Outside Agitators

0:01Speaker 1:Coll Zone Media. On May twenty second, nineteen sixty seven, George ware took the stand in a crowded courtroom in Nashville, Tennessee. Whare was twenty seven years old. He had graduated from Tuskegee University with a master's degree in biochemistry in nineteen sixty five, but he quickly abandoned the job he got up north after graduation for something he thought was more important. He went to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as an aide to chairman Stokely Carmichael, and by nineteen sixty seven he was planning Carmichael's college speaking tour as the national coordinator of campus programs. That was the job where was doing when he'd been arrested in Nashville a few weeks earlier. On the stand, he calmly denied having incited a riot. He was cross examined for hours about the beating he'd endured in the hands of the Nashville police.

1:04Speaker 1:He denied having called the officers monkies, and he denied egging the crowd of black college students on by yelling things like let's get the white police. He had no idea who owned the pistol police had charged him with carrying How could he know he hadn't carried it at all? No one had the police found the gun in someone else's car that he'd ridden in briefly that day. Criminal charges related to his arrest in April were put on hold pending a verdict in this lawsuit, which challenged the constitutionality of Tennessee's riot and disorderly conduct statutes. Everything was still in limbo when George Ware returned to Nashville in August of nineteen sixty seven, but some people weren't content to wait. They wanted that terrible outside agitator arrested immediately, so segregationist lawyer Jack Kershaw convinced a local judge to arrest the civil rights activist on a trumped up charge of sedition. I'm Molly Conger and this it's weird, little guys.

2:35Speaker 1:Today we're circling back to a story that i'd cut from an older episode. I was sorry to have cut it then, but it just didn't feel like there was a neat spot for it in the episodes I was writing about Jack Kershaw in April. It's funny, though I'm never done with any of these stories. I'm never really putting them to bed at the end of a series. I still keep tabs on old characters and storylines. I'm keeping an eye out for echoes of these stories in current events, just waiting to weave those loose ends back in.

3:12Speaker 1:They all fit together, sometimes in surprising ways. And I arrived back at this story this week in a roundabout sort of way. The actual story here is fairly brief. I'd put it off to the side, thinking maybe I'd have time to do a minisot about it one day. I mean, Jack Kershaw having Stokely Carmichael's aid arrested for sedition is a wild thing to stumble across and then just discard. So in the summer of nineteen sixty seven, Saint Anselm's Episcopal Chapel and Student Center in Nashville received a small government grant. The city had received a pot of federal funding for an ty poverty initiatives, and grants were awarded to various programs at the local level. Nashville gave a few thousand dollars to Saint Anselm's to run a summer program for black youth. They called it Liberations School, and most of the volunteers of the school were also organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNICK. The summer program at Saint Anselm's borrowed from curriculums SNICK had already used successfully in their Freedom School programs during the Freedom Summer of nineteen sixty four. The Liberation's School opened

4:35Speaker 1:its doors in late June of nineteen sixty seven. By early August, the program's insurer had dropped them, and the Liberations School was shut down. A Nashville Police captain named John Sarrace had complained that the school was a hotbed of anti white hatred and that SNICK volunteers were using the program to indoctrinate children and foment rebellion. But how on earth did one silly little complaint end up the subject of Senate hearings, New York Times headlines, and a sedition charge. Because John Sarace made his silly little complaint in a Senate hearing on Civil disorders in August of nineteen sixty seven, the Senate Judiciary Committee was already hearing testimony about the civil unrest that had shaken the country that summer. Sarach, as the head of Nashville Police's intelligence division went to Washington to testify about a riot that had taken place in Nashville in April, and John Sarach blamed SNICK for those riots. He was having hard time moving on, so when he saw volunteers from that organization tutoring children in a church, he told the Senate committee that the group was using federal funds to train ten

5:55Speaker 1:year olds how to engage in violent riots. They weren't. They weren't doing that, I mean, obviously right. Federal officials visited the school and found no evidence of Sarach's claims, but it didn't matter. He'd already won. The volunteers from SNICK were hardly strangers who attempts to thwart their efforts, so they adapted. They couldn't use the church anymore, but kids can learn anywhere, and they moved the classes to a public park. In the summer of nineteen sixty seven, SNICK was involved in active litigation against the city of Nashville.

6:41Speaker 1:The trial had been held in May, but the panel of judges wouldn't issue their decision until October. Back in April, there had been several days of unrest that coincided with the week that stokely Carmichael gave speeches at three Nashville area colleges. This is often abbreviated as race riots ensued after a speech from Stokely Carmichael or Stokely Carmichael gave a speech that sparked riots, But that isn't entirely true. The civil disorder in Nashville in April of nineteen sixty seven started at a bar across the street from Fisk University, where Carmichael had given a speech several days earlier. So I think it's less that his speech directly caused police to overreact to a drunk bar patron, leading to a crowd of angry college students escalating into police responding poorly to that crowd of protesters. And it's more likely that Stokely Carmichael chose to give his speeches in places where conditions like this already existed. He's not telling those black college students in Tennessee that racism exists and the police treat them unfairly. He's there talking to them because they already know that. It's likely that whatever happened there that

8:05Speaker 1:weekend would have happened anyway. Stokely Carmichael's speech didn't cause this to happen, and whatever kicked it off, the violence that followed wasn't unique. It happened in more than one hundred other cities that summer, and Stokely Carmichael wasn't giving speeches in all those towns, but in Nashville and in quite a few other cities, SNICK got the blame. Several of the people arrested that weekend in Nashville were SNICK organizers, including George Ware. The group quickly filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state's riot and disorderly conduct laws, and Where's criminal charges were put on hold pending the outcome of the lawsuit. So in Where arrived in Nashville in August of nineteen sixty seven, he hadn't actually been indicted yet on the charges from his April arrest. He had testified at the civil trial in May, but the case wasn't decided yet. And here's where the newspaper reports get a little spotty. I mean, it's strange. Actually there's information that's missing here, and no one seems to acknowledge it.

9:24Speaker 1:On August twenty first, nineteen sixty seven, George Ware was the guest lecturer at the Liberations School in the Park, and it seems like reporters were not allowed close enough to actually hear what he said to the children. Evening editions of local newspapers published on August twenty first say no reporter got close enough to hear anything until the very end of the lesson, and no reporter published anything that sounded particularly inflammatory. But the next morning, George Ware was arrested. According to those same newspapers, two local attorneys in Nashville had gone to a judge to request that an arrest warrant be issued on a charge of sedition.

10:12Speaker 1:Jack Kershaw told reporters that he and his friend Charles Galbraith had acted on their own as citizens, a cryptic sort of comment that he doesn't elaborate on, but Kershaw says they took it upon themselves as private citizens to petition Judge Daniel Boone, that is a real judge, apparently, to issue this arrest warrant. So these same papers that had just the day before all agreed that no reporter got close enough to hear what was said at the Liberation School appearance. They're now publishing Jack Kershaw's claim that George Ware had made a very inflammatory comment to a newsman.

10:57Speaker 1:The AP story says, without evidence or outside corroboration quote, Gershaw said the warrant was based in part on Where's statement to newsmen that black people have to achieve power by any means necessary. I mean, first of all, we have to acknowledge that that's a really innocuous statement. But that's apparently not the issue here. So maybe George Ware said this in an interview he gave after his speech. That's totally possible, right, But if he said it to a reporter, Gershaw is saying this remark was given to a newsman. If George Ware said this to a reporter, why didn't anyone report it? It only appears in print coming out of Jack Kershaw's mouth. No reporter published a story about hearing George Ware say this or anything like it in a speech or interview on August twenty first.

12:00Speaker 1:So Jack Kershaw made it up, fine, right, I mean, if you listen to the Jack Kershaw episodes, you know he's a liar. He's a racist and a liar. Of course he would make something up about George Ware. What difference does it make? It sounds like something George Ware would say, and he had said much spicier stuff on the record many times before. But this is so odd, and the thing I think is the actual truth here doesn't seem worth lying about unless you're very afraid of being caught hanging out with civil rights activists.

12:48Speaker 2:George Ware had said to me sometime a week or so, I had him the man.

12:57Speaker 3:He had.

12:58Speaker 2:I decided to have a little snake fundraiser at my house, and so we invited a number of my friends over to just hang out, meet, to snack. People, get on the list, contribute to money, people hoped.

13:19Speaker 1:And where were these friends?

13:22Speaker 3:Are these childhood.

13:23Speaker 2:Friends, friends from college, law school?

13:26Speaker 4:They were maybe then current friends, some lawyers, some just people on you and who weren't lawyers, the sort of a liberal set of sort of a liberal.

13:42Speaker 1:Set, I thought, that's Reber Bolt, the white Nashville area attorney who represented George Ware back then. The two were good friends, and Bolt was involved in the civil rights movement for many years in the mid nineteen sixties, George Ware often stayed at Bolt's house when he was traveling through the Nashville area.

14:09Speaker 4:And what he's.

14:09Speaker 1:Getting at in that oral history recorded in twenty eighteen, is that George ware did say whatever it was that Jack Kershaw told that judge, but he didn't say it to a reporter. He said it to State Legislator Charles Galbreth, the other attorney who swore out the warrant with Kershawvalbreath had somehow gotten an invitation to the fundraiser that they were holding at Bolt's home this Saturday night before where a speech on Monday, and Galbreth hadn't simply overheard this remark, He'd approached where at the party and asked him to explain the Black Power movement. Charles Galbreth and Jack Kershaw set him up on purpose, and the the best they could bait him into saying was We're going to win by any means necessary. But Jack Kershaw managed to convince Judge Daniel Boone that this again very innocuous statement somehow met the standard for sedition a Tennessee state statute that outlawed any advocating, abetting, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of the overthrow or destruction of the United States or Tennessee State government. Again, it just seems so

15:37Speaker 1:odd that Kershaw went with the by any means necessary, comment and even stranger that he went for the sedition charge. It just seems like there would have been easier ways to catch him up. Declassified FBI files for Stokely Carmichael and Snick show that J. H. R. Hoover was getting multiple memos a day every day for weeks around this time about the feasibility of charging Stokely Carmichael with sedition after his recent trip to Cuba, a trip that George Whare accompanied him on. So it's strange timing that Jack Kershaw would invent a fake sedition case against Where the same week that Jay Hadgar Hoover was blowing a gasket about the impossibility of charging Stokely Carmichael with sedition. The FEDS did strip both men of their passports that week, though a weird coincidence. Maybe Where spent a few days in the local jail before a pastor paid his five thousand dollars bond. A week after his arrest, his attorneys filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Tennessee's sedition law, but they made it clear they'd dropped the case if Where wasn't indicted. That same day, August twenty eighth, a

17:03Speaker 1:Florida congressman invoked Where's name and a speech on the House floor. Representative William Kramer of Florida was a huge proponent of the Anti Riot Act, a bill that would pass the following year, and in this speech in August of nineteen sixty seven, Kramer argued that the Riot Act was necessary to thwart the outside agitators responsible for the race riots that had been happening all summer, outside agitators like Stokely Carmichael and George Ware. Kramer noted that the pair had recently visited communist Cuba, and now where is back in Nashville. Just a day later, a grand jury in Tennessee declined to indict where on the sedition charge, and the whole saga was over. Snick lost their lawsuit against Nashville over the unrest in April. And Where did end up getting indicted on the inciting a riot charge for that incident? He paid a fifty dollars fine and the sedition charge incident never really comes up again. It was just a strange side quest. In my notes about Jack Kershaw, the racist lawyer who built the world's ugliest Confederate monument out of spare parts from a bathtub factory.

18:25Speaker 1:But if you'll indulge me for a minute, I want to talk about how I ended up thinking about George ware in nineteen sixty seven again this week, because again I filed this away from minisode and then I moved on. Wasn't writing about Jack Kershaw anymore. This little tidbit was going to stay stuck in my notes, But these little snippets of history keeps sneaking back up on me. If you haven't already seen the other episode in your podcast app of choice today, there is a brief tribute to my friend Laura Sullivan. She passed away last month and I went to her funeral last week. She was an absolute legend in the field of anti fascist research and a genuine force of nature. I mean, it's just it's a huge loss for the whole world, even if you didn't know her. After the funeral, sitting in a little plastic chair in the reception space of the cemetery, we were just chatting remembering Laura, of course, But given the kind of person Laura was, you can probably guess that it was a room full of people whose passions matched hers tracking right wing extremism. I couldn't tell you how the topic turned to George Lincoln Rockwell, but I swear

19:47Speaker 1:I wasn't the one that brought it up. Maybe because we were gathered there to honor our friend, an anti fascist whom we'd all loved dearly and lost too soon. Maybe that reminded some one of Rockwell, the Nazi leader assassinated by his own best friend. Because loving each other is something we've always had Over the Nazis. They just can't do it, but it's part of the fabric of what we do. But of course, as soon as someone brought up Rockwell, I offered up a few Rockwell facts for the table. You know, I'm up to date on my lore. I'd forgotten to tell you this listener's. But George Lincoln Rockwell's assassin died on Christmas Day last year.

20:36Speaker 1:John Patler, who by then had perverted back to his original Greek surname pat Solos, died two weeks shy of his eighty eighth birthday. That whole story, how the son of a Greek immigrant became an American Nazi, shot his hero and lived out the last half of his life in obscurity. That was all covered in a series of episodes last fall. But I was thinking about Rockwell's death. So on our way home from the few roll, my friend God and I stopped off at a nearby landmark of sorts, this strip mall where George Lincoln Rockwell was assassinated in nineteen sixty seven. It's in Arlington, Virginia. It was on the way home. I'd studied maps and pictures of the area pretty extensively when I was writing about Rockwell, but i'd never been. It turned out it was very unremarkable.

21:27Speaker 1:We took a selfie. The funeral was on Friday. Usually by Friday, I've got a really good idea what I'm writing about. I'm deep into my research, my notes are a mess, but I've got a vision. I didn't when I got up Friday morning, knowing I was going to spend most of the day in the car. I'd read half a book and then decided I didn't want to write about it, and I didn't have any other ideas. But when I got home that night, I was thinking about the summer of nineteen sixty seven. I mean, I started thinking about it because I'd gone out of my way to go stand in a strip mall parking lot, just to see if it made me feel anything because a Nazi got shot there in August of nineteen sixty seven.

22:15Speaker 4:It didn't.

22:17Speaker 1:But thinking back to sitting there in those little plastic chairs at the cemetery, reminiscing about Nazi rallies and police riots, where we'd bumped into each other over the years, chatting about current events, parting ways with well wishes for continued safety at the rallies. We'll probably see each other in the future. I was thinking about the whole summer. I was thinking about this summer, the summer of twenty twenty, the summer of twenty seventeen, and the summer of nineteen sixty seven. They have a lot in common. The summer of nineteen sixty seven got the nickname the Long Hot Summer because between April and August of nineteen sixty seven there were outbreaks of violent unrest and over one hundred cities across the country. I'm not gonna call them race riots, because what does that even mean? A race riot, racial tension, racial violence, racial unrest. These are useless terms designed to erase the reasons people were protesting and the motivation for the violent reactions to those protests from law enforcement. But it was a long, hot summer, and I wonder if we're due for one.

23:33Speaker 2:Two.

23:48Speaker 1:I got home, I was thinking about Darryl Lamont Jenkins. He's Laura's longtime friend and collaborator, the founder of One People's Project. He gave such a beautiful eulogy the funeral. I hadn't seen him in years. Those years have not been kind to most of us. But as we said our goodbyes, he told me he was headed back out to Delaney Hall to cover the protests outside the iced attention facility in Newark, New Jersey. Reports of cruel treatment inside the facility and hunger strikes of sparked protests outside the facility, and things have been getting pretty violent. Federal agents and state police are hurting people inside the facility and outside on the streets. On Saturday, New Jersey Governor Mikey Cheryl gave a press conference about the ongoing situation.

24:44Speaker 5:We know that people from outside the state have been interfering in the protests and escalating them. Five of the six people arrested last night by state police were from outside New Jersey and some national extremist groups have become involved in the protests here today, to the people coming from out of state to create chaos and dangerous situations, you should not be.

25:06Speaker 1:Here outside agitators. Huh, that's what she's going with. It's such a tired trope. I mean, you hear it all the time. It's very popular. A lot of people believe in it, sort of no true Scotsman fallacy for protesters you don't like, And I'm sure you can come up with a few anecdotes to support a belief in the idea that all misbehavior at political protests is the work of a dastardly outsider. But it isn't true. You can believe it, you can feel it, but the data shows it's not true. And I would argue it wouldn't matter if it were. It's a concept we've always carried with us, this desire to blame unknown outsiders for bad things that happen in our communities. We are good people. Our home is a good place. Bad things do not happen here because we are good people. We treat our minorities well.

26:11Speaker 1:If something bad has happened here, it's because some wicked external force has disrupted our peaceful way of life. Right. We heard it all the time in the summer of twenty twenty. Anytime a protest went sideways, it was outside agitators. There's no need to point the finger at police violence, because then we'd have to talk about the fact that that's what the protests are about. So just blame someone from out of town. But the idea wasn't new then.

26:42Speaker 1:In twenty twenty, plenty of commentators pointed to the history of the phrase and the Civil rights movement. Southern cities were all quite sure that their black populations had been perfectly content until those rabble rousers showed up. Black panthers and communists and big city agitators from up north, and before that, well, factory workers and farm workers and working class people all over the country in the nineteen twenties and thirties never would have organized for better working conditions if not for those damned socialists and communists and Bolsheviks and paid professional organizers coming from the big cities to stir up trouble. Everybody was perfectly satisfied with the way things were before those outsiders showed up. Nobody here in our town ever wanted a union, ever wanted integration, ever wanted civil rights, ever wanted freedom until those outsiders came to town. I was well familiar with the way the trope worked in the sixties against civil rights activists, and I asked my husband where he thought it came from, and he suggested the thirties, recalling that it was leveraged

27:51Speaker 1:against union organizers. We were both right, but we were both wrong. I mean, the idea is probably as old as civilization itself. Right, We've always feared the outsider, the unknown change. But I was curious about the phrase, so I popped the words outside agitators into the search bar in a few places where I might find old newspapers and books and magazines, it's slavery. The answer is slavery. The American concept of the outside agitator was invented to justify, defend, protect, and uphold the institution of chattel slavery. The phrase starts occurring with the exact same meaning it holds today, all of a sudden in the mid eighteen fifties. Most of the uses of the phrase I found in the mid eighteen fifties were specifically in reference to Kansas at the height of the Bleeding Kansas Conflict, the bloody battle over whether Kansas would be admitted as a free ray slave state. Now, in the eighteen fifties, he wasn't yet as famous as he would go on to become. But they're talking about people like John Brown. The original outside agitator in American politics is John Brown, and the phrase became a part

29:21Speaker 1:of the standard vocabulary for talking about meddlesome abolitionists in the years leading up to the Civil War. In April of eighteen sixty, almost exactly a year before the war began, Caleb Cushing, a Democratic politician from Massachusetts, gave a speech that was published in quite a few newspapers. He was ostensibly responding to a rather odd book, a pro abolition text written by an extremely racist white Southerner, Hinton Helper's book, The Impending Crisis of the South made a purely economic argument for abolition without recognizing any inherent dignity or humanity in black people. But that's a strange journey for another day, because it barely matters what Helper wrote, because Cushing's speech quickly went off the rails and became a rebuttal to abolitionists thought more generally right. So he starts out talking about this book, but really he's just saying all abolitionists are incoherent and wrong. I can kind of tell he's not speaking to Hinton's book directly, because he makes a snide remark about how all abolitionists love Toussaint l'vature, and I don't think a white supremacist wrote fondly about the

30:41Speaker 1:hero of the Haitian Revolution. Nevertheless, in his speech, Cushing rails against the foolish abolitionists, saying, quote, all these visionary, scatterbrained abolitionists who parade up and down the country with their imaginary self conceited, self sufficient, omniscience and omnipotence, All these outside agitators of slavery have given us no solution. Abolish, abolish, they say, but they have no solution how to do it. And when the war was over and slavery had been abolished, well it was the outside agitator again, stirring up trouble among these newly freed populations of the South. In an October eighteen sixty five issue of the Baton Rouge tri Weekly Gazette, a bizarre op ed opens with the bold claim that the white Southerner cares deeply about the best interests of the newly freed black population. Quote this, we believe every intelligent member of the colored race will concede, nor can they, in reality be made to feel otherwise, notwithstanding all the undue interference to the contrary on the part of outside political agitators, who from selfish and unworthy motives would fain delude the color into the belief that

32:01Speaker 1:they are their best and truest friends. So the author of this piece is saying, we you are former slave masters, are your best and truest friends. These outside political agitators, these abolitionists, these people from the north who wanted to free you, they're lying to you. They have an ulterior motive in manipulating you. The article warns the freed population that things will be worse for them if they trust those awful northern agitators. Quote If, on the other hand, it should unfortunately turn out that evil counsels are allowed to prevail, and the Blacks be placed in a position to be bandied about as a mere football in the hands of artful demagogues, they will make for themselves a bed of thorns. There's no author listed I assume it was written by the paper's editor. But it's a fascinating document language that I don't feel great about repeating, but I think it's important. Here here in eighteen sixty five, some Louisiana newspapermen is warning the newly freed black population.

33:13Speaker 1:But if they don't cozy up to their former masters and tow the line, if they start getting big ideas about equality and get in bed with these big city northerners and their promises, they'll be replaced by immigrants. I mean, this could have been written today. You just swap a few words out, dumb it down a little bit because people aren't quite so literate. These are reactionaries saying to the black population, stay in your place, or things will be worse for you. Right, they're pitting them against a different oppressed population, in this case Irish immigrants. It's really no different than the way they talk to black people today about Latin immigrants. Stay in your place, deal with what you can get, because someone else will do the job cheaper, will exploit someone else. If we have to quote, if the Negro would remain here as an inferior, not demand too much, and perform for reasonable compensation end quote, He'll be fine. But if he quote listens to the few fanatics who preach political and social equality to him and aspires to govern rather than be governed, end quote, he'll be driven out by the flood of immigration. The

34:36Speaker 1:author is threatening to replace freed slave labor with cheap and abundant Irish labor. Again, this is the way the Republican Party talks to Black voters about Latin immigration. The people who are preaching political and social equality, right the Democrat Party with their DEI, they're bringing in the illegals that are replacing you. It's the same one hundred and fifty years later, they're saying the same thing. I could go on. There's an article in March of eighteen sixty seven in The Times picky un in New Orleans blaming a disturbance at the polls on outside agitators. The city was at the time rather violently resisting reconstruction again and again from the eighteen fifties through the twenty twenties. The outside agitator is blamed for instigating the conflict. Without this outsider, everyone would be happy with the way things are. The people here were fine with slavery. They were fine with exploitation, they were fine with low wages, they were fine with segregation, they were fine with police brutality, they were fine with people being abused in a detention center. Everyone here was

35:51Speaker 1:fine until someone came down here and put ideas in their heads. They're being manipulated. They don't want these things on their own accord. The idea took shape in defense of slavery, and that's still its truest form. It's not just this general idea that outsiders are to blame for our problems, and the American conception of the outside agitator, it carries with it the baggage of the eighteen fifties, this idea that the black population just isn't smart enough to want anything, to do anything, to organize themselves in any particular way, unless they've been riled up and pointed in a particular direction. And obviously that's not true. Obviously all people have intrinsic value and dignity and the desire for freedom. But that's what you're saying when you look at these uprisings in nineteen sixty seven and you say, well, that's the work of outside agitators. That's what you're saying, when you look at the uprisings in twenty twenty and you say that that was the work of outside agitators, you're saying that people cannot look around themselves where they live, in their own lives and see injustice and want something else.

37:29Speaker 1:Before the long hot summer of nineteen sixty seven was even over, President Lyndon Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission after its chairman, Otto Kerner. Johnson wanted to get to the bottom of these riots, what's causing them, whose fault were they, and how can we make them stop. Johnson was a big believer in the outside agitator theory. In nineteen sixty eight, the Commission released a four hund page report. The report was based on months of investigation, including sending teams of field researchers to twenty three cities where unrest had occurred.

38:10Speaker 1:Those field teams interviewed more than twelve hundred people, people who'd been arrested, people who'd watched the riots through the living room windows, city officials, police officers, national guardsmen, leaders in the Black Power movement. They talked to people on all sides and people on no side, And they took formal depositions from another one hundred or so people and solicited testimony from experts in various fields. Do you know what they found? Do you know what this government appointed commission concluded was the cause of these one hundred sum odd race riots in the summer of nineteen sixty seven. Racism, the unrest was the result of systemic inequality. That's what the report says. In the report's introduction, they put it pretty plainly, quote, our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal. Reaction to last summer's disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division.

39:18Speaker 1:Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life. They now threaten the future of every American. This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed. Choice is still possible now it was the nineteen sixties. So throughout the report there's language that isn't what I would choose today. But I was shocked that a government report in nineteen sixty eight came to conclusions like this. I mean, the conclusions and the recommendations of this report are so far left of the current Democratic Party PLATF that you'd get kicked out. You couldn't run on this, You couldn't say this in public. The Commission recommended as a solution for the problems identified in the report, massive investment in the black community, jobs, education, mass transit, millions of new units of affordable housing, police reform, expanding anti discrimination laws and enforcement, giving the EEOC and Title seven more teeth, Getting the Department of Labor to work with unions to expand black membership in trade unions and apprentice programs.

40:38Speaker 1:Expanding the civil service focusing on recruiting, hiring, and training people from disadvantaged backgrounds, creating a million new public sector jobs, Federal reimbursement for private sector employees engaging in certain job training programs, Committing to actually ending segregation, using federal funds to hire and train teachers to ensure that all school districts and all students have high quality educators. Expanding access to early childhood education, universal preschool, more financial assistance for higher education, Removing restrictions on welfare eligibility, and establishing a system of income supplementation that would lift all working people and mothers who do not work out of poverty quote to aid in saving children from the prison of poverty that has held their parents. Are you fucking kidding me?

41:33Speaker 1:Nineteen sixty eight, Donald Trump would have had the FBI raid Auto Kerner's home at four am and charged him with conspiracy to commit DEI. And in nineteen sixty eight President Lyndon Johnson wasn't super pleased with the Commission's findings. He preferred the outside agitator narrative. It's easy to arrest a scapegoat, It's much harder to invest in black communities, I guess.

42:04Speaker 3:And Bobby just gave hell today for not carrying out the Turner Commission study. Well, I didn't realize when I parted Turner that this son of a betch from New York, Lindsay would take charge. He did take charge, and he recommended I hire two and a half million people on federal payroll. And I just I have not worried to reflect on Kerner and criticize the commission. At the same time, I couldn't embrace it because I've got a budget.

42:38Speaker 1:That's LBJ. In March of nineteen sixty eight, complaining to Dick Daily, the mayor of Chicago, The Bobby he's referring to here is Robert F. Kennedy Senior, who at the time was challenging Johnson in the presidential primary. Johnson withdrew from the election a few weeks later, and Kennedy was assassinated in June. A Democratic nominee ended up being Hubert Humphrey, and segregationist Third Party Canada George Wallace got way too many votes for my taste, and Richard Nixon ended up being the president. It was a weird year, but the commission found that outside agitators didn't cause the unrest. They weren't even a factor. They were, by and large, according to the data, not even real. Across the data collected, ninety percent of people who'd been arrested in these incidents were local residents. Of that remaining ten percent of arrestees whose home address didn't match the city where they were arrested, most of them resided in the Greater Metropolitan Area. One percent of people arrested during all the civil disturbances in nineteen sixty seven resided in a state other than the one where they were arrested. The outside agitator is a myth.

44:05Speaker 1:It's a story we tell ourselves because the real answer is too scary or too expensive, or it implicates us. The root cause of those uprisings was systemic racial inequality. Nobody was tricked into believing that people just looked around their own lives and saw what was happening. The solution the Commission identified was investing in making society more equal. Out of towners didn't throw the first rock, and it wouldn't have mattered if they did. But I think I do have to say a good word for the outside agitator, not this imaginary violent instigator, but the protester who felt moved to show up somewhere where harm was being done to a stranger. It feels a little cliche, I think, to quote doctor Martin Luther King, Junior, But maybe that's something that I feel because a lot of work was invested in making me feel that way. His message has been deluded and defanged by this constant stream of bland, out of context quotes. When doctor King said injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, he wasn't asking you to write your congressmen about some faraway harm. He was responding directly to allegations that he personally was an outside

45:34Speaker 1:Agitator from his letter from Birmingham jail. Quote, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century BC left their villages and carried there thus saith the Lord far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns. And just as the apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call forraid. Moreover, I am cognizant of the inner relatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

46:27Speaker 1:We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial outside agitator idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds. So when I say the trope of the outside agitator as a racist myth, I mean the idea that all unrest is caused by an outsider who stirs up trouble that would otherwise not have existed.

47:06Speaker 1:That's a myth. No one's riling up the locals and tricking them into riding. That's fake. But none of this contradicts the very real contributions to the struggle from people who saw injustice and went where that injustice was. They didn't provoke otherwise docile locals to take action against their will. They stood shoulder to shoulder with people who already fighting because they all wanted the same thing. People like Viola Luzo, the white mother from Detroit who drove down to Alabama to volunteer with the march to Montgomery. She wasn't announcede hegitator.

47:48Speaker 1:Her own husband tried to convince her that's what she was doing. He told her before she left, it's not your fight. And do you remember what she told him. It's everybody's fight. It's everybody's fight. And she fought that fight and she died for it. James Reed Jonathan Daniels, James Cheney, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman. They went where the fight was because they believed they had a duty to do something about it, and they were martyred for it, and the klansmen who killed them called them outside agitators.

48:28Speaker 1:Thousands and thousands of people got on buses and trains and took turns driving all night to get to the Deep South to do their part. Back then, those aren't outside agitators. Those are people who believed the world could be good. You have to believe that too. We have the same duty today. You can't sit idly by in your hometown and not be concerned about what happens outside of it. Because we are caught in that inescapable network of mutuality. We are tied in that single garment of destiny.

49:08Speaker 1:They want you to believe it's impossible, or maybe just immoral, to care about things that don't directly affect you. They want you to believe it's wrong, it's somehow suspect, maybe even a crime, to cross state lines to show you care about what happens to our neighbors. Because the people being abducted and abused by my federal government are my neighbors, no matter where they're being snatched up. So the outside agitator isn't real. But at the same time, maybe we all have a moral duty to be the outside agitator of their nightmares. Just a quick note before you finish writing me that email. I have used the name Stokely Carmichael throughout this story for clarity's sake, because that was his name the time of these events. Stokely Carmichael changed his name to Kuame Turre in nineteen sixty nine. The majority of the sources I used for this episode, including oral histories from those who knew him, used Quame Tourey's former name when writing or speaking about this time period.

50:26Speaker 1:I understand some sources do opt to use his chosen name throughout, regardless of the time period being discussed, but since he was not the primary subject of the episode, it seemed more straightforward to use the name that you would find if you clicked through to view any of the linked sources. Nashville cop John Sarrace died in February of twenty twenty five. He was eighty seven years old. According to a statement from the Rutherfurd County Sheriff's office.

50:51Speaker 1:He died after a thirteen days stay in the hospital due to complications from an existing medical condition. Sarrace was in the sheriff's custody when he died, following his arrest in January of twenty twenty five on charges of reckless homicide related to the shooting death of his wife, Sharon Rodgers. Sarrace and of course, segregationist lawyer and bathtub sculptor Jack Kershaw, died at the age of ninety six in twenty ten. George Ware outlived him by two years. Weird Little Guys It's a production of Coolshoe Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Conger Park. Executive producers are Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal.

51:48Speaker 1:You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guy's subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.