Cool Zone Media.
Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff? The podcast that it was in reruns during the holidays, But I bet you'll still like this episode even though I recorded a little while ago, because I think that the way that people look back and think about the old civil rights movement, like, wow, everything was so peaceful
all the time, Well it's not true. I mean, some stuff was peaceful, and nonviolence is an important part of political strategy, but it's certainly not the only thing that happened. And so we're going to do a rerun about the armed civil rights movement. I hope you enjoy it. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. It's a podcast. It does what it says in the title.
I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is my guest, Elminique, who is a pop cultural critic and seems to do so much of everything that I have a hard time pinning her down. Joell, how are you?
I'm good.
You know, it's a gray morning, but in LA that counts as weather, so I'm really trying to vibe with it. You know, I got my hot tea, I'm ready to go learn about some nice people.
Is it below seventy degrees there, it.
Is below seventy degrees here. He's got sweaters on. I'm under a blanket currently.
Oh that's nice, it's lovely. I'm in the mountains in my heat is broken. Oh no, Margaret, it's okay. I have like six backup heats horses because I'm like that.
That's good. That's good.
As someone who came from a snowy climate, you need multiple sources of heat at all times just in case.
Yeah.
No, absolutely, Like my house is like like right now, I'm running electric heat space heaters, and if that breaks, I have a wood burning stove. Like it's it's fine. Yes, anyway, Joe, What's what's your favorite of your many jobs besides being a guest on the Poole.
That is a really tough question.
Probably like hosting live events is my favorite because it's like all the aspects of performance, but you get to like perform your ultimate self, you know what I mean. It's just as an extroverted introvert, Like getting to perform all the extrovertedness, you know, for a crowd is a lot of fun and you get to, you know, get their feelings and maybe you make your guest cry, but in like a good way, you know, and like all
that energy is really lovely. And then I would say writing after that is definitely a favorite.
Okay, Okay, that makes a lot of sense to me. I really like performing and then going and hiding. That's like, oh no, for.
Sure afterwards, Please don't talk to me. I was on set recently and we recorded for like four hours straight and then we broke for lunch and I did not leave the set and they're like.
Are you hungry out? I's like no, They're like, are you okay?
And I was like I just need to decompress and not talk to anyone for whatever long we have until the next take, Like I just cannot.
Yeah, So totally, totally, yeah.
Absolutely. We're also joined as always by our producer Sophie.
Hi, Sophie, Hey, Margaret, how are you?
Oh wait, that's not Sophie. Is that Sophie. It's Ian.
Yes, I'm finally on the podcast.
I Yeah. Ian is our audio engineer and also today our producer. How are you doing, Ian?
I'm doing pretty good.
Yeah.
It's a nice cozy, cool morning, you know, got my sweatshirt on, ready to do some podcasts and all right.
So on this show we talk about cool people in history, especially cool movements, cool complicated networks of cool people who actually usually pretty complicated. But this week, well, actually this week's no different. I'm really excited to talk this week about the non violent civil rights movement the nineteen fifties and the sixties in the US South and along the way. I'm going to talk about the people who protected the non violent civil rights movement with the firearms and stuff.
Yeah, yes, they won't get violent, but we sure as fuck will. Those are my favorite people.
Yep, that is today's It is exactly the people who said, oh, that's great, you're non violent. I go to protect you. I'm not nonviolent.
You always need somebody who's ready to do some dirty work.
Always, absolutely exactly. And I think that they don't get enough credit. And so we're going to talk about the armed wing of the non violent civil rights movement, the paradox that isn't half as much of a paradox as it might seem. We're going to talk about the Deacons for Defense and Justice, which was a non ideological but well organized collection of black people who defended civil rights campaigners.
We're going to talk about the North Carolina branch of the NAACP that armed itself, and we're going to talk about all the unaffiliated groups and individuals who relied, often quite effectively on their capacity to defend themselves in the struggle for self determination and all that kind of stuff because we've been doing I mean, as anyone who's listening to the podcast, we've been covering like the Klan a bunch recently and not in the We've been talking about people who fight the Klan, not the.
Good people in the clan, but yeah, yeah, people who fought the Klan, I got.
Yeah, yeah. So you all will be shocked to know this. There's been a concerted effort in the United States of America by white supremacy to disenfranchise black people.
You know, you don't say really, yeah, no.
Yeah, I only learned this recently.
Never mind.
And wherever there's oppression, there's resistance to oppression, which is the core concept of this show. And so I'm going to frame the civil rights movements of the nineteen fifties of the seventies, and the same way that I see it framed by a lot of historians and people who are there at the time, has been kind of made
up of two general parts. You've got the sort of civil rights era of the nineteen fifties and sixties with a focus on non violence and sit ins and registration drives kind of most famously for my public school education, Martin Luther King, I have a dream all of that stuff. And then you've got the Black Power era of the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, best remembered these
days because of the work of the Black Panthers. So that's the classification that I've been presented with is, you know, every dichotomy is false, right, And we're going to talk about some of the ways that all these things blur together. But so people talk about it. They talk about the Civil rights era as like pacifist reformism, and the Black
Power era as like all armed revolutionaries. More and more people are starting to talk about what people have been talking about a lot of along the way, But more and more and more media is paying attention to the Black Panthers, for example, also had a lot of mutual laid programs and breakfast programs and all of these other things that are part of what made them so dangerous and powerful. Yeah, and one day we're going to get into all that, but today we're going to talk about
kind of the inverse. We're going to talk about how in the civil rights era it's more complicated than it's sometimes presented.
When you guys do the breakfast program for the Black Panthers, have me back, and I'll try to get some stories from my dad, who's a direct beneficiary of that program on the South Side of Chicago when he was growing up.
Oh yeah, no, that would be amazing. Yeah, And that's actually one of the kind of things that's interesting is I keep like, on today's episode, I'll like look through this and I like start writing like so and so was, and then I'm like, wait, no, is uh still alive?
Yeah?
Yeah, you know, these people who are fighting in the fifties, sixties, seventies, many of them are still with us, which is fucking cool. So in previous episodes, especially last week's episodes, we talked about that most famous of white supremacist organizations, the ku Klux Klinn, the and we're going to go through the super basics of them, the speed run of these fucking worst people. And well, there's so many worst people in US history, but these are some of the worst people
in US history. Okay, so there's like three or four basic distinct phases of the Klin. They were founded because of frat club for piece of shit white Southern racists. In the wake of the Civil War. They decided to rely on raw terror and violence in order to fight for white supremacy after having lost a war. This fell apart in eighteen seventy one because the federal government was like, you actually can't do that, and then white racists figured
out a better strategy. Instead of nighttime terror was legal disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow laws that fucked everything up really bad. That's Klan number one, and then you got Clan number two. This is the weird multi level marketing scheme invented in nineteen fifteen by some people who are basically cosplaying the old Clan. It was this huge social club for white Protestants that became the armed wing of the Prohibition movement as well as the white supremacy movement.
And they had this whole anti immigrant thing that not only had them fighting against black people, but also Jews and white Catholics and basically immigrants from anywhere. They just fucking hated everyone. Last week we talked about some of the organizations that worked to stop them. They fell apart because like every financial scam, they fell into bitter infighting and disgrace and their property was repossessed and all that shit. By the end of the nineteen thirties or the Begain nineteen.
Thirty time time that was I know.
That, I know, I want more. Well, we're starting to see all of these modern white supremacist movements fall apart into weird infighting.
And it's been really lovely.
Every time I get a little update like so and SOEs go into prison, I'm like, yeah, small.
Victories totally or the like I wish I had the notes in front of me about this, but there's like, I don't know, like ten years ago it like went around the anti fascist thing that some of the Nazi clan member people or whatever, like one of them killed the other because they like there was like some like incestuous like cheating that happened, Like.
They're taking themselves down even yes, yeah, all the insurrectionist who posted to Instagram, it's like, oh, you made everybody's job so much easier.
I know you, I know. And so that's kind of how the nineteen twenties, clan went down even though there was they were five millions strong fucking peak. Eventually everyone realized that there were a bunch of like just random pieces of shit, and people started distancing themselves from them. But the fucking clan is like a stupid racist hydra.
And the third Clan popped back up pretty soon after the second Clan went down, and this time they got back to their roots, which was terrorizing black people in order to maintain white supremacy. And you know, this is kind of back when you people were like really blatant about being white supremacists. Actually, we're getting back there, We're
getting back to that point. But they never reached quite the numbers of the Second Klan because they were less of like a popular organization, right, and they were more just like just fucking terrorists, right. They were really die hard. They were decentralized, and they got an awful lot of terrorism done. They also there's like arguments to be made about whether they infiltrated the police or whether they just came out of the police, you know.
Mmmmm yeah, yeah, I'm on team the slave catchers into police.
Yeah, yeah, I think I think most people would agree with that.
As we just look at their badges, it's who's happening and the current forever police lineage of just you know, active lynching. Yeah, I think they're one in the same.
Yeah, So third clan has a lot of cops in it, or the cops have a lot of clan in it or whatever. We're just using synonyms. But wherever there's the bad people, there's the people trying to stop the bad people. And we're going to talk about some of those cool people.
And we're going to talk today. We're going to talk a lot about some of the nonviolent organizations, right and then on Wednesday we're going to come back and talk more about a lot of the organizations that defended them, even though there was a whole decentralized defense of them that happened before that. And so we're going to talk about two of the major nonviolent organizations today. We're going to talk about CORE and we're going to talk about SNICK.
There's like a bunch more than this. SCLC will come into it a lot, the NAACP will come into it a lot. But for what we're going to talk about Core and SNICK kind of where it's at the oldest one of these groups is the Congress of Racial Equality, just founded in nineteen forty two. It grew out of the Christian pacifist movement, especially a group called the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Only about a third of its founders were black.
I was founded by almost half women, which for the time is better than some of the other people around. You know, a lot of the founders of this were ministers and of various Christian denominations, and that is actually something that they like. The multi faith getting together, the groups that got together a lot of different faith based organizations to do a lot of good work is like something that I think sometimes is left out of the
more radical understandings of all of this history. Basically, Core started as a we like what Gandhi is doing in India, We're going to do that for anti racism in the US. And they got together. They fought against Jim Crow laws, housing discrimination, voting rights, all that stuff. They were pretty cool. They have complicated stuff that we'll get into, but you
know everyone does. In nineteen forty seven, Corps sent sixteen people, eight white, eight black on a journey of reconciliation on buses, and this was kind of the first Freedom Ride about fifteen years before the freedom rides became more of a thing.
And this first journey was a mix of folks that had socialists, that had religious leaders at Pacifist, it has musicians, it had just like people who wanted the world to be better, who were like, fuck it, let's go do this weird, dangerous thing where the government had just passed a law banning segregation on interstate travel, and so basically they were like, all right, we're going to go test that.
We're going to go said people like basically white and black people sitting next to each other on the bus or sometimes the white people sat in the back of the bus and black people sat in the front of the bus. All this shit, and they just basically went around the South, the kind of near South, doing this. It didn't go smoothly. I don't know whether that'll be shocking to hear. It didn't take long before four of
them were arrested. I mean, this is okay. This is like one of the things that's so interesting me about this right is like so much of the Civil rights era stuff was basically like the federal government like would pass a law and then people would be like, let's go see if this law is real, and then they would find out that the law is not real because
the local police everywhere they go, would you know. So basically, two black men were arrested for not moving to the back of the bus, and two white men were arrested for defending the two black men who would not move to the back of the bus. All four of them ended up on segregated chain gangs. The black men got thirty days and the white men got ninety days. And specifically because the racist judge was so mad at the white people for betraying whiteness.
Wow, wow, that is the deep de deep seated hate. Because it's one thing to be like, I hate black people and I punish them more harshly. It's another thing to be like and if you're a white person, I'll punish you three times. Is hard because screw you. He's including my agenda, I guess. Wow.
Yeah, Like overall, like clearly including in the civil rights movement, Like it was much harder for black folks as part of the civil rights movement the wife than the like white allies and stuff. But here and there you would run across this kind of shit where like the clan would go around being like, hey, any white people, if you show up and support this, we're gonna murder you, you know, or or whatever like that. That kind of shit happened a lot. We're gonna get to some of that.
So the judge, I'm not going to read the quote of what I literally can't the judge said a lot of racist shit in the sentence scene.
But it and I'll do an interpretation of the No.
No, I didn't.
I didn't even copy and paste it in my script. It's just bad. It's just bad shit, you know.
Sure.
But in it he specifically called the two white men who I belil leave were not Jewish, referred to them as white Jews from or sorry, referred to them as Jews from New York.
Okay, so not even doing his research, just just out here being like if they held the blacks, they must be Jews.
Just lumping all that hate together.
Just yeah, it's like that, like it's like the coastal elites coming here and ruining everything. You must basically be the Jews from New York and the like Jewish agenda to desegregate the United States. And it was just a slur I think for him, like I don't think he thought they were Jews. I think it's possible, and I couldn't the books I was reading about it didn't like name which of the white people were the people who
got arrested. But it's completely possible they were like Christian ministers, you know, so they get arrested. They spent some time on the chain gang. And one thing of note, they intentionally went to the Near South and not the Deep South, because basically they were like, if we do this in the Deep South, we're all going to die. And it took a special kind of courage to go to the Deep South and desegregate and enroll voters, and or be
from the Deep South and desegregate and enroll voters. And it's a kind of a courage that many of them found, which we'll get to later. One of the black men who serve some time on a chain gang is part of the result of this journey for desegregation. Was a guy I want to take a closer look at because he rules, or at least he did a lot of really cool stuff. Everyone's complicated. His name was Bayard Rustin.
I know, it's like I'm like, yeah, this guy's awesome, and you get to like part of the like descriptions of him that you find, You're like, oh, well, you know, yeah, but like whatever womst amongst it? Like okay, So Bayard Rusting he was a black gay Quaker.
Amazing.
Yeah, and this this is this recurring thing on this show where somehow Quakers end up in every episode. I've never done an episode on the Quakers. They're everywhere.
The Quaker is really rocked with black people, Like whar They were like, no, we're not down with this slavery thing, and we will help for you where we can't.
Yeah, exactly, Like I keep running across being like and then the people who organized to get black people out of slavery were black people and some white Quakers, you know, over and over again. So Bayard Rustin he was deeply involved in Core from its founding and he was everywhere. He did everything mostly from behind the scenes because people were afraid that his homosexuality or socialism would make their movements look bad. And I want to talk about him
really quick. He was kicked out of his university for organizing a strike. He sang tenor on Broadway in the choir. He sang spirituals on a ton of records. He joined the Communist Party for a little while, and then he realized that Stalin was a fuck, and so he quit the Communist Party and he became a socialist. Specifically, he was in the Communist Party until the USSR ordered the Communist Party in the US to stop working for civil rights and start working to try and get the US
to join World War two. He organized a march on Washington for the desegregation of the armed forces. He went to California to fight against the racist in prison of the imprisonment of the Japanese during the war. He would like, go and try and make sure that people could hold onto their property and shit like that while they were being taken into the fucking concentration camps that the US had,
because US is deeply racist. He was arrested nineteen forty two for refusing to give up his seat on a bus and that was the moment, I mean, he was arrested for being black on a bus, and that was the moment where he was like, from now on, I'm not going to hide the fact that I'm gay. Because he basically was just like, oh, I'm with the biggots.
It's hard for me to like totally explain this epiphany that he had, but he talks about it and I should have put the quote in and I didn't, And he got arrested again and again for basically fighting everything bad. He fought against the colonization of India by the British. One time restled for being gay. Like one time he got a rested for rookie up with two dudes in a car. So he's clearly I know, yes.
My polyamorous king, I was with that on him.
I don't know if he was about that life, but if you're doing two dudes in a car at the same time, I love that for him, I know.
Not talked about part of the civil rights movement like anyway. He co wrote an influential, influential passfist paper in the nineteen fifties called Speak Truth the Power, but in the end he kept his name off of it. He chose to keep his name off of it because he didn't want to sexuality discredit the paper. And he worked with
Martin Luther King Junior. It was probably him that who convinced MLKA to stop carrying a handgun for self defense, which goes against the spirit of the rest of today's topic.
But whatever.
Everyone's different has different ideas. You know. He was heavily involved in organizing the nineteen sixty three March on Washington, the one with the I Have a Dream speech. He would have been called the director of the March because he did all of the director of the March stuff, but he was a gay socialist, so they didn't want to put his name on it. And like the fucking right wing dragged up all kinds of shit, just like the same way that people would.
Do it on Twitter now.
Yeah, and he actually was like one of the staunchests, so basically they're like, oh, this communist. He was one of the staunchest anti USSR US socialists to the point where he actually kind of verged into some right wing positions, like he supported the war in Vietnam, for example, because he hated the USSR, so he like supported the Cold War. This is why I was the beginning where I was like, I gets interesting.
The complex time, and when you're yeah, you know.
What I mean, Like American wars are off started because like, oh, someone is doing something terrible, and then we really go in and do horrible shit, and we're.
Like, what we had to stop. This guy had to meet the mother that was so oh gosh, Yeah, you're right, MESSI Yeah.
And so he gets called a conservative socialist, and he's the only term I've actually personally run us. Anyone get called a conservative socialist, and I don't really understand it yet. Funny in the eighties, as most people would be wont to do as an out gay person, he turned to gay activism in the nineteen eighties. He died in nineteen eighty seven, not of HIV AIDS. He died of being old.
He was born in nineteen twelve.
Yeah, included a good long life, Yeah exactly. He did fine anyway, As just an aside, because I find him really interesting because people don't talk about the gay, polyamorous who fucking like organize the March on Washington, you know. Anyway, he was on a chain gang for a while as part of his work for CORE. So that's Core. What a hero, I know, And I'm sure Core could be its own two part episode. But they're going to come in and out of today of this week's Now you've
got Snick. Snick is the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which is six times more radical than you might guess with a name like that. It was black youth formed and black youth led, so didn't have kind of that sort of problem that Core actually ended up dealing with fairly effectively in the mid to late sixties, where they were a little bit too white white lead, you know, for a lot of a lot of what they're doing and
snick comes out of. In nineteen sixty, there were four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, who were like, you know what, fuck all this shit, fuck this fucking white supremacist society we live in. They were freshmen at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, which is an HBCU historically black college or university. One of these freshmen went and tried to buy a hot dog at the Greyhound station and he was denied because he was black.
Because the world's full of racism.
I can't get a hot dog.
Bro. Yeah, oh my guy heard die here with my ancest we had to deal with. I'm like, that is exhausting hot with my green American.
Cat, there's all that shit like people talk about like what my money's no good here or whatever, like, is like this thing that still happens, Yes, for sure, and and yeah, though, like literally can't buy a fucking hot dog something so simple.
We don't want to make your gay wedding cake, even though our whole business is making cakes.
Yeah, totally. Yeah, Somewhere there's a heterosexual couple named Sam and Chris who can't get a wedding cake. You know, we're like, what the hell?
I move out of Indiana? Yeah.
Crazy.
So after getting refused service for a hot dog, they meet up back in one of their dorm rooms and they're like, all right, what the fuck do we do? Right? And there been some sit ins before where people just go and show up and be like, you know what, fuck this, I'm gonna be here whether you want me here or not. Going back to nineteen thirty nine with the Alexandria Library sit in, a lot of those cit ins had been successful, but they've been very scattershot up
to that point. It'd be like every couple of years someone would do a sit in. It's an earlier one that we're gonna talk about later because I'm really good at chronology. And so the four freshmen they're like, all right, we're going to do a sit in at the FW Woolworth Company's store, which is a big department store that also was a lunch counter, and you can go buy stuff there if you're black, but you can't go to
the lunch counter if you're black. So they go in, they asked to be served, and then they refused to leave when they were fused service. February first, nineteen sixty they ordered coffee and donuts, and they got both criticism and support from both white and black folks at the store, Like, obviously, most of the white people were like, fuck, you were not serving you. One white woman was like, oh, this is great what you're doing, but didn't like do anything
about it. And some of the black folks were like, oh please, oh god, this is going to go really badly.
I would not like to be beaten with a police baton today. You're making that probability increase.
Yeah, I get it.
Yeah.
They weren't arrested, but they weren't served. They waited until the store closed, and they left and the store closed, and they showed up again the next day with more than twenty black students from the university. They were a few service, but they weren't arrested. They hung out all
day and did their school work at the store. The next day they had sixty people, including some high school students who joined them, and this time some people from the fucking clan showed up to keep an eye on it all or whatever, right, but they didn't do shit because there was fucking sixty people there. Plant the clan is cowards is one of the main takeaways of all this research.
Oh, for sure, you'd have to be.
Yeah, no exactly. It's like fascism and it's.
Wear masks and they only like unfair fights, so that that sounds about right.
Yeah, the fact that they only like unfair fights is something that we all need to fucking remember. So Day four, February fourth, there's three hundred students. They fill the entire lunch counter, including and this time a tiny handful of some white folks and white women from a nearby university show up to support as well. Day five they get their first real counter protesters, about fifty white men, three of whom were arrested. Day six, they had one thousand
fucking people. They entirely filled the store. Yeah, like shit snowballs sometimes, you know. They entirely fill the store and several nearby other segregated stores. By day eight, the cit In movement spreads across the South. Within months, there's sit ins in fifty five different cities, and on July twenty fifth, nineteen sixty, boycotts had cut their income by a third and the Woolworth store world all started quietly desegregated.
It's lunch counter, Yes, it's bullying where exactly.
So the students they're like, all right, we should we should get organized, right, because that's that's in my mind where the magic happens is it starts with something that is spontaneous and then you figure out how to like keep that going, and that takes structure an organization.
Yeah, when people see power, they are reminded of their own.
Right, Yeah, totally totally, And you need that initial spark for people to actually see that. So in April nineteen sixty, there was a conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. The adults or the like older than students it always is referred to in history. They're like, the adults said this, and then the youth said this. And I'm like, these people are like twenty, I don't want to call them not adults, you.
Know, right, right, right, you're right, the young people.
Yeah, So the older than students helped call for the conference. Specifically, it was Martin Luther King Junior's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the SCLC, called for it, but it wasn't called for by MLKA. It was called for by someone I'm going to get to in a second who is like my absolute my favorite person that I'm going to talk about this week. And the SELC they weave their way throughout this episode, but they're not our focus.
And so the conference was organized by the students, and it was organized by one of the most badass women to ever live, Ella Baker. Ella Baker, so like the people that I'm like pulling aside that I'm really excited about are so behind the scenes, Like yeah, it's like
their fucking thing. Ella Baker worked with King in the SELC, but she was basically there to be critical of him, Like, as far as I can tell, she was critical of his hierarchical leadership and basically the concept of charismatic leadership as the way to run a movement that was like her main thing. She was like, that's not the plan. So she calls for the conference. She told the assembled students, quote, strong people don't need strong leaders. What they need instead
is organization and to help each other. And they're not anti leadership, they're anti this, like you know, strong.
Anti to your point, this hierarchical system that's like we all follow this one person when we're a community of people with dope, ideas and capabilities and skills. And what is the word I'm looking for?
Not materials resources or people of resources?
And yeah, we can absolutely just go out and accomplish these goals without needing to be told to do them.
Yeah, but you know people do need to be told to do chi. Well, it's by things capitaliz. Yay, there's some ads, and we're back and we're talking about Ella fucking Baker, who would probably hate being put on a pedestal. But what is the show but cool people? So I'm going to take an aside and talk about Ella Baker because she is my favorite cool person this episode. Sorry everyone else, I love everyone else, but just seriously, like my like whatever, I will just gush about Ella Baker.
Very quickly, she she grew up listening to her grandmother or tell stories about slavery. As soon as soon as she became an activist, like with the NAACP, she started working for decentralization and against chrismatic leadership and for more democratic organizational models, and for better inclusion of women within
activist organizations. So in a lot of ways, as far as I can tell, like, this is the main person I can point to and say, this is what grassroots activism like, the concept of grassroots activism has always been there, right, But the person who like worked tirelessly to make the Civil rights movement grassroots was Ella Baker. And that's my own conjecture about her being the inventor of grassroots whatever. But she traveled through the South and made direct, interpersonal
connections with people. She believed that the purpose of a national organization was to support local initiatives and help local people help themselves, rather than to like see the local people as people to funnel resources from to move upwards in a pyramid. You know. She basically said, the movement made Martin Luther King. It's not that Martin Luther King made the movement, which doesn't mean that she didn't like Martin Luther King, you know, just the direction of power
had to be understood. She constantly worked against infighting in the civil rights movement, including she fought against red baiting. She was like don't toss out the socialists. They've been here forever. By the end of her life, she actually was more openly a socialist, and while she organized nonviolent direct action, nonviolence was always a strategic choice for her and not a moral imperative. To quote her biography Joanne
Grant quote, she had no qualms about target practice. The first organization that she worked with was the Young Negro's Cooperative League, which was a collectivist organization working to build black economic power through cooperativism, which is something that I've run across here and there, like Fanny Louhamer also got into this stuff later in the sixties and stuff like that, and it's really interesting to me, and I'm really looking forward to do more of a deep dive on cooperativism
and specifically how the US concept of cooperativism was like built out of black cooperativism or like, I don't know, whatever, it's the most whatever, it's fucking cool the one day, I'm going to do a whole episode about that. But Ella Baker, when she stepped back from the movement, it was around the time that the black power stuff in the late sixties started to pick up, but it wasn't because she had a problem with that. It was because of her health. And she continued to be basically part
of everything. She was part of the Free Angela Davis campaign, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the anti apartheid movement, all the while focusing on yeah, right, like just just did everything, never anything showy. She never like got herself like this is the speech or this is the martyr or.
You know, this is the core of activism. And it's something we're absolutely seeing a the activist community, particularly the black activist community in America today, is very adamant that celebrity has no space in their movement, and they're very weary of anybody who comes in and trying to make a name for themselves, because if the idea is liberation and equity for everybody, then how can you center yourself, Yeah,
in that biocycically opposite of the end goal. And so it's so cool to hear from a people who started that, you know, and to have that vision before anyone else. It's it's a radical concept that people can liberate themselves if they're given the tools and if they're educated about their surroundings and what's happening.
Yeah, no that yeah, exactly. No notes Elebaker like you know the other guy right, like complicated here and there. I'm like, Ella Baker. I have everything I've read about Ella Baker. I have not found anything negative to say about Ella Baker.
You know, she's a dope woman doing dope thing. Yeah.
So she called for this student conference and the SCLC, which was the organization she used to call for the conference, they were hoping that the students would become the youth wing of their organization. Right. They were like, ah, excellent, these young people are doing something cool. We will bring them into our organization. And Ella Baker was like, she gave a keynote speech, and her keynote speech was basically like you might want to remain atonymous and set your
own goals and do your own thing. So they did, and the youth the adults who weren't the older adults, they formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It was youth led. They had a few adult advisors or whatever. I'm going to keep using the lord adult accidentally throughout the script. Yeah, Ella Baker was the primary advisor. I've read one thing that claims that the historian Howard Zinn was another one of their advisors, Wow, and I want to know more
about it. He wrote a whole book about SNICK, and I haven't read it yet, so I can't say too much yet. The organizers gave Ella Baker the nickname Fundi, which was a Swahili word. To quote the site Afropunk, the word means to them as relates as to Ela Baker, an artisan who has mastered their craft and shares their knowledge freely with the community. And so SNICK organized their
asses off. They went directly into the most dangerous parts of the South, where many of them were from, although more of them were urban, going into rural spots in the South, which is, as far as I can tell, almost as big of a divide as like North South divide. The urban rural divide was also very major in terms
of organizing. SNICK worked together with Core and the NAACP, but unlike Core and NAACP, there were no membership cards, no membership fees, and while Core was more ideologically committed to nonviolence, SNICK, even though it was in their name, was strategically committed to nonviolence, and the field secretaries, which is what their organizers were called, had tons of autonomy. There weren't like a lot of levels of hierarchy. I mean there was RIGHT as an organization. They had different
levels and tiers or whatever. Right, but like overall, the field organizers, their field secretaries were the main thing. They had a lot of autonomy. And later Snick gets involved in like everything, they get part of the broader left in the late six part of the feminist movement, anti war movement, and there also we'll get to this later, the crucible from which the modern conception of black power was formed. But we're not here just to talk about Snick.
We're going to talk about the delicate and beautiful balance between the non violence civil rights movement and the people willing to use violence to defend the individuals within that movement. So we're going to talk about that. The first thing you got to understand is that in the Deep South, especially in rural areas, the gun issue was a settled issue. Black people owned guns, and they use them to defend
themselves against and others against what white violence. The main book that I'm referencing a lot throughout this is a twenty fourteen book by Charles E. Cobb Junior, and the book is called This Nonviolent Stuff will get you killed. How guns made the civil rights movement possible. And this book fucking rules. It's not this like called arms right. He like very specifically talks about how he's talking about the context of the rural South in the nineteen in sixties,
and it's readable, it's insightful. This is like, literally, if I could just pivot. This is not an actual ad pivot, but just like, seriously, this book rules. It's one of the best books I've ever read for this research. He
was there. Charles Cobb was a field secretary for SNICK from nineteen sixty two to nineteen sixty seven, and the premise of the book, to quote him, is that the use of guns for self defense in the non violence civil rights movement was necessary and vital to the movement's survival. Writing about his own experiences, he said, quote SNICK was unusual and placing its field secretaries in rural Southern communities to work from the bottom up instead of the top down.
Living among the downtrodden black men and women of the Deep South, I underwent a subtle conversion the principles and illusions I had brought with me of nonviolence, of the uniformity of the Southern Black experience were shaped by the men and women I encountered there. We and Snick were radicalized by working with people in their homes and communities much more than by ideology.
It's probably practically living under the boot of oppression made you more active in your desire to liberate the people. Wow, I imagine, imagine in other words, leave your guilded cages, y'all. Yeah, yeah, it's it's for sure different, particularly I think in the Deep South at that time. My dad talks about he his family came up to Chicago during the Great Mississipi Migration, which is a time period post slavery when a lot of black people moved from the South to the North.
But he would go back to Alabama to visit his great grandmother who still lived in a slave cabin where she had been freed.
Like she was freed, they weren't using it. She just stayed on the land.
And I think you know, a lot of people did, which meant you're looking at dirt floors, no inner plumbing. You're restricted to what kinds of jobs you can have in the South under Jim Crow. So you're seeing a lot of people like either being porters or anning chicken and so like it's a and and then because you know, if you know, and the rules set around specific jobs, that's where we got like you can be making two dollars an hour as a waitress, and so there's like
a lot of financial restrictions. And I think we saw you know, I can only imagine that if you were living there during that time, like your instinct would be like, oh, immediately, these people need access to better rights, like this is insane.
Yeah, yeah, totally. And like and there's this thing that also happens right where like people sometimes like go out into a community and he's a he's a black man, but he's from an urban environment going out into a rural environment, you know, and like coming with an ideology, right, and then immediately being like instead of like educating these these like you know, ignorant rural people, instead being like, oh, they know what's up and I should learn from them.
And that was like the process that seemed to happen with snick Field organizers, and that absolutely ties into how the whole thing transformed and the whole push towards black power and the the change within the civil rights movements as far as I can tell and as far as like I've read. And yeah, I I met Charles Cobb briefly in North Carolina because he did a talk about the book, and I I went because that day i'd
just been whatever the Nazis know, they doxed me. I'd just been docks by Nazis they called themselves, don't call us Nazis, were neo Confederates. I'd just been like docks by neo confederates who had like told me, like showed me pictures of my family and told me they were going to burn my house down and shit.
And he sound like Nazis.
I just want to know you yourself, Needo conservatives, you should move in a different direction than the Nazis because that sounds like class a Nazi bullshit.
Oh, Neo Confederates. Sorry, I might as miss stake. Yeah, I said no, But I mean, it's like whatever, Neo Confederate and Nazi, Like, I don't care whether you call yourself an American Nazi or German Nazi, you're fucking Nazi. Like fuck you. They had like just doxed me and some other some other folks. And so I bought a rifle and I never owned a firearm before. I didn't particularly grow up around firearms, and like, I come from a sort of military family, but with like a liberal bent,
you know. And and so I told him, I was like, hey, like your talk was really interesting and meaningful to me because I I just went and bought a rifle today. And he was like, well, how do you How do you feel about that? I was like, I feel really mixed about it, and he was like, that makes sense, you.
Know for sure?
And and Mike, I mostly just like talking about how much I like this guy in this book. But my copy of the book is signed from my generation to yours, and I think about it a lot.
Ah, I'm gonna cry.
That's really beautiful, And especially for somebody who's doing, you know, such key and important work and understands intimately the struggle. Like what a blessing to sort of be given a yeah, you know, like a passing of the baton.
That's wonderful.
Yeah. Uh. To quote more from this, nonviolent stuff will get you killed. The rural black culture that Snickfield secretaries encountered in the Deep South had long accepted arm self defense as legitimate, although local black people could be uncertain about when and how best to employ it. The idea itself was not subject to debate. Guns were common in southern households, used not only for hunting but for protection
from white violence. The idea of removing guns from the equation was, for the vast majority of rural Southern blacks simply a non issue. Later, I'm going to talk about a bunch of the organized groups that defended the non violence movement, and those groups matter, but I think it's also worth understanding where they come from. Which what didn't just like show up like one person wasn't suddenly like,
I've an idea, we can defend ourselves, right. It was built on a bedrock of people just doing it themselves. Charles Cobb describes, for example, a seventy year old woman in Lee County, Georgia named Mama Dolly. She ran a farm, and I'm under the impression maybe she was a local midwife, and a quote a student organizer stayed with her. What Snick would do is I'd send people down to like and Core would do is like people would leave and go into these rural environments and register people to vote
and possibly help organize desegregation and stuff like that. Right, and they would stay with black families who would defend them. So to quote a student organizer, Mama Dolly had this big shotgun. I tried to talk her out of guarding me, but she said, Baby, I brought a lot of these white folks into this world, and I'll take them out of this world if I have to.
Come on. Mama, Yes, I know.
That's why I think she was probably a midwife. Sometimes, no matter what I said, this is to the quote. Sometimes, no matter what I said, she would sit in my bedroom window leg propped up with that big old gun. If you know how to handle it, way better than I did. In fact, I knew nothing about no shotgun.
And everything I've read is story after story of rural farmers defending organizers, most of whom were black urban Southerners, some of whom were you know, white urban Southerners, people from all over in different backgrounds.
Right.
But because frankly, defending these people as part of hospitality, and of course the supremacists were really fucking mad about snick, and so the bravery of these organizers matters, But the bravery of the people who took them in is at least as much. Right because the organizer might leave, but that.
Family wherever and everyone knows you in all your business, and I know that some of them like lost business.
You know what I mean?
If you're, yeah, a black person providing a service that is available to white people, like I could put your whole livelihood in danger.
That's wild.
Yeah. And the Klan was during this time running around killing people, burning and bombing buildings, murdering organizers and like, people would go register to vote and they would get laughed out of the room by clerks or one case, like in I think it was Mississippi, Like literally someone just got pistol whipped because they were like, what do you mean I can't register to vote. I pulled out
a gunhead hit the woman in the head. But you know what won't hit you in the head except with really good deals.
No potato, that's right.
Oh yeah, okay, So so Joelle, one of the things that we try and do on the show is we try to be sponsored only by very good things, right, and so our perennial sponsor is the concept of potatoes. They're good for you, you can eat them cooked when you cook them first. They're cheap. And I'm wondering if you have any anything that you would like to be sponsored by. We've also been sponsored by sleeping dogs.
Like I think good Comb.
Yeah, good Comb was good.
The laughter of children after children is great. I want to be sponsored by a rainy day with a good book. Oh yeah, favorite spaith to live in.
Oh my god, if I could eat. That's what heaven looks like to me.
It's constantly raining, and like there's good books and hot tea everywhere.
He never goes cold.
All right, that is what we are sponsored by today, and possibly some other stuff that you'll hear about in a second. Okay, and we are back, and I'm going to mostly the like atrocities of what people were facing have been told at great length, and so I don't want to like specifically go through like every time that people got murdered or whatever, but one of them that impacts all of this a lot. In Mississippi, in September nineteen sixty one, a local black farmer and NAACP leader
who was affiliated with SNICK. His name is Herbert Lee. He was killed in broad daylight in front of a dozen people. And he got killed by his childhood friend who was a white man, an a racist who it was like neighbors who had just like decided should had gone too far, and he'd basically been like, Hey, come over here, I want to talk to you. And then herbertly, Uh, the murderer, Yeah, the murderer was acquitted that afternoon by an all white jury.
What whoa?
And no one none of the witnesses felt safe coming forward. Right later, a black witness of the crime, Luis Allen, was murdered on his own property before he could testify. And that murderer was almost certainly done by the local county sheriff. And like, this is an example story, not the thing that changed everything. This is what people like, Basically, a lot of the people that I'm reading about were refer to what's happening as a war, and they're like,
I am in a war against white supremacy. And that's that's some of the context, you know. So so SNICK organizers themselves, they didn't go armed because it would break the spell of what they were doing, and nonviolent organizing was a very effective strategy. And and but especially in Mississippi, their local defenders absolutely went armed. The whole thing was massively debated within the movement, but overall a lot of the debates against this sort of protection were happening far away.
You know, they were the movement leaders who weren't in the shit. So I like telling stories about the clan losing. So I'm going to tell some stories about the Klan losing.
Oh Yes.
In nineteen sixty five, Baker County, Georgia, there was a seventeen year old young woman named Shirley Miller, who, alongside other folks, integrated the local high school. The Klan burned across in her yard. More than a dozen of the focks showed up to, you know, scare her and possibly do worse. So Shirley's mother called her neighbors, who poured in armed and took aim at the clansmen, and the klansmen literally begged for their life in order to leave.
Recording of bad.
Could you imagine a recording of that, just playing it back and be like, yes, you assholes, that's for threatening a high school or you jerks.
Yeah. In nineteen sixty four, some folks tried to register to vote and were turned away. Missus Brewer's sons were turned away, so the clan showed up at the Brewer house to teach her and her kids a lesson about trying to vote. So Jannie Brewer, missus Brewer, she armed up her kids, and she armed up her grandkids, and she armed up the Snick organizers who were supposedly not supposed touch guns, and then made a bunch of Molotov cocktails.
Oh to quote Charles Cobb again. As the sheriff and the truckload of klansmen approached the farmhouse, the Brewer family members and some of the Snick workers were still in the fields with rifles and shotguns. Before the raiders reached the house, someone shone a floodlight on them, others fired into the air. Brewer stood on the front porch ready to hurl a Molotov cocktail. Everyone, including the sheriff, fled. Night riders never returned to the Brewer farm.
Come through, fuck around and find out, you real.
What the main thing that I keep finding And I read a book that has a bias, right to be clear, and I've read other stuff, and I have my own bias and all of that, But one of the things that kept happening was the arguments for non violence. Part of the arguments for non violence is this is a very effective strategy in the nitty gritty, and I think
that's true. But part of the argument was if we arm up, they'll kill us, all right, And what the book that you know, this non violence stuff get you killed and anything else that I've read doesn't carry that out, at least in this context and time that I'm talking about. What would happen is the clan shows up, someone takes a fucking warning shot and they're like, oh god, those people have guns, even though the clan is guns too, and they never come back. That happens more times than
not in what I have read. I'm not trying to make a blanket stay.
Feel like no, no, no, no no, but I hear what you're saying. I think the non violent aspect was necessary to change liberal white people's minds, right, because the argument was always like, oh well not yet. People need time to adjust, so your liberty has to wait. But then also, if you react violently to whatever violence is being hurled at you, suddenly you're still the danger, which is a
confusing mind game to play with a person. But there they were, and so I think that that was a you know, and similar to Gandhi, because I'm sure there were people in India also being like no, fuck, you get off my land of British people.
Yes, totally, what are you doing?
But in order to make the world care, you have to be like, now, I didn't do anything to defend myself and these guys were total jerks. Still I didn't do anything to piss them off. I didn't do anything to defend myself, and yet here they still come. And that's when people can sort of be like, oh, well, now I see that you're clearly a monster. There's no way you can't really twist that.
Yeah, totally, which is exhausting.
It's an exhausting gauntlet to ask people to run through. But yeah, what else can you do?
Yeah?
I mean yeah, yeah, Like I don't know, you know, like I'm not. It's so fucking complicated, and it's something that every movement needs to determine for itself, you know. And that is actually one of the things that comes up in the book. And I don't know if I wrote in the script, maybe you hear me talk about later. A higher percentage. It was not universal. There were white people who were totally fine with violence, and there were
black people who totally fine with non violence. But a higher percentage of the organizers who were coming from out who were white, were more ideologically committed to non violence, whereas more of the black organizers were strategically committed to non violence.
I'm sure, yeah, and.
That matters so much, especially when you're talking about like, look, I clearly I'm a white person talking about this history because I think it matters. But like, white people shouldn't fucking have anything to do with saying what should happen? Like that doesn't make any fucking sense.
You know, they still weren't at a place where they were ready to recognize the power structure and its entirety, right, because if they were, then you would never ask people who were constantly being threatened to be non violent. But because they couldn't acknowledge, like, oh, we as white people, also hold power despite the fact that we want to stand with you, So we're going to ask you to not only be non violent, but it's a way for
us to not have to become violent in defenses. Yeah, I can stand with you and say, oh no, I was there. I linked arms, Like, but did you take up arms which would have been much more helpful in protecting these bodies you claim to care about? Like it's again, it's a total mind fuck and a completely ridiculous gauntlet to ask anyone to have to run through. But I think at the time it was the only way to move the needle, and therefore necessary.
I do totally hope that we've.
Moved past that in some I don't think from on a government level we have, but I think for a very person on an individual level, I hope that we as a society are moving past this idea that passivism off, you know, is the best reaction to violence.
Clearly, not right, clearly.
Not yeah, exactly, and then it even strategic non violence apparently works really well paired with self defense.
You know, you know, you know, but I don't want to hurt you.
I don't want to you know, bomb or hurt anybody or takes someone's you know, friend, parent, whatever away from them.
But don't fuck with me. Yeah, I think that's a very reasonable line to draw.
Yeah, Or like, don't fuck with those non violent activists, you.
Know, also, don't fuck with them, they're just here.
Yeah.
Absolutely so.
Another one of these stories, an indigenous activist named Hunter Bear Salter was a professor at an HBCU in Mississippi called Tugala Southern Christian College, and he spent his time advising students who are sitting at lunch counter and you know, teaching and all that stuff. And he traveled armed everywhere he went, and in nineteen ninety four he said the fact that he was known to be armed is the reason he survived the era. And yeah, I have no
particular doubt about that. And the student the school itself was constantly being attacked by night riders because it was an HBCU until the school formed armed groups of students and faculty to keep watch, and when word got out about that, the attacks dropped significantly. So self defense was a decentralized, impromptu and ever present part of the non violence movement until it was organized, which we'll talk about
in part two. But first let's talk about you, Joelle and the things you do and the places people can find the things you do.
Yes, I am on all the social media sites, but mostly Hive nowadays actu amoni. It's j O E l l E m O n I q u E. I'm the EP of Fake Doctor's Real Friends. If you have any desire to come check out a Scrubs rewatch podcast. Also have a New Girl rewatch podcast. Called Welcome to our show that I adore, and then you check out my writing all over the place. I'm doing a lot of work for The Rap Right Now and Polygon, and
then I'm frequently at NPR's pop Culture Happy Hour. Yeah, and I'm hoping to bring a couple of new shows to you guys next year. So just follow me on the socials and you'll hear all about it.
Awesome. I and you got anything you want to plug?
Isn't there a live stream coming up?
Oh?
There is a life Actually I think it's this week.
Yeah, it's this week. As you listen to this, if you want to hear me learn about something bad from Robert Evans, the host of Behind the Bastards, you can listen to the live stream me hearing about bad things. They don't tell me ahead of time what the bad thing is, so you can watch me react in horror to the world. You can get tickets by googling.
Sounds like an amazing show. I'm really excited.
Yeah.
The link to get tickets is a momenthouse dot co slash bTB. I think when you buy a ticket, you can also submit question for the Q and A. Make sure you get those in asap before the event this weekend. Uh yeah, I think that's all I've got.
All right, Well, we will see you all on Wednesday. Farewell. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.