Karl Heinrich Ulrichs Publicly Defended Homosexuality / Wendell Scott born - August 29

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs publicly defended homosexuality at the Congress of German Jurists on this day in 1867, making him the first gay man to publicly speak on the topic of gay rights. / On this day in history, race car driver Wendell Scott was born in Virginia.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everyone. Technically you're getting two days in history today
because we're running two episodes from the History Vault. You'll
also here two hosts, me and Tracy V. Wilson. Hope
you enjoy Welcome to this Day in History Class from
how Stuff Works dot Com and from the desk of
Stuff you Missed in History Class. It's the show where
we explore the past one day at a time with

(00:20):
a quick look at what happened today in history. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
it's August twenty nine. On this day. In eighteen sixty seven,
Carl Heinrich Ulrich made a public defense of same sex
relationships at the Congress of Jurists in Munich, and this

(00:41):
is commonly viewed as the first time that a gay
man spoke out publicly on the topic of gay rights.
So we need to set the stage a little bit here.
Same sex relationships have existed for pretty much all of
human history, and and all that time there have also
been people who lived outside of the way their society
thought about gender, and scieties have also thought about gender

(01:01):
and a lot of different ways. But in Western culture,
the idea that this was an identity, and that it
expressed something intrinsic about who a person is. That idea
is a lot more recent, and in some ways, that
idea in the West grew up in tandem with an
increase in laws against same sex relationships and against cross dressing.

(01:23):
The language that we used to talk about all this
today is also very recent and it's still evolving, and
the terms that we use today didn't exist at all
when Karl Heinrich Rick gave his address. So not only
was he breaking new ground in terms of language around
sex and gender, but also if he lived today, he
might describe himself in completely different terms relating to both

(01:45):
his gender and his sexual orientation with that stage set.
He was born in August twenty five in Germany. From
a very young age, he didn't really fit in with
what was expected of a boy. He'd like to wear
a girl's clothing. A lot of his friends were girls,
and sometimes he talked about wishing he were a girl.
Eventually started having relationships with other men. When he went

(02:06):
to university, he studied law, theology, and history, and he
became a lawyer, a writer, and a judge. Starting in
the eighteen sixties, he wrote a series of essays whose
title is translated as Studies in the Riddle of Male
Male Love. He coined a new word for men who
experienced this love, ronn ears, which English language writers usually

(02:29):
render as earnings. You are in i n g s.
Within the concept of earnings, he coined a lot of
different terms to describe men who had various same sex
attractions and expressions of their gender. This included men that
we would describe as bisexual, pan sexual, and intersex today.
He framed all of this under the idea that earnings

(02:52):
essentially constituted a third sex, and he wrote about how
relationships between people of the same sex, particularly men, should
be legal, and that such couples should be allowed to marry.
This was a start of a long series of articles
that he kept writing into the eighteen seventies, and all
of this was before the word homosexual was coined. Ulrics
also tried to start organizations for gay men and to

(03:15):
advocate against the laws that criminalized homosexuality. His work was banned, though,
and at one point he was sent to prison for
doing it. On August twenty nine, eighteen sixty seven, he
gave this speech at the Congress of German jurists in Munich,
and which he gave this public defense of the idea
of homosexuality. He was advocating for the repeal of anti

(03:36):
homosexual laws. The response to it, though, was overall not
favorable at all. He was shouted down at the meeting,
his works were again banned, and the laws in question
were not repealed. In eighteen eighty he left Germany and
he lived the rest of his life in Italy. He
died in eight Although the terminology that he coined earnings

(04:00):
isn't really in use today, this is one of the
first attempts to create a framework of language for how
we talk about gender and same sex relationships. And Carl
Maria Kurt Benny, who was the man who did coin
the word homosexual, did so in a letter to Rics
about his theories of gender and sexuality. Thanks very much

(04:20):
to Christopher Hasciotis for his research work on today's episode,
and to Tari Harrison for all of her audio work
on this podcast. You can subscribe to This Day in
History Class on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, and wherever else
you get your podcast. You can tune in tomorrow for
one of history's most delightful names. Hi. Everyone, Welcome to

(04:48):
this Day in History class, where we uncover the remnants
of history every day. The day it was August Wendell
Oliver Scott was born in Danville, Virginia. He would later

(05:08):
become the first black man to win a race in
NASCAR's Grand National Series. Scott's father was a driver for
wealthy white families, and he worked on their cars. He
learned a lot about auto mechanics from his father, though
Scott's parents later split up and he did not see
his father for many years. From a young age, Scott

(05:31):
recognized the realities of segregation and Jim Crow in the South.
By the time he was a teenager, he began taking
jobs to support his family. He worked at a drug
store and he became a bricklayer. But when Scott got
tired of bricklaying, he started working as a taxi driver
and bought his own cab. Scott soon became known for

(05:54):
his speed as a taxi driver. He earned that reputation
with passengers and with police officers. He got thirteen tickets
in his time as a taxi driver. In nineteen two,
Scott was drafted in World War Two and began serving
in the army's hundred and first Airborne. His work was

(06:15):
focused on maintaining vehicles. Two years later, while he was
on leave, he married Mary bill Coles, a woman he
met while he was driving his cab. They eventually had
six children together. When World War Two was over, Scott
went back to Danville and began building a business and
mechanic work. While the business was successful, he took on

(06:38):
a partner who mismanaged their money. That partner eventually died
in an accident that also caused their shot to burn down.
So Scott started bootlegging whiskey, but bootlegging was dangerous work.
In nineteen forty nine, Scott regularly watched racist at the
Danville Fairgrounds Speedway. The next steer racing promoter, Martin Rogers,

(07:02):
was looking to bring more people to the races and
decided to find a black driver to increase publicity. He
asked the cops which black guy would be a good fit,
and they suggested Wendell Scott. So Scott borrowed a car
he had used for running liquor that he had since
sold to his brother in law. He loved his first race.

(07:24):
He started out in the Dixie circuit and went on
to do other races that were not affiliated with NASCAR.
In Virginia, he won a race for the first time
in June of nineteen fifty two, and he continued on
to win other races. Though there had been other black
drivers before Scott, he was often the only one at
his events, and racism was still rampant in the nineteen

(07:47):
fifties in the US. People yelled slurs at him and
threatened his children. Plus he did not have sponsors, a
paid pit crew, or a mechanic besides himself. NASCAR, or
the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, was founded
in nineteen Though he had been rejected from entering NASCAR

(08:10):
sanctioned races because of his race, he entered his first
one in nineteen fifty four. Scott was the first black
driver to be in a race that was sanctioned by NASCAR.
Scott was never able to race in a new car
because he could not afford it and did not have sponsorship,
but he built his own cars and was successful in racing. Still,

(08:32):
he was frequently singled out as a black driver. Other
drivers would intentionally wreck his car during races. Inspectors would
demand unnecessary repairs before he could race. This discrimination continued
despite some support from William France Senior or Big Bill,
the founder of NASCAR, and it caused Scott to make

(08:54):
less money, which had to go toward paying for his bills,
gas and car repair coss. Those Scott's cars were not
as new and improved as the other driver's cars, he
still performed will In his first NASCAR season in nineteen
sixty one, Scott made his first appearance in the Grand
National now called the Winston Cup in South Carolina. Two

(09:19):
years later, he won his first and only Grand National race.
Scott continued racing for several years, but in nineteen seventy three,
he was involved in a crash at Talladega Speedway in Alabama.
He survived the crash but fractured many bones and had
to retire from racing. After returning to work in an

(09:40):
auto repair shop and paying for his children to go
to college, he died of spinal cancer in nineteen ninety.
After his death, Scott was inducted into several halls of fame,
including the National Sports Hall of Fame and the NASCAR
Hall of Fame. I'm each Jeffcote, and hopefully you know
a little more about history today than you did yesterday,

(10:04):
and if you want to learn more about Scott, you
can in the two part episode of Stuff You Miss
in History Class called Wendell Scott, Black Nascar Driver in
the Gym crow Era. You can find the link to
that episode in the description, and if you like to
follow us on social media, you can find us at
T D I h D Podcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

(10:29):
Thanks again for listening and we'll see you again tomorrow.
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