Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everyone, it's Eaves. Just wanted to let you know
that you'll be hearing an episode from me and an
episode from Tracy V. Wilson today. I hope you enjoyed
the show. Welcome to this day in History class. It's July.
The Spanish Inquisition was disbanded on this day in history,
and the year might actually surprise you. This was not
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in the hundreds, was not in the sixteen hundreds. It
was in eighteen thirty four. So here's some of the highlights.
Inquisitions actually started out as a judicial procedure during the
medieval period. They were basically a method for religious leaders
to try to seek out heresy. Pope Lucius the Third
requested that his bishops do this in four as one example.
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But eventually inquisitions morphed from a process for seeking out
heresy that one religious leader might command other religious leaders
to do into an institution. By the fifteenth century, what
had just art it out as sort of an an
inquiry process was an established bureaucracy. The inquisition had its
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own rules, its own tribunals, and even though the Spanish
Inquisition is probably the most famous one, there were inquisitions
in other places as well, including Portugal, Venice, and Rome.
It was the Roman Inquisition, for example, that investigated Galileo
for heresy over whether the Earth orbits the Sun. So
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when it comes to Spain spent the Spanish Inquisition was
the first to be formally established, and it was also
the largest of all these various national inquisitions. Pope Sixtus
the Fourth established the Spanish Inquisition on November one, fourtev
and he did that at the request of Ferdinand and Isabella,
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the rulers of Aragon and Castile. Their names may also
be familiar from the stories of Christopher Columbus. So Ferdinand
and Isabella were devoutly Catholic, and they want to make
their combined territory into an explicitly Catholic nation. This meant
ritting the Kingdom of both Muslims and Jews. Spain had
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already conquered most of the Muslim territory through a series
of violent conflicts that are now known as law Reconquista,
and Spain's Jewish population had been facing huge persecution for
years and tremendous pressure to convert to Catholicism. Sometimes this
was not even really a choice. There was a series
of programs in the late fourteenth century that ordered Jews
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to convert under penalty of death, and some people did
convert there for a lot of different reasons. There were
definitely people who converted because of fear for their lives,
they had really no other option. There were probably people
who converted because of a sincerely held religious belief. But
these recent converts, who were known as conversos, were viewed
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with extreme suspicion. A lot of people assumed that they
weren't really Catholic, that they were still being Jewish in secret,
that they were only saying that they were Catholics so
that they would not be killed. And these people became
known as crypto Jews, and so a big part of
the Inquisition was to seek out these supposed crypto Jews,
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and it also morphed into more broadly seeking out heresy.
But a lot of the people who were questioned and
tortured by the Inquisition were recently converted Jewish people. After
Spain's Jews and Muslims had been either driven out of
the country, killed, or forced to convert, the inquisitions attention
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turned more to Protestants after the Protestant Reformation. During its
centuries of existence, the Spanish Inquisition became synonymous with murder, torture,
and general brutality. Inquisitors would arrive in a town and
give people an opportunity to confess and receive punishment. The
people who were accused but didn't just immediately confess, instead
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of facing up punishment, which might be something like a pilgrimage,
instead faced torture and execution. These people who were sentenced
faced an auto de fay, which was a public ceremony
where they received their sentence, and these became a public
spectacle the way people would go to watch executions. In
the early eighteen hundreds, though, the inquisitions power started to
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wane as Spain's government became more secular and less explicitly Catholic.
Then the Inquisition went through several cycles of being suppressed
and then restored again, before the Tribunal of the Holy
Office of the Inquisition was permanently disbanded on July fifteenth,
eighteen thirty four. Over its centuries of existence, well over
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a hundred thousand people were tried at the hands of
the Spanish Inquisition, and thousands of them were executed. You
can learn more about the Spanish Inquisition in the January
fourteenth two thousand nine episode of Stuff You Miss in
History Class. You can subscribe to This Day in History
Class on apple Pie Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and wherefore else
do you get your podcasts? Tomorrow we will have an
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investigative journalist whose work fought against racism, sexism and violence.
What's up, everyone? Welcome to this Day in History Class,
where we bring you a new tidbit from history every day.
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The day was July eighteen sixty four. Maggie Lena Walker
was born in Richmond, Virginia, to Elizabeth Draper Mitchell and
Eccles Cuthbert. Walker would become the first woman in the
US to charter and become president of a bank. Maggie
was born in the beginning of the Reconstruction era, a
year after you, as President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
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During this period, laws known as black co were being
passed to restrict black people's liberties and keep them in poverty.
Lynchings and segregation were on the rise, but there were
strides in black education and political engagement. Maggie's mother, Elizabeth,
was a formerly enslaved assistant for Elizabeth van lou a
union spy and abolitionist Maggie's father, Etles, was an Irish
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American whom Elizabeth had met on the Van lou estate.
Equle's and Elizabeth never married, though Elizabeth married William Mitchell,
who was a butler and writer. In eighteen seventy six,
William's body was found in a river. Though his death
was ruled a suicide, Maggie believed he was murdered. Once
he died, Maggie began working to help her mom out financially.
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Her mom had a laundry business, and Maggie did laundry
and delivered clothes. She was socially aware as a child,
realizing the disparities between black and white people. When she
was fourteen years old, she joined the Independent Order of St. Luke's,
a black organization that helped the sick and elderly. Enrichmond,
Maggie went to the Lancaster School and Richmond Colored Normal School,
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and once she graduated, she began teaching in the public
school system. Once she married her husband, Armstead Walker Jr.
She was required to stop teaching. Marriage bars, which were
the practice of firing married women or not hiring married women,
were not unusual in the teaching industry at the time. Anyway,
Walker continued to be active in the Independent Order of St.
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Luke's or i O. S L. The organization provided members
with disability benefits and death claims. Walker grew the i
O s l s treasury so that premiums cost less
and death claims were paid promptly. In she co founded
the organization's Juvenile Department, which taught black children financial responsibility
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and work ethics and gave them leadership opportunities. Four years later,
Walker became the right Worthy Grand Secretary of the i
O s L, a position she held until she died.
The organization was struggling with growing its members and was
in debt. Maggie grew its membership from a few thousand
people to more than one hundred thousand and twenty four states.
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She also made it a point to hire black women
and donate to black schools for girls, encouraging more professional
opportunities for girls and women, and in August of nineteen
o one, she called for the creation of a black bank,
saying quote, let us put our moneys together, let us
use our moneys. Let us put our money out at
usury among ourselves and reap the benefit ourselves. Let us
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have a bank that will take the nickels and turn
them into dollars. There were about twenty black banks in
the US at the time. Some but not all, white
owned banks took deposits from black customers. White bankers often
refused to give loans to black people, and when they did,
they were often charged high interest rates. Besides that, white
bankers and managers feared white people's perce of black people
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using their banks. Walker encouraged people to use black owned
banks to keep money in the community. In nineteen o two,
she began publishing this St. Luke Harold to encourage black
people in Richmond to start their own institutions, and in
November of nineteen oh three, after studying other banks in Richmond,
she founded the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank to encourage
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savings and facilitate loans. By nineteen o six, savings deposits
have reached about one hundred and seventy thousand dollars. By
nineteen twenty, the bank had financed more than six hundred
home loans, and by nineteen twenty four, the bank had
more than fifty thousand members. Walker later had to merge
the bank with others, but it operated as a black
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owned Institution until two thousand five. Walker also opened a
department store called St. Luke's Emporium, but she had to
close it when white businesses opposed it and black people
did not shop there as much as she had expected.
Besides her banking and community building endeavors, Walker ran for
superintended of Public Instruction in nine though she lost. She
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also fought for women's suffrage in the nineteenth Amendment to
the U. S Constitution, which prohibits the government from denying
the right to vote on the basis of sex. From
nineteen o five to nineteen thirty four, Walker lived in
a Victorian townhouse in an elite black neighborhood in jim Crow, Richmond.
She had diabetes, and in her later years she used
a wheelchair. She died from complications of diabetes in nineteen
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thirty four. I'm Eve step Coote and hopefully you know
a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
We love it if you left us a comment on Twitter,
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we'll see you here in the same place tomorrow. For
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