July 6, 2017 • 34 mins
“Oh, Mac. What did you do?”
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin Before we begin, a warning this episode contains material
that may be upsetting to some listeners. Not long ago,
I drove from Atlanta, Georgia to Birmingham, Alabama. It's a
straight shot west on I twenty one hundred and fifty
(00:35):
miles of rolling hills and piney woods. I got off
the freeway on the downtown exit, just before what the
locals call the Malfunction junction, and drove a few blocks
south until I came to Kelly Ingram Park, which covers
a full city block right in front of sixteen Street
Baptist Church. I wanted to see a statue that stands
in the park, a famous statue Valla's love Statues. I
(01:01):
find them moving. Don't know why. Maybe it's because there
are a representation of something that we have chosen to
take serious, to memorialize in a permanent form. With a statue,
you're saying to the future, this is what I want
you to remember about my generation. The statue I came
(01:23):
to see is at one end of Kelly Ingram Park.
It's of a police officer, big guy menacing heavy pair
of sunglasses. He is a dog on a leash, a
big german shepherd and the dog is lunging huge fangs
bared at a young black boy who's leaning back, hands
to his sides, almost like he's sacrificing himself. It's called
(01:45):
foot soldier. It looks simple, but that statue is not
what you think. Trust me, my name is Malcolm Gladwell.
You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
and Misunderstood. This episode is the second in what are
(02:08):
going to be a few episodes this season on race
and civil rights. On race in the United States, I'm
an outsider. I'm Canadian. My family is half West Indian,
which is a very different cultural experience than being an
African American. My mom had a friend, a Jamaican, who
(02:29):
went down to Georgia once in the nineteen seventies. When
she came back, she said, the racism there cut like
a knife. I couldn't have been more than eight or nine,
and that phrase startled me. It seems so visceral. But
then I moved to the US as an adult, and
it seemed like the way race was discussed didn't cut
like a knife at all. What I saw around race
(02:54):
in the United States was evasion and euphemism. The subject
of my last episode was the Brown Decision. For half
a century, the integration story has been told with all
the suffering taken out. Why is it really necessary that
every grand civil rights narrative be turned into a fairy tale?
Which brings me to kelly Ingram Park and its statue
(03:17):
of the police officer and the dog and the boy.
There's a nice and tidy story you can tell about
that statue, but the real story is much different. Last
summer I got a call from a man who was
friends with the widow of the police officer depicted in
that statue. I'd written about the officer and the dog
(03:38):
in my book David and Goliath, but she wanted to
tell me the rest of the story, so I met
with her. Then I went back to Birmingham a second
time to look for the boy in the statue, and
then a third time to Tuskegee, two hours south of Birmingham.
And there on a long, lazy afternoon, I sat in
the town museum with an artist named Ronald McDowell. Uncle
(04:01):
Jay Me and James Brown. And Ronald McDowell is an
extraordinary man, spidery and fine featured. He showed me his
portfolio and told me in his urgent confessional whisper about
how he was once walking down Sunset Boulevard years ago
and ran into Louis Armstrong's nephew, who took him to
(04:22):
see Michael Jackson, who wanted McDowell to teach him art,
which led in turn to McDowell helping out on the
album Thriller. Yeah. I did the sketches for Michael Day.
Oh wow. I was trying to make him a tool
black superman. And on the back of this piece of
paper is it drawing Michael Diet for me when we
were working on truck as Michael's arn't work one obviously.
(04:43):
He did several pieces from Richard Arrington, who was the
first black mare of Birmingham, used to call Ron McDowell Mac,
which suits him perfectly. He has an air of mischief
about him, which we'll get to. That's pictures of Man
Johnny Couple, Nataliecole. That's in the state capital, the first
(05:05):
African American painting hanging in the state of Alabama. Governor
Siegleman commissioner living there. Mac did the statue in Kelly
Ingram Park. He's the one responsible. Birmingham is a strange
and beautiful place. It was a steel town like Pittsburgh was,
(05:28):
and at the height of the steel industry, there was
a lot of money there. There's an enormous hill on
the south side of town, Mountain Brook, with a gorgeous
country club and graceful pre war homes. That's the wealthy
white part of Birmingham. Down the hill is the other Birmingham,
where blacks and whites lived in uneasy proximity. They used
(05:48):
to call Birmingham the Johannesburg of the South, or Bomingham,
because bombs were a weapon of choice for white supremacists
who wanted to keep black people in their place. There's
an old joke from that period that tells you all
you really need to know. A black man in Chicago
wakes up one morning and tells his wife that Jesus
had come to him in a dream and told him
(06:10):
to go to Birmingham. His wife is horrified. Did Jesus
say he'd go with you? The husband replies, he said
it go as far as Memphis. Birmingham was where Martin
Luther King staged what are the most dramatic protests of
the Civil rights movement, and King chose Birmingham for a
(06:31):
good reason. He wanted to strike at the symbol of
racial oppression, to get ordinary Americans to understand just how
bad things were for black people in the South. So
through the long spring of nineteen sixty three, King and
his people organized sit ins to protest segregation, then boycott's,
then marches. They called it Project C for Confrontation. They
(06:56):
were trying to provoke the Birmingham Chief of Police, a
troglelte named Bull Connor, into doing something so outrageous that
it would turn the tide of public opinion in their favor.
And that's exactly what happened. May third, nineteen sixty three.
(07:17):
King's people start at sixteenth Street Baptist Church, right next
to Kelly Ingram Park. They come out in waves, marching
alongside the park and then continuing on through downtown Birmingham.
They're huge crowds, tons of police in the middle of everything.
A photographer named Bill Hudson takes a picture of a
white police officer with dark sunglasses and a big german shepherd.
(07:40):
The dog is lunging at a young black teenager. The
next day, The New York Times publishes the photograph above
the fold, across three columns on the front page of
its weekend paper, as does basically every other major newspaper
in the country. President Kennedy is asked about the photo
and he's appalled. The Secretary of State says it will
(08:01):
quote embarrass our friends abroad and make our enemies joyful.
It's discussed on the floor of Congress at toils are written.
People have debates about it. It's exactly what King wants,
something to show the rest of the world just how
bad things are in the South, and the tide turns.
A year later, Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, one
(08:24):
of the most important pieces of legislation in the history
of the United States. The Civil Rights Act, people always
say was written in Birmingham. Kelly Ingram Park is now
a shrine to the events of nineteen sixty three, the
first Black Mare of Birmingham. Richard Arrington takes office in
(08:45):
nineteen seventy nine and decides to fill this little patch
of history with sculptures that tell the story of the movement.
He commissions one of Martin Luther King, another of Fred Shuttlesworth,
who was a key leader of the Birmingham protests. There's
one of the four little girls killed when white supremacists
bombed the sixteenth Street Baptist Church in September of nineteen
sixty three. Finally, Errington turns to the photo, the famous photo,
(09:10):
for one final statue, and he calls up Mac McDowell,
who has moved out to Tuskegee from California and transformed
himself into a kind of house artist for the civil
rights movement. He said, I got to get a statue
down right, because the people that marshton a movement are
complaining about the children don't look like them. The children
had white features with black hair, and there were a
(09:32):
lot of complaints. And he said, I needed to do
a design of this image, this photograph of this boy
and this police officer and the dog attacking him. The
other artists with sculptures in Kelly Ingram Park are big names,
white men with impressive resumes. Mac a kid from the
Projects of Oakland, entirely self taught. He had in fact
(09:55):
never done a sculpture before, a detail that he conveniently
failed to tell Richard Arrington. The mayor just wants Mack
to do some sketches, provide a guide. This look on
his face, a look of frustration, like the thing he's
doing what I want. You're not getting it, none of
the sculptures. And I was like, I can't say no
to him because he's powerful. It's a great odd you
(10:16):
know of Birmingham. The next thing, you know, Max doing
the whole thing. And I started sculptinging. In three hours
later I was complete, and I took it to Arrington
about I wanted to think I did it so quick.
SIM waited a week and took it to him and
he said, you got the commission? How much and sell them?
The rest is history. It was unveiled in a special
ceremony in May nineteen ninety five. It's called foot Soldier
(10:39):
because that was the term used to describe the people
who marched in Martin Luther King's army. On the statue's
granite base, it reads, this sculpture is dedicated to the
foot Soldiers of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement. On a
little plaque next to it is the famous photo on
which the statue is based. If you want to see
a picture of it, we have one up on revisionist
(11:00):
history dot com. And the first people to see it
was Stevie Wanders and Mattel's mother and but I didn't
know at the time I did the statue. When you're
doing bronze, you have to smooth everything. Because I was untrained,
I didn't smooth the rocks. So Stevens was filling the
rocks and he cut his hand and one of the
men in the parks was there and he told me,
(11:22):
he saying I'm getting blood of my hand because Stevie
wanted did I was like, oh my god. But it's
almost it's almost it's almost biblical. It's almost like he's
blessing the park with his blood. Yeah, Stevie got cut
on those rocks and Foot Soldier is the most powerful
sculpture in kelly Ingram Park. Nothing else comes close. And
(11:44):
maybe that's where the trouble starts. The name of the
police officer in the photograph was Richard Middleton. Everyone called
him Dick. His best friend on the force was Bobby Hayes.
Big guy lives near a golf course outside Birmingham. Must
be in his eighties by now. Hayes and Middleton started
as police officers in Birmingham right at the moment when
(12:07):
the civil rights movement was asserting its health. The police
department was all white and all mail back then, but
in the streets the balance of power was shifting. When
integration came to the Birmingham school system, Hayes remembers it
as bewildering. If you were a cop, nobody really liked
you because we were carrying the black kids in the school.
(12:33):
That's what we were worried to do, and they were
going to get in. That's just where it was. We
had no choice. The black people didn't like you because
you were a policeman. The white people didn't like you
because you're protecting the black kids and caring. The men
were the crowd. The goofies didn't want them to go.
(12:56):
In nineteen sixty three, King's protest campaign was headquartered in
sixteen Street Baptist Church, which is an old red brick
building on the northwest corner of kelly Ingram Park. The
protesters would come out in the afternoon march around the
park on their way downtown. They were trained in non violence,
marched according to a strict schedule. It was a military operation.
(13:19):
Crowds of people would gather to see the spectacle. The
police were supposed to keep the protesters and the crowd apart.
The protests get bigger and bigger the crowds get bigger
and bigger. It's late spring, so it's starting to get
really hot. The police chief, Bull Connor, starts locking up
everyone he can. Then Connor says to Hew with it,
(13:40):
bringing the dogs. Of course, there's a lot of noise,
a lot of tension in the air, a lot of
people yelling and screaming. Bridge started coming in, you know,
throwing bridge. It got to be a really ugly shlight
real quick, real quick. Dick Middleton, the cop in the photo,
(14:04):
was a member of the city's canine unit. He had
a German shepherd named Leo. He and the other members
of the tactical unit were posted behind a barricade, a
row of wooden saw horses running parallel to the curb.
There's a line of cops and dogs in a kind
of no man's land between the bystanders and the protesters.
(14:25):
He was inside the barricade. The crowd was on the
other side, and they were taunting a pollation, and of
course all we could do is just stand at a
police shall like you just stand there. At that time,
Dick was well back and away. He told me he
was jin yards maybe back at the barricade, and a
(14:48):
guy came around a barricade. So here we have a
foot soldier in the middle of all the mayhem, cutting
through the no man's land towards the sidewalk, and Middleton's
German shepherd, Leo, lunges at him. That's the moment Bill
Hudson captures in his famous photograph, and Ron McDowell captures
in his statue the confrontation between the innocent foot soldier
(15:12):
and the snarling face of racial oppression. Bill Hudson's editor
says later that he picked that particular photo out of
the many taken that day because he was riveted by
the saintly calm of the young man in the snarling
jaws of the German shepherd. Here's where the story starts
(15:34):
to get complicated. This is an interview today Saturday, May
twenty five, nineteen ninety six at the Burringham Civil Rights
ins Or two with mister Walter Gaston of Atlanta, Georgia. Okay,
how did you get involved in the civil rights movement? Now,
(15:55):
that's that's one thing that I've always have a problem with.
I never did get involved with the civil rights movement.
Walter Gadsden is the boy in the photograph. The one
bitten by Leo. He's a mysterious figure. He was interviewed
at the time of the photograph by Jet magazine back
in nineteen sixty three, but only briefly. From time to time,
(16:19):
other people have come forward to say that they were
the one in the photograph, not Gadsden, but those claims
seem dubious. Meanwhile, Gadsden disappears, people try and find him
in can't. All that seems to exist is this oral
history that you're hearing done in honor of the unveiling
of Ron McDowell's statue. And the interview is strange because
(16:41):
it doesn't go the way the interviewer thinks it's going
to go. She starts with the obvious question, you were
a foot soldier? Tell me how that came about? And
he says, I wasn't a foot soldier. But the fact is,
the day of that moment, I was supposed to have
been in school. But a friend of mine, acquaintment that
(17:04):
told me that earlier that Martin Luke game with him
down that day and he was going to be there,
and I said I wanted to be there too. I
wanted to come and flat out what it was all
a battle. Walter Gadsden is a bystander. The famous statue
in kelly Ingram Park foot Soldier is not in fact
(17:26):
of a foot soldier. It gets a stranger. Okay. And
when you're up the school, where did you come downtown
to the park? Areas kelly Ingram Park over there. So
we started walking to the activity and as I approached
and got closer, they turned and looked at me, and
(17:46):
I saw it coming towards me, So I've turned to Lee.
He was walking down the street with the protesters coming
towards him, so he veers off to get out of
their way and rejoined the spectators on the sidewalk. Ducks
in behind the row of sawhorses, where he runs into
officer in Middleton and Leo. So as I turned and
(18:07):
started to walk away, I was great, and the rest
of it grabbed bout the policeman and yain't toward him.
Has that happened to dog, bitch you? I can remember
that that happened simultaneously. Did you go the policeman Gray?
I don't remember what hand, but the dog the grayant
(18:30):
me one hand. If it happened so fast, there was
nothing I gonna do except throw up the league and
trying to protect us. Yeah, and as I was doing
that there I went. Yeah. If you look at the
famous photo, Gadsden's explanation makes sense. Leo is lunging. The
bite is a middlesecond away. But Gaston and Middleton just
(18:53):
look startled, the way people do if they unexpectedly bump
into each other. Gaston has his knee up as a
reflex and his hand on Middleton as if to steady himself.
Middleton has one hand on Gaston and his other arm
is flexed. He's yanking back on the leash. Leo has
freaked out and he's trying to restrain him. Leo whoa.
(19:17):
Middleton's colleague, Bobby Hayes made the same point to me.
Middleton's not letting Leo loose on Gaston quite the opposite.
If you look at the picture, you can tell he's
holding the dog back. But that line taunt that dog
feeder in the air the best I recall, and Dick
got him here. He's holding that line. He's not only
(19:41):
invited guy. Now what does Gaston say about all this?
Does he think he's been the victim of police brutality?
Not at all? In fact, he can't seem to understand
why everyone makes such a big deal out of what
happened to him that day. How does your family members
react to your participation, Well, they were angry to go
(20:04):
by doing teen school that day he appears in an
image that transfix the world, and his parents are mad
that he skips school. The interviewer then tries to get
at Gadsden's connections to the struggle for civil rights. Okay, well,
the church where your parents are, your family members were attending.
Were they involved in the civil rights movement during that time?
(20:26):
You know they never told me of it. What benefits
to you your family in the community realize as a
result of that movement? None. In answer to the question
what benefits did your family receive from the civil rights movement,
(20:46):
he answers none. He's not having any of it. Gadsden's interview,
in fact, just gets weirder. Okay, if you were in
control of an organization or a movement of such and
could go back and change some things, what would you change? Okay,
The things that would change would be a more careful
(21:12):
choice of people involved in all of those movements. There
are too many, well, the big just blood crooked people
many of the people that were involved and had an
(21:34):
oloriety became too crooked. The most famous photograph of the
Civil rights movement is of a startled cop trying desperately
to hold his dog back from biting a bystander who
wasn't that much of a fan of the Civil rights movement.
I'm want to ring Steel, why me, because I've never
(21:54):
had any oloriety whatsoever concerning that picture. That picture who's
in the paper? But many other people were too, many
other situations Buss Bonnie, Yes, but they chose to use
the little boy at fifteen that the little boy, and
he's put up a little boy's eyes. Are you surprised
(22:17):
when you found out about it? I was the oldly flamborgaster.
I don't know who's to thin. And Gadsden's main objection
he's light skinned, he says. The statue makes him look
dark skinned. That statue doesn't look like me. It looks
like a totally different boy. That looks like an African boy.
(22:38):
That's what are your favor It looks like Afican boy.
It looks like an African boy. The color of the features,
the features, the lips, the size. You take a look
at the pictured air and the statue air the boy
short I was told for my age. If you listen
(23:00):
to the whole interview, it nearly goes off the rails.
At this point, the interviewer expected to find a heroic
civil rights veteran. Instead, she's getting a grumpy old man
still wedded to some of the oldest and most awkward
of black prejudices. We're very proud of it, and I
hope you will be too. And now that we know
(23:21):
who you are, we can add a name under there
that you will be a boy let's come to use Well,
m h. I'm still wondering why, after all the information
(23:41):
that I had given, and and and all that, all
that the established me as being a young African boy,
which I'm not. You prefer being called a negro. I
prefer being called what I am? A colored? Oh oh,
(24:01):
you prefer you were colored? I am good? Okay, okay.
Euphemism and evasion. At the beginning, I said that what
I object to is the way so many stories about
race get cleaned up, sanitized, so the brown decision becomes
(24:22):
a fairy tale in which black people triumph without effort. Well,
here's the flip side. When we stop evading and just listen,
it gets complicated. Our hero, Walter Gadsden isn't all that heroic.
As for the bad guy, the officer, his colleague Bobby
Hayes says he wasn't a bad guy. Did Officer Hayes
(24:44):
tell me things that surprised me? And did listening to
Walter Gadsden shock me? Absolutely? Because I'm no different from
anyone else. I liked the fairy tale. So the person
who invited me down to Birmingham in the first place
was Dick Middleton's widow. Everyone calls her Missus Klingler. Her
husband died not long ago, and I think she felt
(25:06):
it was time to speak out. We met at a
barbe restaurant in downtown Birmingham, sat upstairs. So he's a
police officer at a time when Birmingham is obviously going
through some very tumultuous times. Can you tell me about that?
The first that was the first ten years i'd still
(25:27):
learned to speak English. I didn't really know what's going on.
I didn't understand what's going on. Missus Klingler was from Germany.
She met Richard when he was stationed there with the army.
She says, what happened on that spring day in nineteen
sixty three was like a shadow over her husband. He
went to work and come home and enjoy the family.
(25:50):
But I knew something is going on. You know. Then
later on you see the picture in the paper. He
never really discussed it. She had a big book with
her filled with clippings of her husband's career and other
photographs from that day in kelly Ingram Park. She wanted
to set the record straight. Her husband was unfairly vilified.
(26:15):
He done his job and he was he was spit at,
he was thrown rocks at, and he did not let
the guy put the dog toom he was holding the
leash away from em. If you see other pictures what happened.
(26:37):
This was not the white picture, This was not the
stoyed this was not the truth. For the longest time afterwards,
they got hate mail. So how soon did the letters
start coming, Just like I'm sure like the next months
or so when it went all over the world, just
(26:59):
as ugly as you can imagine. Did he ever talk
to any journalist or do you know he never gave
any interviews. He didn't give no interviews because I think
he felt like what he was portrayed. They would not
tellt yeah, yeah, No matter what he say, no matter
(27:22):
what he would do, they would not believe him. All
they look at the picture, that's all. Do you think
your husband suffered a thank he has. Yes, there's a
statue in Kelly Ingram Park of one of the most
iconic moments in civil rights history, and everyone directly involved
(27:43):
in that moment thinks it didn't happen that way. Oh Mac,
what did you do? You said earlier that when you draw,
you try and inhabit the characters. Yes, and so tell
me your emotional reactions to that photograph. Well, I saw
(28:05):
that the boy was maybe about six four, the officers
maybe five ten, five nine, And I said, this is
a movement about power. So I made the little boy
younger and smaller, and the officer taller and stronger. The
arm of the mall is so strong. That's why his
arm is almost like strength. And the dog is more
like a wolf than a real dog. Because if I'm
(28:27):
a little boy, that's what I was seeing, I would
see like this super man hovering over me, putting this big, old,
giant monster of a dog in my groan area, in
my private area. And so that's what I envision when
I first saw the photographs, and you changed it. In
the photograph, I noticed the boy is leaning in, and
in your sculpture he's leaning back. Tell me about that
(28:51):
he's leaning back because I wanted to depict him showing
that I'm not going to fight you. I'm not leaving,
I'm not moving, I'm standing, but I'm not going to
fight you. This is a non violent protest. That's why
his hands are open and it's going back, like do
whatever you're gonna do. Put the dog on me, beat
me with the come of whatever you want to do.
And I saw all of that when I saw the photograph.
(29:12):
We were in the Tuskegee History Center, a museum on
Elm Street, not far from the university. It's in what
looks like an old bank, and it's filled with exhibits
to the town's extraordinary history, the infamous Tuskegee Selfless Study,
the Tuskegee Airman, Rosa Parks, Tuskegee native. McDowell's work was
all over the walls. He took me on a little tour.
(29:34):
Then we sat down and he took out his portfolio.
Here's the natural Those glasses are like Wait, are the
glasses the same? Did you make the glasses bigger too? Yeah? Good, bigger.
Mac is a whole section on the statue, preliminary drawings, sketches, photographs,
So he's almost like a blind officer. He doesn't even
(29:56):
think again because he's so far beyond that killed this nigger,
attacked this nigger. He's so past the reality of this
is a human, innocent, human child, human being. That's why
he was wearing blind people glass. That is so interesting
because when you see that, that's the thing I couldn't
put my finger on. The officer is behaving as if
he's blind. The dog is attacking. He doesn't even see
(30:19):
the boy. You're the first person. I'm telling them too.
That's so interesting. See how vicious the dog with Oh my,
that's a wolf. I did the hair with a I don't.
I don't have to, I don't. I didn't know what
instruments to use. I did all this with a pencil,
(30:40):
pencil the hairs, and I do the teeth like that,
and oh look at the teeth. I did that on purpose.
The curved Oh yeah, because if you have a curve tooth,
like when you see those those um world wolf pictures,
the teeth, the curve because once there's like a snake
when he bites you, if he doesn't retrack and he's
gonna rip, it's not going in coming out. When it
(31:00):
comes out, he's gonna rip flesh. When you're face to
face with the statue. It has historical authority. It's in
the shadow of sixteen Street Baptist Church inside kelly Ingram
Park at the actual site of the Birmingham Marches. But
it's a work of imagination. It's not a literal representation.
(31:23):
It's art. We are there other details that I mean
you were saying you there's the blind officer. There's the
curved teeth on the dog. The officer moved all of
his anger into the dog, and it's the dog that's
attacking the war. You know. That's what they do with
(31:43):
when racism mac made Leo into a wolf and blinded
Middleton and shrank Walter Gadston until he was tiny and
helpless because he was telling a story about Birmingham. That's
what history is. Each side writes their own story, and
the winner's story is the one we call the truth.
(32:04):
You don't think white people told their share of whoppers
over the years in the South. You don't think that
there's a statue in a Southern town somewhere of a
champion of the Confederacy that makes a hero of someone
who was actually a villain. White people got to do
that in the South for centuries. Foot Soldier is just
what happens when the people on the bottom finally get
the power to tell the story their way. It was
(32:26):
a long time coming. It's a brilliant statue. Thank you,
a Poorma Hartington. Yeah, there's some you've some mischief in you.
What do you mean there's a little bit of mischief
in that in your recreation of that photo, you're you're
(32:50):
using that opportunity to make a much broader kind of
subversive point. I'm maybe I went back through Birmingham after
talking to Mac and Tuskegee, and I went to Kelly
Ingram Park one last time stood in front of the statue.
I think everyone who wants to understand the civil rights
(33:12):
movement should do that because of what it means, the
hard one reward of a long and costly battle over
who gets to control the stories that make up history.
But if you do, just keep in mind that Dick
Middleton didn't actually sick his dog Leo on Walter Gadsden,
and that Walter Gadsden wasn't actually a foot soldier for
(33:32):
civil rights. Mayor Arrington tell me, Marnathan, we did the
unvail me. He got hundreds of threats about bombing and
tearing a statue up from all over the world, and
his response was I'll just get backed into a bigger
one in a battle run. So they never touched him. Oh,
he said, if you if you destroy that statue, we're
coming back bigger. Do you know how many times I
(33:53):
begged for somebody. I hope somebody blows it out. I
was like into a bigger one. Revisionist is produced by
Meil LaBelle and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel,
(34:14):
and Ciomara Martinez wife. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn
Williams is our engineer. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special
thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg at Panopley. I'm
Malcolm Gladwell
Pushkin Before we begin, a warning this episode contains material
that may be upsetting to some listeners. Not long ago,
I drove from Atlanta, Georgia to Birmingham, Alabama. It's a
straight shot west on I twenty one hundred and fifty
(00:35):
miles of rolling hills and piney woods. I got off
the freeway on the downtown exit, just before what the
locals call the Malfunction junction, and drove a few blocks
south until I came to Kelly Ingram Park, which covers
a full city block right in front of sixteen Street
Baptist Church. I wanted to see a statue that stands
in the park, a famous statue Valla's love Statues. I
(01:01):
find them moving. Don't know why. Maybe it's because there
are a representation of something that we have chosen to
take serious, to memorialize in a permanent form. With a statue,
you're saying to the future, this is what I want
you to remember about my generation. The statue I came
(01:23):
to see is at one end of Kelly Ingram Park.
It's of a police officer, big guy menacing heavy pair
of sunglasses. He is a dog on a leash, a
big german shepherd and the dog is lunging huge fangs
bared at a young black boy who's leaning back, hands
to his sides, almost like he's sacrificing himself. It's called
(01:45):
foot soldier. It looks simple, but that statue is not
what you think. Trust me, my name is Malcolm Gladwell.
You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
and Misunderstood. This episode is the second in what are
(02:08):
going to be a few episodes this season on race
and civil rights. On race in the United States, I'm
an outsider. I'm Canadian. My family is half West Indian,
which is a very different cultural experience than being an
African American. My mom had a friend, a Jamaican, who
(02:29):
went down to Georgia once in the nineteen seventies. When
she came back, she said, the racism there cut like
a knife. I couldn't have been more than eight or nine,
and that phrase startled me. It seems so visceral. But
then I moved to the US as an adult, and
it seemed like the way race was discussed didn't cut
like a knife at all. What I saw around race
(02:54):
in the United States was evasion and euphemism. The subject
of my last episode was the Brown Decision. For half
a century, the integration story has been told with all
the suffering taken out. Why is it really necessary that
every grand civil rights narrative be turned into a fairy tale?
Which brings me to kelly Ingram Park and its statue
(03:17):
of the police officer and the dog and the boy.
There's a nice and tidy story you can tell about
that statue, but the real story is much different. Last
summer I got a call from a man who was
friends with the widow of the police officer depicted in
that statue. I'd written about the officer and the dog
(03:38):
in my book David and Goliath, but she wanted to
tell me the rest of the story, so I met
with her. Then I went back to Birmingham a second
time to look for the boy in the statue, and
then a third time to Tuskegee, two hours south of Birmingham.
And there on a long, lazy afternoon, I sat in
the town museum with an artist named Ronald McDowell. Uncle
(04:01):
Jay Me and James Brown. And Ronald McDowell is an
extraordinary man, spidery and fine featured. He showed me his
portfolio and told me in his urgent confessional whisper about
how he was once walking down Sunset Boulevard years ago
and ran into Louis Armstrong's nephew, who took him to
(04:22):
see Michael Jackson, who wanted McDowell to teach him art,
which led in turn to McDowell helping out on the
album Thriller. Yeah. I did the sketches for Michael Day.
Oh wow. I was trying to make him a tool
black superman. And on the back of this piece of
paper is it drawing Michael Diet for me when we
were working on truck as Michael's arn't work one obviously.
(04:43):
He did several pieces from Richard Arrington, who was the
first black mare of Birmingham, used to call Ron McDowell Mac,
which suits him perfectly. He has an air of mischief
about him, which we'll get to. That's pictures of Man
Johnny Couple, Nataliecole. That's in the state capital, the first
(05:05):
African American painting hanging in the state of Alabama. Governor
Siegleman commissioner living there. Mac did the statue in Kelly
Ingram Park. He's the one responsible. Birmingham is a strange
and beautiful place. It was a steel town like Pittsburgh was,
(05:28):
and at the height of the steel industry, there was
a lot of money there. There's an enormous hill on
the south side of town, Mountain Brook, with a gorgeous
country club and graceful pre war homes. That's the wealthy
white part of Birmingham. Down the hill is the other Birmingham,
where blacks and whites lived in uneasy proximity. They used
(05:48):
to call Birmingham the Johannesburg of the South, or Bomingham,
because bombs were a weapon of choice for white supremacists
who wanted to keep black people in their place. There's
an old joke from that period that tells you all
you really need to know. A black man in Chicago
wakes up one morning and tells his wife that Jesus
had come to him in a dream and told him
(06:10):
to go to Birmingham. His wife is horrified. Did Jesus
say he'd go with you? The husband replies, he said
it go as far as Memphis. Birmingham was where Martin
Luther King staged what are the most dramatic protests of
the Civil rights movement, and King chose Birmingham for a
(06:31):
good reason. He wanted to strike at the symbol of
racial oppression, to get ordinary Americans to understand just how
bad things were for black people in the South. So
through the long spring of nineteen sixty three, King and
his people organized sit ins to protest segregation, then boycott's,
then marches. They called it Project C for Confrontation. They
(06:56):
were trying to provoke the Birmingham Chief of Police, a
troglelte named Bull Connor, into doing something so outrageous that
it would turn the tide of public opinion in their favor.
And that's exactly what happened. May third, nineteen sixty three.
(07:17):
King's people start at sixteenth Street Baptist Church, right next
to Kelly Ingram Park. They come out in waves, marching
alongside the park and then continuing on through downtown Birmingham.
They're huge crowds, tons of police in the middle of everything.
A photographer named Bill Hudson takes a picture of a
white police officer with dark sunglasses and a big german shepherd.
(07:40):
The dog is lunging at a young black teenager. The
next day, The New York Times publishes the photograph above
the fold, across three columns on the front page of
its weekend paper, as does basically every other major newspaper
in the country. President Kennedy is asked about the photo
and he's appalled. The Secretary of State says it will
(08:01):
quote embarrass our friends abroad and make our enemies joyful.
It's discussed on the floor of Congress at toils are written.
People have debates about it. It's exactly what King wants,
something to show the rest of the world just how
bad things are in the South, and the tide turns.
A year later, Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, one
(08:24):
of the most important pieces of legislation in the history
of the United States. The Civil Rights Act, people always
say was written in Birmingham. Kelly Ingram Park is now
a shrine to the events of nineteen sixty three, the
first Black Mare of Birmingham. Richard Arrington takes office in
(08:45):
nineteen seventy nine and decides to fill this little patch
of history with sculptures that tell the story of the movement.
He commissions one of Martin Luther King, another of Fred Shuttlesworth,
who was a key leader of the Birmingham protests. There's
one of the four little girls killed when white supremacists
bombed the sixteenth Street Baptist Church in September of nineteen
sixty three. Finally, Errington turns to the photo, the famous photo,
(09:10):
for one final statue, and he calls up Mac McDowell,
who has moved out to Tuskegee from California and transformed
himself into a kind of house artist for the civil
rights movement. He said, I got to get a statue
down right, because the people that marshton a movement are
complaining about the children don't look like them. The children
had white features with black hair, and there were a
(09:32):
lot of complaints. And he said, I needed to do
a design of this image, this photograph of this boy
and this police officer and the dog attacking him. The
other artists with sculptures in Kelly Ingram Park are big names,
white men with impressive resumes. Mac a kid from the
Projects of Oakland, entirely self taught. He had in fact
(09:55):
never done a sculpture before, a detail that he conveniently
failed to tell Richard Arrington. The mayor just wants Mack
to do some sketches, provide a guide. This look on
his face, a look of frustration, like the thing he's
doing what I want. You're not getting it, none of
the sculptures. And I was like, I can't say no
to him because he's powerful. It's a great odd you
(10:16):
know of Birmingham. The next thing, you know, Max doing
the whole thing. And I started sculptinging. In three hours
later I was complete, and I took it to Arrington
about I wanted to think I did it so quick.
SIM waited a week and took it to him and
he said, you got the commission? How much and sell them?
The rest is history. It was unveiled in a special
ceremony in May nineteen ninety five. It's called foot Soldier
(10:39):
because that was the term used to describe the people
who marched in Martin Luther King's army. On the statue's
granite base, it reads, this sculpture is dedicated to the
foot Soldiers of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement. On a
little plaque next to it is the famous photo on
which the statue is based. If you want to see
a picture of it, we have one up on revisionist
(11:00):
history dot com. And the first people to see it
was Stevie Wanders and Mattel's mother and but I didn't
know at the time I did the statue. When you're
doing bronze, you have to smooth everything. Because I was untrained,
I didn't smooth the rocks. So Stevens was filling the
rocks and he cut his hand and one of the
men in the parks was there and he told me,
(11:22):
he saying I'm getting blood of my hand because Stevie
wanted did I was like, oh my god. But it's
almost it's almost it's almost biblical. It's almost like he's
blessing the park with his blood. Yeah, Stevie got cut
on those rocks and Foot Soldier is the most powerful
sculpture in kelly Ingram Park. Nothing else comes close. And
(11:44):
maybe that's where the trouble starts. The name of the
police officer in the photograph was Richard Middleton. Everyone called
him Dick. His best friend on the force was Bobby Hayes.
Big guy lives near a golf course outside Birmingham. Must
be in his eighties by now. Hayes and Middleton started
as police officers in Birmingham right at the moment when
(12:07):
the civil rights movement was asserting its health. The police
department was all white and all mail back then, but
in the streets the balance of power was shifting. When
integration came to the Birmingham school system, Hayes remembers it
as bewildering. If you were a cop, nobody really liked
you because we were carrying the black kids in the school.
(12:33):
That's what we were worried to do, and they were
going to get in. That's just where it was. We
had no choice. The black people didn't like you because
you were a policeman. The white people didn't like you
because you're protecting the black kids and caring. The men
were the crowd. The goofies didn't want them to go.
(12:56):
In nineteen sixty three, King's protest campaign was headquartered in
sixteen Street Baptist Church, which is an old red brick
building on the northwest corner of kelly Ingram Park. The
protesters would come out in the afternoon march around the
park on their way downtown. They were trained in non violence,
marched according to a strict schedule. It was a military operation.
(13:19):
Crowds of people would gather to see the spectacle. The
police were supposed to keep the protesters and the crowd apart.
The protests get bigger and bigger the crowds get bigger
and bigger. It's late spring, so it's starting to get
really hot. The police chief, Bull Connor, starts locking up
everyone he can. Then Connor says to Hew with it,
(13:40):
bringing the dogs. Of course, there's a lot of noise,
a lot of tension in the air, a lot of
people yelling and screaming. Bridge started coming in, you know,
throwing bridge. It got to be a really ugly shlight
real quick, real quick. Dick Middleton, the cop in the photo,
(14:04):
was a member of the city's canine unit. He had
a German shepherd named Leo. He and the other members
of the tactical unit were posted behind a barricade, a
row of wooden saw horses running parallel to the curb.
There's a line of cops and dogs in a kind
of no man's land between the bystanders and the protesters.
(14:25):
He was inside the barricade. The crowd was on the
other side, and they were taunting a pollation, and of
course all we could do is just stand at a
police shall like you just stand there. At that time,
Dick was well back and away. He told me he
was jin yards maybe back at the barricade, and a
(14:48):
guy came around a barricade. So here we have a
foot soldier in the middle of all the mayhem, cutting
through the no man's land towards the sidewalk, and Middleton's
German shepherd, Leo, lunges at him. That's the moment Bill
Hudson captures in his famous photograph, and Ron McDowell captures
in his statue the confrontation between the innocent foot soldier
(15:12):
and the snarling face of racial oppression. Bill Hudson's editor
says later that he picked that particular photo out of
the many taken that day because he was riveted by
the saintly calm of the young man in the snarling
jaws of the German shepherd. Here's where the story starts
(15:34):
to get complicated. This is an interview today Saturday, May
twenty five, nineteen ninety six at the Burringham Civil Rights
ins Or two with mister Walter Gaston of Atlanta, Georgia. Okay,
how did you get involved in the civil rights movement? Now,
(15:55):
that's that's one thing that I've always have a problem with.
I never did get involved with the civil rights movement.
Walter Gadsden is the boy in the photograph. The one
bitten by Leo. He's a mysterious figure. He was interviewed
at the time of the photograph by Jet magazine back
in nineteen sixty three, but only briefly. From time to time,
(16:19):
other people have come forward to say that they were
the one in the photograph, not Gadsden, but those claims
seem dubious. Meanwhile, Gadsden disappears, people try and find him
in can't. All that seems to exist is this oral
history that you're hearing done in honor of the unveiling
of Ron McDowell's statue. And the interview is strange because
(16:41):
it doesn't go the way the interviewer thinks it's going
to go. She starts with the obvious question, you were
a foot soldier? Tell me how that came about? And
he says, I wasn't a foot soldier. But the fact is,
the day of that moment, I was supposed to have
been in school. But a friend of mine, acquaintment that
(17:04):
told me that earlier that Martin Luke game with him
down that day and he was going to be there,
and I said I wanted to be there too. I
wanted to come and flat out what it was all
a battle. Walter Gadsden is a bystander. The famous statue
in kelly Ingram Park foot Soldier is not in fact
(17:26):
of a foot soldier. It gets a stranger. Okay. And
when you're up the school, where did you come downtown
to the park? Areas kelly Ingram Park over there. So
we started walking to the activity and as I approached
and got closer, they turned and looked at me, and
(17:46):
I saw it coming towards me, So I've turned to Lee.
He was walking down the street with the protesters coming
towards him, so he veers off to get out of
their way and rejoined the spectators on the sidewalk. Ducks
in behind the row of sawhorses, where he runs into
officer in Middleton and Leo. So as I turned and
(18:07):
started to walk away, I was great, and the rest
of it grabbed bout the policeman and yain't toward him.
Has that happened to dog, bitch you? I can remember
that that happened simultaneously. Did you go the policeman Gray?
I don't remember what hand, but the dog the grayant
(18:30):
me one hand. If it happened so fast, there was
nothing I gonna do except throw up the league and
trying to protect us. Yeah, and as I was doing
that there I went. Yeah. If you look at the
famous photo, Gadsden's explanation makes sense. Leo is lunging. The
bite is a middlesecond away. But Gaston and Middleton just
(18:53):
look startled, the way people do if they unexpectedly bump
into each other. Gaston has his knee up as a
reflex and his hand on Middleton as if to steady himself.
Middleton has one hand on Gaston and his other arm
is flexed. He's yanking back on the leash. Leo has
freaked out and he's trying to restrain him. Leo whoa.
(19:17):
Middleton's colleague, Bobby Hayes made the same point to me.
Middleton's not letting Leo loose on Gaston quite the opposite.
If you look at the picture, you can tell he's
holding the dog back. But that line taunt that dog
feeder in the air the best I recall, and Dick
got him here. He's holding that line. He's not only
(19:41):
invited guy. Now what does Gaston say about all this?
Does he think he's been the victim of police brutality?
Not at all? In fact, he can't seem to understand
why everyone makes such a big deal out of what
happened to him that day. How does your family members
react to your participation, Well, they were angry to go
(20:04):
by doing teen school that day he appears in an
image that transfix the world, and his parents are mad
that he skips school. The interviewer then tries to get
at Gadsden's connections to the struggle for civil rights. Okay, well,
the church where your parents are, your family members were attending.
Were they involved in the civil rights movement during that time?
(20:26):
You know they never told me of it. What benefits
to you your family in the community realize as a
result of that movement? None. In answer to the question
what benefits did your family receive from the civil rights movement,
(20:46):
he answers none. He's not having any of it. Gadsden's interview,
in fact, just gets weirder. Okay, if you were in
control of an organization or a movement of such and
could go back and change some things, what would you change? Okay,
The things that would change would be a more careful
(21:12):
choice of people involved in all of those movements. There
are too many, well, the big just blood crooked people
many of the people that were involved and had an
(21:34):
oloriety became too crooked. The most famous photograph of the
Civil rights movement is of a startled cop trying desperately
to hold his dog back from biting a bystander who
wasn't that much of a fan of the Civil rights movement.
I'm want to ring Steel, why me, because I've never
(21:54):
had any oloriety whatsoever concerning that picture. That picture who's
in the paper? But many other people were too, many
other situations Buss Bonnie, Yes, but they chose to use
the little boy at fifteen that the little boy, and
he's put up a little boy's eyes. Are you surprised
(22:17):
when you found out about it? I was the oldly flamborgaster.
I don't know who's to thin. And Gadsden's main objection
he's light skinned, he says. The statue makes him look
dark skinned. That statue doesn't look like me. It looks
like a totally different boy. That looks like an African boy.
(22:38):
That's what are your favor It looks like Afican boy.
It looks like an African boy. The color of the features,
the features, the lips, the size. You take a look
at the pictured air and the statue air the boy
short I was told for my age. If you listen
(23:00):
to the whole interview, it nearly goes off the rails.
At this point, the interviewer expected to find a heroic
civil rights veteran. Instead, she's getting a grumpy old man
still wedded to some of the oldest and most awkward
of black prejudices. We're very proud of it, and I
hope you will be too. And now that we know
(23:21):
who you are, we can add a name under there
that you will be a boy let's come to use Well,
m h. I'm still wondering why, after all the information
(23:41):
that I had given, and and and all that, all
that the established me as being a young African boy,
which I'm not. You prefer being called a negro. I
prefer being called what I am? A colored? Oh oh,
(24:01):
you prefer you were colored? I am good? Okay, okay.
Euphemism and evasion. At the beginning, I said that what
I object to is the way so many stories about
race get cleaned up, sanitized, so the brown decision becomes
(24:22):
a fairy tale in which black people triumph without effort. Well,
here's the flip side. When we stop evading and just listen,
it gets complicated. Our hero, Walter Gadsden isn't all that heroic.
As for the bad guy, the officer, his colleague Bobby
Hayes says he wasn't a bad guy. Did Officer Hayes
(24:44):
tell me things that surprised me? And did listening to
Walter Gadsden shock me? Absolutely? Because I'm no different from
anyone else. I liked the fairy tale. So the person
who invited me down to Birmingham in the first place
was Dick Middleton's widow. Everyone calls her Missus Klingler. Her
husband died not long ago, and I think she felt
(25:06):
it was time to speak out. We met at a
barbe restaurant in downtown Birmingham, sat upstairs. So he's a
police officer at a time when Birmingham is obviously going
through some very tumultuous times. Can you tell me about that?
The first that was the first ten years i'd still
(25:27):
learned to speak English. I didn't really know what's going on.
I didn't understand what's going on. Missus Klingler was from Germany.
She met Richard when he was stationed there with the army.
She says, what happened on that spring day in nineteen
sixty three was like a shadow over her husband. He
went to work and come home and enjoy the family.
(25:50):
But I knew something is going on. You know. Then
later on you see the picture in the paper. He
never really discussed it. She had a big book with
her filled with clippings of her husband's career and other
photographs from that day in kelly Ingram Park. She wanted
to set the record straight. Her husband was unfairly vilified.
(26:15):
He done his job and he was he was spit at,
he was thrown rocks at, and he did not let
the guy put the dog toom he was holding the
leash away from em. If you see other pictures what happened.
(26:37):
This was not the white picture, This was not the
stoyed this was not the truth. For the longest time afterwards,
they got hate mail. So how soon did the letters
start coming, Just like I'm sure like the next months
or so when it went all over the world, just
(26:59):
as ugly as you can imagine. Did he ever talk
to any journalist or do you know he never gave
any interviews. He didn't give no interviews because I think
he felt like what he was portrayed. They would not
tellt yeah, yeah, No matter what he say, no matter
(27:22):
what he would do, they would not believe him. All
they look at the picture, that's all. Do you think
your husband suffered a thank he has. Yes, there's a
statue in Kelly Ingram Park of one of the most
iconic moments in civil rights history, and everyone directly involved
(27:43):
in that moment thinks it didn't happen that way. Oh Mac,
what did you do? You said earlier that when you draw,
you try and inhabit the characters. Yes, and so tell
me your emotional reactions to that photograph. Well, I saw
(28:05):
that the boy was maybe about six four, the officers
maybe five ten, five nine, And I said, this is
a movement about power. So I made the little boy
younger and smaller, and the officer taller and stronger. The
arm of the mall is so strong. That's why his
arm is almost like strength. And the dog is more
like a wolf than a real dog. Because if I'm
(28:27):
a little boy, that's what I was seeing, I would
see like this super man hovering over me, putting this big, old,
giant monster of a dog in my groan area, in
my private area. And so that's what I envision when
I first saw the photographs, and you changed it. In
the photograph, I noticed the boy is leaning in, and
in your sculpture he's leaning back. Tell me about that
(28:51):
he's leaning back because I wanted to depict him showing
that I'm not going to fight you. I'm not leaving,
I'm not moving, I'm standing, but I'm not going to
fight you. This is a non violent protest. That's why
his hands are open and it's going back, like do
whatever you're gonna do. Put the dog on me, beat
me with the come of whatever you want to do.
And I saw all of that when I saw the photograph.
(29:12):
We were in the Tuskegee History Center, a museum on
Elm Street, not far from the university. It's in what
looks like an old bank, and it's filled with exhibits
to the town's extraordinary history, the infamous Tuskegee Selfless Study,
the Tuskegee Airman, Rosa Parks, Tuskegee native. McDowell's work was
all over the walls. He took me on a little tour.
(29:34):
Then we sat down and he took out his portfolio.
Here's the natural Those glasses are like Wait, are the
glasses the same? Did you make the glasses bigger too? Yeah? Good, bigger.
Mac is a whole section on the statue, preliminary drawings, sketches, photographs,
So he's almost like a blind officer. He doesn't even
(29:56):
think again because he's so far beyond that killed this nigger,
attacked this nigger. He's so past the reality of this
is a human, innocent, human child, human being. That's why
he was wearing blind people glass. That is so interesting
because when you see that, that's the thing I couldn't
put my finger on. The officer is behaving as if
he's blind. The dog is attacking. He doesn't even see
(30:19):
the boy. You're the first person. I'm telling them too.
That's so interesting. See how vicious the dog with Oh my,
that's a wolf. I did the hair with a I don't.
I don't have to, I don't. I didn't know what
instruments to use. I did all this with a pencil,
(30:40):
pencil the hairs, and I do the teeth like that,
and oh look at the teeth. I did that on purpose.
The curved Oh yeah, because if you have a curve tooth,
like when you see those those um world wolf pictures,
the teeth, the curve because once there's like a snake
when he bites you, if he doesn't retrack and he's
gonna rip, it's not going in coming out. When it
(31:00):
comes out, he's gonna rip flesh. When you're face to
face with the statue. It has historical authority. It's in
the shadow of sixteen Street Baptist Church inside kelly Ingram
Park at the actual site of the Birmingham Marches. But
it's a work of imagination. It's not a literal representation.
(31:23):
It's art. We are there other details that I mean
you were saying you there's the blind officer. There's the
curved teeth on the dog. The officer moved all of
his anger into the dog, and it's the dog that's
attacking the war. You know. That's what they do with
(31:43):
when racism mac made Leo into a wolf and blinded
Middleton and shrank Walter Gadston until he was tiny and
helpless because he was telling a story about Birmingham. That's
what history is. Each side writes their own story, and
the winner's story is the one we call the truth.
(32:04):
You don't think white people told their share of whoppers
over the years in the South. You don't think that
there's a statue in a Southern town somewhere of a
champion of the Confederacy that makes a hero of someone
who was actually a villain. White people got to do
that in the South for centuries. Foot Soldier is just
what happens when the people on the bottom finally get
the power to tell the story their way. It was
(32:26):
a long time coming. It's a brilliant statue. Thank you,
a Poorma Hartington. Yeah, there's some you've some mischief in you.
What do you mean there's a little bit of mischief
in that in your recreation of that photo, you're you're
(32:50):
using that opportunity to make a much broader kind of
subversive point. I'm maybe I went back through Birmingham after
talking to Mac and Tuskegee, and I went to Kelly
Ingram Park one last time stood in front of the statue.
I think everyone who wants to understand the civil rights
(33:12):
movement should do that because of what it means, the
hard one reward of a long and costly battle over
who gets to control the stories that make up history.
But if you do, just keep in mind that Dick
Middleton didn't actually sick his dog Leo on Walter Gadsden,
and that Walter Gadsden wasn't actually a foot soldier for
(33:32):
civil rights. Mayor Arrington tell me, Marnathan, we did the
unvail me. He got hundreds of threats about bombing and
tearing a statue up from all over the world, and
his response was I'll just get backed into a bigger
one in a battle run. So they never touched him. Oh,
he said, if you if you destroy that statue, we're
coming back bigger. Do you know how many times I
(33:53):
begged for somebody. I hope somebody blows it out. I
was like into a bigger one. Revisionist is produced by
Meil LaBelle and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel,
(34:14):
and Ciomara Martinez wife. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn
Williams is our engineer. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special
thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg at Panopley. I'm
Malcolm Gladwell
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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