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Green & Red: Podcasts for Scrappy Radicals
The Anniversary of the Greensboro Sit-ins, SNCC and Militant Nonviolence Today (G&R 460)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Green and Red Scrappy Politics for Scrappy People, a regular podcast on radical environmental and anti capitalist politics. Brought to you by Bob Bozanko and Scott Parkins.
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B
Welcome to the silky smooth sounds of the Green and Red podcast. I'm your co host Scott Parkin in Berkeley, California. And as always, I'm joined by Bob.
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A
Bozenko in Niles, Ohio. And we're going to do something of a follow up to a show we did just a couple weeks ago about Martin Luther King. We're going to talk about that era again. February 1, 1960. So that'd be 66 years ago. A group of students from North Carolina AT&T a and T went to a department store lunch counter in Greensboro, sat down, asked to see menus. Obviously the staff there panicked, per the law. Right. It was a segregated society called the police. Crowds formed because they could see these students in the window, came in, started harassing them, throwing stuff at them. Then police came in and arrest those four students. And that's certainly not the first time anything like that had happened in apartheid South. But what that did was it set off what we now often refer to as the sit in movement or even more broadly the modern civil rights movement. And so we wanted to talk about that in the same vein. We talked about Martin Luther King a couple weeks ago to talk about what it means today. So we're going to both like historically talk about the origins of the sit in movement and protest for civil rights and other issues in that era, but then obviously bring it back to what we're seeing today.
- [01:40]
B
Right. And so it's the 65th, it's the 66th anniversary of the Greensboro Sit inside and it obviously transformed American politics in many ways. And we're going to talk about it both, we're going to talk about the history of it and we're going to talk about in the context of what we're seeing with Trump and ICE in Minneapolis and many other places. Like Bob said, the Greensboro Four, which were David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Azell Blair Jr. And Joseph McNeil, who actually just recently died September and rose to the rank of major general, he died in September. Or the Greensboro Four, they went to Woolworths and there were actually sit in campaigns planned like this all over the country. But the Greensboro sit in was actually the first one. There was also a movement of them in Nashville which would become very well known. The Nashville sit in movement and the Nashville sit ins happened less than two weeks after the Greensboro sit ins. I will also say that the Nashville sit ins had Been planning for a while and were like very well organized, included people. It was led by James Lawson, who's a really noted civil rights leader and minister, black minister. But the Nashville sit ins included John Lewis, who is very well known, became. Was in Congress for three decades. Diane Nash, James Bevel, Marion Barry. And this really sparked this huge movement. About 70,000 people ended up participating in the sit in after the Greensboro Four did their action. I really like talking about it in the terms of action. The other thing we'll be talking about is this also led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or sncc, later known as the Student National Coordinating Committee. You see, a real involvement by the Students for Democratic Society is a sort of really powerful moment.
- [03:35]
A
Yeah, let me go back and fill in a little of that. After the first sit ins, obviously they were arrested. And that led to. You pointed out that the creation of sncc, which is really important in the immediate aftermath of the citizen movement, most of the establishment civil rights organizations distance themselves from it. They thought it was too much. Right. It's an election year. They didn't think that was. They thought it was a little bit too rash. The person most important, I think, in this story is actually a woman named Ella Baker. Ella Baker worked closely with Martin Luther King in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the sclc. And the leadership there also distanced themselves from it. Most of the major groups did. CORE and the naacp. You know, you're going too much. These kids, right? But Ella Baker had a good connection with them. And King, among establishment figures, was the only one, really, who stepped in to support this huge movement. And they created sncc, the Student Nonviolent Coordinated Committee, which becomes the most important organization in that era. And by the end of April, so that's February, March, April, three months, over 50,000 people had participated in, including Martin Luther King. And this is King. King usually gets a claim for the Montgomery bus boycott, which is true. But more to the point, this is, I think, really where he took a bigger step into direct action and street politics. That's a boycott that had been done before. But in this particular case, you started to see people actually put their lives on line. And this was mostly at the start, overwhelmingly a movement of young people, students from historically black colleges and universities. I don't think they were called that yet. Were they at that point? I don't think they were yet called that. But eventually you will see, like, white students from the north and so forth, and border students. But originally it's that movement. And the initial media coverage on it was mixed at best, more or less critical. The Democratic Party, not surprisingly, and that's another really important issue I think here. Democratic Party freaked out, contacted King and other leaders and said, you need to wait, wait, are you doing. They tried to dissuade them. They tried to suppress it. And the beauty of this is that SNCC just wasn't really accountable to any of those mainline groups because they really hadn't done anything to help them. A group of activists who realized that the Democratic Party is going to help them. So that's the theme.
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B
It's an election year. So I'm sure the Democrats were especially freaked out.
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A
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And remember at the time, Nixon and the Republicans actually were a decent. They were better on civil rights because Republicans today may. Other Democrats. They were. In 1960, the Democrats were a segregationist party because so much of the party was rooted in the South. There were.
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B
Right.
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A
I don't think there were no Republican senators in. In the 60s from the South. Pretty sure there weren't. No. The first one was John.
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B
Solid South. It was a solid.
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A
It was Solid south for the Democrats. Yeah. They didn't have a Republican senator until John Tower got LBJ's seat after he became vice president. The Kennedys who were running for office were really concerned that this was going to hurt them. Right. Because they wanted to maintain that solid Southern front in the election initially. And what we're seeing with ICE today, the response of Southern law enforcement really helped. Right. Because they were so over the top, beating people. It gets to the point where. And this segues in. I know we don't talk about Nashville in a minute, but this segues into things like the Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer as well, which invite immense repression. Right. Like what we're seeing today. Right. But I just want to go back and fill that in because I think it's an important kind of context.
- [07:20]
B
No, I'm glad you did that. The. What's interesting, talking about law enforcement is in many ways, it's a very provocative strategy towards law enforcement. King himself was interested in dealing with people like Bull Connor. Right. And. And the sheriff and Selma, actually. Jim Clark, I believe. No.
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A
Who are Jim Clark? Lori Pritchett. And I forget where Lori Pritchett was in Alabama. He famously said Southern law enforcement is a ma. Is a question of mind over matter. We don't mind and you don't matter.
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B
He didn't. Exactly. And part of it. This is also what we're seeing happening on the streets of Minneapolis right now. Is that we see. It's. This goes back to what we talked about when we did the episode on King a couple weeks ago, which is around militant nonviolence. If you look at the philosophy around pacifism, it's. You're passively not participating in a system related to war and violence and militancy, militarism rather. But then militant nonviolence is where you go on the offensive. And we are seeing what we see with Greensboro, what we see with Nashville, what we see with sncc, what we see with King is all very much people going on the offensive to provoke a response because they want it to play out onto the conscious of the nation. And so that is also what we're seeing, I would say, in Minneapolis, is that we see people who are, like, being provocative in Minneapolis. What they're mostly doing is recording and following ice and being disruptive when they're harassing people.
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A
The message isn't directed at Southerners either, right? Because they know they're living every day, black and white people in the south, they know this. It's directed to the North. People up north, they knew the south was different. Different kinds of cats there, but until they started to see these images. And it really started even before that with Emmett Till, right. And obviously this is going on long before February 1, 1960, but it's really directed at a different audience. And two things. The media really does pick it up. It's a different. I'm not going to romanticize the US Media ever, But look at what we're seeing today. So that's a big part of it. The media does pick it up, and then there really is, like. I don't want to say it's a conscience, but there really is a sense of kind of shock in the North. The example I've always used is, like, Archie Bunker, right? Where Archie Bunker types saw that, and they were like, holy shit. Wow. Can't believe they're doing that.
- [09:44]
B
I think it's important to note that this came about after the advent of television as a cultural phenomenon, right. If we. If this happened in the 30s or 40s, before we really had television, where those images were not being broadcast into people's living rooms, it may have been less effective. So I think that's an important thing that the civil rights movement was very aware of. We. The images of the Greensboro Four sitting down at the. At the lunch counter and being, like, brutalized and abused and having milkshakes poured over their heads and things like that is also, like, this powerful image which seeps into people's consciousness outside of the South. So I think that's a very important piece.
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A
And when that happened, there was a famous journalist named James Kilpatrick. I don't know if you remember him because he, you're younger, but he was still around like when Reagan was president. He may have even been on the, what's that John McLaughlin show ever. That was where they all scream at each other right now.
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B
That's all, that's all television. No, that's cable news.
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A
Wrong. Wrong. TikTok somebody on Saturday Live did a really.
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B
Jack Jermon.
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A
Jack Jermont, yeah. Was it Dana Carvey did it or he was. It was funny. But anyway, yeah, it was Jack.
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B
It was Dana Carvey. Yeah.
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A
But Kilpatrick is, he's a Reagan right winger. But in 1960 when that happened, Kilpatrick wrote that the juxtaposition couldn't have been greater. These four students from North Carolina at, they wore like coats and ties and he used the word. He's like these slack jawed yokels in their Southern Confederate garb. And it really made a difference. And the other part, though, as Snokely Carmichael, Kwame Ture later said, you could appeal to a conscience back then because some people had one. So it creates. And the point of these things is to create a crisis, right? To create a confrontation, to create a crisis. You're not doing it really to make your enemies change because they're not gonna. And they don't have any need to. You're doing it. And this is what I think really is relevant today. You're doing it so that your allies finally get off their ass. Right. And so what's happening today really doesn't need to be. Trump isn't going to change. My God, he just.
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B
Mag is not going to change.
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A
Mag is not going to change. This needs to be directed at Schumer and Jeffries and Walls and Fried and Slotin and all of those people. Until you get through to them, Trump is untouchable.
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B
There's, there's. I learned a lot about campaign strategy over the years. And some of my mentors include like George Lakey, who was a civil rights activist who worked on Freedom Summer. And George used to teach a, an exercise called Spectrum of Allies. And you would break things down into a pie chart. You would have those who are actively against us, passively against us, neutral, passively with us, and actively with us. And so the point, he learned this from the civil rights movement. This is an exercise that the civil rights movement Used and, but like, the idea was that you would move those who were passively against you, neutral or even passively with you over a sector so that then you would begin to get more people. And that's a little bit of what we're seeing. That's what we saw with the civil rights movement when we have these images broadcast into people's living rooms. But then this is also what we're starting to get now with what's happening. Obviously, it's taken the brutal murder of two activists on the streets of Minneapolis to do that, but we're seeing that. And you and I were talking earlier today about how we're seeing a drop in Republican support for Trump and his ICE policies. We're seeing an increase in the number of people who actually think ICE should not just back down, but be abolished. And we're seeing like a strong reaction from the Republicans because they realize that's what's happened here, is they're losing their support. And it's an election year and there was two special elections in Minneapolis or in Minnesota this week, and the Republicans lost like the Democrats won like 95%, literally 95% of the votes. Looks like Putin's Russia or something. Right.
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A
Well, and one of the leading Republican governor candidates dropped out and he said the Republican parties and denounced eyes and.
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B
Denounced eyes and denounced.
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A
They called it fascist. The ex leader of DHS called it fascist. And another important message lesson out of the sit in era is that because we look at public opinion polling and the Democrats read this and say, oh, we're in good shape for the midterms, dude, after what just happened in Georgia, you can't even assume, you can't assume anything. Right. What I think is also critical, you're not. You don't need 50%. You don't. TRUMP has never had a majority on anything. Not even close. Like, most of the stuff he does is actually quite unpopular. The Senate movement never was over, never had a majority of support anywhere really. Like nationally, in the south, obviously like zero. Right? Close to zero. But that's not true either. There were Southerners who wanted to create like, actually create a new south. But you don't need a majority like the civil rights movement. What it did was it reached certain pockets and in the north, it did have a fairly significant level of support. It reached the media, which, and I will say not to the degree which it was, but I have noticed the shift in the last few months, even in, I'm not reading newspapers in Mississippi and Alabama, Texas or. Although the Houston Chronicle was All Houston's not really a Southern city in that regard. But the media in general has definitely flipped. They're now like really calling things out in ways that they never had before. They're not really doing the equivalency shit the way they used to. Like immediately after the two killings in Minneapolis, they just said that Trump was lying, that the video didn't show that. So you did have that in 1960. And moving forward again, I kind of go back to that. So that Senate movements begin in 1960, 50,000 within the next three months. King himself was arrested. By the fall, you have a presidential election occurring right with Kennedy versus Nixon. Nixon actually probably has majority of black sport, I would assume at the time, like Eisenhower and so forth, because the Democrats were still this other segregationist party. And so while King was arrested, JFK's brother Bobby Kennedy called Coretta Scott King, or I can't remember she made the call or who did and basically they said, hey, like he's going to die in jail, he's going to get killed in jail. And the Kennedys made a few calls. And the Sunday before the election, King's father, Daddy King, and black Martin Luther King Sr. Martin Luther King Sr. Black ministers throughout the south endorsed Kennedy for president, which was a significant right in the Southern, in those Southern states, because even southern, it's a Democratic stronghold. But even by 1960, civil rights is starting to break up that old coalition. Kennedy won the election very closely, honestly probably stole it in Illinois. And that gives rise to an even bigger and more aggressive policy. Sncc, which is now established as the most important group in 1962, begins the Freedom Rides. You know, which are like, again, it's a provocative, it's militant, non violence. It's an aggressive, confrontational, provocative policy. We're going to get on these buses. They usually got them in the border areas like D.C. and Maryland. And then they would go into the south and we know the story of that. They would stop, crowds would show up, the police would be just, they would suddenly disappear, they would firebomb buses, they would beat people up, they would give people concussions. And again, Kennedy and the Democrats begged King to back off. You need to wait. You need to wait. You need to wait. Hence King's famous book, why We Can't Wait. So that continued and actually escalated and at the time the images and I thought it was impossible, but I gotta say that, like we're seeing that right, with the five year old kid who was recently kidnapped and he's in very, what's his Name?
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B
Liam Ramos.
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A
What?
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B
Liam Ramos?
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A
Yeah, Liam. He looks like he's in bad shape. These pictures of him, it's horrific. And obviously the murders and I like pulling pregnant women around and grabbing people out of their cars. And I think there is a level there that even people who were apolitical are now starting to say, holy shit. And that was what was happening by. By the Freedom Ride, period. Kennedy again. And Kennedy again asked King to stop them and actually finally sent federal marshals to escort the Freedom Rides. And they too got attacked and beaten up.
- [17:51]
B
Right, right. And it's. But still, in many ways, it's this provocative move and it's leading to people in the north and I guess the west and other outside of the south who are like very much responding. And it's also not just black students who are getting beat up. It's also like white Northern college students and white college students from Berkeley and places like that. And I think that's an element of it too, which is that they're also like calling their parents and saying, oh, my God, this happened today, or, oh my God, my kid's in the hospital. And so that's also an important piece.
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A
There, which spreads like Renee Good and Alex Credi. It's true. Yeah, I know. It's like some people are saying, oh, we shouldn't be talking about them. We should be like, no, you need to talk about everybody. But yeah, starting around 1961 especially, you started to see northern college kids, basically middle, affluent, middle class white kids go down there and they're the ones who came back and created like sds. Like Tom Hayden was in. I forget which state, but Tom Hayden was in the South. And a lot of the people who created SDS and would become really like famous in that movement got their cut their teeth in the civil rights movement, in the sit in movement.
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B
Abby Hoffman, too.
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A
Yeah. And they're the ones who would come home. And then you have Viola Liuzza, who was a. A mother. You know, that's the kind of sacrifice. She's a mother. She was an activist. Her husband was a union organizer. She had been active herself. She went down there, was assassinated. Jim Reeb who was a Unitarian minister from Boston.
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B
From Boston.
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A
Boston. Yeah, that's right. And then of course, most.
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B
She was beat to death. Beat the death.
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A
Yeah. Sworn and Cheney, Goodman, most famously Schwerner and Chaney were two students, Jewish students from New York. Right.
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B
And one black student. Important little side note is Mississippi Burning is not an accurate description of what happens with the three supporters.
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A
Yeah. The FBI doesn't save. That's why I hated blackkklansman, where Spike Lee makes the FBI heroic.
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B
Like, yeah, Al Parker makes the FBI heroic. Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe are not the FBI at the time.
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A
Spike Lee also took money to do ads for the New York Police Department. Nypd.
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B
Right.
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A
So anyway, I'm, I think Spike Lee's a brilliant filmmaker but.
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B
But less so in his later years.
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A
Yeah. But I think having this, like a lot of people will look back at the civil rights movement like as a template and I'm not sure, like it's not 1960 or 61 anymore. Right. We live in this era, especially with the instant communication. Right. If there had been, I'm curious, like if there had been Instagram and streaming and all that, you know what that would have done? If you had in real time had seen like these people getting beaten up at the Woolworth counter or people being dragged on off a bus or a bus being firebombed or scenes from Vietnam like we have from Gaza, I don't know. But, but the nature of activism now, and you can speak to this, is very different than the era I grew up in. And you mentioned George Laker. One of the people most important to me is Staunton Lind. Right. Who but operated differently. And a lot of them come out of a labor tradition too, which is I think different. This labor was pretty confrontational. It wasn't necessarily like nonviolent resistance and sit ins and stuff like labor threw down.
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B
Which is a little bit of what we're seeing with Minneapolis too is people are, if you've watched just the images since Alex Preddy was murdered, the confrontational nature of what they're doing at these Hiltons in Minneapolis, for example, to the point where they're storming the lobbies and trashing them. Yeah. And Hilton is a, for people should know this by now. But Hilton is a corporate target because they actually house ICE agents all over the country. But like they're definitely doing it in Minneapolis.
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A
It's a Third amendment issue, man. People don't talk, they talk about all these other, the third Amendment that's against quartering. You're not allowed to make people's government can't make people stay in your house.
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B
So obviously people's tactics and strategies evolve and we've been seeing them. There's a lot of other tactics and strategies influencing here. I would say a lot of anarchist really confrontational tactics is what we're also seeing at play. I, I, I will also note that just talking with friends of mine who are on the ground in Minneapolis is half the people you run into at actions are like live streamers, right?
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A
Yeah.
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B
And so there's so much coming out of everything all the time. And that's why we have three or four different view angles of what happened to Alex Preddy, is because there were so many people there videoing and live streaming.
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A
The Democrats line in the sand is we're gonna. We're gonna make them have body cams on because Jonathan Ross wasn't live streaming his own execution of Renee. Good. Right.
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B
Exactly.
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A
Something else that I think is important is because we talk about violence, right? This is a violent era. The steel, little steel strike, the bloody Monday. You actually had more people killed back then. Right. In those labor struggles in the civil rights era, many people were killed. Right? Right now we definitely 32 died in ICE detention last year, and we've eight or nine more killed this year. But again, this isn't unique. The violence is always the state. I won't say the state has a monopoly on it, but surely the state has always been violent and responded violently. And some of this occurred when Franklin Roosevelt was president too.
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B
So.
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A
And somebody came up today, it wasn't ice. It was just Minneapolis police. There was a homeless person in a bus station because it's 10 below right now in Michigan. And the police pushed this guy around and. And roughed him up. Michigan has a Democratic governor who's very well regarded. All Democratic state officials are two Democratic senators and the police like. So, you know, this is another bipartisan issue. Right? And walls and fry talk a good gig, get the fuck out of Minneapolis. And they're not doing. They're not doing. They're cooperating. They arrested people for making noise outside the Hilton where ICE was staying. And I think pretty early on, that was the way the Democrats responded, and certainly the Southern Democrats did. But the Democratic Party didn't want to be associated with this. And the irony here, because we. I can't. I could not imagine if you said to Donald Trump, you get to pick the Democratic leader. I mean, he picked Chuck Schumer. You'd have to, right? Maybe Fetterman. But what's the difference? And what always will shock me? And I don't like mainstream politicians. Lyndon Johnson came through LBJ from Texas, a guy who dropped N word. A guy who didn't vote for civil rights laws. Right. He stepped up. And I think more than anybody, if you're looking for a hero, I don't believe in that bullshit either. The other part that I think is important, which I'm waiting to see now, and I think we might. You've seen a few trickles of it is that the business community finally realized by 19, whatever, 62, 63, 64, that this shit wasn't good. Right. It was destabilizing America. It was not good for the economy. A lot of people who studied this to put this in the context of the Cold War, that the United States had to go along with civil rights because it was losing the propaganda war. Maybe not. I'm not convinced, actually. I think a bigger factor was that it was damaging the global economy. And I keep going back to the episodes. Remember Mad Men, those arts. When Pete Campbell would often talk about the Negro market. Right. The Department of Treasury, Department of Commerce both put out videos in the 50s talking about the importance of the Negro market. And I think they realized like capitalism doesn't work if half the country isn't really participating in it. Not half the country, but. And so I think that's a factor too. So you started to see an establishment response by 1962 or so to this. And I didn't read the details. You probably know more about this last week or so. Didn't like Target and Hilton and a few other.
- [25:56]
B
What was on. There's a couple of pieces here, one which I'm going to talk about here a little bit. There's a corporate boycott and corporate. There's a let's take away their pillars of power that ICE and Trump and those who are perpetuating what we're. We're seeing in these blue cities. But then. But the other thing that happened on Saturday after Alex Preddy got killed is that the CE like 60 some CEOs of companies all based in Minnesota, including Cargill, Target, United Healthcare, there's a bunch of healthcare companies which are based in Minneapolis, all came out with a statement, I think it was, or I read it was organized by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, saying the ICE needs to stand down. And they also frame it as there needs to be a de escalation on both sides. And that's what conservatives who are being critical of ICE and saying that something needs to change here are saying that the left is agitating. The NRA also said that, but it's actually for them to go public and criticize Trump's people's policy, I think is an interesting step. And I think it's all just. It's just a press release. It's just public relations.
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A
Yeah.
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B
But it is an important thing to. And we've. That's the sort of thing we've tracked. We've tracked a lot of this over the years with businesses, response to Trump after 2020 and January 6th and stuff.
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A
It's clear. It's an acid. Things aren't going well. Right.
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B
Clearly.
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A
It's just like the same way, like Thom Tillis, who's retiring, a Republican senator from North Carolina. Tillis is garbage as far as I'm concerned. But Tillis understands. And the one thing, like Tillis has been critical of Christine. No blah, blah, blah.
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B
And Steve Miller especially.
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A
That's the part, though, when a Republican senator says Miller needs to go because he knows that Trump isn't. Trump is out of it. Trump doesn't have a brain. His brain is a syphilitic mess of Swiss cheese. If you have a Republican senator saying Miller needs to go, I think that's bigger than just Miller. I think he's saying this shit's gone too far. And like, they arrested Don Lemon, they're arresting journalists. The whole idea. When what's his name, Tim Wall, sat there with Holman and said, oh, he understands right and wrong like Holman. He's on film taking $50,000 in a fucking paper bag. This is a guy whose pep talks are like. Essentially sounds like Mussolini. Go out there and kill them all. Right?
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B
He's talking about raining hell on Boston, which is a city, a blue city, which has been pushing back on ice.
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A
And that's the other part the media needs to quit talking about. This is immigrate. This is Trump's private army. It needs. And they're starting to break. We've seen a couple things, even in the New York Times. This is Trump's private militia. This has nothing to do with immigration. And for none of that, it's irrelevant. Right. If you can do immigration enforcement, you go to Texas and Florida or wherever. You don't do it in Minnesota. It has nothing to do with Somalis. That's a convenient excuse.
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B
95% of which in Minnesota are citizens.
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A
Yeah. This is Trump's private army. And Minnesota in many ways is a model city. If you're. This is the 21st century. This ain't the New Deal or Great Society anymore. Minnesota, probably, if you were going to point out a city where reform works, you know, it would be Minnesota. It's actually like a pretty well run place.
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B
Right.
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A
And what's. It's the threat of a good example like JFK would have. That's why JFK invades Latin American countries. Right. It's the threat of. And Minnesota is a good example Right.
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B
And part of me feels like that I don't even feel like the Trump people are, like, bright enough to understand that. I feel like it's almost like we just hate Tim Waltz. So we're gonna go.
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A
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think they thought it through that much, but he's a.
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B
So we're gonna go after him because he says he ran against us in the present.
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A
But the reason he's there is because Minnesota is actually pretty good example of it. Right. Yeah.
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B
You know, the other part about Minnesota, I wouldn't quite call it a swing state, but it's one of the states that's on the edge of being a swing state.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And it's always one they worry about a little bit, and that's done. They're never. They're not going to vote Republican for a long time.
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A
No. Amy Klobucar is going to coast. She's going to be the next governor.
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B
That Senate seat is, like, way safer now, too. Oh, got.
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A
Yeah, yeah.
- [29:59]
B
The one thing I want to hit on is this pillar strategy real quick, which is we're seeing this in the progressive media a lot more people like Eric Blanc are talking about this quite a lot. It's actually a strategy that was used by the civil rights movement, which is, like, really important thing to note. It's been in social movements for a long time. I actually learned about it from, like I said, George Lakey and David Solnit, two friends and mentors of mine. And the idea is that these institutions like the Trump administration or ICE or whatever, they actually rely heavily on. On corporations to support that. And even more so than before is because the Trump administration also has been. Draw. Has had this big drive towards privatization. So there's like, certain companies which are really important to ICE operations. Hilton, like we talked about, was very important because they're housing. Because they're housing ICE agents. Target. Target in the Twin Cities, which is based in the Twin Cities, is allowing them to stage in their parking lots. Right. We see companies like Home Depot, which also in other parts of the country allow ICE to stage in their parking lots. It's also a place where a lot of undocumented day laborers go to get work. And so Home Depot actually calls ICE when there's a day laborers out there. There's an airline called Avello Airlines, which actually have been flying undocumented people out of the country to places like El Salvador. Delta also has been participating with ice. There's a number of companies. And so Target. Target. Yeah. I just said Target.
- [31:33]
A
Oh, I'm sorry, Enterprise.
- [31:35]
B
Yeah, Enterprise is another one because that's where Amazon, Palantir, Palantir, Google. And these companies are actually part of what is propping up this ICE operational apparatus. And so one of the things, and one of the things that we're seeing is activists, not just in the Twin Cities, but all over the country. Here in the Bay Area, they actually just had a picket and occupation of both Target and Home Depot, which are pret much across the street from each other in this part of town called Emeryville. But we're seeing actions all over the country now. 65 people got arrested at a Hilton lobby that was housing ICE in New York City a couple days ago. And so when you begin to put pressure on these companies, like Hilton has actually in, at least in the Twin Cities, has actually stopped letting ICE stay in some of their hotels. Right. And so Avello Airlines, cities which actually have contracts with some of these companies, are breaking their contracts. We're really starting to see some of the pillars be targeted by activists, by social movements in this country around the world, to be honest. And it's really beginning to weaken ice.
- [32:38]
A
It's.
- [32:38]
B
There was a. There's a. Spotify actually was running ads for recruitment for ICE and there was such an outcry and pushback on that is like they took some of the. At least took some of those ads off or took them down momentarily. I don't really trust Spotify, even though we're on Spotify right now to. To like fully follow through with that. I think these tech companies are some.
- [32:57]
A
Of the work and all the stuff I've ever done. The thing I'm most proud of actually KBR campaign we did in Houston where every Wednesday beginning in like January before, in 2003, before, because we knew Bush was going to invade. And every Wednesday we had these vigils or whatever outside KBR in downtown Houston, you know, because of Dick Cheney and their relationship with the Bush White House. And yeah, that's. And right now I think too, they need to start going. It's Schumer and Jeffries and all the. These Democrats.
- [33:28]
B
Democrats. Seven Democrats voted for ICE funding, which that's actually starting to happen as well.
- [33:33]
A
The seven who died. Tom Swozo got like just pummeled at, at his meeting the other night. And they're chasing people out in Alabama. And the thing is, like, these people are scary because they got their. They're also. I think they're gutless. I think they're snowflakes at heart, right? They got kevlar and masks and guns. Right. But something else that I think is funny is the whole super bowl thing going on right now. Because the NFL is as right wing and reactionary as you can get. Like Robert Kraft, whose team is in the super bowl this year. The. The Patriots. Kraft is an old crony of Trump, along with Bill Ackman. He's as responsible for the repression on campuses of anti genocide students as anybody. Actually, Kraft has a private. He's letting ICE use the Patriots.
- [34:16]
B
I think Ackman gave $10,000 to Jonathan Ross's GoFundMe.
- [34:19]
A
Yes, he did. He did. But the NFL, and this is symbolic. The halftime entertainment is Bad Bunny speaks for itself, but the pregame entertainment is Green Day. No Trump, no kkk, no fascist usa. And. And I realized, I think Jay Z is actually in charge of the entertainment. But the NFL could have stepped in and said, no, you're not doing that. And Trump has decided not to go to the Super Bowl. Plus, every time he goes to some kind of public event, he gets booed. Right. The idea. It's funny how, like when he says, we have the biggest support ever and we're at 73% and the media reports that, it's like the guy's in the toilet, right?
- [34:51]
B
We won the presidency by the biggest amount of votes ever.
- [34:55]
A
Which is why this raid in Georgia.
- [34:58]
B
I'm sure the Melania film is selling out everywhere it's showing too.
- [35:01]
A
My favorite is it was the in flight movie and everybody walked out. Or if you're trying to escape ICE just go into a theater showing Melania. No one else will be in there. But what did that. Netflix gave them like 75 million for that, right?
- [35:17]
B
Amazon. It was Amazon.
- [35:17]
A
It was Amazon. Oh, it was Amazon. Okay, so it's Jeff Bezos while they're.
- [35:21]
B
Laying off 16,000 workers this week.
- [35:24]
A
And Bezos and Tim Cook were at the premiere right along with Dr. Phil. And.
- [35:29]
B
In the White House.
- [35:30]
A
Yeah, in the White House. It's.
- [35:32]
B
That's quite a brain trust. Quite a brain trust there.
- [35:35]
A
It's an atavistic, nihilistic group. It's a death cult. They're vicious. They won't hesitate to use violence. But conversely, anomalously, it's actually a group of cupcakes who I don't think are that strong. They're doing this. There are people on the inside who hate them. There's been another big dump of Epstein shit today, which includes some just insanely horrific stuff. And I wonder, like, what? There are people inside, we know that, who hate these Fuckers. Will there be an attack on Iran? He's. It's. It's just truly this insane, throwing everything you can all at once against the wall kind of thing. But the stuff I'm seeing in Minnesota, we've said this before, is inspirational, and it really does. In. In. In those ways, I think, hearken back to the start of the modern civil rights. The sit in era, I guess let's call it that, which was really, I think, one of the most important eras in US History. And hopefully there are some relevant lessons in that. It's a different world. A lot of stuff that you did in the 60s, just. It's not like it won't work today. It's not applicable anymore. But those basic things about response and militant nonviolence and challenging, those are universal. Those are eternal.
- [36:54]
B
Right. And also working. Yeah. I will say this, that the propaganda coming out of the White House is that they're backing off and de. Escalating. It's being reported today that the Justice Department Civil Rights Division is investigating whether Alex Preddy's civil rights were violated, which is what we saw with three civil rights workers, for example, in 1964. But it should. Everyone should know. That's just propaganda. Right.
- [37:22]
A
That's whitewash.
- [37:23]
B
They're using things like the Civil Rights Division to go after Palestinian protesters protesting Israeli genocide and Gaza. But that's what the Trump administration's interested in.
- [37:34]
A
Yeah. I forget the name of the woman who heads the Civil Rights Division. She's just horrific.
- [37:38]
B
Yeah.
- [37:39]
A
Yeah. Although. And kind of.
- [37:40]
B
Kind of.
- [37:41]
A
Last thing. I'll say one thing again that's giving me some hope is the DA Of Philadelphia, Ed Krassenstein.
- [37:47]
B
Larry Kressner. And Krassenstein's a journalist.
- [37:52]
A
He's the journalist we were talking about earlier.
- [37:53]
B
Yeah.
- [37:54]
A
Larry Krasner. And I get them. And I will also confuse them both with Ken Klippenstein.
- [37:59]
B
Yeah.
- [37:59]
A
But Larry Krasner. And a lot of it is tough talk. Right. Kind of like you're from Jacob. But two things. Krasner has started an alliance with DAS and other big cities targeted by ice. Right. They call it the FAFO coalition, which is cute, but basically to hold ICE accountable. But one thing he's. He said a couple things that I think are important and I think really need to be part of the public response to ice.
- [38:23]
B
Right.
- [38:23]
A
One is you can't hide forever. Right. Trump will be gone. He'll be dead someday. We know who you are. Right. You know, like Hitler promised the Nazis immunity, and a bunch of them were hanged. Afterward, we will know. We know who you are. We will come and get you. We will find you. It may take a while. At the very least, I think it was Stephen Colbert said, you're never going to go out and have a meal that's not spit in again.
- [38:46]
B
Right.
- [38:46]
A
But the other thing that I thought was a really cool veiled idea when Krasner said, there are 350 million of us and that needs to be out there. Right. Yeah. You guys got a lot of guns and there's a lot of you, but there are 350 million of us. Right. So bring it. Bring it. And I think we're going to see that. I'm not in any way advocating or looking forward to this, but there's going to be more bloodshed. There just is. It's just. I can't believe it hasn't happened yet. These guys are going to burst through somebody's door and you're going to see a firefight. Yeah.
- [39:18]
B
I mean, if they start going into. If they start going into some of these other. Some of these, I'm surprised it hasn't happened in South Minneapolis. South Minneapolis is a working class part of town. That's where AIM was, that had a power base, for example. But especially if they start going into places like Philadelphia.
- [39:38]
A
And Philadelphia, sure.
- [39:40]
B
Places like that could get really ugly.
- [39:42]
A
Last thing is one thing that also in a very good way surprised me is like there are a lot of working class whites who are pissed off because we keep hearing about, oh, they're all Republicans and they've all gone to Trump. Nah.
- [39:54]
B
Yeah, yeah, it's true. If anything, he's losing those people. This is kind of what we were talking about earlier is that we're seeing a drop in support for them. Because if you think about this is something we didn't talk about, but Alex Preddy had a gun on him. They took the gun off of him and then they shot him. And then the Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller were trying to say that he was going to massacre federal agents, that they were acting defensively, which is total bullshit. And then you see this whole big narrative develop around like, he shouldn't have brought a gun to a protest. Right. The gun rights people are not happy about that.
- [40:35]
A
You know, who rejected that today.
- [40:40]
B
Should.
- [40:40]
A
Be left to bring a gun to protest against.
- [40:44]
B
And Trump. And Trump even said a day or two ago that you just can't bring guns out like that.
- [40:49]
A
Oh, I was on video. Yeah. I was like, to a reporter.
- [40:52]
B
Yeah, yeah, he's. Whatever. He's also Brain fried.
- [40:54]
A
But, yeah, maybe Nicki Minaj will be his political savior.
- [41:00]
B
Yeah, there you go.
- [41:02]
A
I'm gonna.
- [41:02]
B
Anyway, I'm gonna wrap it there.
- [41:04]
A
Yeah. Hey, if any of you out there know anyone, the labor movement, like Lee Schuler or Sean Fade, tell them to get off their ass and do something. That's another part, actually, like the civil rights movement. Labor was involved, and locally they are like the labor councils and local unions and so on. But there has to be a strike, like an actual national strike.
- [41:26]
B
Yeah. I do want to shout out the general strike that happened in Minneapolis last Friday and the one that's happening today. I see that all as precursors leading up to things, but we need a lot more national labor leadership and a lot more national left of center, whatever you want to call them, far left support for that, including politicians or Bernie Sanders and AOC calling for that. Question mark.
- [41:48]
A
The Democratic leadership today told people not to go to Minneapolis. There should be 200 Democratic senators and reps right now in Minneapolis. They should be there. Right? Yeah. Stay away. Right. Yeah. Democrats aren't your help. They're not your friends. And I. You got to get through them before you can get to Trump. You got to get. They're the barrier. They're protecting Trump. Yep.
- [42:10]
B
It's true. They're one of the pillars holding up Trump. Let's just put that out there.
- [42:15]
A
You always talk about pillars. I keep going back to Wright Mills, who had a huge influence on me and the power elite, which is similar. Yeah. The Democratic Party clearly is part of that power elite.
- [42:27]
B
All right, we're going to wrap it there. Shout out to the Greensboro four, one of which is still alive. And if you like what you're hearing, please check us out on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Blue Sky. If you're watching this on YouTube, hit that subscribe button. If you're listening to us on an audio platform, give us a rate and review. And if you really like us, go to greenandredpodcast.org and hit that support button or become a patron@patreon.com backslash greenradpodcast and we'll talk to you later. And more now than ever, make trouble and misbehave. It.