CZM Rewind: Part One: The Armed Nonviolent Civil Rights Movement
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State Farm, proud sponsor of My Cultura Podcast Network. Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, the podcast that is in reruns during the holidays. But I bet you'll still like this episode, even though I recorded it 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, Joelle Monique, who is a pop cultural critic and seems to do so much of everything that I have a hard time pinning her down. Joelle, 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 70 degrees there? It is below 70 degrees here. We've got sweaters on. I'm under a blanket currently. Oh, that's nice. It's lovely. I'm in the mountains and my heat is broken. No, Margaret. It's okay. I have like six backup heat sources because I'm like that.

That's good. That's good. As somebody 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, Joelle, what's, what's your favorite of your many jobs besides being a guest on this podcast? That is a really tough question. Um,

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 guests cry but in like a good way you know and like

All of 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, 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

And then we broke for lunch and I did not leave the set. And they're like, are you hungry? I was 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. 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. It's not Sophie. It's Ian. Yes, I'm finally on the podcast. Ian got tired of us. Yeah. 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 podcasting. All right. So on this show, we talk about cool people in history, especially cool movements, cool, complicated networks of cool people who are actually usually pretty complicated. But this week, well, actually, this week's no different. This week, we're going to talk about cool people in history.

I'm really excited to talk this week about the nonviolent civil rights movement in the 1950s and the 60s in the U.S. South. And along the way, I'm going to talk about the people who protected the nonviolent civil rights movement with firearms and stuff. 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 nonviolent. I'm going to protect you. I'm not nonviolent. Yeah.

You always need somebody who's ready to do some dirty work. Absolutely. Exactly. And I think that they don't get enough credit. Um,

And so we're going to talk about the armed wing of the nonviolent 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 justice.

self-determination and all that kind of stuff because we've been doing as anyone who's listening to the podcast we've been covering like the clan a bunch recently and not in the we've been talking about people who fight the clan um not not the good people in the clan but yeah yeah people who fought the clan i got yeah yeah um 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 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 1950s and the 70s in the same way that I see it framed by a lot of historians and people who were there at the time as being kind of made up of two general parts. You've got the sort of civil rights era of the 1950s and 60s with a focus on nonviolence and sit-ins and voter 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 1960s and early 1970s, 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 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 aid programs and breakfast programs and all of these other things that are part of what made them so dangerous and powerful. 100%. 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, that would rule. 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'll like start writing like so-and-so was a and then I'm like, wait, no, is a still alive. Yeah, yeah.

You know, these people who are fighting in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 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 Klan. 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 U.S. history, but these are some of the worst people in U.S. history. Okay, so there's like three or four basic distinct things.

phases of the Klan. 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 1871 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 Klan number two. This is the weird multi-level marketing scheme invented in 1915 by some people who are basically cosplaying the old Klan. 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 work 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 1930s or the beginning of the 1930s. What a great time that was. I know. Bring it back. I know. I want more. Well, we're starting to see all of these modern white supremacist movements fall apart into weird infighting and legal trouble. It's been really lovely every time I get a little update like so-and-so's going to prison. I'm like, okay. Small victories. It warmed my heart. Yeah, 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, 10 years ago, it, like, went around the anti-fascist thing that some of the Nazi Klan member people or whatever, like, one of them killed the other because they, like, there was, like, some, like, incestuous, like, cheating that happened. Yeah, there was. And, like...

And they take themselves down even better. Yeah, exactly. It's like all the insurrectionists who posted to Instagram. It's like, oh, you made everybody's job so much easier. I know. Bless you. I know. And so that's kind of how the 1920s Klan went down. Even though they were 5 million strong at their fucking peak, eventually everyone realized that they were a bunch of just random pieces of shit and people started distancing themselves from them.

But the fucking Klan is like a stupid racist Hydra. And the third Klan popped back up pretty soon after the second Klan 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 clan because they were less of like a popular organization, right? And they were more just like just fucking terrorists, right? They were really diehard. 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? Yeah. Yeah. I'm on team. The slave catchers turned into police. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think most people would agree with that. We just look at their badges and see what's happening and current forever police lineage of just, you know, active lynching. Yeah. I think they're one in the same. Yeah. 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 SNCC. 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 SNCC, kind of where it's at. The oldest one of these groups is the Congress of Racial Equality, just founded in 1942. 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. It 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 of various Christian denominations. And that is actually something that the 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 1947, CORE sent 16 people, eight white

ate black on a journey of reconciliation on buses. And this was kind of the first freedom ride about 15 years before the freedom rides became more of a thing. And this first journey was a mix of folks. It had socialists, it had religious leaders, it had pacifists, it had 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 send 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 at the front of the bus, all that 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 to me about this, right? Is like,

So much of the civil rights era stuff was basically like the federal government 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... 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 30 days, and the white men got 90 days. And specifically because the racist judge was so mad at the white people for betraying whiteness.

Wow. Wow. That is deep, deep, 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 as hard because screw you. Yeah. Ruining 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 than the white allies and stuff. But here and there, you would run across this kind of shit where the Klan would go around being like, hey, any white people, if you show up and support this, we're going to murder you or whatever. That kind of shit happened a lot. We're going to 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 sentencing. You want to drop it and I'll do an interpretation of the judge? No, no, I didn't even copy and paste it in my script. It's just bad. It's just bad shit, you know? I'm sure. But in it, he specifically called the two white men who I believe were not Jewish, referred to them as Jews from New York.

Okay, so not even doing his research, just out here being like, if they help the blacks, they must be Jews. Just lumping all that hate together. From New York specifically. Yeah, it's like the coastal elites coming here and ruining everything. You must basically be the Jews from New York and the Jewish agenda to desegregate the United States. Yeah.

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 spend 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, 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 served some time on a chain gang as 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. Whomst amongst it. Like, okay. So Bayard Rustin, he was a black gay Quaker. Amazing. Yeah. And this, there's this recurring thing on this show where somehow Quakers end up in every episode. I've never done an episode on the Quakers before.

They're everywhere. The Quakers really rocked with black people like way early. They were like, no, we're not down with this slavery thing and we will help free you where we can. 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, yeah.

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 his 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 U.S. to stop working for civil rights and start working to try and get the U.S. to join World War II.

He organized a march on Washington for the desegregation of the armed forces. He went to California to fight against the racist imprisonment of the Japanese during the war. He would 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 U.S. had because the U.S. is deeply racist.

He was arrested in 1942 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 bigots. 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, he also got arrested for being gay. Like, one time he got arrested for hooking up with two dudes in a car. So he's clearly limited. I know. Yes! My polyamorous king. I don't want to put 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, yeah.

He co-wrote an influential pacifist paper in the 1950s called Speak Truth to 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 Jr. It was probably him who convinced MLK 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? Yeah.

He was heavily involved in organizing the 1963 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. Yeah. And...

He actually was like one of the staunchest. 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 where I was beginning where I was like, I guess interesting.

It's a complex time when you're... Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, American wars are often started because, like, oh, someone is doing something terrible, and then we secretly go in and do horrible shit, and we're like, what? Like, we had to stop this guy. I had to meet him on the... So, oh, gosh. Yeah, you're right, messy. Yeah. And so he gets called a conservative socialist, and he's the only term I've actually personally run across anyone get called a conservative socialist. Yeah.

And I don't really understand it yet. So funny. In the 80s, as most people would be wont to do as an out gay person, he turned to gay activism in the 1980s. He died in 1987, not of HIV or AIDS. He died of being old.

He was born in 1912. Yeah. He lived 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 to fucking organize the March on Washington. Anyway, he was on a chain gang for a while as part of his work for CORE. 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 SNCC. SNCC 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 it didn't have kind of that sort of problem that CORE actually ended up dealing with fairly effectively in the mid to late 60s, where they were a little bit too white-led, you know, for a lot of what they're doing. And SNCC comes out of...

In 1960, 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, a 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 God. Every time I hear what my ancestors had to deal with, I'm like, that is exhausting. A hot dog with my green American cat? I know. There's all that shit, like, people talk about, like, what, my money's no good here or whatever. Like, it's like this thing that still happens. Yes, for sure. And...

And yeah, no, 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. Fuck out. Yeah. It's ridiculous. Somewhere there's a heterosexual couple named Sam and Chris who can't get a wedding cake, you know? They're like, what the hell? Gotta 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 have been some sit-ins before where people just go and show up and be like, you know what, fuck this. I'm going to be here whether you want me here or not. Going back to 1939 with the Alexandria Library sit-in.

A lot of those sit-ins had been successful, but they'd 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 going to 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 F.W. Woolworth Company store, which is a big department store that also has 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 ask to be served.

And then they refused to leave when they refused service. February 1st, 1960, 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, we're 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. Think of 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 20 black students from the university. They were a few service, but they weren't arrested. They hung out all day and did their schoolwork at the store. The next day, they had 60 people, including some high school students who joined them.

And this time, some people from the fucking Klan showed up to keep an eye on it all or whatever, right? But they didn't do shit because there was fucking 60 people there. The Klan is cowards is one of the main takeaways of all this research I've done. Oh, for sure. You'd have to be. Yeah, no, exactly. It's like fascism and it's really- They wear masks and they only like unfair fights. So that sounds about right. Yeah. The fact that they only like unfair fights is something that we all need to fucking remember. Yeah.

So day four, February 4th, there's 300 students. They fill the entire lunch counter, including, and this time, a tiny handful of some white folks, some white women from a nearby university show up to support as well. Day five, they get their first real counter protesters, about 50 white men, three of whom were arrested. Day six, they had a 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 sit-in movement spreads across the South. Within months, there's sit-ins in 55 different cities. And on July 25th, 1960, boycotts had cut their income by a third and the Woolworth store world all started, quietly desegregated its lunch counter. Yes, bullying, whirr. Exactly. Exactly.

So the students, they're like, all right, we should get organized, right? Because that's, in my mind, where the magic happens is it starts with something that is spontaneous. And then you figure out how to keep that going. And that takes structure and 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 1960, 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 20. I don't want to call them not adults, you know? Right, right, right, right. The young people. Yeah. So the older than students helped call for the conference. Specifically, it was Martin Luther King Jr.'s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the SCLC conference.

called for it. But it wasn't called for by MLK. 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 SCLC, 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. And that's like their fucking thing. Ella Baker worked with King in the SCLC, 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 figure. 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, right?

Or people with 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 what people do need to be told to do, Joelle? To buy things? It's buy things. Capitalism! Yay! Here's some ads.

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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 grew up listening to her grandmother tell stories about slavery. As soon as she became an activist, like with the NAACP, she started working for decentralization and against charismatic 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 brought 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. Yeah.

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 Negroes 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 Fannie Lou Hamer also got into this stuff later in the 60s 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 built out of black cooperativism or like, I don't know, whatever. It's the most, whatever. It's fucking cool. 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 60s 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 did everything. Never anything showy. She never, like, got herself, like...

Right, right.

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 fight, it's the complete opposite of the end goal. And so it's so cool to hear from the people who started that, you know, and to have that vision before anyone else. 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, Ella Baker. 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, just a dope woman doing dope things. 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. Her keynote speech was basically, look, you might want to remain autonomous 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 word adult accidentally throughout the script. That's fine. 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 SNCC, and I haven't read it yet, so I can't say too much yet.

The organizers gave Ella Baker the nickname Fundy, which was a Swahili word to quote the site Afropunk. The word means to them as relates to Ella Baker, an artisan who has mastered their craft and shares their knowledge freely with the community.

And so SNCC 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 things.

SNCC 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, SNCC, 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, SNCC gets involved in like everything. They get part of the broader left in the late 60s, part of the feminist movement, anti-war movement. And they're 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 SNCC.

We're going to talk about the delicate and beautiful balance between the nonviolent civil rights movement and the people willing to use violence to defend the individuals within that movement. We're going to talk about that. 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 used them to defend themselves against and others against white violence. The main book that I'm referencing a lot throughout this

is a 2014 book by Charles E. Cobb Jr. 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 call to arms, right? He like very specifically talks about how he's talking about the context of the rural South in the 1960s. And...

It's readable. It's insightful. This is like literally, if I could just pivot, it's 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 SNCC from 1962 to 1967. And the premise of the book, to quote him, is that the use of guns for self-defense in the nonviolent civil rights movement was necessary and vital to the movement's survival. Writing about his own experiences, he said, quote,

SNCC was unusual in 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 in SNCC 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. I know. Imagine. In other words, leave your gilded cages, y'all. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's for sure different, particularly I think in the deep South at that time, um,

my dad talks about he, his family came up to Chicago during the great Mississippi migration, which was 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 there.

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 running 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 $2 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. Yeah.

And that was like the process that seemed to happen with SNCC field organizers. And that absolutely ties into how the whole thing transformed and the whole push towards black power and the change within the civil rights movement, as far as I can tell, and as far as like I've read. And yeah, I...

I met Charles Kopp briefly in North Carolina because he did a talk about the book. I went because that day I'd just been... Whatever, the Nazis know they doxxed me. I'd just been doxxed by Nazis. They called themselves, don't call us Nazis, we're neo-Confederates. I'd just been doxxed by neo-Confederates who had told me, showed me pictures of my family and told me they were going to burn my house down and shit.

And you sound like Nazis. I just want to know if you are called neoconservatives, you should move in a different direction than the Nazis, because that sounds like class A Nazi bullshit. Oh, neoconfederate. Sorry, I might have misspoken. Neoconfederate. Yeah, yeah. No, I think you said it right. I said it wrong. No, but I mean, it's like, whatever, neoconfederate 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 so I told him, I was like, hey, like your talk was really interesting and meaningful to me because I just went and bought a rifle today. And he was like, well, how do you feel about that? I was like, I feel really mixed about it. And he was like, that makes sense, you know? Yeah.

For sure. And 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. Oh, I'm going to 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, you know, like a passing of the baton. That's wonderful. Yeah.

Uh, to quote Moore from This Nonviolent Stuff Will Get You Killed, the rural black culture that Snickfield secretaries encountered in the Deep South had long accepted armed 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 nonviolence movement. And those groups matter, but I think it's also worth understanding where they come from, which didn't just like show up, like one person wasn't suddenly like, I have an idea, we can defend ourselves, right? Um,

It was built on a bedrock of people just doing it themselves. Charles Cobb describes, for example, a 70-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 to quote a student organizer, stayed with her. What SNCC would do is they'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. Yeah. So badass. I love that. I know. That's why I think she was probably a midwife. Sometimes, no matter what I said, this is still a quote. Sometimes, no matter what I said, she would sit in my bedroom window, leg propped up with that big old gun. She knew 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 and different backgrounds, right? Because frankly, defending these people was part of hospitality. And of course, the supremacists were...

really fucking mad about SNCC. 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 still lives there. Right, exactly.

and everyone knows you and all your business. And I know that some of them like lost business. You know what I mean? If you're 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,

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 guy pulled out a gun hit him hit the woman in the head but you know what won't hit you in the head except with really good deals oh

Potatoes won't do that. That's right. Oh, yeah. Okay. So, Joelle, one of the things that we try and do on this show is we try to be sponsored only by very good things, right? Yes. And so our perennial sponsor is the concept of potatoes. They're good for you. You can eat them cooked. Why don't you cook them first? They're cheap. And I'm wondering if you have anything that you would like to be sponsored by. We've also been sponsored by Sleeping Dogs. Yes.

A Good Comb. Yeah, A Good Comb was good. The Laughter of Children, I think was another one. The Laughter of Children is great. I want to be sponsored by A Rainy Day with a Good Book. Oh, yeah. Classic choice. That's my favorite space.

To live in. Oh, my God. If I could. That's what heaven looks like to me. It's constantly raining and like there's good books and hot tea everywhere. Tea 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.

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Okay, and we are back. And I'm going to mostly...

The atrocities of what people were facing have been told at great length. And so I don't want to specifically go through every time that people got murdered or whatever. But one of them that impacts all of this a lot, in Mississippi in September 1961, a local Black farmer and NAACP leader who was affiliated with SNCC, his name was 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 and a racist, who was like neighbors, who had just like decided shit had gone too far. And he basically been like, hey, come over here. I want to talk to you. And then murdered Herbert Lee. What a dick. 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? Yeah.

Later, a black witness to the crime, Luis Allen, was murdered on his own property before he could testify. And that murder 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 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 SNCC 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. 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 Klan losing. So I'm going to tell some stories about the Klan losing. Oh, yes. In 1965, Baker County, Georgia, there was a 17-year-old young woman named Shirley Miller who alongside other folks integrated the local high school.

The clan burned a cross in her yard. More than a dozen of the fucks 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 clansmen literally begged for their life in order to be let leave. I wish there was a recording of that. Could you imagine a recording of that? Just playing it back and be like, yes, you assholes. That's for threatening a high schooler, you jerks. Yeah.

In 1964, some folks tried to register to vote and were turned away. Mrs. Brewer's sons were turned away. So the Klan showed up at the Brewer house to teach her and her kids a lesson about trying to vote. So Janie Brewer, Mrs. Brewer, she armed up her kids and she armed up her grandkids and she armed up the SNCC organizers who were supposedly not supposed to 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 SNCC 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. Brewers stood on the front porch ready to hurl a Molotov cocktail. Everyone, including the sheriff, fled. Night riders never returned to the Brewer farm.

Fuck around and find out for 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 nonviolence. Part of the arguments for nonviolence is this is a very effective strategy and 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 nonviolent stuff will 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 Klan shows up, someone takes a fucking warning shot, and they're like, oh, God, those people have guns, even though the Klan has 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 statement. I feel like, no, no, no, no, no. But I hear what you're saying. I think the nonviolent 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, similar to Gandhi, because I'm sure there were people in India also being like, no, fuck you. Get off my land, British people.

people yeah totally what are you doing yeah but in order to make the world care you have to be like no 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 yeah it's an exhausting gauntlet to ask people to run through but yeah what else can you do yeah I mean yeah

Yeah, I'm 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? A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And that is actually one of the things that comes up in the book. And I don't know if I wrote it in the script. Maybe you're going to hear me talk about it later. A higher percentage, it was not universal. There were white people who were totally fine with violence. And

and there were black people were totally fine with nonviolence, but a higher percentage of the organizers who were coming from out who are white were more ideologically committed to nonviolence. Whereas more of the black organizers were strategically committed to nonviolence. I'm sure. Yeah. And that matters so much, especially when you're talking about like, look, I clearly I'm a, 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 in its entirety, right? Yeah. Because if they were, then you would never ask people who were constantly being threatened to be nonviolent.

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 nonviolent, but it's a way for us to not have to become violent in defense of you. I can stand with you and say, oh, no, I was there. I linked arms. Like, but did you take off arms? Which would have been much more helpful in protecting these bodies you claim to care about. Yeah.

It's again, it's a total mindfuck 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 the needle.

past that in some, I don't think from on a government level we have, but I think for a very personal and individual level, I hope that we as a society are moving past this idea that pacifism is the best reaction to violence. Clearly not. Clearly not, I think. Yeah, exactly. And then even strategic nonviolence apparently works really well paired with self-defense. Yeah.

You know, you know, you know, I don't want to hurt you. I don't want to, you know, bomb or hurt anybody or take someone's, you know, friend, parent, whatever away from them. But don't fuck with me. Yeah, that's a very reasonable line to draw. Yeah. Or like, don't fuck with those nonviolent 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 a HBCU in Mississippi called Tugala Southern Christian College. And he spent his time advising students who were sitting at lunch counters and, you know, teaching and all that stuff. And he traveled armed everywhere he went. And in 1994, he said the fact that he was known to be armed is the reason he survived the era. Yeah.

And I, yeah, there's, I have no particular doubt about that. And the student, the school itself was constantly being attacked by Knight 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 nonviolence 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. At Joel Monique. It's J-O-E-L-L-E-M-O-N-I-Q-U-E. I'm the EP of Fake Doctors, Real Friends. If you have any desire to come check out a Scrubs rewatch podcast, I also have a new girl rewatch podcast called Welcome to Our Show that I adore. And then you can check out my writing all online.

over the place. I'm doing a lot of work for The Wrap 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. Ian, you got anything you want to plug? Isn't there a live stream coming up? Oh, there is a live stream coming up. I think it's this week. Yeah, it's this week as you listen to this. Oh my god.

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.

And you can get tickets by Googling it. That sounds like an amazing show. I'm really excited. Yeah. The link to get tickets is momenthouse.co slash btb. I think when you buy a ticket, you can also submit a question for the Q&A. Make sure you get those in ASAP before the event this week. And yeah, I think that's all I got.

All right. Well, we will see you all on Wednesday. Farewell.

Yeah.

Field. F-E-E-L-D. On Field, an app where curious people come to connect, you have the breathing room to explore your own desires and go on a journey wherein the person you discover is yourself. In fact, 62% of Field members evolve their sexuality, interests, and desires within their first year on the app. You have the freedom to explore who you are and what you like in ways you haven't imagined. As part of this community, you'll quickly find that people regularly practice honesty and openness.

See any field bio. Download Fields, F-E-E-L-D, on the App Store or Google Play. PK! Hey there, it's Scott Patterson from I Am All In Again podcast. Life's short, talk fast. Stream Gilmore Girls on Hulu. That's right, grab your coffee and get cozy because all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls are now on Hulu. Stream all the witty banner heartwarming moments and awkward Friday night dinners with Lorelei Rory and

and the eclectic mix of characters. Whether you're re-watching or going Gilmore for the first time, Hulu has you covered. It's a show. It's a lifestyle. It's now streaming on Hulu.

Have you ever brought your magic to Walt Disney World like, "Hey, we came to play"? Did you tip your tiara to a Creole princess or get goofy officially? Step up like a boss and save the day? Or see what life's like under the tree of life? Did you? If you could, would you? When we come through, it's true magic, 'cause we came to play. Bring the magic at Walt Disney World Resort.

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Whether you're ordering wings for the game, whipping up a seven-layer dip, or ordering pizza, there's something about football that makes you want to eat. And this football season, Uber Eats has the best deals on game day food. No matter what you're craving, from two-for-one pizza to buy one, get one wings, Uber Eats will be dropping new deals each week, all season long. Uber Eats, official on-demand delivery partner of the NFL. Order now. Terms and conditions apply. See app for details.