June 2, 2023 • 21 mins
Holly and Tracy talk about a critical letter that Mrs. Pat once received from a fan. Then Tracy mentions the way that Randolph's work is sometimes eclipsed by other Civil Rights events.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy B. Wilson. We talked about missus Patrick Campbell
this week, and I have always found her really interesting
(00:24):
because she is one of those one of those famous
people who because she wrote her own memoir and obviously
that's very slanted in her favor and written later in
her life, so you have to question some of the recollections.
We have so much more insight into really her thinking
about celebrity than we do other people. But I really
(00:46):
wanted to talk about those George Bernard Shaw letters because
I mean, some of them were so ardent and romantic
that like he didn't want any of them published, and
a lot of them, despite her having included some of them,
most of them didn't get published until after they were
(01:06):
both dead. But like it's very funny. I'm not laughing
at them. I'm just laughing at how intense this relationship
was and how unique there dynamic was. Like in one
he writes, shut your ears tight against this blarneying, irish
(01:29):
liar and actor. Read no more of his letters. He
will fill his fountain pen with your heart's blood and
sell your most sacred emotions on the stage. He is
a massive imagination with no heart. But that's well, okay,
it's intense. There are a lot of a lot of
intense ones. There is this other thing that I think
(01:50):
is interesting where you know, we read that theater review
about Lady Churchill writing her play and him being like, oh, yes,
all of the all of the lay write Place now.
But kind of it seems like everyone wrote a play
like everyone thought they had to play in them, right.
She encouraged George Cornwallis Wes to write Place after his bankruptcy,
(02:12):
which happened shortly after they were married, and she produced
one of them in nineteen seventeen. We mentioned her son
started writing plays like everybody was writing Place, which is
interesting to me, That's all. But I wanted to really
really talk about one of her fan letters, okay, because
(02:32):
she does include a lot of these in her memoir
and this one is one of those ones where it's
like two familiar where it's basically like an audience member
who feels he needs to write her for not dressing
(02:55):
pretty enough. Oh no, oh, no, okay, And this was
in a play where she was playing George Sand, who
famously warman's clothing. MM and this letter reads, my dear
missus Campbell, I am so sorry if I was rude
about your trousers, but quite sincerely, they wounded me if
(03:18):
only they had been pretty trousers, but they were not.
They may be historically correct, but in a play which
outrages history on so many vital points, to outrage it
further in the stuff and cut of George Sand's trousers
would have offended nobody and pleased one person at least.
I glared, oh see, who is a woman he was with,
(03:39):
glared so formidably at me when you complained of my
criticisms that I did not dare to ask her how
she'd like to wear trousers like that. I don't think
she would look very nice, do you? Affectionately yours, Rudolph Bessie.
And then he includes the ps, I hadn't really time
to tell you that your performance it was pure genius,
(04:01):
like everything you do. So he had gone to the play,
had spoken with her after it and said she looked awful,
and then wrote this letter to her. But does this
not feel like every criticism that women get in media,
it's like, you suck and you did this so wrong.
By the way, I love your work. Like it's the
whole time you were reading it, I was like, in
(04:24):
my head, the invention of things like the Internet and
email and social media has made it so much easier
for people to just directly contact whoever with those kinds
of comments, and so the whole time you were reading it,
I was like, Oh, he did it on paper too.
(04:50):
I knew this in my head, but like everything that,
I was just so so like so many emails, et cetera. Right,
I mean, everyone that makes stuff online has gotten a
letter like this about how terrible they are. But also
I love your work, which is hilarious to me. Like
I feel like because I have not even related to
(05:12):
anything I've done or made, but I have certainly engaged
with people who are criticizing others in this weird way.
And I'm like, but why is that where you open
and it's like they don't see that there's anything wrong
with it. Yeah, yeah, where they're like, well, they need
to know how people feel. Everybody needs feedback, and it's like, Okay,
if you had to say something, you could put it
(05:34):
in so much better A way than to be like,
those trousers wounded me, right, they wounded him. He introduced
himself to someone who's work he reportedly admired by saying,
I don't like your pants like they wounded him, Tracy.
(05:57):
They hurt him to see pants that he enjoyed on
a woman. Yeah, wounded. Yeah. I probably cackled over this
letter for twenty twenty five minutes because it was just like, well,
there we go. Yeah. I think that was nineteen twenties.
(06:22):
One hundred years later, same letter could be written, except
it's gonna be about vocal fry. No, no, not even
a little. There is a cool thing to jump off
of that. Sorry if anyone feels like I'm banging the
drum there. If anyone is familiar with the painter Philip
Burne Jones, which you may be without knowing his name,
(06:46):
he did a lot of really really sort of striking
Gothic y paintings and some beautiful portraits in the late
eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundred. But one of them
is actually a painting of Missus Campbell. Because if I
(07:09):
describe this painting to you from eighteen ninety seven, you'll
probably have a vague reminiscence of it. It's called the Vamp.
It's in eighteen ninety seven painting. As I said, it's
in I think it's actually a charcoal piece, and it
is a woman with long black hair kind of leaned
(07:29):
over a man who is lying apparently like deceased, on
the bed, and it's very beautiful. You would see it
and be like, oh, yes, I've seen that before, and
she was the model for that, which I sort of
love because then it's like, oh, we don't maybe always
remember her, but she definitely is part of the yeah,
the spirit of art. I googled it in our sense
(07:52):
of Gothic art in particular, which I really really enjoy,
because that's one of those pieces that shows up, like
I think it's used his book covers for some Gothic novels.
It certainly shows up in a lot of films and
in print because it is like a shorthand of like
this idea of the woman who is dangerous and going
(08:13):
to hurt a man, probably because she wore pants that
he didn't like. He just expired. I'm never gonna let
that go. But anyway, I love that painting, and so
I did not realize until I was doing this research
that she had been the model for it. Yeah, that
is missus pat and her. I mean, she had such
(08:34):
a big life and so much fame for a while
that I almost feel guilty that my fixation has become
about her pants getting criticized by a dude. But at
the same time that cracked me up. Cracked me up
the great equalizer. Random people will tell you you dressed wrong,
and you hurt them by not being cute enough. We
(09:04):
talked about a Philip Randolph on the show this week.
Something that struck me while I was working on this
was a lot of like basic general audience kind of
write ups about a Philip Randolph talk about him primarily
in the context of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Borders,
which is huge, important part of his whole career and
(09:25):
his legacy and all of that. He was also a
major major figure in the planning of the March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and it just you know,
my experience going through public school in the United States,
the March on Washington is like one of the biggest
(09:45):
focus materials in like classes about the Civil Rights movement,
or like US history classes when it's Black History Month
or whatever, right, Right. So it just just to me
that for a Philip Randolph specifically, like the Brotherhood of
Sleeping car Porters, gets like so much of the attention,
(10:08):
when this other thing that he was also physically involved
in that gets way more attention in just basic conversations.
And I think some of that is probably because the
Martin Luther King juniors I have a dream speech has
become for a lot of people inaccurately emblematic of everything
(10:31):
about Martin Luther King Jr. And everything about the civil
rights movement, like that has taken an outsized role in
people's understanding of things, And I just I don't know.
I just kept thinking about that as I was working
on this episode, about how, like where so much of
the focus has been relative to all of that, Right.
(10:52):
I had a chuckle to myself. That was just a
nice walk down memory lane while we read this. Okay,
because do you know how I learned about Marcus Garvey
for the first time? No, the Tender Age of thirteen. No,
In William Gibson's Neuromancer. Okay, did you read that book? Yeah?
But uh, I would say a lot of it is
(11:14):
not retained in my memory. Oh I read it almost
once a year. No, you love it. I love it.
And I found it by accident when I was looking
for work by the other William Gibson who wrote The
Miracle Worker. So that was a little bit of a
shock to my tiny mind. But there is a space
tug in Neuromancer called the Marcus Garvey and they I
(11:36):
was like, I don't understand this reference at all, and
so I went and looked it up in the library.
And I remember my elementary I think I was either
I was on that cusp in my school system. I
can't remember if I was last year of elementary school
or first year of middle school. And I remember the
library and though being like, why are you looking this up?
And I was like, I don't understand what's going on
(11:58):
in this book. We have an episode on Marcus Garvey
way back in the in the archive from prior host.
I have never listened to it. I cannot tell you
anything about like that episode or how comprehensive or whatever
it is, but that episode does exist. We also, as
we said in this episode, have a two parter on
(12:19):
Buyered rest in I wrote that one, but I also
wrote it back in something like twenty fourteen or twenty
sixteen or something like that. I have not re listened
to that episode in recent years, like having buyered Resting
come up multiple times in this episode, I'm like, should
we use this as a Saturday Classic? I haven't re
(12:42):
listened to it, so, I you know, sometimes things don't
age as well as we would like them to for
whatever reason, So I haven't really listened to it. But
then also, it's a little weird to run two parts
as Saturday Classics. Yeah, it's always tricky unless we do
one big, giant one, which would be we weird. There
have been times from when our show tended to be,
(13:05):
like when episodes tended to be between twenty and thirty minutes.
If we had two episodes that were closer to twenty
we might just like run them as one, but those
ones are not. Those ones are I think fully half
an hour each and then getting into like an hour
or more long episode can be a tricky. So anyway,
(13:26):
our next open slots for classics are in in June.
We'll see, I'll re listen to him, probably make a
decision on whether we run that. I do love byed
Rest and he's one of my most favorite figures from history. Also,
I want to talk somewhere that Byar dressed in quote
(13:46):
at a birthday party for a Philip Randolph, when he
was talking about how other than his grandparents, nobody but
mister Randolph had stood by him in times of trial
apparently his whole life. Byed rest in all always thought
of a Philip Randolph as mister Randolph, like even when
they were like both adult, solidly long foundation in their
(14:08):
work and their activism, Like he was always mister Randolph
to him. But he also in that quote said he
is the only man I know who is who has
never said an unkind word about anyone or who refuses
to listen to an unkind word about anyone, even though
it may be true. And I love that quote, but
(14:33):
a Philip Randolph could also be really critical of people
that he disagreed with. And so you know, Byron Rested
is not here for me to ask, like, are you
drawing a distinction between criticizing someone and being unkind about that? Right?
We're getting into the semantics about what unkind words are. Yeah. Yeah,
But I was like, at first I was just going
(14:54):
to put that whole quote into the episode, and then
I was like, I, uh, I have thoughts about that,
because there are definitely other A Philip Randolph quotes about
people that you know, a lot of times he had
very justifiable criticisms of where I would not necessarily call
that a kind comment that he made, right. I don't
(15:20):
know if anybody has written a biography of his wife.
As we said in the episode, like Lucille was a
critical part of his work. He could not have done
it all without her. I am intrigued by her and
would like to know more about her, and I don't
(15:42):
offhand know if there is more publicly documented about her
to know you can do an episode that's a two
separate stories where you can do one on her and
one on Alilia Walker Lily Walker, and then will it'll
just be like cool women that seem to keep coming up.
So one quote that I found about Lucille, so they
(16:05):
they apparently like really loved each other, were really devoted
to each other, supported one another's professional and and you know,
actism goals all of that. A Philip Randolph was away
from home a lot by nature of his job. He
was traveling to places to organize and demonstrate. He had
international trips that we did not even bring up in
this episode, like there was a lot he was off
(16:27):
and away, and at one point someone asked Lucille how
she felt about like women because like that, you know,
he's an attractive man, Like what do you think about
like the idea that you're not around and there's you know,
there might be women around. And she said, let them try.
(16:48):
I said that just as Holly took a swallow of yeah,
you just heard me snort diet coke. I love him.
I love it. Yeah, so I love that too. Uh So, anyway, anyway,
I'm glad we finally got to a Philip Randolph. I'm
also glad. Something that people comments about him a lot
is the way that he spoke. It was very distinctive,
(17:09):
and people described it as oratorial or almost Shakespearean or
like terms like that, because like if you if you
listen to a recording of him talking, it's very very
precise and like a very formal way of talking. And
I got to the part about him loving Shakespeare and
establishing a Shakespeare Society, and I was like, well, that
explains some things about you know, who knows what's the
(17:33):
cause and what's the effect. But it seems like most
likely his like distinctive manner of speech and love of
Shakespeare went hand in hand perfection. Yeah, I love it,
I love it. Yeah. I also love train travel. So
having recently discovered that there is a train that I
can take from back Bay out like Westward, which I
(17:59):
think might be a new service on Amtrak, I got
the impression while I was on my trip that the
stop that I got off at was not a stop
that was being served for a long time. So I've
taken trains north and south out of Boston a bunch
of times. My first time going Westward, had a great time.
(18:21):
It's awesome. I haven't done a train trip. Yeah, I
might be one of those people that a train trip
would make a little bit antsy. Maybe I'm not a
journey it's not the destination, it's the journey kind of person.
I'm like, get me where I'm going. So my very
first Amtrak trip was when I was a kid, and
(18:44):
it has to have been on Amtrak because of when
I am alive. But my grandmother and I took Amtrak
to Raleigh from Greensboro, North Carolina, and I only very
vaguely remember this trip, but for many years I could
not get on an airplane because of my visceral terror.
(19:07):
Oh yeah. Kind of a long story. But we were
owned by Discovery Channel and our offices were in Atlanta,
and Discovery Channel offices were in Silver Spring, Maryland, and
so I took Amtrak from Atlanta to d C multiple
times until I started working on my fear of flying.
(19:30):
And I would say that was not my favorite, just
because that train left Atlanta at eight pm and it
arrived in DC at eight am, and when you went
home it was the reverse and sleeping and coach on Amtrak,
I would say, is just logistically not a very comfortable experience, right,
(19:54):
It's sort of like I would say, maybe more comfortable
than being on a red eye flight, but still like
you're in a you're in a seat overnight trying to
sleep is like not, It's not gonna be comfortable for
a lot of people. My vacation trip, however, I got
myself a little sleeper car, which I had a great time.
In my little sleeper car, I had my own little
(20:14):
door that closed, my own little window I could look
out of. Uh, my own little space was great and
I had a pretty view the whole time. It was awesome.
So anyway, I love trains overnight on the train not
as much, but I've taken a bunch of trips on
the down Easter and the Acela Express out of Boston,
and now this one, which was on the Lake Shore Limited. Uh,
(20:39):
that's now you all know more about the am track
trains running out of Boston than maybe you did before.
Like the second service, you didn't know you would get
out of stuff you missed History Class. Tracy will read
you train schedule Tracy's trail train travel. Uh. There is
(20:59):
a TikTok figure called Jed who makes recordings of train trips.
And I just reminded myself that anyway, Happy Friday. Whatever's
coming on your weekend, I hope it is great. If
you're gonna take a train trip somewhere, I hope your
train is on time and comfortable and clean. If you're
not taking a trip anywhere, I hope whatever's on your
(21:21):
plate at home is going okay. We will be back
with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and with something brand new
on Monday. Stuff you missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your
(21:44):
favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy B. Wilson. We talked about missus Patrick Campbell
this week, and I have always found her really interesting
(00:24):
because she is one of those one of those famous
people who because she wrote her own memoir and obviously
that's very slanted in her favor and written later in
her life, so you have to question some of the recollections.
We have so much more insight into really her thinking
about celebrity than we do other people. But I really
(00:46):
wanted to talk about those George Bernard Shaw letters because
I mean, some of them were so ardent and romantic
that like he didn't want any of them published, and
a lot of them, despite her having included some of them,
most of them didn't get published until after they were
(01:06):
both dead. But like it's very funny. I'm not laughing
at them. I'm just laughing at how intense this relationship
was and how unique there dynamic was. Like in one
he writes, shut your ears tight against this blarneying, irish
(01:29):
liar and actor. Read no more of his letters. He
will fill his fountain pen with your heart's blood and
sell your most sacred emotions on the stage. He is
a massive imagination with no heart. But that's well, okay,
it's intense. There are a lot of a lot of
intense ones. There is this other thing that I think
(01:50):
is interesting where you know, we read that theater review
about Lady Churchill writing her play and him being like, oh, yes,
all of the all of the lay write Place now.
But kind of it seems like everyone wrote a play
like everyone thought they had to play in them, right.
She encouraged George Cornwallis Wes to write Place after his bankruptcy,
(02:12):
which happened shortly after they were married, and she produced
one of them in nineteen seventeen. We mentioned her son
started writing plays like everybody was writing Place, which is
interesting to me, That's all. But I wanted to really
really talk about one of her fan letters, okay, because
(02:32):
she does include a lot of these in her memoir
and this one is one of those ones where it's
like two familiar where it's basically like an audience member
who feels he needs to write her for not dressing
(02:55):
pretty enough. Oh no, oh, no, okay, And this was
in a play where she was playing George Sand, who
famously warman's clothing. MM and this letter reads, my dear
missus Campbell, I am so sorry if I was rude
about your trousers, but quite sincerely, they wounded me if
(03:18):
only they had been pretty trousers, but they were not.
They may be historically correct, but in a play which
outrages history on so many vital points, to outrage it
further in the stuff and cut of George Sand's trousers
would have offended nobody and pleased one person at least.
I glared, oh see, who is a woman he was with,
(03:39):
glared so formidably at me when you complained of my
criticisms that I did not dare to ask her how
she'd like to wear trousers like that. I don't think
she would look very nice, do you? Affectionately yours, Rudolph Bessie.
And then he includes the ps, I hadn't really time
to tell you that your performance it was pure genius,
(04:01):
like everything you do. So he had gone to the play,
had spoken with her after it and said she looked awful,
and then wrote this letter to her. But does this
not feel like every criticism that women get in media,
it's like, you suck and you did this so wrong.
By the way, I love your work. Like it's the
whole time you were reading it, I was like, in
(04:24):
my head, the invention of things like the Internet and
email and social media has made it so much easier
for people to just directly contact whoever with those kinds
of comments, and so the whole time you were reading it,
I was like, Oh, he did it on paper too.
(04:50):
I knew this in my head, but like everything that,
I was just so so like so many emails, et cetera. Right,
I mean, everyone that makes stuff online has gotten a
letter like this about how terrible they are. But also
I love your work, which is hilarious to me. Like
I feel like because I have not even related to
(05:12):
anything I've done or made, but I have certainly engaged
with people who are criticizing others in this weird way.
And I'm like, but why is that where you open
and it's like they don't see that there's anything wrong
with it. Yeah, yeah, where they're like, well, they need
to know how people feel. Everybody needs feedback, and it's like, Okay,
if you had to say something, you could put it
(05:34):
in so much better A way than to be like,
those trousers wounded me, right, they wounded him. He introduced
himself to someone who's work he reportedly admired by saying,
I don't like your pants like they wounded him, Tracy.
(05:57):
They hurt him to see pants that he enjoyed on
a woman. Yeah, wounded. Yeah. I probably cackled over this
letter for twenty twenty five minutes because it was just like, well,
there we go. Yeah. I think that was nineteen twenties.
(06:22):
One hundred years later, same letter could be written, except
it's gonna be about vocal fry. No, no, not even
a little. There is a cool thing to jump off
of that. Sorry if anyone feels like I'm banging the
drum there. If anyone is familiar with the painter Philip
Burne Jones, which you may be without knowing his name,
(06:46):
he did a lot of really really sort of striking
Gothic y paintings and some beautiful portraits in the late
eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundred. But one of them
is actually a painting of Missus Campbell. Because if I
(07:09):
describe this painting to you from eighteen ninety seven, you'll
probably have a vague reminiscence of it. It's called the Vamp.
It's in eighteen ninety seven painting. As I said, it's
in I think it's actually a charcoal piece, and it
is a woman with long black hair kind of leaned
(07:29):
over a man who is lying apparently like deceased, on
the bed, and it's very beautiful. You would see it
and be like, oh, yes, I've seen that before, and
she was the model for that, which I sort of
love because then it's like, oh, we don't maybe always
remember her, but she definitely is part of the yeah,
the spirit of art. I googled it in our sense
(07:52):
of Gothic art in particular, which I really really enjoy,
because that's one of those pieces that shows up, like
I think it's used his book covers for some Gothic novels.
It certainly shows up in a lot of films and
in print because it is like a shorthand of like
this idea of the woman who is dangerous and going
(08:13):
to hurt a man, probably because she wore pants that
he didn't like. He just expired. I'm never gonna let
that go. But anyway, I love that painting, and so
I did not realize until I was doing this research
that she had been the model for it. Yeah, that
is missus pat and her. I mean, she had such
(08:34):
a big life and so much fame for a while
that I almost feel guilty that my fixation has become
about her pants getting criticized by a dude. But at
the same time that cracked me up. Cracked me up
the great equalizer. Random people will tell you you dressed wrong,
and you hurt them by not being cute enough. We
(09:04):
talked about a Philip Randolph on the show this week.
Something that struck me while I was working on this
was a lot of like basic general audience kind of
write ups about a Philip Randolph talk about him primarily
in the context of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Borders,
which is huge, important part of his whole career and
(09:25):
his legacy and all of that. He was also a
major major figure in the planning of the March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and it just you know,
my experience going through public school in the United States,
the March on Washington is like one of the biggest
(09:45):
focus materials in like classes about the Civil Rights movement,
or like US history classes when it's Black History Month
or whatever, right, Right. So it just just to me
that for a Philip Randolph specifically, like the Brotherhood of
Sleeping car Porters, gets like so much of the attention,
(10:08):
when this other thing that he was also physically involved
in that gets way more attention in just basic conversations.
And I think some of that is probably because the
Martin Luther King juniors I have a dream speech has
become for a lot of people inaccurately emblematic of everything
(10:31):
about Martin Luther King Jr. And everything about the civil
rights movement, like that has taken an outsized role in
people's understanding of things, And I just I don't know.
I just kept thinking about that as I was working
on this episode, about how, like where so much of
the focus has been relative to all of that, Right.
(10:52):
I had a chuckle to myself. That was just a
nice walk down memory lane while we read this. Okay,
because do you know how I learned about Marcus Garvey
for the first time? No, the Tender Age of thirteen. No,
In William Gibson's Neuromancer. Okay, did you read that book? Yeah?
But uh, I would say a lot of it is
(11:14):
not retained in my memory. Oh I read it almost
once a year. No, you love it. I love it.
And I found it by accident when I was looking
for work by the other William Gibson who wrote The
Miracle Worker. So that was a little bit of a
shock to my tiny mind. But there is a space
tug in Neuromancer called the Marcus Garvey and they I
(11:36):
was like, I don't understand this reference at all, and
so I went and looked it up in the library.
And I remember my elementary I think I was either
I was on that cusp in my school system. I
can't remember if I was last year of elementary school
or first year of middle school. And I remember the
library and though being like, why are you looking this up?
And I was like, I don't understand what's going on
(11:58):
in this book. We have an episode on Marcus Garvey
way back in the in the archive from prior host.
I have never listened to it. I cannot tell you
anything about like that episode or how comprehensive or whatever
it is, but that episode does exist. We also, as
we said in this episode, have a two parter on
(12:19):
Buyered rest in I wrote that one, but I also
wrote it back in something like twenty fourteen or twenty
sixteen or something like that. I have not re listened
to that episode in recent years, like having buyered Resting
come up multiple times in this episode, I'm like, should
we use this as a Saturday Classic? I haven't re
(12:42):
listened to it, so, I you know, sometimes things don't
age as well as we would like them to for
whatever reason, So I haven't really listened to it. But
then also, it's a little weird to run two parts
as Saturday Classics. Yeah, it's always tricky unless we do
one big, giant one, which would be we weird. There
have been times from when our show tended to be,
(13:05):
like when episodes tended to be between twenty and thirty minutes.
If we had two episodes that were closer to twenty
we might just like run them as one, but those
ones are not. Those ones are I think fully half
an hour each and then getting into like an hour
or more long episode can be a tricky. So anyway,
(13:26):
our next open slots for classics are in in June.
We'll see, I'll re listen to him, probably make a
decision on whether we run that. I do love byed
Rest and he's one of my most favorite figures from history. Also,
I want to talk somewhere that Byar dressed in quote
(13:46):
at a birthday party for a Philip Randolph, when he
was talking about how other than his grandparents, nobody but
mister Randolph had stood by him in times of trial
apparently his whole life. Byed rest in all always thought
of a Philip Randolph as mister Randolph, like even when
they were like both adult, solidly long foundation in their
(14:08):
work and their activism, Like he was always mister Randolph
to him. But he also in that quote said he
is the only man I know who is who has
never said an unkind word about anyone or who refuses
to listen to an unkind word about anyone, even though
it may be true. And I love that quote, but
(14:33):
a Philip Randolph could also be really critical of people
that he disagreed with. And so you know, Byron Rested
is not here for me to ask, like, are you
drawing a distinction between criticizing someone and being unkind about that? Right?
We're getting into the semantics about what unkind words are. Yeah. Yeah,
But I was like, at first I was just going
(14:54):
to put that whole quote into the episode, and then
I was like, I, uh, I have thoughts about that,
because there are definitely other A Philip Randolph quotes about
people that you know, a lot of times he had
very justifiable criticisms of where I would not necessarily call
that a kind comment that he made, right. I don't
(15:20):
know if anybody has written a biography of his wife.
As we said in the episode, like Lucille was a
critical part of his work. He could not have done
it all without her. I am intrigued by her and
would like to know more about her, and I don't
(15:42):
offhand know if there is more publicly documented about her
to know you can do an episode that's a two
separate stories where you can do one on her and
one on Alilia Walker Lily Walker, and then will it'll
just be like cool women that seem to keep coming up.
So one quote that I found about Lucille, so they
(16:05):
they apparently like really loved each other, were really devoted
to each other, supported one another's professional and and you know,
actism goals all of that. A Philip Randolph was away
from home a lot by nature of his job. He
was traveling to places to organize and demonstrate. He had
international trips that we did not even bring up in
this episode, like there was a lot he was off
(16:27):
and away, and at one point someone asked Lucille how
she felt about like women because like that, you know,
he's an attractive man, Like what do you think about
like the idea that you're not around and there's you know,
there might be women around. And she said, let them try.
(16:48):
I said that just as Holly took a swallow of yeah,
you just heard me snort diet coke. I love him.
I love it. Yeah, so I love that too. Uh So, anyway, anyway,
I'm glad we finally got to a Philip Randolph. I'm
also glad. Something that people comments about him a lot
is the way that he spoke. It was very distinctive,
(17:09):
and people described it as oratorial or almost Shakespearean or
like terms like that, because like if you if you
listen to a recording of him talking, it's very very
precise and like a very formal way of talking. And
I got to the part about him loving Shakespeare and
establishing a Shakespeare Society, and I was like, well, that
explains some things about you know, who knows what's the
(17:33):
cause and what's the effect. But it seems like most
likely his like distinctive manner of speech and love of
Shakespeare went hand in hand perfection. Yeah, I love it,
I love it. Yeah. I also love train travel. So
having recently discovered that there is a train that I
can take from back Bay out like Westward, which I
(17:59):
think might be a new service on Amtrak, I got
the impression while I was on my trip that the
stop that I got off at was not a stop
that was being served for a long time. So I've
taken trains north and south out of Boston a bunch
of times. My first time going Westward, had a great time.
(18:21):
It's awesome. I haven't done a train trip. Yeah, I
might be one of those people that a train trip
would make a little bit antsy. Maybe I'm not a
journey it's not the destination, it's the journey kind of person.
I'm like, get me where I'm going. So my very
first Amtrak trip was when I was a kid, and
(18:44):
it has to have been on Amtrak because of when
I am alive. But my grandmother and I took Amtrak
to Raleigh from Greensboro, North Carolina, and I only very
vaguely remember this trip, but for many years I could
not get on an airplane because of my visceral terror.
(19:07):
Oh yeah. Kind of a long story. But we were
owned by Discovery Channel and our offices were in Atlanta,
and Discovery Channel offices were in Silver Spring, Maryland, and
so I took Amtrak from Atlanta to d C multiple
times until I started working on my fear of flying.
(19:30):
And I would say that was not my favorite, just
because that train left Atlanta at eight pm and it
arrived in DC at eight am, and when you went
home it was the reverse and sleeping and coach on Amtrak,
I would say, is just logistically not a very comfortable experience, right,
(19:54):
It's sort of like I would say, maybe more comfortable
than being on a red eye flight, but still like
you're in a you're in a seat overnight trying to
sleep is like not, It's not gonna be comfortable for
a lot of people. My vacation trip, however, I got
myself a little sleeper car, which I had a great time.
In my little sleeper car, I had my own little
(20:14):
door that closed, my own little window I could look
out of. Uh, my own little space was great and
I had a pretty view the whole time. It was awesome.
So anyway, I love trains overnight on the train not
as much, but I've taken a bunch of trips on
the down Easter and the Acela Express out of Boston,
and now this one, which was on the Lake Shore Limited. Uh,
(20:39):
that's now you all know more about the am track
trains running out of Boston than maybe you did before.
Like the second service, you didn't know you would get
out of stuff you missed History Class. Tracy will read
you train schedule Tracy's trail train travel. Uh. There is
(20:59):
a TikTok figure called Jed who makes recordings of train trips.
And I just reminded myself that anyway, Happy Friday. Whatever's
coming on your weekend, I hope it is great. If
you're gonna take a train trip somewhere, I hope your
train is on time and comfortable and clean. If you're
not taking a trip anywhere, I hope whatever's on your
(21:21):
plate at home is going okay. We will be back
with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and with something brand new
on Monday. Stuff you missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your
(21:44):
favorite shows,
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Tracy Wilson
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