Under Hoover's time, You've got this kind of communist scare. Bombs are going off, riots in the street. By any means necessary, you try to quash that threat. What's going on now in college campuses? As a government, we're not accepting free speech? Am I a fan of violence?
No?
Have I worked cases against Hamas a proven terrorist organization? Absolutely? They are cold blooded evil. Have I seen any evidence that the people who are being grabbed by masked men on campus are Hamas? No? I haven't, so. I worry that we're you know, we're going back. We're going back.
The A building Episode seven, co Intel.
Pro I want to smoke. Nah, I quit a year ago.
Yeah, me too.
You know those things supposedly killed Edward R.
Morrow.
Yeah, yeah, he did a bunch of stories about cigarettes and cancer.
He died because he.
Was a socialist. Okay, Dan, where the hell are we going?
The work of an FBI agent is surprisingly bureaucratic. Files, names, dates, phone numbers, stakeouts. The two agents you just heard are delivering warnings, warnings to families. Scenarios like the scenes in this episode were commonplace. No one is knocking talks. They were a method of intimidation within the FBI in the era of Gagar Hoover. He's quoted as saying, it's always practical to go after the family. That's where it can hurt the most.
Hello, can I help you?
Well?
Hello, my name is and this is my partner. These are my credentials. We're sorry to bother you. How are you this morning?
You're with who?
The Federal Bureau of Investigation.
We have some news about your son.
First of all, is this your son?
Let's show her the.
Picture any day now, I know, I know?
Hold it, damn it, Walter Johnson?
This him?
Yes?
What is this? Do you know who h.
Rap Brown is? Ma'am? Walter has been spending a lot of time at his shop in Atlanta.
I've seen the name in the paper.
Bad stuff, missus Johnson. These are real radical negroes, the worst kind. And we know you don't want this for Walter. You're a god fearing woman, a Christian woman, a school teacher. You said, Walter to college after losing your husband in Korea? And then how does he pay you back by getting kicked out of Moorhouse?
Behind this Milton crop?
Is that what you want for him?
Is he in trouble?
No?
Not yet.
We just wanted to let you know they get the hell off my porch. Jesus Christ.
You'd think they'd be more grateful, and.
We just delivered the news.
They can do with what they please. Well, maybe she wants to see Walter through plateglass.
For twenty years.
In the early sixties, a new and powerful voice emerged and rose quickly in the movement towards racial equality. H rapped around, had a big voice, and it was getting bigger, and the FBI took notice.
Lyndon Johnson, you can always raise an argument about law and order because he never talks about justice.
But black people.
Fall for that same argument, and they go around talking about lawbreakers. We did not make the laws in this country. We'll neither, Marley not legally confined to those laws, those laws that keep them up keep us.
You got to begin to understand.
That a new wave of black social justice spread nationwire like a firestorm. Leaders like Kaimei terray byb Seal, Angela Davis, Huey P Newton, and Tupac's mother of Phoenie.
Chicour violence is a part of America's culture. It as American, as Jerry Pye American taught the.
Black people to be violent.
We will use that violin to be it ourselves of oppression. If necessary, we will be freed by any means necessary.
Who is this man? And why did the FBI care so much? H?
Rap Brown born Hubert Gerald Brown on October fourth, nineteen forty three, in Baton, Rouge, Louisiana, emerged as a significant figure in the American civil rights movement during the nineteen sixties. His father, Eddie Charles Senior, worked for ESL Oil, and his mother, Thelma Warren Brown, was a domestic worker and elementary school teacher. From an early age, Brown showcased exceptional verbal skills, earning the nickname Rap.
Brown's activism began in his teenage years, when he moved to Washington, d c. And joined the Non Volid Action Group inag a local affiliate of the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee SNICK. By nineteen sixty seven, browse seceated Stokely Carmichael as a national chairman of SNICK. As chairman, Brown was known for his fireI rhetorican stock advocacy for black power. His speeches often attracted national attention and controversy.
In nineteen sixty seven, following a speech in Cambridge, Maryland, Brown was wounded by gunfire from local police officers. Shortly after he left the state, a local school building burned down, leading to accusations against Brown for inciting rights, though the origins of the fire were disputed.
Brown's legal challenges continued into nineteen seventy when two SNICK members died in a car explosion in Maryland under unclear circumstances. Brown went into hiding for eighteen months, appearing on the FBI's ten most wanted lists before being arrested in New York. During his imprisonment, he can ready to Islam and adopted the name Jamil Abdullah l Aman.
Look here it is right here.
Oh I see it.
No, I fucking hate Tennessee. Yeah, pulling over there.
It's amazing.
It works so hard to make their houses look normal.
Hello, my name is This is my partner. These are my credentials. We're sorry to bother you, ma'am. How are you this morning?
For the FBI, the expulsions at Morehouse were an opportunity to curtail this new wave of activism. H Y Brown, as he was known at the time, was particularly effective at talking to young people.
Is this your son, Samuel Jackson.
Oh, I haven't seen him at months.
Have a good day, gentlemen.
It wasn't much to him anyway, and it looks like he's in deep with a smack.
Probably won't hear anything from him.
Oh please, Lord, pick up the phone. Come on, come on, Frankie, Frankie, is Sam there?
Where is he? Okay?
Tell him, I'm going to be in Atlanta the day after tomorrow.
You understand two days. To understand this, you have to understand cointel Pro.
The FBI started the program in nineteen fifty six. The goal was to suffocate interest in the Communist Party of the United States. The FBI used long form surveillance. The operations would take months or even years. Co Intel Pro lacked any due process and often went beyond any jurisdictional standards. To understand cointel Pro from the FBI's perspective, spoke with
Frank for gluesy. Frank joined the FBI in nineteen eighty seven and rose to the ranks, eventually being appointed to the lofty role of Assistant Director for counter Intelligence in twenty eleven by then Director Robert Muller. He's a regular expert contributor on NBC and the author of two books, The FBI Way Inside the Bureau's Code of Excellence and Long Haul Hunting the Highway serial Killers. And as menm pointed out, Frank is also a good looking man.
First of all, though Hans isn't Frank right out of central casting. You're a handsome fella. I'm just saying like this, if I was casting, you know, we're filmmakers, I would cast you as the FBI guy.
Let me tell you, you'd be in the big office, Frank.
Lighting and makeup, lighting and mega. So what was co intel pro It stands it's an acronym. It's a code word that stands for counterintelligence program. That got my attention because I was the head of counter Intelligen just at the end of my career. It was a secret program to counter all of this so called sedition, instability, protest movement, even the violent, especially the violent side of things. And
what did it consist of? Undercover agents, which, by the way, the FBI sucked at in the sixties and early seventies. It was a new concept that guys, white guys in suits and ties and wingtip shoes were somehow good at going undercover in protest movements and developing sources on campus. Not good.
Do you think there's anything in the history of the FBI that had like a seed of this notion of the politicization of the FBI, like certain communities being suspicious of the FBI.
Oh for sure. Look, as they said during Jay Edgar Hoover's reign, and I'll say rain in the FBI because he was there for over forty years. They he used to joke in Washington, if you've seen one FBI director, you've seen them all because he was it.
He was it.
And what does that mean? When you've got that much power, you can become politically powerful. And Hoover knew that, and he knew that the secret of staying in power was behind the scenes to gain political influence. And how did he do that. He kept files on people, kept files on members of Congress, and they feared him. People came to fear Hoover in the black community, minority community. Generally, when people wield power and rule by fear, you can
literally terrorize parts of the population. History repeats itself and the lessons of the past are sometimes forgotten. If you're an evidence based agency like the FBI is right, just the facts, man, facts and evidence in law. The agency has every opportunity to flush out the so called communist threat to America, and you can't find it, or it's far less than you. And that was the case, by the way, for Hoover, and it was particularly the case with MLK, who was viewed by Hoover as a threat.
And we can talk for hours about trying to get inside Hoover's had whether this was largely race racially motivated. I think that was a huge part of it. Whether or not he truly had the goods on MLK being too affiliated with communism, The records we have now available to us today show that he couldn't prove it. The evidence was not there. Did MLK have associates who were
present or former Communist Party members? Yes, he had one particularly close associate who was a former Communist member that sent Hoover into orbit and was used to justify all other means. You know, the phrase by any means necessary, We align closely with Malcolm X in some of his species. By Eddie means necessary, Well, guess what, Jaeger Hoover also adopted that, and it did it in a largely unlawful way, there's a great scene and this is like in FBI data.
There's a great scene in Malcolm X where this the night before Malcolm is killed and these two FBI agents are listening to him talk and he's just sitting in his hotel calling his wife.
Ask them why they had new concre Do you want some furniture?
Do you want some cars? We have?
What if we have? Meanwhile?
King was you know, he like he liked the ladies, right, And these FBI guys are listening and he says to one guy, compared to King, this guy's a monk.
Right, he didn't do anything right.
He was He was boring. He offered none of the salacious details and life that doctor King did. So in some ways he was a disappointment in terms of what they could get on him. You know, the FBI considered Malcolm XX a massive threat. His file was open in nineteen fifty six when the Stars characterized Nation of Islam. As his profile grew nationally, so did his surveillance. His file would include more than thirty six hundred pays of information.
They would either follow him overseas. The extent of the surveillance as far beyond would have documented or published. The scope of this and the relation to his assassination may never be uncovered.
Kennedy was briefed by Hoover on what he was doing with Martin Luther King. Richard Nixon had been briefed on what the plan was for the Black Panthers. You know, we can't pretend that this was all about a rogue FBI director.
It was not.
It was an administration that was held bent on keeping people quiet.
That's amazing because I feel like when I was in college, I would hear people talk about Hotel pro and it sounded like a conspiracy theory against the government. Like it sounded like that's what you know, your high uncle would.
Say, yeah, or some he had a barbershop or something.
Or someone had a barbershop. And it wasn't until much later that I realized that co Intel Probe was real in it and it actually existed. And I always feel like, even even doing this podcast, and some of the older black folks are a little bit hesitant to even to just fully talk because there's there seems to be this still this through line of the poyancy and paranoia about this program.
Yeah, a lot of good came out of the exposure of this program in terms of setting out attorney general guidelines, there was a huge congressional inquiry called the Church Committee. Because the congress members started it was Frank Church, and they were blown away. They they thought, you know, from the media reporting, they thought they had pretty much the
four corners of the co intel program figured out. And then here here comes this parade of witnesses that starts talking about illegal wire taps, breaking into people's homes without warrants, planting evidence, take King evidence, bugging phones, planting microphones. And they were like, you had got to be kidding me. So and by the way, this this certainly extended to to Martin Luther King personally in terms of bugging him without without legal process.
Uh.
And they were blown away. And so a lot of guidelines and laws and rules came into place. And now I truly fear and least by the way we're drilled into our heads, uh in the FBI. I mean, the notion that some supervisor would tell you to do an illegal wiretap or something. You know, it just simply isn't
going to happen. But I have to tell you we may have come full circle because this this concept of you know, going after your your political enemies, going after perceived threats, I think is taking on a new life.
He is more from our conversation with Frank Faguzzi, former de he director of the FBI.
So Malcolm and Dice Furst and not the king assassinated in that period in the early seventies, what were some of the biggest concerns for the FBI.
The biggest concern while Hoover was nearing the end and even after his demise, was we're going to get caught at this. We were in trouble. And when does Hoover when is his raigning nine seventy two he poss I believe. And now people are panicked at FBI headquarters and even in certain field offices because they know there's there's accountability coming. And in fact, there were moves to indict even with
regard to a Watergate cover up. L Patrick Gray, who had been named acting FBI director after Hoover, he was they were moving him toward indictment with all these what they call black bag jobs, that's what they were called, where you would go into someone's home without a warrant and do a search, planting mics or taking evidence or
planting evidence. This stuff was illegal and in many cases, and they were afraid they were going to prison, and there was a movement afoot to actually put FBI executives in prison. So that was their first concern, getting caught and then covering it up, and then getting caught about the cover up, and then you know, there was much discussion about how to whether or not to destroy files,
particularly about MLK. So, for example, Hoover's famous secretary had control of a safety that had what were called the obscene files or yeah, I think they were known as the obscene files, and they included files on congressmen and it's about seventeen congressmen allegedly and MLK. And these included wire taps or bugs placed in his hotel rooms when he traveled. He traveled a lot, and they, yeah, they allegedly can tained evidence of extramarital affairs the WIRESAFS led
to a last ditch effort. And this is how we need to perceive this. By the way, you have the premier law enforcement agency in the country. They have tried every which way to flesh out this communist threat with around MLK and the Black movement. They've been unsuccessful. I mean even to the point where there's there's a memo I've seen from the head of the San Francisco Field office regarding the Black Panthers. Hoover had put out the word, we've got to smash the Black Panthers. They got to go,
and he again he saw them as a threat. And the head of the San Francisco says, Boss, We've taken a hard look at this, and the worst thing we've caught the panthers doing here in our city is feeding breakfast to inner city kits. That's what we've got. And he was pissed by that response. And by the way, when did the real emphasis in the FBI of going after King really kick in? He had his eye have I have a dream speech on the National Mall.
I have a dream.
That one day.
This nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creeds. We hold these choos to be self evident, that all men are created.
This nineteen sixty three, sixty three thank you. That is when literally William Sullivan, who was that then the deputy director of the FBI, says to Hoover, that's enough. This guy has too much power and influence, and oh yeah, he's black. We've got to pull out the stops. That really got the FBI's attention was that I have a dream speech that he could pour people into the National Mall. So then the excerpt of the of the Bug transcript
doesn't work. So they decide they're going to write a letter, and by all accounts it's trafted by this guy, William Sullivan FBI. A course, there's no way in terms of way the FBI works, that that kind of letter would be drafted and sent without Jay Garhoover's approval. Just there's just no way. So it's sent and essentially, and I paraphrase,
you are reprehensible, Immral. We're going to expose you and your your deviance and you know something like the best you know, the best solution for you is to go.
Here are some direct quotes from that letter.
In view of your low grade abnormal personal behavior. I will not dignify your name with either a mister or a reverend or a doctor, and your last name calls to mind only the type of king such as King Henry the eighth and his countless acts of adultery and a moral conduct lower than that of a beast king. Look into your heart. You know you are a complete
fraud and a great liability to all of us. Negro white people in this country have enough frauds of their own, but I am sure that they don't have one at this time that is anywhere near your equal. You are no clergyman, and you know it. I repeat, you are a colossal fraud, and an evil, vicious one at that. You cannot believe in God and act as you do. Clearly you don't believe in any personal moral principles. King,
Like all frauds, your end is approaching. Your honorary degrees, your nobel prize, what a grim farce, and other rewards will not save you. King, I repeat, you are done. No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself. Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. It is all there on the record, your sexual orgies. Listen to yourself, you filthy, abnormal animal. You are all the record. You have been on the record, all your adulterous acts, your
sexual orgies, extending far into the past. This one is but a tiny sample. The American public. The church organizations that have been helping Protestant, Catholic and Jews will know you for what you are, an evil, abnormal beast.
You are done, King.
There is only one thing left.
For you to do.
You know what it is.
You have just thirty four days in which to do this. This exact number has been selected for a specific reason. It has definite practical significance.
You are done.
There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bare to the nation, and the implication.
Cleary that it's time to commit suicide. That's about one of the more horrific things I think in FBI history, quite honestly.
In addition to this letter, the FBI sent audio tapes to doctor King and his wife Coretta. This will literally be known as the blackmail package. The direct undertone of the letter seems to suggest that doctor King should kill himself before receiving the historic Mobil Peace Prize. Pro wanted to destroy personal relationships and family. This was a critical tactic in the process.
Do you think that with the intelligence gathering that the FBI had during this time period, when we think about leaders like Medigar, Evers, King, Malcolm, do you think the FBI is aware of real threats to those leaders?
So I'll caveat this first by saying I don't have direct documented evidence of this, but I'll then quickly go into the reality of life in the FBI those days, which was it was all about targeting these perceived threats and as we said, developing sources literally that will point you to how to how to assassinate a Black Panther leader,
getting in and bugging king suggestion he commits suicide. It's inconceivable to believe that someone in the bureau was on where that people could kill these targets, but it's conceivable that the FBI was part and parcel of trying to do it.
Paranoia was a key tactic for the FBI. Many informants and victims of Conteil pro would be called hysterical by friends and family about potential surveillance. This process was undoubtedly critical in the assassination of Fred Hampton in December of nineteen sixty nine.
The FBI, this has been proven in by many historians, had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago, and they did it through a source development that was close to this Black Panther and a special unit at the Chicago PD so the FBI didn't want to get its hands dirty, but it developed this source close to the panther. Then they turned it over
to this special unit as Chicago PD. When the source said, Hey, our target is going to be here, asleep in this apartment at this time, here comes the Chicago PD unit and they they take him out, They shoot him.
Killed him in Cobood.
Yeah, that was Fred Hampton, right, Fred Hampton, And that the chief concern was getting caught at.
This This quote comes directly from FBI Director Jay Edgar Hoover. We must avoid the rise of a messiah that would unify and electrify the militant nationalist movement. Cointelpro was his brainchild, and the blunt force and lack of civil liberties came right from his playbook.
The mental unrest was just as significant as a potential imprisonment or even loss of life.
Sam Jackson's mother understood this, and when the FBI came to her door in Tennessee, she got to Atlanta as fast as she could.
Mama, I don't know if all of this is necessary. You have had the FBI knock on your door. Come on, mama, let me ask you again. Have you ever had the FBI knock on your door. No, no, well, you didn't see what I saw. You didn't see how nice they were. You didn't see how they were dressed, holding the little papers, big folders filled with names, and one of them names was yours.
Keep your head down and you come back what.
I say the safe?
Oky?
Okay? I love you, I love you too. Sam Jackson has his own insights into the lengths the government went to stop the movement beyond contel Pro in the sixties.
The most drastic thing that happened in the summer sixty nine months, all of a sudden, they took all the marijuana and all the hallucinogens were taken out of Atlanta, and the only drug you could buye was a heroin only drug, you BOYE was heroin and we were drug users, So we started using hero good planning, get people started dying off, people started o daying, dying just became you know, useless, worthless junkies.
Uh.
And that was that was the most effective diffuser of the revolution that they you know, came up with at worked.
Here's former Morehouse alum and civil rights activist James Early.
I brought a context of this, Uh, that has no direct relationship to the takeover, but it's again a contextual piece.
So in that period, then heroin hits.
So, you know, one of my running buddies, Morehouse, had recruited several Puerto Ricans. You know, Morehouse won the national swimming championship I think for two or three years, and a small college swimming championship rig Berto Centron who died of a heroin overdose just a few blocks from campus. This was a time also around that campus of which Morehouse was not ready for. And no, you know, most colleges were not four.
And I can remember three four occasions of you know, we're looking for that weed.
We would go to an apartment.
There would be eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve guys, needles in the arms.
Booting.
Booting is you put the needle in and as the heroine is almost exhausted me, you boot it back. You pull the blood back so that you can draw out as much of the heroin as you can. So this was a contextual issue going on in society. The status quo society. The assumptions, the presumptions of comportment and culture and whatnot were in the process of dramatic sometimes turbulent change.
Sam would flee to Los Angeles and stay with an aunt. He would pursue a new found passion for acting, a passion that grew would assume to be wife with Tagya.
Sam was able to escape, but many Black Americans found themselves caught in the web of co intel pro Welcome back to the A building. Here's more from our conversation with Frank fig Lucy. I heard a story about a young woman who around the time, probably about a year before Fred Hampton was assassinated, was a college student and they were doing the freedom rides to go down south. So they would they would train these college students and they would do the freedom ride and they were they
were holding like these training sessions. The one that she went to was at Oberlin in Ohio. So she goes to Oberlin for the summer and when she gets to Oberlin, her mother and her older sister were waiting for her and they were like, you're not doing this, And she was like, first of all, how did you find out?
You know?
Da da da, And they said, the FBI came to our house and told us that you were doing this and that they couldn't protect you if you went down South, and I hadn't heard a couple stories like that where the FBI would reach out to the parents of students to say, hey, they're in this activity and we can't protect them, be careful, you know, and would enact influence over the person through family members. Is that something that that that rains true to you?
So as a concept, absolutely, you know, does the FBI do this kind of thing, Yes, of course, But let's try to differentiate between doing it legitimately, like reaching out to a family member and trying to prevent a crime, or doing what we call a knock and talk. This
happens all the time. By the way, this didn't get a lot of publicity, but just prior to the January sixth insurrection at the US Capitol, the FBI, by by most accounts that have been verified by not only the media but my own sources, the FBI did a knock and talk with about a dozen to twenty individuals, hardcore people who already were predicated, meaning the FBI already had a case open on them, and there had been some
inkling that they might go to the Capitol. On January sixth, They did knock in talks and said something like we're onto you, right, and you do this at great risk because you're going to blow your case. You're telling the guy we know you are, but we've got winds that you may be thinking about doing bad things at the Capitol, and we're telling you if you get on a plane, train, or automobile and start heading that way, that could put us over the edge to arrest you based off Well,
we have already. There's nothing wrong with that kind of knock and talk. It happens all the time. But now let's go to your scenario at Oberlin knock and talk with a family to say, we don't like what your daughter or niece is about to do, which is lawful activity in aid of a civil rights activism. We don't want to happen. That's a problem that's trying to shape a national narrative that you know. I think it's way too, way too off the off the shark. So what's your reaction.
What was the reaction when you heard about this story at Morehouse Number one?
Glad somebody's addressing it, because I have extremely limited knowledge of this. I even though by the way, my first office, as I said, Atlanta, Georgia and the FBI certainly had contact with Morehouse, have fellow FBI agents who went to Morehouse. But I think there's there's an insight here. Is is it possible that Morehouse is finally getting what what getting a goal in place, which is we're going to seriously
educate our young people. We've got we've got this going pretty damn well here, and we don't need any attention from the government, the FBI. We're in the deep South, Atlanta, Georgia, and let's kind of not rock this boat. And now you have black, bright, black students going not so fast. We don't have everything we want, and we're not going to be as quiet as you may want us to be, and we've got some demands ourselves. I think that that's
just from the outside looking in. I think that's fascinating. I certainly didn't serve in the FBI in Atlanta till like nineteen eighty seven, but you know, the concern still that I can't emphasize this enough, and I put it in my book. I go down there, it's eighty seven. I'm from Connecticut. Do you know that I worked cross burnings and clan rallies as an FBI agent in Atlanta Georgia. Yeah,
in the eighties, it was surreal. I'm on the streets of downtown Atlanta trying to make sure that blacks aren't attacking a clan rally, that the clan doesn't turn on the black protest. And by the way, was it this black protesters? Thank god? There were a lot of protesters at this client rally in Atlanta. But we're like, are we And I'm kind of like, what am I doing here?
Am I?
I know I'm doing this as a civil rights operation? Whose civil rights am I protect? It was part of the question. And then I'll never forget across burning like I think it was Decab County outside of Atlanta, and I'm like, this is another what is going on here?
So why do I mention that? And now go back to this incident at Morehouse and imagine what the climate is in Atlanta and the desire to not mess up what is looking like a good thing Morehouse University and here come these students going no, you know, no, we got a press. The other takeaway I have is what's
going on now in college campuses, good and bad? And this is obviously a hot sensitive topic, but all of the protests on elite college universities with regard to the Palestinian Israeli conflict, right, and people just flipping out our government literally grabbing people with student visas, even green cards, and saying we're taking away your student visa, we're taking
away your green card, and we're deporting you. In one case because a young lady, a Tufts University student, had the audacity to write an opinion piece in the school newspaper. What so you know, it's so I can't. I'm always looking at past and present and seeing the connections, and right now we as a government, we're not accepting free speech on college campus. Am I a fan of violence?
No?
Have I worked cases against Hamas, a proven terrorist organization. Absolutely they are cold blooded evil. Have I seen any evidence that the people who are who are being grabbed by masked men on campus are Hamas?
No?
I have it.
So I worry that we're you know, we're going back. We're going back when you're under stress. Here's where things go south in the bureau and same for all human nature. Under Hoover's time, you've got this kind of communist scare. Bombs are going off, riots in the street. You know, we're not thrilled with black people getting influence and power. We're all scared, okay, And what happens by any means necessary, you try to quash that threat. What happens in the
US after nine to eleven? And I was I was the number two person in FBI Miami after the terror attacks of nine to eleven unprecedented? Right, And do we start to see things going south? Are people trying to develop sources inside mosques? Yes, NYPD all by themselves had a covert program to spy inside mosques. The Patriot Act is passed, and some people take that as license to grab up everybody's phone communications. All kinds of weird things
are happening. How about Hey, how about torture? How about waterboarding? How about the torture to the point where we can't even use what you just gave us in court, We've got to go military tribunal because it's useless to us. Yeah. So, when a society is under stress, things can go bad.
How do you try to put guardrails up? You have the kinds of guardrails that I lived with in my twenty five year experience you and you follow them relentlessly, and you punish those who go outside those guidelines.
Frank, I can't let you. I can't let you talk to my kid, because if you talk to my kid, you might convince him to become an FBI convincing.
Tell me a good job, darn it.
I tell you what.
If it was a year ago, I might have talked him into it. I don't. I don't know what to tell young people today.
Frank, don't I let you. I let you near My son is twenty two. I let you near my kid. Next thing I know, he's got an application in. He's like that, I'm going on to I live in d C. So it's just down the road. Training is down down the road. Like the way you talk about it. Man, you had me halfway looking like am I little too?
All? Like we'll sign you up, We'll sign you up.
In November of twenty twenty four, the surviving family of Malcolm X sued the FBI, the CIA, and the NYPD for the involvement in his assassination. The trial is still pending. These ideas were at the heart of the at Moorhouse. These students wanted their education to mean something in a world that could fall apart at any moment. The state could take down icons.
In this context, the sacrifice of the students at Morehouse if not only reasonable, but a necessary progression of the civil rights movement.
The educational landscape would take a major shift in the next twenty years. The next wave of martyrs would continue the history of protecting the black home and the black family.
The Reagan era would introduce radical changes to policing and drug policy. This would go on to be exacerbated by the nineteen ninety four Crime Bill that would place an entire generation of black and brown people behind bars for non violent crimes.
In twenty twenty five, our republic is in scorn. We must revisit the heroes of our past to defeat the cowards of our future. Next time, on the A Building, the lock in the idea just came from two people, myself and another brother named Spurge and Smith.
Certainly think there's a risk in protesting Bay, specifically because the world was burning.
The risk hasn't been this high a long time. They came out of it. I'm knocking, huh, class, I demand to be released, and I said, I demand as you get back in now. The A Building is produced by Imagine Audio for iHeart Podcasts. It is written and hosted by me, Hans Charles and my co host menelike La Mumba.
It is executive produced by Karl Welker and Nathan Kloke, me Medelich, Wlamomba and Hans Charles.
Executive producers at iHeart Podcasts ar Katrina Norville and Nikki Torre Marketing lead is David Wasserman.
It is produced, directed, and edited by Timothy Fernarra with producer John Asanti. Sound design and music by Alloy Tracks.
And special thanks to April Ryan, Doctor, Eliot Davis, Kim vci Ada, Bobby Know and James Early. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and review the A Building on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts