CZM Rewind: Part One: The Armed Nonviolent Civil Rights Movement

We JUST got back from Holiday and haven't recorded yet, so in THIS CZM Rewind Margaret talks with Joelle Monique about how the Deacons for Defense and Justice, the NAACP, and others organized for self-defense during the Civil Rights Era.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff?
The podcast that it was in reruns during the holidays,
But I bet you'll still like this episode even though
I recorded a little while ago, because I think that
the way that people look back and think about the
old civil rights movement, like, wow, everything was so peaceful

(00:28):
all the time, Well it's not true. I mean, some
stuff was peaceful, and nonviolence is an important part of
political strategy, but it's certainly not the only thing that happened.
And so we're going to do a rerun about the
armed civil rights movement. I hope you enjoy it. Hello,

(00:49):
and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. It's
a podcast. It does what it says in the title.
I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is
my guest, Elminique, who is a pop cultural critic and
seems to do so much of everything that I have
a hard time pinning her down. Joell, how are you?

Speaker 3 (01:08):
I'm good.

Speaker 4 (01:10):
You know, it's a gray morning, but in LA that
counts as weather, so I'm really trying to vibe with it.
You know, I got my hot tea, I'm ready to
go learn about some nice people.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Is it below seventy degrees there, it.

Speaker 4 (01:23):
Is below seventy degrees here. He's got sweaters on. I'm
under a blanket currently.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Oh that's nice, it's lovely. I'm in the mountains in
my heat is broken. Oh no, Margaret, it's okay. I
have like six backup heats horses because I'm like that.

Speaker 3 (01:40):
That's good. That's good.

Speaker 4 (01:41):
As someone who came from a snowy climate, you need
multiple sources of heat at all times just in case.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
No, absolutely, Like my house is like like right now,
I'm running electric heat space heaters, and if that breaks,
I have a wood burning stove. Like it's it's fine. Yes, anyway, Joe,
What's what's your favorite of your many jobs besides being
a guest on the Poole.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
That is a really tough question.

Speaker 4 (02:08):
Probably like hosting live events is my favorite because it's
like all the aspects of performance, but you get to
like perform your ultimate self, you know what I mean.
It's just as an extroverted introvert, Like getting to perform
all the extrovertedness, you know, for a crowd is a
lot of fun and you get to, you know, get

(02:28):
their feelings and maybe you make your guest cry, but
in like a good way, you know, and like all
that energy is really lovely. And then I would say
writing after that is definitely a favorite.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Okay, Okay, that makes a lot of sense to me.
I really like performing and then going and hiding. That's like,
oh no, for.

Speaker 4 (02:46):
Sure afterwards, Please don't talk to me. I was on
set recently and we recorded for like four hours straight
and then we broke for lunch and I did not
leave the set and they're like.

Speaker 3 (02:55):
Are you hungry out? I's like no, They're like, are
you okay?

Speaker 4 (02:58):
And I was like I just need to decompress and
not talk to anyone for whatever long we have until
the next take, Like I just cannot.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
Yeah, So totally, totally, yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
Absolutely. We're also joined as always by our producer Sophie.

Speaker 5 (03:11):
Hi, Sophie, Hey, Margaret, how are you?

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Oh wait, that's not Sophie. Is that Sophie. It's Ian.

Speaker 5 (03:21):
Yes, I'm finally on the podcast.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
I Yeah. Ian is our audio engineer and also today
our producer. How are you doing, Ian?

Speaker 5 (03:33):
I'm doing pretty good.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
It's a nice cozy, cool morning, you know, got my
sweatshirt on, ready to do some podcasts and all right.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
So on this show we talk about cool people in history,
especially cool movements, cool complicated networks of cool people who
actually usually pretty complicated. But this week, well, actually this
week's no different. I'm really excited to talk this week
about the non violent civil rights movement the nineteen fifties
and the sixties in the US South and along the way.
I'm going to talk about the people who protected the
non violent civil rights movement with the firearms and stuff.

Speaker 4 (04:05):
Yeah, yes, they won't get violent, but we sure as
fuck will. Those are my favorite people.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yep, that is today's It is exactly the people who said, oh,
that's great, you're non violent. I go to protect you.
I'm not nonviolent.

Speaker 5 (04:20):
You always need somebody who's ready to do some dirty work.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
Always, absolutely exactly. And I think that they don't get
enough credit. And so we're going to talk about the
armed wing of the non violent civil rights movement, the
paradox that isn't half as much of a paradox as
it might seem. We're going to talk about the Deacons
for Defense and Justice, which was a non ideological but
well organized collection of black people who defended civil rights campaigners.
We're going to talk about the North Carolina branch of

(04:44):
the NAACP that armed itself, and we're going to talk
about all the unaffiliated groups and individuals who relied, often
quite effectively on their capacity to defend themselves in the
struggle for self determination and all that kind of stuff
because we've been doing I mean, as anyone who's listening
to the podcast, we've been covering like the Klan a
bunch recently and not in the We've been talking about

(05:08):
people who fight the Klan, not the.

Speaker 4 (05:11):
Good people in the clan, but yeah, yeah, people who
fought the Klan, I got.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, yeah. So you all will be shocked to know this.
There's been a concerted effort in the United States of
America by white supremacy to disenfranchise black people.

Speaker 5 (05:27):
You know, you don't say really, yeah, no.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
Yeah, I only learned this recently.

Speaker 5 (05:33):
Never mind.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
And wherever there's oppression, there's resistance to oppression, which is
the core concept of this show. And so I'm going
to frame the civil rights movements of the nineteen fifties
of the seventies, and the same way that I see
it framed by a lot of historians and people who
are there at the time, has been kind of made
up of two general parts. You've got the sort of
civil rights era of the nineteen fifties and sixties with
a focus on non violence and sit ins and registration

(06:00):
drives kind of most famously for my public school education,
Martin Luther King, I have a dream all of that stuff.
And then you've got the Black Power era of the
late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, best remembered these
days because of the work of the Black Panthers. So
that's the classification that I've been presented with is, you know,

(06:20):
every dichotomy is false, right, And we're going to talk
about some of the ways that all these things blur together.
But so people talk about it. They talk about the
Civil rights era as like pacifist reformism, and the Black
Power era as like all armed revolutionaries. More and more
people are starting to talk about what people have been
talking about a lot of along the way, But more
and more and more media is paying attention to the
Black Panthers, for example, also had a lot of mutual

(06:42):
laid programs and breakfast programs and all of these other
things that are part of what made them so dangerous
and powerful. Yeah, and one day we're going to get
into all that, but today we're going to talk about
kind of the inverse. We're going to talk about how
in the civil rights era it's more complicated than it's
sometimes presented.

Speaker 4 (06:58):
When you guys do the breakfast program for the Black Panthers,
have me back, and I'll try to get some stories
from my dad, who's a direct beneficiary of that program
on the South Side of Chicago when he was growing up.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
Oh yeah, no, that would be amazing. Yeah, And that's
actually one of the kind of things that's interesting is
I keep like, on today's episode, I'll like look through
this and I like start writing like so and so was,
and then I'm like, wait, no, is uh still alive?

Speaker 3 (07:22):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah, you know, these people who are fighting in the fifties, sixties, seventies,
many of them are still with us, which is fucking cool.
So in previous episodes, especially last week's episodes, we talked
about that most famous of white supremacist organizations, the ku
Klux Klinn, the and we're going to go through the
super basics of them, the speed run of these fucking

(07:43):
worst people. And well, there's so many worst people in
US history, but these are some of the worst people
in US history. Okay, so there's like three or four
basic distinct phases of the Klin. They were founded because
of frat club for piece of shit white Southern racists.
In the wake of the Civil War. They decided to
rely on raw terror and violence in order to fight
for white supremacy after having lost a war. This fell

(08:06):
apart in eighteen seventy one because the federal government was like,
you actually can't do that, and then white racists figured
out a better strategy. Instead of nighttime terror was legal
disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow laws that fucked everything up
really bad. That's Klan number one, and then you got
Clan number two. This is the weird multi level marketing
scheme invented in nineteen fifteen by some people who are

(08:29):
basically cosplaying the old Clan. It was this huge social
club for white Protestants that became the armed wing of
the Prohibition movement as well as the white supremacy movement.
And they had this whole anti immigrant thing that not
only had them fighting against black people, but also Jews
and white Catholics and basically immigrants from anywhere. They just
fucking hated everyone. Last week we talked about some of

(08:51):
the organizations that worked to stop them. They fell apart
because like every financial scam, they fell into bitter infighting
and disgrace and their property was repossessed and all that shit.
By the end of the nineteen thirties or the Begain nineteen.

Speaker 3 (09:03):
Thirty time time that was I know.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
That, I know, I want more. Well, we're starting to
see all of these modern white supremacist movements fall apart
into weird infighting.

Speaker 3 (09:12):
And it's been really lovely.

Speaker 4 (09:13):
Every time I get a little update like so and
SOEs go into prison, I'm like, yeah, small.

Speaker 2 (09:18):
Victories totally or the like I wish I had the
notes in front of me about this, but there's like,
I don't know, like ten years ago it like went
around the anti fascist thing that some of the Nazi
clan member people or whatever, like one of them killed
the other because they like there was like some like
incestuous like cheating that happened, Like.

Speaker 4 (09:43):
They're taking themselves down even yes, yeah, all the insurrectionist
who posted to Instagram, it's like, oh, you made everybody's
job so much easier.

Speaker 2 (09:50):
I know you, I know. And so that's kind of
how the nineteen twenties, clan went down even though there
was they were five millions strong fucking peak. Eventually everyone
realized that there were a bunch of like just random
pieces of shit, and people started distancing themselves from them.
But the fucking clan is like a stupid racist hydra.

(10:14):
And the third Clan popped back up pretty soon after
the second Clan went down, and this time they got
back to their roots, which was terrorizing black people in
order to maintain white supremacy. And you know, this is
kind of back when you people were like really blatant
about being white supremacists. Actually, we're getting back there, We're
getting back to that point. But they never reached quite

(10:34):
the numbers of the Second Klan because they were less
of like a popular organization, right, and they were more
just like just fucking terrorists, right. They were really die hard.
They were decentralized, and they got an awful lot of
terrorism done. They also there's like arguments to be made
about whether they infiltrated the police or whether they just
came out of the police, you know.

Speaker 4 (10:55):
Mmmmm yeah, yeah, I'm on team the slave catchers into police.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
Yeah, yeah, I think I think most people would agree
with that.

Speaker 4 (11:04):
As we just look at their badges, it's who's happening
and the current forever police lineage of just you know,
active lynching. Yeah, I think they're one in the same.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
Yeah, So third clan has a lot of cops in it,
or the cops have a lot of clan in it
or whatever. We're just using synonyms. But wherever there's the
bad people, there's the people trying to stop the bad people.
And we're going to talk about some of those cool people.
And we're going to talk today. We're going to talk

(11:36):
a lot about some of the nonviolent organizations, right and
then on Wednesday we're going to come back and talk
more about a lot of the organizations that defended them,
even though there was a whole decentralized defense of them
that happened before that. And so we're going to talk
about two of the major nonviolent organizations today. We're going
to talk about CORE and we're going to talk about SNICK.

(11:58):
There's like a bunch more than this. SCLC will come
into it a lot, the NAACP will come into it
a lot. But for what we're going to talk about
Core and SNICK kind of where it's at the oldest
one of these groups is the Congress of Racial Equality,
just founded in nineteen forty two. It grew out of
the Christian pacifist movement, especially a group called the Fellowship

(12:20):
of Reconciliation. Only about a third of its founders were black.
I was founded by almost half women, which for the
time is better than some of the other people around.
You know, a lot of the founders of this were
ministers and of various Christian denominations, and that is actually
something that they like. The multi faith getting together, the

(12:41):
groups that got together a lot of different faith based
organizations to do a lot of good work is like
something that I think sometimes is left out of the
more radical understandings of all of this history. Basically, Core
started as a we like what Gandhi is doing in India,
We're going to do that for anti racism in the US.
And they got together. They fought against Jim Crow laws,

(13:03):
housing discrimination, voting rights, all that stuff. They were pretty cool.
They have complicated stuff that we'll get into, but you
know everyone does. In nineteen forty seven, Corps sent sixteen people,
eight white, eight black on a journey of reconciliation on buses,
and this was kind of the first Freedom Ride about

(13:24):
fifteen years before the freedom rides became more of a thing.
And this first journey was a mix of folks that
had socialists, that had religious leaders at Pacifist, it has musicians,
it had just like people who wanted the world to
be better, who were like, fuck it, let's go do
this weird, dangerous thing where the government had just passed
a law banning segregation on interstate travel, and so basically

(13:46):
they were like, all right, we're going to go test that.
We're going to go said people like basically white and
black people sitting next to each other on the bus
or sometimes the white people sat in the back of
the bus and black people sat in the front of
the bus. All this shit, and they just basically went
around the South, the kind of near South, doing this.
It didn't go smoothly. I don't know whether that'll be

(14:10):
shocking to hear. It didn't take long before four of
them were arrested. I mean, this is okay. This is
like one of the things that's so interesting me about
this right is like so much of the Civil rights
era stuff was basically like the federal government like would
pass a law and then people would be like, let's
go see if this law is real, and then they
would find out that the law is not real because
the local police everywhere they go, would you know. So basically,

(14:35):
two black men were arrested for not moving to the
back of the bus, and two white men were arrested
for defending the two black men who would not move
to the back of the bus. All four of them
ended up on segregated chain gangs. The black men got
thirty days and the white men got ninety days. And
specifically because the racist judge was so mad at the
white people for betraying whiteness.

Speaker 4 (14:56):
Wow, wow, that is the deep de deep seated hate.
Because it's one thing to be like, I hate black
people and I punish them more harshly. It's another thing
to be like and if you're a white person, I'll
punish you three times. Is hard because screw you. He's
including my agenda, I guess. Wow.

Speaker 2 (15:13):
Yeah, Like overall, like clearly including in the civil rights movement,
Like it was much harder for black folks as part
of the civil rights movement the wife than the like
white allies and stuff. But here and there you would
run across this kind of shit where like the clan
would go around being like, hey, any white people, if
you show up and support this, we're gonna murder you,
you know, or or whatever like that. That kind of

(15:35):
shit happened a lot. We're gonna get to some of that.
So the judge, I'm not going to read the quote
of what I literally can't the judge said a lot
of racist shit in the sentence scene.

Speaker 3 (15:46):
But it and I'll do an interpretation of the No.

Speaker 5 (15:50):
No, I didn't.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
I didn't even copy and paste it in my script.
It's just bad. It's just bad shit, you know.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
But in it he specifically called the two white men
who I belil leave were not Jewish, referred to them
as white Jews from or sorry, referred to them as
Jews from New York.

Speaker 4 (16:06):
Okay, so not even doing his research, just just out
here being like if they held the blacks, they must
be Jews.

Speaker 5 (16:13):
Just lumping all that hate together.

Speaker 2 (16:15):
Just yeah, it's like that, like it's like the coastal
elites coming here and ruining everything. You must basically be
the Jews from New York and the like Jewish agenda
to desegregate the United States. And it was just a
slur I think for him, like I don't think he
thought they were Jews. I think it's possible, and I

(16:36):
couldn't the books I was reading about it didn't like
name which of the white people were the people who
got arrested. But it's completely possible they were like Christian ministers,
you know, so they get arrested. They spent some time
on the chain gang. And one thing of note, they
intentionally went to the Near South and not the Deep South,
because basically they were like, if we do this in

(16:57):
the Deep South, we're all going to die. And it
took a special kind of courage to go to the
Deep South and desegregate and enroll voters, and or be
from the Deep South and desegregate and enroll voters. And
it's a kind of a courage that many of them found,
which we'll get to later. One of the black men
who serve some time on a chain gang is part

(17:17):
of the result of this journey for desegregation. Was a
guy I want to take a closer look at because
he rules, or at least he did a lot of
really cool stuff. Everyone's complicated. His name was Bayard Rustin.
I know, it's like I'm like, yeah, this guy's awesome,
and you get to like part of the like descriptions
of him that you find, You're like, oh, well, you know, yeah,

(17:39):
but like whatever womst amongst it? Like okay, So Bayard
Rusting he was a black gay Quaker.

Speaker 3 (17:46):
Amazing.

Speaker 2 (17:47):
Yeah, and this this is this recurring thing on this
show where somehow Quakers end up in every episode. I've
never done an episode on the Quakers. They're everywhere.

Speaker 4 (17:57):
The Quaker is really rocked with black people, Like whar
They were like, no, we're not down with this slavery thing,
and we will help for you where we can't.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
Yeah, exactly, Like I keep running across being like and
then the people who organized to get black people out
of slavery were black people and some white Quakers, you know,
over and over again. So Bayard Rustin he was deeply
involved in Core from its founding and he was everywhere.

(18:27):
He did everything mostly from behind the scenes because people
were afraid that his homosexuality or socialism would make their
movements look bad. And I want to talk about him
really quick. He was kicked out of his university for
organizing a strike. He sang tenor on Broadway in the choir.
He sang spirituals on a ton of records. He joined

(18:47):
the Communist Party for a little while, and then he
realized that Stalin was a fuck, and so he quit
the Communist Party and he became a socialist. Specifically, he
was in the Communist Party until the USSR ordered the
Communist Party in the US to stop working for civil
rights and start working to try and get the US
to join World War two. He organized a march on
Washington for the desegregation of the armed forces. He went

(19:09):
to California to fight against the racist in prison of
the imprisonment of the Japanese during the war. He would like,
go and try and make sure that people could hold
onto their property and shit like that while they were
being taken into the fucking concentration camps that the US had,
because US is deeply racist. He was arrested nineteen forty
two for refusing to give up his seat on a
bus and that was the moment, I mean, he was

(19:31):
arrested for being black on a bus, and that was
the moment where he was like, from now on, I'm
not going to hide the fact that I'm gay. Because
he basically was just like, oh, I'm with the biggots.
It's hard for me to like totally explain this epiphany
that he had, but he talks about it and I
should have put the quote in and I didn't, And

(19:52):
he got arrested again and again for basically fighting everything bad.
He fought against the colonization of India by the British.
One time restled for being gay. Like one time he
got a rested for rookie up with two dudes in
a car. So he's clearly I know, yes.

Speaker 3 (20:08):
My polyamorous king, I was with that on him.

Speaker 4 (20:10):
I don't know if he was about that life, but
if you're doing two dudes in a car at the
same time, I love that for him, I know.

Speaker 2 (20:17):
Not talked about part of the civil rights movement like anyway.
He co wrote an influential, influential passfist paper in the
nineteen fifties called Speak Truth the Power, but in the
end he kept his name off of it. He chose
to keep his name off of it because he didn't
want to sexuality discredit the paper. And he worked with
Martin Luther King Junior. It was probably him that who

(20:41):
convinced MLKA to stop carrying a handgun for self defense,
which goes against the spirit of the rest of today's topic.

Speaker 5 (20:47):
But whatever.

Speaker 2 (20:48):
Everyone's different has different ideas. You know. He was heavily
involved in organizing the nineteen sixty three March on Washington,
the one with the I Have a Dream speech. He
would have been called the director of the March because
he did all of the director of the March stuff,
but he was a gay socialist, so they didn't want
to put his name on it. And like the fucking

(21:10):
right wing dragged up all kinds of shit, just like
the same way that people would.

Speaker 5 (21:12):
Do it on Twitter now.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yeah, and he actually was like one of the staunchests,
so basically they're like, oh, this communist. He was one
of the staunchest anti USSR US socialists to the point
where he actually kind of verged into some right wing positions,
like he supported the war in Vietnam, for example, because
he hated the USSR, so he like supported the Cold War.

(21:34):
This is why I was the beginning where I was like,
I gets interesting.

Speaker 3 (21:39):
The complex time, and when you're yeah, you know.

Speaker 4 (21:42):
What I mean, Like American wars are off started because like, oh,
someone is doing something terrible, and then we really go
in and do horrible shit, and we're.

Speaker 3 (21:49):
Like, what we had to stop. This guy had to
meet the mother that was so oh gosh, Yeah, you're right,
MESSI Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
And so he gets called a conservative socialist, and he's
the only term I've actually personally run us. Anyone get
called a conservative socialist, and I don't really understand it yet.
Funny in the eighties, as most people would be wont
to do as an out gay person, he turned to
gay activism in the nineteen eighties. He died in nineteen
eighty seven, not of HIV AIDS. He died of being old.

Speaker 3 (22:18):
He was born in nineteen twelve.

Speaker 2 (22:20):
Yeah, included a good long life, Yeah exactly. He did
fine anyway, As just an aside, because I find him
really interesting because people don't talk about the gay, polyamorous
who fucking like organize the March on Washington, you know. Anyway,
he was on a chain gang for a while as
part of his work for CORE. So that's Core. What
a hero, I know, And I'm sure Core could be

(22:43):
its own two part episode. But they're going to come
in and out of today of this week's Now you've
got Snick. Snick is the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which
is six times more radical than you might guess with
a name like that. It was black youth formed and
black youth led, so didn't have kind of that sort
of problem that Core actually ended up dealing with fairly

(23:04):
effectively in the mid to late sixties, where they were
a little bit too white white lead, you know, for
a lot of a lot of what they're doing and
snick comes out of. In nineteen sixty, there were four
black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, who were like, you
know what, fuck all this shit, fuck this fucking white

(23:25):
supremacist society we live in. They were freshmen at the
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, which is an
HBCU historically black college or university. One of these freshmen
went and tried to buy a hot dog at the
Greyhound station and he was denied because he was black.
Because the world's full of racism.

Speaker 3 (23:46):
I can't get a hot dog.

Speaker 4 (23:47):
Bro. Yeah, oh my guy heard die here with my
ancest we had to deal with. I'm like, that is
exhausting hot with my green American.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
Cat, there's all that shit like people talk about like
what my money's no good here or whatever, like, is
like this thing that still happens, Yes, for sure, and
and yeah, though, like literally can't buy a fucking hot
dog something so simple.

Speaker 4 (24:08):
We don't want to make your gay wedding cake, even
though our whole business is making cakes.

Speaker 2 (24:12):
Yeah, totally. Yeah, Somewhere there's a heterosexual couple named Sam
and Chris who can't get a wedding cake. You know,
we're like, what the hell?

Speaker 3 (24:21):
I move out of Indiana? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:23):
Crazy.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
So after getting refused service for a hot dog, they
meet up back in one of their dorm rooms and
they're like, all right, what the fuck do we do? Right?
And there been some sit ins before where people just
go and show up and be like, you know what,
fuck this, I'm gonna be here whether you want me
here or not. Going back to nineteen thirty nine with
the Alexandria Library sit in, a lot of those cit

(24:46):
ins had been successful, but they've been very scattershot up
to that point. It'd be like every couple of years
someone would do a sit in. It's an earlier one
that we're gonna talk about later because I'm really good
at chronology. And so the four freshmen they're like, all right,
we're going to do a sit in at the FW
Woolworth Company's store, which is a big department store that
also was a lunch counter, and you can go buy
stuff there if you're black, but you can't go to

(25:08):
the lunch counter if you're black. So they go in,
they asked to be served, and then they refused to
leave when they were fused service. February first, nineteen sixty
they ordered coffee and donuts, and they got both criticism
and support from both white and black folks at the store, Like, obviously,
most of the white people were like, fuck, you were
not serving you. One white woman was like, oh, this

(25:29):
is great what you're doing, but didn't like do anything
about it. And some of the black folks were like,
oh please, oh god, this is going to go really badly.

Speaker 4 (25:36):
I would not like to be beaten with a police
baton today. You're making that probability increase.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
Yeah, I get it.

Speaker 5 (25:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
They weren't arrested, but they weren't served. They waited until
the store closed, and they left and the store closed,
and they showed up again the next day with more
than twenty black students from the university. They were a
few service, but they weren't arrested. They hung out all
day and did their school work at the store. The
next day they had sixty people, including some high school

(26:05):
students who joined them, and this time some people from
the fucking clan showed up to keep an eye on
it all or whatever, right, but they didn't do shit
because there was fucking sixty people there. Plant the clan
is cowards is one of the main takeaways of all
this research.

Speaker 3 (26:18):
Oh, for sure, you'd have to be.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah, no exactly. It's like fascism and it's.

Speaker 5 (26:24):
Wear masks and they only like unfair fights, so that
that sounds about right.

Speaker 2 (26:29):
Yeah, the fact that they only like unfair fights is
something that we all need to fucking remember. So Day four,
February fourth, there's three hundred students. They fill the entire
lunch counter, including and this time a tiny handful of
some white folks and white women from a nearby university
show up to support as well. Day five they get
their first real counter protesters, about fifty white men, three

(26:51):
of whom were arrested. Day six, they had one thousand
fucking people. They entirely filled the store. Yeah, like shit
snowballs sometimes, you know. They entirely fill the store and
several nearby other segregated stores. By day eight, the cit
In movement spreads across the South. Within months, there's sit
ins in fifty five different cities, and on July twenty fifth,

(27:15):
nineteen sixty, boycotts had cut their income by a third
and the Woolworth store world all started quietly desegregated.

Speaker 4 (27:23):
It's lunch counter, Yes, it's bullying where exactly.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
So the students they're like, all right, we should we
should get organized, right, because that's that's in my mind
where the magic happens is it starts with something that
is spontaneous and then you figure out how to like
keep that going, and that takes structure an organization.

Speaker 4 (27:47):
Yeah, when people see power, they are reminded of their own.

Speaker 2 (27:51):
Right, Yeah, totally totally, And you need that initial spark
for people to actually see that. So in April nineteen sixty,
there was a conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. The adults
or the like older than students it always is referred
to in history. They're like, the adults said this, and
then the youth said this. And I'm like, these people
are like twenty, I don't want to call them not adults, you.

Speaker 3 (28:12):
Know, right, right, right, you're right, the young people.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yeah, So the older than students helped call for the conference. Specifically,
it was Martin Luther King Junior's organization, the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference or the SCLC, called for it, but it
wasn't called for by MLKA. It was called for by
someone I'm going to get to in a second who

(28:35):
is like my absolute my favorite person that I'm going
to talk about this week. And the SELC they weave
their way throughout this episode, but they're not our focus.
And so the conference was organized by the students, and
it was organized by one of the most badass women
to ever live, Ella Baker. Ella Baker, so like the
people that I'm like pulling aside that I'm really excited
about are so behind the scenes, Like yeah, it's like

(29:00):
their fucking thing. Ella Baker worked with King in the SELC,
but she was basically there to be critical of him, Like,
as far as I can tell, she was critical of
his hierarchical leadership and basically the concept of charismatic leadership
as the way to run a movement that was like
her main thing. She was like, that's not the plan.
So she calls for the conference. She told the assembled students, quote,

(29:22):
strong people don't need strong leaders. What they need instead
is organization and to help each other. And they're not
anti leadership, they're anti this, like you know, strong.

Speaker 4 (29:33):
Anti to your point, this hierarchical system that's like we
all follow this one person when we're a community of
people with dope, ideas and capabilities and skills. And what
is the word I'm looking for?

Speaker 3 (29:47):
Not materials resources or people of resources?

Speaker 4 (29:52):
And yeah, we can absolutely just go out and accomplish
these goals without needing to be told to do them.

Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah, but you know people do need to be told
to do chi. Well, it's by things capitaliz. Yay, there's
some ads, and we're back and we're talking about Ella
fucking Baker, who would probably hate being put on a pedestal.

(30:22):
But what is the show but cool people? So I'm
going to take an aside and talk about Ella Baker
because she is my favorite cool person this episode. Sorry
everyone else, I love everyone else, but just seriously, like
my like whatever, I will just gush about Ella Baker.
Very quickly, she she grew up listening to her grandmother
or tell stories about slavery. As soon as soon as
she became an activist, like with the NAACP, she started

(30:44):
working for decentralization and against chrismatic leadership and for more
democratic organizational models, and for better inclusion of women within
activist organizations. So in a lot of ways, as far
as I can tell, like, this is the main person
I can point to and say, this is what grassroots
activism like, the concept of grassroots activism has always been there, right,

(31:04):
But the person who like worked tirelessly to make the
Civil rights movement grassroots was Ella Baker. And that's my
own conjecture about her being the inventor of grassroots whatever.
But she traveled through the South and made direct, interpersonal
connections with people. She believed that the purpose of a
national organization was to support local initiatives and help local

(31:26):
people help themselves, rather than to like see the local
people as people to funnel resources from to move upwards
in a pyramid. You know. She basically said, the movement
made Martin Luther King. It's not that Martin Luther King
made the movement, which doesn't mean that she didn't like
Martin Luther King, you know, just the direction of power
had to be understood. She constantly worked against infighting in

(31:50):
the civil rights movement, including she fought against red baiting.
She was like don't toss out the socialists. They've been
here forever. By the end of her life, she actually
was more openly a socialist, and while she organized nonviolent
direct action, nonviolence was always a strategic choice for her
and not a moral imperative. To quote her biography Joanne
Grant quote, she had no qualms about target practice. The

(32:13):
first organization that she worked with was the Young Negro's
Cooperative League, which was a collectivist organization working to build
black economic power through cooperativism, which is something that I've
run across here and there, like Fanny Louhamer also got
into this stuff later in the sixties and stuff like that,
and it's really interesting to me, and I'm really looking

(32:33):
forward to do more of a deep dive on cooperativism
and specifically how the US concept of cooperativism was like
built out of black cooperativism or like, I don't know, whatever,
it's the most whatever, it's fucking cool the one day,
I'm going to do a whole episode about that. But
Ella Baker, when she stepped back from the movement, it

(32:53):
was around the time that the black power stuff in
the late sixties started to pick up, but it wasn't
because she had a problem with that. It was because
of her health. And she continued to be basically part
of everything. She was part of the Free Angela Davis campaign,
the Puerto Rican independence movement, the anti apartheid movement, all
the while focusing on yeah, right, like just just did everything,

(33:15):
never anything showy. She never like got herself like this
is the speech or this is the martyr or.

Speaker 4 (33:25):
You know, this is the core of activism. And it's
something we're absolutely seeing a the activist community, particularly the
black activist community in America today, is very adamant that
celebrity has no space in their movement, and they're very
weary of anybody who comes in and trying to make
a name for themselves, because if the idea is liberation

(33:49):
and equity for everybody, then how can you center yourself, Yeah,
in that biocycically opposite of the end goal. And so
it's so cool to hear from a people who started that,
you know, and to have that vision before anyone else.
It's it's a radical concept that people can liberate themselves

(34:09):
if they're given the tools and if they're educated about
their surroundings and what's happening.

Speaker 2 (34:15):
Yeah, no that yeah, exactly. No notes Elebaker like you
know the other guy right, like complicated here and there.
I'm like, Ella Baker. I have everything I've read about
Ella Baker. I have not found anything negative to say
about Ella Baker.

Speaker 3 (34:33):
You know, she's a dope woman doing dope thing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
So she called for this student conference and the SCLC,
which was the organization she used to call for the conference,
they were hoping that the students would become the youth
wing of their organization. Right. They were like, ah, excellent,
these young people are doing something cool. We will bring
them into our organization. And Ella Baker was like, she
gave a keynote speech, and her keynote speech was basically

(34:58):
like you might want to remain atonymous and set your
own goals and do your own thing. So they did,
and the youth the adults who weren't the older adults,
they formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It was youth led.
They had a few adult advisors or whatever. I'm going
to keep using the lord adult accidentally throughout the script. Yeah,

(35:21):
Ella Baker was the primary advisor. I've read one thing
that claims that the historian Howard Zinn was another one
of their advisors, Wow, and I want to know more
about it. He wrote a whole book about SNICK, and
I haven't read it yet, so I can't say too
much yet. The organizers gave Ella Baker the nickname Fundi,
which was a Swahili word. To quote the site Afropunk,

(35:44):
the word means to them as relates as to Ela Baker,
an artisan who has mastered their craft and shares their
knowledge freely with the community. And so SNICK organized their
asses off. They went directly into the most dangerous parts
of the South, where many of them were from, although
more of them were urban, going into rural spots in

(36:04):
the South, which is, as far as I can tell,
almost as big of a divide as like North South divide.
The urban rural divide was also very major in terms
of organizing. SNICK worked together with Core and the NAACP,
but unlike Core and NAACP, there were no membership cards,
no membership fees, and while Core was more ideologically committed

(36:27):
to nonviolence, SNICK, even though it was in their name,
was strategically committed to nonviolence, and the field secretaries, which
is what their organizers were called, had tons of autonomy.
There weren't like a lot of levels of hierarchy. I
mean there was RIGHT as an organization. They had different
levels and tiers or whatever. Right, but like overall, the

(36:48):
field organizers, their field secretaries were the main thing. They
had a lot of autonomy. And later Snick gets involved
in like everything, they get part of the broader left
in the late six part of the feminist movement, anti
war movement, and there also we'll get to this later,
the crucible from which the modern conception of black power
was formed. But we're not here just to talk about Snick.

(37:11):
We're going to talk about the delicate and beautiful balance
between the non violence civil rights movement and the people
willing to use violence to defend the individuals within that movement.
So we're going to talk about that. The first thing
you got to understand is that in the Deep South,
especially in rural areas, the gun issue was a settled issue.
Black people owned guns, and they use them to defend

(37:32):
themselves against and others against what white violence. The main
book that I'm referencing a lot throughout this is a
twenty fourteen book by Charles E. Cobb Junior, and the
book is called This Nonviolent Stuff will get you killed.
How guns made the civil rights movement possible. And this
book fucking rules. It's not this like called arms right.

(37:54):
He like very specifically talks about how he's talking about
the context of the rural South in the nineteen in sixties,
and it's readable, it's insightful. This is like, literally, if
I could just pivot. This is not an actual ad pivot,
but just like, seriously, this book rules. It's one of
the best books I've ever read for this research. He
was there. Charles Cobb was a field secretary for SNICK

(38:15):
from nineteen sixty two to nineteen sixty seven, and the
premise of the book, to quote him, is that the
use of guns for self defense in the non violence
civil rights movement was necessary and vital to the movement's survival.
Writing about his own experiences, he said, quote SNICK was
unusual and placing its field secretaries in rural Southern communities

(38:36):
to work from the bottom up instead of the top down.
Living among the downtrodden black men and women of the
Deep South, I underwent a subtle conversion the principles and
illusions I had brought with me of nonviolence, of the
uniformity of the Southern Black experience were shaped by the
men and women I encountered there. We and Snick were
radicalized by working with people in their homes and communities
much more than by ideology.

Speaker 4 (38:58):
It's probably practically living under the boot of oppression made
you more active in your desire to liberate the people. Wow,
I imagine, imagine in other words, leave your guilded cages, y'all. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's for sure different, particularly I think in the
Deep South at that time. My dad talks about he

(39:20):
his family came up to Chicago during the Great Mississipi Migration,
which is a time period post slavery when a lot
of black people moved from the South to the North.
But he would go back to Alabama to visit his
great grandmother who still lived in a slave cabin where
she had been freed.

Speaker 3 (39:36):
Like she was freed, they weren't using it. She just
stayed on the land.

Speaker 4 (39:41):
And I think you know, a lot of people did,
which meant you're looking at dirt floors, no inner plumbing.
You're restricted to what kinds of jobs you can have
in the South under Jim Crow. So you're seeing a
lot of people like either being porters or anning chicken
and so like it's a and and then because you know,
if you know, and the rules set around specific jobs,

(40:01):
that's where we got like you can be making two
dollars an hour as a waitress, and so there's like
a lot of financial restrictions. And I think we saw
you know, I can only imagine that if you were
living there during that time, like your instinct would be like, oh, immediately,
these people need access to better rights, like this is insane.

Speaker 2 (40:19):
Yeah, yeah, totally. And like and there's this thing that
also happens right where like people sometimes like go out
into a community and he's a he's a black man,
but he's from an urban environment going out into a
rural environment, you know, and like coming with an ideology, right,

(40:40):
and then immediately being like instead of like educating these
these like you know, ignorant rural people, instead being like, oh,
they know what's up and I should learn from them.
And that was like the process that seemed to happen
with snick Field organizers, and that absolutely ties into how

(41:00):
the whole thing transformed and the whole push towards black
power and the the change within the civil rights movements
as far as I can tell and as far as
like I've read. And yeah, I I met Charles Cobb
briefly in North Carolina because he did a talk about
the book, and I I went because that day i'd

(41:23):
just been whatever the Nazis know, they doxed me. I'd
just been docks by Nazis they called themselves, don't call
us Nazis, were neo Confederates. I'd just been like docks
by neo confederates who had like told me, like showed
me pictures of my family and told me they were
going to burn my house down and shit.

Speaker 3 (41:38):
And he sound like Nazis.

Speaker 4 (41:40):
I just want to know you yourself, Needo conservatives, you
should move in a different direction than the Nazis because
that sounds like class a Nazi bullshit.

Speaker 2 (41:47):
Oh, Neo Confederates. Sorry, I might as miss stake. Yeah,
I said no, But I mean, it's like whatever, Neo
Confederate and Nazi, Like, I don't care whether you call
yourself an American Nazi or German Nazi, you're fucking Nazi.
Like fuck you. They had like just doxed me and
some other some other folks. And so I bought a
rifle and I never owned a firearm before. I didn't

(42:08):
particularly grow up around firearms, and like, I come from
a sort of military family, but with like a liberal bent,
you know. And and so I told him, I was like, hey,
like your talk was really interesting and meaningful to me
because I I just went and bought a rifle today.
And he was like, well, how do you How do
you feel about that? I was like, I feel really
mixed about it, and he was like, that makes sense, you.

Speaker 5 (42:30):
Know for sure?

Speaker 2 (42:33):
And and Mike, I mostly just like talking about how
much I like this guy in this book. But my
copy of the book is signed from my generation to yours,
and I think about it a lot.

Speaker 3 (42:41):
Ah, I'm gonna cry.

Speaker 4 (42:43):
That's really beautiful, And especially for somebody who's doing, you know,
such key and important work and understands intimately the struggle.
Like what a blessing to sort of be given a yeah,
you know, like a passing of the baton.

Speaker 3 (42:56):
That's wonderful.

Speaker 2 (42:57):
Yeah. Uh. To quote more from this, nonviolent stuff will
get you killed. The rural black culture that Snickfield secretaries
encountered in the Deep South had long accepted arm self
defense as legitimate, although local black people could be uncertain
about when and how best to employ it. The idea
itself was not subject to debate. Guns were common in

(43:17):
southern households, used not only for hunting but for protection
from white violence. The idea of removing guns from the
equation was, for the vast majority of rural Southern blacks
simply a non issue. Later, I'm going to talk about
a bunch of the organized groups that defended the non
violence movement, and those groups matter, but I think it's
also worth understanding where they come from. Which what didn't

(43:39):
just like show up like one person wasn't suddenly like,
I've an idea, we can defend ourselves, right. It was
built on a bedrock of people just doing it themselves.
Charles Cobb describes, for example, a seventy year old woman
in Lee County, Georgia named Mama Dolly. She ran a farm,
and I'm under the impression maybe she was a local midwife,
and a quote a student organizer stayed with her. What

(44:00):
Snick would do is I'd send people down to like
and Core would do is like people would leave and
go into these rural environments and register people to vote
and possibly help organize desegregation and stuff like that. Right,
and they would stay with black families who would defend them.
So to quote a student organizer, Mama Dolly had this

(44:20):
big shotgun. I tried to talk her out of guarding me,
but she said, Baby, I brought a lot of these
white folks into this world, and I'll take them out
of this world if I have to.

Speaker 5 (44:29):
Come on. Mama, Yes, I know.

Speaker 2 (44:33):
That's why I think she was probably a midwife. Sometimes,
no matter what I said, this is to the quote. Sometimes,
no matter what I said, she would sit in my
bedroom window leg propped up with that big old gun.
If you know how to handle it, way better than
I did. In fact, I knew nothing about no shotgun.
And everything I've read is story after story of rural
farmers defending organizers, most of whom were black urban Southerners,

(44:56):
some of whom were you know, white urban Southerners, people
from all over in different backgrounds.

Speaker 3 (45:01):
Right.

Speaker 2 (45:01):
But because frankly, defending these people as part of hospitality,
and of course the supremacists were really fucking mad about snick,
and so the bravery of these organizers matters, But the
bravery of the people who took them in is at
least as much. Right because the organizer might leave, but that.

Speaker 4 (45:19):
Family wherever and everyone knows you in all your business,
and I know that some of them like lost business.

Speaker 3 (45:29):
You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 (45:29):
If you're, yeah, a black person providing a service that
is available to white people, like I could put your
whole livelihood in danger.

Speaker 3 (45:36):
That's wild.

Speaker 2 (45:37):
Yeah. And the Klan was during this time running around
killing people, burning and bombing buildings, murdering organizers and like,
people would go register to vote and they would get
laughed out of the room by clerks or one case,
like in I think it was Mississippi, Like literally someone
just got pistol whipped because they were like, what do

(45:57):
you mean I can't register to vote. I pulled out
a gunhead hit the woman in the head. But you
know what won't hit you in the head except with
really good deals.

Speaker 5 (46:08):
No potato, that's right.

Speaker 2 (46:13):
Oh yeah, okay, So so Joelle, one of the things
that we try and do on the show is we
try to be sponsored only by very good things, right,
and so our perennial sponsor is the concept of potatoes.
They're good for you, you can eat them cooked when you
cook them first. They're cheap. And I'm wondering if you
have any anything that you would like to be sponsored by.
We've also been sponsored by sleeping dogs.

Speaker 5 (46:37):
Like I think good Comb.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
Yeah, good Comb was good.

Speaker 4 (46:41):
The laughter of children after children is great. I want
to be sponsored by a rainy day with a good book.
Oh yeah, favorite spaith to live in.

Speaker 3 (46:54):
Oh my god, if I could eat. That's what heaven
looks like to me.

Speaker 4 (46:57):
It's constantly raining, and like there's good books and hot
tea everywhere.

Speaker 3 (47:02):
He never goes cold.

Speaker 2 (47:04):
All right, that is what we are sponsored by today,
and possibly some other stuff that you'll hear about in
a second. Okay, and we are back, and I'm going
to mostly the like atrocities of what people were facing
have been told at great length, and so I don't

(47:24):
want to like specifically go through like every time that
people got murdered or whatever, but one of them that
impacts all of this a lot. In Mississippi, in September
nineteen sixty one, a local black farmer and NAACP leader
who was affiliated with SNICK. His name is Herbert Lee.
He was killed in broad daylight in front of a

(47:45):
dozen people. And he got killed by his childhood friend
who was a white man, an a racist who it was
like neighbors who had just like decided should had gone
too far, and he'd basically been like, Hey, come over here,
I want to talk to you. And then herbertly, Uh,
the murderer, Yeah, the murderer was acquitted that afternoon by

(48:07):
an all white jury.

Speaker 5 (48:08):
What whoa?

Speaker 2 (48:10):
And no one none of the witnesses felt safe coming forward.
Right later, a black witness of the crime, Luis Allen,
was murdered on his own property before he could testify.
And that murderer was almost certainly done by the local
county sheriff. And like, this is an example story, not

(48:31):
the thing that changed everything. This is what people like, Basically,
a lot of the people that I'm reading about were
refer to what's happening as a war, and they're like,
I am in a war against white supremacy. And that's
that's some of the context, you know. So so SNICK

(48:51):
organizers themselves, they didn't go armed because it would break
the spell of what they were doing, and nonviolent organizing
was a very effective strategy. And and but especially in Mississippi,
their local defenders absolutely went armed. The whole thing was
massively debated within the movement, but overall a lot of

(49:11):
the debates against this sort of protection were happening far away.
You know, they were the movement leaders who weren't in
the shit. So I like telling stories about the clan losing.
So I'm going to tell some stories about the Klan losing.

Speaker 3 (49:28):
Oh Yes.

Speaker 2 (49:30):
In nineteen sixty five, Baker County, Georgia, there was a
seventeen year old young woman named Shirley Miller, who, alongside
other folks, integrated the local high school. The Klan burned
across in her yard. More than a dozen of the
focks showed up to, you know, scare her and possibly
do worse. So Shirley's mother called her neighbors, who poured
in armed and took aim at the clansmen, and the

(49:51):
klansmen literally begged for their life in order to leave.

Speaker 3 (49:57):
Recording of bad.

Speaker 4 (50:00):
Could you imagine a recording of that, just playing it
back and be like, yes, you assholes, that's for threatening
a high school or you jerks.

Speaker 2 (50:08):
Yeah. In nineteen sixty four, some folks tried to register
to vote and were turned away. Missus Brewer's sons were
turned away, so the clan showed up at the Brewer
house to teach her and her kids a lesson about
trying to vote. So Jannie Brewer, missus Brewer, she armed
up her kids, and she armed up her grandkids, and
she armed up the Snick organizers who were supposedly not

(50:28):
supposed touch guns, and then made a bunch of Molotov cocktails.
Oh to quote Charles Cobb again. As the sheriff and
the truckload of klansmen approached the farmhouse, the Brewer family
members and some of the Snick workers were still in
the fields with rifles and shotguns. Before the raiders reached
the house, someone shone a floodlight on them, others fired

(50:51):
into the air. Brewer stood on the front porch ready
to hurl a Molotov cocktail. Everyone, including the sheriff, fled.
Night riders never returned to the Brewer farm.

Speaker 3 (51:02):
Come through, fuck around and find out, you real.

Speaker 2 (51:07):
What the main thing that I keep finding And I
read a book that has a bias, right to be clear,
and I've read other stuff, and I have my own
bias and all of that, But one of the things
that kept happening was the arguments for non violence. Part
of the arguments for non violence is this is a
very effective strategy in the nitty gritty, and I think
that's true. But part of the argument was if we

(51:29):
arm up, they'll kill us, all right, And what the
book that you know, this non violence stuff get you
killed and anything else that I've read doesn't carry that out,
at least in this context and time that I'm talking about.
What would happen is the clan shows up, someone takes
a fucking warning shot and they're like, oh god, those

(51:50):
people have guns, even though the clan is guns too,
and they never come back. That happens more times than
not in what I have read. I'm not trying to
make a blanket stay.

Speaker 4 (52:00):
Feel like no, no, no, no no, but I hear what
you're saying. I think the non violent aspect was necessary
to change liberal white people's minds, right, because the argument
was always like, oh well not yet. People need time
to adjust, so your liberty has to wait. But then also,
if you react violently to whatever violence is being hurled

(52:21):
at you, suddenly you're still the danger, which is a
confusing mind game to play with a person. But there
they were, and so I think that that was a
you know, and similar to Gandhi, because I'm sure there
were people in India also being like no, fuck, you
get off my land of British people.

Speaker 2 (52:36):
Yes, totally, what are you doing?

Speaker 4 (52:39):
But in order to make the world care, you have
to be like, now, I didn't do anything to defend
myself and these guys were total jerks. Still I didn't
do anything to piss them off. I didn't do anything
to defend myself, and yet here they still come. And
that's when people can sort of be like, oh, well,
now I see that you're clearly a monster. There's no
way you can't really twist that.

Speaker 2 (52:56):
Yeah, totally, which is exhausting.

Speaker 3 (52:58):
It's an exhausting gauntlet to ask people to run through.
But yeah, what else can you do?

Speaker 5 (53:03):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (53:03):
I mean yeah, yeah, Like I don't know, you know,
like I'm not. It's so fucking complicated, and it's something
that every movement needs to determine for itself, you know.
And that is actually one of the things that comes
up in the book. And I don't know if I
wrote in the script, maybe you hear me talk about later.
A higher percentage. It was not universal. There were white

(53:25):
people who were totally fine with violence, and there were
black people who totally fine with non violence. But a
higher percentage of the organizers who were coming from out
who were white, were more ideologically committed to non violence,
whereas more of the black organizers were strategically committed to
non violence.

Speaker 3 (53:40):
I'm sure, yeah, and.

Speaker 2 (53:44):
That matters so much, especially when you're talking about like, look,
I clearly I'm a white person talking about this history
because I think it matters. But like, white people shouldn't
fucking have anything to do with saying what should happen?
Like that doesn't make any fucking sense.

Speaker 4 (53:59):
You know, they still weren't at a place where they
were ready to recognize the power structure and its entirety, right,
because if they were, then you would never ask people
who were constantly being threatened to be non violent. But
because they couldn't acknowledge, like, oh, we as white people,
also hold power despite the fact that we want to
stand with you, So we're going to ask you to

(54:21):
not only be non violent, but it's a way for
us to not have to become violent in defenses. Yeah,
I can stand with you and say, oh no, I
was there. I linked arms, Like, but did you take
up arms which would have been much more helpful in
protecting these bodies you claim to care about? Like it's again,
it's a total mind fuck and a completely ridiculous gauntlet

(54:41):
to ask anyone to have to run through. But I
think at the time it was the only way to
move the needle, and therefore necessary.

Speaker 3 (54:50):
I do totally hope that we've.

Speaker 4 (54:53):
Moved past that in some I don't think from on
a government level we have, but I think for a
very person on an individual level, I hope that we
as a society are moving past this idea that passivism off,
you know, is the best reaction to violence.

Speaker 3 (55:10):
Clearly, not right, clearly.

Speaker 2 (55:12):
Not yeah, exactly, and then it even strategic non violence
apparently works really well paired with self defense.

Speaker 3 (55:20):
You know, you know, you know, but I don't want
to hurt you.

Speaker 4 (55:24):
I don't want to you know, bomb or hurt anybody
or takes someone's you know, friend, parent, whatever away from them.

Speaker 3 (55:31):
But don't fuck with me. Yeah, I think that's a
very reasonable line to draw.

Speaker 2 (55:36):
Yeah, Or like, don't fuck with those non violent activists, you.

Speaker 3 (55:39):
Know, also, don't fuck with them, they're just here.

Speaker 2 (55:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (55:42):
Absolutely so.

Speaker 2 (55:45):
Another one of these stories, an indigenous activist named Hunter
Bear Salter was a professor at an HBCU in Mississippi
called Tugala Southern Christian College, and he spent his time
advising students who are sitting at lunch counter and you know,
teaching and all that stuff. And he traveled armed everywhere
he went, and in nineteen ninety four he said the

(56:06):
fact that he was known to be armed is the
reason he survived the era. And yeah, I have no
particular doubt about that. And the student the school itself
was constantly being attacked by night riders because it was
an HBCU until the school formed armed groups of students
and faculty to keep watch, and when word got out
about that, the attacks dropped significantly. So self defense was

(56:28):
a decentralized, impromptu and ever present part of the non
violence movement until it was organized, which we'll talk about
in part two. But first let's talk about you, Joelle
and the things you do and the places people can
find the things you do.

Speaker 4 (56:47):
Yes, I am on all the social media sites, but
mostly Hive nowadays actu amoni. It's j O E l
l E m O n I q u E. I'm
the EP of Fake Doctor's Real Friends. If you have
any desire to come check out a Scrubs rewatch podcast.
Also have a New Girl rewatch podcast. Called Welcome to

(57:09):
our show that I adore, and then you check out
my writing all over the place. I'm doing a lot
of work for The Rap Right Now and Polygon, and
then I'm frequently at NPR's pop Culture Happy Hour. Yeah,
and I'm hoping to bring a couple of new shows
to you guys next year. So just follow me on

(57:29):
the socials and you'll hear all about it.

Speaker 2 (57:32):
Awesome. I and you got anything you want to plug?

Speaker 5 (57:36):
Isn't there a live stream coming up?

Speaker 4 (57:38):
Oh?

Speaker 5 (57:38):
There is a life Actually I think it's this week.

Speaker 2 (57:41):
Yeah, it's this week. As you listen to this, if
you want to hear me learn about something bad from
Robert Evans, the host of Behind the Bastards, you can
listen to the live stream me hearing about bad things.
They don't tell me ahead of time what the bad
thing is, so you can watch me react in horror

(58:03):
to the world. You can get tickets by googling.

Speaker 3 (58:07):
Sounds like an amazing show. I'm really excited.

Speaker 4 (58:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:11):
The link to get tickets is a momenthouse dot co
slash bTB. I think when you buy a ticket, you
can also submit question for the Q and A. Make
sure you get those in asap before the event this weekend.
Uh yeah, I think that's all I've got.

Speaker 2 (58:26):
All right, Well, we will see you all on Wednesday. Farewell.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

(58:49):
your podcasts.