Part One: Mutual Aid and Burial Societies: The Origins of Black Cooperativism in the US

Margaret talks with Joelle Monique about the deep roots of economic cooperation in Black America.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People. Did
Cool Stuff the only podcast that I am currently recording
while sleep deprived because I fell into a really deep
research hall instead of sleeping. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
and with me today is Joel Monique, who is a
filmmaker and iHeart, executive producer and a writer. How are you?

Speaker 2 (00:23):
I'm so good, Margaret. You know, sometimes we listen to
be very frank and not too excited. I don't like
when people are too happy. It makes me feel suspected,
like what's going on that you have so much joy
in your life?

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Yeah, like hippies, they're always pretending to be.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Happy for sure. What was it? Called it toxic happiness
with an aggressive happiness for You're like, this is it's
too much. But I've been doing a lot of different
stuff and trying new things and things. I was like, oh,
I'm gonna do this for a really long time. For example,
go on a vacation. I keep saying I'm going to
go on vacation, and then either I work through it

(01:01):
or it's a work trip, neither of which counts as
a vacation. So I've actually told people you can't contact
me through these days. I'm taking off, I have plans,
I've booked things. It's happening. I am leaving my state.
I'm only going to the next one, but it's still happening.
I'm very excited about it. And I'm gonna see making

(01:21):
the Stallion while I'm there, so you know, it's just
a sea of winds.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
There's this HP Lovecraft movie that's terrible. I'lled dig on
and I don't actually sually watch horror movies, but I
watched this a long time ago. The scene that I remember,
besides the scenes that I couldn't watch because I'm squeamish,
was the very beginning. They're on this boat and he's
just like working on his laptop the whole time they're
on this like boat out off the coast of Spain
or something, and finally his wife is like fuck you
and throws his laptop into the ocean. And I think

(01:47):
about that scene because about once a month I think
to myself, what if I threw my laptop into the ocean,
wouldn't that be great? And then I remember how much
I enjoy eating food and how much I enjoy expressing
ideas and having other people interact with this.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah, yeah, you'd be upset without the word. I just think,
what if I could work and it didn't have to
be a grind?

Speaker 1 (02:13):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:15):
What if you could work and people were like, that's
good enough for today, and you're like, I also feel
satisfied with the amount of work done today out of
return for more work tomorrow, Like I'm gonna be alive tomorrow.
It's just weird to me that we're just like just
keep going, like, but I'm done, I'm done, I'm done
for the day. I'm tired. Yeah, I feel you also
would completely just be Sometimes I'm like, I do I

(02:35):
need this laptop? So I throw it away? Do I
violently destroy it?

Speaker 1 (02:39):
Or just put it in a.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
Drawer and close it and pretend like it's not there anymore?

Speaker 1 (02:44):
All the different ways we dream about destroying our phones
and laptops.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
For sure.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
Well, you may be a producer, but you're not our producer,
because our producer is Sophie. Hi.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
Hi, that's a good that's not Sophie.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
See, that's that's that's the joke is because actually we
have another producer who's just usually not on Mike, named Scharen,
but today Charene is our producer.

Speaker 3 (03:10):
Here, no, h charene, I am here. Thank you for
having me.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
I'm always looking for opportunities to hang with Scheren And
then you were like, Sharen can come hang out with us,
and I was like, this is the greatest day.

Speaker 3 (03:21):
Way about you though, Oh my god, it was so
cool at the moment.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
Correct very loved this is great.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
So okay, other people involved in making this. Our audio
engineer is Danel. Everyone has to say hi to Daniel
Hi Danel.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
Hy Danel Hi Danel.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
We love Our theme music was written forced by un woman.
So the last time we had you on, I think
was an episode about the Black Panthers Breakfast program, the
Mutual Aid program.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yes, do you know what they're Okay? I asked my father.
I was like, hey, will you tell me about that
time that you got food from the Black Panthers And
he was like, absolutely I would, And then I never
thought about it again. I need to sit him down
and actually get recorded, because yeah, he's got like all
of these different stories and stuff. I can maybe ask
my uncle too. But that was a great episode. I

(04:11):
really like learning about that program. That program actually led
me to the documentary The Dear Mama Tupac documentary have
you seen and.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
I haven't seen it yet. I want to do a
specific I like have a book about the Shakur family specifically.
And I'm like waiting to yes, yes, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
It's fabulous and one of the and I've watched a
ton of dots about like the Black Panthers and stuff,
but one of the best about the women behind the
Black Panther movement, about the actual organization that went into
the breakfast program and how it was useful, why it
pissed people off. Fabulous, so good, great footage.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
That's that's awesome. And and the thing I love about
that story. The thing that really stuck with me when
people tell me this story when I was like a
young radical or whatever, people be like, look, the black
they're scared people because they walked around with guns, but
they scared people especially because they fed people, you know.
And this idea that the mutual aid program is like,

(05:09):
really what scared the FBI? And we talked about that
third episode, and today we're going to talk about even
more mutual aid that scared the ever loving shit out
of a bunch of racists. Oh okay, And the reason
I am sleep deprived is this wasn't originally my plan
when I set out to write a script this week,
because last week on this show, I covered a bunch

(05:31):
of factory takeovers in Argentina about how workers took over
their workplaces and turned them into worker cooperatives in two
thousand and one to two thousand and three or so,
and a bunch of these are still around, and it
was fun and had me on this like worker co
op kick, and I was like, I might talk about
worker co ops more this week. And in that episode
last week, I made the claim that the history of

(05:51):
the cooperative movement in the US owes an awful lot
to Black America in a way that is not acknowledged
much right, partly because like the overall okay, the reputation
of co ops. When I think about like co ops,
I tend to think of gentrifying forces of white people.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
Yes, sure, I also view that they are large, beautiful
grocery stories with great produce where they stop you right
at the front. They're like, do you have a membership?
And if not, do you have cash for that membership?
Otherwise get out and you're just like, oh, okay, won't
even look at your space.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
Sorry, Yeah, and so I was like, Okay, I want
to if I made that claim flippantly, I want to
talk about it. And so I was like, Okay, when
I do this piece on worker cooperatives, I'll talk a
little bit about how I was influenced by the black cooperative,
by black cooperative economic thought. And then I started reading

(06:45):
all the books about black economic cooperative thought.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
Mm hmmm.

Speaker 1 (06:49):
So black cooperative economics is not the side story to
this week. It is the story.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
It is the story as it should be. Probably we're
about yes, it really is.

Speaker 1 (07:00):
Not only that, but like there's more Like I stopped
because I ran out of like one time in the
week because I'm sleep deprived, but two like it ran
out of episode time. You know, Wow, we're not even
going to run up to the modern day. The history
of early Black American cooperative economics is just too good

(07:20):
not to deep dive. It is even more fundamental to
understanding how kind of everything in America works than I
would have imagined. And the origin the origin to that
is basically black mutual aid and black rebellion and black cooperation.
Because as far as I can tell, every honest story

(07:43):
about America starts in one or both of the following
two places. Okay, either violent colonial expansion in the genocide
of indigenous peoples, sure, yeah, or the unique racialized chattel
slavery system that was the backbone of the New World
and especially the US is a.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
Seem like important pillais to get started and building a
class of people who leave everyone else literally in their dust. Yeah,
I could see it. I could see.

Speaker 1 (08:11):
Yeah, they would come.

Speaker 2 (08:12):
Back to this.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
It really does. Like any anything you talk about is
that happens in the US is going to be influenced
by both of these things. We all live in the
shadow of these things. And I'm going to argue, because
I like metaphor and take metaphor very seriously, that we
live on land that is haunted. For some of us,

(08:34):
it is haunted by what our ancestors did. For others,
is haunted by what happened to our ancestors. For an
awful lot of people, it's both. But this show's middle
name is formally and Charine. Just make sure to make
it from now on, the show's formal name just stick
this in the middle of the show title is the
coolest things that have ever happened have happened in the
shadow of or in reaction to the worst atrocities the

(08:56):
world's ever seen.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
Wait what we're ting? Can they get that down?

Speaker 1 (08:59):
Yeah? Yeah, the coolest things that have ever happened have
happened in the shadow of, or in reaction to, the
worst atrocities that the world's ever seen. It's a mouthful,
but I think it's worth it.

Speaker 2 (09:12):
But accurate. Okay, I'm gonna listen more, and then I
have potentially some theories.

Speaker 1 (09:19):
Wow, no, no, give me your theories.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
Okay, So before we started recording, I woulday, but I've
been reading a ton of fantasy books, a lot a
lot of fantasy that and Japanese death poetry heavily in
my rotation lately, and the idea of atrocities being not
necessary but entirely unavoidable. Yeah, right, has been lingering over

(09:48):
a lot of that work. I think a lot of
the fantasy I'm reading lately almost always has some kind
of centered shenocide, wore atomic bomb, more atomic esque weapon,
the big one. It's I think haunting us. I think
we're very conscious, like subconsciously aware of the fact that

(10:11):
we are constantly dealing with these atrocities, and yet it's
weird how in our daytime. We do not at all
make space to pause and think or react or address
any of the issues. Yeah, totally sort of haunted by
the fact that it's coming at me and like it's
just pouring out of our art. It's just constantly pouring

(10:33):
out of art of being like, do you know that
we were just killing each other out like a very
large level, very quickly. Yeah, do you see it is?
It's not registering. It's pretty people are telling you. Does
it register now? Maybe it's packaged in a very entertaining story.
Do you see it now? No, it's been it's.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
Creeping me out a little bit.

Speaker 2 (10:49):
I'll be honest.

Speaker 1 (10:51):
No, But see that makes sense and it actually ties
into something that I like. Folks will be surprised to
know that. Another Cool Zone media host, Robert Evans, keeps
the opposite schedule that I do, and so when I
was awake at five in the morning to keep writing
a script, Robert Evans was also awake, but for the
opposite reason, and we were like texting each other and

(11:13):
one of the things that comes up is about we
were just talking about how emotion comes through art and
sometimes how we kind of need art both the creation
of it and the experience of it almost to like
let ourselves feel certain emotions. Yeah, you know, and it
I don't know whether it's because like otherwise we're afraid
that we'll be consumed by them or let mean, honestly, okay,

(11:36):
this is completely off the capital we're talking about, but
like I feel, as I get older, i'd like have
my emotional reactions are dulled. They're still there, but they're
like the sharp edges have been like worn down by time.
Oh for sure, So art becomes even more important to
me as they get older.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
Is that why dads can only cry when they watch movies,
watch very emotional movies, because they're like because I talked
to my father and father like figures men of fatherly ages.
And a lot of times, you know, when I talk
about taking action, they are so like you could if

(12:15):
you want to do if they're like, it's really honorable
that you want to be organizing her out in the street.
But that's not a thing that works. I've said it
fail so many times. It's just it's almost cute, you know,
because it's sometimes cantatizing where you're like celeeral, but yeah,
they're just they're complete. Do I think worn down by existing.

(12:38):
Maybe yeah, are is important. I'm excited to learn about commerce.
Don't mean to derailis. But no, no, I really got
me thinking. And I've also been reading so much poetry
lately that I was immediately like LinkedIn. I was like, yes,
I too, take poetry seriously.

Speaker 1 (12:54):
No, no, I I this is the other stuff that
I'm like. I think people they only know me through
my podcast are like, ah, Margaret who only reads history books,
which is true because I spend all my time reading
history books. But like art and all this stuff, is
I like anything to talk about it too, but to
talk about history and sociology books. I've talked a lot

(13:16):
on the show about the nineteenth century labor movement, especially
how either how annoying and racist the white unions were
or how cool the internationalist, anti racist like integrated unions were.
I haven't actually talked yet as much as I'd like
to about the specific black unions that also existed. But
all the good stuff that comes from the crucible of

(13:38):
the labor movement came either through immigrant workers or black workers.
And we've talked a bunch about a bunch of different strikes,
about how the most important strike in US history. The
most successful labor action in all of US history was
when the black people in the South won the Civil
War by conducting the largest general strike in US history,

(14:00):
crippling the Confederate economy.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
And I don't know, you think about what you're talking about.
That's crazy.

Speaker 1 (14:06):
Oh god, no, no, no, okay, so, oh my god.
So there's this sociologist who I'm about to talk about,
a bunch named W. E. B. Dubois and not yeah,
not pronounced Dubois, Dubois, which I kept wanting to say constantly,
but it's Dubois. And he wrote this theory. But it

(14:28):
wasn't a theory he like, I mean, he backed it
up with facts. I guess it's like a theory in
like a science way, not in a like random conjecture way.
Right where he lays out that enslaved people in the
US South performed a massive general strike. They withheld their
labor during the Civil War in a way that crippled

(14:50):
the Confederate economy and in many ways won the war
and the transfer also because a ton of people fled
at great risk to get across the lines and then
they didn't just like I mean, I'm sure some of
them did. I wouldn't blame him, but they didn't just
like keep going. They stuck around, and they said, well,
how can we help, how can we help the war effort?

(15:11):
And there was this like labor army of formally enslaved,
self emancipated people and it actually, like I talked about
it long enough ago that I'm afraid I'll get the
details wrong. Okay, but this is what I knew about
du boys is that he was the guy who wrote
that thing about the general strike and like changed my

(15:33):
conception of the US Civil War. But it turns out
he wrote a lot of stuff. I mean, I knew
he wrote a lot of stuff, right, Yeah, I didn't
know what it was. So du Bois spent his incredibly
long and influential career throwing proverbial dynamond I guess. Okay, So,
like part of the reason I think that we don't
hear about him much, right is because by the time,

(15:55):
at least of like my white education, there is only
two black people in history, and there's the good one,
Martin Luther King and then the bad one Malcolm X.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
For sure. The way uh it was, I went to
an all white elementary school, and so yeah, that was
definitely the the messaging across the board there.

Speaker 1 (16:16):
Yeah, and so we didn't hear about him as much
or any of the like really influential thinkers that came
before the nineteen sixties.

Speaker 2 (16:25):
Wait was to be Okay, did Paris had a World's
Fair at some point? I think he was at.

Speaker 1 (16:36):
It and he didn't put it past him. It would
that sounds like something he would do.

Speaker 2 (16:41):
Okay, if it's this incredible book that is so highlights
all this detailed information that he brought there about like
what the African American was doing like at that time,
and there's like all these beautiful photographs, so folks like
dressed to the nines, and then there's like talk of
their business and stuff, and just that heat had sort

(17:02):
of like was recording and preserving our history as it
was happening in a way that wouldn't be bias leader,
which I think is kind.

Speaker 1 (17:11):
Of that sounds like this guy, yeah, because that's what
he He's a sociologist and he was really fucking good one.
And another thing that he talked about a lot that
we take for granted today, but was a revolutionary idea
at the time. Even my white education talked about how
the failure of reconstruction right like after the Civil War

(17:34):
was one how the failure of it was because of
racist white people, right, it was because of Jim Crow
Laws and the KKK and like not like black people
are lazy until the boys proved it. The general hypothesis
with black people are lazy and that's why reconstruction failed,
which makes me very annoyed.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
This is Tony Morrison has a quote I will pair
of phrase about sort of being for still waste time
explaining racism away to be like, hey, that's just racism, Yeah,
not talking in fact, you're just talking to me racism
and how to take my time to explain why it's
racist to you instead of doing the work that I
should actually be doing. One exhausting situation. Our poor guy

(18:18):
to bois, he was really suffering.

Speaker 1 (18:20):
That's what he did over the course of his Like
this guy lives to be ninety five and he keeps
working his entire life, right, he saw a lot, sir,
And like I think about I don't remember this guy's name.
A long time ago, my ex boyfriend was telling me
this story about like, yeah, there was this scientist and
he had to spend his entire career measuring skulls because

(18:42):
he was the guy who proved that black people's brains
aren't smaller, and like, imagine, I mean, I guess that's
an important thing to do with your life. Imagine having
to do that with your fucking life.

Speaker 2 (18:54):
I have to put so many numbers down on paper
that you finally see was just right in front of
your face, that that's it's trying, it's trying existing in space. Sometimes, Yeah,
that's crazy.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
So Dubois said a lot of stuff, some of which
was mind blowing at the time, it seems obvious in retrospect,
and some of which isn't talked about now, like this
general strike theory of the US Civil War, and people
have pushed back on that a little bit, like it
wasn't the only thing that once the Civil War. There
was this whole war part of it too, you know,
and like, but it was a really important part that

(19:29):
is still left out of that conversation. He was also
the first person writing about black cooperative economics, at least
that I've found, and in nineteen oh seven he edited
a book called Economic Cooperation among Negro Americans, which had
an excellent and evocative subtitle report of a social study

(19:51):
made by Atlanta University under the patronage of Carnegie Institution
of Washington, d C. Together with the proceedings of the
twelfth Conference of the Study of the Negro Problems held
at Lanta University on Tuesday, May the twenty eighth. Nineteen
oh seven. Wow, I know, just really draws you in.

Speaker 2 (20:06):
Rules, right out the tongue.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah, okay. Two epiphanies while reading this one. People knew
how to subtitle books back in the day. Just really
just lays it out, just real explicit.

Speaker 2 (20:17):
No talk about what's in here. We're not trying to
build mystery. This is the text, Please find us.

Speaker 1 (20:23):
Yeah. Two. My second epiphany was that I have become
someone who reads books with subtitles like this and finds
them riveting and loses sleep because I read more of
the nineteen oh seven book that's incredibly hard to parse
than the twenty fourteen book that explains it all very

(20:44):
rationally and in a way that's easier to understand.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
Because you're an academic and you're like, this is the
first source, this is this is the good stuff right here.
I never knew anyone else's opinions or thoughts.

Speaker 1 (20:56):
No, I'm in art schools, I can't be an academic.
And then I'm like, no, I participate in the academic
study of these books. And yeah, exactly. The nineteen oh
seven book has a lot more of the like really
interesting details, and a lot less of the here's how
to explain it to someone one hundred and fifteen years

(21:18):
from now.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
Right.

Speaker 1 (21:20):
The more readable book I just want to shout out
is called Collective Courage. It's by Jessica Gordon Nemhard and
it's from one hundred years later, in twenty fourteen.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
That's the one I'll be reading.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
Yeah, but before we talk about the history itself, I
want to talk about these products and services that supported
our podcast and we're back. Hey, I also want to

(21:53):
talk about the historian. I want to talk about W. E. B.
Du Bois, or as his friends called him, because he
insisted doctor du Bois.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
List. See, he said, I have the education. I'm not
dealing with these white people.

Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yeah, no, totally, Like.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
This is exhausting, y'all see me, you know what's up?
Please call me the proper way. I respect the hell
out of it.

Speaker 1 (22:18):
Even his best friend had to call him doctor du Bois. However,
his best friend was white. So it's like, according to
one article I read.

Speaker 2 (22:26):
Okay, this is so he said, I can't be best
friends with you if you show me proper respect and
deference at all times so I'm not caught out tripping again.
Seems reasonable that a pro like, we're gonna risk friendship
in this era.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
And if you're gonna be a guy who's like even
my best friends to call me doctor du bois, and
you're gonna be five foot five and carry a cane
even when you don't need it, and wear like dressed
to the nines at all times, you are either an
asshole or one of the coolest and weirdest, most interesting
intellectuals of your time.

Speaker 2 (23:01):
It's really a fifty to fifty split here because I'm
keeping read flags. But also, like, you know what, Yeah,
the truth is always a little murkier. You really want
to put him in a category. I'm sure he was
a complicated human being. Yeah, but there's definitely a lot
of those areaser just like we what now. But yeah,
you know, okay, guy had personality you would not soon

(23:22):
forget him.

Speaker 1 (23:23):
No, I find him charming. I haven't read as much
about his personal life, you know, is that some people
have pointed out that he wasn't necessarily the best husband
or father, but that is outside the scope of this podcast,
and I don't know enough to really talk about it. Yeah,
but besides all these things, the thing you need to
know about doctor du Boys is that he was the

(23:45):
first black graduate with a PhD from Harvard. He had
the club.

Speaker 2 (23:49):
I assure you the pleasure was Harvard when somebody was
asking him about what was her time at Harvard, Like,
I'm sure the pleasure was Harvard. I'm a fact that,
but I'm pretty sure that's that care that rules.

Speaker 1 (24:04):
Okay, which is awesome because later in his life he's
going to reference Oscar Wilde, and Oscar Wilde was exactly
the kind of guy who would say that kind of thing,
right for sure, Like I've I found at least one
thing that referred to him as a dandy, and I
really like putting him in the Oscar wild category. In
a lot of ways, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
That makes sense, spiffy fits wellgroom mushed ash, you can
see it.

Speaker 1 (24:24):
Yeah, and like real fucking good takes on politics.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
Actually, yes, Harvard, Goozett confirms, Okay, that's a factual quote
from Hell.

Speaker 1 (24:33):
Yeah. So the second thing you need to know about
doctor Dubois is that he was born in eighteen sixty eight,
which is famously only three years after the first Juneteenth,
the day when the amani Emancipation Proclamation finally hit Texas.

Speaker 2 (24:48):
Okay, not to safie too much, but I recently found
out my great great great possibly a fourth grade in there.
Grandfather at the initial one in Austin. We own a
store called the Lions Convenience Store, part of the founding,
like Black families of Austin. I was very excited about it.

(25:09):
I no idea where the first two teenth That's amazing.
I've been learning a lot about this space and time.
It's an interesting period for black people that I think
we're sort of only just now uncovering as a consciously
like the in a more zeitgeist way.

Speaker 1 (25:24):
That makes sense to me. I think that there's a
lot of like it's been really interesting to me to
learn that we know more about things that happened a
long time ago now than we did like closer to
those events.

Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yes, one hundred percent.

Speaker 1 (25:40):
That is wild to me. So he was born only
three years after the end of legal chattel slavery in
the US and I'm adding all those qualifiers because there
is still legal slavery in the US. It is in
prison systems, and there's still chattel slavery in the US.
It happens to undocumented people. But the end of legal
chattel slavery in the US is a big fucking deal,

(26:00):
one of the biggest deals in the history of the world. Honestly,
he lived for ninety five years and he died in
nineteen sixty three. He literally died the day before the
March on Washington from the nineteen sixties civil rights era.

Speaker 2 (26:15):
Okay, wait to mark history with just your entrance and exits.

Speaker 1 (26:19):
A it's a reminder that the space between these two
events is one guy. There's one guy between those events.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
Yeah. Wow, he wasn't there for either of them, Right,
you just missed. Yeah, that's intense. Yeah. Time is much
shorter than we think it is. Sure.

Speaker 1 (26:40):
Yeah, so Dubois before he was doctor du Bois, when
he was just Web, he probably didn't go by w
He probably did. He's the kind of kid who would
have gone by Web. Someone knows more about this than me.
There's hundreds of books written about this man. I read
some of his writing and some writing about him. He
was born in Massachusetts in a black community that he

(27:02):
described as a fairly idyllic setting, like local white churches
helped pay for his college, and he says he didn't
experience a ton of racism as a kid. Then he
went to an HBCU, a historically black college in Tennessee.
That place is called Fisk. You will be surprised to
know that between his idyllic black community in Massachusetts and

(27:27):
Tennessee in whatever, he suddenly had to experience an awful
lot of racism culture shock.

Speaker 2 (27:34):
When you cast the Mason Dixon HiT's different for sure.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
Yeah. He went on to become the first black person
in history to get PhD from Harvard, like I was saying,
and then he just went on to write some of
the most influential shit about race the world has ever seen.
In nineteen oh three, he published his most famous book,
The Souls of Black Folk. By nineteen thirty five, he
wrote Black Reconstruction, which is when he laid out about
how Reconstruction was a failure of wasn't a failure by

(28:01):
black people?

Speaker 2 (28:02):
You know?

Speaker 1 (28:03):
Yeah, And the classic black civil rights dichotomy that I
grew up learning about, of course, is Martin Luther King
the Reformer, and Malcolm X the radical right. Yeah, this
sells MLKA short. He was way fucking cooler than my
white liberal education taught me.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
Oh for sure. For sure. I think when I'm okay,
it's like the one of the most waking organizers, like
guy on the ground who understood what it meant not
just to be the face, but to structure the the
way movements were captured. Right, like when I just recently

(28:44):
learned that he chose pretty women to be arrested with
and Georgia, who was like, listen, if they're arresting gorgeous
young women, people are gonna be upset about it.

Speaker 4 (28:54):
Me.

Speaker 2 (28:54):
Yeah, black, I don't really care about me. They'll care
these women are geting arrested, and they could be like,
show we're knowing. Also what we know about the man
is a full human being. But I also think it's
just like that kind of thinking is a is necessary
in order to make movements h gain traction with folks
who might otherwise just you know, chill in the middle,

(29:16):
be comfortable and that. Yeah, yeah, a brilliant thinker, not
just the guy who was like, we no fighting back,
which I think is often how he gets painted.

Speaker 1 (29:26):
No, totally, and it's he's easier to misrepresent and recuperate
into capitalism and like whiteness than the man than Malcolm X,
who was just it's very hard to do that to
Malcolm X.

Speaker 2 (29:38):
Right, yeah, well, because you get to whatever you see
Malcomax being Oh, that guy took no shit, like he
would not food anybody in this room. He would be
like pretender, fake, get out of my face, like no,
there's no uh, it's not a guy who was interested
in being a politician necessarily.

Speaker 1 (29:55):
Yeah, and clear. I wouldn't fuck with either of them
by selling them on the street.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
I'm okay, we'll just take you by surprise exactly, sweet
face like pastorly voice where you're like, oh okay, like
this guy's chill, and then he starts speaking to you
like I'm dumb, I'm stupid, and why did I think
I could take this man is brilliant, Like oh.

Speaker 1 (30:13):
God, yeah, no, totally. So at the turn of the century,
you had a different dichotomy of black intellectuals that was
being presented to everyone. Right, you had Booker T. Washington,
who is more moderate. His position gets called accommodationism and
basically Booker T. Washington, this sells him a little bit short,
and I'll talk about in a second. Booker T. Washington

(30:34):
said folks should compromise on their rights in order to
get the bare minimum ount of white society. Basically, doctor
du Bois comes on the scene and he's like, we
are intellectually the equal of whites, and we demand a
quality now. But it's not just like du Bois radical,
Washington boring compromiser. It was actually about also how they

(30:55):
positions themselves are on class. Washington was like, we want
to focus on our working class power. I'm paraphrasing here,
I'm a little bit putting words in their mouths. We're
going to focus on working class power by educating ourselves
as laborers and will become the economic equals of white
people by like doing manual labor and stuff, and then
we'll be in a better place to fight for our rights.

(31:17):
And a lot of people don't like this because it's like, well,
that's the work we're already expected to do within white society. Anyway,
du Bois came in and he believed in what was
called a classical education. He's a Harvard man. He wants
to focus on intellectual quality. He claimed that a quote
talented tenth, a sort of intellectual class of elites that

(31:39):
made up about ten percent of the black population, aha,
would lead the black people to equality. And it is
not surprising that he ends up pretty Marxist, right.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
Yeah, yeah, the talented tenth is the belief there within
is still held strongly amongst certain African Americans, and in
concerning in what I find to be somewhat concerning ways.

Speaker 1 (32:02):
Yeah, and du bois So the boys didn't coin it. It
was actually coined by a white northern liberals who used
it to diswade their plans.

Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
Right, They were like, oh, we're going to establish black
colleges in the South and make a make a talented tenth.
You could probably guess by the way in our tones.
I have no interest in offering strategic advice. This is
not a plan that specifically appeals to me.

Speaker 2 (32:30):
Yeah. I think any plaster, any plan for improvement that
requires selecting tempercent of people to move on while everybody
else sort of waits for them to open the door,
is immediately suspect, like, wait, what's happening here? Who's doing
the choosing? Would define talent? Talent in what way like
it just it's all it's yeah, not great.

Speaker 1 (32:51):
Well what's interesting. Du Bois is such an interesting thinker.
He develops as he gets older and I'm cutting ahead
to further my script, he changes his position this and
he stops being like by the end of his life,
he's not like, oh, we need the smart ten percent.
He kind of is like, we need the moral ten percent. Oh,
and we also need people to like integrate our struggle

(33:14):
into broader struggle of other marginalized people, and like there's
actually he's hard to pin down in some ways.

Speaker 2 (33:22):
We change so much over the course of our extremely
long lives.

Speaker 1 (33:25):
I know, right, like what like I don't think the
same shit when I was twenty No.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
Thank god he experienced so much.

Speaker 1 (33:34):
So this more radical thinker actually still had more in
common with MLK than Malcolm X, at least tactically. Du
Bois in the early twentieth century. He was not super
stoked on Black Insurrection. He was like, I get it,
I'm not anti. I understand why people do it. Like
he's not mad at Nat Turner, for example, like the
most famous slaver vault person during this period. And we'll

(33:56):
probably still you know, all that stuff comes from the
right place and maintains our dignity. Right, It's better than
just sucking it up. But it is politically misguided because
with the white power structure is more powerful than us,
is his argument. But the opposite position, the accommodationist position,
destroys our dignity and undermines us as people. He presents
this idea so he believes in this third tradition, a

(34:18):
nonviolent defiance, which he connects to Frederick Douglas's legacy. And
what's interesting about this from my point of view, all
of these people are so you know, like when you
simplify him to be like oh Berker T. Washington's like
boring liberal, yeah, or like Frederick Douglass totally nonviolent. Like
first of all, I mean, like the Civil War wasn't
a non violent protest. His like sons were fighting in that.

(34:42):
You know, he was a little bit old by that point.
I'm sure he would have been. Frederick Douglass was no pacifist.
I like this quote by him because it, well, whatever
he says, if the Southern outrages on the colored race continue,
the negro will become a chemist. Anarchists have not the opoly.
I'm bomb making and the Negro will learn.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
A check and innate. Just don't push us too far.
I really appreciate with people just kind of laying on
the line just to be like, you know, what actually
we do, But I think that's also it's irritating. And
again I would say with my my education in Black
American history begins in college because I was want to

(35:28):
start hanging out more black kids my age, and I
I'm sort of it's somewhat perplexing, but also you understand
the intentionality of it the older I get of just
how things we think are understood and buried are constantly
rebrought up as being like factual, like the idea that oh,

(35:53):
black folks just lack education, and if it's just education,
then that would be what would give them a head,
or oh they're lazy, if they would just work harder,
then that's how. It's just like, it's wild to me
that people can still be distracted from the fact that
these are systems in place that are concrete and and

(36:13):
and they're here, and we have to fix it. We
have to do I mean, we have to tear down
and rebuild the system. But there's that I don't know,
it's just crazy. Yeah, that's crazy.

Speaker 1 (36:22):
No, And you know you're right about how like, yeah,
watching these things, like of course everyone understands systemic racism,
and then we've like slipped at remembering systemic racism, you know. Yeah,
So Dubois was into a sort of less violent defiance.
To quote author David Haikwan Kim, Dubois's third way of
political self assertion quote inherits the moral and spiritual legacy

(36:46):
of black insurrectionism without advocating violent mayhem or caste submission.
And so basically it's like, well, we're going to stand up,
but we're just not necessarily going to do it in
these like kind of one off ways. But he gets
really interesting but all this shit I okay, well so
hear me out, Okay, okay, So tactically and strategically he's
sounding a little bit more Martin Luther King. Right, non

(37:07):
violence is not the same as submission. It's the op
is a form of rebellion.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
But the other thing about du Bois is that he
also presaged black nationalism in some ways, according to at
least you know, some of the authors I was reading.
Frederick Douglass was about black folks integrating into white society.
The boys insisted that black people should embrace their African
heritage even while living in the US.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
Yes, everyone else is allowed to, might we also enjoy?

Speaker 1 (37:40):
And he gets more radical as he gets older. Later
in his life he talked about how this negative view
he had of the insurrectionist like when he was writing
in his youth, he wrote about black insurrectionists being like, look,
I got where they're coming from, but it wasn't the
right plan. And the white insurrectionists, like the labor movement
and the anarchists and stuff like that, he writes about
them and he's like, I don't know, it's just weird

(38:01):
flash in the pan stuff. It doesn't matter. Right Later
he writes explicitly about how this was his Harvard education,
talking this is what they taught him to believe about
these movements, and he started seeing labor uprisings as part
of a lineage of struggle, not as just like sporadic

(38:21):
uprisings into chaos.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
Ah.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
He started adding class more actively to his critique, and
he started seeing all of these struggles as connected. And
he didn't drop race. This is his primary thing for
understandable reasons, but he became more of a like racism
deeply informs capitalism, and the two are intertwined, which is
to say, I really like this guy's thinking.

Speaker 2 (38:45):
Yeah, well, and you've paid a picture of an evolution, right.
I mean, if you grew up in a sheltered, comfortable
town where everybody looks like you and your happy in
life is good, like, that's how you perceive the whole
world because you were young, know nothing else. And then
you get to college and you learn a little bit more,
and then it sounds like what should be obvious, And

(39:06):
maybe the main lesson and takeaway for folks is I've
start speaking to more organizers. Is something I've certainly been
checked on a lot, which is like, you come from
a class that has a lot of privilege that you've
not acknowledged yet. And if you do not acknowledge your
class privilege, and then if you do not engage people
outside of your class, you are not actively doing the work.

(39:27):
You're missing such a large picture of what's actually going on.
And it just sounds like he got out in the
world and was like, oh, there's a lot totally. The
workers are angry for a reason.

Speaker 1 (39:39):
Yeah, not random, no, absolutely, but you know what's a
good steam valve for class aggression is ads and stuff
that goodbye, and that way you don't feel as bad
about capitalism because you can participate in it through here's
the ad break.

Speaker 2 (39:58):
Did do? Did it do?

Speaker 1 (40:10):
And we're back.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
Hey.

Speaker 1 (40:13):
So he actually helped form the NAACP in nineteen oh nine,
and then he edited its paper for twenty five years,
which was called The Crisis, which is a fucking sick
name for a newspaper.

Speaker 2 (40:24):
It really is gets attention getting.

Speaker 1 (40:27):
Yeah, and I'm not going to get into like there's
a lot of other folks, like Marcus Garvey comes on
the scene shortly after this and is pretty critical of Dubois.
They have a lot of conflict and you know, and
they're both involved in the Pan Africanist movement, which is
a movement to unite Africa and also often African people
in the diaspora into one identity and or nation to

(40:47):
unite against colonization. But like there's a lot of like
splits within that, and like Dubois, understandably, people were critical
of some of the things that he said. Into sure,
but you know, whatever I did all this cool shit.
His actual political beliefs were pretty consistent throughout his life,
He started off even before he figured out all this

(41:08):
other shit, believing in economic cooperation, like it's not even
the it's not even like nineteen hundred yet before he
starts writing about economic cooperation. He also believed consistently throughout
his life that black people should demand their rights directly
and immediately, and he was basically a democratic socialist for
most of his career. How he actually carried himself politically varied. Basically,

(41:31):
he did whatever he thought was pragmatic at any given point.
He would sometimes vote Republican, sometimes Democrats, sometimes third party,
sometimes refuse to vote, depending on the candidates at the time,
and basically like what they specifically offered to the black community,
which I don't make sense.

Speaker 2 (41:45):
Whatever, it's a logical way to vote and move through
life to Yeah, no party loyalties, I'm aboutfit.

Speaker 1 (41:52):
He would join and leave the Socialist Party and the
Communist Party. He would pick fights and men ties between
the NAACP and the Communist Party, like all the time.
He started off against US involvement in World War One.
This is a common sort of anti imperialist position. Then
he ended up in favor of World War One. Then
he regretted being in favor of World War One. He

(42:13):
was opposed to US involvement in World War Two, especially
in the Pacific Theater, because he figured that the US
would probably use that opportunity to just do more imperialism,
which which yeah, you know, that makes sense. There's very
few wars that the US is a government was involved
with which I'm like, we were solidly on the right side,
and World War two is one of those. But I

(42:35):
still completely understand the critique of the Pacific theater. We'll
just expand US interests.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
I mean, listen, you two things can be true. We
could join Lee and fight Nazis and also ravage countries
that were like, its completely unnecessary. We take advantage wherever
we go, so you know, yeah, man, yeah.

Speaker 4 (42:56):
I know.

Speaker 1 (43:00):
So compromising in ways that seemed pragmatic and then regretting
it was a hallmark of his life, it seems. And
I'm making that because it happened at least twice. Okay,
there was the World War one one and then in
nineteen twenty eight, one of du Bois's mentees was a
fellow black Harvard Man named Augustus Granville Dill, and he
was caught by the vice squad doing homosexuality in a

(43:23):
public bathroom. Du Boys fired him from the crisis Boys
now and Augustus retired from writing, and then spent the
rest of his life like as a piano player and teacher.
Du Bois regretted this for the rest of his life,
as you shared it in his autobiography, he wrote, quote,

(43:45):
I had before that time no conception of homosexuality. I
had never understood the tragedy of an Oscar Wild. I
dismissed my coworker forthwith and spent heavy days regretting my act.

Speaker 2 (43:57):
Amazing of you two, say so, sir, I mean, I
think a lot of people would just take it to
their grave, you know. I know, it's wonderful for him
to have said it out loud, because it is really tragic.

Speaker 1 (44:13):
That's the thing I find really compelling is this sort
of intellectual honesty where it seems like he's like not
specifically committed to an ideology, he's like committed to trying
to do right, and sometimes he slips up really dramatically
and is inconsistent, and he feels really human.

Speaker 2 (44:32):
I mean, and that's a rarity, I think, especially for
people who are lifted onto such pedestals and the work
is very good. People are like hero, I'm like well
human being.

Speaker 1 (44:43):
Yeah, totally, totally. As he aged, he became more and
more radical During the Cold War. He remained critical of
the USSR for its despotism, but overall he backed them
against US imperialism, and the US didn't like him for this.
He's absolutely caught up in the Red scare time and

(45:04):
time again, even though he kept like being like, I'm
I'm not with the communists, but he would like as
the US government like goes after him more and more,
He's just hanging out with his communist friends. He's like,
fuck the US government.

Speaker 2 (45:14):
He's like, I'm not one of them, but I like
it better over here.

Speaker 1 (45:17):
Yeah, And he deepened his analysis of how all sorts
of marginalized people need to work together. He shifted his
belief about an educated vanguard leading the way to a
sort of moral guidance where being a good person and
specifically selfless was far more important than specifically their education.
The US revoked his passport for him being a commi,

(45:38):
and when he was like in his fucking in his eighties,
they were like, oh, no, you're a sketchy commi.

Speaker 2 (45:44):
Uncle Sam's never not petty.

Speaker 1 (45:46):
I know it took a nineteen fifty eight Supreme Court
decision to get him his passport back.

Speaker 2 (45:52):
Y'all were extra petty. Wow. Usually this is running around
with some paperwork, a little extra long line. Yeah, Supreme Court.
God damn.

Speaker 1 (46:01):
So he moved to Ghana nineteen sixty one, at age
ninety three.

Speaker 2 (46:05):
I love the man, he says, and peace out. No
one talked to me ever again.

Speaker 1 (46:09):
Sucking done. Yeah, and before he moves to Ghana, as
final fuck you to the US government, he formally enrolls
and gets his membership card in the Communist Party the USA.
Slow clap, slow, and most analysis I've seen isn't because
like suddenly, at ninety three, he suddenly becomes a committed

(46:31):
Communist Party communist.

Speaker 2 (46:32):
He's been doing it the whole time.

Speaker 1 (46:34):
It's a fuck you, it's a fuck you the Red Scare,
it's a fuck you the US government.

Speaker 2 (46:38):
That is amazing. I really I enjoy that. Yeah, yeah,
you help this man prisoner. I mean, like, the United
States is large, but there's the reason he should be
confined to its borders. That's crazy. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:52):
He died in Ghana two years later, not suspiciously. I
mean he was fucking ninety five and he died the
day before the march on Washington.

Speaker 2 (46:59):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (47:00):
And the Communist Party in the US, honestly, being pretty clever,
they started a youth organization called the du Boys Club,
which was a reference to the patriotic boys clubs of America.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
That's amazing settiness all around. Live.

Speaker 3 (47:18):
You know that, I did laugh really hard, And.

Speaker 1 (47:28):
So yeah do boys one of America's most important public intellectuals.
And why do I want to talk about him? I
did all this research talking about him because because of
a paragraph he wrote in the introduction of his book
about economic cooperation, the nineteen oh seven book. And I'm
going to quote this paragraph, quote the conference. The conference

(47:50):
that produced this report regards the economic development of the
Negro Americans at present as in a critical state. The
crisis arises not so much because of the idleness or
even a lack of skill, as by reason of the
fact they unwittingly stand hesitating at the crossroads. One way
leads to the old trodden ways of grasping fierce individualistic competition,

(48:13):
where the shrewd, cunning, skilled and rich among them will
prey upon the ignorance and simplicity of the mass of
the race and get wealth at the expense of the
general well being. The other way leading to cooperation and
capital and labor, the massing of small savings, the wide
distribution of capital, and a more general equality of wealth

(48:35):
and comfort. The latter path of cooperative effort has already
been entered by many. We find a wide development of
industrial and sick relief, many building and loan associations, some
cooperation of artisans, and considerable cooperation in retail trade.

Speaker 2 (48:54):
He was ready. He was like, I have a plan,
Please follow it. It sounds like a dream. I mean,
nobody took note. No one was like, wow, maybe that could.

Speaker 1 (49:07):
Thing that would work for us, That would have been
a better plan overall. And that's like even like he's
always waffling on like party politics or whatever. I mean,
these are white parties. The Communist Party of US was
like actually fairly black during this time period because they're
the only political party in the US that was like
consistently good about race issues during that time the whole
like nineteen twenties nineteen forties era. They were like anyway, whatever,

(49:30):
that's besides the point, because I'm like people probably know
this about me. I'm like not a big fan of
the USSR, but I'm also not a big fan of
the US government or whatever. But it's like, why does
he need specific party politics and ideological lines. He laid
out exactly what he's hoping will happen. Yeah, and it

(49:51):
comes from the black experience in America, not European ideology.

Speaker 2 (49:58):
Yeah. Yeah, it's again and incredible to me. Uh, the
absolute choke whole power has to be like, oh no,
we have we have the solutions. We're pretty clear on
what would work and be most beneficial for most people.

(50:19):
That's not a mystery. We don't need to solve it.
We have the answers. We're just refuse to do it.
You're just not going to even try it. No, Yeah,
heaven't forbid. They see it works, long, don't do it.
It's just crazy.

Speaker 1 (50:32):
Well, and we're going to get to that and probably
on Wednesday's episode where they do. They prove a lot
of this stuff works, and then of course reaction comes
and why supremacy comes and shuts a lot of it down.
But so basically, he lays out a challenge to all
of us because he saw how black Americans were absolutely
the leaders in the realm of economic cooperation in the US.

(50:53):
And it's possible that no group in history has ever
pulled itself up economically from worse conditions against such fierce
odds as Black America did after the Civil War. When
I think about an America without Jim Crow and the KKK,
like it would just be fucking unrecognizable today. Oh for sure,
there's a reason that white people end up like literally

(51:16):
bombing a place called Black Wall Street. Yeah, because Black
Americans organized and fought in a thousand ways, and one
of those ways was economically. Author Jessica Gordon Nemhard lays
out a bunch of shit about how black cooperativism worked
in the US that had it existed since the beginning,
like actually goes back before the beginning of the US,

(51:37):
That women have consistently taken the leading role in most
of its organizations. Wow, oh yeah, it's the numbers aren't
even close. We're gonna talk about it next episode. That
many of the organizations were specifically cross class in a
way that greatly strengthened them, and that basically all of
them throughout time have been opposed, often violently and destructively,

(52:00):
by white supremacy, and yet to spite that they've done
so much, and so were we talking a little about
what they did.

Speaker 2 (52:08):
Women are so great, y'all.

Speaker 1 (52:10):
I love women, I know they Yeah, like the black
women organizing in this era just held down entire economies
of Yeah, Like it's just fucking incredible. The history of
black economic cooperation in resistance to racism and slavery in
the US is older than the US itself. I think

(52:31):
I've brought it up before on the show because it
like blew my mind when I first found this out.
You know, like when you think of insurance companies, you
largely think of like evil capitalist things, right, Yeah, for sure. Yeah,
you know they have radical roots.

Speaker 2 (52:44):
Insurance has radical roots. You know what it would because
insurance here to ensure that you are taking care of
in difficult times and someone exactly I can make coin
off of that. Wherefore, I know, human being suck.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
I know, insurance companies have their roots in mutual aid.
In some ways, you could say mutual aid has its roots.
Mutual aid is like a recognizable name. Practice kind of
has its roots in old insurance companies. They like not companies,
insurance associations.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
Dubois traces the history of this legacy of cooperation back
to Africa itself. He argues that despite the claims of
the anthropology at the time enslave people. This is another
one of those things that I think is common knowledge now,
but like wasn't then. Basically at the time, people were like, oh, no,
black people as soon as they got to America, they
don't remember Africa. There's no connection to any cultural or

(53:36):
religious traditions. That's you know, total blank slate. Instead, du
Bois argues that people brought an awful lot over with them,
since they were people who had memories.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
Full, full lives, remember their stories. Yeah, I've been watching
and learning a lot about Black culinary.

Speaker 1 (53:57):
Traditions that have been oh cool.

Speaker 2 (54:00):
From West Africa to here. They're interesting maps where they
lay out, you know, soil conditions in different parts of
West Africa, and they're like you'll see here they were
growing rice, and then the rice were growing the same
way here, and then in the architecture of a lot
of southern buildings. You can see similar designs in like
ancient African architecture, specifically West African architecture, where like the

(54:25):
way the they're low and flat so that wind can
blow across the top and keep the lower parts cooler,
things features like that, and so it's yeah, it's everywhere,
and it's again, it's wild to think how intensely woven
enslaved people were to everyday culture and society. People were like,

(54:45):
they're not doing anything here, just like you couldn't get dressed,
you couldn't feed yourself, you couldn't like farmer lands like
literally over here doing everything entertaining your damn children, like
making sure they don't get killed, like so much. And
then to like the willful arrogance to be like what
they've had no effect, yes, is not totally.

Speaker 1 (55:08):
And also that those people are lazy, You mean, the
people who've built your house and feed you and take
care of your children and brush your hair.

Speaker 2 (55:15):
Literally in the fields while you're chilling on the porch,
like god it's hot. These lazy assholes making sure my
life runs well. Y'all were crazy, ah, so much.

Speaker 1 (55:28):
Yeah, And so once people got here, got here, and
so once people were stolen and fucking trafficked, a ton
of people started organizing help one another out in all
kinds of different ways. Enslaved people on a plantation might
collectively tend a small garden plot for themselves. They organized

(55:49):
to buy one another freedom. Maroon communities start popping up everywhere.
This is like one of my favorite things to cover.
I will always when I find out about new Maroon community.
It's an easy roon communities are there are these? They're
gorilla societies, uh like gorilla with EU or u E,

(56:09):
populated mostly by self freed black people and Indigenous people
with the occasional poor white family. And these Maroon communities,
many of which lasted for generations, would have totally different
social orders in the societies around them. And a lot
of these societies were very cooperative. Also, they sometimes go
raid slave society and that's cool too, Margaret.

Speaker 2 (56:29):
Okay, oh my god, huh. I literally touched the hem
of this in my research. I was telling Margaret before
that I've been doing a lot of research on who
do practicing enslaved folk like pre Civil War, and what
I learned is like, typically a lot of these wait,

(56:51):
what was the word users.

Speaker 1 (56:52):
It was not in my maroon towny, Maroon societies.

Speaker 2 (56:55):
Societies, maroone societies, so.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
Apparently communities or colonies or yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:01):
I read about a couple of them and they were
saying that they would specifically choose like difficult territory to
it was like deep deep deep with the swamp on
the islands that you have to like swim or like
you have a boat to get to. And I was like,
this is so cool. It's legit. How I script Okay,
I can't even talk about it, but I'm so excited
when you do an episode on them, will you please

(57:22):
invite me because I am so curious to learn more.
I think it's the coolest thing to just be like
part of the reason because you know, when you think
about when I think about my black friends who have
a firm grip on the history of our people in
this country, there are folks who grew up like in
deeply embedded black cultures, right so like yes, church, but

(57:46):
also school, like they had black teachers growing up, which
a lot of black kids, Like I had my black
teacher until my third year of college. Yeah, like I
just were like outside of my imediate family and then
we go visit, extended family just wasn't there. And so
I say all that just to say, like, it's it's

(58:07):
interesting to think that a lot of the reasons this
information isn't getting passed over to like white kids, Like
a lot of that information is like this is for
don't know, this is for us, we're over here. It's
like the first time I saw Daughters of the Dust,
which is essentially about a maroon community society of people
like living out there. I uh, I think the beautiful.

(58:28):
I'm really excited to learn more about them. I've got
really guests.

Speaker 1 (58:31):
Sorry, I didn't know that they were so prevalent. Like
I first heard of this one called the Great and
the Great Dismal Swamp in northeast North Carolina, and frankly,
I first heard about it because like white radicals love
when there's like white people in the story. Of course,
like we talk a lot about John Brown and shit
like that. Yeah, and the Great Dismal Swamp. There's like

(58:53):
this version of the story that there was like also
poor white people living there, and that's probably true, but
if so, it's like way less important than people talk about.
But the thing so then you're like, oh, there was
this one maroon society or you hear about these ones
in other countries or things like that, and slowly you're
like these were fucking everywhere, Like this is like not

(59:17):
you couldn't have a slave society without it being interspersed
with pockets of freedom. Yeah, no matter how hard they tried,
and they literally invented policing in order to try and
stop this kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (59:32):
You sure did.

Speaker 1 (59:34):
But the other thing that gets kind of played up,
and a lot of the versions of this is like
and then they would go raid slave Society and bring
into clare war on slave Society and like that's like
kinda true, but also a lot of the Maroon communities
were like, don't go fucking rating. Well, like fucking they'll
come shut us down.

Speaker 2 (59:50):
Like no, right, first of all, like let's be smart
about it. Okay, we got to protect everybody here, Like
for sure, let's get some people out, but like also
the ones who handle your shu, because again, there are
so many people here already. The deeper tectae. Yeah, I
imagine it would be a highly selective, highly organized operations
and not just pitchforks. You know.

Speaker 1 (01:00:13):
Yeah, the rating was like pretty but a lot of
the actual organizations of them were somewhat informal. But then again,
we did an episode about I don't remember what the
main topic was, it was probably it was about Brazil
and there was this like king, a black king, living
in the mountains of in a maroon community in Brazil
with like an army, a palace, and it was like

(01:00:37):
it was kind of wild. So there's that one and
then another for anyone who's listening is like, I want
to already hear episodes. We did an episode about Fort
Negro in Florida, which was not part of the US
at the time, which was a very militant run society
that started from black British soldiers. Okay, so much listening
to do market Yeah, no, I'm like, I'll probably have

(01:00:58):
you on for Great Dismal Swamp. I've been planning to
do that one for a while. So in addition to
these maroon communities, you also have entire secret societies that
formed about which we know very little because they're secret societies.
But we know a little bit about them, partly because
there's that not actually secret societies. The Masons, the Freemasons,

(01:01:23):
they get tied into this story too in a positive way.

Speaker 2 (01:01:27):
The conspiracy theorists are going to be clocking a lot
of things. I know.

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
Well conspiracy theorists. Black Freemasons in the US are older
than the US. On March sixth, seventeen seventy five, a
year before the US fifteen Free Black Men were initiated
into Freemasonry, soon forming the African Lodge number four fifty nine.
Then they formed a national Grand Lodge of three other lodges. Wow,

(01:01:55):
one of the biggest, the two biggest centers of the
cooperative organ that we're going to be talking about. One
of them is the secret societies and the other is churches.
Dubois rites, Oh, this ties into what you were actually
talking about. He's going to use outdated terminology for this,
Dubois writes. It was not, at first, by any means,

(01:02:17):
a Christian church, but rather an adaptation of those Heathen
rights which we roughly designate by the term obi worship
of Voodooism. Association and missionary effort soon gave these rights
a veneer of Christianity, and gradually, after two centuries, the
church became Christian with a Calvinistic creed and with many
of the old customs still clinging to the services. It

(01:02:39):
is this historic fact that the Negro Church of today
bases itself on one of the few surviving social institutions
of the African fatherland that accounts for its extraordinary growth
and vitality.

Speaker 2 (01:02:51):
Yes, yes, I mean, if you think of all the
things that sertifically think of coming out of a church,
and then you distill it down to the who do is,
which is essentially a practice of non faith based rituals
that are meant to invoke either healing or inspiration or protection.

(01:03:13):
These were These were again women again, the protectors, again
the organizers and based of the community. These were people
often bringing children into the world is duels or you know, midwives.
And it's yeah, it's fascinating to consider. I had I
had the link of as Christianity was forced on enslaged people,

(01:03:37):
the rituals and traditions of the Christian Church were intermingled
with who do but linking that then to organize movements.
I hadn't had that chain link yet.

Speaker 1 (01:03:49):
No, And it's he makes it like it's one of
the main things that du Bois ends up writing about
in this piece is about partly because there's more information
about how the church groups did it right. Yeah, but
it's like like syncretic Christianity is something that is really
interesting as relates to I've studied more about a colonization
like Ireland, right, you know, you have the Irish Catholics

(01:04:09):
that are a syncretic faith that is still believes in
fairy wells up until like the eighteen hundreds, which is
like fourteen hundred years after they all supposedly became Christians.
You know. And this isn't to say that the Black
churches today are not fully Christian, just that syncretism and
the transition of religion is like a more complicated and
interesting process than people give it credit for. Absolutely, the

(01:04:33):
church became one of the centers of black cooperative life
and through that one of the centers of revolt and
also building cooperative economies, which are not wholly separate things.
Several of the most ambitious slaver vaults in the US
grew out of Black churches. Take for example, Denmark Vesse.
Denmark Vessey was a black man who bought his way
out of slavery in South Carolina. He literally won a

(01:04:56):
lottery and was like, sweet by me, that's what I want.

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
Holy Molly, that it would be the luckiest day.

Speaker 1 (01:05:06):
Oh my god, wow, I know.

Speaker 2 (01:05:09):
And also how chet it's like watching kids try to
get into schools by winning a lottery. You're like, this
probably shouldn't be how that words sign?

Speaker 1 (01:05:21):
Oh yeah, God, so he's free and he starts an
African Methodist Episcopal congregation in South Carolina and immediately starts
illegally teaching in slave kids how to read, which is
a fucking cool thing to do.

Speaker 2 (01:05:35):
It's fucking awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:05:38):
Then he wasn't able. He's a carpenter, and he makes
enough money that he should be able to buy his
wife and children their freedom. Their owner won't sell bitch, Okay,
So he did what any reasonable person would do and
tried to overthrow the slave empire of the United States
of America.

Speaker 2 (01:05:57):
What other options have you left me? I tried you
pay Dan, you said no, So.

Speaker 1 (01:06:02):
I know I have to fight you. I genuinely like
I would watch this movie like that is a perfectly
natural and worthy conclusion to reach. Yes, he planned for
a revolt on the Steel Day, and this is okay.
So it's like been proven and Corty did this. But
there's like, like, if you read the Wikipedia about this,
for example, it's all written in the like was accused

(01:06:22):
of not like totally absolutely did, But I think all
this is cool as shit. So I'm just gonna say did,
because he like you do the crime you do the
time you can brag about it, whether he did it
or not. You know what, I like this rule. Okay, Yeah,
I have a friend I probably brought this up before.
I have a friend who was like convicted of all
of the property destruction out of protest in Pittsburgh. Like

(01:06:45):
they were like, you smashed every window that was broken,
which was like physically impossible for him to have done. Sure,
and then he like went to prison about it for
a while. And now I'm like, yeah, you could tell
people you broke every window.

Speaker 2 (01:06:59):
He they absolutely could. Absolutely, I did it.

Speaker 1 (01:07:04):
Yeah the time it was me, I teleport.

Speaker 2 (01:07:07):
I'm amazing for having done it. Yeah, exactly, You're welcome. Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:07:13):
So he planned a revolt for b Steel Day July fourteenth,
eighteen twenty two. Thousands of people enslaved and free alike,
almost all but not exclusively black, were in on this plan. Wow.
Two fucking people out of those thousands snitched them out?

Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
Now? Was it? Bring them forward? Got to take this
beating because what.

Speaker 1 (01:07:38):
Yeah, everyone gets rounded up. Thirty five people, including VESSI,
are hanged. Of course, the four white conspirators were off
let off waylighter. They weren't the snitches.

Speaker 2 (01:07:51):
I know for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:07:52):
They were let off way lighter. I mean just literally
because they're white, right, and they get a few months
in prison each, I think they're in court, they're able
to be like, oh, I was totally doing it for money,
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:08:02):
And so therefore it's it's a job. Yeah, you could
understand money. What else could I do? What? Oh? God,
capitalism you wild? Wow? This whole system trash wow.

Speaker 1 (01:08:18):
Yeah. But I will say one, Okay, clearly, this uprising
did not destroy the slave Empire of the United States,
but his kids lived became free because they survived long
enough to see the end of legal chattel slavery in
the United States. And this these insurrections, you throw enough

(01:08:40):
sparks and eventually fire catches, and that's what ended slavery.
So that's one way the church was involved, is that
he was you know, he ran a church.

Speaker 4 (01:08:50):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:08:50):
Nat Turner probably the most famous rebel in Southern history.
And I'm not going to talk about him because I'm
planning to do the whole thing about him. He was
a preacher also, but because the church was where people
would meet and try and overthrow the slave empire, it
was under constant scrutiny from the evil Empire. The enforcers
of that evil empire, and still people organized despite all
of that. And we'll talk about what they organized on Wednesday. Yeah,

(01:09:17):
but first we could talk about the stuff that you do.
And I mean producing is literally a form of organization,
but you know it's not the only thing you do.

Speaker 2 (01:09:25):
Yeah, uh, it's not what even Yeah, I think mostly
right now, I've been working with a friend to get
her film production company up. She has this radical idea
of how to make filmmaking a mentally healthy and safe
space to work, which it is currently not. It is

(01:09:47):
both our passion. She comes from a poor background. I
come from a middle class background, but we neither of
us have money to start this career. Took a long time,
you know, And so we're working on like how do
you create ethical hours and still make your day and
get your shots? How do you film difficult scenes in

(01:10:09):
a way that both protects the performers but also everyone
working around that scene. And it's been a great honor,
and so where our film is, we're applying to festivals
right now, and it's something I hope to be doing
more of and bringing more of that into some of
my other spaces, like my program at here at iHeart
Next up where we train and develop folks who've never

(01:10:30):
made podcasts before but have interesting stories to tell.

Speaker 4 (01:10:34):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:10:35):
I think it's sort of the form of organizing I
found I can take on right now. Is helping people
who want to have careers and the arts find ways
to do it in a way that's financially reasonable. Money
is keeping people out of the arts. It's really bothering me.
So this is my one little way in. But yeah, yeah,

(01:10:55):
I guess that's kind of what I do outside of work.
But again, always it's just more work.

Speaker 1 (01:11:01):
But I mean that stuff matters, And like the idea
of like, you know, we complain a lot about how
tech culture wants to like work everyone to death, right,
you know. Tech culture is like, oh, if you don't
work eighty hours a week for my tech startup, you
don't care about it, yea, And like where did they
get that idea from? Well, nonprofits and the arts are
the two places where that has been the norm forever,
where everyone working on a project is expected like, well,

(01:11:24):
since you care about it, you're going to work yourself
to death over it.

Speaker 2 (01:11:28):
You know, it's so unnecessary. You can make beautiful, impactful
art without having to feel like shit without missing out
on important life events, without stressing yourself into like an
unrecognizable shape. Yeah. So yeah, more of that if you
can find spaces to do it within your own life.
I say, tecklate, it's been rather rewarding.

Speaker 1 (01:11:51):
Hell yeah. My plug this week is that today if
you're listening on the day that drops, which is June tenth,
twenty twenty four, the kickstarter for my book, The Sapling Cage,
my debut novel. I've written a ton of novellas and
short story collections and all kinds of other books, but
I've never written a novel that well, okay, I ghost

(01:12:11):
wrote some romance novels, but I'm not allowed to say
that I did that. Well, I'm not allowed to tell
you what they are. My debut novel, The Sapling Cage,
is being kickstarted as of today, and you can find
it on Kickstarter and you can pre order it there,
and I'm really excited about it. I'm trying to make
this the biggest book debut of my career, and you
all can help buy backing it. And I'm going to

(01:12:33):
read a blurb for my own book. I didn't write
this blurb. Another author, Nissi Shall wrote this blurb, simple, strange,
and elegantly effective. The Sapling Cage begins Margaret Kiljoy's anarchist
fantasy series with an engrossing story of the struggles between
tax collecting knights, barfly thieves, and apprentice witches still too
raw to use the magic they can barely see out

(01:12:55):
of the corners of their eyes. There are goodies and
baddies of all genders. There's bullying monsters and healing rainbows
and rotten scheming nobles. This book was so gripping that,
though I tried my best to slow down as the
end came rushing nearer and nearer, I just couldn't do it.
Now that I've reached the last page, the only thing
keeping me from crying about it is the knowledge that

(01:13:15):
there's more of Killjoy's glorious epic to come.

Speaker 2 (01:13:18):
I'm soul. That's a really good one.

Speaker 1 (01:13:21):
Ah, thanks Margaret.

Speaker 2 (01:13:23):
Wow, Okay, got some chills and very excited. That's gonna
be fun.

Speaker 1 (01:13:28):
Thanks, and you all can hear more about the story
of this podcast, well, not the story about the podcast. Whatever,
come back. We're gonna have another episode of this on Wednesday.
Talk to you then, Hi, Margaret, here just with one
more plug. If you're listening to this episode on the
day it came out, on June tenth, twenty twenty four,
then this will be timely. And if you're listening some

(01:13:50):
other time you can still hear it. It'll still sadly
be timely, because tomorrow is June eleventh, and I'm going
to read a statement about what that means. June eleventh
is the International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason and
long term anarchist prisoners. This day seeks to strengthen the
connections between those behind the prison walls and those of

(01:14:13):
us on the outside through benefit events, actions, and spreading
the names and stories of our friends locked away since
twenty eleven. This day intends to address the specific issues
facing long term prisoners and strives to build a network
of solidarity that has built on memory, action, and remaining
unyielding in the face of repression. To learn more about
the history of June eleventh, the prisoners we support, or

(01:14:35):
to get some ideas for organizing a June eleventh event
where you live, visit June one one dot org.

Speaker 4 (01:14:47):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media.
Visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.

Speaker 2 (01:15:04):
M