Behind the Scenes Minis: Bad Goals and Spirit Clothes

Tracy discusses film ratings and the bias behind them. Talk then turns to clothing in the afterlife.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. Today we returned to the five
oh four sit ins to talk about some of the

(00:21):
specific people involved in it, which we haven't done before. Yeah,
and also talk more about the Rehabilitation Act of nineteen
seventy three, because the vast majority of what people talk
about with that today is that language at the end. Yeah,
that's you know about section five oh four. There's not
a lot of discussion about the tone of the overall

(00:43):
Rehabilitation Act of nineteen seventy three. It to me, there's
a very nineteen seventies piece of legislation. Right, It's a
lot of vibes in that legislation. Yeah, Like there's I
mean there's not, like we said, there's stuff in it
that was good. It is good to have funding for
things like interpreters for deaf people and requirements for government

(01:09):
agencies to have interpreters who can talk to people who
need an interpreter. Right, All of all that part is good. Yeah,
But there's the the whole underpinning is basically that the
goal is to quote rehabilitate people and the right the
goal is to have a vocational outcome, meaning a job,

(01:32):
and like that is not it's the law acknowledges that
that's not necessarily going to work for everyone. Some people
cannot work for whatever reason, that there's not an accessibility
plan that will make work accessible to some people. But
the like, the vibe of the law is definitely that, like,

(01:53):
the goal is a vocational plan for as many people
as possible. I watched the movie Crip Camp Yeah over
the weekend because I had, like, it has crossed my
radar many times and I just had not had the
opportunity to watch it, and so since it was relevant

(02:13):
to this episode, I didn't realize how relevant it was
to the episode because I didn't realize how much the
movie was going to talk about beyond the years of
the people at the camp. Right. It's a really good movie,
it's a really good documentary. I noticed after I have
watched it that its MPAA rating is an R and

(02:40):
I found that frustrating. It is not an R rated
movie to me. Do you know why you didn say
like for the following reason that says something like some
strong language and sexual situations, and I I will freely
admit I am not a mo I'm not a person

(03:01):
that assigns film ratings. That is not my job. I
do not have all of the standards in front of
me of what goes into those ratings. But there have
been various past documentaries that have looked at biases in
those ratings and how the same sexual situation will receive

(03:24):
a stronger rating depending on who it's involved, like who
is Like, if there's a sex scene that involves a
white man and a white woman, that might be like
a PG thirteen rating, and functionally the same scene involving
two black men might that might be, Oh, we gotta

(03:47):
rate this are And so my gut response to this
rating is that it was probably rated this way because
there are a couple of different conversations about sexually transmitted diseases,
and I think the idea of disabled people being sexually

(04:10):
whole fulfilled people made reviewers uncomfortable, yeah, and led to
it being what I felt like was a harsher rating
or a stronger rating than after watching the movie I
really felt like it needed. Yeah. There's also the like
I mean, ratings have long been problematic in a variety

(04:31):
of ways. Because even even in addition to the things
that you just mentioned, like different people being involved in
that leading to different rating, it also depends on what
reviewers looked at it. Yeah, sure, and their own biases
and their own things they may or may not be
squinky about. I mean, theoretically they have training in their

(04:51):
objective enough in their job, but like, no one can
remove all of their bias in any any way, you
know what I mean, none of us can. They all
have hear it biases, and so that also leads to
another layer of like, yeah, this isn't always fair and
sometimes it doesn't make any sense. Yeah. Yeah. I just
felt like, ultimately that was not an R rated movie

(05:13):
to me. I mean, if you were gonna watch it
with your kids and you maybe want to have a
conversation with your kids about topics like genital lice and
kind of rhea. I'm laughing because the conversations around it
in the movie, some of them are hilarious, Like there
is just this candor about the fact that, like there

(05:34):
was a crabs outbreak at the camp and some of
the discussion of it is funny, and that's I was laughing.
But anyway, I see, I found myself laughing for the
selfish reason of I never have to have these conversations
with my cats. Like there's a reason I'm not a parent,
and it's because I'm not equipped to be a parent. Yeah,
I would not be a good one. And one of

(05:56):
one of the reasons is that I wouldn't be good
at conversations like that. Yeah. Something else that struck me
about the movie, which you know, this camp existed in
The Catskills from I think I said nineteen fifty one
to nineteen seventy seven, something like that, and there's a
lot of footage from the camp when it was in operation,
recorded by different people. Some were filmmakers who went to
the camp to record things, some were campers or staffers

(06:18):
themselves who recorded things. So there's a lot of like
very nineteen seventies footage from this camp. And one of
the things that struck me is that, like this was
a camp for disabled teenagers and a lot of the
people on staff. Some people on staff were not disabled,
but some people on staff were. And still a lot

(06:39):
of the things in the camp, like the things they
were having to do to make things accessible. It's like
there was not a lift to lift for people to
go swimming. Oh yea yeah, yeah, like to get into
I don't remember if it was a lake or a
swimming pool, but whichever it was, to get into it,
people were physically lifting you into it. Right, People were
physically be carried onto and off of buses because the

(07:02):
buses did not have a lift or a wheelchair ramp
or anything like that. Yeah. And so this is, you know,
a time of history that you know, I would be
I'm not quite old enough to remember the late nineteen
seventies because I would have been two and three years old.
But when I got into my slightly older elementary years

(07:27):
and then into my more adult years, seeing how many
of those types of accessibility things have become more common,
and then how many things there still are that are
just thrown together. Yeah, Like, in some ways we've come
a long way and in some ways really not. Yeah.
I think too. We have the benefit because we get

(07:50):
to travel for work to foreign countries on occasion. Two
we also see like globally how things haven't have not
been handled sure, which like is very eye opening. It's
something that I will confess I probably didn't think about
enough until my husband, for a while worked for a
company that provided and also enabled vehicles to be accessible.

(08:18):
So like some of them where we will just sell
you an accessible vehicle. But in other cases people would
be like, I have a car. I love my car,
but now I cannot drive my car anymore because I
have had like an accident or whatever and I or
I've had a progressive illness and I can no longer
drive it. And they would basically like convert that vehicle, right,
And so now everywhere we go, Brian is always like,
that's not that's not compliant, that's not complab but he

(08:41):
points it out because he's hyper aware. And now I
have become much more aware about it. Something I see
often that my hate is people who park their cars
in the striped off area that is for a wheelchair lift.
Red rage, absolutely hate it. It makes me so angry.
I also notice occasionally I'll be staying at a at

(09:04):
a hotel and for whatever reason, they will have put
me in a room that is meant to be accessible,
and sometimes like it will just jump out at me,
how like, yeah, there's a grab bar in the bathroom,
but it's not in a place that would allow a
person to transfer from a wheelchair to the toilet, it's

(09:24):
in a weird place that like, that's not helping anyone.
Or I remember being in a room that was supposedly
accessible one time, and there was no way that a
person who was using a wheelchair would have been able
to get to the closet where their clothes would go.
And it was like there was no there was not

(09:45):
a wide enough passage around the bed. And it's like
there's so much of that stuff. So like there are
places where like regulations have not been put into place correctly,
like places where it's like we installed a grab bar
and the grab bar is not in a good place. Yeah,
it's like they're they're going through a checklist to retrofit

(10:06):
a space that was never designed. Yeah, with that in mind,
and it doesn't technically they meet the requirements, but it
doesn't really help anybody. And then you have folks like
my mom whose needs are greater than what the requirement is. Right, So,
like traveling any distance away from home is really hard

(10:26):
for my mom because she doesn't just need an accessible bathroom.
The accessible bathroom needs to have enough room for a
lift to fit into it to transfer her from a
chair to the toilet. Yeah, and even when she had
more mobility and she was using a walker rather than

(10:48):
using a power wheelchair. She was traveling with my dad
one time and they stopped at a rest area and
she went into the accessible stall and there was no
way for her to get into the stall and get
onto the toilet, and also closed the door behind her. Yeah,
which was number one embarrassing. Yeah, And then number two,
a stranger came in and decided that my mom needed

(11:09):
help and would not take my mom's assurances that mom
needed help. And this person who met well, just it
was worse than if my mom had just been allowed
to handle her own hygiene. I will say I have

(11:37):
a cool version of this, okay of a retrofit that
I saw, Yeah, at a resort where they had expanded
the resort, and at that point they had enough surplus
rooms that they could retrofit one whole portion of it.
And what they did was to accommodate people like your mom.

(11:59):
They combined two hotel rooms into one, so the bathroom
was enormous and had tons of space. Yeah, and that
way like, and the doors were wide and there was
like ample room to maneuver around whatever kind of vehicle
or assist lift you had, and I was just like,
I know, this isn't feasible for every hoteler resort, Yeah,

(12:19):
but this is incredible, and I wish I hope they
teach other places how to do this, because yeah, it
was like, oh, this is all actual functioning things that
I read. I wish I could remember where this was,
but I read an article somewhere that was about just
really reimagining public restrooms. Yeah, because there are a lot

(12:42):
of people who need a restroom for a lot of
different reasons. Like there are parents who need to change
a diaper, and there are people who use wheelchairs or
walkers and like need enough space and the ability to
get onto you and off like all of this stuff.
You know, maybe you have a job interview and you
need to use the bathroom to change your clothes. Maybe

(13:04):
you have a religious requirement to do some kind of
like washing of your hands and face over like a
lot of different reasons that people need to be in
the bathroom. And it was envisioning this public bathroom space
that would be able to meet all of these needs
for all of these different people. And of course it
was like a spacious space that had privacy and had

(13:25):
room for all of these different purposes, and I was like,
that bathroom seems so amazing to me and so unlikely
to ever be implemented at scale because everybody wants to
save money and have less room dedicated to those kinds
of things. Yeah, I mean another area that gets problematic

(13:46):
is not even in a public space, but like there
are huge tracts of neighborhood developments that were built during
a period of time in the US when in real
estate you kept the bathrooms as small as you could
to maximize the living areas of the home, and those
are really really hard to retrofit because like there just

(14:10):
is not a place to expand out a wall unless
you lose two thirds of your kitchen or you know
what I mean, or give up a bedroom. And like
I think, and I hope, I mean, part of this
is just like the mansion of it all right that
now even you know, relatively middle of the roadhouses have
almost palatial bathrooms in many cases. But like when I

(14:33):
think about some of the ones, like the neighborhood where
my husband grew up, the tiniest bathrooms on earth, and
I remember thinking when I first saw them, like, how
would anybody get in here? If they had any kind
of like even if they were on crutches temporarily, how
would they make you know what I mean? Like, there's
so many instances of spaces that are built like that

(14:55):
that are private places and not even public spaces that
need to be considered. Yeah, And I have had a
conversation sort of the conversation in that I have said,
we need to think about where we are going to
live when we get old, right, because there will be
a time in our lives when we will not be

(15:15):
able to manage these stairs, right. And Patrick is like,
we will have one of those chairlifts put in, and
I'm just like, Babe, I don't think one of those
chairlifts is actually going to work in this stairwell that
was built almost one hundred years ago. It seems unlikely
to me. And you know, that's one of the things

(15:35):
about buying a house that's more than one hundred years old. Yeah.
I do have a friend who I met in the
weirdest circumstance, quite accidentally in New York. But she is
in her seventies. She lives in England in an old house,
and last year she's perfectly like she's spry as can be,
she can get around anywhere right now, sure, but she

(15:57):
recognizes that's not always going to be the case, and
it's sooner rather than later, and she doesn't want her
kids to have to deal with figuring it out. So
like she put in her own elevator last year and yeah,
in the future when I needed, I have it, and
right now I can just enjoy it. I'm like, yeah,
right on. Yeah, A very long time ago, I had
some friends who had a house built for their family

(16:21):
to live in, and they had that house built with
the mindset of we're probably going to live here for
our whole lives and at some point probably a parent
will come live with us, and so they built a
house to have enough space to do that, and also
to have an elevator that went from the first floor

(16:43):
to the second floor of their home. Yeah, which, of
course you know, was incredibly smart, but also something that
came with a lot of privilege to be able to
afford a house that size with an elevator in it, Right,
That is the other thing, like, not everyone is in
a position where they can make those adjustments. Yeah, And
we haven't really talked at all how incredibly expensive being
disabled us so so expensive like prohibitively expensive. Yeah yeah, yeah,

(17:12):
like my mom's wheelchair costs more than the last car
that I bought. Yeah, we also didn't I hope that
this was obvious from the episode itself. We didn't call
it out specifically, but I just also wanted to say that, like,
disability rights and LGBTQ rights have gone hand in hand
the whole time. Yeah, and so the fact that we're

(17:33):
at this point now in US history where there are
attacks on DEI and those attacks are targeting trans people
and gay men and lesbians, other queer people, also disabled people,
like that is not new. That is stuff that has
been going on this whole time. Yeah. The other thing

(17:53):
that always makes me irate though, is that any I
almost hate calling them accommodations because it makes it sound like, oh,
we have to go out of our way to do
anything that is put in place to make places accessible
and fair and equal benefits everybody. It helps everybody. Yes,

(18:17):
It's not like whenever people make the argument in any
of these things that like, oh, why should everybody else
have to go, and I'm like, because you're also benefiting, fool,
Like I don't this is so easy? Yeah. Yeah, even
like in ways that are just benign and like thoughtless. Right,

(18:38):
if you are in a city that has really good
curb cuts everywhere, things like deliveries get easier, things like
just walking around for people that do not have any
any issue, walking gets easier, like so many things improved.
Parents with their strollers, life is easier. It's so silly

(18:58):
that anybody would think that that was so now, yeah,
infringing on their yeah, day to day life. It's like
it's only making your life easier too. Yeah. Well, and
there are still like there's so much stuff with the
ADA that still isn't fully implemented, with a lot of
that full implementation still boiling down to well, it's too

(19:20):
expensive to put ramps everywhere. And it's like, y'all thought
it was a reasonable expense to build stairs for non
disabled people when you first built the building, So right,
there was money for that. We come, there's not money
for this. I have the same argument sometimes about things
involving parking and bike lanes. There's money for a parking lot,

(19:43):
there should be money for a bike lane. Yeah, but
that's just me. And if I see you parking in
a handicap stripe zone, fury, I'm I'm probably going to
say something really unkind to you because you will have
deserved it. Yeah, I don't remember. This was when I
was still living in Atlanta. I was out with a

(20:04):
friend and we went we were growing to some store
somewhere and there were two striped off spaces that were
the wheelchair lift spaces, and both of them had a
car parked in them, and they were just at like
a cell phone store or something like. They like it
was one of those parking lasts that kind of served
a bunch of buildings. And I remember leaving ugly notes

(20:26):
on both of their windshield because I was like, this
is unacceptable. If a person is in a van and
they need to get out of it, they cannot because
you have chosen to illegally park your car here. Yep,
just to be closer to the store because there was
plenty of other spots. Yeah. Anyway, strong feelings interconnected things

(20:50):
for me to be mad about. I did really really
love and got quite choked up about it. I got
choked up about many things in this episode, but I
had not realized and really really loved the whole aspect
of how much the Black Panthers got involved. Oh yeah,
and that they were feeding everybody. I just oh, the heartwarm. Yeah,
so good. We've talked about the Black Panthers on the

(21:12):
show before, and I don't actually remember like where we
talked more about the Black Panthers and starting the breakfast
program and all of this other stuff, because so many people,
particularly so many white people of a certain age, have
been told that the Black Panthers were dangerous and associate
them only with being armed black men. And number one,

(21:34):
there's reasons for the armed people needing to protect their
own neighborhoods, Like there was a reason for that. It
was not something they made up. And then number two,
like so much of what they were doing was like
we're going to start a health clinic and we're going
to screen everybody in this neighborhood for sickle cell. That's
going to help make people's lives better. And then when

(21:54):
it came to the five O four sentence, just part
of the thing being like you are fighting for liberation
and we're going to help you with that. Yeah, I
love it. We talked about Grave Robin this week. We

(22:15):
did this isn't necessarily a January themed thing, but just
got interested in it, and that's how it goes, this
is very interesting to me for a number of reasons.
So when I was doing Criminalia, we did an entire
season about grave robbers. Although that was mostly like people
that stole bodies and right sold them to science in
many cases, what was very interesting to me was that

(22:37):
while people were certainly upset in those instances and the
many stories we told, the reaction in Salt Lake, based
in significant part to the concerns that the deceased after
life had been adulterated, was much greater than in some
a lot of the other cases where people actually stole bodies. Yeah.

(23:00):
I have researched, and I just found that fascinating. Yeah. Yeah,
I had a number of mental questions happening as that.
I was like, is that there are some religious and
spiritual traditions that like the idea is the state of
your body at your death is what it is in

(23:23):
the afterlife, and so it's really important that like people's
bodies be intact. Yeah. So I had this sort of
mental question of, like, is the issue that if they
arrive in heaven with no clothes, that they are naked forever? Yes,
and that like, is it impossible to put on clothes

(23:43):
in heaven if you didn't have them already. And I
just thought about that for a while. People have different
beliefs and that they can be different from one another.
It's and that was just like a curiosity. But then
I also was really fixated on like how there were
boxes and boxes of clothes, because my first thought was, oh,

(24:05):
obviously he was going to like clean up these clothes
and sell them in his shop. But when he apparently
had boxes and boxes of them far more than he
was selling in the shop, I was like, Okay, what
what was your deal here, sir? What are theories? Yeah,
it is one of them, just like an unusual morbid

(24:26):
fixation on people's clothes. Okay, no, minus from personal experience,
the those are unfinished objects in his sewing rooms. What
they thought? Okay that I had. I had another thought
as well. One I think probably he was getting clothes
at a faster rate than he was turning them over,

(24:46):
because like he seemed to recognize he would go back
and dig them up pretty quickly after their initial burial, right,
But he also seemed to recognize that, like you have
to let some time elapse before you refurbish this and
put it up or sale or use it in some
way in your tailoring business to lessen the likelihood that
someone will recognize it. Yeah, So I really think it

(25:09):
was a he was not good at managing material in
material out right. Think that was part of it, Okay, Yeah,
I was sort of mentally divided between poorly thought out
criminal enterprise and psychological fixation, or maybe some combination of both.

(25:29):
I think something has to happen in your head where
you normalize it, and then he probably it didn't seem weird.
And of course I have eighteen I don't know how
many there were, the numbers never specified, but of course
I have eighteen boxes of dead people clothes that I
took off of them after they were buried in my
living room. Of course that's what I do. That's just

(25:49):
what we're doing. Yeah, Like, there's a weird thing. But
I I I mean, I don't, I don't know. We
don't have any of his own words other than what
is relayed secondhand through accounts like Dewey's, and he sure
about what he said. So it's a little we don't know.
It's all guesswork. Yeah. The questions that you had about

(26:13):
concerns about nudity in the afterlife. Oh yeah, some of
those were also in that Brigham Young sermon that I
didn't want to quote the whole thing, but he mentioned specifically.
He brings up an interesting example, which I guess is
from a real situation, but we don't know of having

(26:35):
seen a young boy talking to some women who were
really distraught over this whole thing, and the kid's take
was like, hey, you know, garments get destroyed in a
variety of ways, like people that burn in a fire
if they're devout and their you know, like the angels
will put their clothes back together for them, it's gonna

(26:56):
be okay. And like Brigham Young even mentions that you
know your close degrade in the in the grave, and
like it's fine. When you get to heaven, you know,
the higher powers will have taken care of that. They
have tailoring skills, they will they will bring those disparate
threads and fibers back together and you will be a okay.

(27:19):
I did find that that whole sermon very reassuring, Like
in tone, it was just like, oh, that's very very
He took a really like he was like, I don't
want to talk about the horrible stuff because it's horrible right,
and it's hard for any of us to understand that.
How can I make you guys less scared? Right? And
I'm like, oh, this is actually pretty interesting. I love
the ghost part. The ghosts are not asking you for clothes.

(27:43):
The ghosts don't need pants. They're fun. Yeah. Yeah, I
just thought that was very, very entertaining. The child logic
involves there involved there reminds me a little bit of
when I was a kid growing up in the late
seventies early eighties, kind of in the era of hijackings
in yeah, the world of air travel. A thing that

(28:06):
I was told in Sunday School, and other people I
know who were in other denominations in other states were
also told in Sunday School was that if you were
on the airplane and the airplane got hijacked, the hijackers
would demand that you spit on the Bible, and if
you didn't spit on the Bible, they would kill you.

(28:29):
A great thing to tell impressionable young children. And my
thought at the age of you know, five or six,
was like, I mean, if the choices spit or die,
I like, I bet God would forgive me, right, I
think God would forgive me for showing up naked at

(28:50):
the gates of Heaven. Be fine, You're getting a robe.
It's all good. Yeah. I don't know, none of this
is in line with any of my current thought about
what happens when we die, but like, yes, for kids,
you know, when you're a child, things make sense in
a certain way. Yeah, we mentioned it a little bit
in the show, but it sent me in this weird

(29:14):
spiral where there are not a lot of newspaper mentions
of this whole thing that are contemporary to it. Okay,
And at first I thought I was losing my damn mind.
I'm like, is my all of my databases broken? Are
all the archive sites that I use somehow broken? And

(29:35):
some of it was that I was using his name Jean,
and a lot of them had anglicized in mentions. But
also then I was reading one particular paper and it
specifically said there's not a lot of newspaper coverage from
when this was going down, and that was on purpose,
because everybody was freaking out already. Yeah, And I was like, aha,

(29:58):
I understand, Like the first thing that I found is
that Brigham Young sermon. Yeah, Like when I say, the
first thing I had looked at other things. But that
was the earliest mention in the papers that I found,
because there were people just already concerned. It had already
spread so quickly. And I think, personally, this is my
speculation that Salt Lake because it was new, because we

(30:20):
know it was founded as a religious community and as
a haven for people that felt they were being persecuted.
I think they were worried if they ran something like
that in the paper, it would get picked up nationally,
oh sure, or internationally even, and that word would spread
that their church had this very ugly problem with one

(30:40):
of their converts. They had raised up as like evidence
of how wonderful their religion was and how it could
offer people things that they couldn't find elsewhere. I think
it might have been a little bit of image management.
That is strictly my speculation, right, that makes sense, But
they really don't talk about it till later, And it

(31:00):
also makes sense, I mean, and this continues to be
relevant today, like the decisions that are made in news
reporting of is this story going to help people or
harm people? And if it's going to harm them, is
it newsworthy enough that it still needs to be published? Right?
And so it's possible that some of that may have

(31:22):
been going on too, even though the state of journalism
and journalistic ethics totally different in the nineteenth century versus today,
Well so was the state of the law. Right, this
is a total extra judicial solution of using air quotes.
In my head like, well, I guess we got to
exile them because they were also worried. It never came
up specifically in any other research, but I had another

(31:46):
speculative theory that there were concerns that if they did
execute him and bury him, that his grave would be
constantly tampered with. Oh sure, in a retribution move. And
I also just think nobody wanted to kill somebody as
a solution. Yeah, it was a very fascinating, very fascinating thing.

(32:09):
I was wildly entertained, which sounds grizzly, but just right.
Looking at the psychology of a community dealing with this
was very interesting to me. Yeah, I I When you
sent me the outline and I read it through, I
was also fascinated, and like it wasn't It wasn't really
a morbid fascination, but more of like a wow, this

(32:31):
story is has so many turns that I did not expect. Yes,
I I did chuckle when I first read nobody thought
about the fact that he would take apart the Yeah, no, nobody.
I guess it's one of those things where like, if
you do not have a devious mind, it never occurs

(32:53):
to you that that could happen. Somebody might build a boat.
Somebody will just take this shack apart and make a
boat out of it. Yeah, make a little raft for themselves.
And who knows. He could have just drowned in his
escape and write, or he could have, you know, lived
a weird life after that. I don't know. Who knows.
We don't know, but I'll be thinking about this one

(33:14):
for a long time. Yeah. Weird way to start the
new year, I know. But here we are. If you
are about to head into your weekend, I hope that
it is as relaxing as possible, that you deal with
no big questions of morality or any kind of problem

(33:36):
that might cause you to have to think about what
its implications are to your faith or your afterlife. I
hope everybody's cool to each other and that you get
to eat delicious things and relax, and that the new
year is treating you as well as it possibly can,
given the weird times that we live in. If you
are not off this weekend, I still hope you eat
a lot of delicious things and that you are surrounded

(33:59):
by love and kindness. We will be right back here
tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday we
will have something for rand new. Stuff you missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

(34:20):
you listen to your favorite shows.