:38):
defendants whore acquitted. And as a result of you know,
all this legal battling and maneuvering, since a lot of
the key organizers and leaders as a New York Plat
Panther Party were incarcerated, the organization was pretty badly crippled,

(01:45:00):
and as with its you know, activities and general momentum,
I think that's that's that's something that the Planted Party
had to struggle with very often, having it's it's key members,
it's it's leaders and and and members incarcerated and charged

(01:45:21):
and facing trial. And so as a result, Panther Party
was almost for almost its entire existence, was basically fighting
charges and trying to get its members out of jail
and this, that and the other. It's a lot of
its efforts ended up treating towards that. So I think

(01:45:41):
seeing now the New York Plant Party was crippled, I
think it highlights the importance of distribution and decentralization when
it comes to organizing it. How I the importance of
as the future Stabolitionists of the Americans say, moving like
my core is a my core is basically a mute
world relationship between fungi and plant roots. So they move

(01:46:04):
nutrients seen plants they're connected to, and they basically create
this kind of fungal network that that spreads across an ecosystem,
and it prevents researchers from basically able to see where
they begin where they end. They you know, they grow slowly.
Sometimes they pop up above ground there's like mushrooms and stuff,
but primarily they exist underground. And so what the our

(01:46:28):
future establishers are talking about is basically creating a movement
that is primarily underground that spreads and is interconnected and
cannot be pinned down with such a clear pinned down
or easily infiltrated like how the party was able to
with such a clear you know, structure and the chain

(01:46:50):
of command. So basically move like mccres A, work from
the ground or underground and work for the roots, work
from the roots MHM. Eventually, after most of his comrades
were acquitted, Balagum pleaded guilty to the charges that he

(01:47:12):
and somebody else did attempt to shoot the police officers
so then he became the only one of twenty one
original defendants who was actually convicted. So that was going on. Um.
You know, while the New York plant the case was
being played out, Balagoon's politics were starting to shift revolutionary

(01:47:39):
nationalism and democratic and the democratic centralism of the party
were beginning to if you healthy critique, I would say,
and Balagoon is starting to shift more towards anti authoritarian politics.
At the same time, about's going through that political journey.

(01:48:01):
More generally speaking, the New York Black Panther Party was
getting to feel disenchanted with how the national leadership was
handling things. Like the tension had already existed because of
the differences in focus, you know what, the New York
Panthers being more Pan African and the Oakland Panthers being
more class focused. But one of the after one of

(01:48:26):
the leaders of the Panther Party, Geronimo Pratt, had been
purged from leadership for his coute que counter revolutionary behavior,
um tension started to build because Pratt was seen as

(01:48:47):
a hero to a lot of members of the New
York UM Party because he had been very much parliamentary,
he had been very much paramilitarily organized, and he had
taken it up upon himselves the train Panther members in
paramilitary tactics. And so after he was you know, push

(01:49:08):
from the leadership um and a few other leaders were
also pouged. The New York Panthers began to feel disconnected
from the from the national because the whole reason they

(01:49:28):
were attracted to the Panther Party is because of this
this image of armed Panthers patrolling against the police of
you know, underground perrilla warfare um, and so, you know,
the New York Panther movement was very much associated with that.
But once they saw the sort of pudges they were

(01:49:51):
taken place, um, some of which they looked up to.
When they saw that the national leadership sent these other
guys Robert Bay and told on Stoli into New York
to assume leadership of the chapter to basically important leaders
from outside movement, rather than sort of bring up new ones,

(01:50:11):
you know, from within the local community. It basically work
to destabilize what the New York Panthers were working for.
Because when these guys rolled up, they had a very autocratic,
hierarchical style of leadership, unlike you know, the Pennywell guy
who was very much grassroots in his approach. And I

(01:50:36):
mean even as Sata Suku had like basically critiqued the
quality of the West Coast leaders sent to New York
when she spoke about how Robert Bay and Jolly, who
are from the Rest Coast, had a very aggressive, and
she said, a belligerent way of talking and dealing with people.

(01:50:58):
And so that really what built up towards UM from
simple initial differences of opinions and misunderstanding leaning towards the
dissolution of the connection between the national leadership and the
New York Chapter. The New York Chapter wanted to focus
on things of a more national orientation. UM. They wanted

(01:51:22):
to work on the tenant issues that they had started
with in the first place, but the nationally appointed leadership
was not interested in tenant issues and they don't want
to play so much focus on on on you know,
nationalists oriented issues Pan African, its US. And so when

(01:51:47):
you know, these groups were reassigned from their tenant organizing
to the s the people programs that were working in
the West Coast that was also presented by the New
York Panthers. Because the New York pan Douse they were
you know, working on certain things. They had like tenant
organizing behind their belt, and they had like these different
mutual league projects and stuff going on, these you know,

(01:52:09):
sort of support and solidarity things going on, and to
be toold from the outside, Hey, stop doing this tenant
organizing and stuff. Do these things as working where we
are coming from. It didn't play out well yeah, I
mean the last time in Or told me to do that,
I left. I literally had this happen to me, which

(01:52:29):
just like no, yeah, yeah, yeah, it doesn't work O.
Not to mention. And I mean this was a criticism
I mentioned earlier about who. A lot of the focus
ended up being towards um getting people out of jail
and you know, dealing with legal defense. One thing about

(01:52:50):
we criticized was the fact that the national leadership selected
leader to him and who would be released from view
m like, it didn't matter you know what the round
and file or fell prisoners of war or who had
the Lewis Bill or whatever, what about it is what
the leadership, who the leadership wanted to be chosen to
be allowed. And of course it should also be noted

(01:53:12):
that parts of what was building these tensions and building
these divisions quo until prove, and you know, the FBI
working at every separate the way to foment divisions and
fire up divisions within the national leadership, within the New
York Chapter, even within the New York plants, the twenty
one defendants. So you can't you can't reach that aspect
of it. Yes we can. We can criticize these organizations

(01:53:35):
and these movements for their missteps. We also to keep
in mind the context that they were in, the tensions
they were facing, and the fact that they were being
openly assaulted and clandestinely assaulted by the US government and
all you know, angles at all corners. I think sometimes
it's like they both kind of fit together in that,

(01:53:55):
Like if you look at what the U. S. Intelligence
Services were good at, right the very the very specific
thing they'd become incredibly good at because they've been doing
it for you know, like basically since the end of
World War Two, is that they were really really good
at hammering down these like these sort of like centralized
party apparatus. Is like that's how they basically turned cpu

(01:54:19):
SA from like genuinely really powerful political movement the thirties
to like by the fifties, it's entirely run by like
the FBI, and so yeah, it's like this is this
is kind of mismatch here because it's like, on the
one hand, you're suffering incredibly heavy repression, but then also
it's like the political form that you're taking is a
form that the U. S. State has gotten really really

(01:54:39):
good at fighting. So the two issues sort of like
compound each other exactly exactly. And so of course, like
it's not like the rank and file that necessarily just
going to roll over fun that these things happen, right,
So they were trying their best to like submit these
criticisms to the national leadership through the like Black Panther newspaper,

(01:55:03):
but eventually the New York Panther twenty one defendants took
a public position and there was seen as critical of
the national leadership when they sent an open letter to
the Weather Underground, which they published on the nineteenth January,

(01:55:25):
those who don't know the weather on the ground was
basically a bunch of um white radicals who basically we're
trying to fight the U. S. Government by doing a
bunch of bollins and fighting souldarity with national liberation movements
like in Vietnam. Yeah, the stuff ranges from like pretty funny,
like they kept blowing up the statue for the Haymarket cops,

(01:55:48):
to like, what are you guys doing? It's it was.
It was a very weird organization. Yeah, yeah, quite quite
quite the characters and so um. The Open Letter applauded
the insludent actions because Cubman New York Party was very
much intact militant sort of stuff. So the Open Letter

(01:56:09):
applauded the insludent actions of the Weather Underground and acknowledged
them as part of the Van God of the revolutionary
movements United States. They never mentioned the national leadership of
the b p P, but they also critiqued like kind
of like a a subtle sort of unspoken kind of thing,
shady kind of through shade. Basically, they were like critical

(01:56:32):
of self proclaimed a vanguard parties that abandoned the action
to the radical and the ground struggle and the political prisoners.
I mean, that's as open as you could be with
the actually saying. But yeah, so of course, and Babdagoon
was you know, he agreed with this criticism. And so

(01:56:54):
because the national leadership had you know, wasn't you know
actually attacking the occupational forces of the la Ploma state anymore. Um.
And because you know, a lot of money being collected
was going towards Bill, and a lot of people were
sycriticizing the fact that some of the leaders who were
beginning to live pretty comfortably while a lot of the

(01:57:16):
rank and file was based we were sitting out in jail.
Once the letter went out, new Turn basically expelled the
Plant and basically declared the Plant at one enemies of
the people. Jesus. Yeah, a lot of them, and not
just Plant the twenty one, but also the New York

(01:57:39):
EPP leaders in general, just all of them branded enemies
of the people. Um. Some of the defendants like Richard
to Ruben Moore and set Away Table and a few
others also ended up going to Algeria late in the month.
Members of the New York Black Panther Party who will

(01:58:00):
the press conference and basically equal for the purge of
human Newton and the Planta Party chief of staff David
Hilliard and the formation of a new National Central Committee
and basically, like I said, officially split from the National Organization.
I want to find interesting able with that approach to
it is they basically fought fire with fire, for one,

(01:58:21):
so you're like, oh, you want to call us enemy
of the people, we were going to call you enemies
of the people. And then on top of that, you
also have to deal with the fact that their solution
to the problem of the National Central Committee being too
big for their bridges and interfere and with their grassroots
politics was like, you know, we needed a new National

(01:58:43):
Central Committee. Well, you know what, this reminds me of
a lot. Yes, it reminds me of a lot of
the stuff that happens in the sort of early cultural
revolution where it's like you have a bunch of people well,
I mean, okay, the big difference of the early culture revolutions,
like every single group is like claiming at their loyal demount.
But like you get a lot of these things where

(01:59:04):
you know, people people will be like, hey, the party
has been becoming incredibly overbearing, and then you get like
most of them are just like okay, like our solution
to this is we are now the party. But then
you you get these sort of like ultra left groups
who are making sort of like not exactly anarchist but
are making sort of structural critiques of it, and those

(01:59:25):
guys just get like purged and killed. I don't know,
the dynamics and the critiques remind me of it. Yeah,
I think it's something that we see just in general
and politics. Honestly, it's a sort of limitation of the imagination. Wait,

(01:59:47):
people aren't on't conceiving of things like outside of what
has already been done. I mean, I myself and guilty
of this because a lot of my inspirations are like
pre colonial coaches and you know, societies and stuff. But
still I try to like bring those into a new
context and think of ways that can be applied differently.

(02:00:10):
I just when you think about this approach it where
you have the issues of the National Central Committee, the
solution is to create a new central Committee rather than
consider an approach that's not involved a National Central Committee. Um.
I think that's something we see all too all too often,
or even like just nostalgia politics in general, people's whole

(02:00:30):
approach to politics is trying to replicate past movements. But anyway,
so as you see in balagoons involvements, you know, well,
as a child, I'm gonna with his parents, you know,
with the Cambridge protests with the army and his involvement

(02:00:53):
in that. But the New York Tenants organizing UM with
the Plant, the Party, with the Europa Temple, all these
things how to inform his political development, inspired him to
be part of dynamic revolutionary movements that he respected and
he loved and he trusted. But it also helped him

(02:01:18):
to question the decision making and the nature of organizations
and how the structure of organizations um relates to state repression.
So my name Jail. You tend to have a lot,
a lot of time to think and consider, and so

(02:01:39):
Bablagoon wanted to sit and think and basically correct all
these ideological weaknesses that are the stirring in his head
that basically compromised the militant liberation movements that he wanted
to see liberate his people. So I can good by

(02:02:00):
saying that we must learn from the past. In this
you know, short for agents about Lagoon's life, We've ended
up coming to a lot of different conversations about the
nature of movements today. And I think that sort of
critical approach to you know, people's history something we should
be doing more often in our modern discussions of the past,

(02:02:25):
the good, the bad, and the ugly. Anyway, join us
for part two of Valagoon's journey, as we explore his
path towards new African anarchism. You can find me Andrew
on YouTube, dot com slash Andwism, and on Twitter at

(02:02:47):
underscore saying true this has been It could Happen Here?
Chris was here too. Yeah. You can find us at
Happened Here Pod on Twitter and Instagram. Follow us at
the Cool Zone. Yeah, I'll see you next time. Welcome

(02:03:23):
to It Could Happen Here, the podcast about stuff falling
apart and how we can maybe put some of it
back together. Today, I'm your host, Garrison Davis. Though this
episode is going to be more of an it did
happen here sort of thing, as this is part one
of a special three part series made in collaboration with

(02:03:43):
the Atlantic Community Press about the history of the old
Atlanta Prison Farm. If you haven't listened to my super
sized three hour two part series on the Defend the
Atlanta Forest Movement from last May, i'd recommend you check
that out just for you know, extra context, but it's

(02:04:04):
not strictly necessary, as will be mostly going over history
for these next few episodes, although I will sprinkle in
updates about what's been happening in Atlanta related to the
stop Cop City movement throughout this series. At the end
of this episode, there will be a summary about the
most recent week of action now for this series, not

(02:04:27):
only did the Atlantic Community Press provide the vast majority
of the historical research and format for these episodes, I
was also able to record with two members of the collective,
Sam and Laura, so you'll hear snippets of our conversations
over the course of these next few episodes as well.
Last year, in the lead up to the Atlanta's City

(02:04:49):
Council signing over hundreds of acres of forest to the
Atlanta Police Foundation to build a state of the art
militarized police training facility, complete with a large mock city,
around that same time, a group of people decided to
look into the history of the land in question, famed
for being the site of an old federal prison honor farm.

(02:05:12):
This was also around the same time last year when
more atrocities of the residential school systems were being unearthed,
and with the Atlanta Police Foundations plans to bulldoze large
sections of forest that were once used as an old
labor prison, the possibility of disturbing forgotten grave sites seemed
to be worth considering. Um, okay, I'm Sam. I help

(02:05:37):
out with I do research for the Atlantic Community Press Collective, UM,
so that means I file open records requests. I accidentally
I helped accidentally write a seventeen page history report in summer,
and I listened to fun things like community stakeholders committee

(02:05:57):
meetings and UH council meetings. What is the inception for
the Atlantic Community Press Collective. So at the beginning, it
was me, Laura and another friend of ours, and we
were all just kind of involved on the periphery of
the movement. Laura, please feel free to correct me if

(02:06:18):
direct me also, but just as part of the general
movement and resistance to Cops City. One of us raised
the question I based on when the prison farm was
an operation. One of us asked, I wonder if they're
unmarked graves there, because given the error in which the
prison farm was an operation, it's not unrealistic that people

(02:06:41):
were just buried on site, especially m for prisoners who
didn't have families to claim them, which is horrible, but
there you go. Um. That was sort of the genesis
of our history report. And then I guess naturally, as
an extension of that, we started asking questions of city
government and county government about the I guess construction process

(02:07:06):
of Cops City. Throughout the development of Cops City, concerns
regarding environmental racism, police violence, and land stewardship in an
era of climate change have all been discussed, if not
by local government or the Atlanta Police Foundation, but at
least by community members, some local press, and national media.
Despite this, very little is actually publicly known about the

(02:07:29):
actual history of the land that Atlanta Police Foundation wants
to build Cops City on and the history of the
prison farm itself. The most often cited histories suggests that
the land was the site of a federal prison farm
that was later taken over by the city and then
soon abandoned. Archival research into the site on Key Road,

(02:07:52):
conducted by volunteers with the Atlantic Community Press, tell a
different story. Months of archival research trivial that not only
was it never run federally, it was run as a
city prison farm uninterrupted from about nineteen twenty to the
early nine nineties and doing considerable harm to those incarcerated throughout.

(02:08:15):
Despite claims of reform made at every stage through the
gathering of old legal notices, old newspaper articles, letters from nurses,
legislative and inspection records, and oral histories of forgotten legacy
of torture, overcrowding slave conditions, quote unquote, the lack of healthcare,

(02:08:37):
labor strikes, death, and unmarked Popper's graves have slowly been
rediscovered through Atlanta's radical scene. And this just barely scratches
the surface. As the Atlantic community press conducted their research,
to conflicting surprises arose, one being that there was just
so much available historical documentation that seemingly very few people

(02:09:02):
had dug into and put together correctly in the past,
and two that there was so much information that was
just missing entirely, records that were either just missing, destroyed, misfiled,
or possibly were never kept in the first place. The
nature of this kind of archival research is pulling on

(02:09:23):
one question and then finding dozens more. With limited time
and resources, you can find yourself with more questions than
definitive answers. These episodes are meant to just be a
brief overview of the broad strokes of this history, while
also serving as a survey of the possible directions that
further research can take. Many people, including an individual on

(02:09:47):
the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee for the Atlanta Public Safety
Training Center a k a COP City, have advocated that
there must be responsible, in depth investigations into the history
of this land and many of its current physical attributes
before any further development could take place. Katherine Nichols already

(02:10:10):
laid the groundwork for such research in her thesis on
the unmarked graves and burial grounds of the Brandon Indian
Residential School System and the history of what took place
during its operation. A three pronged approach includes archival research,
field research, and qualitative interviews with effective members of community.

(02:10:32):
This type of research will be discussed more in the
third episode. However, this research would take time, and with
construction and deforestation attempts proceeding at an increasing rate, the
opportunity to do further on the ground historical research is
quickly vanishing. The same policing institutions that caused so much

(02:10:52):
harm are increasingly trying to physically bulldoze away centuries of history.
We did not set out to write this word. We
did not We did not know literally when we started
writing this that the Wooten Report and the same we
old Atlanta prison farm campaigns proved it incorrect history. We
didn't know there were two more than two. Frankly, prison farms.

(02:11:16):
No one's wrong for not knowing about this, But we've
emailed this to city council repeatedly. Laura has Laura has
done amazing, tenacious work and just making sure that every
single government official involved in this project knows exactly what
kind of violence there perpetuating the cops. City is bad

(02:11:36):
enough on its own, but when you have an accurate
historical understanding of not just what they are building, but
where they are building it, it's beyond the pale. It's
beyond belief. It's it's disgusting. They want to build this
and stolen indigenous land. They want to build this on
a slave plantation. Are you kidding me? What were we
out in the streets for? What are people still out

(02:11:59):
in the streets are? I know they know what we're saying.
I know they know who we are. I know they're listening.
It's just disgusting. It's disgusting to me. Before we continue,
let's talk a little bit about the idea of history.
I think for a lot of people, especially white people,
are engagement with history is often so distant we keep

(02:12:23):
ourselves othered, conceptualizing history as some abstract narrative instead of
the direct flesh and blood we ourselves and our systemic
relations grew out of. History should be the tales and
songs of joy and sorrow and pain, generational wisdom and

(02:12:43):
trauma told by the people who lived it, not just
a list of names and the numerical record keeping of
the structures that caused ongoing suffering, which still benefit from
this abstraction. Preserving history for its own sake is all
and good, but doing preservation with an explicit, ecological and
intersectional drive can be much more insightful, not to mention,

(02:13:07):
respectful for those who it literally happened to in the past.
This perspective argues for the preservation on the basis of
its material effects on people both past and present, and
to demonstrate the direct continuity of control of these structures
over the people they affect and the repeating patterns of

(02:13:29):
rhetoric used to justify it. Similarly, Katherine Nichols points out
in her residential school thesis that it's essential to view
this type of history and these records within a full
living context. Obviously, a complete consideration of context is outside
the small scope of this podcast and could probably make

(02:13:51):
up multiple volumes of books. The time period will be
diving into, roughly the nineteen twenties to present day, has
been home to an unceasing trend of the criminalization of
many marginalized peoples, especially black, Indigenous, poor, disabled, and mentally
ill people, which will see demonstrated throughout the story told

(02:14:14):
here and on into the present. This criminalization of marginalized
people's coincides with institutions of power engaging in what Lauren
Berland calls the slow death. The phrase slow death refers
to the physical wearing out of a population and the

(02:14:35):
deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly
a defining condition of their experience and historical existence. It's
like a mass phenomenon of material and metaphysical restriction that
typically already marginalized people face when living under capitalist or
authoritative governing structures. The slow death manifests by intentionally and

(02:15:01):
repeatedly subjugating people to events and conditions known to contribute
to suffering, resulting in an early death of those deemed
less valuable by capital interests, sometimes even at their own expense.
Other times for the sake of profit. All that gets
passed down through generations with the corresponding generational trauma that

(02:15:23):
becomes a defining feature of personal and cultural identity. In
the case of the prison farm, we see the slow
death and living history in many forms. A swastika found
in one of the bedrooms, white inmates going on strike.
Shortly after the prison farm is racially integrated, Stokely Carmichael

(02:15:46):
is held at the farm for several days on the
charge of loitering. At the height of the Civil rights era,
after Martin Luther King's assassination, donkeys from the prison farm
pull his casket through town. Own nurses beg for more
tuberculosis tests for overcrowded prisoners. Homeless alcoholics are repeatedly cycled

(02:16:08):
in and out of the system. All of these instances
are similar to others both at the time and now
in present today, and reflect the racial and class dynamics
at the heart of the constral system. These same socio
political forces continued to shape the social landscape of Atlanta,
whether that be through the criminalization of Atlanta's water boys,

(02:16:31):
black teenagers who sell ice cold drinks to motorists. We
also see it in the ongoing eviction and housing crisis,
the lack of resources in the midst of a pandemic,
the continued cycling of homeless people through the prison system
instead of providing humane housing, the squashing of anti state
protests but allowance of white supremacists and anti vax protests.

(02:16:55):
All these highlight the further need for this history to
be told by the people it affects, rather than the
institutions responsible, which are already seeking to take hold and
control the narratives surrounding this piece of land and their
own history. The Police Foundation has announced its intention to

(02:17:15):
build separate museums on the site, dedicated to police officers, firefighters,
and the labor prison that was once located there. The
museum idea has been framed as a concession to last
year's anti cops city call in campaigns, a concession that
will result in land being paved over and as sanitized,

(02:17:38):
police approved history to be built over top the offending
institutions like the Atlanta Police Department, the Atlanta Police Foundation,
City Council in the Mayor's office, and the media organizations
which support them try to pay lip service to the
atrocities of the past as quickly as possible while retaining
all the power and then bulldozing for the forgotten history

(02:18:02):
as well discuss vague gestures towards the harms of the
past without material accountability for the harm done have been
used throughout the prison Farm's history to justify continued control
of physical and narrative space, and is simply vapid virtue signaling. Now,
before we deep dive into the prison farm itself, as

(02:18:26):
a part of the intent to place the history in
its full living context, it's necessary to state the land
the prison farm was built on was a thriving trade
hub for Native Americans throughout the continent. Every story that
takes place in quote unquote America has grown from genocide, colonialism,

(02:18:47):
broken treaties, and the division of interconnected land into individual
parcels for ownership. This is part of the history and
needs to be reckoned with and fully reconciled before anyone
can truly be free. That extensive history is outside the
scope of this episode, but we are trying to get
such topics discussed on this platform with more qualified people.

(02:19:11):
The most frequently cited history about this piece of land
is a historical analysis of the Atlanta Prison of Farm
by Jillian Wootton of the City Planning Department, written in nine.
In it, we are told that the Key Road property
was purchased in nineteen eighteen by the Bureau of Prisons

(02:19:31):
and the United States federal government. It was called the
Honor Farm, and federal prisoners grew crops and raised livestock
to feed the population of the nearby Federal penitentiary. The
piece claims that the site operated until nineteen six when
it was then purchased by the Atlanta City government and

(02:19:53):
shut down soon after, at which point the history becomes murky,
as a single report of a labor strike on the
land seems to contradict claims of the nineteen sixties closing.
If you just google old Planta Prison Farm, there's two
things that are going to come up. There's a campaign

(02:20:14):
called Save the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, and this website
tells you the story of how in the early to
mid twentieth century, the federal government operated a prison farm
in Atlanta, and then sometime in the fifties, the city
of Atlanta took it over. And it links to a
document written in by a person named Gillian Luton, who

(02:20:39):
I think was probably doing the best She could in
given the difficulties we had in researching this, and what
this commonly cited history, the Save the Old Wlanta Prison
Farm campaign and this more official report written by Jillian
Luton tell you is again that sometime in the fifties
the city bought this prison bar territory. We found nothing

(02:21:02):
to support that. If our initial question was where the
graves where the body is buried, the question we ended
up asking was, well, when did the city take over
the prison farm from the federal government. And we kept
going back and back and back further into historical record
until we eventually got to around nineteen eleven, when the

(02:21:25):
city itself bought the property that would become Cops City
and operated their own prison farm and long store. Short
the conclusion we came to was the federal prison farm
was a completely separate property, a completely separate prison system.
And sometimes even though this prison farm really only shut

(02:21:49):
down sometime around the early nineteen nineties, in the course
of just a few decades, we've forgotten the story of
the people who were incurcerated there and the story of
the prison farm to the way where we don't even
understand that it was its own thing, which is it's
it just makes me angry, Like every abuse possible you

(02:22:10):
can imagine happened at the prison farm and we can't
even we've just completed it with another prison. Horrible, horrible
things happened. Like that's how poor custodians have been of
this history. A lot of people don't know that there
were actually three prison farms running all in Atlanta essentially
once technically technically two of them are into cap Um.

(02:22:34):
There was the U. S Prison Farm Number one federally run.
That's the one that most people know now as an
apartment complex. Uh sorry, I don't remember it off the
top of my head. Then there's number two, which is
what people know as the quote unquote on our farm
near Panthersville. Then we have the City of Atlanta prison farm.

(02:22:56):
So there are three running at the exact scene time,
all with that a fairly short distance from each other.
This isn't something that was unique to Georgia by any means,
but the history of it is largely ignored. Convict least

(02:23:17):
labor was incredibly common. The archive Atlanta Sorry did a
podcast specifically on the convict least labor that was done
to build the Atlanta streets basically every street in Atlanta
was built by convict least labor, and a lot of
that labor came from the Atlanta Prison Farm as well

(02:23:39):
as some of the other prison farms around. There's also
the Chattahoochee Brickworks Company that was recently turned into a
public park, and it was historically acknowledged by our mayor,
Mayor Dickens for its horrific atrocities of slave labor or

(02:24:00):
building or creating these bricks at the company m where
many people died. So there's just this hypocrisy of hey,
we're using slave labor at this location and it is horrific,
and we are going to acknowledge that, and we are
going to put a plaque out there and do a

(02:24:23):
ribbon cutting ceremony and truly acknowledge this atrocity. Whereas here,
because they want the land, they're just going to cover
it up and oh, hey, our acknowledgement from this is
we're going to utilize some marble library stones in our

(02:24:43):
capaganda entrance to the horse bearings. That's pretty much what
they're going to do. The Atlantic Community Press research found
that the Wooton History Report actually conflates three different properties.
Property number one, a prison farm on the property of
the Federal Penitentiary, where the penitentiary still exists today. Another property,

(02:25:05):
number two was a second prison farm on Panthersville Road
that was purchased from farmers in nineteen twenty and was
used to supplement the production of the first federal prison farm.
But the third property, and the one that we're focused
on here today, is the one on Key Road in
unincorporated decap County. This one was only ever owned and

(02:25:29):
operated by the city government and was used to produce
food for city prisons. It operated from up until the
early nineties before shutting down and being abandoned and then
used as a dumping ground for the city until now
where they have plans to turn it into a militarized
police training facility. After serving as a slave plantation, the

(02:25:53):
Key Road property operated as a municipal dairy farm, but
accusations that the farm was loosing the city money, coupled
with the ongoing scandals at the city jail stockade in Glenwood,
opened up debates within the city government ranging from nineteen
fifteen to nineteen twenty about closing the old stockade and

(02:26:13):
moving prisoners to the municipal dairy farm. The stockade was
overcrowded and unprofitable, and expanding it would cost the city
too much money. Meanwhile, the area it was in was
developing quickly and quote filling up with small property owners,
and the presence of the stockade is an hindrance to
further development unquote. They proposed building a park, or a

(02:26:38):
golf course, or school or all three on the land
to cater to new residents. Meanwhile, the Superintendent of Prisons, T. B. Langford,
who had also inexplicably be put in control of the
municipal dairy in nineteen eighteen, was the subject of a
nineteen twenty Atlantic Constitution piece that examined Atlanta Humane Society

(02:27:00):
claims of women's stockade prisoners being tied to a chair
known as the Bucking chair and whipped with a strap
for disobedience. He at first denied these claims, saying that
white women at the stock aide were never whipped to
his knowledge and quote Negro women only seldom so unquote.

(02:27:25):
An investigation apparently disproved this, and he was ordered to
stop the corporal punishment, which he argued was both good
and necessary and should not be stopped because changing the
course would be an admission of having done something wrong.
He argued that workshy prisoners would need to be motivated somehow,

(02:27:50):
so by the end of January nineteen twenty, Atlantic City
Council passed a law banning whippings and offering a new
form of punishment instead quote solitary confinement on a diet
of bread and water unquote. Complaints of the stockade losing
money continued into April nine, and T. B. Langford suggested

(02:28:12):
moving the whole operation to the dairy farm, which he
also controlled. Conveniently, prohibition had started earlier that year, so
it was suggested that the city could save a lot
of money by making a new influx of prisoners work
this city dairy. Moving prisoners to the dairy farm had
one problem. It was not legal to build prison facilities

(02:28:35):
on land outside city limits, and the Key Road property
was located in unincorporated de Cap County despite being owned
by the City of Atlanta. This problem was easily solved
by city council, who simply passed a bill making it
legal to build city prison facilities on land outside the city,

(02:28:56):
even outside of Fulton County. By November, the proposal to
close this cockade and move the prisoners to the dairy
farm was agreed upon, and from that point forward, the
Key Road Municipal Dairy Farm became the Atlanta City Prison
and Dairy Farm, later simplified to the Atlantic City Prison Farm.

(02:29:18):
Council members were being praised for bringing in the quote
largest number of prisoners at any one time in the
past ten years, saving the city twenty dollars a day
on the cost of feeding prisoners, and increasing dairy production
by two hundred and fifty gallons a week unquote. It
was seen as a win win win for the new

(02:29:40):
property owners, city government, and police, but it was a
huge loss for the most vulnerable citizens of the city
and for the residents of the surrounding Decab County area
who had no way of consenting to this deal, just
like how modern day Decab County residents have no say whatsoever.
And Atlanta's goals of building a militarized police training compound

(02:30:04):
with a gun range and explosives testing section in what
would formerly be there forested backyard, I mean building cups
city here is just a continuation of the violence that
has been done to this land since the earliest since
time and memorial like this was. This was first of all,
this was stolen Muskogee land. Then it was a plantation.

(02:30:29):
Then it was a prison farm, which is just an
extension of being a plantation. When it stopped being a
prison farm and just started being mostly a prison, horrible
horrible things were done to people and the solitary confinement cells.
This mostly happened in the eighties. Then we the prison
and the farming stopped. It just became a commercial dumping

(02:30:50):
ground in an area of the city that already has
some of the worst water quality and air quality standards
and in the whole metro area. UM the South River
Forest Coalition and the South River Watershed Alliance are the
best sources for that. UM. But this was stolen land

(02:31:10):
from the bee at the store. The start the story
was stolen land. And then I guess the last historical
record is social and environmental injustice. And now you want
to give it to the police in this day and age,
I guess you could say, like it's just compounding violence
upon violence upon violence. Okay, now it's time for the

(02:31:35):
update that I promised on the Week of Action that
recently took place in Atlanta. So near the end of
this past July from the there was another week of
Action as a part of the movement to Defend the
Atlanta Forest and Stop Cops City. Before things even kicked off,

(02:31:57):
Ryan Millsap of Black Hole Movie students, just days before
the July Week of Action put up concrete barricades around
the section of forest that currently operates as a public
park that protests had previously gathered in. He later made
an appearance alongside some bulldozers in Entrenchment Creek Park where

(02:32:18):
then said bulldozers seemingly accidentally question mark damaged a park gazebo.
So great work, Ryan. We just wrapped up our week
of action. Obviously, we did a whole bunch of really
awesome events. UM writer's workshops, we had multiple music festivals,
daily A meetings, medic trainings, we did an arcan training

(02:32:42):
and distribution daily meals. I personally, UM had the fortune
to attend to talk by John Lash who was incarcerated
at what is now called Metro Reentry Center, but at
the time was called Metro State Prison, which is just
across the street UM from the south end of the

(02:33:03):
child prison that's on the south end of the prison
farm property. This was the most well attended week of
action there has been so far, especially on the first
Saturday with the first music festival, like as some as
folks were leaving, like people not at all affiliated with
the forest movement beforehand, or like heard about the music

(02:33:24):
like the school music festival in the woods. They were
brought in by the music festival. But then we were
able to educate them on the fight to defend this
forest in their neighborhood, which is like that is the goal.
That was an amazing experience. There were three different instances
of arrests during this most recent week of action. On

(02:33:45):
July in Cobb County, on the north end of the
Metro Atlanta area, four people were arrested at a noise
demo outside of a contractor's residence. Police scanner audio has
cops discussing charges for the people who were standing outside
on public property to include criminal trespass and also discussed

(02:34:08):
was quote with the eco terrorists happening in the county,
possible domestic terrorist charges unquote, it will be criminal trespass,
will be wrong with the eco terrorists and happened in
the county. Domestic terrorism as well, wasn't possible domestic terrorism

(02:34:29):
as well? It will be negative ontomestic terrorism. That last
cop they're called a negative on domestic terrorism. This was
not the first instance of law enforcement referring to defend
the Atlanta Forest protesters as eco terrorists. On July six,

(02:34:52):
people were arrested near the ruins of the old prison
Farm for criminal trespassing, seemingly just for hanging out in
the prison farm area, which has been a well known
urban exploration hangout spot for decades. These people were just
taken to jail for being there. In the bail hearing,

(02:35:12):
the judge said that he didn't even know why they
got arrested. They were soon released with signature bonds for
all and then on Friday, July seven, people were arrested
at a noise demo at a brass Field and Gory
construction site. Currently Brassfield and Gory is the lead contractor
for the Cops City project. The site was on Georgia

(02:35:36):
State University property. The Atlantic Police Department responded as well.
Unicorn riot footage shows people making a loop through the
building and chanting before a construction worker aggressively shoves one
protester out of the doorway. Here's some police scanner audio.
Unit three they're saying that no one's in the building

(02:35:56):
now protestor wise, but they were inside the building, so
they all need to be I D and can you
advise on a number by proximly fifty seven. But if
you still got eyes on the people walking away, can
you snap some pictures. I'm on the way up there
in case they're calmed before mirror inside the building. So

(02:36:19):
I mean, that's that's ground for CTS. So we can
stop just taking pictures you and the three. That's affirmative,
but we can stop into hands Leaves, coffee, APT Homeland
and Zone three is in a route to provide support
of that location. Coming up on the location now. Atlanta
Police stated that no property damage was done beyond a

(02:36:40):
bucket being kicked, and yet seven people are facing a
slate of felony charges. Yeah, major, says Homelands en route.
So no property destruction, nobody assault, fit nothing that was
the problem. They walked back in dead, thank you, sir.

(02:37:02):
One person was hospitalized due to broken ribs sustained during
their arrest. For the first nine hours after the arrests,
police refused to give jail support the location or contact
info for where the arrestees were being sent. The following
Tuesday night, everyone was finally released on posted bond and

(02:37:24):
with that that wraps up part one of the three
part series for the history of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm.
Before I close out, I do want to plug the
Atlanta Solidarity Fund at a t L solidarity dot org
that helps protesters with bail and legal stuff, So donate

(02:37:45):
to that if you have the means. Also in the description,
I'm going to leave that link. Also the link for
the Atlantic Community Press history report that they published last year.
That will also be in the description below. Thanks for listening.
Check out Atlanta Community Press on Twitter or the website.

(02:38:06):
See you on the other side. Welcome to it could

(02:38:30):
happen here today. I'm your host, Garrison Davis, and this
is part two of our three part series on the
history of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, made in collaboration
with the Atlanta Community Press Collective. Last episode, I talked
about how one of the initial motivations for running a

(02:38:52):
city prison farm was to save money on the project
of incarceration, or perhaps even starts generating money. This for
me to the case throughout its existence, though exactly how
well it performed at that was often questioned. Use of
prison or slave labor for government projects was not a
new concept in Atlanta, though. Around the time of its

(02:39:14):
incorporation in the mid nineteenth century, the City of Atlanta's
population was around one fifth enslaved persons. City Hall itself,
along with many other iconic buildings and roads, was built
using convict lease labor from the Chattahoochee Brickworks, notorious for
its brutal conditions and was owned by a former Atlanta mayor.

(02:39:40):
The City Prison Farm produced various crops, livestock, and dairy,
but it also provided workers for other city projects. In
nineteen forty six, Superintendent H. H. Gibson bragged that he
was cutting the city prison food budget in half, as
well as quote furnishing the city eleven thousand, nine hundred

(02:40:01):
sixty one man days of work on city streets by
prisoners unquote within a six month period. In nine they
began saving further money on incarceration by getting the women
prisoners to make the new uniforms, adding that quote, the
city can buy better materials because the labor is free unquote.

(02:40:25):
They attempted to incentivize overtime work by offering quote extra
credit for each hour of overtime worked for reduced sentences.
The prisoners were forced to build some of their own
cages as well. Into one of the older prison buildings
was designated for use as a hospital for people with

(02:40:48):
maneial diseases. That meant that prisoners would need a new
building and they had to build it themselves. Quote. Most
of the work was done with prison labor, with the
city providing the materials unquote. They were also responsible for
the cleaning and maintenance of the buildings in order to
pass health inspection. According to an Atlantic Constitution article, quote,

(02:41:13):
the dormitory scrubbed daily by men and women whose drunkenness
and traffic violations placed them behind a mop or tractor
for an average fifteen day stay one four health rating.
In nineteen fifty eight. Prisoners were even made to rescue
a guard's furniture from a fire. By the nineteen seventies,

(02:41:35):
the farm provided more than half the food and dairy
products for inmates in city detention centers. By the nineteen eighties,
the prison firm had stopped growing crops, but still provided
for of the pork and beef eaten by the prisoners,
both at the farm and at the city jail. The

(02:41:56):
work heavily subsidized city operations and was crinci are crucial. H. H. Gibson,
the head of the prison farm, in said quote, idleness
is the root of all evil in prison management. To
be completely exempt from work, a prisoner should be minus
both arms and both legs unquote. In the Courier Journal

(02:42:18):
article where he makes those claims, the publication also accepts
Gibson's claims that he quote took care to see the
guards did not overwork prisoners, and that the guards are
not permitted to strike or even curse prisoners unquote, and
this would of course be later proven very much untrue.

(02:42:40):
White guards were known to send black women to a
less occupied area, supposedly to do extra work, but upon arrival,
the prisoners would be raped by the guards. If they refused,
they were quote given a hard way to go unquote.
These same guards had the power to assign extra work

(02:43:01):
to prisoners. This was supposed to have been fixed several
years earlier with the hiring of a black woman guard,
but according to the Pittsburgh Courier, she was quote only
a matron in name. The white guards continued to supervise
the colored women inmates unquote. The same statement details a

(02:43:23):
beating with a broom handle. It claims that black women
were forced to farm in the rain while white women
were allowed to stay inside and read newspapers, and called
for further investigations since the banning of the bucking chair
used for whippings. Solitary confinement end quote. The whole unquote

(02:43:44):
was the official punishment for not working at the standards
set by the prison guards and wardens. We know little
about the conditions of the whole in earlier years, but
in nineteen five a new administ trader named Ralph Holsey
took over operations of the prison farm. A skeething report

(02:44:06):
from journalist Dick Herbert, who went undercover as a prisoner, alleged,
among many other things, that the whole was quote where
men were starved and degraded unquote. His report drew much
negative attention to the conditions on the farm, the whole
being one of them. At the time, Holsey said that

(02:44:27):
he was quote not happy with it as it is,
but it is necessary for discipline unquote. The whole was
described as an eight foot by four foot windowless room
where troublesome inmates are kept in solitary confinement. It's described
as quote. Furnishings now include a pale and two buckets,

(02:44:49):
no bed, no mattress or plumbing. Holsey allegedly planned to
fit such cells with an iron lattice, bunk and toilet facilities,
but we have no one to cation that this was
ever followed through on, and the whole continued to be
used regularly up until the mid eighties. Leadership of the

(02:45:09):
prison Farm changed hands many times throughout its history, and
at each passing of the torch there were claims of
improvement the dawn of a new, better era, bleak and
cruel conditions remained no matter who was in charge. Archival
research shows that for over half a century, life on

(02:45:30):
the farm was subject to hard labor, long days, harsh punishments, overcrowding,
poor sanitation, and constantly lacking healthcare. J. D. Hudson, the
superintendent of the prison farm in later years, who was
hyped up by press as a sort of humanitarian reformer,

(02:45:50):
described the previous conditions of the prison farm as slave labor.
He bragged frequently of his intention to give prisoners quote
a measure of self respect so they could lead decent
lives again. Upon being instated he announced his intention to
empty solitary confinement and forbid guards from hitting or abusing inmates,

(02:46:13):
something which we must point out had been declared many
times before already. He also made statements saying that inmates
are quote written with guilt about their lives, and they
want to be mistreated and abused, and they want to
be denigrated as some sort of atonement for their sins unquote.

(02:46:34):
So this might explain why the great Reformer himself was
still in charge when the a c l U sued
the city in two for conditions on the farm, citing
quote illegal and unconstitutional punishments such as leg irons and
excessive time in solitary confinement unquote, along with the long

(02:46:55):
track record of unsanitary conditions. Mayor Andrew Young said of
the suit, quote, it's simply a problem the city hasn't
gotten around to handling yet unquote. At that point, the
whole was still in use as solitary confinement and described
as a room seven feet long by four ft wide

(02:47:16):
that is virtually without heat in the winter and without
cooling in the summer. Prisoners were held there twenty three
hours a day, with an hour out for baths, often
held for many days at a time. The suit was
settled in nineteen eighty five with a forty dollar settlements
split between three former prisoners, but the city never actually

(02:47:37):
admitted guilt. Prison Farm staff were also ordered to avoid
using isolation cells like the whole and told to build
twenty new individual cells. The a c l U and
those supporting the suit hoped that this lawsuit would push
the city to make changes, but in nineteen eighty seven,
just two years later, the city tried to build any

(02:48:00):
more solitary confinement cells at the prison farm, and this
project only fell through because white contractors they hired were
caught taking job contracts slated for minority run businesses by
using a front. And hopefully you don't need me to
tell you that solitary confinement is still used as punishment
in most prisons today. It's been ages. Something. I looked

(02:48:22):
at this newspaper quotes document and just there's so much
Atlanta may well take pride and the fact that it's
city prison Farm has won such recognition as a model
progressive institution that decided as a model in other metropolitan
areas for municipal penal systems need improvement. I mean, that's

(02:48:43):
the same thing they're trying to do with Cops City. Yeah,
and this is this is from nine that that was
one of the surprising things that that we found was
that so many aspects of like specific fights that are
being had about Cops City have happened fifty sixty years ago.
Like they were trying to expand the prison harm I

(02:49:05):
think eastward more into the Cab County in the forties,
and that the Cab County residents were like, no, you
can't do this to our county. But it was because
they didn't want the black prisoners near the white elementary school.
And like nine that was that like wasn't long after
when they like formally disallowed whipping. Yeah, Like that's like

(02:49:29):
it's there's still like obviously it's they're still doing brutal
stuff in terms of like solitary and other forms of
torture and rape, but like posing it as this like
model facilities, like you just got in trouble like a
few years previous for like whipping all of your prisoners,
tying people down to a chair, like and then one

(02:49:49):
of my favorites guards shoot two women prisoners while firing
vainly at each other. I can't remember if we put
that one in the article or not. But two prison
guards were shooting at each other because they were I
don't know, cranky or whatever and ended up just like
shooting to prisoners. Since then, inside the report from last
year on the history of the prison farm, there's like

(02:50:11):
almost like a hundred citations and a whole bunch of
background stuff. How once you kind have had this question
of like is there unmarked graves at this site? How
can we go about researching it? What were the kind
of techniques and things you used to gather all of
this information? Um, and then let alone, Like how do

(02:50:31):
you start sorting through all that to pick out, you know,
which which seems more incredible than others. You know, there's
a lot of there's a lot of conflicting history in
in in some regards. So how what was like the
whole entire research process, Like because looking at just the
list of citations, it is a little overwhelming. Yes, it's

(02:50:52):
very overwhelming. So our rather co author and Laura they
did so much of the research, um, Like I have
to give enormous prompts to them. Like they even made
a couple of trips to things like the State Archives,
which are slightly south of the city. I think kind

(02:51:14):
of snuck into a university library because a lot of
a lot of these, like in person resources were still
closed at the time due to COVID restrictions. A lot
of them aren't open now unfortunately. So like we have
a huge document of just like newspaper quotes. A big

(02:51:35):
big source for us were historical newspaper articles, mostly because
because we initially started looking for official documents, um, this
this is a pub this was a public entity. The
city is required to keep records, um. And what we
found was just a huge dearth of them. And most

(02:51:57):
of the articles that are not articles but like official
documents that are still around are housed in a really
great collection at Georgia State University in downtown. But a
lot of those things are they're just fairly limited, or
if they're like year to year reports, it's like just

(02:52:18):
one from the fifties, there is one from the sixties.
There's no consistent documentation available. So then we went to
public record, which is newspaper articles, and oh my god,
there are so many newspaper articles about the prison farm.
I never want to read a newspaper again. And we
kind of used things that happened at the prison farm

(02:52:41):
that we're noteworthy enough to make it into the newspaper too.
I guess you could say guide what the biggest beats
in the history of the prison farm work. And that
kind of led us to what was something that we
didn't know when we started our research, which was just

(02:53:04):
how poorly or just how mangled the history of the
prison farm has become. This land approximately nineteen seventy five,
started becoming a police training academy, So there has been
some sort of police training facility on this land since
approximately nine There was even a slight version of a

(02:53:30):
mock city in the eighties. They had an intersection that
was for training for urban encounters, if you will. So
this is the kind of information that we're digging to
try to find the history. We're literally seeing legal notices
in the newspaper, so advertisements, and this is how we're

(02:53:51):
piecing this information together. When the pandemic hit for the
first time in recent memory, there was a large scale
public discussion on how the structure of the prison system
is detrimental to the health of incarcerated persons. Public health
experts advocated that the best way to limit the spread

(02:54:11):
of disease is simply to have less people in prison.
We'll talk more about COVID's impact on prison populations in
a bit, but first let's note how overcrowding and lack
of medical treatment in prisons leading to disastrous and deadly
health outcomes is no new issue. When Dick Herbert went

(02:54:32):
into the Atlanta prison Farm undercover for the Atlanta Journal
Constitution in nineteen six, one of his main findings was
quote non existent medical treatment. He reported quote tubercular, coughing,
sickly men waiting to die, society's discards herded into an

(02:54:53):
unwashed stock aide, only to be turned out again without
even a smattering of help unquote. This was the case
from the early days of the prison farm, and remained
the case for long after. Already, by nineteen thirty eight,
the prison farm was described by Mayor Hartsfield as an

(02:55:13):
ungodly mess and was likely facing issues with communicable diseases,
as evidenced by a call for quote separate hospital wards
for diseased prisoners unquote. But it took city council until
nineteen forty one to even quote study a proposal to
equip the new building nearing completion for a five hundred

(02:55:34):
bed emergency hospital unquote. The completed building was still not
furnished by nineteen forty three, and in nineteen forty four,
instead of making the new building into a health facility,
they moved the prisoners into the new building and fitted
the twenty year old prison building out to be a
city detention hospital for treatment of those infected with venereal disease,

(02:55:56):
and then, rather than be used as a hospital order
for the prison farm, it was then used to treat
a manerial disease bastions from throughout the city. This was
expected to quote meat demand for years to come, but
by ninety five there were already calls to close the
entire prison farm and convert the whole thing into a

(02:56:17):
veneerial disease quarantine clinic due to an increasing load. Obviously,
those calls were never adopted, and the prison farm remained
in operation in a grossly recursive mirror of the present.
In an October one, nineteen fifty seven edition of the
Atlantic Constitution, a quote Asian flew outbreak prompted the immediate

(02:56:41):
release of quote any person who is ill and who
has a home to return to unquote. Even this was qualified,
though h H. Gibson, who was heading the prison at
the time, said that only some of those who had
been convicted of just light in fractions would be released.
He also said that older men with a history of

(02:57:02):
tuberculosis would be released due to the risk of their
contracting pneumonia. Quoting Gibson, quote, none of the men who
had temperatures of one hundred and one or more were released.
Some of these older men have no places to go,
and if we released them with a possible case of
flu and higher temperature, chances are we would find them

(02:57:22):
dead in the woods or somewhere a day later. Unquote.
There was no mention of efforts to mitigate spread within
the prison of Farm facility, and the fate of those
who were forced to stay is unknown to us at
the present moment. In December of nineteen fifty seven, the
Decab County Grand Jury presented findings from an investigation that

(02:57:44):
found that the prison farm was severely lacking in healthcare.
They advised that a building should be provided so that
prisoners who are ill can be held aside from the
ones who are not sick, meaning that in the twenty
years since this was first proposed, it had still not
been implemented. They recommended that prisoners who were sick be

(02:58:05):
given examinations and a record to be kept of those prisoners,
and the prison farm should quote employ a proper nursing
staff unquote. Their final recommendation was that quote some sort
of sick quarters should be put into effects the prisoners
who are ill can be held aside from the ones
who are not sick unquote. The implication from these recommendations,

(02:58:27):
of course, is that none of these practices were in
placed at the time of investigation. A year later, in
November of nineteen fifty eight, a second Decab grand jury
quote found fault with its medical facilities, along with the
lack of fire safeguards in the prison farm. Of course,
thanks to Dick Herbert's undercover investigation for the Atlanta Journal Constitution,

(02:58:50):
we now know that by nineteen sixty five, nearly ten
years later, medical treatment was still found to be non
existent at the prison farm, and by nineteen six a
prisoner quote with a record of hospitalization for tuberculosis and
heart trouble, collapsed and died unquote. Despite the order that
medical records for sick patients be kept, there was no

(02:59:13):
record on file that this patient had ever seen the doctor.
Recorded sections from a meeting between the prison farm and
the Department of Prisons indicate that they planned to hire
a full time registered nurse in nineteen seventy two to
assist the on site doctor. Other plans included tests for tuberculosis,

(02:59:36):
PEP tests for female prisoners, and basic height, weight, and
blood tests. They also indicated that they were not currently
providing vision, hearing, or dental care. In Atlanta Voice article
from nineteen seventy three claims there are quote unquote new
improvements in this area with the quote employment of a

(02:59:56):
physician and two nurses, a detoxification program for alcoholics, health tests,
and a humane approach to prisoner problems unquote, But by
nineteen seventy six we still see such things being raised
as simply proposals. An interoffice communication at Grady Memorial Hospital

(03:00:17):
states the need for quote a nurse clinician to be
hired by Grady and paid by the state under contract
to provide screening and triage services on site and referral
when appropriate to Grady Hospital. One of them suggests entering
this contract for reasons that it will generate one dollars

(03:00:39):
in income and quote minimized public criticisms of inadequate healthcare
for prisoners unquote. It also states that currently prisoners quote
get only crisis oriented emergency care. A May nineteen seventy
six Community Relations Commission report indicates that many of the

(03:01:01):
health care issues are caused by the reluctance of guards
to respond to prisoner complaints and quote brutality at Grady
Hospital by Atlanta police officers unquote. Another proposal from Grady
one month later suggests that rather than hiring a nurse
specifically for the prison farm, they use a nurse from

(03:01:21):
the Central Referral Office to act as a liaison with
non clinical personnel at each of the eight detention centers
in the city and give recommendations over the phone. They
note that this would save the prison thousands of dollars
a year. A nineteen seventies seven letter from Shirley Millwood,
interset Grady Hospital, indicates that prisoners were still being transported

(03:01:46):
to Grady for the administration of medication, and that even
that was not often done. One of her patients was
supposed to be brought in every day for medication, but
Millwood claimed, quote the jail personnel have not lied the
patient had been experiencing chest pain and shortness of breath
all afternoon, but was not brought in until ten thirty pm. Quote.

(03:02:10):
I feel that this is negligent on their part, and
it is certainly detrimental to our patients. If something happens
to this patient, will the jail be liable for the
problems that result from him not being properly medicated? Unquote.
In an undated document entitled Health Program City of Atlanta
Prison Farm, tolled from the same archival collection as the

(03:02:32):
other Grady Hospital records, does indicate that since nineteen seventy one,
a doctor is on site five days a week for
one hour each day, and a nurse is on duty
twenty four hours a day. It states that wherever feasible,
treatment should be done on the prison farm property, but

(03:02:53):
lays out several procedures to follow for serious medical emergencies,
usually involving transportation to Grady Hospital. However, it points out
that quote unattended heart attacks, poison or suicide, overdose cases,
and heroin withdrawal in jail frequently occur. The report also
says that in the case of public intoxication, quote, minor

(03:03:17):
medical skill and routine capacity in easing interpersonal tensions can
reduce difficulty for arresting officers, reduce the arrests needed, and
initiate more constructive rooting than directly to jail unquote. The
report points out that in diabetic patients, their convulsions and

(03:03:37):
the similar smell of their breath to acetone can lead
to incorrect conclusions with permanent health effects. It also mentions
that delirium treatment's condition associated with withdrawal of alcohol and
other substances can quote endanger and inmates life and more
than one has died unquote. Without proper healthcare, separation of

(03:04:00):
sick and healthy prisoners, and in the midst of a
decades long tuberculosis epidemic, overcrowding would certainly be a major
contributing factor to sickness and death in prison scenarios. Archival
research found that overcrowding was a recurring complaint throughout the
over half century of the prison farm's existence, despite frequent

(03:04:24):
expansions often motivated by the overcrowding in the first place.
Overcrowding is a common occurrence in prisons and jails throughout
the country. A longitudinal study by the Vera Institute of
Justice found that quote as jail populations have exceeded capacity,
county policy makers have turned to jail expansion rather than

(03:04:45):
alternatives to incarceration. In some cases, decision makers also argue
that replacing older facilities will provide safer living and working
conditions for the increasing numbers of people in the jail unquote.
How Ever, institute researchers note that quote. Larger jails built
to accommodate an overcrowded population often see their populations continue

(03:05:10):
to increase. This is because expansion alone fails to address
the root causes of overcrowding, leaving in place the very
policies and practices that drove the jail's population increase in
the first place. Indeed, there is a risk that the
existence of a larger jail with more beds may reduce
the incentive to make policy changes that address the factors

(03:05:33):
driving overcrowding, due to the temporary relief expansion provides unquote.
This is precisely what we see play out here in
the case of the old prison farm, and in fact,
is still an ongoing issue in Atlanta area incarceration systems today.
Since early on in the COVID nineteen pandemic, it's been

(03:05:54):
made clear that the most effective way to mitigate the
devastation of endemic COVID nineteen and pisons and jails is
to reduce the number of people behind bars, and wow,
perhaps that would be a good idea in general, not
even related to this specific pandemic. The United States locks
up a larger portion of its population than any other

(03:06:15):
nation in the world, and just the state of Georgia
has the fourth largest incarceration rate in the entire world
if you compare individual US states to all other entire countries.
Throughout only three states, New Jersey, California, and North Carolina
released a significant number of incarcerating people from prisons. Parole

(03:06:39):
boards also approved fewer releases in the first year of
the pandemic compared to the year prior. The response of
governments was so bad that in total, ten fewer people
were released in prisons and jails compared to As a result,
at the end of the first year of the pandemic,

(03:07:01):
nineteen state prison systems were at nine capacity or higher.
Incarcerated people are infected by the coronavirus at a rate
more than five times higher than the nation's overall rate.
According to research reported in the Journal of the American
Medical Association from July of The reported death rate of

(03:07:24):
inmates thirty nine deaths per one hundred thousand, is also
much higher than the national rate of twenty nine deaths
per one hundred thousand. As of April sixte more than
six hundred and sixty one thousand incarcerated people and staff
have been infected with coronavirus, and at least two thousand

(03:07:45):
and nine hundred and ninety have died, according to The
New York Times, and getting data more recent than that
is actually almost impossible because many carstral agencies have simply
stopped collecting and releasing information. The number of infections and
deaths is likely even higher than the reported number. Because

(03:08:07):
jails and prisons are conducting limited testing on incarcerated people.
Many facilities won't test incarcerated people who die after showing
symptoms of COVID nineteen. A lack of data reporting by
carstral agencies has prevented the public from being able to
understand the full impact of the pandemic on incarcetrated persons.

(03:08:29):
Organizations like the u c l A Law COVID nineteen
Behind Bars Project, the Martial Project, and the COVID Prison
Project have been working to collect data and information as
there's been a lack of transparency from agencies in providing
adequate or correct data on the number of cases, safety protocols,
and deaths within their jails and prisons. Many states Department

(03:08:53):
of Corrections rolled back or stopped reporting their COVID nineteen
data altogether in the summer of twenty twenty one, during
the Delta variant surge and way before the openercron wave
that hit last winter. For example, in Georgia, the Georgia
Department of Corrections has not reported any new COVID deaths

(03:09:14):
since March one, and last year halted all public reporting data.
Among all the correctional systems in the United States, the
Georgia Department of Corrections has the second highest case fatality
rate or percentage of those people who have reported infections

(03:09:34):
and later die. So this has been a problem in
Georgia for a long time, whether that be with the
old Atlanta prison farm or the current day jail's, prisons
and penitentiaries. I'm going to close out this episode with
this little tidbit from one of the conversations I had
with members of the Atlanta Community Press Collective. I think

(03:09:58):
just something that's continue waste not addressed. UM. I know
a lot of people like to focus on positive things
or more inspiring things. I guess as far as prison
stuff goes, because I know I've had people repeatedly asked like, hey,
were there strikes? Were their uprisings? Which is really inspirational.

(03:10:22):
I agree, But there's also a really really sad history
that a lot of people aren't addressing and how many
people died by suicide here or attempted to die by suicide,
and it's really sad that no one seems to care

(03:10:42):
about that aspect that there were horrific atrocities. There were
frequent rapes and beatings. There's a photo from the a
j C That literally says black woman. I think it's
like from the forties and they are moving around chemically

(03:11:07):
infused sludge. It literally says sludge as fertilizer. We have
proof of these atrocities, and people just like to focus
on things of like, oh, hey, there was arsenic in
a lake. I've never been able to find anything about that.
I have no idea where that came from. I'm not
saying it didn't happen, but there are so many concrete

(03:11:33):
examples of horrific things that happened here. We don't need
to make up stories. They exist and they're here. You
just have to pay attention and read about it. There's
literally a woman who attempted suicide six times because she
hated being in the whole so bad. The isolated confinement

(03:11:56):
self labeled the whole like six times aimes. And nobody
addresses this kind of stuff, even as forest offenders like
we owe it to ourselves to educate our community about
exactly what happened here, even the worst of it, and

(03:12:19):
then we'll go fucking raped in the woods because you've
got to take care of yourself too. But even as
we acknowledge this land, we need to know the history
of it too. That doesn't for us. Today. In the
next episode, will be going over the details of possible
grave sites and how further research into the prison farm
could be done, as well as more updates on the

(03:12:42):
happenings in the Fight to Defend the Atlanta Forest. See
you on the other side, Welcome this is it could

(03:13:05):
happen here. The podcast about how it feels like everything
is kind of falling apart and maybe what we can
do to put stuff back together. I'm Garrison Davis, your
host for this episode, and this is the third and
final part of our mini series on the history of
the old Atlanta prison Farm, produced in collaboration with the

(03:13:27):
Atlanta Community Press Collective. We're actually going to start this
episode with a little update on what's been going on
in Atlanta as a part of the Defend the Atlanta
Forest and Stop Cops City movement, considering the Atlanta Police
Foundation's Cops City project is very much a direct continuation

(03:13:48):
of the authoritarian and carcetral oppression of the prison farm
that occupied the very same section of land. Here's an
audio clip of one of my conversations with members of
the Atlantic Community Press Collective from right before the recent
July Week of Action, and this is about the status

(03:14:10):
of construction on the South River or Willani Forest. So
for the past month or so, it's kind of been
a waiting game, Like if you refer to the construction
timeline that whenever open records request revealed, like construction really
should have started in earnest by now, like they last

(03:14:31):
time I saw figure they want to have this open
by fall of next year, and they are not on
that timeline. And that's not all necessarily due to the movement.
So I think between UM just the general supply train
havoc that's happening across different industries right now, definitely the

(03:14:54):
construction industry. I think UM they did men and this
during one of the recent UM Community Stakeholders Committee meetings
where they're like, oh, yeah, by the way, we are
kind of having sub supply chain issues. In addition to
I don't think a p D and the Police Foundation
really expected to have any kind of continued resistance on

(03:15:18):
the ground UM or any kind of continued public bad press.
I don't think they think they thought they passed the
legislation on the public would kind of move on UM,
because that's frankly what he usually happens when people, when
people when movements that criticize the police happen, they usually

(03:15:39):
get repressed or people's attention turns turns to other things
pretty quickly. We know that they have a permit for
It's what exactly is it is a permit for. It
is kind of complicated, but one way or another, it
enables the Police Foundation, there contractors and our vendors to

(03:16:03):
construct a basically like a temporary construction fence like you
would see around a construction site. But in that permit
I believe expires in August of this year, because that's
a temporary permit, but that fence does not seem to
have gone up, so it's it's kind of a stalemate
right now. Just five days after the July week of

(03:16:27):
action wrapped on early Wednesday morning on August three, dozens
of work vehicles and police amassed around the forest, staging
heavy machinery, setting up roadblocks, and started dismantling barricades in
the forest. Sounds of tree cutting could be heard near
the occupied to stop Cops City tree sets. Police were

(03:16:51):
initially stalled by the burning of tire barricades near roads,
but around seven am, heavy machinery bree to the proposed
site for Cops City and entered on the north side
of the forest. Excavators cleared barricades and trees were felled
near trails, making wider paths into the forest. De Cab

(03:17:14):
County Police officers accompanied gas pipeline workers who were on
the ground adjacent to Entrenchment Creek Park. One arrest was reported.
The arrestee was originally being taken straight to jail and
then got diverted to police headquarters for questioning, and it
was confirmed that FBI was also on the scene. There

(03:17:36):
were no attempts at extraction of tree sitters and no
additional arrests reported. That day, the Atlanta Police Foundations contract
workers did substantial forest clearing in an area of the
woods near the entrance gate on Key Road, directly adjacent
to the existing power line clearing. Much of the surrounding

(03:17:57):
neighborhood was blocked off by the Atlantic Department for most
of the day, with no warning given to local residents,
many of whom have stopped cops city yard signs. The
work being done along the power line cut is assumed
to be either for installing sewer lines and or drilling holes.

(03:18:18):
The presence of Georgia Power suggests that they could have
been trying to bore holes to install power lines. The
next morning, around twenty cops, some mounted on a t
v S, patrolled throughout the forest, possibly looking for rebuilt
barricades or to snatch up anyone they found in the area.
Ever since then, there's been cops, sometimes on a t

(03:18:41):
v S, spotted multiple times a week in the forest,
usually during early in the morning. How much grounds clearing
and pre construction work was done recently in the forest
was slightly surprising considering the land disturbance permit has not
yet been issued, though it is possible that the recent

(03:19:01):
work was covered by existing utility easements or the temporary
construction permit that expires later this month that was mainly
issued around the goal of putting up a security offense
around the forest. And with that now, let's get back
to the history of the prison farm. As discussed last episode,

(03:19:22):
overcrowding was one of the initial motivations for proposing to
move the Glenwood Stockade prisoners to the dairy Farm site,
though it was not the final decisive factor because at
the time populations there were dwindling. Several years later, though,
Councilman chose Wood was being praised for increasing the incarcerated

(03:19:44):
population because it brought in more revenue, and several years
after that, in overcrowding at the second stockade on Decatur
and Hillard prompted discussions on expanding the prison farm by
bringing in portable buildings from the school board and expanding
the woman's prison by one hundred feet. A police report

(03:20:06):
from nineteen thirty six says, quote, we find that all
prisoners have separate quarters which are in sanitary condition but overcrowded.
We recommend that another unit be constructed for white female
prisoners as well as white male prisoners unquote, And by
nineteen thirty eight, a new wing was completed housing seventy

(03:20:27):
five more prisoners, and another edition of the same size
was expected to be added to the main building, but
only five months later, the prison farm's own superintendent again
described the conditions there as overcrowded and recommended another expansion
and separate ward for quote unquote diseased prisoners. In nineteen

(03:20:47):
thirty nine, a proposal to extend the land by one
hundred and eighty four acres was protested by Decab residents
on the basis that it was directly next to a
white school and that quote for their development of penal
institutions in net section would destroy the value of surrounding
property and preclude the development of a civic center which

(03:21:09):
citizens seek near the west side school grounds unquote. The
plan was abandoned, but later brought up with a compromise
in that they would instead only take a hundred and
thirty four acres, leaving a fifty acre buffer between the
prison farm and the school. In four, a new building,

(03:21:30):
originally slated to be a medical ward, was built, and
as we saw in the healthcare section, this ended up
becoming a new prison building, and the old building became
the Maneial Disease Hospital. The new building could quote house
seven and twenty five prisoners without crowding them unquote, and
was said to be able to quote eliminate long standing

(03:21:51):
criticism of nearby residents because of escapes from the old
overcrowded and ill arranged structure unquote. In nineteen forty six,
the city took possession of an additional eighty nine acres
of land for the prison farm, but still overcrowding was
again raised as an issue in nineteen fifty two, but

(03:22:11):
this time certain sentences were reduced from twenty days to
ten days to address this problem, constituting the first time
a slightly decarce oral approach was used. But despite this
and yet another new wing being built in nineteen fifty eight,
a grand jury in nineteen sixty found that the prison
farm was quote unquote exceedingly overcrowded and quote as a result,

(03:22:37):
the health of prisoners is jeopardized unquote. They suggested building
a quote unquote work camp to alleviate crowding. Dick Herbert's
undercover investigation in nineteen sixty five found that men were
sleeping on the floor and tables because there was still
not enough beds. A quote from Herbert says, so closely

(03:22:59):
pass act are the three hundred bunks that they are
alternated head to foot. In nineteen sixty seven, Atlanta started
talking about chronic alcoholism as a health problem rather than
one of criminality. However, the assumption was that this was
still to be treated by those in charge of the prisons. Quote.

(03:23:20):
The prison is already crowded up against its six hundred
person capacity, said the Atlanta Journal Constitution. But according to
Superintendent Holsey, the conversion to a rehabilitation center would mean
longer stays and thus higher populations, stating quote, they likely
will have to build a whole new city prison farm unquote.

(03:23:44):
A nineteen seventy six article from the Atlanta Journal Constitution
says that in nineteen seventy a thousand prisoners were packed
in the old building. Inmates slept in rickety beds. Three
high health inspectors and judges cut the population for humanity's sake.
It further claimed that the facility was now quote well

(03:24:05):
below its comfortable capacity of four hundred prisoners unquote. In
nineteen seventy four, the Uniform Alcohol Treatment Act was passed,
although never fully funded, which effectively decriminalized alcoholism. This act
was said to reduce the population of the prison farm
from five hundred in nineteen seventy two to two hundred

(03:24:26):
and nine eighty three, although new laws were passed further
criminalizing certain actions while intoxicated at the behest of the
business community who quote demanded drunks and winos be removed
from the streets unquote. This era marks the last time
the Atlantic community press research found complaints of overcrowding. The

(03:24:50):
lack of further complaints strongly suggests that decriminalization is a
better answer to the problem of overcrowding rather than prison expansion.
It also necessary to mention that alleviating the problem fifty
years into the project does not make up for the
unnecessary harm and death likely caused by these conditions over
the years. As we went over last episode, overcrowding of

(03:25:14):
jail's remains a problem in our modern jails and prisons. Currently,
the Fulton County Sheriff wants the Atlanta City government to
abandon their promise of closing a city jail and instead
rent the jail to Fulton County to alleviate overcrowding in
their system. This is billed as a humanitarian move, but

(03:25:35):
as we've discussed in the past few episodes, history suggests otherwise,
and the most successful way at reducing harm was decarcet
role approaches. Complaints about poor sanitation and malnutrition also span
the prison farm's history. Combined with the previously detailed conditions,

(03:25:55):
these would further increase the likelihood of sickness and death
within the prison. For arm walls, prisoners eight complained that
quote a silver dollar would cover each particle of food
given to prisoners and asked for quote more vegetables and
less sorghum unquote. In ninety one, during a tense meeting

(03:26:16):
in which Decab tried unsuccessfully to prevent Atlanta from expanding
the prison farm, a DECAB resident said that the farm
was without sanitary facilities, despite frequent assurances that the facility
was clean. However, work was temporarily abandoned on that expansion
after Decab County citizens sought and obtained an injunction against

(03:26:38):
the City of Atlanta for dumping untreated sewage into entrenchment creek.
There is a large gap in reporting on these particular conditions,
but there's evidence that they persisted, because in nineteen sixty,
the Decab Ground jury found that quote, restrooms were deplorable
in both white and negro wards unquote, and that the

(03:27:00):
kitchen floor was quote unquote in a deplorable state and
should be replaced. The Atlanta Journal Constitution's own inspection curiously
concluded that the farm was quote operated very efficiently and
with good sanitary conditions unquote, But just two years later,
Dick Herbert's undercover work as a prisoner showed quite the contrary.

(03:27:25):
He found puddles of spit at drainage grills, wondered if
many of the men had tuberculosis, and said that quote
it was not uncommon to find dead bugs or hair
in food. The rusty, dirty tins we drank out of
should be replaced unquote. Herbert also mentioned that quote the

(03:27:45):
food was almost entirely a thin and liquid diet, and
also said that inmates often complained that the best of
the farms produce and meats are reserved for the guards
and hired help, and just to remind or that they
themselves worked to grow all that produce. A prisoner named
Carl h sent to the prison farm in nineteen sixty

(03:28:08):
eight on a public drunkenness charge, said, after five days
at the facility, quote, I've had one half of a
meal since I've been here unquote. Apparently, by this time,
local court rulings had determined that chronic alcoholics could no
longer be arrested on these charges, but the judge claimed, quote,

(03:28:28):
I'm doing it from a humanitarian standpoint, whether it's legal
or not. Unquote. Carl said of that matter, that the
judge quote told me that he was going to save
my life. I told him he can't save my life
out there at the stockade. I told him he can
send me anywhere, but not the stockade. He can't save
my life out there unquote. This was three years after

(03:28:52):
Superintendent Holsey was praised for his reforms and interviewed by
the Atlanta Journal Constitution saying, quote, I'm just trying to
make this place sanitary and livable for these people unquote.
On two occasions in nineteen sixty nine, the vast majority
of prisoners went on strike due to poor food. The
first time, they demanded a raise for the cook and

(03:29:15):
the hiring of a new cook. But four months later,
these conditions which were agreed to to end the strike
had still not been met. Prison farm administrators once again
promised to raise cook wages and hire a new cook
to end the strike, but we have no indication that
they ever followed through on that. In Atlanta Journal Constitution

(03:29:35):
article from nineteen seventy states that prisoners were working in
the kitchen while infected with tuberculosis. Quote one man was
sent to Batty State Hospital after it was found his
tuberculosis was so advanced that he started hemorrhaging. He had
worked in the kitchen the night before unquote. When asked
about this, the prison farm administrator R. F. Jordan's said

(03:29:57):
that some prisoners do have tuberculosis, and yes, quote some
of them work in the kitchen, but only if their
case is arrested. Unquote. Employees protesting discrimination against black employees
at the farm and unfair and illegal incarceration of alcoholics
also said that quote there are rats and roaches and
filth that you wouldn't believe unquote. In nineteen seventy one,

(03:30:21):
the prison farm was found to be serving food illegally
without a license. But health officials complained that there were
only two of them for the entire multi county district
and they had no means of actually enforcing licenses or
food safety. Just one month later, prisoners again went on
strike due to being served watered down gravy and being

(03:30:42):
unjustly incarcerated for alcoholism. Reports on conditions are few and
far between after this period, but the two a c
l U lawsuit claimed, among other things, that the conditions
at the facility are unsanitary. There is most likely more
information to find between these years, As one prison farm

(03:31:04):
worker said, quote, we used to have strikes out here
about every month, sometimes two or three a month unquote.
In nine three, Superintendent Hudson, once hailed as the great
humanitarian reformer, was replaced after quote complaints from employees and
city politicians about his handling of the city jail, its

(03:31:26):
employees and prisoners. Hudson said of the criticism, quote, I
get bored when there aren't any problems. Serenity is not
my thing unquote. A big focus of the research that
the Atlantic Community Press did was on the question of
unmarked graves at the prison farm site. There are persistent

(03:31:47):
folk stories about these that may be tempting for some
to write off as unfounded rumors. However, oral histories and
qualitative interviews need to be taken seriously and considered along
side other forms of evidence. Some stories have already been substantiated,
and for others, the evidence found so far certainly places

(03:32:08):
them within the realm of possibility. This episode, I'm not
going to try to prove without a shadow of a
doubt that there are unmarked graves on the property that
is slated to become a cop city, but I will
discuss documentation that shows that there is a strong possibility
that needs to be carefully and fully investigated, regardless of

(03:32:30):
how long it takes to do so properly. To start,
there is this quote from an Atlanta Journal constitution piece
from nineteen seventy six. Quote, Maud, the deceased elephant and
two hundred and eighty inmates rest in peace at the
City of Atlanta prison Farm. Unquote. Now, I'm gonna unpack

(03:32:52):
that one at a time, because there's a there's a
lot there. Uh. The elephant, Maud was the former zoo
elephant end that died and whose corpse was dumped at
the prison farm property by the city, and as for
the line about two hundred and eighty buried inmates. There's
no other details given in the article, and some researchers

(03:33:16):
suspect that this is some kind of sick, sarcastic joke
on the newspaper's part, as the rest of the article
attempts to paint life at the prison Farm as one
of leisure and respite. According to local folk historian Scott Peterson,
there is, however, a known burial ground off of Bouldercrest

(03:33:38):
and Key Road that contains both marked and unmarked graves
that was once owned and operated by the prison Farm. Now,
to be perfectly clear, this burial ground is not on
the current property slated to become Cops City. The section
of land that was originally the prison Farm has been
divided up into many smaller pieces, a few hundred years

(03:34:00):
of which the Atlanta Police Foundation is trying to turn
into the new militarized police training compound. However, the burial
site that Scott Peterson talks about does tell us that
a that there is some truth behind at least some
of the folk stories, and be the prison Farm as
a whole contained at least some unmarked graves, which leads

(03:34:21):
us to believe that there could be others throughout the
property and that other claims are at least worth taking seriously.
When the Atlantic Community Press was doing the bulk of
their historical research last year, they attempted to find death
and burial records for inmates that died while incarcerated at
the prison farm through archival digging. Select inmate death and

(03:34:45):
burial records were found simply via public reporting. We know
for certain that at least several deaths occurred in very
close time spans. One man was sprayed with an insecticide,
which the warden denies, but which the attending nurse and
those who sprayed the man corroborate. Samuel Bayon's thirty six

(03:35:07):
year old black man quote unquote dropped dead shortly after
a patrolman woke him up to get dressed. Mark Isaiah
Willem died after quote unquote becoming sick. In Atlanta Daily World,
headline reads quote coroner's jury will probe death of prisoner.
Brown urges full investigation. And that's dated from nineteen fifty three.

(03:35:31):
On April, Robert Reynolds, forty nine year old black man
died from head injuries, prompting an investigation, and in reference
to Reynolds, Charlie Brown, a nineteen fifty three mayoral candidate, declared, quote,
approximately ten prisoners have died in the jail in the
last four years under mysterious circumstances unquote. Despite these known deaths,

(03:35:57):
finding official records listing either deaths or burials at the
site was much more difficult. On top of searching through
several archives, researchers sent Georgia Open Records Act requests to
the Police Department, the Department of Corrections, and the Atlantic
City Council. The Police Department said that the records would

(03:36:18):
be in the custody of the Department of Corrections. However,
the Department of Corrections stated that they are not and
never were, the custodians of such records. The Atlantic City
Council replied to requests by sending the inaccurate Jillian Wooton
History Report, but also connected researchers with a historian. Serena

(03:36:38):
McCracken of the Atlanta History Center has said that there's
a possibility such records simply do not exist, either that
they were never kept in the first place due to
laws at the time, or that they were destroyed at
some point, either due to negligence or an expiring period
of retention. There is also the possibility that these records

(03:37:00):
do exist and simply have not been yet found. They
could have been misfiled, or requests could have been sent
to the wrong agency, or they could just be sitting
in a box of mill doing records still on the
land today, as so many other records were when the
city finally shut down the site, many of which are
now lost forever in the ensuing fires and other ravages

(03:37:23):
of time. In the Georgia Archives file on the prison farm,
a memo was discovered describing procedures for the death of inmates.
The memo says that upon a prisoner's death, their nearest
kin should be notified. If the body is not claimed, quote,
then the body shall be given a pauper's burial not

(03:37:44):
to exceed fifty dollars unquote. Such burials don't always include
a headstone, but rather a marker or a burial flag,
which can easily erode away or become invisible over time.
Not all unmarked graves on the site necessarily exist within
a traditional grave plot. According to Scott Peterson, who has

(03:38:06):
collected folk stories and oral histories about the land for
twenty years. There is another plot next to an old
oak tree and sunken in structure that was once used
to shade the warden during lynch ings. This would of
course be not legal, but as we've talked about, legality
does not always dictate the behaviors of prison farm wardens,

(03:38:30):
and there are records of cases of runaways at other
prison farms that were later discovered to have been killed
and buried on site. As such, these claims are not
outside the bounds of possibility, and, if anything, are highly likely.
There are also many similarities between the conditions at the
prison farm and those of the Brandon Indian Residential School

(03:38:53):
that would lead to the need to bury many bodies
without necessarily keeping tight records. Katherine and Nicole thesis details
a history of airborne diseases aggravated by factors such as
poor sanitation and ventilation, lack of medical attention, malnutrition, violence
and abuse, overwork and accidents, and harsh punishment of runaways,

(03:39:17):
all of which are also seen throughout the prison Farm's history.
I don't want to draw too tight a comparison between
the prison farm and other places and other events, it
is worth looking at other similar situations as something that
shows that the question of unmarked graves is not unfounded
nor uncharacteristic of the institutions of the time. There have

(03:39:42):
been several other instances where institutions with similar conditions were
later found to have unmarked graves, burial grounds, or other
human remains. Human remains. In sugar Land, Texas, near the
old Imperial Prison Farm, there were found have quote belonged
to prisoners who worked on the land once used as

(03:40:05):
a sugar plantation unquote. An article from the Tyler Morning
Telegraph describes life of physical abuse, forced labor, and poor nutrition,
much like the prison farm in Atlanta. Similarly to Atlanta, quote,
it wasn't until it became clear that these abuses were
widespread and affecting white prisoners that public opinions started to

(03:40:28):
shift unquote. In Arkansas, in nineteen sixty eight, a reformist
superintendent of Cummins Prison Farm discovered the remains of three
former prisoners. His discovery quote made international news, embarrassed Governor
Winthrop Rockefeller, and infuriated conservative politicians. It also led to

(03:40:50):
merchants firing and banishment from the field of prison management unquote. Finally,
although the Brandon Indian Residential School was a prison farm,
archival research points to conditions for the prisoners held at
the Atlanta prison Farm that are not dissimilar from the
conditions of the children held at the Brandon Indian Residential School.

(03:41:12):
We see lacking healthcare, poor sanitation and ventilation, malnutrition, violence
and abuse, a heavy workload, accidents, and harsh punishments all
contributed to the deaths there, and each of those factors
has been demonstrated via archival research to have existed on
the prison farm in Atlanta. As mentioned at the beginning

(03:41:34):
of the first episode, this is not an exhaustive or
comprehensive history. Further research is necessary, and hopefully, as explained
by the past few episodes, is extremely warranted. However, what's
laid out here and in the Atlantic community presses other
work already changes our fundamental understanding of the Atlanta prison farm.

(03:41:58):
Far from a federal program ending in the sixties before
being essentially abandoned, we saw that the Atlanta prison Farm
on Key Road was a city run from the very
beginning and the direct continuation of the already cruel stockade.
Contrary to popular belief, it was run continuously from the
early twenties up into the nineteen nineties, it was a

(03:42:22):
completely different property than the Honor Farm. Despite many, including
the Atlanta Police Foundation, continuing to use that phrase when
referring to the site. At the city run prison farm,
atrocious conditions persisted across the better part of a century
and ongoing into what we would consider the modern era,

(03:42:42):
despite claims at each stage that the bad times were
behind us and a new era lay ahead. There is
a documented history of the city prioritizing its ability to
cut costs with prison labor, essentially extending slavery, Extensive records
of physical and emotional abuse, torture, forced labor, overwork, a

(03:43:03):
lack of healthcare for sanitation, overcrowding, and poor nutrition ranging
throughout the entire history of the site. Nearly every stage
of leadership has gotten caught breaking rules and laws while
avoiding the same carcetral fate as the prisoners, as well
as a reluctance by city officials to enact policies that
would truly alleviate these harms and attempt to make up

(03:43:26):
for them, rather ensuring that power remains continuous, as is
the case with cops city. This history demonstrates how Atlantic
City government is perfectly fine with over ruling rights of
the residents of Decab County who are disenfranchised from the city.
With the Atlanta Police Foundation and the city getting closer
and closer to deforestation and facility construction, the window of

(03:43:50):
opportunity is shrinking for further on the ground historical research.
The fact that they've yet to meet the requirements for
the full environmental assessment, let alone the careful historical analysis
necessary considering the history of the land, means that the
city is not only physically erasing the history of the
lives it's destroyed, but also risking the possibility of desecrating

(03:44:15):
their graves in the process. A guest column in the
Supporter Report by Lilly Ponins, an environmental engineer and now
former member of the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee for the
Atlanta Public Safety Training Center ak A COP City, gave
us an inside look at how the development of COPS

(03:44:36):
City is knowingly and willingly refusing to do their due
diligence assessments and pave over decades of corstral history. Quote.
Since joining the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee for the Atlanta
Public Safety Training Center. I've observed the developers from Da
Vinci Development Collaborative, along with the Atlanta Police Foundation, mislead

(03:44:57):
the community into believing that they are following a legitimate,
regulated environmental due diligence process. In reality, they are doing
less than the minimum to meet the legally defined standards
for environmental site assessment reporting and are breaking the trust
of stakeholders and the terms of their ground lease agreement
with the City of Atlanta. Given the historical operation as

(03:45:20):
a prison farm and plantation prior to that conditions violence, abuse, accidents,
and harsh punishments, it is reasonable to believe that areas
of the property could contain human remains in unmarked graves.
This was never investigated. Comments and professional input from myself
and others on the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee were brushed off,

(03:45:44):
and no additional site investigations were considered beyond the limited
site investigation. To remedy this, the City of Atlanta must
force the development team to act responsibly by requiring a
proper phase to environmental site assessment. If they fail to
do so, taxpayers are likely to foot the bill for

(03:46:04):
the remediation that is being ignored or for the complicated
litigation that will arise when this development team disturbs human
remains on this site unquote. A few months ago, Lily
Pontins was kicked off the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee after
writing this column. Both the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee and

(03:46:29):
COPS City have repeatedly been made aware that the assessments
they've done failed to meet environmental requirements, and the reports
that they're using to base decisions off of and green
light proposals have been shown to be inaccurate. As far
as responding to City council, APF enlisted Terra Con to

(03:46:50):
write a cultural report. This report was highly inaccurate due
to relying on the Billian Luten report. I personally emailed
City Council as Atlantic community press collective and as I've

(03:47:11):
repeatedly told them, hey, this is incorrect, this is why,
here's proof. This is really disgusting and sad that you
refuse to acknowledge any of this history. And ironically, a
month or two later, another report comes out that's slightly better,

(03:47:33):
slightly revised, but still has that whitewashed aspect that the
original one did. I had the misfortune to recently need
to reread the terra con report um, and I don't
believe they they address when the city supposedly took over

(03:47:54):
the prison the federal farm at all. I don't think
they discussed that date in the slightest. But the Bluten
report they draw from, I think she just says sometime
in the fifties, which was how we figured out because
we were trying to nail down the date of the fifties,
and when we had to go back and back and
back and back and back. We found out when the
city purchased the land by literally just going to the

(03:48:14):
decap history archives at the courthouse and looking them up.
A fairly quick process in terms of research that APF
obviously didn't hair or bother to look into at all.

(03:48:35):
Obviously the City of Atlanta didn't either. Yeah. In her
residential school thesis, Katherine Nichols lays out a robust process
for unobtrusively examining possibilities of human remains while respecting the
communities affected. Her process involves thorough archival research, including the

(03:48:56):
use of oral histories and unconfirmed local knowledge to general
leads for a deeper investigation. This archivalrysearch is then situated
alongside the currently existing literature on the subject. She then
conducts qualitative interviews with local community members and family members
of those affected. She stresses that this qualitative information is

(03:49:18):
not to be written off just because it does not
align with records that the state institutions consider to be legitimate.
And finally, she lays out a method for field research
including site reconnaissance, field walking and probing, site preparation, controlled burns, mapping,
aerial photography, soil profiles, metal detector surveys, ground penetrating radar,

(03:49:40):
and ground conductivity surveys, all checked against controls to ensure
that they align with the results of the same methods
on previously known unmarked grave sites. Crucially, all of this
is done with the consent of the relevant communities and
is done unobtrusively as to not disturb the graves. Now

(03:50:00):
that the construction process has ostensibly started, Um, how does
that factor into, like, you know, disturbing the grounds where
there could be no all of this history that is
being unearthed and kind of paved over top of. Um,
how does that kind of impact the ability to do

(03:50:22):
ethical research going forward into the history of this land. So,
for one thing, we talked on and off with a
handful of archaeologists and anthropologists and related fields about if
we were going to go onto the prison farm property
and conduct a search for grape sites or other historical information, like,

(03:50:46):
we have no legal way to do that. It would
be trespassing. And we also know that from the quote
unquote cultural report that the Police Foundation had done, they
didn't really do that kind of search. Um, they were
mostly searching for evidence of I guess you could say

(03:51:06):
indigenous artifacts, not let's say bodies buried in the nineteen twenties.
So the ability to do on site historical research is
it kind of depends on, Hey, how willing are you
to get picked up for felony trespassing because that's a
charge they can put on you. It definitely feels like

(03:51:29):
we're up against a clock. I'm just going to add
on to that. I feel like one of the issues
that we've definitely come across, as far as looking for
graves that are related to the prison farm, your options
are pretty much grund Prendy trading radar or what they
call cadaver dogs. Cadaver dogs theoretically can sniff up to

(03:51:53):
a hundred years. From what I've read, how many people
have connections to cadaver dogs honestly, and then also the
just logistics of attempting to get ground penetrating radar in
a forest UM is definitely difficult. Are you worried as

(03:52:15):
construction continues that even if stuff is discovered, whether that
be unmarked graves or you know other other various other
things that do you have any any level of confidence
that if things are found they'll even go public? Or
are you worried that if they find things they'll just
cover it up? Basically, I have absolutely zero faith. I

(03:52:38):
mean to me that I have absolutely zero faith to
directly ensure a question. I have absolutely zero faith that
anything that is found will be preserved. UM. We also
have it on fairly good authority that the issuing of
construction permits is imminent. UM. The cab kine of Commissioner
Ted Terry is are our best uh legal ally, if

(03:53:03):
you will um our best government ally. He last week,
during the Week of Action, introduced UM a resolution that
would ask Dicab County CEO Michael Thurmond to basically make
a series of asks himself of the City of Atlanta.
This is basically legally the most the County Commission can

(03:53:24):
do and it is all incumbent upon the CEO of
the county to actually do these things. UM hope is
not great for the county CEO to do any of
these things. But um ted Terry, among other things, asked
for additional environmental studies, which by the way, they are
required to do in the lease. He asked for additional

(03:53:47):
historical research and full disclosure. He actually cited the Press
Collective's history report we did last summer in the legislation,
which was both he's a state actor, but also you've
got to admit that's kind of cool. Um, it was
gratifying to see our work receive a fairly high level

(03:54:08):
of recognition. Additional environmental studies, historical research, noise studies, and
ultimately he asks that the CEO asked the city to
consider just relocating the site completely. I think something that
we need to take into consideration throughout this entire research
process is that a lot of the records that we

(03:54:31):
have access to our newspaper, the primary newspaper service we
have access to is the a j C, which we
have a clear we have clear proof that a j
C continues to be racist, continues to focus on the
narrative that they would like to project as far as

(03:54:52):
being accomplices to the police and to a p F
and how that correlates to this city's history and mishandling
of this piece of land. Um. When we were looking
through older articles, they are handful of papers. There's the

(03:55:17):
Great Sparckled Bird, which is as so it's a student
run newspaper. This one, I'm assuming, just based on the
sixties and seventies time frame, that there's a decent chance
that it was primarily written by white people. I do
not have proof of that. I'm just going on with

(03:55:38):
gut feeling with that. So there is a probably a
bit of bias, but it really does start to give
a different picture of the people that were sent to
the prison from There were several g SU students who
were sent there and they were put in the whole.

(03:55:59):
One was put the whole just because he had long
hair and he refused to cut his hair, so they said,
you know what, you're going into isolation, have fun um
and he was there for a little bit. It's important
to reiterate that throughout much of the archival research that
produced these findings, the bulk of the articles discovered were
from the Atlanta Journal, The Atlantic Constitution, and the Atlanta

(03:56:22):
Journal Constitution after the two merged. Though these papers reported
on bad conditions once they had become public, and in
two cases were responsible for investigative work that made these
conditions public. These white run papers, much like many major newspapers,
have a known history of racism and support for the
police state and carcetral institutions. We therefore believe that a

(03:56:47):
thorough search through archives of black run newspapers such as
the Atlanta Daily, World, magazines and other publications is necessary
to gain a more complete understanding of the history. Both
myself and the researchers that put this history together are
furthermore white, and so it is possible that our own

(03:57:09):
biases and blind spots could be present in this reporting.
We strongly believe that a more complete accounting of this
history could be undertaken by people who have been more
directly affected, and hope that these episodes and the research
they're based on, is not taken as the end of
the story, but just a beginning and an invitation to

(03:57:31):
further scrutiny. Is there really any way to continue the
research that would be necessary to actually preserve the history
and keep people knowledgeable about the atrocities that's happened the
past hundred plus years, Like with if construction continues, is
there even a way to do this now or is

(03:57:52):
that clock really just running out? So I think one
of the biggest hurdles as far as preserving the history
is honestly just getting people to care about it, because
it's not sexy. It's not people in tree houses. It's

(03:58:13):
sitting on a computer just skimming through thousands of articles.
No one cares that in two the a c l
You sued the city because they were using illegal in
unconstitutional punishments. Nobody really cares about that kind of stuff.
It's not that exciting in the grand scheme of things,

(03:58:34):
but it's part of the history, and it's part of
what has led us to where we are now with
Cops City and with that that wraps up our miniseries
on the very much incomplete history of the old Atlanta
Prison Farm. The fact that there's seemingly little to know
original official records to learn from because they were either

(03:58:57):
trashed or never kept in the first place, is itself
cover up and denial of history and gross denial of
the experiences of trauma and oppression of those who are
subjected to the horrors of the prison farm. It's bad
enough that the city couldn't be bothered to remember the history,
but crucially they're bulldozed over. Police endorsed narrative in whatever

(03:59:20):
museum or plaque they want to create cannot be allowed
to become the story of the prison farm. And it's
many atrocities that we are still rediscovering. There is still
a long way to go and we have barely scratched
the surface. Hopefully this is just the start of more
people paying attention to the forgotten histories like this and

(03:59:40):
then going out and doing further digging. You can check
out the Atlantic Community Press Collective and they're great reporting
at a t L Press Collective dot com or Atlanta
Underscore Press on Twitter. See you all on the other side. Hey,
we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from

(04:00:03):
now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen.
Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
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You can find sources for it could happen here. Updated
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for listening.