Six Impossible Episodes: Other Ins

We've talked about sit-ins on the show before. This time, we’re looking at other -ins – direct action demonstrations and similar protests that have some similarities to the sit-in movement. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class the production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
I started talking immediately as I could see that Holly
was taking a drinking water. So not long ago on

(00:25):
the podcast, we talked about the sit in movement in
the United States of the nineteen sixties, and today we're
kind of coming back to that theme with an addition
of six Impossible episodes. For listeners who are new to
our show. This is when we take a shorter look
at six topics that, for one reason or another, we
can't quite tackle as a standalone episode. That can be
for all kinds of reasons, including how much information is

(00:49):
available and how broad the topic itself is. This time
we are looking at what I'm just calling other ins,
so other direct action demonstrations and some protests that have
some similarities to that sit in movement that we talked
about earlier. A couple of today's topics might have worked
as whole episodes, but I really like having them as

(01:11):
part of this collection because together they illustrate a wide
variety of ways that these kinds of demonstrations have worked
in the United States. They point out some similarities and
differences in these movements, so we're keeping them all together today.
And our first event took place in Alexandria, Virginia. A
lot of articles about it today call it the Alexandria

(01:34):
Library sit in, but accounts and newspaper reports from the
time described it as a sit down strike. On August one, nine,
a group of young black men tried to get library
cards at the whites only library on Queen Street in Alexandria, Virginia,
which is the Kate Waller Barrett Branch Library today. Their
names were William Evans, Otto L. Tucker, Edward Gaddis, Morris Murray,

(01:58):
and Clarence Strain, and they were all between the ages
of nineteen and twenty two. So they each came into
the library one at a time and asked Alice Green,
who was the assistant librarian on duty, if they could
register for a library card. She told each of them
know that the library was for whites only, and then
from there each of them would pick a book from

(02:20):
the stacks and then sit down at a table to
read it, or at least to try to read. Later
on some of them gave interviews where they talked about
being way too nervous to actually concentrate on what was
on the page, so once one person had gotten a
book and sat down, the next person would come in
and do the same thing. With five black men sitting
at five different tables in the library and refusing to leave,

(02:42):
Green wasn't sure what to do. She sent the librari's page,
William Adam, to the home of the head librarian, Catherine Scoggin,
to tell her what was going on. Scoggin went to
city Hall to discuss what was happening with the city
planner and the chief of Police. Soon police were on
the scene of the library. Ay and a sixth participant
in this who was fourteen year old Bobby Strange, had

(03:04):
been tasked with keeping watch over the library and then
going to get Attorney Samuel Wilbert Tucker, known as sw
from his law office, which was nearby when the police
got there. S. W. Tucker had graduated from Howard University
in nineteen thirty three, studied law on his own, and
passed the Virginia Bar Exam at the age of only twenty,

(03:25):
a year too young to actually be sworn in. He
had arranged the sit down strike at the library, and
his brother Otto, was one of the people sitting in
back in, s W and Otto had been arrested after
refusing to give up their seat on a trolley to
a white passenger, so they already had some experience in
civil disobedience. S W and a friend had also been

(03:48):
denied library cards shortly after the library opened. He was
hoping to use that as part of a court case
to force the library to integrate. The sit in was
part of that plan as well. S W. Tucker had
also have gotten a photographer to document the scene, and
that photographer captured a picture of the demonstrators being escorted
out of the building by police. What you won't see

(04:10):
if you look at this photo online is that by
the time that happened, a crowd of about three hundred
angry spectators, along with some other reporters, had also gathered
around the building. The demonstrators were charged with disorderly conduct,
and Tucker arranged for their release from jail. In terms
of Tucker's legal action, the library was taxpayer funded and

(04:31):
black residents paid taxes but weren't allowed to use it,
so his hope was that the courts would force the
library to allow equal access to black residents, but rather
than integrate the library, the city of Alexandria rushed through
approvals for a new library for black patrons, the Robert H.
Robinson Library, which opened on February four. When S. W.

(04:54):
Tucker got a letter inviting him to register for a
library card at that branch, he ands with a refusal,
insisting that he issued the card he had already applied
for at the library that had already existed. He went
on to write, quote, continued delay beyond the close of
this month and issuing me a card for use of
the library on Queen Street will be taken as refusal

(05:16):
to do so, whereupon I feel justified in seeking aid
of court to enforce my right. Tucker went on to
become the lead lawyer for the Double A CP in Virginia.
During his legal career, he argued before the U. S.
Supreme Court several times, including in the attempts to overturn
public school segregation in Virginia. Today, an elementary school in

(05:38):
Alexandria is named in his honor, and the former Robinson
Library is the Alexandria Black History Museum. In October nine
a judge dismissed the disorderly conduct charges against the young
men who sat in, which had never come to trial.
So one of the really interesting things about this sit
in is that it used the same strategy that then

(05:58):
double a CP and our civil rights organizations were using
really extensively later on. It's not like nobody had ever
thought to do this, but he was sort of doing
something that would become a really huge part of the
movement later, and that was pairing direct action with legal action.
The Alexandria sit in pre dated the parts that we
really think of as the most active parts of the

(06:19):
civil rights movement, but this strategy was really similar to
a lot of what was going on later on. Next up,
we have a relatively early moment in the movement for
lgbt Q rights in the US, back when it was
more commonly known as the homophile movement. The Madachine Society
was one of the earliest gay rights organizations in the
United States. One documented as being older is Chicago Society

(06:42):
for Human Rights, which was founded into We covered that
on the show In the Machine. Society was first founded
in Los Angeles in nineteen fifty one, and then other
chapters formed in other cities around the US after that,
and in nineteen sixty six, members of New York City's
Manachine Society challenged regulations that prohibited gay men from being

(07:03):
served alcohol in New York's bars. Those regulations came from
the New York State Liquor Authority in the form of
a requirement that bar patrons had to display quote orderly conduct.
In the liquor Authority's view, homosexuality was inherently disorderly. Although
the policy didn't specifically mention sexual orientation, police frequently rated

(07:25):
bars that were believed to have a gay clientele, and
bars posted signs saying that men had to be facing
the bar while drinking. This was part of an overall
climate of homophobia, stigmatization, and harassment, and it was not
unique to New York. Other states had similar policies, some
of which specifically referenced homosexuality. On April one, nineteen sixty six,

(07:47):
three Matachine Society members went to bars in New York
City with the hope of being denied service so that
then they could file suit and try to get that
policy overturned. They included Dick Leish, who was the head
of the New York chap of the Machine Society, as
well as Craig Rodwell and John Timmins. A fourth man,
Randy Wicker, also joined them as they went on. They

(08:09):
had informed reporters of what they were doing ahead of time,
and they called it a sip in. This turned out
to be a little easier said than done them. The
men's first choice had been a bar that had a
sign posted in the window that said if you're gay,
go away, but as soon as the staff there realized
that there were reporters on the premises, they closed down
for the day. At their next stop, the men told

(08:30):
the bartender that they were homosexual, but that they would
not be disorderly, and they asked to be served, and
in that case the bartender served them, which is what
happened at their next stop as well. There are interviews
I think it was with Dick Leish where he was
talking about at this point they were like, we have
we've got to get turned down at the next bar,
or we're gonna have to table this for later because

(08:51):
we're going to be like too inebriated to make the
argument that we're not disorderly. So they finally wound up
at a bar called Julius Is in Greenwich Village, which
they thought would be hyper sensitive to their presence there
because it had recently been rated by police the same
as before. They sat down at the bar. They told
the bartender that they were gay, but they were going
to remain orderly, and they said that they wanted to

(09:13):
be served. The bartender had already put glasses in front
of them and covered them with his hands, saying I
can't serve you. Then this led to a dramatic photo
captured by Fred mcdera of the Village Voice, with a
three Mann coats and ties facing the bartender and the
bartender covering their glasses. With the help of the A c.
L U, the men filed legal action against the State

(09:35):
Liquor Board and the bar. New York City's Commissioned on
Human Rights got involved with it as well, so under
the threat of a lawsuit, the Liquor Board changed the policy.
Then in nineteen sixty seven, which was just a few
years later, a New York Court of Appeals issued a
ruling in the case Kerma Restaurant Corporation Versus State Liquor Authority,
and that court ruling specifically said that homosexuality was not

(09:58):
inherently disorderly. That ruling did not end discrimination at New
York's bars. Though the Stonewall riots started after a police
raid on June nineteen sixty nine, that was another two
more years after that appeals court ruling had happened. We
are going to take a quick sponsor break before we
go on to some more actions. The Machine Society sit

(10:25):
in we talked about a moment ago was inspired by
the nineteen sixties civil rights sit ins that we just
covered on a podcast, and that was also true of
our next active protest, which is the fissions that took
place in the Pacific Northwest in the nineteen fifties and
sixties and beyond. But the context for that protest stretches
all the way back to the nineteenth century. Isaac Ingles

(10:47):
Stevens became governor of what was then Washington Territory in
eighteen fifty three. One of his objectives as governor was
to secure as much land as possible from the indigenous
tribes and nations who were living in the Pacific north West.
As we discussed in our recent two partner on the
occupation of Alcatraz, he did this through treaties, and these
treaties detailed the terms under which the Native nations ceded

(11:10):
land to the United States. These treaties ultimately assigned more
than nine of the total land to the United States,
with the rest being established as a reservation land. At
least thirteen tribes and nations were signatories to these treaties,
including the Nsqually, the Pulp, and the muccle Shoote, although
the exact number is a little complicated because Stevens treated

(11:33):
individual villages as separate tribes when he was negotiating these treaties,
under the idea that a smaller group would have less
negotiating power. These treaties covered a lot of points in
the relationship between the Indigenous nations and the United States,
but one important point was fishing rights. While there were
multiple treaties at work, they all had similar language. Here

(11:54):
the quote right of taking fish at all usual and
accustomed grounds and stations is further secured to set Indians
in common with all citizens of the territory, So the
Native nations, I mean this has been the case with
all of the Native American history that we talked about
on the show. Like they a lot of these treaties
were heavily skewed in favor of the United States versus

(12:17):
the indigenous tribe or nation. In this case, though all
of the nations involved refused to sign the treaties without
that point about fishing rights, because not only was fishing
a major source of food, but the fish and the
act of fishing also held religious and spiritual significance. And
from Stevens point of view, he was totally willing to
make that concession for very pragmatic reasons, because if the

(12:40):
indigenous people did not retain their fishing rights, then the
government was going to be obligated to provide them with
some other kind of food source. At first, the indigenous
nations were able to exercise their rights to fish in
the waterways around the Pacific Northwest using their traditional methods,
which included using gillnets, which are like underwater walls made
of netting. There just weren't that many non indigenous people

(13:03):
in the Pacific Northwest yet, and at first those who
were there were more interested in other industries like lumber.
But as the non indigenous population started to grow, Indigenous
people started having more trouble exercising those rights, and that
also was true as federal policy toward indigenous people went
through all of those shifts that we talked about in

(13:23):
the Occupation of Alcatraz episodes, the state of Washington started
to interpret that treaty language is meaning that the Indigenous
people had fishing rights only on their reservations, and that
was in defiance of some federal court rulings which weren't
always totally clear and decisive, but they generally upheld the

(13:44):
Native people's rights to fish in other waterways as well.
These restrictions made it increasingly difficult for Indigenous people in
the Pacific northwest of Fish the best runs for salmon
and steelhead trout were outside of the reservation's boundaries. On
top of that, during the period of allotment, the reservations
themselves got smaller. Then, when the federal government implemented its

(14:07):
termination policies, which were supposed to get rid of the
reservations and make Native people quote subject to the same
laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as
are applicable to other citizens of the United States, the
state of Washington and to a lesser extent, Oregon became
increasingly focused on enforcing fishing and conservation laws, specifically when

(14:29):
violated by Native people, even though those treaties were still
in place. Yeah, it's like the state laws were contrary
to the treaty language, but the treaties had not been
abolished in any way. They were still in effect. Running
alongside all of this was a perception among predominantly white
sport fishers that the indigenous people were what was to

(14:51):
blame for declining populations of salmon and steelhead trout, and
this was in defiance of actual data. Between nine fifty
eight in nineteen sixty seven, Indigenous people caught six and
a half percent of the catch in the Pacific Northwest.
White sport fishers caught twelve point two percent, and then
commercial fishing operations took all the rest. More than eighty

(15:13):
percent of the catch was through commercial fishing operations, not
through indigenous people or sport fishers doing their own thing.
I can tell you firsthand that that belief persisted into
the seventies when I lived there as a kid. That
does not surprise me at all. I remember hearing neighbors,
adult neighbors discuss how they wanted to go fishing, but

(15:34):
then said very disparaging things about the native population and
how they had ruined it for everyone. Yeah, we we
talked in our behind the scenes after the Greensboro Lunch
Counter sit in his episode about how like we'll be
doing research on something and the whole topic is angering,
but then there will be one element that just is
particularly viscerally angering. And the things that were said about

(15:58):
like the Indigenous people are trying to get something for nothing,
Like I got so angry over and over in this
part of it. And eventually the only safe place for
an Indigenous person to fish in the Pacific Northwest was
on a reservation. Outside a reservation, Indigenous fishers were being harassed,
arrested and jailed and having their equipment confiscated by police,

(16:18):
including their boats. Plus outside of the reservations, nets and traps,
which were part of traditional indigenous fishing practices were outlawed.
So this was still a few years away from the
occupation of Alcatraz and the rise of an inter tribal
movement for Indigenous rights that we just discussed back in
November and the Pacific Northwest in the nineteen fifties and

(16:39):
early sixties, most tribal leaders were taking a more conciliatory
approach to things. The National Congress of American Indians was
explicitly not in favor of the direct action methods that
the civil rights movement was using, finding them really to
be too aggressive and contradictory to Indigenous culture. So like
there was a a banner hanging from their headquarters at

(17:02):
one point that said something along the lines of like
an Indigenous people don't demonstrate, Like they were not in
favor of sit ins or marches or any of those
kinds of things at this point as a trend among leadership,
but not everyone agreed. In nineteen sixty four, the Survival
of the American Indian Association s a i A was established,
with a focus on direct action and civil disobedience. One

(17:25):
of the organization's demonstrations was a series of fishings around
the Pacific Northwest. They were not the first people to
do this. For example, Robert Stiacum was arrested while fishing
in nineteen fifty four, and he hoped that his arrest
would lead to a court ruling that would clarify the
Indigenous Nation's treaty rights. Unfortunately, his criminal record went well
beyond this act of civil disobedience. That whole story is

(17:48):
outside the scope of this episode. So these fishings, arranged
by the s A I started on February twenty seven,
nineteen sixty four, and they continued well into the nineteen seventies,
sometimes times as individual fishing events and sometimes as prolonged
demonstrations that established encampments with fishing going on throughout that
whole time. The demonstrators had legal and strategic advice from

(18:12):
Jack Tanner, who was the director of the Tacoma, Washington
chapter of the Double A c P. They also had
the attention of celebrity supporters, including Marlon Brando, who was
arrested at a fishing on March second of nineteen sixty four,
but wasn't ultimately charged with a crime. These fishing's attracted
a lot of criticism, at least at first. Many indigenous

(18:33):
leaders disagreed with the strategy entirely, preferring to focus on compromise.
Jack Tanner's colleagues in the civil rights movement criticized his involvement,
saying it was taking his focus away from Black Americans.
The Washington State Sportsmen's Club, which was a lobbying organization
that had a lot of influence over the State Game Department,

(18:54):
described Native people as trying to flaunt the rules and
get special privileges on December six, nine four, they issued
a statement encouraging the state to get rid of all
fishing regulations quote to allow such waters to become barren
until such time as the Congress of the United States
or the courts of our Land sets up enforceable regulations
that will allow the state to carry on a reasonable

(19:16):
fisheries management program. This was kind of a burn it
all down mentality. Overall, the white media portrayed the Indigenous
protesters as backward and lawless, so non violence was a
core part of the strategy for the civil rights movement
and the United States for a lot of the time,
but that wasn't really entirely the case in the fishing movement.

(19:38):
The demonstrators were repeatedly targeted by game wardens and by police,
including being beaten with clubs and sprayed with tear gas.
On December seven, police making an arrest rand demonstrators canoe
with their boat, which jumped to the demonstrators into the water.
It is not entirely clear whether that was an accident
or intentional. At some encampments, Native people carried firearms to

(20:02):
defend themselves, and at others they fought back with things
like stones and paddles. After a brawl on October thirteenth
of nineteen sixty four, the a c l U agreed
to defend some of the demonstrators. At first, the a
c l YOU really focused on people who had been
charged with interfering with police, and then they later expanded
it to include defending people who were arrested for fishing,

(20:23):
as was the case with the occupation of Alcatraz. This
turned into an inter tribal movement, with supporters from other
Native nations traveling to the Pacific Northwest from other parts
of North America to support the demonstrators. The movement also
gradually gained more support among non Indigenous people, including members
of the American Friends Services Committee and the Black Panther Party.

(20:45):
In September of nineteen sixty eight, a massive protest was
planned that pulled together all these populations. It was supposed
to involve five days of fishing, but it went on
for more than forty. This movement continued into the nineteen seventy's.
On June seventeenth of nineteen seventy, the Washington State Sportsman's Club,
which was still insisting that Indigenous people were trying to

(21:07):
get undeserved special privileges at the expensive white sport. Fishers
filed a lawsuit, but the judge did not find in
their favor. At the judge found in favor of the
Indigenous Nations, granting a fifteen day window in which net
fishing would be allowed in the Puyallup River. By that point,
more tribal leadership had started to support these protests. On

(21:29):
February nineteen seventy one, the s a i A asked
the U. S. Attorney General to file suit against the
state of Washington for violating the treaties that the Native
nations had signed all the way back in the nineteenth century.
Judge George Bolt issued his decision on February twelfth, nineteen
seventy four. This came to be known as the Bolt Decision,

(21:50):
and it was one of a series of court cases
that were all part of this. It ruled that the
Native tribes that were party to those treaties were entitled
to fifty percent of the available catch, including fishing outside
their reservations. That was way better than the six and
a half percent that they had actually been fishing according

(22:10):
to that earlier data. Um This was regarded as a
huge wind for the indigenous people, but of course it
did not fix everything. Non indigenous fishers were outraged and
tried to stage their own fishings as like a counter demonstration.
The ruling also didn't apply to landless indigenous nations or
ones that had not been party to those earlier treaties,

(22:33):
and that included the Duwamish, Chinook, and Snohomish people's Native
nations in the Pacific Northwest are also still reliant on
fishing for food, and the populations of those fishes continued
to decline through the effects of commercial fishing, habitat loss,
increasing ocean temperatures, all kinds of other factors. Back in

(22:53):
we did an episode on Ed Roberts and the independent
Living movement which evolved in Berkeley, California in the nineteenth
sties and seventies. Before this point, a lot of disability
advocacy had really been focused on parents and caregivers of
disabled people rather than on disabled people's own self advocacy.
The Independent living movement really shifted that focus more towards

(23:16):
self determination and self advocacy. So this kind of language
about independence has been evolving in more recent years to
include the idea of interdependence, because really all of us
depend on other people in some ways, and when it
comes to disability, a lot of times that interdependence is
really stigmatized. Obviously, that's a brief sum up, not the

(23:37):
entirety of the philosophy at this point, but in terms
of the nineteen sixties and seventies, this move toward independence
and away from pity and paternalism was just huge. One
of the moments that came up in that episode is
the passage of section five oh four of the Rehabilitation
Act in nineteen seventy three and the sit in that
followed it, But we didn't really spend much time on

(23:59):
that at all. So Section five oh four was the
first federal law regarding civil rights for people with disabilities.
It read quote, no otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the
United States shall, solely on the basis of his handicap,
be excluded from the participation, be denied the benefits of,
or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity

(24:22):
receiving federal financial assistance. So that sounds pretty great, but
this law was just the starting point, like, how do
you define, to use the language of the law, what
handicapped means, What did or didn't classify as discrimination. Federal
agencies needed to create their own regulations regarding how Section

(24:42):
five oh four would actually be implemented and enforced. And
this applied to every federal agency but the Department of Health, Education,
and Welfare or h g W. I don't know if
maybe people say that HUGH that was selected as the
lead agency. They were to set their regulations first, and
then the other agencies would follow. But between nineteen seventy

(25:06):
three and nineteen seventy seven nothing happened. Attorneys from the
Office for Civil Rights drafted regulations and sent them to
h g W, but rather than publishing them for public comment,
the Department sent them to Congress, and then Congress sent
them back. It went on for so long that in
the meantime, President Richard Nixon, who had signed it into law,

(25:26):
was impeached, and then his successor, Gerald Ford, had been
replaced by Jimmy Carter. By that point, disability rights activists
were demanding for the regulations that the Office for Civil
Rights had drafted be put into place. Instead, the Carter
administration set up a task force to study and revise them,
and that task force did not include any disabled members.

(25:48):
It became clear that this study and revision process was
going to weaken the proposed regulations that the Office for
Civil Rights had recommended back in nineteen seventy three, so
the American Coalition of Citizens with disabilit Ladies decided to
take action. They gave the h e W an ultimatum
either h g W Secretary Joseph Califano would sign the

(26:08):
regulations as written by April four n or activists would
start sitting in at h g W offices on April five.
April fourth came and went, and on April five, demonstrators
took over the federal buildings that housed eight different regional offices.
Most of these sit ins lasted for a day or two,
but in San Francisco, more than a hundred people sat

(26:30):
in for twenty six days. Unlike some of the other
sit ins that we've talked about, they didn't show up
during business hours and leave when h g W closed
for the day. Activists took over the building and stayed,
which was really possible thanks to the involvement of lots
of other organizations, including civil rights and gay rights groups,
church organizations, and politicians who were on the demonstrator's side.

(26:55):
In San Francisco, Glide Memorial Church and the Black Panther
Party prod aided meals. Over the course of the sit
in in San Francisco, conditions in the building became increasingly difficult.
Supporters had donated things like mattresses and a shower attachment
that could be used with a sink faucet, but people
had to sleep in shifts because there were not enough
sleeping spaces. The building's rest rooms overall were not accessible.

(27:20):
Nobody had any privacy, and in some cases it wasn't
just uncomfortable, it was potentially life threatening. For example, people
who used catheters or ventilators didn't necessarily have caregivers or
other people on hand who knew how to operate and
care for these devices. Eventually, a delegation from the San
Francisco sit in was selected to travel to Washington, d C.

(27:41):
To meet with legislators. People donated funds for plane tickets
for people who could travel by air. The International Association
of Machinists rented a moving truck with a lift and
used it to transport people who used wheelchairs. Once in Washington,
they met with senators to go over the original regulations
point by point, Answering senators objections one by one. I

(28:04):
cannot imagine how uncomfortable this trip was, especially for the
people who were literally in a moving van. Like my
mom uses a wheelchair that she can't really transfer out
of to get into a vehicle, so like there's a
special vehicle with a ramp and tie downs for her chair, like,
and that is not a comfortable trip. A lot of
the time, this was literally a moving van with no windows,

(28:28):
driving people across the country. Yeah. Secretary Califano finally signed
these regulations on April nineteen seventy seven. They included general
provisions along with regulations on employment practices, program accessibility, primary
and secondary education, post secondary education, health welfare and social services,

(28:49):
and government procedures. Overall, this was a major success for
the disability rights movement, but at the same time, enforcement
was a huge issue. Opponents argued that the work and
expense involved made the regulations impractical or impossible to implement.
The regulations also served as a template for the Americans
with Disabilities Act, which became law in nine, but actually

(29:12):
implementing that has been a struggle as well, even now
decades later. Yeah, I remember there being headlines. I feel
like it was late last year about, uh, maybe we
don't need to implement this because it's just too expensive,
and people were like, you have had thirty years. I
have feelings about this too. We should also note that,

(29:35):
as is the case with any group, disabled people are
not a monolith, and accessibility looks really different for different disabilities.
Different parts of the community have different perspectives depending on
all kinds of issues. During the five oh four set in,
for example, some members of the deaf community felt like
they were excluded, and the deaf community also thought that
some of the regulations, like a requirement for educating disabled

(29:59):
children and streams with their non disabled peers whenever possible,
could threaten deaf culture. That said, though beyond the regulations,
activists who were part of these sit ins have also
talked about their role in shifting non disabled people's perceptions
of disability. In the words of Judas Human, who was
part of the sit in and as an international disability

(30:19):
rights advocate today, quote, through the sit in, we turned
ourselves from being oppressed individuals into being empowered people. We
demonstrated to the entire nation that disabled people could take
control over our own lives and take leadership in the
struggle for equality. She went on to say, quote, we
overcame years of parochialism. Uh. If you're curious, there was

(30:42):
an episode of Drunk History on this that cast disabled
people in the roles of all the five or four protesters,
which shouldn't sound like some kind of accomplishment, but it is. Sadly. Yes, yes,
there was a lot in this middle act of the show.
So we're going to take a quick sponsor break to

(31:08):
return to our six and possible episodes. The idea of
respectability has come up in a lot of our episodes
on the civil rights movement in the United States. It
came up in uh, in our recent episode on the
Greensboro sit ins and the other sit ins. It's come
up in today's shows so far, even when we haven't
called it out specifically. A lot of these demonstrations that

(31:28):
we have talked about have involved people who took a
lot of care to always be very polite and very
well dressed. And this has been a strategy and a
lot of social movements, but it's definitely not the only strategy,
which is really illustrated by what we're about to talk about.
The first official reporting of what came to be known
as acquired immune deficiency syndrome came in the Morbidity and

(31:51):
Mortality Weekly Report, which is a publication of the US
Centers for Disease Control. It described an unusual outbreak of
pneumosis just pneumo in five previously healthy gay men in
Los Angeles, and that was on June five. In just
five years following that, more than twenty eight thousand cases
of AIDS were reported in the United States and more

(32:14):
than twenty four thousand, five hundred people had died. By
the end of nineteen eighty six, there was no approved
treatment for HIV, which is the virus that causes AIDS
in the United States. The US federal government had been
incredibly slow to respond, and at that point President Ronald
Reagan had not made any public statements on the crisis
at all. A really lengthy drug approval process also meant

(32:38):
that people with HIV were dying while they waited for
access to drugs that were already extending people's lives in
other countries. People who were affected by this, who had
either contracted HIV or who knew and loved people who did,
were outraged. This was particularly true among gay men, who
were disproportionately affected. In response, to all of this, Larry

(32:58):
Kramer and other activists for the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power,
or act UP on March twelfth in New York City.
Its purpose was to use direct action to force the government,
drug companies, public health agencies, insurance companies, everyone involved in
the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of HIV and AIDS to

(33:19):
get moving immediately. So act UP still exists today and
is still directly involved in AIDS advocacy because this is
not over. Throughout its existence, the organization has become known
for demonstrations that are angry and aggressive and militant and
just viscerally affecting. As one example, act UP has organized
marches to Washington, d C. In which people have scattered

(33:42):
the ashes of loved ones who died from AIDS related
diseases on the White House lawn. Some who have participated
in these marches have said that if that is not
enough to prompt the government to act that they would
start using bodies. One of act ups tactics has been
the die in in which demonstrators lie down unmoving, usually
in a public space, sometimes in roadways, blocking traffic. This

(34:06):
is part of actives very first protest on March twenty
when seventeen people lay down in the intersection of Broadway
and Wall Street in New York City outside Trinity Church.
At this demonstration, the protesters had a very clear set
of demands that they had written up ahead of time.
They wanted the FDA to immediately release potentially life saving drugs,

(34:27):
to eliminate double blind studies in which HIV positive patients
were given placebos, and to make these drugs affordable. They
also demanded a massive public education campaign, protections against discrimination
for people who are being treated for AIDS, and quote
immediate establishment of a coordinated, comprehensive and compassionate national policy

(34:48):
on AIDS. Okay, when it comes to those drug standards,
in general, people think of controlled studies and double blind
trials as helpful in making sure that the drugs that
make it to market are safe and effective. We talked
about some of that in our two part episode on
the litamide. But in the early nineteen eighties, the FDA
approval process took up to nine years. That was much

(35:10):
longer than people lived after being diagnosed with HIV, especially
before the test for the disease was approved in nine five.
Since there had been very little public education on the disease.
Most people were diagnosed after contracting an opportunistic infection, at
which point they just did not have long to live. Yeah,
people like people couldn't wait that long. And then also

(35:32):
the idea that somebody could be in a study, like
somebody who was HIV positive could be in a study
where they would be given up placebo, like, they didn't
have time to wait until that study was over to
find out whether they could get the actual drug or not.
So on September fourteenth nine, act UP held a rally
and die in outside of the New York Stock Exchange
to protest pharmaceutical company Burrows Welcome, which manufactured a z T,

(35:56):
which by that point was the only drug in the
United States that was approved to treat HIV. Demonstrators had
also made their way into the building and dropped a
banner from a balcony that said cell Welcome. So one
of the things they were protesting was how expensive brows
Welcome had made a z T, So not long after
the demonstration, they lowered the price for a year of

(36:16):
a z T treatment, which had originally been ten thousand
dollars per patient per year, to six thousand, four hundred dollars.
Act ups very aggressive advocacy on this has often been
credited with prompting the change, although Burrow's Welcome has maintained
that they had already been planning to do it. Because
of their tactics and the stigma surrounding both homosexuality and AIDS,

(36:39):
act UPS actions have been inherently controversial. One particular die
in was particularly divisive. In December, act UP and Women's
Health Action mobilization demonstrated inside St. Patrick's Cathedral during high Mass.
They were both there to protest John Cardinal O'Connor, Archbishop
of New York, who was influential in city politics and

(37:02):
who opposed things like sex education, abortion access, AIDS education,
and condom distribution. Yeah, a lot of that also applied
to the Catholic Church in general. So this demonstration included
ade in in the cathedral's aisles. More than forty people
were arrested, with some of the demonstrators being carried out
of the cathedral on stretchers. Act UP had initially intended

(37:25):
this demonstration to be somewhat quiet, to sort of go
into the church have they're dying in the aisles without
otherwise causing a lot of disruption, But as it developed,
Michael Petrellis loudly blew a whistle and shouted, you're killing us,
and that tipped the protest into something that became a
lot more chaotic. People were offended not only at the

(37:46):
disruption of the church services, but also because one of
the demonstrators, Thomas Keane, through a host wafer from the
Communion service on the floor. He later said that he
did not realize how offensive that would be to Catholics
who believed the the Communion host was the body of Christ.
Even within act UP, some people began to argue that
the tone of these demonstrations was turning off potential supporters.

(38:09):
So overall, these demonstrations have been credited with like getting
more effective AIDS policy happening more quickly, and as we
said earlier, act UP is still using Dian's as a
protest tool like today. On October four, there was a
die in at the New York Public Library after they

(38:30):
put up an exhibit titled why we Fight Remembering AIDS Activism.
One of act ups slogans at that event was AIDS
is not history, because this idea that we were remembering
activism sort of suggest that we are done with it
now and We're not. Another took place on January one,
after the inauguration of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio,

(38:53):
because at that point act UP had been trying to
meet with him about his AIDS platform for months without success.
Act UP repeated the AIDS is Not History theme at
the Whitney Museum in eighteen after the museum arranged a
retrospective of the work of David boina Rovitch, who was
an act UP member before his death in nine act

(39:14):
UP again felt that the Whitney's presentation made it seem
as though the AIDS epidemic was in the past rather
than being a critical current issue. Okay, so the last
one the teaching movement during the Vietnam War. This one
is a little bit different. It wasn't exactly a direct
action meant to force the US government to end its
military involvement in Vietnam. Instead, it was an educational tool

(39:37):
that inspired people to take on direct actions of their own. So,
for context, during the nineteen sixty four presidential election, part
of Lyndon Baines Johnson's campaign was a peace platform, so
people thought he was going to end American involvement in Vietnam.
But on February thirteenth of nineteen sixty five, which was
less than a month after being inaugurated, Johnson authorized a

(39:59):
bomb campaign that was known as Operation Rolling Thunder, as
well as combat troop deployments to Vietnam. And there had
been American personnel and Vietnam before that, but not in
a combat capacity. People who had voted for him, thinking
that he was going to end American involvement in the war,
felt really betrayed. That spring, the Faculty Committee to Stop
the War in Vietnam at the University of Michigan was

(40:21):
discussing ways to demonstrate against the war and against what
they saw as the militarization of their academic disciplines. As
one example, social scientists had been recruited to work on
a military funded counterinsurgency program called Project Camelot, which was
meant to study cultures primarily in Latin America. And of course,

(40:42):
people in hard science fields had seen the development of
weapons like the atomic bomb. Academics had also seen their
work branded as a communist threat during the Cold War,
with accusations that they were indoctrinating students against the United States.
There was a lot going on with the education community. Yeah,
and at first these particular professors and other educators were

(41:06):
focused on a walkout in which classes would be canceled
and faculty would instead give anti war lectures somewhere off campus.
But people raised some concerns about whether that was in
the best interests of students and whether people would perceive
it as the professor's not being committed to their work.
And a staff meeting on March seventeenth, after a lot

(41:26):
of debate about this whole walkout and strike idea, anthropologist
Marshall Salons said, I've got it. They say we're neglecting
our responsibilities as teachers. Let's show them how responsible we feel.
Instead of teaching out, we will teach in all night.
This led to the first teaching and held from eight
pm on March until eight am the following morning. It

(41:50):
was held in Angel Hall Auditorium, although the crowd was
so large that it spilled out to other parts of
the campus, including the library steps. More than two and
people attended, with about five hundred still there when the
last lecture started. Women enrolled at the university had a
curfew at the time, but it was waived so that
they could attend In addition to the faculty involvement, Students

(42:13):
for a Democratic Society were also part of the event.
This event included lectures and discussions that were meant to
educate attendees on things like the military industrial complex and
Cold War rhetoric, and US foreign policy, the effects of
weapons like napalm and phosphorus bombs. There were at least
two different bomb threats during the event, with police clearing

(42:35):
the building after one of them, and counter demonstrators were
inside and outside the building shouting pro war slogans like
better dead than Red. Two days later, another teaching was
held at Columbia University in New York City. More teachings followed,
and on April seventeenth, ninetive and inter university Committee for

(42:55):
a Public Hearing on Vietnam was established. Participating schools include
to the University of Chicago, m I T, University of Wisconsin,
Wayne State University, and Washington University in St. Louis. The
committee published a pamphlet called The Meaning of the National Teaching.
It began quote the teachings were born in protest against

(43:16):
the United States policy in Vietnam. However, they are vehicles
for a larger purpose. There are a means of discussion
and debate without which democracy lacks significance. On May fifteenth,
that National Teaching was held in Washington, d C. This
was an all day event that was also broadcast on
more than two hundred radio stations. It included discussions about

(43:38):
US policies and context of the war, along with debates
between supporters and opponents of US policy toward Vietnam. National
Security Adviser mc george Bundy was supposed to be at
the National Teaching, but he canceled at the last minute
for a trip to the Dominican Republic that was described
as urgent. Yeah, of course, there are people who wondered
if that was a convenient excuse or in actual urgency.

(44:01):
On one and twenty two, the largest teaching in this
movement was held at the University of California at Berkeley,
with thirty thousand people in attendance. The committee had followed
up with mc george Bundy repeatedly after his cancelation at
the National Teaching uh The committee's hope was that they
would schedule some kind of opportunity for the debate and
discussion that he was supposed to have been a part of,

(44:24):
and that did finally happen with a televised event in July.
The teaching movement didn't really last beyond nineteen five. Over time,
people started to become concerned that it had shifted from
being an explicitly anti war movement about educating people to
one that was more focused on a debate between two sides.
As the anti war movement became more radical, activists started

(44:47):
seeing the teachings as too conservative. At the same time,
the teaching movement is marked as a critical moment in
the early anti Vietnam War movement. Carl Oglesby of Students
for a Democratic Society called it as droke of genius.
That quote put the debate on the map for the
whole academic community. And you could not be an intellectual
after those teachings and not think a lot and express

(45:09):
yourself and defend your ideas about Vietnam. According to Martial Salads,
it also shifted some of the counterculture movement from one
that was ideologically pacifist and pro civil rights to one
that was overtly political and more likely to take direct action.
I think this is I mean, there's so much um
discussion of the anti war movement during Vietnam which could

(45:34):
be really divisive, and I don't know if could be
was even a strong enough word, Like it was really
divisive and became really militant in a lot of places. Um.
And so this to me feels like this kind of
nice precursor that was about basically educating people about all
of the context, like all the context for it was
happening in Vietnam, all the context for what it could

(45:57):
mean in like the world of global story, all of
that that then like went on to inspire people to
take direct action. Do you have a little bit of
listener mail? I do. I do have a little listener mail.
I feel like this episode of runs a little long sometimes,
so I picked something really quick. Uh. It is from Miriam,
who's one of several people who wrote to us about this.

(46:18):
Miriam says, I love your podcast and all your fabulous ideas.
I wanted to let you know that there is a
show where someone steals art and cultural pieces and returns
them to rightful owners. Well sort of. Check out the
new animated reboot of Carmen San Diego. My kids love
this show, and while I'm pretty partial to the original,
it's a fun twist and a little cathartic to think

(46:39):
of somewhere out there righting wrongs. I can't wait to
hear what you ladies come up with next piece, Miriam.
So that was from It was in reference to the
behind the scenes of our two part episode on Lord
Elgin and the parthenon Marbles, where Holly talked about wanting
to have a show where people uh steal things and
return them um mirror. I did not write to us

(47:00):
about this, but someone else did, so I just wanted
to note that at three different points in that outline,
somehow I managed to type the year eighteen hundred one
eight zero zero as eight one eight eight zero. It's
clear from context that that was a typo, I think,

(47:23):
but since I did manage to either make it three
times or it was a copy paste issue from me
like picking up the date at one point in that
outline of putting it in other places. Anyway, if you
heard that and you were like, what are you talking about, Tracy,
my fingers uh ran a foul of the correct numbers um.
If you would like to write to us about this

(47:44):
or any other podcast or a history podcast at i
heeart radio dot com. If you have heard an old
episode where you heard the old email address, and you
sent us something to the old email address, you don't
need to re send it to the new one. Will
still get it to the old one for some unforeseeable
amount of time. Um like me have had a few
people that have sort of forwarded us the email from
the old email address. That's not a problem. But you

(48:05):
don't have to. It'll be fine. We'll still get it. Um.
So that's History Podcast at i heart radio dot com,
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(48:29):
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