Speaker 1: The art world. It is essentially a money laundering business.
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Speaker 1: they don't even know or suspect that their fakes. I'm
Speaker 1: Alec Baldwin and this is a podcast about deception, greed,
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Speaker 1: and saw this bright red painting presuming to be a Rothko.
Speaker 1: Of course, art forgeries only happen because there's money to
Speaker 1: be made, a lot of money. I'm listening to what
Speaker 1: they're paying for these things. It was an incredible mansi money.
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Speaker 1: Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the AD Council. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Behind the Police, a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
Speaker 1: Back to Behind the Police, the special miniseries for Behind
Speaker 1: the Bass Huts, which is normally a show that I
Speaker 1: Robert Evans do about the worst people in all of history.
Speaker 1: But for these weeks and these these episodes, is a
Speaker 1: deep dive into the entire history of American police, the
Speaker 1: greatest bastards of them all, collection of them. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: My guest in this journey into the history of police
Speaker 1: stem uh is my friend Jason Petty, better known as
Speaker 1: the hip hop artist propaganda Jason. How are you doing today?
Speaker 1: We'll sup happy Joe. The actual the actual one day
Speaker 1: of Independence. Yes, the day that like we as a
Speaker 1: nation kind of sort of started to begin to try
Speaker 1: to live up to the promises made at our founding,
Speaker 1: except not for women. Uh. Yeah, there's still another. We're
Speaker 1: still waiting for another. Uh, there's another independence coming soon.
Speaker 1: It's been a rough couple of been a rough couple
Speaker 1: of centuries. Guys. Um. Yeah, yeah. In fact, the MATS
Speaker 1: page A proclamation was two years before this because the
Speaker 1: war wasn't done and still we were waiting on Texas
Speaker 1: and still we were waiting on Texas and in some
Speaker 1: ways still are still. Yeah, as a Texan, I could
Speaker 1: I think it's still kind of waiting on Texas. So um,
Speaker 1: in honor of I mean this, it won't be Juneteenth
Speaker 1: anymore when these episodes drop. But these two episodes this week,
Speaker 1: we're we're going real deep into um, the history of
Speaker 1: racism and policing. Um. The That's that's what these next
Speaker 1: two episodes are going to be. And then after that
Speaker 1: we're going to kind of get back to a broader
Speaker 1: history of policing and come up to the modern era.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about the war on drugs and cops and stuff.
Speaker 1: But but this, this is these two episodes are going
Speaker 1: to be more focused onto something that I think is
Speaker 1: critical but not very well known to most people. You know.
Speaker 1: Usually there's there's one aspect to which kind of what
Speaker 1: we're talking about is known today, which is that if
Speaker 1: you if you wound up at a protest recently, which
Speaker 1: I assume a lot of you have, of you may
Speaker 1: have heard the venerable left wing protest chant. Cops and
Speaker 1: clan go hand in hand. Um, And if you're a
Speaker 1: fan of rage against the machine, I'm sure you're familiar
Speaker 1: with their their similar lines. Some of those that workforces
Speaker 1: are the same that burn crosses. Uh. And you know, uh,
Speaker 1: we we talked a bit about how, you know, the
Speaker 1: sort of story spreading about slave patrols and how that
Speaker 1: was the origin of policing and how that was you know,
Speaker 1: partly true but not entirely accurate because it was more
Speaker 1: complicated than that. This is a case where the the
Speaker 1: kind of like pithy chance uh and social media posts
Speaker 1: and stuff actually are really accurate. Like that. That's what
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about today. Yeah, so in in in
Speaker 1: a very veiled defense for everybody else that didn't have
Speaker 1: to live these realities. Like there's some realities like something
Speaker 1: like a red lining, Like I understand, I understand that
Speaker 1: there is a wide out of people. You have to
Speaker 1: go out of your way unless you're black to know
Speaker 1: what redlining is because it doesn't affect you, you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. So I'm gonna give you that I
Speaker 1: don't know the script, but I know, based on what
Speaker 1: the way that Robert's leading in, I have an idea
Speaker 1: that I'm probably gonna know these stories, but I'm pretty
Speaker 1: sure you don't because they ain't affected you. You never
Speaker 1: thought about redlining, because you never There was never a
Speaker 1: time that your grandparents was looking at the neighborhood and
Speaker 1: was like, we can't live here. And it's not because
Speaker 1: you couldn't afford to live here. It's because you wasn't
Speaker 1: allowed to live here, you know what I'm saying. So
Speaker 1: I understand that you don't know this. There's probably things
Speaker 1: in your life, like we could talk about some Native
Speaker 1: American heritage and stories and stuff like that that you
Speaker 1: probably would have no idea unless you went out in
Speaker 1: your way. I went out of my way to learn
Speaker 1: those things because I understand what it means to be
Speaker 1: an oppressed person. So strap in, this is about to
Speaker 1: be earth shattering for you. It's it's gonna be right. Um. So,
Speaker 1: in the immediate wake of the war, you remember, after
Speaker 1: part one, you know, we kind of ended on slave
Speaker 1: patrols just turned in right into police departments. Um. But
Speaker 1: in the immediate way to the war, a lot of
Speaker 1: the South, which you know occupied by the United States Military,
Speaker 1: the Union Military um and millions of black men had
Speaker 1: suddenly gained the right to vote for the first time,
Speaker 1: like kind of right around that same period, and historians
Speaker 1: generally call the the time from eighteen sixty to eighteen
Speaker 1: seventies seven in the former South reconstruction, and it was
Speaker 1: a time of great hope for black Americans. Seven hundred
Speaker 1: black men were elected to public office, including two senators
Speaker 1: and fourteen members of the House of Representatives, which when
Speaker 1: you consider that, like a huge chunk of those men
Speaker 1: had been slaves a couple of years earlier, like that's
Speaker 1: in that's maybe the rapidest turn around from not from
Speaker 1: politically being you know, not a person to being in
Speaker 1: power that like has ever happened. Thirteen hundred black men
Speaker 1: and women were appointed to various government jobs during this period.
Speaker 1: Free men pulled their resources, They formed companies, Some of
Speaker 1: them fought to receive back wages, and even tried to
Speaker 1: take land from their former masters. It was generally not successful,
Speaker 1: but attempts were made and all across the South. Groups
Speaker 1: of freedmen also formed militias, sometimes using the rifles with
Speaker 1: which they had served in the Union Army and obviously. Um,
Speaker 1: a lot of white folks weren't happy with this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it worked. It's like, so they go, you know, we're
Speaker 1: just gonna let them. You forget that, especially in the South,
Speaker 1: the vast majority of the population were freed slaves. So
Speaker 1: just by the sheer numbers, if you let us vote,
Speaker 1: we're gonna vote in our own people. Yeah, it's you're
Speaker 1: not going to be in charge anymore. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this was a pickle for um, for the white supremacists.
Speaker 1: We we we could say that fairly. Um. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: outside of the transition of slave patrols to police departments,
Speaker 1: a lot of white people just sort of on their
Speaker 1: own attempted to put newly freed black people in their
Speaker 1: place by using the law to to you know, suppress them.
Speaker 1: Laws were passed throughout the old slave states that banned
Speaker 1: vagrancy or being out in public without a visible means
Speaker 1: of support. You might recognize this as the same tactic
Speaker 1: used a little bit later to stop union workers from
Speaker 1: organizing in other parts of the country. Um, so that
Speaker 1: is kind of we can we we can see some
Speaker 1: sometimes the exact same tactic being used for very different
Speaker 1: groups of of oppressed Americans. But it is. It's the
Speaker 1: same thing. Like, what do we just make it illegal
Speaker 1: for them to be outside? Yeah? So um. In this case,
Speaker 1: vagrancy laws were used to force black people to take employment,
Speaker 1: generally a sharecropper. So you make it illegal to be
Speaker 1: outside without a job. That forces people to take jobs.
Speaker 1: And since like you don't want to go to jail,
Speaker 1: your choice, like you have to very quickly get whatever
Speaker 1: job you can get, which means people, you know, the
Speaker 1: power is in the hands of the person offering you
Speaker 1: the job, which means they could give you a job
Speaker 1: that's basically slavery, which is in fact, what a lot
Speaker 1: of sharecropping job share cropping? Yeah. Um, so again not
Speaker 1: quite slavery, but also not nearly as far from being
Speaker 1: slavery as it really ought to have been. Slavery light, Yeah,
Speaker 1: slavery light. A little bit of diet. It's like the
Speaker 1: Coke zero of human beings. That's one calorie. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: is better for you, but not very much better. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not very much better. Um, and it'll probably give you
Speaker 1: a brain tumor. Um. I want to I'll cut that
Speaker 1: bed out off. Coke zero wants to sponsor the podcast.
Speaker 1: I will take your money yeah, so I want to
Speaker 1: kick off our quotations in this episode with one from
Speaker 1: the absolutely critical book that everybody ought to read, The
Speaker 1: End of Policing by Alex Vitalete. Anyone on the roads
Speaker 1: without proof of employment was quickly subjected to police action.
Speaker 1: Local police were the essential front door of the twin
Speaker 1: evils of convict leasing and prison farms. Local sheriffs would
Speaker 1: arrest free blacks on flimsy to non exist in evidence,
Speaker 1: then drive them into a cruel and inhuman justice system
Speaker 1: whose punishments often resulted in death. These same sheriffs and
Speaker 1: judges also received kickbacks and in some cases generated lists
Speaker 1: of fit and hard working blacks to be incarcerated on
Speaker 1: behalf of employers who had then leased them out to
Speaker 1: perform forced labor for profit. Douglas Blackman chronicles the appalling
Speaker 1: conditions of mines and lumber camps, where thousands perished. But
Speaker 1: the Jim Crow era policing had become a central tool
Speaker 1: of maintaining racial inequality throughout the South, supplemented by ad
Speaker 1: hoc vigilante such as the ku Klux Klan, which often
Speaker 1: worked closely with and was populated by local police. Good
Speaker 1: little summary of how it all went down. Yeah, yep,
Speaker 1: so the motherfucking KKK um. Let's come on, get into
Speaker 1: a baby. Now. We've done a whole two potter on
Speaker 1: the history of the clan, the first and the second
Speaker 1: clan at least on Behind the Bastards already, So if
Speaker 1: you want a detailed history of both of those organizations,
Speaker 1: you can check that out. It's in it's in the
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards feed. But I'm gonna give a little
Speaker 1: bit of an overview before we dig into the cop
Speaker 1: you know, specific stuff. The KKK formed initially in Pulaski, Tennessee,
Speaker 1: in eighteen sixty six. First like saying Pulaski. Pulaski. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a fun name of a town. It's a shame
Speaker 1: all of the terrorism. Anyway, The very first KKK cell
Speaker 1: was formed by a bunch of board drunk and pretty
Speaker 1: well off Confederate veterans. They dressed up like wizards, and
Speaker 1: they gave themselves absurd titles and went out at night
Speaker 1: uh costumed as the ghosts of Confederate veterans in order
Speaker 1: to scare freed black people. One of the KKK founders
Speaker 1: happened to own the local newspaper and he published a
Speaker 1: bunch of mysterious letters from a grand cyclops, all of
Speaker 1: which made the clan seem cool and mysterious and powerful.
Speaker 1: This early meme, and that's really what the KKK was
Speaker 1: at the start, spread very quickly throughout the South, and
Speaker 1: soon thousands of white dudes were dressing like ghosts and
Speaker 1: terrorizing black people, generally while drunk as all hell. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they wore dresses, other times they pretended to be aliens.
Speaker 1: They did this because it was fun, but also because
Speaker 1: it made their abuse more impactful. And her fantastic book
Speaker 1: Ku Klux, Elaine Parsons explains this in a way that
Speaker 1: I think is really important when it comes to just
Speaker 1: sort of understanding modern right wing street violence and why
Speaker 1: a lot of it seems so silly, like a lot
Speaker 1: of the ways they dress up that act are so
Speaker 1: on that surface absurd quote Ku Klux endeavored to portray
Speaker 1: victims entirely rational fear of their physical violence, as though
Speaker 1: it were superstition or gullibility. The victim, telling Lee, failed
Speaker 1: to get the joke, allowing himself to be frightened by
Speaker 1: ghosts or devils. Get the joke, Yeah, they didn't get
Speaker 1: the joke. Shot at you. Yeah, yeah, you know, while
Speaker 1: I'm hanging from my neck. Yeah you get it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we hung you from a tree and we were dressed
Speaker 1: as aliens, don't You don't get the joke? Ye, scared
Speaker 1: of aliens? Yeah, yeah, there it is. Yeah, fucking fascists
Speaker 1: are always yeah what Yeah, at some point you have
Speaker 1: to explain to me and one of these bastard episodes
Speaker 1: why far right fascists are just not funny. Yeah. It's
Speaker 1: because it's not funny. It's because comedy, um, good comedy
Speaker 1: requires uh, what's the word I'm looking for here? Um empathy? Right,
Speaker 1: Like you have to understand other people in order to
Speaker 1: say things that are funny to them. There it is, yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you? Yeah. So um yeah, many, if not most,
Speaker 1: of these early clansmen were former slave patrol members, and
Speaker 1: a sizeable number of these early clansmen, in addition to
Speaker 1: being former slaver patrol members, were also current law enforcement
Speaker 1: you know, sheriffs and the like. There was also, outside
Speaker 1: of you know, even the clan, just a huge amount
Speaker 1: of vigilante violence directed against black people during this time,
Speaker 1: and it all does sort of bleed together. One Edgefield County,
Speaker 1: South Carolina, military officer like a U. S. Military officer
Speaker 1: stationed in the in the former Confederacy in eighteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: wrote this quote. Two men white had killed a Negro,
Speaker 1: plus cut the ear off on another the evening before,
Speaker 1: about five miles left of my encampment. It is presumed
Speaker 1: they belonged to a regular organized band of guerrillas which
Speaker 1: infests that country. It is practiced among these monsters either
Speaker 1: to kill or mutilate any colored people who unluckily falls
Speaker 1: into their power. None of the colored people dared to
Speaker 1: sleep in their houses at night, but had to take
Speaker 1: refuge in the surrounding country. Some part of the peaceful,
Speaker 1: loyal white population are well acquainted with the haunts of
Speaker 1: these depredators, but dread them. Would they betray them? As
Speaker 1: there is no protective power in the country. They are
Speaker 1: a terror to the loyal population at night. These ruffians,
Speaker 1: besotted with drink, rave and tear like prairie Indians through
Speaker 1: the streets of the city. The civil law is powerless
Speaker 1: to protect against such desperadoes. That's interesting because it gives
Speaker 1: you an idea of how terrifying it was during this period,
Speaker 1: how these people acted. It gives you also, like a
Speaker 1: look into the head of sort of I guess what
Speaker 1: you'd call like a white ally who was also still
Speaker 1: really racist against Native Americans, Like, yeah, there's a prairie Indian.
Speaker 1: That's what that is of all the whole sentence. That's
Speaker 1: what I caught where I was like, wait what it's
Speaker 1: like you're you're so uh what do we talk? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I was like yeah, it's like the record skipped. But
Speaker 1: I was just like yeah, man, yeah, man, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: hold up. Yeah, it's kind of like you want to
Speaker 1: be really proud of like Ulysses Simpson Grant because you know,
Speaker 1: as flawed as he was, he beat the Confederacy. He
Speaker 1: was pretty committed to to black people not being slaves.
Speaker 1: He was committed to them having the right to vote.
Speaker 1: He did some really good stuff as present for black people.
Speaker 1: Real terrible record with the Native America, just like real bad. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: so you know, we have we do have a couple
Speaker 1: of of of of founding members of this country that
Speaker 1: we can be comprehensively proud of, but they're pretty much
Speaker 1: just Thomas Paine actually, when just basically and and and
Speaker 1: John Brown. Yeah, yeah, yeah, John Brown, there was a
Speaker 1: neat moment in his history where he was like asked
Speaker 1: by some white folks he lived around to help them
Speaker 1: clear out a group of Native Americans from the community,
Speaker 1: and he was like, I'd rather clear your ass out
Speaker 1: of here. Yeah, good guy, John Brown. So, um, civil
Speaker 1: law was often powerless to stop these kind of bands
Speaker 1: of marauding white terrorists in this or insurgents really in
Speaker 1: this period of time. Um, but civil law was also
Speaker 1: often on board with this kind of violence. So it
Speaker 1: was a mix of we really have no resources to
Speaker 1: stop these people, and we also don't want to stop
Speaker 1: these people. Uh. And a good example of how this
Speaker 1: looked comes from the case of Union County, South Carolina.
Speaker 1: That town included a virulent cell of klansmen roughly organized
Speaker 1: around a local criminal named Bill Fawcett. Now, Fawcett had
Speaker 1: been a member of another anti black guerrilla band known
Speaker 1: to Union troops as Slickers previously, he and his friends
Speaker 1: seemed to have slid rather seamlessly into becoming klansmen once
Speaker 1: that was the hip new way to be racist terrorists.
Speaker 1: Fawcett was repeatedly arrested for disorderly conduct and violence, but
Speaker 1: he had good connections to local law enforcement, and he
Speaker 1: and his friends were also tied heavily into the wealthy
Speaker 1: gentry in the Union County, so they never really did
Speaker 1: any hard time because they were good smugglers and they
Speaker 1: helped keep the rich people in the county well supplied
Speaker 1: with tax free liquor. One of the wealthy men who
Speaker 1: supported Fawcett and his vigilante activities was James Rice Rogers.
Speaker 1: He sold the illegal liquor that Fawcett smuggled, and he
Speaker 1: was also the county sheriff in eighteen seventy. So that's
Speaker 1: back around the uh and again we're seeing kind of
Speaker 1: the same thing we are seeing in like the big
Speaker 1: you know, northern cities in this period of time where
Speaker 1: the police are intimately tied with vice, right you know.
Speaker 1: Um So, on the night of December thirty one, eighteen seventy,
Speaker 1: Union County was struck by a series of violent rates.
Speaker 1: And this kind of originated from a clash between white
Speaker 1: and black folks that still very complex. It started when
Speaker 1: two of Fawcett's men set out to deliver a barrel
Speaker 1: of illegal whiskey and they were stopped on the road
Speaker 1: by a checkpoint of black militiamen. And these guys were
Speaker 1: actually from two different black militias who had set up
Speaker 1: patrols in the area they lived because there were bands
Speaker 1: of armed clans been writing about and those clansmen had
Speaker 1: killed people recently. Um. Not black people would also like
Speaker 1: white Republicans in this period. Um, so they yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're killing Republicans. Publican meant something different back then, Yeah,
Speaker 1: sure did so. Um. There's these bands of you know,
Speaker 1: armed klansmen running around killing people, and so black folks
Speaker 1: set up militias to protect their neighborhoods, right, so they're
Speaker 1: doing like armed community self defense. And this this group
Speaker 1: of faucets you know men start driving up to one
Speaker 1: of these uh, one of these checkpoints with a barrel
Speaker 1: of illegal whiskey um, and this militia holds Fawcett's men
Speaker 1: up and they demand their hand over the whiskey. Um.
Speaker 1: It's kind of unclear if they're just if they just
Speaker 1: want the whiskey because they're like, oh hey, let's get
Speaker 1: some whiskey, um, or if they're more like you guys
Speaker 1: are sketchy as hell. Um, you kind of seem like
Speaker 1: the clan dudes because these guys were both probably klansmen
Speaker 1: who have been writing around and like, we want to
Speaker 1: see what the hell is up. And obviously these these
Speaker 1: white dudes weren't willing to like listen to what a
Speaker 1: bunch of black militias said, and they write off, and
Speaker 1: so the black militiamen opened fire at their wagon. Uh.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote from historian A. Lane Parsons here. Perhaps
Speaker 1: it was important to the pickets or those who fired,
Speaker 1: that white men not dismissed their armed demands and drive
Speaker 1: breezily by. Such pickets were part of how power operated
Speaker 1: in Union, and to mobilize the resources to set one
Speaker 1: up only to have it dismissed might have serious consequences.
Speaker 1: Perhaps the shots were not about the whiskey at all.
Speaker 1: There is some reason to suspect that Stevens, who's one
Speaker 1: of the men driving that whiskey train, having passed through
Speaker 1: the organized group, would have headed straight to Fawcett, which
Speaker 1: might well have led to trouble, not unlike that which
Speaker 1: was caused by shooting. So like, they might have been
Speaker 1: worried that these people were going to go back to
Speaker 1: the clan and try to organize an attack on the
Speaker 1: picket and so and trouble definitely followed, you know them,
Speaker 1: shooting at the wagon. Both the Fawcetts men immediately got
Speaker 1: out of the wagon and fled, but one of them
Speaker 1: was caught and he was executed by the militia, and
Speaker 1: his body was posed in a matter similar to how
Speaker 1: clansmen in the area had posed recently executed black men.
Speaker 1: Parsons continues. The black militia here was replicating the subculture
Speaker 1: of collective violence with which Union County ins were familiar.
Speaker 1: Picketing a road to defend one of their own from
Speaker 1: attack was conventional Union County behavior, as probably was the
Speaker 1: shakedown of Steven's. Even shooting after the retreating figures of
Speaker 1: Stevens and Robinson as they ran their picket would perhaps
Speaker 1: not have been particularly abnormal and as gunhappy a culture
Speaker 1: as Union Counties, the killing of Stevens made it a
Speaker 1: much more serious matter of course. Militiaman, however, might have
Speaker 1: miscalibrated elite's willingness to support Fawcett's marginal men, giving Steven's
Speaker 1: limital status he was a criminal. Had the militia been
Speaker 1: composed of white members, it seems likely that the whole
Speaker 1: affair would have blown over. Indeed, when Steven's peer, Thomas
Speaker 1: Jefferson Greer, had been shot just months earlier. His assailant,
Speaker 1: who was another white guy, had enjoyed widespreads public support,
Speaker 1: but again, John Sanders had been a white man. The
Speaker 1: fact that a black militia had killed a white guy
Speaker 1: was not okay to local white elites, and so large
Speaker 1: armed groups of white men formed up and started confiscating
Speaker 1: militia weapons from black homes, disarming them first. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: so like they, I get a bunch of pushback from said,
Speaker 1: you know, uh anarchists, boogoloo dudes who are like low
Speaker 1: key bugleloo but don't want to admit it. You know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, um saying like I don't understand why
Speaker 1: black people don't arm themselves, like you're doing all this
Speaker 1: peaceful protests. Maybe you should, like you yelling at us
Speaker 1: about being malicious coming out here heavenly armed. Maybe y'all
Speaker 1: should start heavily being heavily armed, as if we ain't
Speaker 1: never thought of that, like like I would. What makes
Speaker 1: you think we that thought ain't crossed our mind yet?
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying, Like, do you want me
Speaker 1: to go? You did a thing on them offered act already.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying, We did that already, But
Speaker 1: like this what years is? What year you're talking about
Speaker 1: right now? Yeah, it's this. I'm a big I'm a
Speaker 1: supporter of of of of not just black people, members
Speaker 1: of marginalized groups, particularly as we continue to hurdle towards
Speaker 1: an uncertain future. Considering armed self defense. Yes, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's been done a lot, and historically there's a lot
Speaker 1: more armed white people. So it's still like, it's not
Speaker 1: the solution. It's not the solution, and like, why you
Speaker 1: think we ain't thought it at? Like do you think
Speaker 1: we ain't thought of at This has been tried before
Speaker 1: and and sometimes it does work. We'll be we'll actually
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about this a few times in this episode.
Speaker 1: It's not like like again, I I'm one of the
Speaker 1: anarchists being like consider it. You know it's I'm not
Speaker 1: saying consider it, but these people talking to me as
Speaker 1: if we never thought about you know what I'm saying
Speaker 1: from the fucking beginning, From the beginning, what makes you
Speaker 1: think like you come home, bro, and yeah what happens?
Speaker 1: You know, the black people in Union County are organized
Speaker 1: and they are armed and white people start going door
Speaker 1: to door and taking guns out of it. Yes, and
Speaker 1: the reality of like and I love the part of
Speaker 1: that passage that was like this is not abnorm more
Speaker 1: like what what what I wish I could run through
Speaker 1: all of the streets of America and explain is our
Speaker 1: countin American culture is violent, like we are. All of
Speaker 1: your statues are war heroes were founded on a protest.
Speaker 1: This is a violent culture. And our country, our power structures,
Speaker 1: they respond to violence. So I just don't like, I'm
Speaker 1: not telling you this is the right way. I'm just
Speaker 1: telling you this is the ocean you swimming in. You
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. Right, we are saltwater fishies. That's
Speaker 1: where we are. We are a violent culture. So you
Speaker 1: mad at somebody else who's who's experiencing violence, right, Like,
Speaker 1: like it's become bit on those experiencing violence to remain peaceful.
Speaker 1: Just it means like I don't think you want to
Speaker 1: you asking me to be a fresh water fish in
Speaker 1: a saltwater ocean, Like, I just don't know what to
Speaker 1: tell you. The water is violent. So this is what's
Speaker 1: going to happen. Yeah yeah, so um yeah, So the
Speaker 1: white folks start taking all the guns of the black
Speaker 1: people who are in malicious um. And they also arrest
Speaker 1: dozens of black men, many of men whom had no
Speaker 1: ties to the malitious. Now, some of these men attempted
Speaker 1: to resist, but they ultimately decided that a gunfight would
Speaker 1: do them no good. Uh. They basically were like hold
Speaker 1: up in a house that was surrounded by white folks,
Speaker 1: and they had the choice do we defend ourselves or
Speaker 1: do we give ourselves up? And kind of the decision was,
Speaker 1: if we defend ourselves, we will either kill or injure
Speaker 1: some of these white folks and they will be really
Speaker 1: angry when they finished killing us because there's a lot
Speaker 1: more of them, and they're gonna burn down every black
Speaker 1: house in the neighborhood. Right that, Yeah, they like white
Speaker 1: people at this time and even and at that time
Speaker 1: and in this time, but mostly at that time. Are
Speaker 1: the elevation saying like you elevate the moment, like dial
Speaker 1: the eat up. You know what I'm saying. So these
Speaker 1: folks like give themselves up to say the neighborhood. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: for several days, the white elites in Union County debated
Speaker 1: over this list of randomly arrested black men that they
Speaker 1: had and decided basically, we're credit aside, how many of
Speaker 1: them should can we punish and how many of them
Speaker 1: can we spare without provoking a broader race riot among like,
Speaker 1: because you know, there were like a chunk of folks
Speaker 1: in power who are like who understood like, most of
Speaker 1: these arrests are bullshit, but also we have to punish
Speaker 1: some black people more or less at random, otherwise the
Speaker 1: poor white folks in the county are going to go
Speaker 1: on a race riot. So there's like this big debate
Speaker 1: with the local elites. And Alice Walker, the head of
Speaker 1: a local black militia, gets arrested on his way to
Speaker 1: travel to the governor to warn him about what's happening
Speaker 1: in Union County. Now Walker hadn't been present at any
Speaker 1: of the events that had sparked this, but he was
Speaker 1: hated by the most racist of the local whites because
Speaker 1: he was the organizer of a black militia, so local
Speaker 1: law enforcement decided that his death would go really far
Speaker 1: in calming the white mob. Now Walker had supporters who
Speaker 1: were ready to rally to his defense, armed, but again
Speaker 1: he told them not to um. He was innocent, and
Speaker 1: he was certain that a court case would bear out
Speaker 1: his innocence, but he never got the chance to actually,
Speaker 1: you know, do that. On January five, a huge gang
Speaker 1: of ku Kux klansmen rated the Union County jail and
Speaker 1: abducted five arrested black men, who also happened to be
Speaker 1: prominent local Republicans Parsons rights quote. It is not possible
Speaker 1: to name any of the members of the costumed group,
Speaker 1: but because though not all of the men were on
Speaker 1: horseback and were costumed, we can imagine that many of
Speaker 1: the group's members were elites. From the size of the group.
Speaker 1: Even if we accept only a cautious estimate, it seems
Speaker 1: likely that they came from adjoining counties. There's a good
Speaker 1: deal of evidence that some of Fawcett's friends were present
Speaker 1: in a leadership role at this event, and one man
Speaker 1: who was later named by witnesses to the raid as
Speaker 1: a leader of the clan mob that abducted all these
Speaker 1: black men was Fawcett's good buddy, Sheriff Rice Rogers. Um.
Speaker 1: So again, yeah, the ship, that's how they get into
Speaker 1: the jail is the sheriff as a klansman and he
Speaker 1: lets him him in. Yeah, yeah, and you know, obviously
Speaker 1: what you're expecting happens to these black men and it's tragic. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: and it's it's possible even that. Like, so, there was
Speaker 1: one of the things that did happen when the KKK
Speaker 1: showed up at this jail is they struggled with a
Speaker 1: deputy to get the keys. Um. And it's heavily suspected
Speaker 1: by historians, including Elaine Parsons, that this was all kind
Speaker 1: of an act um and that it's likely that the
Speaker 1: deputy who struggled with the clan after giving up the keys,
Speaker 1: put on a clan costume and engaged in the raid
Speaker 1: after being robbed. Yeah, yeah, I can totally picture that, Hey,
Speaker 1: don't take my key, don't take my key. Look, I'm
Speaker 1: doing the right thing. Yeah. And it is like again
Speaker 1: a lot and this this this I highlight this story
Speaker 1: because I think specific stories are kind of useful in
Speaker 1: getting people emotionally involved. But this is one of this happened.
Speaker 1: We will never know how many times constantly, Um, like
Speaker 1: the whole idea of a mob showing up at the
Speaker 1: jail and the officers handing over the keys or straight
Speaker 1: up just participating in the raid of the jail with
Speaker 1: clan robes On was a constant story during this period.
Speaker 1: Um Now as a rule, local law enforcement either again
Speaker 1: helped actively or turned a blind eye to clan violence
Speaker 1: out of fear. Watching from Washington, d C. President U. S.
Speaker 1: Grant was shocked by what seemed to be nothing so
Speaker 1: much as a resurgent Confederate movement in his you know,
Speaker 1: in his country. So when he had come to power,
Speaker 1: Granted believed that the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which
Speaker 1: guaranteed black men the right to vote, would solve the
Speaker 1: problem of securing the rights of newly freed black people.
Speaker 1: He was taken by surprise by the vicious string of
Speaker 1: murders that followed black emancipation and chat Noogat Tennessee, a
Speaker 1: black man named Andrew Flowers defeated the white candidate for
Speaker 1: Justice of the Peace in an eighteen seventy election. Despite
Speaker 1: the fact that this man had just been elected justice
Speaker 1: police were nowhere in evidence while klansman whipped and beat
Speaker 1: him and told him that no inward would hold office
Speaker 1: in the United States. Again common story, Yeah and survived.
Speaker 1: Yeah again, Hey, why don't you just put black people
Speaker 1: in office? You think we ain't thought it at Yeah,
Speaker 1: gotta deal with the problem of mass violence being done
Speaker 1: to black people in support of white supremacy. Not always
Speaker 1: by white people, but in support of white supremacy. Because
Speaker 1: we'll talk next week about how how having black officers
Speaker 1: and police departments works, because it doesn't always work the
Speaker 1: way you might suspect, because white supremacy. Yeah, we're talking
Speaker 1: to the first one. Whiteness is a thing. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know what isn't the ku klux jus. No, that's not
Speaker 1: that's not what I mean. Yeah, you know that's the
Speaker 1: harsh Let's not analyze that too much. Right now, let's
Speaker 1: just go through the episode one Funk the Police. It's
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Speaker 1: E and d J E f N sat down with
Speaker 1: artists and icon Ya, which Vulture called one most significant interviews.
Speaker 1: I literally had to go like Danos and I don't
Speaker 1: want to have to be the villain. But when I
Speaker 1: went and did the Donda thing, he returned and abody
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Speaker 1: Apple Podcast, or where ever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: We're back, Oh my gosh. You know what I love
Speaker 1: is being back from ADS because it means that we
Speaker 1: can talk more about the horrific history of racism and
Speaker 1: law enforcement, terror and trauma. That's it's inside of my
Speaker 1: DNA and it passed on generationally. Yes, should have had
Speaker 1: an air horn there, so uh. Starting in eighteen seventy
Speaker 1: U President Grant began to lobby Congress to give him
Speaker 1: power to do something about the clan because again, local
Speaker 1: law enforcement was actively aiding and abetting the KK. In
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy and eighteen seventy one, Congress passed the enforcement as.
Speaker 1: These protected the rights of black men to vote, hold office,
Speaker 1: and serve on reason and generally enjoy equal protection under
Speaker 1: the law. The Ku Klux Klan Acts, as they came
Speaker 1: to be known, allowed President Grant to call up the
Speaker 1: army to order in order to arrest and break up
Speaker 1: the bands of disguised night marauders. And we're gonna be
Speaker 1: like critical of law enforcement on this podcast, but we
Speaker 1: gotta be fair when it's important to be fair, and
Speaker 1: federal law enforcement did a pretty decent job on breaking
Speaker 1: up the clan. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is this is
Speaker 1: where things get really complicated, prop because a lot of
Speaker 1: the credit for this goes to Amos Ackerman, the Attorney
Speaker 1: General of the United States. Ackerman joined the Republican Party
Speaker 1: after the Civil War and became one of the nation's
Speaker 1: most strenuous advocates for black suffrage. He was like, black
Speaker 1: people have the right to vote and hold office, and
Speaker 1: we will I I will make sure we enforce this
Speaker 1: with fucking riflemen if we have to. Um. Historian William S.
Speaker 1: Mcpheeley said of Ackerman that quote no Attorney general before
Speaker 1: or since has been more vigorous in the prosecution of
Speaker 1: cases designed to protect the lives and rights of black Americans.
Speaker 1: And here's where things get complicated, because before he was
Speaker 1: a Republican, before he was the Attorney General, Amos Ackerman
Speaker 1: volunteered and fought in the Confederate Army. People have layers
Speaker 1: of complication. People are complicated. They in them contain many yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: And this if for Amos this seems to have been
Speaker 1: like he was. It seems to have been more a
Speaker 1: matter of, like you hear about these folks who are
Speaker 1: like really loyal to their state for reasons I have
Speaker 1: trouble understanding. Like, he doesn't seem to have joined the
Speaker 1: Confederate Army specifically to fight for slavery, although he fought
Speaker 1: for slavery because that's what the Confederate Army fought for.
Speaker 1: But in his mind, I think it was more like,
Speaker 1: I'm really loyal to Georgia. I don't know, I can't
Speaker 1: get in ahead of that guy, but I guess if
Speaker 1: you can make that up, he tried to afterwards. Um,
Speaker 1: so I want to give it to the possibility that people, uh,
Speaker 1: probably hundreds of them at the time, you know, like
Speaker 1: you said, just was like, look, we're down. Here is
Speaker 1: what we do. We're fighting far our way of life.
Speaker 1: I guess that's right. And in the middle of that
Speaker 1: finally had this like, you know, this is bullshit, you
Speaker 1: know I'm saying, and was like, but if you're the
Speaker 1: onliest person for miles talking like this, it's probably hard
Speaker 1: to find some good community and you're probably gonna fumble,
Speaker 1: and then you become this guy to where you're like, hey,
Speaker 1: there's one thing I can do. I could probably like
Speaker 1: dismantle this clan thing. That's the thing to do, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. Yeah, if there's a thing that
Speaker 1: can make up for volunteering to serve in the Confederate Army,
Speaker 1: I guess it's dismantling the KKK. I guess, yeah, Like
Speaker 1: that's a good that's a good good artist. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the worst clan violence was in South Carolina, and
Speaker 1: Grant declared martial law in that state, citing a condition
Speaker 1: of lawlessness. He suspended habeas corpus uh, and numerous clansmen
Speaker 1: were rounded up by federal authorities, including Sheriff Rice Rogers,
Speaker 1: who we have been talking about a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of Sheriff Scott dropped pulled up in this. So
Speaker 1: the Senate held extensive hearings where hundreds of black victims
Speaker 1: of the clan were allowed to tell their stories to
Speaker 1: the nation. Under Ackerman's direction, six hundred clansmen were convicted
Speaker 1: and sixty five of them sent to a federal penitentiary.
Speaker 1: By eighteen seventy two, the clan was no longer a
Speaker 1: meaningful force in the United States. Frederick Douglas himself said
Speaker 1: that without President Grant's actions, black Americans would have been
Speaker 1: trapped again in a condition almost identical to slavery. That
Speaker 1: is probably true, but it's also true that Grant kind
Speaker 1: of botched the landing on this one, firing Ackerman to
Speaker 1: appease his political rivals and commuting the sentences of some
Speaker 1: clansmen in a bid for reconciliations. So again I can't
Speaker 1: stand here. You know, let's be fair. Um. But also
Speaker 1: you know, it is fair to say that Ulysses Simon
Speaker 1: Simpson Grant was probably the best presidential advocate for black
Speaker 1: rights that existed until at least f DR. That's I
Speaker 1: was gonna say, like, yeah, why not to the New Deal?
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, even like even he got an asterisk
Speaker 1: next to ye Yeah, a couple of them. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: terrorism was, however, briefly out as a method of suppress,
Speaker 1: of repressing Black Americans and enforcing white supremacy, or at
Speaker 1: least terrorism and kind of an organized fashion because we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about lynching later. Um. This left the law
Speaker 1: and law enforcement as the last organized refuge for white supremacists.
Speaker 1: The Black Codes had been made i llegal in eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, when the Fourteenth Amendment gave black people equal
Speaker 1: protection under the law. Um, But in eighteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: the first Jim Crow laws began to be passed, mandating
Speaker 1: separate public spaces for black and white people. Suddenly, white
Speaker 1: and black people were now expected by law to use
Speaker 1: separate schools, libraries, water fountains, and restaurants. The police could
Speaker 1: no longer arrest black men for voting, although that absolutely
Speaker 1: still happened, but they could arrest black people for entering
Speaker 1: white spaces. The clan was gone, but the police remained,
Speaker 1: and for decades they took over the hard work of
Speaker 1: enforcing white supremacy from the terrorists. In nineteen fifteen, William J. Simmons,
Speaker 1: former minister, performed a real active resurrection and brought the
Speaker 1: KKK back to life. Now, Simmons had been a big
Speaker 1: nerd for things like the Masons and other fraternal societies
Speaker 1: that were a big part of life back in the
Speaker 1: day clubs where men would gather and dress up in
Speaker 1: costumes and do silly rituals and generally get drunk. Simmons
Speaker 1: wanted to make a society of his own, and he
Speaker 1: decided that reviving the old KKK would be easiest because
Speaker 1: then he could cash in on the clan's name recognition
Speaker 1: and branding. Again, I cover all this in that two
Speaker 1: part or that we we already did on the show,
Speaker 1: but before we move on to the cops stuff, the
Speaker 1: important thing to know is that the second clan was
Speaker 1: fucking huge, while the first had been a relatively small
Speaker 1: group of terrorists the second Clan had its terrorists, but
Speaker 1: it was largely a social club that included millions of Americans.
Speaker 1: At its height, they had a summer camp like. It
Speaker 1: was not quite the same thing. Yeah, they sold branded
Speaker 1: equipment and stuff like, and in a lot of ways
Speaker 1: they were basically a pyramid scheme. Simmons engaged a pr
Speaker 1: firm to help him repackage this old terrorist group as
Speaker 1: a cool club for families. By nineteen twenty, the whole
Speaker 1: thing had gone viral name and wide, and the claim
Speaker 1: did engage in pushing racist laws. But for the folks
Speaker 1: at the top, I think more than even a force
Speaker 1: for racism, the clan was a grift right now. There
Speaker 1: were a lot of racists in like everyone in the
Speaker 1: clan was a racist still, and there were a lot
Speaker 1: of racists who were like the old clansman kind of
Speaker 1: at the top. Making money was more the goal than
Speaker 1: anything else. Um yeah, uh so uh. In ninety one,
Speaker 1: Simmons gave an interview to the Atlanta Journal that was
Speaker 1: basically his sales pitch to the nation for the Ku
Speaker 1: Klux Klan from a right up in the National Museum
Speaker 1: of American History website quote while explicitly advocating white supremacy.
Speaker 1: Simmons played up his group's commitment to law and order,
Speaker 1: promoted their enforcement of prohibition, and even boasted of his
Speaker 1: own police credentials. He claimed members at every level of
Speaker 1: law enforcement belonged to his organization and that the local
Speaker 1: sheriff was often one of the first to join when
Speaker 1: the clan came to a town. Ominously, Simmons declared that
Speaker 1: the sheriff of Fulton County knows where he can get
Speaker 1: two members of the clan in a moment's called to
Speaker 1: suppress anything in the way of lawlessness. There it is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he wasn't blowing hot air when he said this.
Speaker 1: In Anaheim, California, Klansmen won four out of five seats
Speaker 1: on the city council, dominating local politics until nineteen. They
Speaker 1: voted to allow officers who are clan members to patrol
Speaker 1: wearing their full KKK uniform instead of their normal police uniform.
Speaker 1: Non police clansmen were also allowed to patrol and interrogate
Speaker 1: citizens in the streets. I guess want you guys to
Speaker 1: know that anaheims where Disneyland is, so just just like
Speaker 1: let this let that sink in Anaheim. Anaheim Disneyland. Is
Speaker 1: you want to go to downtown Disney it's Anaheim. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The City Council of Anaheim, who are klansmen, are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: cops can just wear their clan uniforms to do their job.
Speaker 1: It's just a club, yeah, yeah, And the clan uniform
Speaker 1: basically is the same as the police uniform. So like,
Speaker 1: we're good. So I don't understand the problem. You know
Speaker 1: this this is probably something for episode five, But just
Speaker 1: like when I think to myself, like how anyone can
Speaker 1: get their brain around even at that time, after the
Speaker 1: law to change, after you fought the war, I just
Speaker 1: think at the core it's because you, like, black people
Speaker 1: are just You're still just functional. You're still just a
Speaker 1: in the brain of the white supremacist at the time,
Speaker 1: and I think sometimes the stain of that's still here
Speaker 1: now where it's like you are you're an appliance. Black
Speaker 1: people are an appliance, right, So when you can make
Speaker 1: an appliance out of our entire bodies, that slavery, right So,
Speaker 1: and then you move that into mass incarceration to where
Speaker 1: you like, okay and segregation and stuff like that, like
Speaker 1: who wants to live in the house with their cows right,
Speaker 1: because you're just in your washing machine doesn't have rights.
Speaker 1: It's just a washing machine. You know. So when you
Speaker 1: if you think of an entire person because of their
Speaker 1: color as just a function for yourself, and it's not
Speaker 1: even just black people, it's like even people that like
Speaker 1: if your argument against uh, you know, supporting immigrant rights,
Speaker 1: especially immigrants of Latin American, you know, people is like, well,
Speaker 1: well who's going to pick our cotton or pick our strawberries?
Speaker 1: Who's gonna be You still see these people as an appliance,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. So when I got my
Speaker 1: ten thousand new followers, that's saying support black voices. I
Speaker 1: wanted to be like, yo, thank you for coming. Here's
Speaker 1: ten other things. I am bad. You know, I got daughters,
Speaker 1: I'm lactose in tolerant. You know what I'm saying. I
Speaker 1: think butters disgusting. It's because you're still see me as
Speaker 1: an appliance, you know what I'm saying. So if if
Speaker 1: if I'm just the if I'm just the cow, if
Speaker 1: I'm just the function, so even if it's a function
Speaker 1: of you learning from me, I'm still just it's still
Speaker 1: just you. Hility, If it's a function of y'are just
Speaker 1: supposed to pick our fields. You don't get rights. Y'all
Speaker 1: live over there. And I don't understand why the damn
Speaker 1: refrigerator wants me to treat it like an equal, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, Like you're just the refrigeration, Like
Speaker 1: shut up, you know what, man here, we need to
Speaker 1: figure out something to make the damn cows and pigs
Speaker 1: understand that they just cows and pigs, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. So to me, it's like if if that's
Speaker 1: where your brain goes, Damn, I went on a rant.
Speaker 1: But if that's where your brain goes, that's why it's
Speaker 1: so like mind boggling to this to these clans people,
Speaker 1: was just like I don't understand why these black people
Speaker 1: keep asking to sit at our tables. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's yeah. I mean like but like that that
Speaker 1: is sort of that's this is a really important thing
Speaker 1: to understand because Jim we usually talk about Jim Crow
Speaker 1: like white people usually talk about Jim Crow. I'm thinking
Speaker 1: back to like how I've taught about it, like it
Speaker 1: was this terrible thing that happened that was done to
Speaker 1: black people, which it is was. It was a crime,
Speaker 1: but also what Jim Crow was is the foundation of
Speaker 1: law enforcement. Law enforcement in this country was still very
Speaker 1: much in flux and being formalized when Jim Crow started.
Speaker 1: It was really fucking new. Like the first police department
Speaker 1: had only started in eighteen thirty eight. Jim Crow starts
Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy seven. So US law enforcement and much,
Speaker 1: if not most of this country is is founded um
Speaker 1: at this like more or less at the same time
Speaker 1: as Jim Crow, which means that US law enforcement is
Speaker 1: founded in large part to keep the appliances in the
Speaker 1: eyes of the white elite separated from the white elite.
Speaker 1: Like that that yeah, um so yeah important point. Um so.
Speaker 1: The second Clan was also real popular in Oregon, maybe
Speaker 1: more popular in Oregon than it was anywhere else in
Speaker 1: the country. And patient zero for the Oregon Clan was
Speaker 1: the southern town of Medford, which is not Bedford, which
Speaker 1: is where you go Shakespeare in the Park. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: that's Ashland, which is right next to Medford, right, And
Speaker 1: and Ashland is a very different city, but like, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's great tea house I love. I actually like like
Speaker 1: Medford and Ashland are both like right next to each
Speaker 1: other and both in one of the prettiest parts of Oregon.
Speaker 1: And that's one of the prettiest places in the entire planet.
Speaker 1: Like I've been all over the damn world, I haven't
Speaker 1: found anywhere. I found some places that are like up
Speaker 1: there with with that part of Oregon, but I haven't
Speaker 1: done anything that I find pretty like fucking gorgeous place.
Speaker 1: But also Medford has a real long history of straight
Speaker 1: up fascism right into the present day. Um, the mayor
Speaker 1: of the town of Phoenix, I think it was Phoenix,
Speaker 1: which is like right outside of Medford, basically a suburb
Speaker 1: of Medford. The mayor two or three days ago, drove
Speaker 1: his car into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters.
Speaker 1: The mayor, yeah, so the issues go continue. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: could see my face rightw wow. So, um, Medford is
Speaker 1: where Luther Powell, the klegal sent by the National Clan
Speaker 1: to establish the clan in Oregon, set up the state's
Speaker 1: first KKK outpost. He gained initial recruits by pointing to
Speaker 1: the massive bootlegging problem in nearby Jackson County and making
Speaker 1: the case that the Clan could help with law and order.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote now from a paper by Ben
Speaker 1: Bruce of Chapman University. Powell sold the clan to potential
Speaker 1: followers not as a brotherhood of bigotry, but as a
Speaker 1: beacon of patriotism, cultural conservatism, and social order. According to Powell,
Speaker 1: the clan was there to uphold traditional American society against
Speaker 1: the threat of the Roaring twenties. Specifically, pal emphasized the
Speaker 1: clan support for the enforcement of Prohibition. In a matter
Speaker 1: of weeks, pal had sworn over a hundred men into
Speaker 1: the Invisible Empire, most of who were policemen. Clan expert
Speaker 1: and author David Chalmers describes the clan under Palace being
Speaker 1: in the law and order business. Luther palace recruiting success
Speaker 1: in Medford cannot be quantified by lists of names on
Speaker 1: paper on membership dues alone. With his newfound support from
Speaker 1: local police officers, pal accused Medford County of insufficient prohibition
Speaker 1: enforcement policies. He then spearheaded the successful recall of the
Speaker 1: county sheriff. Within a month, the mayor of Medford was
Speaker 1: dressed in white robes as well. So Medford again this
Speaker 1: is and this happens. We're talking about Anaheim and Medford,
Speaker 1: and like We'll talk about a couple of other cities,
Speaker 1: but this is happening all over the U. S. We're
Speaker 1: like whole city governments and the whole police departments are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: what if we're just klansmen too, This is fine? Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: So pal success perfectly embodies what made the second clan
Speaker 1: much more successful than the first. The first KKK was
Speaker 1: literally an insurgent terrorist army. The new KKK positioned itself
Speaker 1: as a force for law and order, standing alongside the
Speaker 1: state in order to help keep white people safe. Um,
Speaker 1: it was a It was again not a vigilante like
Speaker 1: terrorist organization, but instead the same kind of designated vigilante
Speaker 1: force if you remember that from our first couple of episodes,
Speaker 1: designated vigilante force like the police. And that's why it
Speaker 1: was often like a lot of local clan cells were
Speaker 1: majority police officers. So Powell moved on quickly from Medford
Speaker 1: to Portland, as most people who visit Medford tend to do.
Speaker 1: Within months, the city had thousands of clansmen, and it
Speaker 1: may have garnered more KKK members more quickly than any
Speaker 1: other city. Now, again, this rapid success in Portland came
Speaker 1: in part from the fact that the clan was seen
Speaker 1: as respectable. Shortly after opening, the Portland Clan Chapter partnered
Speaker 1: openly with the Portland Police Bureau. Since the Portland Police
Speaker 1: Bureau only had a hundred and fifty men at this point,
Speaker 1: it considered itself understaffed, and the Mayor of Portland decided
Speaker 1: to appoint a vigilante police auxiliary, and he allowed the
Speaker 1: KKK to pick the members. These men received police powers
Speaker 1: and firearms, but their names were kept hidden, effectively turning
Speaker 1: themselves into a secret police force. I should note here
Speaker 1: that during the recent protests in Portland, a commander of
Speaker 1: the Portland Police Ports Force sent out a directive ordering
Speaker 1: police officers to cover up their names and replace them
Speaker 1: with numbers that could only be traced back to names internally. Um,
Speaker 1: just a fun little thing. Portland Police Bureau, same force
Speaker 1: that partnered openly with the clan. Cool stuff. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Portland's where there's where on where on burn Side in
Speaker 1: m ok you can go to a park of just
Speaker 1: food trucks and you can get craft like vegan waffles.
Speaker 1: That's in Portland. And the cops are claim members and
Speaker 1: the yeah, yeah, yeah exactly. I've heard a lot at
Speaker 1: you Portland's I've heard a lot of cops and clan
Speaker 1: go hand in hand chance in port in the Portland
Speaker 1: streets recently, and I obviously a lot of people believe that,
Speaker 1: but I don't know if those people know that. Literally,
Speaker 1: the Portland Police Bureau had an official arrangement with the KKK.
Speaker 1: Yeah seriously, you know. Yeah, no, you're literally correct in
Speaker 1: a very direct way, not just in a these guys
Speaker 1: are secretly clan memberis but no, no, no, like the
Speaker 1: PPB had an arrangement. Yeah, cool stuff, So a story.
Speaker 1: Oregon also had a major clan problem, and this is
Speaker 1: because it was the most diverse city in the state,
Speaker 1: which meant at this point didn't mean that it was
Speaker 1: the most the least lowest number of white people, and
Speaker 1: meant that it had like basically, it had the most
Speaker 1: the highest number of Catholic people who came from weird
Speaker 1: parts of Europe like right that and again, the second
Speaker 1: clan in this period, some historians will argue, was actually
Speaker 1: more racist and violent against Catholics and Jewish people, or
Speaker 1: at least as racist and violent as it was to
Speaker 1: black people. Like this is it is like they've broadened
Speaker 1: their their spate of hatred um, and obviously it found
Speaker 1: a healthy base of resentful Protestant white people in a Storia.
Speaker 1: Clan leaders brought in anti Catholic speakers to rile up
Speaker 1: the public, and they rallied themselves around enforcing vice laws
Speaker 1: that the police had not handled to their satisfaction. Primarily,
Speaker 1: they went after prohibition violators and prostitutes. On June seventeenth,
Speaker 1: ninety two, the clan sent both local newspapers and the
Speaker 1: sheriff a letter demanding that he take action against the
Speaker 1: whistle in the heart of a local bootlegging operation. Two
Speaker 1: weeks before the letter, two people had died in a
Speaker 1: drunken accident after leaving the whistle in. The clan led
Speaker 1: her to the sheriff threatened to take care of the
Speaker 1: problem if he failed to do so. On June nineteenth,
Speaker 1: the KKK sent fifty men into the whistle In. They
Speaker 1: were met by Sheriff's deputies, who had been called ironically
Speaker 1: by the bootleggers inside. The sheriff arrested both men, and
Speaker 1: the whole incident became something of a local scandal. The
Speaker 1: clan used it to petition for a recall election, which
Speaker 1: they again succeeded. In getting their candidate one a recall election,
Speaker 1: giving them control of a story a sheriff's department, and
Speaker 1: soon after they swept local government elections too. Variations of
Speaker 1: the story repeated themselves all over Oregon, and the clan
Speaker 1: was eventually successful in electing their own candidate for Governor,
Speaker 1: Walter I. Pierce. His regime passed the Oregon Compulsory School Bill,
Speaker 1: which required all children from eight to fifteen to attend
Speaker 1: public school. That sounds innocuous enough on the surface, but
Speaker 1: the purpose of the bill was to destroy all Catholic
Speaker 1: schools because those were not public. And again, the KKK
Speaker 1: really hates Catholics, and definitely the Oregon Clan is more
Speaker 1: anti Catholic than it is anti Black, but only because
Speaker 1: there's not a whole lot of black people in Oregon, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: It was like it's like ninety percent white people at
Speaker 1: this point. So that's why the KKK is so focused
Speaker 1: on although they also focus a lot on Japanese and
Speaker 1: Chinese immigrants, and like this governor that they elect pushes
Speaker 1: a bill to basically make it impossible to move to
Speaker 1: Oregon or work in Oregon as an Asian person, and
Speaker 1: you know, the both the anti compulsory bill and the
Speaker 1: anti Asians bills like those get struck down. Um, and
Speaker 1: this governor who is backed by the clan winds up
Speaker 1: kind of turning on the clan, not because he's a
Speaker 1: good guy, but because, um, he doesn't he thinks that
Speaker 1: after he gets elected, he doesn't really feel loyal to
Speaker 1: the clan anymore. Like so anyway, it's a complicated story,
Speaker 1: but it's the clan. I'm just like man like y'all
Speaker 1: since I feel like when I the more I learned
Speaker 1: about them, I'm just like man, y'all are all over
Speaker 1: the place where I just sometimes I can't even draw
Speaker 1: the I can't even connect the dots of their hatred,
Speaker 1: like how like how are how are we talking about
Speaker 1: Jews right now? Like where it's like when did we
Speaker 1: get to that? You know? Or I just I can
Speaker 1: imagine I would love to see a skit where somebody's
Speaker 1: trying to complain where where uh some new kids in
Speaker 1: the back of the room at the clan meeting and
Speaker 1: can't keep up with like wait, we're talking about Catholics?
Speaker 1: Now what what what they do? Wait with what's the
Speaker 1: problem with you know what? I'm saying like, just like,
Speaker 1: I can't even this is a bleat tangent, but I'm
Speaker 1: just like, yeah, I just I can't keep up. Man.
Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, just heang man, at least be consistent.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, um break Oh yeah we should That
Speaker 1: was smooth. Thank you. Yeah, here's have a have a
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Speaker 1: on Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back.
Speaker 1: We have returned, and we're talking still about the Oregon Clan.
Speaker 1: So the Oregon kk hit K success in local and
Speaker 1: state politics give them the legitimacy they needed to feel
Speaker 1: comfortable carrying out acts of violence. On April eleventh, nineteen,
Speaker 1: a twenty two year old Latino man named Sam Johnson
Speaker 1: was grabbed in the middle of the night by a
Speaker 1: group of robed klansmen. They dragged him into the forest
Speaker 1: and they hung him from a tree quote not long
Speaker 1: enough to kill him, but sufficiently long to give him
Speaker 1: a glance into eternity. According to a local paper, While
Speaker 1: he lay on the ground recovering, the mob told him
Speaker 1: that he had to leave town or they would come
Speaker 1: back and kill him. This semi lynching was again reported
Speaker 1: on in the local paper, but no arrests were made.
Speaker 1: The county sheriff was almost certainly one of the men
Speaker 1: who abducted Sam, called him a bad actor who just
Speaker 1: hadn't done anything serious enough to get arrested, so he
Speaker 1: doesn't have a criminal record, but he was. We decided
Speaker 1: he was a criminal, so it's fine. Yeah. The sheriff
Speaker 1: accused him of bootlegging without any evidence and washed his
Speaker 1: hands of the case. On March eighteenth, a Catholic piano
Speaker 1: salesman named JF. Hale was assaulted in the same way,
Speaker 1: taking a gunpoint into the woods and then hung almost
Speaker 1: to death. This time the demand was made that Hale
Speaker 1: drop a lawsuit against another Medford man for an unpaid debt,
Speaker 1: and that he also leave town. The sheriff said the
Speaker 1: kidnapping two was of no local interest, which it's also
Speaker 1: worth noting that there was a recent h well last year,
Speaker 1: a trans black woman who was murdered in the city
Speaker 1: of Portland's um and the death was written on Well
Speaker 1: who died in the city of port The police ruled
Speaker 1: it a suicide. There's a lot that shady about it.
Speaker 1: The family has asked for it to be investigated, and
Speaker 1: the police said that investigating it, uh further was not
Speaker 1: of local interest. Um, so that's cool. That's a cool thing.
Speaker 1: That Again, I got to point out how this never
Speaker 1: stopped and has never really even slowed down in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways. This this is this playbook has ever
Speaker 1: failed these fools? Yes? Yeah uh. On April two, a
Speaker 1: black railroad worker who had just been released from jail
Speaker 1: over prohibition violation was kidnapped hung again in order to
Speaker 1: flee the town. As he ran away, he heard men
Speaker 1: shouting back at him can you run inward, while some
Speaker 1: in the crowd fired at his feet with their revolvers.
Speaker 1: By this point, local media had begun covering the clan
Speaker 1: subductions and outraged articles. One in the Medford Mail Tribune
Speaker 1: revealed that the state clan leadership had actually sent notes
Speaker 1: to individual members within the county with instructions on how
Speaker 1: to carry out these necktie attacks. The clanton denied these
Speaker 1: letters since they had not been sent on a fi
Speaker 1: clan letterhead. Again, they had a lot of products, had
Speaker 1: a lot of products and services actually in this period,
Speaker 1: because it wasn't all letter hit. They sold insurance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is incredible. So klegal. H. E. Griffith, who was
Speaker 1: the guy who had taken over the Medford clan, demanded
Speaker 1: and your name is can you say his his title? Again?
Speaker 1: Just legal? Just klegal? I I yeah, I'm just yeah,
Speaker 1: exercises that women do to keep Oh yes, yes, it
Speaker 1: does sound like that. Yeah. Now so h Griffith prop
Speaker 1: thank you, hey girl, dad. Yeah, you know what I'm saying. Yeah. So. Um,
Speaker 1: the Medford Mail Tribune like writes a letter about how
Speaker 1: the clan is very obviously behind all this, and the
Speaker 1: guy in charge of the Medford Clan demands to that
Speaker 1: the newspaper give him a chance to respond, and the
Speaker 1: Medford Mail Tribune lets him release his statement through the
Speaker 1: paper denying any role in the semi lynchings. Gotta gotta
Speaker 1: tell both sides of the story, um Ben Bruce writes,
Speaker 1: quote klegal A g. Griffith gave an official statement denying
Speaker 1: any prior knowledge of the aforementioned event events, as well
Speaker 1: as the clan's alleged involvement. Griffith accused the local papers
Speaker 1: of severely misrepresenting the facts. In the same article, Griffith
Speaker 1: endorsed the clan as a regular, fraternal, patriotic, and benevolent
Speaker 1: order that stands for pure Americanism, protection of pure womanhood,
Speaker 1: free speech and press, free public schools, restricted immigration, white supremacy,
Speaker 1: and law and order, and consistently assists all law officers
Speaker 1: in the performance of their duties. Um, that's cool. Surprisingly,
Speaker 1: the people of Medford did not believe these denials, or
Speaker 1: at least enough of them didn't. That public outrage did
Speaker 1: force a trial, which occurred nearly a year later. Nineteen
Speaker 1: clansmen were charged with participating in the necktie parties, as
Speaker 1: they came to be known. One of the men was
Speaker 1: the former police chief of Medford, Good Lord. The main
Speaker 1: witness was JF. Hale, the piano salesman, but the state
Speaker 1: decided he was not a reputable citizen, largely because his
Speaker 1: son had been born out of wedlock. It is the twenties. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's cool. All charges against the klansmen were dropped.
Speaker 1: Ye oh yeah, so you remember that You remember last
Speaker 1: year that at that um that uh anti abortion protests
Speaker 1: where that little boy was like eye to eye with
Speaker 1: that Native American man and like the the whole picture went.
Speaker 1: Remember that. Yeah, So this that what you're just explaining
Speaker 1: explains in a lot of ways why everybody looked at
Speaker 1: that moment and saw two different things. Because the what
Speaker 1: what the terror that a lot of us are talking about,
Speaker 1: like why this was so frustrating was because the the
Speaker 1: ambiguity of this kid's face of just being like he
Speaker 1: is just a kid. He is kind of smirking, right,
Speaker 1: and you could say, well, we didn't do anything. He
Speaker 1: interrupt the guy he's just standing there looking at it. Me.
Speaker 1: If they're at his own protests, it's fine. But when
Speaker 1: you hear stories like this, what And I can't say
Speaker 1: because I'm not in that kid's head and I wasn't there.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying, when I look at it, I see
Speaker 1: the history. You're explaining, the idea that you that these
Speaker 1: boys can function without any imputant. What's the world I'm
Speaker 1: looking for? Imputant, punitive, they're impunity. What's the word I'm
Speaker 1: looking for. I don't know. But the point is they're
Speaker 1: not gonna get in trouble, That's what I'm trying to say. Right,
Speaker 1: so you can always lean back and be like, what,
Speaker 1: I didn't do anything. So and I just remembered how
Speaker 1: many times in my own life recognizing that smirk, knowing
Speaker 1: that no matter what this kid did did, no matter
Speaker 1: how terrible it is, no no matter how much evidence I have,
Speaker 1: he will not be punished, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: So that's the like so whether I know what this
Speaker 1: kid was thinking or not, it's like, this is what
Speaker 1: America saw. There was two America's one of the one
Speaker 1: side of America saw this kid has. This kid's gonna
Speaker 1: there's no matter what, he's not gonna get in trouble.
Speaker 1: And this is this is why when we finally do
Speaker 1: reform law enforcement, you know, uh, disband the police and
Speaker 1: replace it with something better. One of the federal agencies
Speaker 1: we need is a is a federal branch that is
Speaker 1: just a groups of people who go door to door
Speaker 1: and just give people one solid punch in the face
Speaker 1: when they really deserve it, when they like they don't.
Speaker 1: We shouldn't be sending him to prison. They didn't do
Speaker 1: a prison thing. Like you were a dick, and now
Speaker 1: you're gonna get hit in the face. Yeah yeah, a
Speaker 1: good slapping, Yeah yeah, somebody the damn face. Yeah yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: I think it's back from get shipped, which is like
Speaker 1: a face in of a fist. Is the is the
Speaker 1: direct translation? Yeah, Yeah, Sometimes people just need to get
Speaker 1: like not hard, not enough to do damage. Like we'll
Speaker 1: train these people to deliver like legally appropriate slaps and punches,
Speaker 1: but like you were a deck and somebody needs to
Speaker 1: fucking smack you, and like it should be a group
Speaker 1: of of of men and women in suits who come
Speaker 1: to your door and say, like you have been selected
Speaker 1: to get smacked in the face because you were a
Speaker 1: dick and you need to know it. That's my suggestion. Um,
Speaker 1: not a bad one. Yeah. So Oregon's clan was relatively
Speaker 1: non violent, and I again this totally tells you how
Speaker 1: bad the second clan was. We're calling like lynch ng's
Speaker 1: that don't kill anybody, relatively non violent compared to the
Speaker 1: clan in Oklahoma, for example, had a horrifically violent clan
Speaker 1: that also eventually wound up in charge of most a
Speaker 1: lot of the the different state or or like local
Speaker 1: cities and departments, police departments and stuff. Um. And it
Speaker 1: was also comparatively non violent when you sort of put
Speaker 1: it against the clan in Indiana for example. There in Indiana,
Speaker 1: the KKK was successful in infiltrating a local civilian law
Speaker 1: enforcement agency, the Horse Thief Detective Association. Now, this odd
Speaker 1: group got its start in the eighteen forties and it's
Speaker 1: members were basically licensed vigilantes with the right to protect
Speaker 1: property via violence. And as you can guess by the name.
Speaker 1: They started to prosecute horse thieves. Right, law enforcement can't
Speaker 1: catch all these horse thieves, will deputize civilians, will give
Speaker 1: them the right to like arrest and funk up people
Speaker 1: to stop horse thievery. But they also had kind of
Speaker 1: broader rights to enforce laws. Um. Now, the birth of
Speaker 1: the automobile reduced the Horse Thief Detective Association to in
Speaker 1: somewhat irrelevant group. But when the KKK came to Indiana
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen twenties, they saw that, like, there
Speaker 1: was this organization that civilians who are klansmen could join
Speaker 1: and it would give them the right to carry out
Speaker 1: violence with state backing. So they start flooding the h
Speaker 1: d t A with membership, and they also start giving
Speaker 1: existing members in the h d t A free and
Speaker 1: subsidized membership in the KKK because the see that, like,
Speaker 1: this weird little organization gives them the right to enforce
Speaker 1: the law in Indiana without like having to get elected
Speaker 1: sheriff or anything or put you know, even recruit police officers.
Speaker 1: So the Indiana Clan starts pouring money into the h
Speaker 1: d t A and offering their existing members low priced
Speaker 1: entry into the clan quote as sworn members of h
Speaker 1: d t A chapters, clansmen in the state essentially formed
Speaker 1: an armed, officially sanctioned force that would allow them to
Speaker 1: enact their agenda under the guise of legitimate law enforcement. Now.
Speaker 1: In his work on the clan in Indiana, historian Leonard J.
Speaker 1: Moore details membership records from nineteen twenty five that showed
Speaker 1: that over twenty of the state's eligible population, white Protestant
Speaker 1: native born males belonged to the KKK, and some counties
Speaker 1: that number exceeded thirty three. In Marion County, which included
Speaker 1: the city of Indianapolis, over a quarter of eligible men
Speaker 1: belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, some twenty five thousand
Speaker 1: members in total, many of whom held dual membership in
Speaker 1: the h d t A chapter. Okay, wait, m hm
Speaker 1: uh they paid dues. Yeah, yeah, no, it was a
Speaker 1: for profit in debt. Yeah, I remember that, which I forgot.
Speaker 1: How lame that even makes it even more lame. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're paid to be in here. More so lame.
Speaker 1: It's pretty cool. So I'm gonna quote again from a historian,
Speaker 1: Leonard J. Moore quote, uh as horse thief detectives. The
Speaker 1: Indiana Clan came down on bootleggers, organized labor immigrants, and
Speaker 1: African American populations, and one incident related in Elliott Jaspin's
Speaker 1: book Buried in the Bitter Waters, they helped expel black
Speaker 1: citizens from the mining town of Blandford in western Indiana.
Speaker 1: On January eighteenth, nineteen twenty three, a young girl from
Speaker 1: Blandford reported that she had been abducted and assaulted by
Speaker 1: an African American man. Within forty eight hours, several hundred
Speaker 1: white towns folk met and demanded that all black residents leave,
Speaker 1: beginning with unmarried men who were to be outside town
Speaker 1: limits by that evening. Within a week, all black residents
Speaker 1: of Blandford, approximately fifty people had fled. That exodus was
Speaker 1: overseen by Harry Newland, the sheriff of a million county
Speaker 1: and himself a clansmen, along with members of the Dana
Speaker 1: h d t A and the Help Township h d
Speaker 1: t A, two of the four chapters in the area.
Speaker 1: The Help Township chapter alone included over a dozen members
Speaker 1: of the clan, including its captain. African American citizens both
Speaker 1: in Blandford and the surrounding county felt forced to comply
Speaker 1: and departed in mass As Jaspin notes, the nineteen cents
Speaker 1: has recorded well over two hundred black residents in Vermilion County.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty, that number was less than seventy. That's
Speaker 1: an active of ethnic cleansing. That's what we call ethnic cleansing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what that's called. Yeah. Yeah, so the k Indiana
Speaker 1: all the KKK was active all throughout And again think
Speaker 1: about this, Think about this civilian group with law enforcement
Speaker 1: powers enforcing white supremacy. When you think about, for example,
Speaker 1: armed members of far right Molissia's showing up to support
Speaker 1: the police at protests. Um, yeah, that's so. The KKK
Speaker 1: was active all throughout the United States during this period,
Speaker 1: eventually reaching a peak of like four million members. Exists
Speaker 1: no accurate nationwide count for how many people were forced
Speaker 1: out of their homes by the clan, how many were
Speaker 1: assaulted by them, are killed by them, just as there
Speaker 1: exists no comprehensive accounting for how often this behavior occurred,
Speaker 1: either with the consent or the enthusiastic help of the police.
Speaker 1: In either case, it may be a mistake to even
Speaker 1: attempt to quantify the KKK's part in this specifically because
Speaker 1: the violence of both the First and Second Clan occurred
Speaker 1: within a much broader context of mass violence against black
Speaker 1: people by white people with the express consent of law enforcement.
Speaker 1: This violence started up during reconstruction and continued all the
Speaker 1: way into nineteen fifty. We tend to call it lynching today,
Speaker 1: although it took a variety of forms, and we will
Speaker 1: never know how many black men were killed during this period,
Speaker 1: but the Equal Justice Initiative estimates sixty five hundred at
Speaker 1: the minimum. These murders occurred at a steady pace, with
Speaker 1: intermittent eruptions that were spurred on by a mix of
Speaker 1: economic recessions, war, and white resentment of black success. And
Speaker 1: all that brings me to the story of the Red
Speaker 1: Summer of nineteen nineteen. Have you heard of this prop Yes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna guess I think because of the show Watchmen.
Speaker 1: Actually a lot more white people know about Tulsa now,
Speaker 1: which we'll be talking about in part two. I don't
Speaker 1: think very many. I didn't know about fucking Red Summer
Speaker 1: until like a week or two ago. So four, Part
Speaker 1: four Jesus, Part four for the week, Part two for
Speaker 1: the week. Okay, well, okay, yeah, the next episode we
Speaker 1: will talk about Tulsa. This episode, this is uh yeah,
Speaker 1: Red Summer nineteen nineteen. Again, this is the type of
Speaker 1: stuff that, like, like I said before, if it's not
Speaker 1: in your experience, yeah you you'd have to go out
Speaker 1: of your way to know this, um. But if it is,
Speaker 1: it's like, this is why I will always hammer like,
Speaker 1: you know, having a good strong sense of self, a
Speaker 1: sense of community, and then having relationships across communities, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. So that now you don't sound
Speaker 1: like an asshole when you don't know what you're talking
Speaker 1: about because you don't know people from other places, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. So this is so so yeah.
Speaker 1: So anyway, this ship won't be in your textbooks and
Speaker 1: it's not going to be no, uh, you're lucky if
Speaker 1: you get a paragraph on the Red Summer in a
Speaker 1: in a textbook, and not all texts. Mind sure didn't
Speaker 1: have it. It is in some textbooks because some of
Speaker 1: the articles I read on it, like we're specifically analyzing
Speaker 1: how it's covered in textbooks, but again, generally about a paragraph. Now,
Speaker 1: the Red Summer is the name given by Double A
Speaker 1: CP leader James Weldon Johnson for the months in nineteen
Speaker 1: nineteen when a wave of racist riots. Race riots is
Speaker 1: often the term, I think racist riots is more accurate.
Speaker 1: Woke out against black communities in Charleston, South Carolina, Longview, Texas, Bisbee, Arizona, Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. Chicago, Knoxville, Omaha, and Elane, Arkansas. At least
Speaker 1: a hundred and fifty people were killed in the violence,
Speaker 1: and a hundred or so more lynched, but it's probably
Speaker 1: more like a thousand and dead. You'll you'll hear again,
Speaker 1: we don't We're not gonna We're never gonna get a
Speaker 1: good accounting. Um. And I hope the listeners here like
Speaker 1: as he gets into this story again, just like we said,
Speaker 1: you know, to the militia folks that are like, how
Speaker 1: come black people don't arm? And when we say, you
Speaker 1: think we ain't thought it at right now, as you read,
Speaker 1: as you listen to this story, when people say, well,
Speaker 1: how come you don't build your own businesses and support
Speaker 1: your own community and start your own capitalistic spaces, let
Speaker 1: me say, you think we ain't thought it at yeah? Yeah, Um.
Speaker 1: So obviously you know, clan members were involved with and
Speaker 1: behind a great deal of a violence of Red Summer,
Speaker 1: but not not necessarily most of it, although in Pittsburgh
Speaker 1: the KKK chapter posted up notices around a black neighborhood
Speaker 1: which stated the war is over Negroes. Stay in your place.
Speaker 1: If you don't, will put you there um, which is
Speaker 1: a little ironic because a lot of Red Summer involved
Speaker 1: white crowds going into black neighbors coming coming into Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly mine and our own business fucking. While plansmen were
Speaker 1: regular drivers of violence during Red Summer, uniformed police officers
Speaker 1: played at least as larger role, maybe even a larger one.
Speaker 1: One of the first riots started in Chicago on July
Speaker 1: after a black child mistakenly swam into a chunk of
Speaker 1: beach that was whites only under Jim Crow. White people
Speaker 1: on the beach saw this child, Eugene Williams, and started
Speaker 1: pelting him with rocks. Every time he would attempt to
Speaker 1: come to shore, they would throw more rocks at him.
Speaker 1: He eventually drowned. This brought a cloud crowd of furious
Speaker 1: black citizens out. More rocks were thrown. A white officer
Speaker 1: showed up, observed the situation, and decided to arrest a
Speaker 1: black guy. This for obvious reasons helped push tensions in
Speaker 1: Chicago to a boiling point. The resulting riot led to
Speaker 1: thirty eight, mostly black deaths, and the police responded with
Speaker 1: a mix of completely neglect, often allowing the white mobs
Speaker 1: to do violence, and occasional acts of giving a ship,
Speaker 1: possibly due to the presence of black men on the
Speaker 1: Chicago p D. The most example notable example of this
Speaker 1: was probably the Chicago police holding back a white mob
Speaker 1: from burning down a hospital filled with mostly black patients.
Speaker 1: The only CPD officer to die during the riot was
Speaker 1: a black man. Red summer actually continued into the fall,
Speaker 1: and one of its bloodiest hot spots was Phillips County, Arkansas.
Speaker 1: On September thirty, small group of black people gathered at
Speaker 1: a rural church to organize a sharecroppers union. Two police,
Speaker 1: white policemen showed up, and they had been sent there
Speaker 1: specifically to stop the union from organizing. So again we
Speaker 1: do have some interchange with what we talked about in
Speaker 1: the last episode, where the police exist to stop unions
Speaker 1: for wealthy people. Anyway, um, so they claimed they were
Speaker 1: looking for a bootlegger and what happened next is unclear,
Speaker 1: but a gunfight broke out and one officer was killed,
Speaker 1: almost certainly in self defense by the people in that meeting.
Speaker 1: The local sheriff sent out a call for armed random
Speaker 1: white dudes to quote hunt Mr. Inward, and he did
Speaker 1: not use the in word. Yeah, I mean he used
Speaker 1: the in word, but he didn't, you know, he used
Speaker 1: the real one, hunt Mr. Inward in his lair. Hundreds
Speaker 1: of white dudes from all over the area and even
Speaker 1: from the adjoining state of Mississippi showed up in Phillips
Speaker 1: County with guns. They opened fire wildly at every black
Speaker 1: person they saw, with the enthusiastic consent and help of
Speaker 1: the police. Frank Moore, a black farmer, survived the massacre.
Speaker 1: He later recalled the white sent word that they was
Speaker 1: coming down here to kill every inn where they found.
Speaker 1: There were three hundred or four hundred or more white
Speaker 1: men with guns, shooting and killing women and children. Now,
Speaker 1: of course klansmen were involved, and some of those clansmen
Speaker 1: were likely police officers, but the violence in Phillips County
Speaker 1: was backed by state and local officials, lawmen, and business owners,
Speaker 1: not just a vigilante social club. The official death toll
Speaker 1: was eleven black men and five white men killed. The
Speaker 1: real number of murdered black people is believed to range
Speaker 1: from anywhere from one hundred to two hundred and thirties seven.
Speaker 1: At one point, the white mobs were aided by federal
Speaker 1: troops as well. Local reporters helped the government cover up
Speaker 1: the massacre by claiming the violence had been white self
Speaker 1: defense against a black uprising. One Arkansas Gazette article opened
Speaker 1: with the headline Negro's plan to kill all whites. Good lord, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can just make it up and yo, like going
Speaker 1: into like some of these specific communities just to color,
Speaker 1: just to color some of the story. We're becoming a fluid,
Speaker 1: especially the ones in South Carolina. They were like, okay, listen,
Speaker 1: you don't want to do business with us. Fine, So
Speaker 1: we were saying it was opening banks, selling their own homes,
Speaker 1: starting their own businesses, growing their own crops. Was like, okay,
Speaker 1: it's fine, Fine, we don't have to live together. It's fine,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. And then all of the sudden,
Speaker 1: somebody just come knocking down. It's like, what do you
Speaker 1: and you know, specifically sparked by that community, share croppers
Speaker 1: in the community being like, we need to agitate together
Speaker 1: to have a better deal in a legal and constitutionally
Speaker 1: protected way. Oh, now you're shooting at us. Now, now
Speaker 1: you're shooting at us. It was just like you're like, okay, wait, okay,
Speaker 1: so we're not three fist human anymore. The law applies
Speaker 1: to us. It seems like this system of sharecropping don't work.
Speaker 1: Maybe we should work together and figure out a better
Speaker 1: way to I mean, I mean, we we were citizens.
Speaker 1: Now we have this right, We have this right. All
Speaker 1: guess we don't know you're shooting us. Okay, this is
Speaker 1: just like the Oh I was in fear of my life.
Speaker 1: Bullshit that cops every day they were uprising. You'll hear
Speaker 1: that again in the next episode two. Yeah, they were
Speaker 1: mining their own business. I was afraid of the woman
Speaker 1: sleeping in her own house. It's it's uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not a big chairman mal fan um, but when
Speaker 1: he said political power comes from the barrel of a gun,
Speaker 1: he was not incorrect. Like, and that's what you see here,
Speaker 1: right right, That's what that's what Red Summer is. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I recognize things are getting a little bit muddled
Speaker 1: here in this podcast about the history of the police
Speaker 1: visa be the difference between the vigilante violence, the KKK violence,
Speaker 1: the police violence. The police violence that is KKK violence.
Speaker 1: And that's because very real history is always muddled, and
Speaker 1: in this period police were often perpetrators and lynch ings
Speaker 1: and white mob violence against black people. They also more
Speaker 1: often failed to intervene in this sort of thing, and
Speaker 1: they did sometimes fight against it um often because there
Speaker 1: were black officers on the force, but there were in
Speaker 1: this period. It is important to note some very brave
Speaker 1: white officers who were like, this isn't fucking okay, and
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to erase those people, but nationwide, as
Speaker 1: a coal police completely failed to defend black citizens in
Speaker 1: any organized, meaningful way during the Red Summer of nineteen nineteen.
Speaker 1: White people initiated more or less add percent of the
Speaker 1: violence during this summer, and law enforcement consistently failed to
Speaker 1: protect them. In Washington, d C. While white mobs marched
Speaker 1: through black neighborhoods, firing wildly, the police response was so
Speaker 1: lackluster that the mayor was had to call in the
Speaker 1: military in order to protect the city's black citizens. The
Speaker 1: individual racism of white officers mixed with the simple reality
Speaker 1: that police had never been intended to protect poor neighborhoods
Speaker 1: or businesses in an organized fashion left black people with
Speaker 1: no option but to protect themselves. And to tell that
Speaker 1: story in brief, I'm going to quote from an article
Speaker 1: in teen Vogue by Ursula wolf Rocca. Quote. In Knoxville, Tennessee,
Speaker 1: armed black men organized themselves to successfully repel hundreds of
Speaker 1: white rioters that who had already destroyed the county jail
Speaker 1: with a battering ram and dynamite. In Chicago, African Americans
Speaker 1: formed self defense units after days of white terror in
Speaker 1: their neighborhoods. Many of these defenders were veterans among the
Speaker 1: three hundred and seventy thousand black men inducted into the
Speaker 1: army during World War One, who hoped fighting for democracy
Speaker 1: abroad might finally secure their first class citizenship at home.
Speaker 1: The mob violence in Chicago convinced Harry Haywood, a veteran
Speaker 1: of the all black three hundred and seventy Infantry Regiment,
Speaker 1: he had made a mistake. As he explained, I had
Speaker 1: been fighting the wrong war. The Germans weren't the enemy.
Speaker 1: The enemy was right here at home in Washington. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there it is. Yeah, the muddle is the I love
Speaker 1: that you said, muddled because that's the point. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the point we're trying to make. When it comes to
Speaker 1: policing in America, it is muddled. I can't I should
Speaker 1: be able to tell the difference. I should be able
Speaker 1: to go. That is the clan. These are the police
Speaker 1: I should be And that's our point. I can't tell
Speaker 1: the difference. That's the point. Yep, yep. Mayna continue that
Speaker 1: quote about black self defense. During Red Summer in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. Seventeen year old Kerry Johnson opened fire on
Speaker 1: men breaking into her home while a thousand white rioters
Speaker 1: laid siege to her neighborhood. In Anniston, Alabama, in December
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighteen, a black veteran sergeant Edgar Caldwell was
Speaker 1: ordered out of the white section of a street car.
Speaker 1: He refused, kicked out of the car, and set upon
Speaker 1: by the white motorman and conductor. Caldwell shot his pistol twice,
Speaker 1: killing one of his attackers. Though uncoordinated, when looked at together,
Speaker 1: these hundreds of moments in and leading up to nineteen
Speaker 1: nineteen read is an awesome display of collective black agency
Speaker 1: and self preservation. So again, black arms self defense often
Speaker 1: is overwhelmed by again the year number of white people
Speaker 1: their additional resources. They're backing of the state. But it
Speaker 1: also works out sometimes and it saves a lot of
Speaker 1: lives when it does. So I don't want to be
Speaker 1: saying like it's not at tactic that succeeds it historically
Speaker 1: has um. In two thousand sixteen, City Councilwoman Angelia Williams
Speaker 1: took to the stage at an in double a cp luncheon.
Speaker 1: She told the crowd that modern racists had quote taken
Speaker 1: off their white hats and white sheeted robes and put
Speaker 1: on police uniforms. Some of them have put on shirts
Speaker 1: and ties his policy makers, and some of them have
Speaker 1: put on robes as judges. This did not go over well,
Speaker 1: and she was roundly pillaried by law enforcement officials. A
Speaker 1: lot of them were like Democrats, and a wide variety
Speaker 1: of elected local Democrats. Um. But if Councilwoman Williams had
Speaker 1: wanted to bring up recent cases of folks who worked
Speaker 1: forces and also burnt crosses, she would not have had
Speaker 1: to google hard. In two thousand twelve, a Little Rock,
Speaker 1: Arkansas officer who attended at least one KKK meeting, shot
Speaker 1: and killed a fifteen year old black child. In two
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen, video leaked of Anniston, Alabama, police off Sir
Speaker 1: Joshua dogg Roll delivering a speech for the League of
Speaker 1: the South. Now, the League of the South is a
Speaker 1: neo Confederate organization and for all intents and purposes, just
Speaker 1: addressed up rebranding of the KKK that tries to look
Speaker 1: a little bit more palatable. These motherfucker's marched with the
Speaker 1: Nazis in Charlottesville in two thousand and seventeen. Doggerel had
Speaker 1: joined the League in nineteen. He'd been a police officer
Speaker 1: since two thousands six. He talked openly about the League
Speaker 1: of the South to his fellow officers. He advised them
Speaker 1: to join, and he held meetings at a steakhouse very
Speaker 1: close to the police station. He posted pro Confederate content
Speaker 1: on his Facebook, including pictures of early KKK leaders. Doggerel's
Speaker 1: clan affiliations were doubly concerning, giving Anniston's history. In May
Speaker 1: of nineteen sixty one, the Freedom Writers had shown up
Speaker 1: in town to protest against segregation and Jim Crow. They
Speaker 1: were assaulted by a massive klansmen who slashed their tires,
Speaker 1: broke their bus windows, and tried to light the bus
Speaker 1: on fire with them in it. The Anniston Police Department
Speaker 1: was headquartered a block away from this, a little closer
Speaker 1: than the steakhouse where Officer dogg Roll With decades later
Speaker 1: hold meetings. Anniston officers failed to arrive at the scene
Speaker 1: of crime untill hours later. No one was arrested. They
Speaker 1: may have been late because a number of them probably
Speaker 1: had to change out of their robes and into their
Speaker 1: uniforms because they were there. Yeah, because they were trying
Speaker 1: to burn the bust down. Yes. Now, I cannot point
Speaker 1: you to any specific act of racial violence that Officer
Speaker 1: dogg Role committed while in uniform, as it is damnably
Speaker 1: hard to get good information on police misbehavior from the
Speaker 1: very best police departments, and Anniston is not one of those.
Speaker 1: But significant evidence suggests that Officer dog Role in his
Speaker 1: membership in what is a Confederate organization is not a
Speaker 1: one off from an article in the Guardian quote. Although
Speaker 1: it is unusual to be for a police officer to
Speaker 1: be so open about his involvement in an extremist organization,
Speaker 1: for decades, anti government white supremacist groups have been attempting
Speaker 1: to recruit police officers into their ranks. It is something
Speaker 1: a lot of folks are overlooking, says v Ta B. Johnson,
Speaker 1: an assistant professor of law at Georgetown University. Police forces
Speaker 1: are becoming more interested in talking about implicit bias, the
Speaker 1: unconscious racial biases we carry with us as Americans, but
Speaker 1: people aren't really addressing the explicit biases that are present
Speaker 1: on police forces. According to Johnson's research, there have been
Speaker 1: at least a hundred different scandals and more than forty
Speaker 1: different states involving police officers who have sent racist emails
Speaker 1: and text messages or made racist comments on social media
Speaker 1: since the nineteen nineties. A recent investigation by the Center
Speaker 1: for Investigative Reporting found that hundreds of active duty and
Speaker 1: retired law enforcement officers from around the country were members
Speaker 1: of Confederate, anti government and anti Islam groups on Facebook.
Speaker 1: But there's no official record of officers who are tied
Speaker 1: to white supremacists or other extremist groups. Because in the US,
Speaker 1: there's no federal policy for screening or monitoring the countries
Speaker 1: eight hundred thousand plus law enforcement officers for extremist views.
Speaker 1: The eighteen thousand or so police departments across the country
Speaker 1: are largely left to police themselves now of course. Yeah
Speaker 1: that's a good call. Yeah, yeah, I have a suggestion.
Speaker 1: If they police themselves, why don't we police ourselves? I
Speaker 1: mean apparently as Yeah, what's it? Like? I just you
Speaker 1: can't people think we you think we're making this stuff
Speaker 1: up when we say, yo, cops are racist. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to tell you it's racism over the area. Like what, like,
Speaker 1: I just what what possible gain do any of us
Speaker 1: have accusing falsely an entire organization to be racist, Like
Speaker 1: what like what what do you think my end game
Speaker 1: would be? There's no like, I gained nothing from making
Speaker 1: this stuff up. Yeah, it's and again like people always
Speaker 1: focus on like you know, oh, well you know, that's
Speaker 1: not that many police officers, you know when you you
Speaker 1: you read them the numbers like that compared to how
Speaker 1: many there are, and it's like, well, no, that those
Speaker 1: are the ones that individual activists have for after hours,
Speaker 1: probably for each individual officer trapped down and verified because again,
Speaker 1: the government's not looking at us. But also, let's say
Speaker 1: there's a block party that happened next to your house,
Speaker 1: right hundred people. One of those people shoots you in
Speaker 1: the arm with a handgun for no reason. And everyone
Speaker 1: else in the crowd hangs out around them and does nothing. Um,
Speaker 1: and you complain about it and they're like, well it
Speaker 1: was only one of us that shot you. Does does
Speaker 1: that matter? Not at all? Yeah, they're kind of all
Speaker 1: pieces of ship, right, you kind of all just let
Speaker 1: me later. Yeah, kind of a ship party. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: you are your home. Yeah. In two thousands seventeen, a
Speaker 1: classified FBI counter terrorism policy guide was obtained by the Intercept.
Speaker 1: I don't know how they got this, but there are
Speaker 1: actually quite a few police FBI agents who are real
Speaker 1: piste about this problem and seemed to be vigorously leaking
Speaker 1: information to the press. Um In a section focused on
Speaker 1: how the bureau lists individuals on a terrorism watch list,
Speaker 1: the author's note that quote and again the authors being
Speaker 1: FBI domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremist, white supremacist extremists,
Speaker 1: and sovereign sit A and extremists often have identified active
Speaker 1: links to law enforcement officers. The FBI goes on to
Speaker 1: note that they had to alter some of their policies
Speaker 1: when dealing with local law enforcement to account for the
Speaker 1: fact that so many of them are members of extremist
Speaker 1: groups like isn't too many. Yeah, we gotta like we've
Speaker 1: had to change how we interact with cops as the
Speaker 1: FBI because we're scared of you. Motherfucker's. One of the
Speaker 1: one of the justifiable criticisms of of the series we're
Speaker 1: doing is that we're not really going to lean into
Speaker 1: the FBI much because I've kind of determined to focus
Speaker 1: on like cops, like like normal police law, like the
Speaker 1: folks in the street. Even though there is a very
Speaker 1: long and well worth discussing history of racism within the FBI. Um,
Speaker 1: we talk about that quite a bit, and our two
Speaker 1: part are on the bastards who killed the Black panthers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we didn't. We'll get into it a bit next week. Um,
Speaker 1: but we're going to focus really on like you know,
Speaker 1: beat cops essentially, like what leads to them police departments,
Speaker 1: just because I can't. We can't do this for like
Speaker 1: to straight weeks. Um, we both have other stuff we
Speaker 1: gotta deal with. Um. Yeah. The term ghost skins is
Speaker 1: often used by white supremacists to refer to folks who
Speaker 1: basically hide their power level to gain respected jobs in
Speaker 1: society and advanced white supremacy. Law enforcement is for a
Speaker 1: particularly prized field for these ghost skins because it gives
Speaker 1: them virtually unchecked opportunities to do violence to non white people.
Speaker 1: One example of this would be a gang of officers
Speaker 1: within the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department who in ninete
Speaker 1: embarked on a campaign of vandalism and the beating and
Speaker 1: torturing of black Californians. Have you heard of the Lynwood
Speaker 1: Vikings prop Yes, I have, Yeah. The Lynwood Vikings were
Speaker 1: a violent Neo Nazi gang that committed arson and murder
Speaker 1: and torture on black Californians. And the gang was entirely
Speaker 1: made up of Los Angeles County Sheriff's officers. It was
Speaker 1: a Neo Nazi gang that was all Sheriff's officers. Let
Speaker 1: that sink in. Let that sink in. And now think
Speaker 1: of the young man who was recently found hung to
Speaker 1: death in Palmdale, California, and who was declared a suicide
Speaker 1: by Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, and then the Los Angeles
Speaker 1: Sheriff's Department was in a gunfight with his half brother
Speaker 1: where they killed him a couple of days later, And
Speaker 1: that it is reported that the Palmdale Chunk of the
Speaker 1: Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has what they called the news
Speaker 1: called cliques within it that were you might call them gangs,
Speaker 1: maybe like the Lynwood Vikings. Because this keeps happening weird,
Speaker 1: because this is not history. It's yeah, yeah, people need
Speaker 1: to know more about the Lynwood Vikings. Um yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: so uh yeah, it's it's cool. We're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: John Burge in Chicago in the next episode. Um, but
Speaker 1: for right now. The intercept goes on to give a
Speaker 1: couple of other examples, and I'm gonna quote from their
Speaker 1: article again. In Cleveland, officials found that a number of
Speaker 1: police officers had scrolled racist or Nazi graphy throughout their
Speaker 1: department's locker rooms. In Texas, to police officers were fired
Speaker 1: when it was discovered that they were klansmen. One of
Speaker 1: them said he had tried to boost the organization's membership
Speaker 1: by giving an application to a fellow officer he thought
Speaker 1: shared his white, Christian heterosexual values. Now, in two thousand fifteen,
Speaker 1: to his very minor credit, FBI Director James Comey acknowledged
Speaker 1: in a speech that all of us in law enforcement
Speaker 1: must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our
Speaker 1: history is not pretty. This is about as close as
Speaker 1: you're going to get to having an actual member of
Speaker 1: law enforce enforcement admit that, in fact, the cops and
Speaker 1: the clan regularly do go hand in hand. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: so good stuff. Take a deep breath, everybody, good stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: whoo whoo to the rest of us. Yeah yeah, we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about lynching on Thursday. Um, and we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about how the police defeated lynching by something
Speaker 1: that's arguably as bad. So yeah, yeah, yeah, I feel
Speaker 1: wonderful right now. I am. I didn't we didn't should
Speaker 1: have maybe not schedule this recording session for June tenth.
Speaker 1: I do feel I do feel bad about that's the day.
Speaker 1: My emotions are all over the place right now. Nah,
Speaker 1: it's all good, you know what I'm saying, Like, you know,
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways, like like we were talking
Speaker 1: off camera or off camera off mike, like, yeah, I don't,
Speaker 1: I don't know, because it's never actually we've never had
Speaker 1: to celebrate this holiday with anybody else. So there's no
Speaker 1: actual traditions for June. Yeah, except for to think about
Speaker 1: what all this ship. We didn't went through the fact
Speaker 1: that we survived it. You know what I'm saying. That's
Speaker 1: usually which and then we go down to you know,
Speaker 1: Crenshaw and eat some barbecue. But I'm like, this is
Speaker 1: actually great. It's like look and and maybe we'll end
Speaker 1: it on a high note. It's like and yet we
Speaker 1: still exist, Yeah, and yet we still are here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and like have been forcing the situation to suck less
Speaker 1: consistently for a couple of centuries of of fighting like
Speaker 1: trench like the emotional equivalent of trench warfare. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And I guess a good tradition for white folks like
Speaker 1: myself and like Sophie is too, is to do this.
Speaker 1: It's just been June tenth going like Jesus Christ, good God. Um,
Speaker 1: prop you got any plug doubles to plug before we
Speaker 1: roll out of here? Yeah, propit pop dot com. Uh
Speaker 1: got a bunch of new merge. Um. California has now
Speaker 1: required face masks, So I got some face masks there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Here that flat earther neighbors required by Yeah you got
Speaker 1: flat earther neighbors. Can we just pause for that way?
Speaker 1: I mean statistically now, Yeah, there's like I had the
Speaker 1: building make like red signs that say to wear face masks,
Speaker 1: and the Elevator and Karen and Ken I don't know
Speaker 1: their fucking names. I hate them of course, of course,
Speaker 1: just walk around like deep deep deep, and then I'm like, hey,
Speaker 1: how about a face mask and they kind of just
Speaker 1: look at me like I've said something in a language
Speaker 1: they don't understand and runaway. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, go
Speaker 1: get some coffee, Go get some face masks. Got some
Speaker 1: new water flask too, best merch you guys, dude, thank you.
Speaker 1: And it's all earth friendly. It's all like zero waste,
Speaker 1: like that's how it works, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: recyclable the materials. Recyclable is recycled material. You know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. I'm out here. I'm out here like being
Speaker 1: a good part of Portland's or earth sensitive. Hell yeah,
Speaker 1: well that's the episode. Um, go go do some stuff. Yeah.
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