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Monty Mader
Nobody's free until everybody's free By Fannie Lou Hamer in The summer of 1964, Mississippi was a place where democracy came with a price. For generations, black Americans across the south had been locked out of the ballot box through terror, poll taxes, impossible literacy tests, and the constant, suffocating threat of violence. In Mississippi, the most segregated state in the union, less than 7% of eligible black voters were registered. Not because they didn't want to vote, because the system, backed by sheriffs, pastors, judges, bombers in the nights, and white supremacy groups, had made sure they couldn't. And then, in the summer of 1964, something shifted. Nearly a thousand young black people, black organizers who had already been fighting for years, joined by white college students across the country, poured into Mississippi with a Mission Register, voters open freedom schools and force the eyes of a nation onto what was happening in the American South. They called it Freedom Summer. The state called it an invasion. They called them instigators, and the violence that they met them with was swift and savage. Three civil rights workers, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, were murdered within weeks of the summer beginning, their bodies buried in an earthen dam. 37 black churches were firebombed. Homes were shot up in the dark. Volunteers were beaten on courthouse steps in broad daylight. And they stayed. They refused to leave because the people who had lived under this terror their entire lives were not going to leave. Women like Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper's daughter who tried to register to vote and was thrown off her plantation, beaten in a Mississippi jail and nearly killed and stood back up, walked to the microphone and told the whole world what America was doing to its own people. This is the story of that summer and of everything that it unleashed and what it has for us today, what it can teach us today. Welcome back to Flipping Tables. I'm Monty Mader. This episode, we're going back to the back half of the civil rights movement for part two. We'll hear from people who lived it, examine the forces that tried to stop it, and reckon with just how hard and how costly the fight for basic human dignity truly was. Freedom was never given. It was demanded. Which is why I will never allow people to say to women or to black people, oh, well, you were given your rights. No, they weren't. It was demanded, it was marched for, it was bled for, it was died for. And it was one. Welcome to Flipping Tables. Hello, everybody, and welcome back. Just two quick announcements. First, apologies for the podcast being late. Last week had a huge technical issue on my dashboard where all of the podcast disappeared. The episodes were totally gone, so I didn't upload anything until I figured out what was going on. I didn't want the episode to be lost. Thankfully, all of it was backed up, retrieval salvageable, and now you have those episodes. But apologies for those being late. They will return to their normal release schedule as well as you hear this one. So apologies for that being late. And the second thing is, Patreon users, you should be seeing the new exclusive merch for Flipping Tables for myself as well as for the highway to Hell podcast, because some of you listen to that as well. That's going to be exclusive to you for the next two weeks before it's released to the general public. And I would love to know what you think, especially about Havarti the Cheese Goblin, our new mascot over on highway to Hell. Really excited for this episode. If you've listened to part one, you already heard how emotional I got upset I got with part one. I'm probably going to be exactly the same with part two. Between what's going on in the south and the rollback of these type of rights, as well as, you know, the ongoing attack on women's rights, I don't know if you saw my video about it, North Carolina's Bill 1232, which thankfully I think is going to get shut down, I don't think it's going to pass. But it's always an indicator of what the next steps are. The same steps that everybody's been saying would happen. This bill proposed that human life now starts at fertilization, not conception, and that anyone who tries to prevent implantation of a fertilized egg would be punishable by the death penalty or life impri. So that would effectively make illegal across the board, IUDs, IVF, and the morning after pill. Uh, it also allowed for people to defend an unimplanted egg by murdering someone if they suspected they were trying to prevent the implantation of the egg, which would then end the implantation of the egg, which is a weird rationale. It also allowed for the prosecution of anyone who has worked in labor and delivery because of dncs for miscarriages, anyone who has had to make those decisions for women in care. I don't know why it's so hard, you know, to have the belief that medical professionals should make medical decisions. I don't know. I feel like that's a better idea idea than, you know, an old white dude politician who doesn't know what a period is and doesn't know where the CLIT is and making those decisions for women. That just, that makes sense to me. But yes, without all of that going on in the states and all this while Trump is stealing tax dollars to pay off insurrectionists and he's building a wrestling cage on the front lawn of the White House to celebrate his birthday. We live in a clown car. Anyways, I'm gonna get into part two. So if I get a little emotional, a little sassy, a little spicy, you know why, there's a lot going on. I'm also, and I will admit this, many of you know, I bought a house, I moved. It's been a really slow kind of settling in process. So I'm still sleeping on the floor and things aren't unpacked because I've been traveling. And it makes me a little extra spicy because I don't. I still feel like I don't live anywhere. Mississippi 1964 is by any meaningful measure, a police state. The state government was controlled by men who explicitly committed themselves to preserving segregation by any means necessary. And I want to point out, and the reason I do is because we see this reflected in the movement. Now, many of these people were devoted Christians or claimed to be, but they believed in what they called the natural order. That, of course put white people on the top, and they were committed to doing whatever it takes. And they used the same religious justification language we're hearing now to justify and preserve segregation. Governor Paul Johnson of Mississippi had run on a platform of standing in the schoolhouse door, meaning blocking black people from entering. The citizens council had its tentacles in every institution, and the Klan operated with near complete impunity. In 1964, only 6.7% of eligible black voters in Mississippi were registered. In some counties with black majorities, the number was effectively zero. In Humphreys county, there was a 9,000 black adults of voting age. No one was registered, not a single person. The student nonviolent coordinating committee and the Congress of racial Equality in the spring of 1964 organized what would become known as Freedom Summer. It was a massive voter registration and education drive across Mississippi, deliberately staffed with hundreds of white college students from the north. The strat. The strategy was cynical but rational. The lives of white northern college students, the children of middle class families with access to media, politicians and lawyers, were valued differently than the lives of black Mississippians. If white students were beaten or killed, the national response would be different. And they were right. But it wasn't enough. On June 21st of 1964, the first day of Freedom Summer, three civil rights workers disappeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi. James Cheney, 21, a black core worker from Meridian, Mississippi. Andrew Goodman, 20, a white college student from New York. And Michael Schwermer, 24, a white Corps organizer from New York who'd been organizing in Mississippi for months and whom the clan called, quote, goatee and had targeted him specifically. They had gone to investigate the burning of a black church. On their way back, they were stopped by Neshoba county deputy sheriff named Cecil Price, who was a clan member. They were held in jail, released at night when a mob had assembled and then driven out into the night and shot. Their bodies were buried in an earthen dam. And, and with especially these, these drives to register people to vote are still being demonized in the South. They're starting to put restrictions on voter registration drives where you can host them, who can host them to make it more and more difficult to get people registered to vote. Because the higher the voter turnout, the less likely they are to pass what they want to pass. Republicans know that right now their policies are super unpopular. So even in Tennessee and some of the other southern states, they are starting to crack down even now on being able to help, like to do voter registration drives. It took 44 days to find these young men's bodies. During that time, the searchers, many of them navy divers, found the decomposed bodies of seven other black men in Mississippi waterways. These men, their names largely unknown, their deaths uninvestigated, had simply disappeared. No one had searched for them because no one with power cared enough to look. The murders of Cheney, Goodman and Schwarmer were documented through FBI investigation and subsequent prosecutions. Edgar Ray Killen, the Klan member who organized the murders, was not convicted until 2005, 41 years later, when he was 80 years old, he was convicted not of murder, but of manslaughter. He served time until his death in 2018. That's a. That's way too much free time in life for organizing the murder of three students. It's way too much. And, and this as. And if you're listening to my work, you. You probably believe, like, and understand the racist core of America that has always been there. Whenever people get on my channel and they're like, racism was dead until Obama became president, I'm like, so a black guy became president, and all of the sudden everybody became racist. Really? Really? They just. Because a black man became president, now they're race. Okay, sure, sure, sure. No, they were racist beforehand, which is why they were mad. A black man became president, but it has always been there. It has always been the core. We're talking someone got away with a triple homicide for 41 years. And even then, he was only convicted of manslaughter. And meanwhile, if you again watch my page recently, last, last week, there was a execution scheduled here in Tennessee for a man who was convicted of a triple homicide in the 90s. His name is Tony Carruthers. He has a mental handicap. He is a black man. He was forced to defend himself in court. He also was not convicted on any physical evidence. The prosecution lied to the jury about what had happened to the bodies. At one point, the only witness against him whose testimony convicted him was a paid state informant that the state lied about, and then the informant recanted later. And there's new physical evidence like fingerprints and DNA that could exonerate Tony, and the state refuses to test it. Just by comparison, Tony Carruthers versus this clan member, what was his name? Edgar Ray Killen, who organized the murders. Very different. Very different. And he only got manslaughter. Tony Carruthers got a triple homicide, and they won't test the evidence that could exonerate him. Cecil Price, who was the deputy sheriff, was convicted in 1967 in a federal civil rights prosecution along with six other clan members of conspiring to deprive Chaney, Goodman and Schwermer of their civil rights. If you remember from the Leo murders, this was the same way that they got the Klan members that killed Viola Liozzo. The maximum sentence available under the federal statute was 10 years. Price served four years, triple homicide. And he got four years because they couldn't get him. They couldn't convict them on murder charges because nobody in Mississippi would convict them. Because they wanted these voter registration people out of the state so they had to get them on civil rights charges. And price only served four years. Freedom Summer brought nearly 700 volunteers to Mississippi. They ran freedom schools teaching literacy and civic education. They organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as a challenge to the all white Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. The challenge was presented to the credentials committee at the convention of August in 19. At the convention in August of 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer, the sharecropper's daughter I mentioned earlier, the woman who had been fired, shot at and beaten nearly to death for just trying to vote, testified that before the committee. Her testimony, broadcast on national television, was devastating and it was simple and direct and powerful. She asked, is this America, the land of the free, the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America? President Johnson, watching from the White House, was so shaken by her testimony, so afraid of its political effect, that he called an impromptu press conference to pull cameras away from the televised hearing. Historians have documented this in. In LBJ's own recorded phone calls. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was offered a compromise. Two at large seats with no voting rights. They rejected it. Fannie Lou Hamer's response was we didn't come all this way for no two seats. They went home to Mississippi. But they had changed something. The moral bankruptcy of the Democratic party's accommodation of Southern white supremacy was now very visible to the world. The political realignment that would shape American politics for the next half century had begun. And remember that the civil rights is responsible for the party switch. This is when the conservative values switch sides. Selma, Alabama and the march that changed everything. I mentioned this briefly last week. The Selma campaign of early 1965 is the climax of the voting rights struggle. The moment when the full weight of state violence against peaceful demonstrators was displayed before the cameras of the nation and the conscience of the world, forcing them to crack open. Dallas County, Alabama, where Selma is the county seat, had a black population that constituted a majority of the county's residents. In 1965, there was approximately 15,000 black adults of voting age in Dallas County. Only 335 were registered to vote. The Dallas County Voter League had been working to register black voters since the 1920s. The work was slow and of course, very dangerous. Sheriff Jim Clark, a man who wore a button on his uniform that Read never. You can imagine what that means. And carried an electric cattle prod, made sure their work was slow and dangerous. The SNCC had been working in Selma for years, and In January of 1965, the SCLC joined them and the campaign intensified. Day after day, black citizens attempted to register at the Dallas county courthouse. Day after day, sheriff Clark and his posse turned them away, arrested them, or beat them. On February 18th of 1965, in nearby Marion, Alabama, a protest march was attacked by state troopers and sheriff's deputies. In the dark, the troopers had smashed the street lights before moving in. A young man named Jimmy Lee Jackson, trying to protect his mother and grandfather from the beating, was shot in the stomach at point blank range by a state trooper named James Bernard Fowler. Jackson died eight days later. He was only 26. James Bernard Fowler was not charged with any crime until till 2007. 42 years later, he murdered a protester who was trying to protect his mother and grandfather. 42 years later, and only because there was pressure to prosecute from the Jackson family and civil rights organizations, he was charged with murder. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor manslaughter. And he served six fucking months for killing a kid. Six months. Here it goes. All right. Jimmie Lee Jackson's death generated the idea for a march from selma to Montgomery, 54 miles to the state capitol to lay their grievances at the feet of governor George Wallace, the man who had declared in his inaugural address, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. And that's exactly what the south is trying to go Back to. Sunday, March 7th of 1965, approximately 600 marchers gathered at Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams. I've been in this church now. They walked to the Edmund Pettus bridge, which, by the way, was named after a confederate general and grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. And they crossed the crest of the bridge and saw what was waiting for them across the far end of the bridge. A wall of state troopers in blue helmets and gas masks. Sheriff Clark's mounted posse, Clark himself, and they had an ambulance waiting. John Lewis, who was at the front of the march, later described the moment of crossing the crest of the bridge. He said, quote, I stopped dead in my tracks. So did Hosea Williams. I said, hosea, can you swim? He said, no. I said, neither can I, and I'm not sure we're going to get across this bridge alive. They were given two minutes to disperse, but they did not wait two minutes. Mounted troopers advanced at a gallop Troopers on foot move forward with clubs and tear gas. And it was all captured on film and television. It was shown that night on abc, interrupting the broadcast of judgment at Nuremberg. A film about Nazi war crimes. Viewers at home watching one moment of film about the Holocaust, the next. A film about American state troopers beating peaceful marchers on a bridge in Alabama made their own connections, as they should, because we have, you know, in American media, we have all these movies depicting America's the hero against the evil Nazis. And they were. But they neglect to say that much of the Nazi rhetoric and their propaganda and their programs was based on American eugenists, eugenist movements. Movements and on Jim Crow. That is the connection that.
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Martin Luther King Jr.
That.
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Monty Mader
That's exactly what happened. And it was this film that Viola Liuto. Liuzzo, I always want to make it. It's Z. Liuzzo was. That was the film that she saw when she came down from Detroit, when we covered her episode. That was what she saw, where she was like, I have to get in my car and go help. I can't allow this to happen. John Lewis's skull was fractured by a trooper's club. He was left on a bridge bleeding and managed to make it back to Brown Chapel. He was photographed with a gaping wound in his head, still in his overcoat, leading others in prayer. He was only 25 years old, if you know John Lewis. He went on to serve 17 terms in the United States Congress representing Georgia. He died in 2020. One of the great heroes of American democracy, Amelia Boynton Robertson, was beaten unconscious, left lying in a roadway. A photograph of her lying in a trooper's arms, appearing lifeless became one of the iconic images of this moment. And of course, the nation erupted as we should have. President Johnson, who had been moving very slowly on voting rights legislation, had the force of public opinion suddenly and irresistibly behind him. Eight days after Bloody Sunday, he went to a joint session of Congress and delivered what the most powerful civil rights address by an American president. He spoke about Selma. He spoke about what that country has seen. And we're going to listen to that speech now.
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Lyndon B. Johnson
But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of America, Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too, because it's not just Negroes, but really it's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall Overcome. As a man whose roots go deeply into Southern soil, I know how agonizing racial feelings are. I know how difficult it is to reshape the attitudes and the structure of our society. But a century has passed, more than a hundred years since the Negro was freed. And he is not fully freed tonight. It was more than a hundred years ago that Abraham Lincoln, a great president of another party, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. But emancipation is a proclamation and not a fact. A century has passed, more than a hundred years since equality was promised. And yet the Negro is not equal. A century has passed since the day of promise, and the promise is unkind. The time of justice has now come. I tell you that I believe sincerely that no force can hold it back. It is right in the eyes of man and God that it should come. And when it does, I think that day will brighten the lives of every American. For Negroes are not the only victims. How many white children have gone uneducated? How many white families have lived in stark poverty? How many white lives have been scarred by fear because we've wasted our energy and our substance to maintain the barriers of hatred and terror? So I say to all of you here and to all in the nation tonight that those who appeal to you to hold on to the past do so at the cost of denying you your future. This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all. All black and white, all north and south, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies. Poverty, ignorance, disease. They are enemies. Not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies, too, Poverty, disease and ignorance, we shall overcome.
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Monty Mader
He took the words of the movement's anthem and made them words of the federal government. There were actual lawmakers who wept on the floor of Congress. The Selma to Montgomery march, in its third attempt, took three tries right, the first ending in Bloody Sunday. The second, having been turned back, finally completed its journey. On March 25th of 1965. Under the Protection of federalized Alabama National Guard and army troops, 25,000 people walked to the steps of the Alabama State Capitol, again mentioned before, Viola Liuzzo. Liuzzo, the white Detroit housewife, the mother of five who had driven to Selma to help shuttle marchers, was shot and killed while driving along Highway 80. That night, she was murdered by Klan members, including a man who turned out to be an FBI informant. That informant, Gary Thomas Rowe Jr. Was given immunity for his testimony. The Klan members were convicted of violating Liuzzo's civil rights because murder was a state charge and the state of Alabama refused to prosecute these men for killing her. He was sentenced, and they were each sentenced to 10 years for civil rights violations. And we do have a full episode on hers. And I always say her name is Liuzzo in there. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's Liuzzo. Now let's talk about the Civil Rights Voting Act. What changed and what didn't and what we're seeing now. The Voting Rights act of 1965 was signed by President Johnson on August 6th of 1965. So much of not just Freedom Summer, but the march to Montgomery made this possible. It made it happen. Never believe anybody who says, oh, well, they gave you the rights. No, they didn't. It was earned and fought for. It was by any measure a revolutionary bill. It prohibited the use of literacy tests, poll taxes, and other devices designed to prevent minorities from voting. It required states with histories of voting discrimination determined by a formula based on electoral participation and the presence of these devices like poll taxes to obtain pre clearance from the Justice Department before making any changes to voting laws. Which has all been rolled back. Which has all been rolled back. So states that were known to discriminate, if they were going to change a voting law and put in a hurdle, they had to get clearance from the Justice Department first. Federal examiners could be sent directly into southern counties to register voters. The results, of course, were immediate and profound. In Mississippi, black voter registration went from 6.7% in 1964 to 59.8% in 1967. In Alabama, it went from 19.3% to 51.6%. Black Southerners, for the first time since Reconstruction, were registering and voting in numbers that reflected their share of the population. This is about being able to choose your representative that your voice gets heard. Black elected officials appeared across the South. John Lewis, of course, would eventually go to congress. Andrew Young would go to Congress and become the mayor of Atlanta and the UN Ambassador Towns that had never had a black elected official elected one, and then two, and then more. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic party eventually transformed into electoral power the legal structure of Jim Crow disenfranchisement had been dismantled. But. There's always a but. The Voting Rights act addressed the most explicit mechanisms of disenfranchisement. It did not address poverty. It did not address economic power that white elites had accumulated over centuries. It did not address the fact that in many southern counties, black communities had been deliberately kept undereducated, economically dependent, or intentionally destroyed if they got too successful or they wanted their land. It did not address the ways in which political Power, once achieved, could be gerrymandered away, which is exactly what, what we're seeing right now. Resistance to black political power did not end, of course, with the Voting Rights Acts. It changed form. If you couldn't stop black people from voting, you could make their votes count for less. Gerrymandering. You know it. You know the thing. Drawing legislative districts to dilute black voting strength became a standard tool at large. Elections in which the whole county or city votes for all the seats rather than by district were adopted specifically to prevent black candidates from winning in all black or black majority areas. These tactics were documented in scholarly work, litigation records. The Supreme Court addressed some of them in subsequent decisions. But the structural disadvantages, the poverty, the lack of capital, the inferior schools remained. It's still here. We are obviously seeing it now. They are using gerrymandering as a tool not just to keep the House, but if they can control enough states, they can also call for an Article 5 Constitutional Convention and get rid of the amendments they keep talking about getting rid of, like the 14th Amendment, the 17th Amendment and the 19th Amendment. Now, the 14th Amendment is your birthright citizenship. 17th Amendment is that you get to vote for your senators, not your state legislators picking them. And of course the 19th amendment that the conservative movement really hates right now, a woman's right to vote. Before we get into some of the Supreme Court rulings that really gutted the Voting Rights act, we're going to take our first of two mid show sponsor breaks again. If you would like these episodes early and ad free, you can sign up@patreon.com montemater thank you for listening to those sponsors. Before I get into the Supreme Court's recent decisions that have really started to roll back the protections of the Civil Rights act, of the Civil Rights Voting act, let's talk about gerrymandering itself and where it originated in its history. Of course, it's a mashup of a politician's name and a salamander. But the story begins in 1812 at the office of Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts. Jerry was a founding father, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a future vice President of the United States. And in the winter of 1812, he was willing to bend the rules a little bit to keep his party in power. At Jerry's direction, the Massachusetts legislature redrew the states states senate districts in a way that was nakedly partisan, like very clearly carving up the map to concentrate federalist voters into as few districts as possible while spreading Democratic Republican voters across as many as they could win one district in particular. Snaking through essex county, was so grotesquely shaped that a politician cartoonist at the Boston gazette Noticed it represented a salamander. The editors named it after the governor who drew it. And the gerrymander was born. That's where it comes from. Gerry himself reportedly found the whole thing, of course, distasteful, but he signed the bill anyway. He lost the governorship that November, but the technique he lent his name to would outlast him, of course. Over A century later, two centuries, in the decades following 1812, gerrymandering became a standard feature of the American political life. It was practiced freely by both parties, Largely accepted as an unfortunate but inevitable part of electoral politics. Because you gotta stay in power. You can't possibly do it fairly and actually represent the will of the people. What. As the country expanded and new states entered the union, the drawing of district lines became one of the most coveted levers of power, Especially because it determined which states would remain free states, which states would be slave states as new states entered the union. But after the civil war, gerrymandering took on, obviously, a different and darker dimension. During reconstruction, black Americans in the south voted in enormous numbers for the first time. We talked about that in our first episode. Black men were elected to congress, the state legislatures, local offices immediately. And then when re. When federal troops withdrew, Remember this period that white supremacists called, quote, redemption? They deployed every tool available to make sure there was no black political power. Power and deliberate redrawing of district lines was part of that. It's what they're doing right now. They just did it in Tennessee. Thankfully, Alabama's map got struck down. I'm sure they'll find another way to do it. And we saw, of course, Texas do it last year. The technique was devastatingly effective. In state after state, black communities that might have formed a voting majority in a single district were cracked apart the way they did. Memphis spread across several white majority areas diluting their votes into irrelevance. And that's. That's the point of it. It's not that they're going to lose their right to vote, because that's the argument a lot of conservatives have on my page. What rights did they lose? They can still vote. But what they have done is they have taken away the ability of Shelby county to elect representation that represents Shelby county and their needs, which are mostly black residents who have needs specific to them. But now their district is one that is joined with all these white rural areas have totally different needs who their vote like counts as far less of a percentage than a white person's does. And actually, Vincent Perez in Texas pointed out how this redistricting basically dilutes those votes to counting for much less than a white vote. And he said that one Hispanic vote in Texas counts as merely one third of a white vote. One black vote counts as barely one fifth. And that's what they're doing here and now. And of course, it's very, very effective. What they do is they crack black districts, spread them across white majority ones, diluting their votes into irrelevance. Or they do what's called packing, jamming a single district so that their votes piled up uselessly in one place while surrounding districts remain safely white with white interests. And the two primary strategies that they're still using are called cracking and packing. And the other thing I want to say, because again, people will be like, oh, these both parties have done it fore. And they have, that's, that's absolutely true, they have. But when it comes to the civil rights use of gerrymandering, gerrymandering to disenfranchise black voters, it has always been conservative led. That is, that, that is just the fact. You cannot like that fact, but it's a fact. And how it's happening now to dilute the black vote and the Hispanic vote is also being done by Republicans, specifically in southern states. And they're like, well, the blue states are redistricting. I love how people were freaking out about Californ putting it out on a vote so that people could vote on it. In response to Texas gerrymandering to steal seats. They didn't say a word about Texas. Texas was fine. But as soon as California responds to even the playing field by putting it on the ballot so that people could vote on it and it passes, they're the undemocratic problem. The, the hypocrisy and the cognitive dissonance is just elite. Before the digital age, gerrymandering was constrained by the limits of human calculation. A talented map maker could carve up a city or county with some precision. But the sheer complexity of manipulating hundreds of thousands of voters across an entire state had like, practical limits. But then computers came along and obliterated those limits. By the 1990s, sophisticated mapping software could analyze voting data block by block, street by street, predict with remarkable accuracy how any given configuration of the district lines would perform at the ballot box. You could also demographically map every single neighborhood, every single street. You knew where the people of color lived. Map makers could now engineer outcomes rather than simply approximate them. What had once been art became in the hands of modern operatives like science. The 2010 census, the redistricting that followed brought this transformation into sharp relief. Republicans, executing a strategy called red map, they called the redistricting majority Project, focused enormous resources on winning state legislative races in key states before the new maps were drawn. And it worked. Understand and I'll give, I will give MAGA Republicans, ultra conservatives this. They have been organized for a long time. They have been wanting to take over for a long time. And they have been organized and they have been deliberate. And let me tell you, your state representatives matter so much, especially in a census year. So when 2030 rolls around, I mean, you should be voting every time there's an election in your state. But 2030, especially this is where redistricting happens after a census. I mean, now states are just redistricting willy nilly, but typically it happens after a census. And boy, did this idea work. In states like North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio, they drew congressional and state legislative maps with precision. Maps designed to guarantee Republican majorities even in years when Democratic candidates won more total votes in the state, just got right in there. Democrats, where they held power in states like Maryland and Illinois, did the same. Right. This is all about holding power. And again, both parties have done want to be very clear, but gerrymandering, gerrymandering for the specific intent of disenfranchising racial minorities is a very, is, is niche to a specific group. The result in many states, of course, was a system that had effectively been turned upside down. Rather than voters choosing their representatives, representatives were choosing their voters. And now they had the power of computers to be able to make it more effective. Now there's been legal challenges to partisan gerrymandering that wound their way through the courts. The Supreme Court struck down racial gerrymandering in a series of cases beginning with Shaw vs Reno in 1993, recognizing. Recognizing that using race as a predominant factor in drawing district lines violated the equal protection clause. But racial and partisan gerrymandering are difficult to disentangle in practice, which is true particularly in the south, because it's, it's always partisan and racial. They're not really separated. And that was the excuse. When we were in Tennessee in the committee meetings, they kept saying, oh, this has nothing to do with race. It's our only all black district. It just, it just. We just want to guarantee that an all Republican delegation goes to Washington. We want to send an all Republican delegation because Tennessee is wrecked. And the reality is, is that Tennessee, like Texas, is much more purple than people realize, but it's been gerrymandered for so long and the way that the districts are drawn that, that we only have, we have a red super majority kind of indefinitely because they did the same thing here they've done in other states. So race and party affiliation overlaps so heavily in conservative movements that it's very hard to actually separate the two. So when the court's ruling about racial discrimination, how do you separate that from a partisan platform when that is part of your partisan platform? The most consequential ruling came down in 2019, Ruko vs Common Cause. The Supreme Court, in a 54 decision, held that federal courts have no authority to strike down maps on the grounds of partisan gerrymandering. So all they have to do is say, oh, it's just for. It's just because I want my party to win and stay in power. Such claims, the majority wrote, present political questions beyond the reach of federal courts. This is a sweeping decision that effectively closed the federal courthouse door on one of the most significant threats, threats to electoral fairness. And we are seeing that right now. But I wanted to give that backstory, that history, and then I want to talk about how the Supreme Court, even while it was ruling to try to kind of limit certain types of gerrymandering, it also was failing. In 2013, the Supreme Court in Shelby county versus Holder gutted the voted Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the 54 majority, struck down the formula used to determine which states required pre clearance clearance, effectively ending that requirement, meaning that states that had had a history of racial discrimination when it came to the vote no longer had to get clearance to change their voting laws in their districts. Roberts famously wrote, quote, things have changed dramatically, quote, in the South. No, they have not. Within hours of the decision, Texas announced, of course, it would implement a voter ID law that had previously been blocked under pre clearance. North Carolina, within weeks, enacted sweeping voting restrictions law that federal appeals court later found had targeted African American voters with, quote, surgical precision. Because of course it did. And I want to talk about this voter ID law here in a second because again, conservative argument is you, you know, you want people to be illegally voting. The Heritage foundation that has been trying to find evidence of all these illegal votes that are happening, which isn't happening, by the way, and you get prosecuted if you fraudulently vote, by the way. So for all of you conservatives that are like, we're going to go out to California and vote for Spencer Pratt, please do, please, please, please, please Livestream it, record it, post it, let me know how that goes. The problem with voter ID laws is there's multiple. First of all, we don't have an illegal voting problem. The Heritage foundation, which has been trying to bolster evidence for this since the 80s, has found less than a hundred possible cases, less than a hundred out of billions of votes cast. That's almost perfect. That's almost perfect. States that have scoured, like Georgia, did a whole investigation, couldn't find undocumented people voting. At most, what people did find was sometimes they were sent voter registration accidentally by the DMV because the DMV made a mistake. They're not voting. That's not a real thing. The reason that voter ID laws are a problem is, first of all, when you go into vote and you give your name, the DMV has your information. They know where you live, they know if you're a citizen, they can look at that list and see if you live in that area and you are voting at the correct place. They already have you. They already have you. Your driver's license especially should qualify. The problem with voter ID laws is that it functions as a poll tax. Unless the state is willing to issue free and fast ID cards that would allow you to vote. Everyone is guaranteed the right to vote without a poll tax. And if people have to pay a fee to get this ID in order to vote, you have instituted a poll tax. That is why it's a problem. That is, that is against the Constitution. So if states want voter ID laws, sure, the state needs to issue a free voter id. But also, I have voted in Wyoming, Virginia, New York and Tennessee. I have never not had to have my, my name and my ID verified. So I don't know who they're talking about. But that's why voter ID laws are the problem. Not because the DMV doesn't already know who you are, because they know who you are. That's why you can register with your, like you can register because they know where you live. The voter ID problem is that it implements a poll tax. So the Voting Rights act had done extraordinary work for 48 years and the Supreme Court decided that work was done. And of course we're seeing that happen now. And now these laws are changing. They don't have to have pre clearance to redistrict and they are once again targeting African American voters. Let's talk about Memphis in 1968. But before I do, let's take our second of two mid show sponsor breaks again. You can get these episodes ad free and see the new merch@patreon.com montemater this
- [41:05]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
episode 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 New York and Italy, their getaways are sure to take unexpected turns where comedy ensues. Watch the four seasons, now streaming only on Netflix.
- [41:34]
Monty Mader
Thank you again. Memphis of 1968 February 1, 1968 Two black sanitation workers, Echo Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death inside a garbage truck with a malfunctioning compactor. They had climbed inside the truck body to shelter from the rain because the city of Memphis did not provide black sanitation workers with brake facilities. So it was pouring rain. They climbed inside the truck body to get out of it because they didn't have a brake facility provided by the city. And they were killed by the equipment they operated in a city that treated them not as employees but as human trash. The city of Memphis offered Cole and Walker's families one month's pay. No pension, no death benefits. The workers union had been trying to negotiate for years over wages, safety and the basic dignity of recognition as a union. They were refused repeatedly. On February 12th of 1968, 1300 black sanitation workers in Memphis went on went on strike. They marched through the streets of Memphis Memphis carrying signs that read I am a man. Three words that seem like absurdly simple and painfully obvious. And yet those words said everything about what the civil rights movement was ultimately about. It's not about the laws or the votes. It's about the fundamental recognition of the full humanity of black people in a country that had spent hundreds of years denying it. Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb, who had previously served a term as mayor in the 50s during which he had refused to negotiate with sanitation workers, declared that the strike was illegal and refused to negotiate because of course, they'd did. Remember what we said in past episodes about language where when people get in power, authoritarian, racist, whatever, whatever their goal is, how do they dehumanize people who resist their illegal or immoral action? They call them terrorists, agitators, rioters. And then they get their followers to pick up that language so that when someone like Alex Preddy is on his hands and knees on the ground and gets shot 10 times in the back, they're like, he was a terrorist. No, he was wasn't. He was helping a Woman get up after a gravy seal knocked her to the ground. The city government used every tool at its disposal against the workers. Police confrontations with marchers became common, of course. On February 23, police officers sprayed marchers, including ministers and city councilmen, with mace. They clubbed demonstrators. Martin Luther King Jr. Came to Memphis in support of the strike. He had been in Memphis once and had promised to return. On March 28, he led a downtown march that turned violent, not through any action of the sanitation workers, but as the police responded aggressively. And some young men at the edges of the crowd responded in turn defending themselves. Windows were broken. Police moved in with clubs and Mace. A 16 year old boy, Larry Payne, was shot and killed by a police officer in a housing project. The officer claimed the boy had a knife. Witnesses said he was unarmed and running away. King was devastated. He returned to Memphis in April to lead another march to demonstrate that the movement remained committed to nonviolence. And on the evening of April 3, at the Mason Temple church of God in Christ, the largest black owned building in the world at the time he delivered what would be his final speech, had almost not come. He was exhausted, he was depressed. He'd been receiving death threats, of course, but the people were there and he came. Martin Luther King spoke about the threats on his life. He spoke about the parable of the good samaritan. He spoke about the movement. And he closed with some powerful words that we're going to listen to now.
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Martin Luther King Jr.
All we say to America is be true to what you said on paper. Because lived in China or even Russia or any totalitarian country. Maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic first amendment privileges because they haven't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest. Far right. So just as I say we aren't going to let any dogs or water hoses turn us around. We aren't going to let any injunction turn us around. Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now because I've been to the mountaintop,
- [46:16]
Monty Mader
I don't mind.
- [46:21]
Martin Luther King Jr.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain and I've looked over and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know the night that we as a people will get to the promised land. So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
- [47:19]
Monty Mader
The next evening, April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. Stepped onto the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. He was standing on the balcony talking with Jesse Jackson and other aides and at 6:01pm a single bullet from a high powered rifle struck him in the jaw and the next neck. He died at St. Joseph Hospital at 7:05pm he was 39 years old. James Earl Ray, a white career criminal and avid segregationist, was arrested in London two months later. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years. He later recanted his guilty plea and claimed a broader conspiracy existed. He died in prison in 1998. The King family to this day believes the full truth of the assassination has not been told. And I agree. And if you've never been to Memphis, first of all, go. It's a lovely city. I know it gets a bad reputation, but it's, it's really incredible. The music is great, the food is good, but go to the Lorraine Hotel Motel, which is now a civil rights museum. And it is, it is well worth the trip. It was a big learning moment for me as I was trying to educate myself on the truth of civil rights when I was deconstructing. After the assassination in Memphis, riots broke out across the country in more than 100 cities. National Guard was deployed. Thousands of people were arrested, buildings were burned. And in memory, Memphis, of course, the sanitation strike continued as it should. Thirteen days after King's murder. April 16th of 1968, the city of Memphis and the sanitation workers reached an agreement. The city recognized. The union workers received pay increases and dues check off and the strike was over again. The Lorraine Motel where King was killed is now the National Civil Rights Museum. The bullet hole from the rifle is preserved. You can see it, the balcony railing, the cars parked below. Everything is exactly as it was at 6:01pm on April 3rd. When you stand there, you can feel in your body what happened there. And I ended up meeting a woman. I wish I could remember her name. This was years ago. Now. There was this older black woman who was. And I don't know if she was just helping at the museum or if she was visiting, but I Went in by myself. And again, this was years and years ago. And I think she saw my face and she saw that I was learning a lot of these things for the very first time. And she sat with me and kind of held my hand and really talked to me, me about what I was learning and about her own experiences in the 60s. And I'm just very, very deeply, deeply grateful for her and the time that she took that day to educate me and to sit with me when I was letting this information cascade over me for the first time. Memphis today is one of the poorest large cities in the United States. And it has been done that is intentional. Tennessee has done that intentionally. They have, have taken a lot of their city rights away. They have violated their self governance over and over and over. They have deprived them of funding intentionally because it is the only majority black district, naturally, in Tennessee. It is one of the highest poverty rates, one of the highest violent crime rates because poverty and crime are married, and one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the country. It is now also right next to Elon Musk's AI data center. And Boxtown, just outside of Memphis is now the number one place for ambulance calls related to asthma. These are not, none of these things are accidents. They're accumulated weight of centuries of deliberate disinvestment, of redlining, of urban renewal policies that bulldoze black neighborhoods and the systemic exclusion from wealth building mechanisms that allowed white families to prosper. And the next time someone tells you we can't possibly give people reparations, remember that $1.776 billion was just reserved to give reparations to white people who had their feelings hurt after they stormed the Capitol in 2023. Of course, Memphis became the center of national attention again when Tyre Nichols, a 29 year old black man and photographer and father, was stopped by specialized Memphis police unit called Scorpion and he was beaten to death. He was beaten so severely that he died three days later. Five Memphis police officers who were themselves black, were charged with murder. The city disbanded the Scorpion unit. The Tyre Nichols case was not simply about individual police officers making an individual decision. It was about the system of policing in which aggressive harassment of communities, specifically black men, has been normalized and incentivized because remember, the slavery loophole in the United States Constitution is that you can enslave someone who is incarcerated for a crime. It's a system that has its roots in the slave patrols and decades of militarized police presence in black neighborhoods that followed. This is the history of the police department that's why there's so many problems that have to be rooted out. The individual police officers. Race does not change the structural reality. They were instruments of that system. System. Memphis is still fighting. It's still fighting today. And Memphis just lost its voting power two weeks ago. So let's draw the whole story together. Part one and part two. The civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s is one of the most extraordinary chapters in our history. Against a system of total oppression, backed by the full weight of state governments, federal indifference, and organized terrorism by white supremacy groups. A group of ordinary and extraordinary human beings, most of them very young. Young college students, many of them poor, nearly all of them aware that they might lose their life, dismantled the legal architecture of American apartheid. And I think that is one of the most hopeful things of this. If you feel like I'm just a normal person, what could I possibly do? What we do matters. The civil rights movement, while it has, you know, it has Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. That, that we, we think of, or Fannie Lou Hamer, the army that actually caused the movement to move forward was a bunch of poor college kids. Kids for the most part. And, and we didn't cover Malcolm X a lot in this episode, but I did an independent episode on him. I would highly recommend you go listen to. He's an amazing, amazing story. They did this through extraordinary personal courage. They did it through organization. They did it using strategy, understanding, how to use the tools of media, litigation and political pressure, which we still have, especially through social media. They did it through suffering, honesty, through the willingness to absorb violence. Absorb violence and keep marching, searching. And they succeeded. The Civil Rights act of 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965 are, despite their limitations, transformative. They changed American apartheid, and I use that word intentionally because that's what it was. They changed what was legally possible in American life. They protected people. They enabled black middle class to actually grow in ways that had been blocked before. They opened the doors to education, employment, political participation. But they did not, and they cannot not undo 300 years, 400 years almost of accumulated theft. The wealth gap between black and white Americans today is a direct consequence of centuries of, during which black wealth was actively extracted and black people were legally barred from accumulating capital. That is why the conversation about reparations has to be there. Because the racial disparities in health outcomes, educational outcomes, incarceration rates, these are not mysteries. Poverty rates, these are predictable results of a history that neither one law or two could fully correct. It's A history of not allowing them to buy in nice neighborhoods. It's a history of not allowing them into education. It's a history of not allowing them into certain jobs. Makes a huge difference. And the voting rights that were won with so much blood and courage are under sustained attack right now. We're going backwards. And that is the full intent of the weight of the GOP right now. After Shelby county versus Holder decision in 2013, again, states across the south and beyond quickly moved to restrict voting access. Strict voter ID requirements that disproportionately affect black and Latino voters. Polling place closures in majority minority precincts. They now have to travel further. Voter roll purges. We've seen, We've heard that language before. Restrictions on early voting. Right. Limitations on mail in voting. All of these are to decrease voter turnout, specifically from minorities. But because the GOP and the Republicans do better in an election when there's lower voter turnout and, of course, gerrymandering. That has be found. That has been found. And it's so blatant now to be racially motivated and keeping up a long tradition in the south because the south in particular is guilty of that. The methods have changed from poll taxes and literacy tests, but the goal, which is limiting the political power of black and brown communities is the same. The scholars Arie Berman, which is Give Us the ballot from 2015, and Carol Anderson, one person no vote in 2018, have documented this new wave of voter suppression in great detail. So if you are interested in, like, the step by step, what's really been changing and how has this created impact, I highly recommend those two books. So give us the ballot published in 2015, and one person no vote in 2018. King said the arc of the moral universe is long, but it only bends toward justice if we bend it. It doesn't naturally do that. And before I give you some action items, if you're sitting there and you've heard the story, maybe you heard some things that you never knew before, like I did all those years ago. I want you to sit with, like, the weight of this for, like, just a minute. Fannie Lou Hamer, Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carol Robertson, Carol Denise McNair, Herbert Lee, Louise Allen, Jimmie Lee Jackson, Viola Liuzzo, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwermer, Echol Cole, Robert Walker, Martin Luther King, Jr. These were human beings who loved their families and they wanted to live. They wanted rights. They wanted the right to vote. And they were killed or beaten or imprisoned or driven from their homes. Because they wanted rights that you and I take as a given, especially if we're white. I have never had to question if I will have access to vote, not once. The right to participate in democracy of the country they were born in. They won extraordinary things at an extraordinary cost. And what they won is being chipped away. And we see it. And it's so blatant there's no hiding it anymore. What it asks of us is action. Yes, grief. Yes, anger. But action first. Vote and make sure everyone knows you vote and make sure that everyone you know votes. I know this seems obvious. It's not. Voting is the most basic act of resistance to those who want to disenfranchise you. And if your vote didn't matter, they wouldn't work so damn hard to suppress it. The Fannie Lou Hamers and the John Lewis's of the world did not bleed. So we can stay home because we're cynical or busy. Well, I don't like either candidate. So I'm not going to vote or I'm not going to participate. That doesn't help help. It doesn't be loud about the fact that you vote. Encourage everyone you know to vote and vote, especially in smaller elections. All of this movement that what we are seeing happen today, that is dismantling us, started on school boards. You need to know who's on your school boards because that's going to decide who bans books, who has access to your children, what your kids get to learn or don't get to learn. And this also started dominantly in state legislatures. Voters have to do it. But more than voting, become a resource for voting. Learn the laws in your state. Registration deadlines, ID requirements, polling places, help people register, remind people to register. Drive people to the polls, especially if you know some elderly people, that it might be harder for them to get out there, volunteer as a poll worker or an election judge. So much there. Number two, protect and fight for the Voting Rights Act. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement act, named after, after John Lewis whose skull was cracked on Edmund Pettus Bridge, would restore the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Gutted by Shelby county, it has passed the House multiple times, installed in the Senate. The states that have a history of racially discriminating should have to have clearance to change their laws so that they stop racially discriminating. Because as soon as they're given permission, they do it again. Contact your senators, call them all the time, annoy them. Make sure that the office knows you by your first name. The Civil rights movement demonstrated that sustained political pressure works. One call is just a call. Hundreds of calls are news. Thousands of calls become a movement. Number three, fight gerrymandering. We're seeing this across the South. The redrawing of electoral districts after 2020 produced some of the most aggressively gerrymandered maps in American history. Like ever, challenge racial gerrymandering through litigation. It has worked repeatedly in federal courts. Find a way to support lawsuits. If you're an attorney, lend your expertise to this. Fight against it. Protest it it. Contact your state and local reps. I don't care if you think they're not going to listen to you. Do it anyway. Show up for protests, show up for marches. Support independent redistricting commissions at a state level which remove map drawing power from partisan legislators. This should be the standard of the states. Every single state, and I don't care if you're blue or red, should have an independent group that draws the districts. That's how we get rid of gerrymandering for partisan benefits which again both parties historically have done done. But we also get rid of racial gerrymandering. It should be independently done through independent redistricting commissions. That is something I do believe that we should challenge any progressive or left leaning candidates at any level. Challenge them on their opinions on redistricting because they it should not be in the hands of people who want to hold power. Number four, of course, oppose voter suppression legislation in your state. State legislators are where most voting rights fights happen. They show up locally, not federally. Show up in public hearings on election legislation, testify organ, learn to identify voter suppression tactics. So read, read about the history of this. So you know if things are happening. Stricter voter ID laws without free accessible ID provisions. Again we're talking about people who maybe can't access or can't afford to buy a specific id. It should be provided for free. If you're noticing polling places are closing in minority communities. Voter roll purges that target low Turner turnout voters. Restrictions on voter registration drives. Limitations on early voting or Sunday voting which targets specifically souls to the polls. Drives from black traffic searches. One of the best resources for this is go to Brennan Center Voting Laws Roundup. It'll track voting legislation restrictions so you can look and see if there's something going on in your state that you can be active about opposing. And so we have to support criminal justice reform. Mass incarceration is one of the most powerful modern tools of modern disenfranchisement. In many states, people with felony convictions lose the right to vote. Sometimes permanently. Approximately 5.2 million Americans, Americans mostly and not not mostly, disproportionately black and Latino are disenfranchised due to felony convictions. The Sentencing Projects s project estimates that 1 in 16 Black Americans of voting age is disenfranchised due to felony conviction. In some states that ratio is 1 in 5. So support organizations fighting for the restoration of voting rights for people with felony convictions. If you get convicted of a crime, you should do your time 100%. But once you have done your time, you should be able to vote. End mandatory minimums, support bail reform and fight against the criminalization of poverty. Should not be a crime that you can get arrested for if you're homeless. Just another excuse to fill those beds and make profit off of it. Again, the Brennan center is a great resource for this. The Color of Change is a great resource for this and the ACLU's National Prison Project 6 support independent local journalism. The civil rights movement depended on witnesses. And this is why it's so important. Go to protest, be there, view video. I know sometimes people are like, oh, why is everyone filming? We have to have that footage. The civil rights movement depended on the photographers and the journalists who captured the fire hoses and the dogs and the bodies on the bridge and showed them to the world. Without that, that change wouldn't have happened. Local journalism, which documents local corruption, police misconduct, the political nonsense is in crisis. It's being hollowed out by economic forces because people can't afford to live and be present in these locations. In some cases, cases they're bought out by ideologically motivated owners who suppress their coverage. If you have somebody who is local journalism that you know of myself, I participate in journalism as well, reporting on all of these. But even for me, there's too much to cover on my own. And other people do this even in a more full time capacity. Support those people. Number seven. Know your rights and assert them. Know your voting rights. If you are turned away from a polling place, do not simply leave. Ask for a provisional ballot. You are entitled to a one contact. The election protection line is 1-866-Our- Vote or 1-866-6878683. This is a nonpartisan service run by a lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law operates on election days to help voters navigate problems. Know your rights and encounters with police record interactions. When it's safe to do so, know that you have the right to remain silent, of course, and you have the right to an attorney. Number eight, show up. Show up literally physically. People physically being present in the streets, in the jailhouses, at the courthouse steps, in the state capitol is what propelled the civil rights movement forward. When rights are threatened, organized physical presence matters. That's one of the downfalls of social media, is often we can feel involved in the story without actually being there. Physical presence signals commitment and it creates media attention. We need to push things forward. Show up to city council meetings, go to those school board meetings. Show up to public hearings on legislation. We have to. Democracy operates and these laws change. In rooms that are mostly empty. Don't let the rooms be empty. 9. Build coalitions across lines. Civil rights movement was at its most powerful because they were able to rally allies. The march on Selma included Jewish rabbis, Catholic nuns, Protestant ministers, and secular activists. Solidarity across racial, religious, political lines. Because this is for all of us. This is for all of us. Organize with groups that are bringing everybody in because all of us need these protections. And then 10, remember these stories. And not just slavery and Jim Crow and civil rights. Remember what's happened in the last 10 years. Like, remember what's been going on. Don't let yourself get so overwhelmed that we forget. I mean, how many of us have heard anything about Minneapolis in two months? It gets washed away. We can't let that happen. There's a movement now to limit how much American history can be taught in our public schools. The history of slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement. Florida, Tennessee and Texas and other states have already passed legislation that restricts the teaching of historical history. You can't teach about the brutality of slavery. You can't teach about the brutality of Jim Crow or what actually happened in the civil rights movement anymore. The laws specifically cite the fear of making white students uncomfortable. Addie mae Collins was 14 years old when she was blown up in a church. Emmett Till was 14 years old when he was beaten beyond recognition and thrown into a river. If the school's not going to tell their stories, you tell them. Tell your kids, tell your neighbors, tell your co workers, your elected officials. History often is written by the victor, is written by the oppressor. And history that is forgotten tends to repeat. And I have a list of books. If you're someone who's just like, I, I don't know where to start. Read Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy, which was a life changing book for me when it came to racial inequity. Ari Berman's Give Us the Ballot, Carol Anderson's White Rage, and One Person no Vote. Those are two different books. Taylor Branch's trilogy, Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan's Edge, john Lewis's Walking with the Wind, ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors and A Red Record, timothy Tyson's the Blood of Emmett Till, charles Payne's I've Got the Light of Freedom. And, of course, visit the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, if you can, the Equal Justice Initiative's National Memorial for Peace and justice as well, in Montgomery, Alabama. John Lewis, on the last day before he died, wrote an essay that was published to the New York Times. On the day of his funeral. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he knew he was dying, and he wrote it anyway. And he wrote, though I may not be there with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life, I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring, and it is our turn. And I wish that the battle didn't have to be fought again, but it does. And it's our turn to be there. I will see you next week on Flipping Tables.