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I want to sit with something in 1964. Not 1864, not 1664, 1964, a black woman named Fannie Lou Hamer's husband was fired from his job. The day after she tried to register to vote in Mississippi. She herself was shot at by night riders. She was beaten by police in a jail cell in Winona, Mississippi, so badly that she suffered permanent kidney damage, a blood clot behind one eye, and nerve damage that never fully healed. She was just trying to vote. And she wasn't even able to vote. She attempted to register. The same year, three young men, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were stopped by a deputy sheriff in Neshoba County, Mississippi, held in a jail cell while mob assembled, released into the night and then beaten, shot and buried in an earthen dam. They were trying to help people vote. This is not ancient history. This is within the lifetime of people who are alive today. People who remember just this last week as of this recording, Tennessee called a special session to crack the only black district here in Tennessee. I was just in this last Saturday, Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, marching with some people who marched the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 for the right to vote. Like this isn't a mirror of history. This is the exact same issue. And I know I wasn't taught about the civil rights movement growing up. It was glossed over. The cruelty was omitted. It was seen as frivolous and unnecessary to fight just to get on paper what Christian white people would have done anyway eventually. And after I saw what the Tennessee legislature did, I realized we all need to sit with this history, I typically wouldn't do a back to back two part episode, but it's just too important and it's just too much about what's going on now. What you're about to hear is the story of how a nation built on the premise that all men are created equal, spent nearly a century after the Civil War systematically, legally and violently and bureaucratically ensuring that millions of its citizens could not exercise the most basic right of democracy, the right to vote. And it is the story of the men and women, most of them ordinary people, some of them extraordinary, who refuse to let that stand. This is something that for almost a century, people legally were blocking others from voting. Just because it's legal doesn't make it right. This is their story. This is how the civil rights happened. It's how it's still being written. Civil rights and the right to vote are very much an ever present issue happening right now all across states in the south today on Flipping Tables. Hello and welcome, or welcome back to Flipping Tables. We talk a lot about deconstruction here. American history, current events, biographies, just trying to learn a lot, to be curious, eternally asking questions. I call my followers the Covenant of the Curious. Because here all questions are welcome and it is part of your journey. Your faith is your own, your beliefs are your own and you are allowed to question them every time, time and change your mind if you come in contact with new information. I'm going to jump right into today. And again, normally I wouldn't do a back to back two part episode series, but with what's been going on, it just felt too important to not talk about this right now. So I'm just going to jump in. To understand the civil rights movement, we have to understand what the civil rights movement was fighting against. We have to go back not just to slavery, but to the moment slavery ended. Because what happened in that moment tells us everything about what would come after. On April 9th of 1865, Lee surrenders at Appomattox. The war was over. Four million human beings who had been owned as property, who had been bought and sold and bred like livestock, who had been whipped and branded and raped and murdered with legal impunity. Again, because it's legal doesn't mean that it's right. We're now, at least on paper, free. And for this brief extraordinary moment, something like democracy flickered into the American South. This period is known as the Reconstruction. Roughly from 1863, 1865 to 1877 represents one of the most radical democratic experiments in American history. Under the protection of federal troops, and backed by constitutional amendments, Black men in the south voted in massive numbers. When they got that right to vote, they came out and they voted. They ran for office, and they won. Between 1870 and 1876, two black men served in the United States Senate. Haram Revels and Blanche Bruce, both from Mississippi. And more than 600 black men served in southern state legislatures. Black communities built schools, they negotiated labor contracts, they formed mutual aid societies, and began to slowly build political power. The historian W.E.B. du Bois, in his monumental 1935 work, Black Reconstruction in America, called this period, quote, the most extraordinary and bold attempt of democracy in this land. End quote. And he was right. And the white southern political establishment, much like it is today, was determined to destroy it. I really should have grabbed a whiskey for this episode because, man, I'm sassy about what's going on. What followed Reconstruction is sometimes called redemption, which is such an offensive word to use for this. It was chosen deliberately. It reframes the violent counter revolution as restoration, specifically spiritual restoration. Southern Democrats, who at this point in history were the party of white supremacy. Remember, the party switch happens later, not the party. They would become organized with explicit purpose to drive black voters from the polls and reclaim political power. They called this redemption because they believed it was their right as white supremacist pieces of garbage to control all political power and disenfranchise black people. And the audacity of these people to call themselves Christians is just even what I saw today. I mean, there are several se sitting members of the Tennessee state legislator that are connected to the clan, and they'll be out there quoting scripture and just the worst people in existence. Fine. Everything's fine. So they used redemption specifically to make it sound like restoration, spiritual healing. And they drove black voters from the polls through terrorism, fraud, and eventually through the law. The hamburg Massacre of 1876 in South Carolina took place on July 8th in the small town of Hamburg when the heavily armed white paramilitary group known as the Red Shirts attacked a black state militia unit during the final months of Reconstruction. The confrontation began over a minor dispute on the town's main street and escalated when a former Confederate general, Matthew C. Butler, demanded the militia disarm After a siege of the militia's armory. The red shirts captured several black men, executed at least four of them in cold blood, and looted the town. The massacre was a deliberate act of political terror designed to suppress black voters and overthrow South Carolina's Republican government. And it succeeded, helping to install Democrat Wade Hampton III as governor that fall. And effectively ending Reconstruction in the state. The Ellenton riot took place from September 15th to 19th in 1876 in and town of Ellenton, South Carolina, just months after Hamburg, during the same campaign of white paramilitary terror aimed at overthrowing Reconstruction. It began when a black man named Peter Williams was accused of assaulting a white woman. And the white rifle clubs, essentially the red shirts under a different name, mobilized across Akin and Barnwell counties to hunt him down. Over five days, roving bands of armed white men attacked black residents across the countryside, killing an estimated 30 to 100 black South Carolinians. Some estimates are even higher. Federal troops eventually intervene and disperse the mobs, but no one was meaningfully prosecuted. That sounds familiar, right? Commit a bunch of crimes and no meaningful prosecution or accountability. Like Hamburg, Ellenton was political violence dressed as a manhunt. And it helped deliver South Carolina to Wade Hampton III and the Democrats in the November election, sealing the end of Reconstruction in the state. The Colfax massacre of 1873 in Louisiana took place on Eastern Sunday, Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, in the small town of Colfax, Louisiana, seat of the Grant Parish. The killings grew out of the disputed 1872 Louisiana gubernatorial election in which Republican and Democratic claimants both insisted they had won. To protect the local Republican government and the courthouse from a Democratic takeover, a group of mostly black freedmen, many of them Union army veterans, occupied and fortified the Colfax courthouse on Eastern Sunday. A heavily east, I keep saying Eastern on Easter Sunday, a heavily armed force of roughly 150 white men, organized from the White League and former Confederates and equipped with a small, small cannon, surrounded and assaulted the building. After setting the courthouse on fire and forcing a surrender, the white attackers executed dozens of black men who had laid down their arms. Estimates of the dead range from 60 to more than 150. With three white attackers killed, federal prosecutors charged several perpetrators under the Enforcement Acts. But in the 1876 Supreme Court decision United States versus Cruikshank, the convictions were overturned on the grounds that the 14th Amendment applied only to state action, not to private violence, gutting federal civil rights enforcement and clearing the path for the paramilitary terror that would end Reconstruction. When they gutted the 14th amendment, it's very similar to what's happening now where the Civil Rights act was just gutted, and it allows for this legal kind of legislative violence as well as interpersonal violence without any kind of state intervention. And then what they'll say is, well, we advocate for small government lack of regulation. What they mean is lack of regulation when it comes to their corporations to make a bunch of money. But also lack of regulation so that when they violate people's civil liberties or their safety, there's no consequences. In 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes became the president through a backroom deal. I said I wasn't going to get so mad. The Compromise of 1877, in which Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the south in exchange for southern electoral votes, just, just put black people back on a platter and served them right up to win the presidency. The troops left, and without the troops and without federal enforcement, the counter revolution exceed accelerated. By 1890s, every Southern state was in the process of constructing what scholars would later call the Jim Crow system, A comprehensive architecture of racial apartheid backed by law, custom and violence. Again, just because it is tradition does not make it right. Just because it is legal does not make it right. The historian C. Van Woodward, in his essential 1955 study the Strange career of Jim Crow, traced how quickly and deliberately these laws were being constructed. And I want to be abundantly clear, it is happening right now. They are rebuilding the structure of Jim Crow in the south by disenfranchising their vote, diluting their vote. A politician should not be able to choose who their voters are. The voters should choose their representation. Because say it with me, there is no taxation without representation. And what's critical to understand is that Jim Crow was deliberate and intentional the same way it is now. It was state by state, statute by statute. Southern legislatures built a system designed to accomplish several things simultaneously. To segregate black life from white life in every conceivable sphere, to strip black citizens of political power like the right to vote, and to maintain a captive labor force through debt, peonage and vagrancy. Laws that were slavery by another name. Remember that slavery is officially outlawed in the constitution, except for if you're arrested, if you're in jail, slave labor for prisoners is still allowed. There's a reason that the public school to prison pipeline, especially for young black men, exists because that is a way they can enforce slave labor. Especially in the south, we're using prison labor with little to no pay is still very much used. So let's talk about how they stole the vote, because that's what happening is right now. Because this is central to not only everything that follows in the history we're looking at right now, but it's the playbook of what we are seeing in our moment. We are in our civil rights moment right now, and we have to have a grasp of what's going on. So the 15th amendment that was ratified in 1870 stated clearly that the right of citizens to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude. Southern states could not disenfranchise black men explicitly on the basis of race because this mo this mostly affected men. Black women were even more disenfranchised. So they found other ways. They wrote in poll taxes, you had to pay a fee to vote. In an era where sharecroppers often never saw cash money, their entire economic lives were conducted in the ledgers of white landowners who always seem to owe them nothing. At the end of the year, a poll tax might have, might as well have in the moon. And the taxes were often cumulative. So you had to pay for every year you hadn't voted going back several years. So these are sharecroppers that have no money. They're not actually getting paid. Their whole life is tied up in the white landowner's plantation. So they like they don't have cash. Mississippi instituted its poll tax in 1890. By 1900, black voter registration in Mississippi had collapsed from 190,000 registered black voters to under 6,000. They then imposed literacy tests. The state would require voters to read and interpret a passage of law or the state constitution. But the interpretation was at the complete discretion of the white registrar. A black man with a college degree could be failed. A white man who was functionally illiterate could be passed. It was completely subjective. In Alabama in 1965, a doctoral educated black professor was failed on a literacy test, while the white man who wrote in his name with an X was registered without difficulty. So this is documented cases recorded by by federal observers. Then they added grandfather clauses. In some states you could only vote if your grandfather could vote. Since grandfather of most black southerners were enslaved, this provision was perfectly calibrated to exclude them. And then they had white primaries. The south was for the most part of this period, a one party region. The Democratic party was primary. Excuse me. The Democratic primary was the only election that mattered. Winning the primary meant winning the election. So southern states declined, declared the Democratic party a private club. And private clubs could set their own membership rules. Black voters were simply excluded from the only vote that actually mattered. The Supreme Court repeatedly upheld variations of this scheme before finally striking it down in Smith versus all right in 1944. So, and again, remember, this is before the party switch, but this is essentially them deciding that a political party is a private club. Then they implemented residency and re registration requirements. It was designed specifically to Target sharecroppers who removed frequently. If you miss a single cycle because you relocated to a different county, you had to start the registration process over. And then, of course, their personal favorite, economic terror. A black person who attempted to register could lose their job the next day, be evicted from their land or their home, have their credit cut off at a store where they bought food. In Mississippi and Alabama, the names of people who registered to vote were published in the local newspapers so to they could be targets to physical terror, beatings, burnings and lynchings. The scholar Ida B. Wells Barnett and the great anti lynching journalist who worked out of Memphis, documented this in excruciating detail in her pamphlets Southern horrors in 1892 and a red record in 1895. Drawing on her own investigation and on newspaper records, she cataloged hundreds of lynchings across the south and demolished the prevailing white narrative that lynching was a response to black criminality. They deserved it. They did something. They're criminals. And she was able to prove, no, they aren't. In case after case, she showed that lynching was just a political and economic weapon. Black men were lynched for owning land that a white man wanted, for competing with a white business, for voting, for organizing, for being prosperous, for not being scared enough. The NAACP, which was founded in 1909, would continue her work. Between 1877 and 1950, they documented approximately 4,743 racial lynchings in the United States, nearly 100% of them in the South. Now the actual number is certainly much, much higher, much higher. These are just the ones that they could record. The Supreme Court's contribution to this architecture came in 1896 with a very important case you've probably heard of, Plessy versus Ferguson, one of the most catastrophic decisions in the court's history. This is not the first time that the Supreme Court has stood in the way of civil rights, has sabotaged the Constitution, has sabotaged protections. This is not the first time. And while that is so disheartening because humans can be so evil and so cruel, it is also very hopeful because this means that we beat them back once, we can do it again and be honest about getting rid of these movements once and for all this time. Because we are in this moment in history right now because we did not effectively punish the Confederacy after winning the Civil War. In this court case, homer Plessy, who was 78 white and 18 black by Louisiana's racial classification, had deliberately boarded a whites only rail car as a test case for the newly founded Citizens Committee, a black civil rights organization in New Orleans. He was arrested and his case went to the Supreme Court. The court ruled 7 to 1 that separate but equal facilities were actually constitutional. The dissent, written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slaveholder, ironically became one of the most prescient opinions of the Supreme Court history. He said, quote, he said, quote, our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. But of course, seven of his colleagues disagreed. And with Plessy, the legal foundation of American apartheid was complete and it was now backed by the Supreme Court. The civil rights movement was born into this world. Not a world of individual prejudice or bigotry, obviously there's that, but a system. When people. Well, racism is a system. So there's a lot of. You'll see people online, you know, conservative talking heads or people be like, oh, well, black people are racist against white people. Everyone can have racial prejudice. That is true. Racism is a system which disenfranchises a group based on race. A system that operates that way can only operate from the position of the more powerful, whoever that more powerful race is, whoever can enforce laws, regulations, restrictions on another race. That is what racism is. So there is a difference, There is a structural difference between racism and racial prejudice. The civil rights movement was born into this world. So not a world of individual prejudice and bigotry, obviously there was that, but a system, a system that was legally backed by the Supreme Court. And that's a distinction. When people talk about systemic racism versus racial prejudice, you'll see a lot of conservatives, talking heads or, or, you know, know, whoever say, oh, well, black people are racist against white people. Everyone can experience or feel racial prejudice. Systemic racism is. Is what we are talking about right here, where you have a system of laws, legal backing to enact your prejudice, your restriction, your confinement, or your exclusion of someone based on race. Systemic racism can only happen at the hands of whoever is operating the position of power. So for black people, yes, there can be rac prejudice against white people, and in many cases, quite frankly, it's justified. And we're going to get into a lot of that today. But racism as a system can only be implemented by whoever has the most political power. That's the difference. So this is a comprehensive, interlocking system of laws, economics, violence and culture designed to hold a population in permanent subordination. Again, this is what it means when we say systemic racism. Again, what Tennessee did last week is systemic racism. The white southern conservative supermajority of Tennessee used political power to disenfranchise votes Based on race. That's what they did. Now, they didn't say it like that. They did say in committee, oh, we're doing this to take the vote so we can send all Republicans. But they only targeted their energy at the only black dominant district in the state of Tennessee, in Memphis. And Memphis is not a legally drawn, like civil rights county. Shelby county is just where a lot of black people live. And now it's split three ways. It's way bigger than the white hoods of Pulaski, Tennessee, where one of the birthplaces of the Klan. Understanding this is essential because when we talk about the courage it took to challenge the system, you're challenging the law. That's why so much of what the coverage in the civil rights movement from conservatives or from white supremacists or people that just wanted to maintain the status quo, they would call people who were fighting for civil rights criminals. And technically many of them were because they were fighting a legal system. When we talk about the men and women who registered voters in Mississippi, who sat on lunch counters in Greensboro, who marched across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, we have to understand what they were up against. They weren't fighting against sentiments or attitudes. They were fighting the full power of the state, local and federal government. They were fighting an empire. And before I get into the wound city in act two, Memphis, Tennessee, I'm going to take our first of two mid show sponsor breaks. If you would like to receive these episodes early and ad free, you can subscribe to support my work@patreon.com montemater so let's spend a little time with one city because Memphis, Tennessee is so important right now. And it was important in the civil rights movement in the 60s. It's important now, but it was important before that that Memphis is the civil rights story, concentrated and distilled like it's the glory, the tragedy. It's all visible there. You can feel it. So if you've never been to Memphis, Memphis sits on a bluff above the Mississippi River. It was, for much of the 19th and 20th century, the largest inland cotton market in the world. Cotton made Memphis bloody rich. And cotton, of course, was built on enslaved labor and then on the near slavery of sharecropping, because sharecropping wasn't far off. Memphis's wealth was extracted from black bodies and the cotton was extracted from the delta soil. So the story of black Memphis begins with a massacre similar to the massacres I read earlier. In May of 1866, one year after the end of the Civil War, white Mobs in Memphis, led substantially by Irish immigrant police officers and firemen, rampaged through Black neighborhoods for three days. They killed at least 46 Black people. Some accounts put the number much higher. They wounded hundreds more. They burned 91 homes, four churches and eight schools. They gang raped black women. They targeted black Union army veterans, men who had served the country, who had worn the uniform, who embodied in their persons the possibility of black freedom and dignity. The Memphis massacre of 1866 is documented in congressional records. A Joint committee on Reconstruction investigation in the summer of 1866 produced hundreds of pages of testimony from survivors, including horrifically graphic accounts of rape and murder. It is harrowing. A woman named Francis Thompson described being gang raped by seven white men. A woman named Cynthia Townsend described watching her husband shot in the street. And this was Memphis's introduction to the post Civil War era. The message was delivered loud and clear and it was written in blood. In the 1880s and the 1890s, Memphis, of course, as I mentioned, was home to Ida B. Wells, one of the most important journalists and civil rights activists in American history and one of the least known to the general public. Wells had been born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862, was freed at the age of three by the emancipation Proclamation. She became a teacher and then a journalist in Memphis, co owning a paper called the Free Speech and headlight. In 1892, three of her friends, Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart were lynched in Memphis. They owned a cooperative grocery store that was competing successfully with a white owned store in the same neighborhood. So the white store owner organized a mob and the three men were taken from jail and shot and their bodies were mutilated. Wells went to investigate. And what she found, not just in this case, but in case after case after case across the south, was that the lynching narratives being promoted by the white newspapers were flat out fucking lies. The alleged offenses were pretext for what they had already done and it was just an excuse to sanctify murdering black men and women. The real reason black men were lynched was economic competition, political threat and the assertion of dignity. And that's what pisses me off when I see these incel. I'm sorry, I'm going to curse a lot this episode. I'm real mad. This whole. All of what's going on in the south and, and just what I'm seeing and what I'm watching people go through when I Edmund Pettus Bridge watching people in their wheelchairs and their walkers come across that bridge and they've done it already has Me riled right the off. And so when I see these manosphere incel people being like, why don't, why don't black people just build their own economies? Why don't they just. They have. And every time they've done it, we've burned it. Every time they competed economically, white people rolled in with gangs and lynched them, destroyed their businesses, accused them of crimes, and then ended their lives. Redemption. Remember Ida published her findings. The white citizens of Memphis responded by destroying her printing press and threatening her life. She was out of town when it happened and she never returned to Memphis. She moved to New York and continued her work for there there from there. But before she left, she told black people in Memphis, she said, leave, get out. She said, quote. There is therefore only one thing left to do, she wrote in free speech. Save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives or property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but take us out and murder us in cold blood when accused by white persons. And thousands did leave. And this pointed to something important, that even in the midst of terror, black communities were making strategic choices, building alternative institutions, finding ways to survive and resist. One of the most remarkable remarkable figures in Memphis history, and probably a little bit more obscure, is Robert Reed Church senior who became what many historians consider the first black millionaire in the South. He was born into slavery. He came to Memphis after the war, built a real estate and business empire. In 1906, he founded the solvent Savings bank and Trust, one of the first black owned banks in Tennessee. In 1899, he built Church's park and Auditorium, the finest public venue in Memphis. Because black citizens were excluded from white owned parks and performance spaces, he brought Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington to Memphis to speak there. His son, Robert Church Jr. Would become one of the most powerful black Republican political figures in the nation in the early 20th century, running what was known as the Lincoln League, a black political organization that could deliver tens of thousands of black votes in Memphis and Tennessee to Republican presidential candidates. And one of the things, this is just kind of a personal tidbit for me. I chose to stay in Tennessee and get a house here, an anchor here, because I know that a lot of people are leaving. And I don't blame anyone for leaving, but I also know there's a lot of people who can't. Because for as many people as left Memphis, left Tennessee, left the south, there was many who couldn't. And this part of the story is where things take a darker turn. Because the man who destroyed Robert Church Jr. Who essentially drove him out of Memphis, had his property seized for back taxes and dismantled. The Lincolnling was e. H. Boss Crump. Edward Crump was Memphis's political boss from roughly 1909 until his death in 1950. He was a democrat. He ran in Memphis. He ran Memphis like a personal fiefdom. And his relationship with the black community was a defining example of the paternalistic political control in American history. Crump understood something and used it effectively that many white southern politicians didn't, that black votes, properly controlled, were useful. So he didn't simply disenfranchise black voters in Memphis the way Mississippi did. Instead, he would pay their poll taxes, he would bust them to the polls. He told them who to vote for, and they voted for who they were told. This was not democracy. This was a machine where he was manipulating people. Black people in Memphis had something that resembled political participation. Their names appeared on voter rolls, they cast ballots, but they had no actual political power because their right to vote, their ability to vote, was in the hands of a white man who was paying for it and telling them what they had to do. Their decisions were all made by Crump, a white supremacist piece of who enforced segregation with the full apparatus of the city government. When Robert Church Jr. Began to organize a real independent black political movement, when he began to build political power that didn't flow through Crump, Crump moved to destroy him. Church's properties were assessed at inflated values, generating tax bills he couldn't pay. City contracts with church affiliated businesses were canceled. Police harassment increased. Church eventually left Memphis in the 1940s. His political organization broke and his property in the hands of others again. Disenfranchisement through economic strangulation, not just in the voting booth, but in every sphere of life that could generate independent political power. By the mid 20th century, Memphis was a city of sharp racial geography. The tri State Defender, a black owned newspaper, documented daily life under segregation. The insults, the indignities, the danger. Black memphians rode in the back of the bus they use separate water fountains, sat in separate sections of the movie theaters. The balcony, which black moviegoers called the buzzards roost, was where they had to sit for movie theaters. They couldn't try on clothes and white owned stores. They could not eat lunch at the counters and they could not stay in white owned hotels. And Memphis's black community, like black communities throughout the south, lived with the constant knowledge that any challenge to this order could and would be met with violence, economic ruin and death. We'll return to Memphis in a minute. Because what happened there in 1968 is both the movement's greatest tragedy and one of the most important, important and powerful statements of what was at stake. And I think you probably know what I'm talking about. The modern civil rights movement has many points of origin. There's different, the different moments people will point to and say this was when it all started. But if you ask a lot of the movement's veterans, people like John Lewis, Andrew Young, others, they will point to one event that changed everything. August 28, 1955. 14 year old Emmett Till, visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi from his home in Chicago was pulled from his great uncle Moses Wright's home in the middle of the night by two white men, Roy Bryant and his half brother J.W. mil him Bryant's wife had accused Emmett of and the accounts vary widely and have been disputed some form of inappropriate behavior at their country store which Emmett Till did not do. He the crime. He flirted with a white woman, which he didn't do. She would recant that three days later Emmett Till's body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River. He'd been beaten so severely that Moses Wright could only identify him by initial ring. He'd been shot in the head. A 75 pound gin fan had been tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body down. His mother, M. Till Mobley made a decision that changed American history. She brought his body home to Chicago and she insisted on an open casket funeral. She wanted the world to see what had been done to her son. Jet magazine, the black owned weekly published photographs of Emmett Till's body. 100,000 people came to view that open casket in Chicago. The photographs circle circulated around the country, across the world. There were and remain among the most shattering images in American history. Roy Bryant and J.W. milam were tried for murder in Sumner, Mississippi. An all white jury as black citizens were of course excluded from jury pools. Moses Wright, the great uncle of the 64 year old sharecropper stood up in that courtroom in Mississippi in 1955, pointed at the man who came into his house and taken his great nephew and said there he, he is. He used the word sir addressing the court. But he pointed this act of courage in that courtroom in that state in that year is huge. He knew that by doing that, by naming him, by pointing at him in front of that all white jury that he was risking being killed. It didn't matter. The jury deliberated for a whole 67 minutes. One juror later said they would have been done Sooner. But they stopped to drink sodas to make it look bad. Better not guilty. Bryant and Milam, protected by double jeopardy, sold their story to the journalist William Bradford Huey. It was published in look magazine in January of 1956. They confessed to the murder in detail. They were never charged again. The historian Timothy Tyson, in his essential 2017 book, the Blood of Emmett Till, called the murder, quote, a wound from which America has never recovered. And he's right. But it was al also, paradoxically, a wound that galvanized people. People. John Lewis, who was then a teenager in rural Alabama, read about Emmett Till. Emmett Till and made a decision. Rosa Parks, when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus four months later, said she thought of Emmett Till when she made that refusal. And I want to revisit real quick the woman who made this accusation and then her husband and his relative killed Emmett Till. The woman's name was Carolyn Bryant Donham. And the original accusation was that Emmett grabbed her by the hand and waist before propositioning her, saying he had been with a white woman before. I doubt it. Like, let's be real. There's no teenage young black man visiting Mississippi for the first time that's gonna roll up on a white woman like that. But years later, when professor Timothy Tyson raised that trial Testimony in a 2008 interview with Don Ham, he claimed she told him, that part's not true. But I mean, at the time, who cares, right? Who cares? Because he was just a. Just another black kid. And I'm so thankful for the courage of his mother to have that open casket funeral. This all brings us to Montgomery, Alabama, December 1st of 1955. You know the story. Rosa Parks, a seamstress and NAACP secretary, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. She was arrested. And what happened next was not spontaneous. Rosa Parks was not, not simply tired. She was also a trained civil rights activist who had attended Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a place that trained organizers from across the South. The Montgomery movement had been building for years, waiting for the right test case. Joanne Robinson of the Women's Political Council had already drafted leaflets for a bus boycott before Parks was ever arrested. She was part of the movement. She was going in, and she was thinking about Emmett Till when she did it. When the arrest happened, Robinson printed and distributed 52,000 flyers in a single night. They were ready. And as we go into what is happening in our country right now, we have got to be ready, get organized, follow local groups, go to trainings, because we have to be ready. For when our moment comes. Following that, for 381 days over a year, black citizens of Montgomery refused to ride city buses. They organized carpools. They walked miles in the heat and the cold. They faced bombings of their leaders homes and churches. They were arrested on spurious charges charges. Their leader, a young Baptist minister new to town named Martin Luther King Jr. Had his home bombed while his wife and infant daughter were inside. And the boycott worked because money is the only thing that does. The bus system was losing money. The city was losing money. The Supreme Court would rule in Browder vs Gail that Montgomery's bus segregation was unconstitutional and the city desegregated its buses not because they had a change of heart, but because they were losing money. Money. And that's something else happening right now is we need to be prepared for general strikes, protesting with our money because money is the only thing that convinces them. Without us, the economy doesn't run and it's high time we start exercising that power. But more importantly, in fact, much more importantly, the boycott proved that a sustained, organized, disciplined, nonviolent mass movement could win. It proved that the black community, if unified, had economic leverage because they do and we do do. It proved that the federal courts could be tools of liberation, not just instruments of oppression. And it elevated a leader who had a gift for making moral stakes of the struggle legible to the entire nation and to the world. Martin Luther King Jr. Was 26 years old when the Montgomery bus boycott began. And before I get into the sit ins, the Freedom Riders and the state's response, I'm going to take our second of two mid show sponsor breaks.
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is brought to you by Netflix. The four Seasons is back for season two. Starring Tina Fey, Will Forte, Colman Domingo, Marco Calvani, Carrie, Kenny Silver and Erika Henningsen. After a difficult year, your favorite group of friends continues their tradition of vacationing together. Now with a baby in tow. From the Jersey Shore to upstate New York and Italy, their getaways are sure to take unexpected turns. Where comedy ensues. Watch the Four Seasons May 28th only on Netflix.
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February 1st, 1960. GREENSBORO, NC. Four black college freshmen, Isaiah Blair Jr, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David Richmond, walk into the Woolworths Department stor in Elm street, bought school supplies and sat down at the whites only lunch counter. They ordered coffee. They were refused service. And they sat and sat. And then they came back the next day with more students and the next day with more. Within two weeks, sit ins had spread to cities across the South. Within two months, more than 50 cities. Within a year, over 70,000 people had participated in sit ins, wade ins, kneelings, and other forms of nonviolent direct action. The response of white southerners to these peaceful, neatly dressed young people sitting at lunch counters was, of course, and this is documented in police records, news photographs and court documents, absolutely relentlessly savage and barbaric. They poured ketchup and mustard on the student's head. They burned them with cigarettes. They punched them, kicked them off their stools. They poured hot coffee on them. White gangs were allowed to assault the protesters while police watched them do it, and then arrested the protesters, the victims, victims for disturbing the peace. And the students did not fight back. They were trained in nonviolent discipline. They absorbed the blows. They kept their eyes forward. They looked, as the journalist Diane mcwhorter wrote, more dignified than their tormentors. And I want to be careful here because while I agree with the nonviolent approach and the nonviolent training when we talk about this, I want to be careful that that doesn't become a conversation of, well, you should just sit and take it. Because that has also been used as justification for continued abuse, not just racially, but in other, other avenues as far as, well, you know, when you fight back, you're now the aggressor. So this is so important for historical context. I don't want that to read as people should take abuse or an assault from a domestic partner or anything like that. In this context, they knew, knew that this was what they had to do, but also it is often weaponized by abusers. So I just wanted to clarify that just a little bit. So the this moment, the sit ins gave birth to one of the most important organizations in American history, the student nonviolent coordinating committee, or the SNCC. Founded in April 1960 at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, the SNCC would become the sharp edge of the movement, the organization willing to go deepest into the most dangerous territory, willing to do the hardest organization in the most hostile counties of Mississippi and Alabama. Its members were young, many of them students, and they would Pay an extraordinary price. And man, these movements are so often carried on the backs of the young. And I think that we're going to see our students doing it again. We already are seeing students do it again. Students are organizing walkouts, they're protesting. I also think. And I. I can't remember the young man's name. I wish I could. I think we're going to see a. There was a young athlete who. Young black athlete who said, said, you either. I can't remember what the parameter was, but he basically told the school that wanted to recruit him. He's like, I'm not going to play unless you get rid of xyz. I think they were flying a Confederate flag and the school got rid of it. I think we're going to see a lot of black athletes, which, let's be real, our college and professional sports rely on. Refuse to play, refuse to be entertainment in a place that will not treat them as equals. And I can't wait. Can't wait. The guiding spirit of the SNCC's founding was Ella Baker, a veteran organized organizer who had worked with the NAACP for years and understood with clarity that movements are built from the bottom up. She said, quote, strong people don't need strong leaders. The SNCC would embody that philosophy. Decentralized, grassroots, trusting the people they organized. And man, isn't that the truth. Being in Montgomery this weekend with. With people, just ordinary people getting together, feeling the energy of that. And I'm getting goose. As soon as I mention it, I always get goosebumps. I could feel. Feel the energy and the spirit of people who have come before me in that mo. In that moment, the power of that. That it's ordinary people that create extraordinary change. In May of 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, organized the Freedom Rides. The Supreme Court had ruled in Boynton vs. Virginia, 1960, that segregation in interstate bus terminals was unconstitutional. The federal government, of course, was not enforcing the rules ruling. So CORE decided to force the issue. Thirteen people, seven black, six white, boarded two buses in Washington, D.C. bound for New Orleans. They would ride together, sitting in integrated seating, using segregated facilities and daring the south to respond. A lot of these instances are essentially what the conservatives have done to get the rollback of the Civil Rights Voting Act. The. The pushback of Roe is they create cases to get it taken to the Supreme Court. And that's exactly what. What progressives and people that actually want to maintain civil rights need to be ready to do. And, and white folks, we have to be in the Mire. And we have to be putting ourselves between the abusers and minorities like that. That is our role. There is. And that's not to say we won't get arrested, we won't get hurt. Several of my friends have been arrested this last year in protests. But there's a modicum of safety that we can provide and we have to be willing to allow that to happen. We have to be willing for these cases to emerge. In Michigan, In Rock Hill, South Carolina, John Lewis, then 21 years old, the son of sharecroppers from Pike County, Alabama, was beaten at the bus terminal when he tried to enter the white waiting room. It would not be the last time, of course, if you know anything about John Lewis, that he bled for the movement. He was beaten so many times during the civil rights years that his fellow organizers lost count. In Aniston, Alabama, one of the buses was firebombed. A mob slashed its tires, forced it to stop, and then set it on fire. Fire. Freedom riders stumbled out of the burning bus, choking on smoke. They were beaten by the mob with metal pipes. While law enforcement watched. A photograph of the burning bus taken by a young wire service photographer went around the world. So, like, again, I want to pause because there's the language of rhetoric, right? It is very clear in this history who the aggressor is. And so often, even now, that same aggressor, that same energy is pointing at black people, pointing at protesters, calling them terrorists, calling them, them, you know, what's the word I'm looking for? You know, disturbances, disturbing the peace, calling them rogue. Because all those second amendment don't give a about standing up to an unruly government because it's here and all they're doing is licking boots. But they use that language to disenfranchise and dehumanize the people that they oppose so that they seem like the godly law abiding people while they enact this violence. There is no way to read about the Reconstruction era, the quote, redemption period, Jim Crow and civil rights without being very clear, clear on who the aggressor was. The second bus reached Birmingham where commissioner of public safety Eugene Bull Connor had told the KKK they would have 15 minutes with the Freedom Riders before police arrives. The Klan beat the writers with baseball bats, pipes and fists. In the bus terminal, a writer named Walter Bergman suffered a stroke from the beating that left him partially paralyzed. In Montgomery, it was the same scene. There was a mob at the bus terminal. Police absent the beating of writers and journalists alike. One federal observer Was beaten unconscious. And I want to be clear. The people who participated in these beatings are still alive. Many of them. It was them or it was their parents. This is not ancient history. And they are the same people whose grandson is now a legislator in the states. This is not ancient history. They. They often. I hate how they do this. They put these pictures in black and white, and it makes it seem like it's old, like it's so long ago. And that's done intentionally. It is not old. These people are still alive, and they have passed their poison down because they were never prosecuted for it. And this time we will make that mistake. Attorney general Robert Kennedy, under enormous pressure, deeply reluctant, slow to act, eventually negotiated an agreement with Alabama governor John Patterson to provide some protection for the riders to continue to miss his Mississippi. In Mississippi, the writers were arrested en masse, sent to the parchment farm, the state penitentiary, one of the most brutal in the country, where they were stripped, put in dirty cells, subjected to psychological torture. Guards confiscated their toothbrushes, their mattresses, their clothing. They sang freedom songs, and the guards responded by tightening the cell windows, making the heat unbearable for them. And you know what they did? They kept singing, there's no doubt who's on the right and wrong side. And we. I read this and it's so enraging because I see it mirrored now. By summer's end, more than 400 Freedom Riders had been arrested. The interstate commerce commission, finally pressured by the Kennedy administration to act, issued regulations mandating desegregation of interstate terminals. The freedom rides worked, but it costs people. Young boy was paralyzed, People were beaten. People were put in prison for using a bus terminal. Let's talk about the state governments we're doing during this time because again, we have to understand that the violence visited on civil rights activists is not just mob violence. It's state sponsored terrorism. That's what it is. Like they. They called Renee good and Alex pretty terrorists. A woman in her minivan and a man who was helping a young woman off the ground, and he got shot 10 times in the back. But they use the word terrorist again so that they can dehumanize and then justify the actions they're already planning to take. What happened in the civil rights movement and the violence that I think will be enacted now, I think we will see an increase in state violence is state sponsored terrorism. Just because it's legal doesn't make it right. The Mississippi state sovereignty commission, created by the Mississippi state legislature in 1956, funded with state tax dollars dollars, was an intelligence agency Whose explicit purpose was to maintain segregation. That's all they were there for. It operated for nearly two decades until 1973. Its files, 102. Excuse me, 132,000 pages of documents was sealed for 25 years and wasn't released until the late 1990s. Revealed extensive surveillance. State the sovereignty commission hired black informants to infiltrate civil rights organizations. It shared information about civil rights workers, like their names, their addresses, their skin schedules with the ku klux klan and the white citizen councils. It worked with local sheriffs to arrest and harass activists. It compiled dossiers on thousands of mississippians. It attempted to blackmail civil rights leaders with information about their personal lives. It paid pro segregation propaganda to be distributed nationally. And the white citizens councils, founded in Mississippi in 1954 in direct response to Brown versus the Board of education, the integration of schools, which is why segregation academy started, it's why liberty university exists, spread rapidly across the south. They were, quote, the respectable face of the clan, essentially. If the clan was the terrorist arm, citizens council was the economic arm. Their members were bankers, merchants, mayors and sheriffs. They enforced segregation through economic pressure, Calling in loans, denying credit, firing employees, canceling insurance policies, or things like refusing to sell seed to black farmers. In sunflower county, mississippi, after a group of black citizens attempted to register to vote in 1962, the Citizens Council published their names in the local local paper, and every single one of them was fired from their job, evicted from their homes, or had their credit canceled within days. And then, of course, there was the ku klux klan. The kkk of the civil rights era, which was a revived klan of the 1950s and 60s, was not a fraternal organization of bigots. Or at least it wasn't just that. This was a paramilitary, terrorist organization with deep roots in southern law enforcement. They still have those roots. Wilson county, one county over from where I live, Deeply embedded with klan leadership in their police department. I believe the sheriff of the county also. Don't quote me on that one. But within their law enforcement, this is. This is still happening. What I'm reading to you right now is not that much different than what's happening now. It's more covert now, but pretty soon they're not going to have to be covert anymore. In many southern counties still is. The klan and the sheriff's department were functionally the same organization. The killings are documented in the FBI files. We have congressional testimony, court records, and I'm going to name some of them. Herbert Lee, a farmer and naacp member in liberty, mississippi, who was working with the SNCC voter registration organizers was shot dead in broad daylight in September of 1961 by E. H. Hurst, a Mississippi state legislator. Hearst claims self defense. An all white coroner's jury took one hour to exonerate him. Louise Allen, the only black witness to Lee's murder was shot dead in his driveway jam January of 1964. No one was charged. Medgar Evans, the Mississippi NAACP field secretary, a World War II veteran, one of the bravest men of his generation, was shot in the back in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi in June of 1963. He was coming back from a meeting. His wife Merlee and his children rushed outside when they heard the shot. His killer, Byron De La Beckwith, a Klan member, was tried twice by all white juries in 1964. Both ended in hung juries. He lived free for 1330 years. He wasn't convicted until 1994 only after New evidence emerged. And Merly Evers who had never stopped fighting for justice, pushed for a new trial. Addie Mae Collins. Cynthia Wesley, Carol Robertson. Carol Denise McNair. Four little girls between the ages of 11 and 14 were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15th, 1963. It was a Sunday morning morning. They were in the church basement putting on their choir robes when dynamo dynamite that was planted by clan members Robert chambliss, Thomas Blanton Jr, Herman Frank Cash and Bobby Frank Cherry exploded. 22 others were injured. The four girls were killed because they were in the basement putting their choir robes on. Robert Chambliss was not convicted until 1977. Thomas Blanton Jr. And Bobby Frank Cherry were not convicted in 2000 until 2001 and 2002. Herman Frank Cash died in 1994 without ever facing charges. This, this is the timeline of American quote, justice for four little girls in their Sunday choir robes. And they got away with it because quite frankly finally getting a sentence in 2001 is not good enough. That's way too many years of freedom. By 1963, the Civil Rights movement was at a crossroads. The Kennedy administration was sympathetic but cautious because. Because they were who didn't want to lose the white vote. Deep breaths, deep breaths. They were terrified of alienating the southern white Democrats. They were moving with agonizing slowness. I'm sorry, it frustrates me so much like in, in a world because I used to make the. I used to say the phrase a lot of. Well, they, you know, it was a different time or they were reflection. They were men of their time. I used to, I Used to give the founding fathers kind of a passion us like eight to ten years ago with that kind of language. But then when you look at history, even in the time of Columbus, there were people arguing that indigenous people should be treated as humans with respect. There was always people in every period who knew it was wrong and refused to let it happen. John Brown is my favorite, knew it was wrong, gave his life for it because he, he saw slavery for the great evil that it was. And he was willing to go to war for, for it. He was willing to challenge it. He was willing to drag slave owners out of their houses and make them pay the consequences of their evil actions. There was always somebody who knew it was wrong. So the moral case was clear with the Kennedy administration, but the political will in Washington, of course, was absent. Birmingham, Alabama, was deliberately chosen as the site of the next major confrontation. Chosen because of Bull Connor. Remember, Eugene Bull Connor, the commissioner of public safety was a man whose racial hatred was theat operatic and he was incapable of restraint. King and the southern Christian leadership conference understood something about Connor. He could be provoked into revealing on camera exactly what the civil rights was up against. The Birmingham campaign, which was codenamed Project C for confrontation began in April of 1963. Protesters marched, they sat in, they prayed. Man, when I was at the rally this weekend in Montgomery, like, I, I felt like I was in like a spiritual experience. I felt like I was in a worship service. Like we were singing hymns, gospel songs, spirituals, people were praying and they were dancing. I, I, there was something, what they understood in the 60s about the power of this type of non violent resistance, specifically around music, Music, I think I feel like I got a taste of that this weekend and it, it has, it has made me so grateful, so emotional, so inspired and so galvanized. And that's what they did here in Birmingham. Knowing it would force a confrontation, they were arrested by the hundreds. On Good Friday, April 12, King himself was arrested and placed in solitary confinement in a Birmingham jail. They are responding to a letter from a white Alabama clergyman who criticized the protests as, quote, unwise and untimely timely. Right. Even these, quote, progressive people that are like, I mean, is it really the right time to do that? Do you really have to say anything? Is it that big of a deal? Fuck you. Disrespectfully. King wouldn't say that. He was much more composed than I am right now, of course. In response to this letter, he wrote what would become known as the letter from the Birmingham jail, One of the great moral documents of the 20th century century. Within that document, he wrote, quote, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed. The jails were full. The adult population of the black community had largely been arrested. The SCLC made a controversial decision. They would send the children. On May 2, 1963, what become known as D Day or the Children's Crusade, more than a thousand black children, children, some as young as 6 years old, marched out of the 16th Street Baptist Church into the streets of Birmingham singing freedom songs. They were arrested by the hundreds. 50 children per bus to the jail. The next day. When more came, Bill Bull Connor had run out of jail space. These are children as young as six years old. But Bull Connor couldn't hold back. He couldn't restrain himself. Because that white supremacy, that white insecurity, that white mediocrity is so affirming, afraid, and it is so insubstantial, it can't help but lash out because it is so afraid of its own inferiority. Because if you felt supreme, you would not need to work so damn hard to push everyone else down. So he deployed fire hoses and he deployed police dogs. You've seen these photos. The photographs in the film footage went around the world. High pressure hoses, water powerful enough to strip bark off of trees was directed at children, at men and women, knocking them off their feet, tearing their clothing and slamming them against buildings. German shepherd police dogs were lunging at black teenagers. The photograph of a dog lunging at the stomach of a 15 year old boy named Walter Gadson appeared on the front page of the New York Times and newspapers across the world. President Kennedy, viewing these images, said they made him sick. Then do something, Mr. President. He was not alone, of course. The photographs did what years of reports and testimony had not. They made the abstract concrete and the distant immediate. Immediate. They made it impossible to look away. Within weeks, Birmingham's white business establishment, their city having been made an international pariah, negotiated an agreement desegregating lunch counters, drinking fountains and restrooms and committing to hire black workers. Bombings of the homes of civil rights leaders followed, of course. Riots followed the bombings. But the deal held. And on June 11th of 1963, President Kennedy went on national television and announced that he was sending a civil rights bill to Congress. Congress, he said, 100 years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves. Yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. And I want to credit Kennedy here. I just feel frustrated at the slowness of their movement. Because when it doesn't affect you, you can turn your head slightly and pretend that it's not a real problem. The March on Washington. August 28, 1963. 100 years, almost to the day after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, a quarter of a million people gathered on the National Mall. John Lewis, then 23 years, delivered a speech that had been edited under pressure from older movement leaders and administration officials. The original version was even more militant, calling for a march through the heart of Dixie the way Sherman did. Even the edited version crackled with urgency. He said, we will march through the heart of Dixie the way Sherman did. We shall not. Sorry. The original said, we shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground nonviolently. Mm. Oh, that's so good. Martin Luther spoke. Martin Luther King spoke last. And he improvised. He put aside his prepared text when gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, standing nearby, called out, tell them about the dream, Martin. And he did. And of course, you have heard the very famous, I have a dream that one day, you know, this. Kennedy was assassinated three months later. Lyndon B. Johnson, a complicated Texan with a complex history on civil rights, but a very shrewd understanding of political power. And by 1964, a genuine commitment to the cause. Outwardly, I'm always. I've always kind of been a little bit on the fence with this, but it does seem like he understood that that was the next path forward. So I'm going to give him this one. I'm going to say that he understood. He took the reins and he did push the civil rights bill forward. The Civil Rights act of 1964 was passed after a 60 day Senate filibuster. They were not going to have it. And you can guess it was the Southern southerners the longest in Senate history. It prohibited the discrimination in public accommodations, outlawed employment discrimination, and cut off federal funding to programs that practice discrimination. The reason they hate DEI so much is not because they think those people are underqualified. They know they're not. They want the good old boys club back where they can choose not to hire anyone they want because that's government interference. But it did not fully protect the right to vote. Vote. And for part two, we are going to get into freedom Summer and how the civil rights voting act came to be. And I want. I know that I. I have this. This preacher energy and I get riled up and this stuff does it. It angers me so deeply. There. There is a core part of my body that aches and burns when I read things like this. But I. And I know that right now, as. Especially if, if you're learning a lot of this for the first time, or maybe you're deconstructing, or maybe you're like, how could it be that states could do this again? Understand that there is light at the end of this tunnel. I cannot shake this palatable, persistent hope that we are in for a bumpy ride. But we are seeing the same poison that was driven under the soil seep back up. We are seeing what these movements really are, what this country really is at some of its core levels. And we get the opportunity to grab it from the root and rip it it out of the ground and burn it. We get an opportunity to build systems that actually work for everyone. And I believe that in my lifetime this will be the path to the America that America has always claimed she is. To a place where we have real democracy, real representation, real equality for everyone. I truly believe that. But in order for that to happen, we have to be so civically minded, they can't stop us. That means I don't want to just know who's running for governor or Senate or the president. I want to know who's running for the school, school board. I am going to be so involved. I am like a fly you can't get rid of. I am glued to you. I am stuck to you. I am giving you friction every step of the way. And then we have to be willing to go to the streets. We have to be willing to economically strike because when we do that, we have the power. It is scary. I get it. I get it. I do. I've had. I have had moments in this journey for myself where I have been attacked. People have showed up outside my home. I understand that that fear is reasonable, but understand that at its core, at its root, we have the peace power. They would not come so hard after our votes and our representation if it didn't matter. They would not work so hard to manipulate these elections if the elections didn't matter. They would not work so hard to keep us distracted buying things, buying into materialism if it didn't matter. Our money matters, our vote matters. You matter. And I don't want you to believe that, whatever your circumstances, stance, that you can't be a part of this. We all can. We all have to. The way that I described being in Montgomery this weekend is, if you've seen sinners, if you haven't, this won't make as much sense, but hopefully I can explain it in sinners Fabulous movie. One of my new favorite movies of all time. Easily in my top three. Now, there's a part where Sammy, one of the main characters, he's playing the guitar and he's singing this amazing blue song at this juke joint and everybody's dancing. And as he does it, it. You start to see all of these. There's indigenous dancers and musicians popping up. And then a guy shows up playing an electric guitar. And you see all of the music bring to life everyone from both the past and the present. This. This culture of music, the. The power of the music that moves us. And what I felt this weekend in Montgomery was that feeling with this movement, I felt the power and the presence of every single person who has come before me, who has said, this is not right. And I don't care if you say it's legal or not, I'm against you. Because this is not the first time that humanity has stood up and said, I'm not going to take this anymore. There has been one every century. There has been people that refuse to take it lying down. And I felt all of those people, but I also felt the future that I'm standing there because I've got a great niece that's a year and a half years old, one and a half years old, that I want her to understand what this is about. I want her to always advocate for equality for others. I want her. Her to have the rights my mother had. And it was this moment of this awakening, this spirit of revolution that I. I wish I could package it and send it to you in the mail. But what it showed me was that change is possible again, but we cannot. We cannot allow ourselves complacency or comfort or to be so crippled by fear that we refuse to act. And I'm very excited to see you for part two, two for the Civil Rights Voting Act. Next week on flipping Tables.