The History of American Police and the Ku Klux Klan

Episode Transcript
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Behind the Police, a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome

(01:54):
Back to Behind the Police, the special miniseries for Behind
the Bass Huts, which is normally a show that I
Robert Evans do about the worst people in all of history.
But for these weeks and these these episodes, is a
deep dive into the entire history of American police, the
greatest bastards of them all, collection of them. Yeah. Uh.

(02:16):
My guest in this journey into the history of police
stem uh is my friend Jason Petty, better known as
the hip hop artist propaganda Jason. How are you doing today?
We'll sup happy Joe. The actual the actual one day
of Independence. Yes, the day that like we as a

(02:37):
nation kind of sort of started to begin to try
to live up to the promises made at our founding,
except not for women. Uh. Yeah, there's still another. We're
still waiting for another. Uh, there's another independence coming soon.
It's been a rough couple of been a rough couple

(02:57):
of centuries. Guys. Um. Yeah, yeah. In fact, the MATS
page A proclamation was two years before this because the
war wasn't done and still we were waiting on Texas
and still we were waiting on Texas and in some
ways still are still. Yeah, as a Texan, I could
I think it's still kind of waiting on Texas. So um,

(03:20):
in honor of I mean this, it won't be Juneteenth
anymore when these episodes drop. But these two episodes this week,
we're we're going real deep into um, the history of
racism and policing. Um. The That's that's what these next
two episodes are going to be. And then after that
we're going to kind of get back to a broader
history of policing and come up to the modern era.
We'll talk about the war on drugs and cops and stuff.

(03:42):
But but this, this is these two episodes are going
to be more focused onto something that I think is
critical but not very well known to most people. You know.
Usually there's there's one aspect to which kind of what
we're talking about is known today, which is that if
you if you wound up at a protest recently, which
I assume a lot of you have, of you may
have heard the venerable left wing protest chant. Cops and

(04:04):
clan go hand in hand. Um, And if you're a
fan of rage against the machine, I'm sure you're familiar
with their their similar lines. Some of those that workforces
are the same that burn crosses. Uh. And you know, uh,
we we talked a bit about how, you know, the
sort of story spreading about slave patrols and how that
was the origin of policing and how that was you know,

(04:25):
partly true but not entirely accurate because it was more
complicated than that. This is a case where the the
kind of like pithy chance uh and social media posts
and stuff actually are really accurate. Like that. That's what
we're gonna talk about today. Yeah, so in in in
a very veiled defense for everybody else that didn't have

(04:51):
to live these realities. Like there's some realities like something
like a red lining, Like I understand, I understand that
there is a wide out of people. You have to
go out of your way unless you're black to know
what redlining is because it doesn't affect you, you know
what I'm saying. So I'm gonna give you that I
don't know the script, but I know, based on what

(05:13):
the way that Robert's leading in, I have an idea
that I'm probably gonna know these stories, but I'm pretty
sure you don't because they ain't affected you. You never
thought about redlining, because you never There was never a
time that your grandparents was looking at the neighborhood and
was like, we can't live here. And it's not because
you couldn't afford to live here. It's because you wasn't

(05:34):
allowed to live here, you know what I'm saying. So
I understand that you don't know this. There's probably things
in your life, like we could talk about some Native
American heritage and stories and stuff like that that you
probably would have no idea unless you went out in
your way. I went out of my way to learn
those things because I understand what it means to be
an oppressed person. So strap in, this is about to

(05:56):
be earth shattering for you. It's it's gonna be right. Um. So,
in the immediate wake of the war, you remember, after
part one, you know, we kind of ended on slave
patrols just turned in right into police departments. Um. But
in the immediate way to the war, a lot of
the South, which you know occupied by the United States Military,
the Union Military um and millions of black men had

(06:18):
suddenly gained the right to vote for the first time,
like kind of right around that same period, and historians
generally call the the time from eighteen sixty to eighteen
seventies seven in the former South reconstruction, and it was
a time of great hope for black Americans. Seven hundred
black men were elected to public office, including two senators
and fourteen members of the House of Representatives, which when

(06:38):
you consider that, like a huge chunk of those men
had been slaves a couple of years earlier, like that's
in that's maybe the rapidest turn around from not from
politically being you know, not a person to being in
power that like has ever happened. Thirteen hundred black men
and women were appointed to various government jobs during this period.

(06:59):
Free men pulled their resources, They formed companies, Some of
them fought to receive back wages, and even tried to
take land from their former masters. It was generally not successful,
but attempts were made and all across the South. Groups
of freedmen also formed militias, sometimes using the rifles with
which they had served in the Union Army and obviously. Um,
a lot of white folks weren't happy with this. Yeah,

(07:22):
it worked. It's like, so they go, you know, we're
just gonna let them. You forget that, especially in the South,
the vast majority of the population were freed slaves. So
just by the sheer numbers, if you let us vote,
we're gonna vote in our own people. Yeah, it's you're
not going to be in charge anymore. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

(07:46):
So this was a pickle for um, for the white supremacists.
We we we could say that fairly. Um. Yeah, And
outside of the transition of slave patrols to police departments,
a lot of white people just sort of on their
own attempted to put newly freed black people in their
place by using the law to to you know, suppress them.
Laws were passed throughout the old slave states that banned

(08:06):
vagrancy or being out in public without a visible means
of support. You might recognize this as the same tactic
used a little bit later to stop union workers from
organizing in other parts of the country. Um, so that
is kind of we can we we can see some
sometimes the exact same tactic being used for very different
groups of of oppressed Americans. But it is. It's the
same thing. Like, what do we just make it illegal

(08:28):
for them to be outside? Yeah? So um. In this case,
vagrancy laws were used to force black people to take employment,
generally a sharecropper. So you make it illegal to be
outside without a job. That forces people to take jobs.
And since like you don't want to go to jail,
your choice, like you have to very quickly get whatever
job you can get, which means people, you know, the

(08:49):
power is in the hands of the person offering you
the job, which means they could give you a job
that's basically slavery, which is in fact, what a lot
of sharecropping job share cropping? Yeah. Um, so again not
quite slavery, but also not nearly as far from being
slavery as it really ought to have been. Slavery light, Yeah,

(09:10):
slavery light. A little bit of diet. It's like the
Coke zero of human beings. That's one calorie. Yeah, it
is better for you, but not very much better. Yeah,
not very much better. Um, and it'll probably give you
a brain tumor. Um. I want to I'll cut that

(09:31):
bed out off. Coke zero wants to sponsor the podcast.
I will take your money yeah, so I want to
kick off our quotations in this episode with one from
the absolutely critical book that everybody ought to read, The
End of Policing by Alex Vitalete. Anyone on the roads
without proof of employment was quickly subjected to police action.

(09:51):
Local police were the essential front door of the twin
evils of convict leasing and prison farms. Local sheriffs would
arrest free blacks on flimsy to non exist in evidence,
then drive them into a cruel and inhuman justice system
whose punishments often resulted in death. These same sheriffs and
judges also received kickbacks and in some cases generated lists
of fit and hard working blacks to be incarcerated on

(10:13):
behalf of employers who had then leased them out to
perform forced labor for profit. Douglas Blackman chronicles the appalling
conditions of mines and lumber camps, where thousands perished. But
the Jim Crow era policing had become a central tool
of maintaining racial inequality throughout the South, supplemented by ad
hoc vigilante such as the ku Klux Klan, which often
worked closely with and was populated by local police. Good

(10:36):
little summary of how it all went down. Yeah, yep,
so the motherfucking KKK um. Let's come on, get into
a baby. Now. We've done a whole two potter on
the history of the clan, the first and the second
clan at least on Behind the Bastards already, So if
you want a detailed history of both of those organizations,
you can check that out. It's in it's in the
Behind the Bastards feed. But I'm gonna give a little

(10:58):
bit of an overview before we dig into the cop
you know, specific stuff. The KKK formed initially in Pulaski, Tennessee,
in eighteen sixty six. First like saying Pulaski. Pulaski. Yeah,
it's a fun name of a town. It's a shame
all of the terrorism. Anyway, The very first KKK cell
was formed by a bunch of board drunk and pretty

(11:20):
well off Confederate veterans. They dressed up like wizards, and
they gave themselves absurd titles and went out at night
uh costumed as the ghosts of Confederate veterans in order
to scare freed black people. One of the KKK founders
happened to own the local newspaper and he published a
bunch of mysterious letters from a grand cyclops, all of
which made the clan seem cool and mysterious and powerful.

(11:41):
This early meme, and that's really what the KKK was
at the start, spread very quickly throughout the South, and
soon thousands of white dudes were dressing like ghosts and
terrorizing black people, generally while drunk as all hell. Sometimes
they wore dresses, other times they pretended to be aliens.
They did this because it was fun, but also because
it made their abuse more impactful. And her fantastic book
Ku Klux, Elaine Parsons explains this in a way that

(12:03):
I think is really important when it comes to just
sort of understanding modern right wing street violence and why
a lot of it seems so silly, like a lot
of the ways they dress up that act are so
on that surface absurd quote Ku Klux endeavored to portray
victims entirely rational fear of their physical violence, as though
it were superstition or gullibility. The victim, telling Lee, failed

(12:24):
to get the joke, allowing himself to be frightened by
ghosts or devils. Get the joke, Yeah, they didn't get
the joke. Shot at you. Yeah, yeah, you know, while
I'm hanging from my neck. Yeah you get it. Yeah,
we hung you from a tree and we were dressed
as aliens, don't You don't get the joke? Ye, scared

(12:45):
of aliens? Yeah, yeah, there it is. Yeah, fucking fascists
are always yeah what Yeah, at some point you have
to explain to me and one of these bastard episodes
why far right fascists are just not funny. Yeah. It's
because it's not funny. It's because comedy, um, good comedy

(13:09):
requires uh, what's the word I'm looking for here? Um empathy? Right,
Like you have to understand other people in order to
say things that are funny to them. There it is, yeah,
thank you? Yeah. So um yeah, many, if not most,
of these early clansmen were former slave patrol members, and

(13:31):
a sizeable number of these early clansmen, in addition to
being former slaver patrol members, were also current law enforcement
you know, sheriffs and the like. There was also, outside
of you know, even the clan, just a huge amount
of vigilante violence directed against black people during this time,
and it all does sort of bleed together. One Edgefield County,
South Carolina, military officer like a U. S. Military officer

(13:51):
stationed in the in the former Confederacy in eighteen sixty six,
wrote this quote. Two men white had killed a Negro,
plus cut the ear off on another the evening before,
about five miles left of my encampment. It is presumed
they belonged to a regular organized band of guerrillas which
infests that country. It is practiced among these monsters either
to kill or mutilate any colored people who unluckily falls

(14:13):
into their power. None of the colored people dared to
sleep in their houses at night, but had to take
refuge in the surrounding country. Some part of the peaceful,
loyal white population are well acquainted with the haunts of
these depredators, but dread them. Would they betray them? As
there is no protective power in the country. They are
a terror to the loyal population at night. These ruffians,
besotted with drink, rave and tear like prairie Indians through

(14:33):
the streets of the city. The civil law is powerless
to protect against such desperadoes. That's interesting because it gives
you an idea of how terrifying it was during this period,
how these people acted. It gives you also, like a
look into the head of sort of I guess what
you'd call like a white ally who was also still
really racist against Native Americans, Like, yeah, there's a prairie Indian.

(14:53):
That's what that is of all the whole sentence. That's
what I caught where I was like, wait what it's
like you're you're so uh what do we talk? Yeah?
I was like yeah, it's like the record skipped. But
I was just like yeah, man, yeah, man, yeah, man,
hold up. Yeah, it's kind of like you want to
be really proud of like Ulysses Simpson Grant because you know,
as flawed as he was, he beat the Confederacy. He

(15:15):
was pretty committed to to black people not being slaves.
He was committed to them having the right to vote.
He did some really good stuff as present for black people.
Real terrible record with the Native America, just like real bad. Yeah. Um,
so you know, we have we do have a couple
of of of of founding members of this country that

(15:37):
we can be comprehensively proud of, but they're pretty much
just Thomas Paine actually, when just basically and and and
John Brown. Yeah, yeah, yeah, John Brown, there was a
neat moment in his history where he was like asked
by some white folks he lived around to help them
clear out a group of Native Americans from the community,
and he was like, I'd rather clear your ass out

(15:59):
of here. Yeah, good guy, John Brown. So, um, civil
law was often powerless to stop these kind of bands
of marauding white terrorists in this or insurgents really in
this period of time. Um, but civil law was also
often on board with this kind of violence. So it
was a mix of we really have no resources to

(16:20):
stop these people, and we also don't want to stop
these people. Uh. And a good example of how this
looked comes from the case of Union County, South Carolina.
That town included a virulent cell of klansmen roughly organized
around a local criminal named Bill Fawcett. Now, Fawcett had
been a member of another anti black guerrilla band known
to Union troops as Slickers previously, he and his friends

(16:41):
seemed to have slid rather seamlessly into becoming klansmen once
that was the hip new way to be racist terrorists.
Fawcett was repeatedly arrested for disorderly conduct and violence, but
he had good connections to local law enforcement, and he
and his friends were also tied heavily into the wealthy
gentry in the Union County, so they never really did
any hard time because they were good smugglers and they
helped keep the rich people in the county well supplied

(17:03):
with tax free liquor. One of the wealthy men who
supported Fawcett and his vigilante activities was James Rice Rogers.
He sold the illegal liquor that Fawcett smuggled, and he
was also the county sheriff in eighteen seventy. So that's
back around the uh and again we're seeing kind of
the same thing we are seeing in like the big

(17:24):
you know, northern cities in this period of time where
the police are intimately tied with vice, right you know.
Um So, on the night of December thirty one, eighteen seventy,
Union County was struck by a series of violent rates.
And this kind of originated from a clash between white
and black folks that still very complex. It started when
two of Fawcett's men set out to deliver a barrel

(17:45):
of illegal whiskey and they were stopped on the road
by a checkpoint of black militiamen. And these guys were
actually from two different black militias who had set up
patrols in the area they lived because there were bands
of armed clans been writing about and those clansmen had
killed people recently. Um. Not black people would also like
white Republicans in this period. Um, so they yeah, yeah,

(18:07):
they're they're killing Republicans. Publican meant something different back then, Yeah,
sure did so. Um. There's these bands of you know,
armed klansmen running around killing people, and so black folks
set up militias to protect their neighborhoods, right, so they're
doing like armed community self defense. And this this group
of faucets you know men start driving up to one
of these uh, one of these checkpoints with a barrel

(18:28):
of illegal whiskey um, and this militia holds Fawcett's men
up and they demand their hand over the whiskey. Um.
It's kind of unclear if they're just if they just
want the whiskey because they're like, oh hey, let's get
some whiskey, um, or if they're more like you guys
are sketchy as hell. Um, you kind of seem like
the clan dudes because these guys were both probably klansmen
who have been writing around and like, we want to
see what the hell is up. And obviously these these

(18:51):
white dudes weren't willing to like listen to what a
bunch of black militias said, and they write off, and
so the black militiamen opened fire at their wagon. Uh.
I'm gonna quote from historian A. Lane Parsons here. Perhaps
it was important to the pickets or those who fired,
that white men not dismissed their armed demands and drive
breezily by. Such pickets were part of how power operated

(19:11):
in Union, and to mobilize the resources to set one
up only to have it dismissed might have serious consequences.
Perhaps the shots were not about the whiskey at all.
There is some reason to suspect that Stevens, who's one
of the men driving that whiskey train, having passed through
the organized group, would have headed straight to Fawcett, which
might well have led to trouble, not unlike that which
was caused by shooting. So like, they might have been
worried that these people were going to go back to

(19:33):
the clan and try to organize an attack on the
picket and so and trouble definitely followed, you know them,
shooting at the wagon. Both the Fawcetts men immediately got
out of the wagon and fled, but one of them
was caught and he was executed by the militia, and
his body was posed in a matter similar to how
clansmen in the area had posed recently executed black men.
Parsons continues. The black militia here was replicating the subculture

(19:56):
of collective violence with which Union County ins were familiar.
Picketing a road to defend one of their own from
attack was conventional Union County behavior, as probably was the
shakedown of Steven's. Even shooting after the retreating figures of
Stevens and Robinson as they ran their picket would perhaps
not have been particularly abnormal and as gunhappy a culture
as Union Counties, the killing of Stevens made it a

(20:16):
much more serious matter of course. Militiaman, however, might have
miscalibrated elite's willingness to support Fawcett's marginal men, giving Steven's
limital status he was a criminal. Had the militia been
composed of white members, it seems likely that the whole
affair would have blown over. Indeed, when Steven's peer, Thomas
Jefferson Greer, had been shot just months earlier. His assailant,
who was another white guy, had enjoyed widespreads public support,

(20:37):
but again, John Sanders had been a white man. The
fact that a black militia had killed a white guy
was not okay to local white elites, and so large
armed groups of white men formed up and started confiscating
militia weapons from black homes, disarming them first. Yeah. So
so like they, I get a bunch of pushback from said,

(21:01):
you know, uh anarchists, boogoloo dudes who are like low
key bugleloo but don't want to admit it. You know
what I'm saying, um saying like I don't understand why
black people don't arm themselves, like you're doing all this
peaceful protests. Maybe you should, like you yelling at us
about being malicious coming out here heavenly armed. Maybe y'all

(21:21):
should start heavily being heavily armed, as if we ain't
never thought of that, like like I would. What makes
you think we that thought ain't crossed our mind yet?
You know what I'm saying, Like, do you want me
to go? You did a thing on them offered act already.
You know what I'm saying, We did that already, But
like this what years is? What year you're talking about

(21:42):
right now? Yeah, it's this. I'm a big I'm a
supporter of of of of not just black people, members
of marginalized groups, particularly as we continue to hurdle towards
an uncertain future. Considering armed self defense. Yes, like, yeah,
that's been done a lot, and historically there's a lot

(22:03):
more armed white people. So it's still like, it's not
the solution. It's not the solution, and like, why you
think we ain't thought it at? Like do you think
we ain't thought of at This has been tried before
and and sometimes it does work. We'll be we'll actually
gonna be talking about this a few times in this episode.
It's not like like again, I I'm one of the

(22:26):
anarchists being like consider it. You know it's I'm not
saying consider it, but these people talking to me as
if we never thought about you know what I'm saying
from the fucking beginning, From the beginning, what makes you
think like you come home, bro, and yeah what happens?
You know, the black people in Union County are organized

(22:47):
and they are armed and white people start going door
to door and taking guns out of it. Yes, and
the reality of like and I love the part of
that passage that was like this is not abnorm more
like what what what I wish I could run through
all of the streets of America and explain is our

(23:08):
countin American culture is violent, like we are. All of
your statues are war heroes were founded on a protest.
This is a violent culture. And our country, our power structures,
they respond to violence. So I just don't like, I'm

(23:28):
not telling you this is the right way. I'm just
telling you this is the ocean you swimming in. You
know what I'm saying. Right, we are saltwater fishies. That's
where we are. We are a violent culture. So you
mad at somebody else who's who's experiencing violence, right, Like,
like it's become bit on those experiencing violence to remain peaceful.

(23:50):
Just it means like I don't think you want to
you asking me to be a fresh water fish in
a saltwater ocean, Like, I just don't know what to
tell you. The water is violent. So this is what's
going to happen. Yeah yeah, so um yeah, So the
white folks start taking all the guns of the black
people who are in malicious um. And they also arrest

(24:11):
dozens of black men, many of men whom had no
ties to the malitious. Now, some of these men attempted
to resist, but they ultimately decided that a gunfight would
do them no good. Uh. They basically were like hold
up in a house that was surrounded by white folks,
and they had the choice do we defend ourselves or
do we give ourselves up? And kind of the decision was,
if we defend ourselves, we will either kill or injure

(24:32):
some of these white folks and they will be really
angry when they finished killing us because there's a lot
more of them, and they're gonna burn down every black
house in the neighborhood. Right that, Yeah, they like white
people at this time and even and at that time
and in this time, but mostly at that time. Are
the elevation saying like you elevate the moment, like dial

(24:56):
the eat up. You know what I'm saying. So these
folks like give themselves up to say the neighborhood. Um. Now,
for several days, the white elites in Union County debated
over this list of randomly arrested black men that they
had and decided basically, we're credit aside, how many of
them should can we punish and how many of them
can we spare without provoking a broader race riot among like,

(25:17):
because you know, there were like a chunk of folks
in power who are like who understood like, most of
these arrests are bullshit, but also we have to punish
some black people more or less at random, otherwise the
poor white folks in the county are going to go
on a race riot. So there's like this big debate
with the local elites. And Alice Walker, the head of
a local black militia, gets arrested on his way to

(25:38):
travel to the governor to warn him about what's happening
in Union County. Now Walker hadn't been present at any
of the events that had sparked this, but he was
hated by the most racist of the local whites because
he was the organizer of a black militia, so local
law enforcement decided that his death would go really far
in calming the white mob. Now Walker had supporters who
were ready to rally to his defense, armed, but again

(25:59):
he told them not to um. He was innocent, and
he was certain that a court case would bear out
his innocence, but he never got the chance to actually,
you know, do that. On January five, a huge gang
of ku Kux klansmen rated the Union County jail and
abducted five arrested black men, who also happened to be
prominent local Republicans Parsons rights quote. It is not possible
to name any of the members of the costumed group,

(26:20):
but because though not all of the men were on
horseback and were costumed, we can imagine that many of
the group's members were elites. From the size of the group.
Even if we accept only a cautious estimate, it seems
likely that they came from adjoining counties. There's a good
deal of evidence that some of Fawcett's friends were present
in a leadership role at this event, and one man
who was later named by witnesses to the raid as
a leader of the clan mob that abducted all these

(26:40):
black men was Fawcett's good buddy, Sheriff Rice Rogers. Um.
So again, yeah, the ship, that's how they get into
the jail is the sheriff as a klansman and he
lets him him in. Yeah, yeah, and you know, obviously
what you're expecting happens to these black men and it's tragic. Yeah. Um,
and it's it's possible even that. Like, so, there was
one of the things that did happen when the KKK

(27:02):
showed up at this jail is they struggled with a
deputy to get the keys. Um. And it's heavily suspected
by historians, including Elaine Parsons, that this was all kind
of an act um and that it's likely that the
deputy who struggled with the clan after giving up the keys,
put on a clan costume and engaged in the raid
after being robbed. Yeah, yeah, I can totally picture that, Hey,

(27:25):
don't take my key, don't take my key. Look, I'm
doing the right thing. Yeah. And it is like again
a lot and this this this I highlight this story
because I think specific stories are kind of useful in
getting people emotionally involved. But this is one of this happened.
We will never know how many times constantly, Um, like

(27:46):
the whole idea of a mob showing up at the
jail and the officers handing over the keys or straight
up just participating in the raid of the jail with
clan robes On was a constant story during this period.
Um Now as a rule, local law enforcement either again
helped actively or turned a blind eye to clan violence
out of fear. Watching from Washington, d C. President U. S.

(28:09):
Grant was shocked by what seemed to be nothing so
much as a resurgent Confederate movement in his you know,
in his country. So when he had come to power,
Granted believed that the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which
guaranteed black men the right to vote, would solve the
problem of securing the rights of newly freed black people.
He was taken by surprise by the vicious string of
murders that followed black emancipation and chat Noogat Tennessee, a

(28:32):
black man named Andrew Flowers defeated the white candidate for
Justice of the Peace in an eighteen seventy election. Despite
the fact that this man had just been elected justice
police were nowhere in evidence while klansman whipped and beat
him and told him that no inward would hold office
in the United States. Again common story, Yeah and survived.
Yeah again, Hey, why don't you just put black people

(28:53):
in office? You think we ain't thought it at Yeah,
gotta deal with the problem of mass violence being done
to black people in support of white supremacy. Not always
by white people, but in support of white supremacy. Because
we'll talk next week about how how having black officers

(29:14):
and police departments works, because it doesn't always work the
way you might suspect, because white supremacy. Yeah, we're talking
to the first one. Whiteness is a thing. Yeah, you
know what isn't the ku klux jus. No, that's not
that's not what I mean. Yeah, you know that's the

(29:35):
harsh Let's not analyze that too much. Right now, let's
just go through the episode one Funk the Police. It's
time for an ad bk fuk the Police. Products. The
Black Effect Presents features honest conversations and exclusive interviews, a
space for artists, everyday people and listeners to amplify, elevate,

(29:57):
and empower black voices with great conversation. Make sure to
listen to The Black Effect Presents podcast on I Heart Radio,
Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi. I'm
Robert sex Reese, host of The Doctor sex re Show,
and every episode I listened to people talk about their

(30:17):
sex and intimacy issues and yes, I despise every minute
of it, and she she made mistakes too, ill everyone
at her wedding. But hell is real. We're all trapped
here and there's nothing any of us can do about it.
So join me, won't You? Listen to the Doctors Sex
re Show every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Make sure

(30:41):
to check out drink Champs, your number one music podcast
on the Black Effect Podcast Network. Host n O r
E and d J E f N sat down with
artists and icon Ya, which Vulture called one most significant interviews.
I literally had to go like Danos and I don't
want to have to be the villain. But when I
went and did the Donda thing, he returned and abody

(31:02):
had to sit back and watch the real leader. Check
out drink Champ's conversation with Yea and many more legendary
artists each and every Friday on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcast, or where ever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back, Oh my gosh. You know what I love

(31:23):
is being back from ADS because it means that we
can talk more about the horrific history of racism and
law enforcement, terror and trauma. That's it's inside of my
DNA and it passed on generationally. Yes, should have had
an air horn there, so uh. Starting in eighteen seventy
U President Grant began to lobby Congress to give him

(31:44):
power to do something about the clan because again, local
law enforcement was actively aiding and abetting the KK. In
eighteen seventy and eighteen seventy one, Congress passed the enforcement as.
These protected the rights of black men to vote, hold office,
and serve on reason and generally enjoy equal protection under
the law. The Ku Klux Klan Acts, as they came
to be known, allowed President Grant to call up the

(32:07):
army to order in order to arrest and break up
the bands of disguised night marauders. And we're gonna be
like critical of law enforcement on this podcast, but we
gotta be fair when it's important to be fair, and
federal law enforcement did a pretty decent job on breaking
up the clan. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is this is
where things get really complicated, prop because a lot of

(32:28):
the credit for this goes to Amos Ackerman, the Attorney
General of the United States. Ackerman joined the Republican Party
after the Civil War and became one of the nation's
most strenuous advocates for black suffrage. He was like, black
people have the right to vote and hold office, and
we will I I will make sure we enforce this
with fucking riflemen if we have to. Um. Historian William S.

(32:50):
Mcpheeley said of Ackerman that quote no Attorney general before
or since has been more vigorous in the prosecution of
cases designed to protect the lives and rights of black Americans.
And here's where things get complicated, because before he was
a Republican, before he was the Attorney General, Amos Ackerman
volunteered and fought in the Confederate Army. People have layers

(33:14):
of complication. People are complicated. They in them contain many yeah. Um.
And this if for Amos this seems to have been
like he was. It seems to have been more a
matter of, like you hear about these folks who are
like really loyal to their state for reasons I have
trouble understanding. Like, he doesn't seem to have joined the
Confederate Army specifically to fight for slavery, although he fought

(33:36):
for slavery because that's what the Confederate Army fought for.
But in his mind, I think it was more like,
I'm really loyal to Georgia. I don't know, I can't
get in ahead of that guy, but I guess if
you can make that up, he tried to afterwards. Um,
so I want to give it to the possibility that people, uh,

(33:56):
probably hundreds of them at the time, you know, like
you said, just was like, look, we're down. Here is
what we do. We're fighting far our way of life.
I guess that's right. And in the middle of that
finally had this like, you know, this is bullshit, you
know I'm saying, and was like, but if you're the
onliest person for miles talking like this, it's probably hard

(34:17):
to find some good community and you're probably gonna fumble,
and then you become this guy to where you're like, hey,
there's one thing I can do. I could probably like
dismantle this clan thing. That's the thing to do, you
know what I'm saying. Yeah, if there's a thing that
can make up for volunteering to serve in the Confederate Army,
I guess it's dismantling the KKK. I guess, yeah, Like

(34:39):
that's a good that's a good good artist. Yeah. Yeah,
So the worst clan violence was in South Carolina, and
Grant declared martial law in that state, citing a condition
of lawlessness. He suspended habeas corpus uh, and numerous clansmen
were rounded up by federal authorities, including Sheriff Rice Rogers,
who we have been talking about a lot of a

(35:00):
lot of Sheriff Scott dropped pulled up in this. So
the Senate held extensive hearings where hundreds of black victims
of the clan were allowed to tell their stories to
the nation. Under Ackerman's direction, six hundred clansmen were convicted
and sixty five of them sent to a federal penitentiary.
By eighteen seventy two, the clan was no longer a
meaningful force in the United States. Frederick Douglas himself said

(35:21):
that without President Grant's actions, black Americans would have been
trapped again in a condition almost identical to slavery. That
is probably true, but it's also true that Grant kind
of botched the landing on this one, firing Ackerman to
appease his political rivals and commuting the sentences of some
clansmen in a bid for reconciliations. So again I can't
stand here. You know, let's be fair. Um. But also

(35:43):
you know, it is fair to say that Ulysses Simon
Simpson Grant was probably the best presidential advocate for black
rights that existed until at least f DR. That's I
was gonna say, like, yeah, why not to the New Deal?
You know, yeah, even like even he got an asterisk
next to ye Yeah, a couple of them. Yeah. So

(36:06):
terrorism was, however, briefly out as a method of suppress,
of repressing Black Americans and enforcing white supremacy, or at
least terrorism and kind of an organized fashion because we're
gonna talk about lynching later. Um. This left the law
and law enforcement as the last organized refuge for white supremacists.
The Black Codes had been made i llegal in eighteen
sixty eight, when the Fourteenth Amendment gave black people equal

(36:27):
protection under the law. Um, But in eighteen seventy seven,
the first Jim Crow laws began to be passed, mandating
separate public spaces for black and white people. Suddenly, white
and black people were now expected by law to use
separate schools, libraries, water fountains, and restaurants. The police could
no longer arrest black men for voting, although that absolutely
still happened, but they could arrest black people for entering

(36:48):
white spaces. The clan was gone, but the police remained,
and for decades they took over the hard work of
enforcing white supremacy from the terrorists. In nineteen fifteen, William J. Simmons,
former minister, performed a real active resurrection and brought the
KKK back to life. Now, Simmons had been a big
nerd for things like the Masons and other fraternal societies

(37:08):
that were a big part of life back in the
day clubs where men would gather and dress up in
costumes and do silly rituals and generally get drunk. Simmons
wanted to make a society of his own, and he
decided that reviving the old KKK would be easiest because
then he could cash in on the clan's name recognition
and branding. Again, I cover all this in that two
part or that we we already did on the show,
but before we move on to the cops stuff, the

(37:29):
important thing to know is that the second clan was
fucking huge, while the first had been a relatively small
group of terrorists the second Clan had its terrorists, but
it was largely a social club that included millions of Americans.
At its height, they had a summer camp like. It
was not quite the same thing. Yeah, they sold branded
equipment and stuff like, and in a lot of ways

(37:50):
they were basically a pyramid scheme. Simmons engaged a pr
firm to help him repackage this old terrorist group as
a cool club for families. By nineteen twenty, the whole
thing had gone viral name and wide, and the claim
did engage in pushing racist laws. But for the folks
at the top, I think more than even a force
for racism, the clan was a grift right now. There
were a lot of racists in like everyone in the

(38:12):
clan was a racist still, and there were a lot
of racists who were like the old clansman kind of
at the top. Making money was more the goal than
anything else. Um yeah, uh so uh. In ninety one,
Simmons gave an interview to the Atlanta Journal that was
basically his sales pitch to the nation for the Ku
Klux Klan from a right up in the National Museum
of American History website quote while explicitly advocating white supremacy.

(38:35):
Simmons played up his group's commitment to law and order,
promoted their enforcement of prohibition, and even boasted of his
own police credentials. He claimed members at every level of
law enforcement belonged to his organization and that the local
sheriff was often one of the first to join when
the clan came to a town. Ominously, Simmons declared that
the sheriff of Fulton County knows where he can get
two members of the clan in a moment's called to

(38:57):
suppress anything in the way of lawlessness. There it is. Yeah,
and he wasn't blowing hot air when he said this.
In Anaheim, California, Klansmen won four out of five seats
on the city council, dominating local politics until nineteen. They
voted to allow officers who are clan members to patrol
wearing their full KKK uniform instead of their normal police uniform.

(39:18):
Non police clansmen were also allowed to patrol and interrogate
citizens in the streets. I guess want you guys to
know that anaheims where Disneyland is, so just just like
let this let that sink in Anaheim. Anaheim Disneyland. Is
you want to go to downtown Disney it's Anaheim. Yeah.
The City Council of Anaheim, who are klansmen, are like, yeah,

(39:41):
cops can just wear their clan uniforms to do their job.
It's just a club, yeah, yeah, And the clan uniform
basically is the same as the police uniform. So like,
we're good. So I don't understand the problem. You know
this this is probably something for episode five, But just
like when I think to myself, like how anyone can

(40:04):
get their brain around even at that time, after the
law to change, after you fought the war, I just
think at the core it's because you, like, black people
are just You're still just functional. You're still just a
in the brain of the white supremacist at the time,
and I think sometimes the stain of that's still here

(40:26):
now where it's like you are you're an appliance. Black
people are an appliance, right, So when you can make
an appliance out of our entire bodies, that slavery, right So,
and then you move that into mass incarceration to where
you like, okay and segregation and stuff like that, like
who wants to live in the house with their cows right,

(40:48):
because you're just in your washing machine doesn't have rights.
It's just a washing machine. You know. So when you
if you think of an entire person because of their
color as just a function for yourself, and it's not
even just black people, it's like even people that like
if your argument against uh, you know, supporting immigrant rights,

(41:12):
especially immigrants of Latin American, you know, people is like, well,
well who's going to pick our cotton or pick our strawberries?
Who's gonna be You still see these people as an appliance,
you know what I'm saying. So when I got my
ten thousand new followers, that's saying support black voices. I
wanted to be like, yo, thank you for coming. Here's

(41:32):
ten other things. I am bad. You know, I got daughters,
I'm lactose in tolerant. You know what I'm saying. I
think butters disgusting. It's because you're still see me as
an appliance, you know what I'm saying. So if if
if I'm just the if I'm just the cow, if

(41:54):
I'm just the function, so even if it's a function
of you learning from me, I'm still just it's still
just you. Hility, If it's a function of y'are just
supposed to pick our fields. You don't get rights. Y'all
live over there. And I don't understand why the damn
refrigerator wants me to treat it like an equal, you

(42:15):
know what I'm saying, Like you're just the refrigeration, Like
shut up, you know what, man here, we need to
figure out something to make the damn cows and pigs
understand that they just cows and pigs, you know what
I'm saying. So to me, it's like if if that's
where your brain goes, Damn, I went on a rant.

(42:35):
But if that's where your brain goes, that's why it's
so like mind boggling to this to these clans people,
was just like I don't understand why these black people
keep asking to sit at our tables. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
And that's yeah. I mean like but like that that
is sort of that's this is a really important thing

(42:57):
to understand because Jim we usually talk about Jim Crow
like white people usually talk about Jim Crow. I'm thinking
back to like how I've taught about it, like it
was this terrible thing that happened that was done to
black people, which it is was. It was a crime,
but also what Jim Crow was is the foundation of
law enforcement. Law enforcement in this country was still very
much in flux and being formalized when Jim Crow started.
It was really fucking new. Like the first police department

(43:20):
had only started in eighteen thirty eight. Jim Crow starts
in eighteen seventy seven. So US law enforcement and much,
if not most of this country is is founded um
at this like more or less at the same time
as Jim Crow, which means that US law enforcement is
founded in large part to keep the appliances in the
eyes of the white elite separated from the white elite.

(43:44):
Like that that yeah, um so yeah important point. Um so.
The second Clan was also real popular in Oregon, maybe
more popular in Oregon than it was anywhere else in
the country. And patient zero for the Oregon Clan was
the southern town of Medford, which is not Bedford, which

(44:05):
is where you go Shakespeare in the Park. Yeah, No,
that's Ashland, which is right next to Medford, right, And
and Ashland is a very different city, but like, yeah,
there's great tea house I love. I actually like like
Medford and Ashland are both like right next to each
other and both in one of the prettiest parts of Oregon.

(44:26):
And that's one of the prettiest places in the entire planet.
Like I've been all over the damn world, I haven't
found anywhere. I found some places that are like up
there with with that part of Oregon, but I haven't
done anything that I find pretty like fucking gorgeous place.
But also Medford has a real long history of straight
up fascism right into the present day. Um, the mayor
of the town of Phoenix, I think it was Phoenix,

(44:47):
which is like right outside of Medford, basically a suburb
of Medford. The mayor two or three days ago, drove
his car into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters.
The mayor, yeah, so the issues go continue. Yeah, I
could see my face rightw wow. So, um, Medford is

(45:13):
where Luther Powell, the klegal sent by the National Clan
to establish the clan in Oregon, set up the state's
first KKK outpost. He gained initial recruits by pointing to
the massive bootlegging problem in nearby Jackson County and making
the case that the Clan could help with law and order.
And I'm gonna quote now from a paper by Ben
Bruce of Chapman University. Powell sold the clan to potential

(45:35):
followers not as a brotherhood of bigotry, but as a
beacon of patriotism, cultural conservatism, and social order. According to Powell,
the clan was there to uphold traditional American society against
the threat of the Roaring twenties. Specifically, pal emphasized the
clan support for the enforcement of Prohibition. In a matter
of weeks, pal had sworn over a hundred men into
the Invisible Empire, most of who were policemen. Clan expert

(45:58):
and author David Chalmers describes the clan under Palace being
in the law and order business. Luther palace recruiting success
in Medford cannot be quantified by lists of names on
paper on membership dues alone. With his newfound support from
local police officers, pal accused Medford County of insufficient prohibition
enforcement policies. He then spearheaded the successful recall of the
county sheriff. Within a month, the mayor of Medford was

(46:20):
dressed in white robes as well. So Medford again this
is and this happens. We're talking about Anaheim and Medford,
and like We'll talk about a couple of other cities,
but this is happening all over the U. S. We're
like whole city governments and the whole police departments are like, yeah,
what if we're just klansmen too, This is fine? Yeah yeah.
So pal success perfectly embodies what made the second clan

(46:44):
much more successful than the first. The first KKK was
literally an insurgent terrorist army. The new KKK positioned itself
as a force for law and order, standing alongside the
state in order to help keep white people safe. Um,
it was a It was again not a vigilante like

(47:05):
terrorist organization, but instead the same kind of designated vigilante
force if you remember that from our first couple of episodes,
designated vigilante force like the police. And that's why it
was often like a lot of local clan cells were
majority police officers. So Powell moved on quickly from Medford
to Portland, as most people who visit Medford tend to do.

(47:26):
Within months, the city had thousands of clansmen, and it
may have garnered more KKK members more quickly than any
other city. Now, again, this rapid success in Portland came
in part from the fact that the clan was seen
as respectable. Shortly after opening, the Portland Clan Chapter partnered
openly with the Portland Police Bureau. Since the Portland Police

(47:48):
Bureau only had a hundred and fifty men at this point,
it considered itself understaffed, and the Mayor of Portland decided
to appoint a vigilante police auxiliary, and he allowed the
KKK to pick the members. These men received police powers
and firearms, but their names were kept hidden, effectively turning
themselves into a secret police force. I should note here

(48:09):
that during the recent protests in Portland, a commander of
the Portland Police Ports Force sent out a directive ordering
police officers to cover up their names and replace them
with numbers that could only be traced back to names internally. Um,
just a fun little thing. Portland Police Bureau, same force
that partnered openly with the clan. Cool stuff. Oh my god.

(48:32):
Portland's where there's where on where on burn Side in
m ok you can go to a park of just
food trucks and you can get craft like vegan waffles.
That's in Portland. And the cops are claim members and

(48:55):
the yeah, yeah, yeah exactly. I've heard a lot at
you Portland's I've heard a lot of cops and clan
go hand in hand chance in port in the Portland
streets recently, and I obviously a lot of people believe that,
but I don't know if those people know that. Literally,
the Portland Police Bureau had an official arrangement with the KKK.

(49:18):
Yeah seriously, you know. Yeah, no, you're literally correct in
a very direct way, not just in a these guys
are secretly clan memberis but no, no, no, like the
PPB had an arrangement. Yeah, cool stuff, So a story.
Oregon also had a major clan problem, and this is
because it was the most diverse city in the state,

(49:39):
which meant at this point didn't mean that it was
the most the least lowest number of white people, and
meant that it had like basically, it had the most
the highest number of Catholic people who came from weird
parts of Europe like right that and again, the second
clan in this period, some historians will argue, was actually
more racist and violent against Catholics and Jewish people, or
at least as racist and violent as it was to

(50:02):
black people. Like this is it is like they've broadened
their their spate of hatred um, and obviously it found
a healthy base of resentful Protestant white people in a Storia.
Clan leaders brought in anti Catholic speakers to rile up
the public, and they rallied themselves around enforcing vice laws
that the police had not handled to their satisfaction. Primarily,
they went after prohibition violators and prostitutes. On June seventeenth,

(50:25):
ninety two, the clan sent both local newspapers and the
sheriff a letter demanding that he take action against the
whistle in the heart of a local bootlegging operation. Two
weeks before the letter, two people had died in a
drunken accident after leaving the whistle in. The clan led
her to the sheriff threatened to take care of the
problem if he failed to do so. On June nineteenth,
the KKK sent fifty men into the whistle In. They

(50:46):
were met by Sheriff's deputies, who had been called ironically
by the bootleggers inside. The sheriff arrested both men, and
the whole incident became something of a local scandal. The
clan used it to petition for a recall election, which
they again succeeded. In getting their candidate one a recall election,
giving them control of a story a sheriff's department, and
soon after they swept local government elections too. Variations of
the story repeated themselves all over Oregon, and the clan

(51:09):
was eventually successful in electing their own candidate for Governor,
Walter I. Pierce. His regime passed the Oregon Compulsory School Bill,
which required all children from eight to fifteen to attend
public school. That sounds innocuous enough on the surface, but
the purpose of the bill was to destroy all Catholic
schools because those were not public. And again, the KKK
really hates Catholics, and definitely the Oregon Clan is more

(51:30):
anti Catholic than it is anti Black, but only because
there's not a whole lot of black people in Oregon, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was like it's like ninety percent white people at
this point. So that's why the KKK is so focused
on although they also focus a lot on Japanese and
Chinese immigrants, and like this governor that they elect pushes
a bill to basically make it impossible to move to

(51:51):
Oregon or work in Oregon as an Asian person, and
you know, the both the anti compulsory bill and the
anti Asians bills like those get struck down. Um, and
this governor who is backed by the clan winds up
kind of turning on the clan, not because he's a
good guy, but because, um, he doesn't he thinks that
after he gets elected, he doesn't really feel loyal to

(52:12):
the clan anymore. Like so anyway, it's a complicated story,
but it's the clan. I'm just like man like y'all
since I feel like when I the more I learned
about them, I'm just like man, y'all are all over
the place where I just sometimes I can't even draw
the I can't even connect the dots of their hatred,
like how like how are how are we talking about

(52:35):
Jews right now? Like where it's like when did we
get to that? You know? Or I just I can
imagine I would love to see a skit where somebody's
trying to complain where where uh some new kids in
the back of the room at the clan meeting and
can't keep up with like wait, we're talking about Catholics?
Now what what what they do? Wait with what's the

(52:56):
problem with you know what? I'm saying like, just like,
I can't even this is a bleat tangent, but I'm
just like, yeah, I just I can't keep up. Man.
I'm like, yeah, just heang man, at least be consistent.
Yeah yeah, yeah, um break Oh yeah we should That
was smooth. Thank you. Yeah, here's have a have a

(53:17):
handful of products, buckaroos. After thirty years, it's time to
return to the halls of West Beverly High and hang
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(53:39):
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(54:20):
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(55:02):
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(55:29):
We have returned, and we're talking still about the Oregon Clan.
So the Oregon kk hit K success in local and
state politics give them the legitimacy they needed to feel
comfortable carrying out acts of violence. On April eleventh, nineteen,
a twenty two year old Latino man named Sam Johnson
was grabbed in the middle of the night by a
group of robed klansmen. They dragged him into the forest

(55:49):
and they hung him from a tree quote not long
enough to kill him, but sufficiently long to give him
a glance into eternity. According to a local paper, While
he lay on the ground recovering, the mob told him
that he had to leave town or they would come
back and kill him. This semi lynching was again reported
on in the local paper, but no arrests were made.
The county sheriff was almost certainly one of the men

(56:09):
who abducted Sam, called him a bad actor who just
hadn't done anything serious enough to get arrested, so he
doesn't have a criminal record, but he was. We decided
he was a criminal, so it's fine. Yeah. The sheriff
accused him of bootlegging without any evidence and washed his
hands of the case. On March eighteenth, a Catholic piano

(56:30):
salesman named JF. Hale was assaulted in the same way,
taking a gunpoint into the woods and then hung almost
to death. This time the demand was made that Hale
drop a lawsuit against another Medford man for an unpaid debt,
and that he also leave town. The sheriff said the
kidnapping two was of no local interest, which it's also
worth noting that there was a recent h well last year,

(56:53):
a trans black woman who was murdered in the city
of Portland's um and the death was written on Well
who died in the city of port The police ruled
it a suicide. There's a lot that shady about it.
The family has asked for it to be investigated, and
the police said that investigating it, uh further was not
of local interest. Um, so that's cool. That's a cool thing.
That Again, I got to point out how this never

(57:14):
stopped and has never really even slowed down in a
lot of ways. This this is this playbook has ever
failed these fools? Yes? Yeah uh. On April two, a
black railroad worker who had just been released from jail
over prohibition violation was kidnapped hung again in order to

(57:34):
flee the town. As he ran away, he heard men
shouting back at him can you run inward, while some
in the crowd fired at his feet with their revolvers.
By this point, local media had begun covering the clan
subductions and outraged articles. One in the Medford Mail Tribune
revealed that the state clan leadership had actually sent notes
to individual members within the county with instructions on how
to carry out these necktie attacks. The clanton denied these

(57:58):
letters since they had not been sent on a fi
clan letterhead. Again, they had a lot of products, had
a lot of products and services actually in this period,
because it wasn't all letter hit. They sold insurance. Yeah,
this is incredible. So klegal. H. E. Griffith, who was

(58:18):
the guy who had taken over the Medford clan, demanded
and your name is can you say his his title? Again?
Just legal? Just klegal? I I yeah, I'm just yeah,
exercises that women do to keep Oh yes, yes, it
does sound like that. Yeah. Now so h Griffith prop

(58:42):
thank you, hey girl, dad. Yeah, you know what I'm saying. Yeah. So. Um,
the Medford Mail Tribune like writes a letter about how
the clan is very obviously behind all this, and the
guy in charge of the Medford Clan demands to that
the newspaper give him a chance to respond, and the
Medford Mail Tribune lets him release his statement through the
paper denying any role in the semi lynchings. Gotta gotta

(59:03):
tell both sides of the story, um Ben Bruce writes,
quote klegal A g. Griffith gave an official statement denying
any prior knowledge of the aforementioned event events, as well
as the clan's alleged involvement. Griffith accused the local papers
of severely misrepresenting the facts. In the same article, Griffith
endorsed the clan as a regular, fraternal, patriotic, and benevolent
order that stands for pure Americanism, protection of pure womanhood,

(59:27):
free speech and press, free public schools, restricted immigration, white supremacy,
and law and order, and consistently assists all law officers
in the performance of their duties. Um, that's cool. Surprisingly,
the people of Medford did not believe these denials, or
at least enough of them didn't. That public outrage did
force a trial, which occurred nearly a year later. Nineteen

(59:48):
clansmen were charged with participating in the necktie parties, as
they came to be known. One of the men was
the former police chief of Medford, Good Lord. The main
witness was JF. Hale, the piano salesman, but the state
decided he was not a reputable citizen, largely because his
son had been born out of wedlock. It is the twenties. Uh,

(01:00:15):
it's it's cool. All charges against the klansmen were dropped.
Ye oh yeah, so you remember that You remember last
year that at that um that uh anti abortion protests
where that little boy was like eye to eye with
that Native American man and like the the whole picture went.

(01:00:36):
Remember that. Yeah, So this that what you're just explaining
explains in a lot of ways why everybody looked at
that moment and saw two different things. Because the what
what the terror that a lot of us are talking about,
like why this was so frustrating was because the the

(01:01:01):
ambiguity of this kid's face of just being like he
is just a kid. He is kind of smirking, right,
and you could say, well, we didn't do anything. He
interrupt the guy he's just standing there looking at it. Me.
If they're at his own protests, it's fine. But when
you hear stories like this, what And I can't say
because I'm not in that kid's head and I wasn't there.
I'm just saying, when I look at it, I see

(01:01:24):
the history. You're explaining, the idea that you that these
boys can function without any imputant. What's the world I'm
looking for? Imputant, punitive, they're impunity. What's the word I'm
looking for. I don't know. But the point is they're
not gonna get in trouble, That's what I'm trying to say. Right,

(01:01:45):
so you can always lean back and be like, what,
I didn't do anything. So and I just remembered how
many times in my own life recognizing that smirk, knowing
that no matter what this kid did did, no matter
how terrible it is, no no matter how much evidence I have,
he will not be punished, you know what I'm saying.

(01:02:07):
So that's the like so whether I know what this
kid was thinking or not, it's like, this is what
America saw. There was two America's one of the one
side of America saw this kid has. This kid's gonna
there's no matter what, he's not gonna get in trouble.
And this is this is why when we finally do
reform law enforcement, you know, uh, disband the police and

(01:02:30):
replace it with something better. One of the federal agencies
we need is a is a federal branch that is
just a groups of people who go door to door
and just give people one solid punch in the face
when they really deserve it, when they like they don't.
We shouldn't be sending him to prison. They didn't do
a prison thing. Like you were a dick, and now
you're gonna get hit in the face. Yeah yeah, a

(01:02:50):
good slapping, Yeah yeah, somebody the damn face. Yeah yeah. Uh,
I think it's back from get shipped, which is like
a face in of a fist. Is the is the
direct translation? Yeah, Yeah, Sometimes people just need to get
like not hard, not enough to do damage. Like we'll
train these people to deliver like legally appropriate slaps and punches,

(01:03:11):
but like you were a deck and somebody needs to
fucking smack you, and like it should be a group
of of of men and women in suits who come
to your door and say, like you have been selected
to get smacked in the face because you were a
dick and you need to know it. That's my suggestion. Um,
not a bad one. Yeah. So Oregon's clan was relatively

(01:03:32):
non violent, and I again this totally tells you how
bad the second clan was. We're calling like lynch ng's
that don't kill anybody, relatively non violent compared to the
clan in Oklahoma, for example, had a horrifically violent clan
that also eventually wound up in charge of most a
lot of the the different state or or like local
cities and departments, police departments and stuff. Um. And it

(01:03:54):
was also comparatively non violent when you sort of put
it against the clan in Indiana for example. There in Indiana,
the KKK was successful in infiltrating a local civilian law
enforcement agency, the Horse Thief Detective Association. Now, this odd
group got its start in the eighteen forties and it's
members were basically licensed vigilantes with the right to protect

(01:04:16):
property via violence. And as you can guess by the name.
They started to prosecute horse thieves. Right, law enforcement can't
catch all these horse thieves, will deputize civilians, will give
them the right to like arrest and funk up people
to stop horse thievery. But they also had kind of
broader rights to enforce laws. Um. Now, the birth of
the automobile reduced the Horse Thief Detective Association to in
somewhat irrelevant group. But when the KKK came to Indiana

(01:04:39):
in the early nineteen twenties, they saw that, like, there
was this organization that civilians who are klansmen could join
and it would give them the right to carry out
violence with state backing. So they start flooding the h
d t A with membership, and they also start giving
existing members in the h d t A free and
subsidized membership in the KKK because the see that, like,

(01:05:00):
this weird little organization gives them the right to enforce
the law in Indiana without like having to get elected
sheriff or anything or put you know, even recruit police officers.
So the Indiana Clan starts pouring money into the h
d t A and offering their existing members low priced
entry into the clan quote as sworn members of h
d t A chapters, clansmen in the state essentially formed
an armed, officially sanctioned force that would allow them to

(01:05:22):
enact their agenda under the guise of legitimate law enforcement. Now.
In his work on the clan in Indiana, historian Leonard J.
Moore details membership records from nineteen twenty five that showed
that over twenty of the state's eligible population, white Protestant
native born males belonged to the KKK, and some counties
that number exceeded thirty three. In Marion County, which included

(01:05:44):
the city of Indianapolis, over a quarter of eligible men
belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, some twenty five thousand
members in total, many of whom held dual membership in
the h d t A chapter. Okay, wait, m hm
uh they paid dues. Yeah, yeah, no, it was a
for profit in debt. Yeah, I remember that, which I forgot.
How lame that even makes it even more lame. Yeah,

(01:06:06):
they're they're paid to be in here. More so lame.
It's pretty cool. So I'm gonna quote again from a historian,
Leonard J. Moore quote, uh as horse thief detectives. The
Indiana Clan came down on bootleggers, organized labor immigrants, and
African American populations, and one incident related in Elliott Jaspin's

(01:06:30):
book Buried in the Bitter Waters, they helped expel black
citizens from the mining town of Blandford in western Indiana.
On January eighteenth, nineteen twenty three, a young girl from
Blandford reported that she had been abducted and assaulted by
an African American man. Within forty eight hours, several hundred
white towns folk met and demanded that all black residents leave,
beginning with unmarried men who were to be outside town
limits by that evening. Within a week, all black residents

(01:06:52):
of Blandford, approximately fifty people had fled. That exodus was
overseen by Harry Newland, the sheriff of a million county
and himself a clansmen, along with members of the Dana
h d t A and the Help Township h d
t A, two of the four chapters in the area.
The Help Township chapter alone included over a dozen members
of the clan, including its captain. African American citizens both
in Blandford and the surrounding county felt forced to comply

(01:07:14):
and departed in mass As Jaspin notes, the nineteen cents
has recorded well over two hundred black residents in Vermilion County.
In nineteen thirty, that number was less than seventy. That's
an active of ethnic cleansing. That's what we call ethnic cleansing. Yeah,
that's what that's called. Yeah. Yeah, so the k Indiana
all the KKK was active all throughout And again think

(01:07:38):
about this, Think about this civilian group with law enforcement
powers enforcing white supremacy. When you think about, for example,
armed members of far right Molissia's showing up to support
the police at protests. Um, yeah, that's so. The KKK
was active all throughout the United States during this period,
eventually reaching a peak of like four million members. Exists

(01:08:00):
no accurate nationwide count for how many people were forced
out of their homes by the clan, how many were
assaulted by them, are killed by them, just as there
exists no comprehensive accounting for how often this behavior occurred,
either with the consent or the enthusiastic help of the police.
In either case, it may be a mistake to even
attempt to quantify the KKK's part in this specifically because
the violence of both the First and Second Clan occurred

(01:08:22):
within a much broader context of mass violence against black
people by white people with the express consent of law enforcement.
This violence started up during reconstruction and continued all the
way into nineteen fifty. We tend to call it lynching today,
although it took a variety of forms, and we will
never know how many black men were killed during this period,
but the Equal Justice Initiative estimates sixty five hundred at

(01:08:44):
the minimum. These murders occurred at a steady pace, with
intermittent eruptions that were spurred on by a mix of
economic recessions, war, and white resentment of black success. And
all that brings me to the story of the Red
Summer of nineteen nineteen. Have you heard of this prop Yes, yeah, yeah,
I'm gonna guess I think because of the show Watchmen.

(01:09:05):
Actually a lot more white people know about Tulsa now,
which we'll be talking about in part two. I don't
think very many. I didn't know about fucking Red Summer
until like a week or two ago. So four, Part
four Jesus, Part four for the week, Part two for
the week. Okay, well, okay, yeah, the next episode we
will talk about Tulsa. This episode, this is uh yeah,

(01:09:25):
Red Summer nineteen nineteen. Again, this is the type of
stuff that, like, like I said before, if it's not
in your experience, yeah you you'd have to go out
of your way to know this, um. But if it is,
it's like, this is why I will always hammer like,

(01:09:45):
you know, having a good strong sense of self, a
sense of community, and then having relationships across communities, you
know what I'm saying. So that now you don't sound
like an asshole when you don't know what you're talking
about because you don't know people from other places, you
know what I'm saying. So this is so so yeah.

(01:10:07):
So anyway, this ship won't be in your textbooks and
it's not going to be no, uh, you're lucky if
you get a paragraph on the Red Summer in a
in a textbook, and not all texts. Mind sure didn't
have it. It is in some textbooks because some of
the articles I read on it, like we're specifically analyzing
how it's covered in textbooks, but again, generally about a paragraph. Now,

(01:10:31):
the Red Summer is the name given by Double A
CP leader James Weldon Johnson for the months in nineteen
nineteen when a wave of racist riots. Race riots is
often the term, I think racist riots is more accurate.
Woke out against black communities in Charleston, South Carolina, Longview, Texas, Bisbee, Arizona, Washington,
d C. Chicago, Knoxville, Omaha, and Elane, Arkansas. At least

(01:10:54):
a hundred and fifty people were killed in the violence,
and a hundred or so more lynched, but it's probably
more like a thousand and dead. You'll you'll hear again,
we don't We're not gonna We're never gonna get a
good accounting. Um. And I hope the listeners here like
as he gets into this story again, just like we said,
you know, to the militia folks that are like, how
come black people don't arm? And when we say, you
think we ain't thought it at right now, as you read,

(01:11:18):
as you listen to this story, when people say, well,
how come you don't build your own businesses and support
your own community and start your own capitalistic spaces, let
me say, you think we ain't thought it at yeah? Yeah, Um.
So obviously you know, clan members were involved with and
behind a great deal of a violence of Red Summer,

(01:11:38):
but not not necessarily most of it, although in Pittsburgh
the KKK chapter posted up notices around a black neighborhood
which stated the war is over Negroes. Stay in your place.
If you don't, will put you there um, which is
a little ironic because a lot of Red Summer involved
white crowds going into black neighbors coming coming into Yeah,
exactly mine and our own business fucking. While plansmen were

(01:12:02):
regular drivers of violence during Red Summer, uniformed police officers
played at least as larger role, maybe even a larger one.
One of the first riots started in Chicago on July
after a black child mistakenly swam into a chunk of
beach that was whites only under Jim Crow. White people
on the beach saw this child, Eugene Williams, and started

(01:12:22):
pelting him with rocks. Every time he would attempt to
come to shore, they would throw more rocks at him.
He eventually drowned. This brought a cloud crowd of furious
black citizens out. More rocks were thrown. A white officer
showed up, observed the situation, and decided to arrest a
black guy. This for obvious reasons helped push tensions in
Chicago to a boiling point. The resulting riot led to

(01:12:45):
thirty eight, mostly black deaths, and the police responded with
a mix of completely neglect, often allowing the white mobs
to do violence, and occasional acts of giving a ship,
possibly due to the presence of black men on the
Chicago p D. The most example notable example of this
was probably the Chicago police holding back a white mob
from burning down a hospital filled with mostly black patients.
The only CPD officer to die during the riot was

(01:13:08):
a black man. Red summer actually continued into the fall,
and one of its bloodiest hot spots was Phillips County, Arkansas.
On September thirty, small group of black people gathered at
a rural church to organize a sharecroppers union. Two police,
white policemen showed up, and they had been sent there
specifically to stop the union from organizing. So again we
do have some interchange with what we talked about in

(01:13:29):
the last episode, where the police exist to stop unions
for wealthy people. Anyway, um, so they claimed they were
looking for a bootlegger and what happened next is unclear,
but a gunfight broke out and one officer was killed,
almost certainly in self defense by the people in that meeting.
The local sheriff sent out a call for armed random
white dudes to quote hunt Mr. Inward, and he did

(01:13:51):
not use the in word. Yeah, I mean he used
the in word, but he didn't, you know, he used
the real one, hunt Mr. Inward in his lair. Hundreds
of white dudes from all over the area and even
from the adjoining state of Mississippi showed up in Phillips
County with guns. They opened fire wildly at every black
person they saw, with the enthusiastic consent and help of
the police. Frank Moore, a black farmer, survived the massacre.

(01:14:13):
He later recalled the white sent word that they was
coming down here to kill every inn where they found.
There were three hundred or four hundred or more white
men with guns, shooting and killing women and children. Now,
of course klansmen were involved, and some of those clansmen
were likely police officers, but the violence in Phillips County
was backed by state and local officials, lawmen, and business owners,
not just a vigilante social club. The official death toll

(01:14:35):
was eleven black men and five white men killed. The
real number of murdered black people is believed to range
from anywhere from one hundred to two hundred and thirties seven.
At one point, the white mobs were aided by federal
troops as well. Local reporters helped the government cover up
the massacre by claiming the violence had been white self
defense against a black uprising. One Arkansas Gazette article opened

(01:14:57):
with the headline Negro's plan to kill all whites. Good lord, Yeah,
you can just make it up and yo, like going
into like some of these specific communities just to color,
just to color some of the story. We're becoming a fluid,

(01:15:18):
especially the ones in South Carolina. They were like, okay, listen,
you don't want to do business with us. Fine, So
we were saying it was opening banks, selling their own homes,
starting their own businesses, growing their own crops. Was like, okay,
it's fine, Fine, we don't have to live together. It's fine,
you know what I'm saying. And then all of the sudden,
somebody just come knocking down. It's like, what do you

(01:15:40):
and you know, specifically sparked by that community, share croppers
in the community being like, we need to agitate together
to have a better deal in a legal and constitutionally
protected way. Oh, now you're shooting at us. Now, now
you're shooting at us. It was just like you're like, okay, wait, okay,
so we're not three fist human anymore. The law applies
to us. It seems like this system of sharecropping don't work.

(01:16:02):
Maybe we should work together and figure out a better
way to I mean, I mean, we we were citizens.
Now we have this right, We have this right. All
guess we don't know you're shooting us. Okay, this is
just like the Oh I was in fear of my life.
Bullshit that cops every day they were uprising. You'll hear

(01:16:23):
that again in the next episode two. Yeah, they were
mining their own business. I was afraid of the woman
sleeping in her own house. It's it's uh, you know,
I'm not a big chairman mal fan um, but when
he said political power comes from the barrel of a gun,

(01:16:43):
he was not incorrect. Like, and that's what you see here,
right right, That's what that's what Red Summer is. Um. Yeah,
And I recognize things are getting a little bit muddled
here in this podcast about the history of the police
visa be the difference between the vigilante violence, the KKK violence,
the police violence. The police violence that is KKK violence.
And that's because very real history is always muddled, and

(01:17:05):
in this period police were often perpetrators and lynch ings
and white mob violence against black people. They also more
often failed to intervene in this sort of thing, and
they did sometimes fight against it um often because there
were black officers on the force, but there were in
this period. It is important to note some very brave
white officers who were like, this isn't fucking okay, and
I'm not trying to erase those people, but nationwide, as

(01:17:28):
a coal police completely failed to defend black citizens in
any organized, meaningful way during the Red Summer of nineteen nineteen.
White people initiated more or less add percent of the
violence during this summer, and law enforcement consistently failed to
protect them. In Washington, d C. While white mobs marched
through black neighborhoods, firing wildly, the police response was so

(01:17:49):
lackluster that the mayor was had to call in the
military in order to protect the city's black citizens. The
individual racism of white officers mixed with the simple reality
that police had never been intended to protect poor neighborhoods
or businesses in an organized fashion left black people with
no option but to protect themselves. And to tell that
story in brief, I'm going to quote from an article
in teen Vogue by Ursula wolf Rocca. Quote. In Knoxville, Tennessee,

(01:18:13):
armed black men organized themselves to successfully repel hundreds of
white rioters that who had already destroyed the county jail
with a battering ram and dynamite. In Chicago, African Americans
formed self defense units after days of white terror in
their neighborhoods. Many of these defenders were veterans among the
three hundred and seventy thousand black men inducted into the
army during World War One, who hoped fighting for democracy
abroad might finally secure their first class citizenship at home.

(01:18:37):
The mob violence in Chicago convinced Harry Haywood, a veteran
of the all black three hundred and seventy Infantry Regiment,
he had made a mistake. As he explained, I had
been fighting the wrong war. The Germans weren't the enemy.
The enemy was right here at home in Washington. Yeah,
there it is. Yeah, the muddle is the I love
that you said, muddled because that's the point. Yeah, that's

(01:19:00):
the point we're trying to make. When it comes to
policing in America, it is muddled. I can't I should
be able to tell the difference. I should be able
to go. That is the clan. These are the police
I should be And that's our point. I can't tell
the difference. That's the point. Yep, yep. Mayna continue that

(01:19:23):
quote about black self defense. During Red Summer in Washington,
d C. Seventeen year old Kerry Johnson opened fire on
men breaking into her home while a thousand white rioters
laid siege to her neighborhood. In Anniston, Alabama, in December
of nineteen eighteen, a black veteran sergeant Edgar Caldwell was
ordered out of the white section of a street car.
He refused, kicked out of the car, and set upon
by the white motorman and conductor. Caldwell shot his pistol twice,

(01:19:44):
killing one of his attackers. Though uncoordinated, when looked at together,
these hundreds of moments in and leading up to nineteen
nineteen read is an awesome display of collective black agency
and self preservation. So again, black arms self defense often
is overwhelmed by again the year number of white people
their additional resources. They're backing of the state. But it
also works out sometimes and it saves a lot of

(01:20:06):
lives when it does. So I don't want to be
saying like it's not at tactic that succeeds it historically
has um. In two thousand sixteen, City Councilwoman Angelia Williams
took to the stage at an in double a cp luncheon.
She told the crowd that modern racists had quote taken
off their white hats and white sheeted robes and put

(01:20:26):
on police uniforms. Some of them have put on shirts
and ties his policy makers, and some of them have
put on robes as judges. This did not go over well,
and she was roundly pillaried by law enforcement officials. A
lot of them were like Democrats, and a wide variety
of elected local Democrats. Um. But if Councilwoman Williams had
wanted to bring up recent cases of folks who worked
forces and also burnt crosses, she would not have had

(01:20:48):
to google hard. In two thousand twelve, a Little Rock,
Arkansas officer who attended at least one KKK meeting, shot
and killed a fifteen year old black child. In two
thousand fifteen, video leaked of Anniston, Alabama, police off Sir
Joshua dogg Roll delivering a speech for the League of
the South. Now, the League of the South is a
neo Confederate organization and for all intents and purposes, just

(01:21:08):
addressed up rebranding of the KKK that tries to look
a little bit more palatable. These motherfucker's marched with the
Nazis in Charlottesville in two thousand and seventeen. Doggerel had
joined the League in nineteen. He'd been a police officer
since two thousands six. He talked openly about the League
of the South to his fellow officers. He advised them
to join, and he held meetings at a steakhouse very
close to the police station. He posted pro Confederate content

(01:21:30):
on his Facebook, including pictures of early KKK leaders. Doggerel's
clan affiliations were doubly concerning, giving Anniston's history. In May
of nineteen sixty one, the Freedom Writers had shown up
in town to protest against segregation and Jim Crow. They
were assaulted by a massive klansmen who slashed their tires,
broke their bus windows, and tried to light the bus
on fire with them in it. The Anniston Police Department

(01:21:51):
was headquartered a block away from this, a little closer
than the steakhouse where Officer dogg Roll With decades later
hold meetings. Anniston officers failed to arrive at the scene
of crime untill hours later. No one was arrested. They
may have been late because a number of them probably
had to change out of their robes and into their
uniforms because they were there. Yeah, because they were trying
to burn the bust down. Yes. Now, I cannot point

(01:22:14):
you to any specific act of racial violence that Officer
dogg Role committed while in uniform, as it is damnably
hard to get good information on police misbehavior from the
very best police departments, and Anniston is not one of those.
But significant evidence suggests that Officer dog Role in his
membership in what is a Confederate organization is not a
one off from an article in the Guardian quote. Although

(01:22:37):
it is unusual to be for a police officer to
be so open about his involvement in an extremist organization,
for decades, anti government white supremacist groups have been attempting
to recruit police officers into their ranks. It is something
a lot of folks are overlooking, says v Ta B. Johnson,
an assistant professor of law at Georgetown University. Police forces
are becoming more interested in talking about implicit bias, the
unconscious racial biases we carry with us as Americans, but

(01:22:59):
people aren't really addressing the explicit biases that are present
on police forces. According to Johnson's research, there have been
at least a hundred different scandals and more than forty
different states involving police officers who have sent racist emails
and text messages or made racist comments on social media
since the nineteen nineties. A recent investigation by the Center
for Investigative Reporting found that hundreds of active duty and
retired law enforcement officers from around the country were members

(01:23:21):
of Confederate, anti government and anti Islam groups on Facebook.
But there's no official record of officers who are tied
to white supremacists or other extremist groups. Because in the US,
there's no federal policy for screening or monitoring the countries
eight hundred thousand plus law enforcement officers for extremist views.
The eighteen thousand or so police departments across the country
are largely left to police themselves now of course. Yeah

(01:23:43):
that's a good call. Yeah, yeah, I have a suggestion.
If they police themselves, why don't we police ourselves? I
mean apparently as Yeah, what's it? Like? I just you
can't people think we you think we're making this stuff

(01:24:08):
up when we say, yo, cops are racist. I'm trying
to tell you it's racism over the area. Like what, like,
I just what what possible gain do any of us
have accusing falsely an entire organization to be racist, Like
what like what what do you think my end game

(01:24:30):
would be? There's no like, I gained nothing from making
this stuff up. Yeah, it's and again like people always
focus on like you know, oh, well you know, that's
not that many police officers, you know when you you
you read them the numbers like that compared to how
many there are, and it's like, well, no, that those
are the ones that individual activists have for after hours,

(01:24:51):
probably for each individual officer trapped down and verified because again,
the government's not looking at us. But also, let's say
there's a block party that happened next to your house,
right hundred people. One of those people shoots you in
the arm with a handgun for no reason. And everyone
else in the crowd hangs out around them and does nothing. Um,

(01:25:11):
and you complain about it and they're like, well it
was only one of us that shot you. Does does
that matter? Not at all? Yeah, they're kind of all
pieces of ship, right, you kind of all just let
me later. Yeah, kind of a ship party. Yeah, like
you are your home. Yeah. In two thousands seventeen, a

(01:25:32):
classified FBI counter terrorism policy guide was obtained by the Intercept.
I don't know how they got this, but there are
actually quite a few police FBI agents who are real
piste about this problem and seemed to be vigorously leaking
information to the press. Um In a section focused on
how the bureau lists individuals on a terrorism watch list,
the author's note that quote and again the authors being

(01:25:53):
FBI domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremist, white supremacist extremists,
and sovereign sit A and extremists often have identified active
links to law enforcement officers. The FBI goes on to
note that they had to alter some of their policies
when dealing with local law enforcement to account for the
fact that so many of them are members of extremist
groups like isn't too many. Yeah, we gotta like we've

(01:26:17):
had to change how we interact with cops as the
FBI because we're scared of you. Motherfucker's. One of the
one of the justifiable criticisms of of the series we're
doing is that we're not really going to lean into
the FBI much because I've kind of determined to focus
on like cops, like like normal police law, like the
folks in the street. Even though there is a very

(01:26:39):
long and well worth discussing history of racism within the FBI. Um,
we talk about that quite a bit, and our two
part are on the bastards who killed the Black panthers. Yeah,
we didn't. We'll get into it a bit next week. Um,
but we're going to focus really on like you know,
beat cops essentially, like what leads to them police departments,
just because I can't. We can't do this for like

(01:26:59):
to straight weeks. Um, we both have other stuff we
gotta deal with. Um. Yeah. The term ghost skins is
often used by white supremacists to refer to folks who
basically hide their power level to gain respected jobs in
society and advanced white supremacy. Law enforcement is for a
particularly prized field for these ghost skins because it gives
them virtually unchecked opportunities to do violence to non white people.

(01:27:22):
One example of this would be a gang of officers
within the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department who in ninete
embarked on a campaign of vandalism and the beating and
torturing of black Californians. Have you heard of the Lynwood
Vikings prop Yes, I have, Yeah. The Lynwood Vikings were
a violent Neo Nazi gang that committed arson and murder

(01:27:42):
and torture on black Californians. And the gang was entirely
made up of Los Angeles County Sheriff's officers. It was
a Neo Nazi gang that was all Sheriff's officers. Let
that sink in. Let that sink in. And now think
of the young man who was recently found hung to
death in Palmdale, California, and who was declared a suicide

(01:28:07):
by Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, and then the Los Angeles
Sheriff's Department was in a gunfight with his half brother
where they killed him a couple of days later, And
that it is reported that the Palmdale Chunk of the
Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has what they called the news
called cliques within it that were you might call them gangs,

(01:28:28):
maybe like the Lynwood Vikings. Because this keeps happening weird,
because this is not history. It's yeah, yeah, people need
to know more about the Lynwood Vikings. Um yeah yeah,
so uh yeah, it's it's cool. We're gonna talk about
John Burge in Chicago in the next episode. Um, but

(01:28:50):
for right now. The intercept goes on to give a
couple of other examples, and I'm gonna quote from their
article again. In Cleveland, officials found that a number of
police officers had scrolled racist or Nazi graphy throughout their
department's locker rooms. In Texas, to police officers were fired
when it was discovered that they were klansmen. One of
them said he had tried to boost the organization's membership
by giving an application to a fellow officer he thought

(01:29:10):
shared his white, Christian heterosexual values. Now, in two thousand fifteen,
to his very minor credit, FBI Director James Comey acknowledged
in a speech that all of us in law enforcement
must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our
history is not pretty. This is about as close as
you're going to get to having an actual member of
law enforce enforcement admit that, in fact, the cops and

(01:29:32):
the clan regularly do go hand in hand. Um yeah,
so good stuff. Take a deep breath, everybody, good stuff. Yeah,
whoo whoo to the rest of us. Yeah yeah, we're

(01:29:52):
gonna talk about lynching on Thursday. Um, and we're going
to talk about how the police defeated lynching by something
that's arguably as bad. So yeah, yeah, yeah, I feel
wonderful right now. I am. I didn't we didn't should

(01:30:14):
have maybe not schedule this recording session for June tenth.
I do feel I do feel bad about that's the day.
My emotions are all over the place right now. Nah,
it's all good, you know what I'm saying, Like, you know,
in a lot of ways, like like we were talking
off camera or off camera off mike, like, yeah, I don't,

(01:30:35):
I don't know, because it's never actually we've never had
to celebrate this holiday with anybody else. So there's no
actual traditions for June. Yeah, except for to think about
what all this ship. We didn't went through the fact
that we survived it. You know what I'm saying. That's
usually which and then we go down to you know,
Crenshaw and eat some barbecue. But I'm like, this is

(01:30:57):
actually great. It's like look and and maybe we'll end
it on a high note. It's like and yet we
still exist, Yeah, and yet we still are here. Yeah,
and like have been forcing the situation to suck less
consistently for a couple of centuries of of fighting like

(01:31:20):
trench like the emotional equivalent of trench warfare. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah,
And I guess a good tradition for white folks like
myself and like Sophie is too, is to do this.
It's just been June tenth going like Jesus Christ, good God. Um,

(01:31:43):
prop you got any plug doubles to plug before we
roll out of here? Yeah, propit pop dot com. Uh
got a bunch of new merge. Um. California has now
required face masks, So I got some face masks there. Yeah.
Here that flat earther neighbors required by Yeah you got
flat earther neighbors. Can we just pause for that way?

(01:32:06):
I mean statistically now, Yeah, there's like I had the
building make like red signs that say to wear face masks,
and the Elevator and Karen and Ken I don't know
their fucking names. I hate them of course, of course,
just walk around like deep deep deep, and then I'm like, hey,
how about a face mask and they kind of just

(01:32:26):
look at me like I've said something in a language
they don't understand and runaway. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, go
get some coffee, Go get some face masks. Got some
new water flask too, best merch you guys, dude, thank you.
And it's all earth friendly. It's all like zero waste,
like that's how it works, you know what I'm saying,

(01:32:48):
recyclable the materials. Recyclable is recycled material. You know what
I'm saying. I'm out here. I'm out here like being
a good part of Portland's or earth sensitive. Hell yeah,
well that's the episode. Um, go go do some stuff. Yeah.

(01:33:13):
Behind the Police is a production of I Heart Radio.
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What's up, guys, I'm a shop Blau and I am
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