225 - It’s Jenga

Karen and Georgia cover the life of Ida B. Wells and the Stonewall uprising.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Hello, and welcome to my favorite murder the podcast. It
sure is for this new America.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
It sure isn't bind me. We'll do our best.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Is this the old America that we read so much about?
I mean, the fuck? What the fuck to.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Just start it off like nothing is ever going to
be the same again. No, it's true, and it's amazing and.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
Well, yeah, there's definitely so many good parts about it. Yeah,
like we keep being shown the bad parts. But the
good thing is then we're also if you're looking correctly,
you're also being shown the good parts.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
There is progress being made in We were just talking
about Jordan and I are just talking about how in
the same fast past forty eight hours, so much has changed,
so many things have happened, so much information has come
over the wire. I get all my information through an
old teletype and.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
Maybe are accidentally just watching the wire this whole time.
It's someone that I.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Love the wire, Stringer Bell save me. That's why it's
so stressful. But no, there's just yeah. I mean, guys,
I think you know better than anybody that we don't
know how to talk about socio political, race, relational things.

(01:40):
We didn't go to college as we've said multiple times.
I mean that's number one. I mean we're both educated
by social media, as everybody is these days. We're all
reading the same articles, we're all looking at the same reactions. Yeah,
so this will be more of a we're just kind
of repeat back a lot of things that you've probably

(02:00):
already heard.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
But you know, we're here as to acknowledged privileged white
women who want to support and are doing everything they
can and acknowledge that we're not. We don't know shit,
and we're doing our best to know shit, and because
so many of our listeners think, fucking god want to

(02:24):
know shit too. Yeah, we're having a conversation with you
guys about it.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
Yeah, or maybe even what a lot of us are
learning is that it's not a conversation. We need to
zip it and listen to people who we haven't been
listening to all of our lives and start actually acknowledging.
The only way to get rid of these white blind
spots that a lot of us have, or this complete
ignorance of other people's experience, is to stop talking about

(02:52):
ourselves and putting ourselves in the center of everything, and
instead step back and be the observer where you can
actually learn. And I think that whole thing that happened
when everyone put up their black square and everyone you know,
the intent behind that. I believe there was a good
intention of stop talking about your dumb shit and pay

(03:15):
attention to this incredibly important movement that's actually exploding in
the most real and unbelievable way right in front of us.
But then that got turned into like, you like, it's
an excuse for white people to not have to participate, right, discomfort,
And so I think there was a nice kind of
fix on that because I think a lot of people

(03:36):
were like, got it, that's not the way. You actually
have to keep participating, and you have to keep listening,
and what you're doing is just being asked to instead
of giving your opinion or being like I'm so sad
and I'm so upset. Who gives a shit? Yeah, if
you're a sad or upset, let's hear from the people
that this actually really affects a day to day bay,
Let's hear from the people who are constantly in danger

(03:58):
because law enforcement is violent with black people and people
of color.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
You know what it felt like to me was like,
we're all in a boat, Okay, and the white people
are running from side to side on the boat to
be like, don't tip, don't tip. We've turned to this side,
we have to run on that side. We're making the
boat tip on that side. The people of color are
in the middle of the boat being like, can you
guys all calm the fuck down and just calm stand

(04:24):
in the middle with us and stand here with us,
and stop fucking tipping the boat unintentionally but you're doing
You're causing the boat to tip.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
Yeah, it absolutely does. But I think what is impressive
is before what would have taken four years for the
running side to side to stop and the lot of
arguing of like, well here's some dumb political stance that
actually isn't related and doesn't make sense. Instead of any
of that, there's just people are learning this very quick,
like oops, that was a mistake, and they discome I

(05:00):
think this is maybe for me personally, what I've learned
in the last four years of doing this podcast, which
is basically the theme of this podcast is mistakes in
many ways. Oops, sorry about that, right, But what I've
learned is the pain of your mistake and the shame
you feel because you made a mistake. And you got

(05:21):
called out as privileged, racist, blind spot whatever it is
you should be say thank you for that pain, because
it is nothing compared to the pain of somebody watching
a family member gets shot in front of them because
they didn't they did one, they didn't do the right thing,

(05:41):
or they whatever. They've just basically been profiled. It's nothing
compared to the pain of being in constant fear of
your life. It is just an ego personal thing that
you can absolutely get over easily, and all you have
to do is say sorry and I'm going to do
better the end and stop talking about yourself. That's all
every as we talk about ourselves were oh seven minutes straight.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
Every tweet I've put up that hasn't just been a
retweet of someone smarter than me, who knows more than me,
I've deleted because I don't even realize how fucking self
centered it sounds. Even when I'm like fuck this and
fuck that, and I'm a you know, and here's what
I think. It's like, Yes, you don't realize how much
it is about you. While when you're blabbing your mouth

(06:25):
until you fucking see it and you're like shut up,
I don't get a fucking voice in this I get
to support other voices.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
Well yeah, and the whole point of social media is
blabbing your mouth and making it about ourselves. But people
are making the switch. People are turning it, turning it around.
People are I think what I'm seeing is people getting
that in a real way and being like, oh right,
it's no one wants to hear my dumb joke right now,
or sometimes they do. I mean there's people being very

(06:54):
funny and on topic in my timeline at Twitter, people
I love.

Speaker 2 (06:58):
The comedic voice is so necessary and you have funny,
biting things to say that advance the narrative. But I
think people like me who's just like I hate Jimmy Fallon,
it's like that's not fucking helping anyone.

Speaker 1 (07:13):
That can help well. And also that's the I think
that's like kind of the comforting easy thing where you're like, oh,
I'm going to stand back and kind of like cancel
people that'll do it, and it's like everyone's kind of learning. Essentially,
if you can't put your body out next to people
of color and black people who are protesting, if that's
not something you can do, then you have to give money.

(07:33):
It's pretty much. That's it. Yep, you have and you
also have to stake your claim because, as some brilliant
person put it in the one millionth tweet that I've
read over the past you know, four days whatever.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
Another really great thing that people who can't give money,
who can't and won't protest for whatever reason, is to
call and tweet at and just barrage the people who
are quote unquote in charge of making these legislations of
you know, creating these laws that fucking just completely discount

(08:07):
people who are socio economically disadvantaged and a disadvantage because
of one hundred and fucking fifty years of you know, racism.
And so you can do something.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
Really, this really smart person said, it's no longer democrats
versus Republicans. It's the only thing it is now is
racists against anti racist people. Yeah, and you have to
you have to declare your side because with white people
could be anything and you so basically you have to
just put up or shut up, which I think is

(08:41):
kind of that is incredibly fascinating. And I also think
that the movement, the action people are taking that is peaceful, quiet,
peaceful protesting, that at some point the police are just
like and now we're going to tear gas you is
proving everyone's point, and it's a point that most white
people never had to acknowledge, talk about, or think about

(09:03):
for up until this moment in history. At least in
like my generation, you would hear about it, talk about it.
We would every once in a while, people would tweet
it us of like, you can't you know, talking about
jail term reform, talking about this, talking about that, where
I honestly didn't understand where I'd be like, but we
want serial killers to rot in jail, that's what we're thinking.

(09:25):
And they're just like, no, this overall right.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
The private the privatization of prisons means that the more
people you in prison, the more lucrative your fucking businesses
and so and and because of this systemic racism throughout
our country, the people who are going to prison are
the people who are less, who have more disadvantages with money,

(09:53):
with education, you know, and they're going to prison. And
so it's it's a system that's that's put in that
is you know, racist, because our country was built on
the fucking backs of black people, yep. And that's and
now it and it's been you know, you can't take

(10:13):
one piece out of it. It's like fucking Jenga. You
can't take one piece out without the rest of it falling.
So the people who make money on fucking private prisons
are not going to be okay with you know, with
a reform, with with with police reform. They're not going
to be okay with affordable housing. They're not going you
know back you know, fucking not forty years ago. They're

(10:35):
not going to be okay with schools being unsegregated. It's
just it's people who are making so much fucking money.
It's people who are grabbing money who don't fucking need
any more money.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
Well, also, somebody made that really good point too. It's
this what's so exciting about this period of time, this
presence of it, where there's many good intention people who
don't suffer at the hands of police brutality, and so
kind of it's easy. It has been easy for us

(11:08):
to go. I don't know if it's that important. I
don't know, it seems like. And then just basically now
that we all walk around with a video recorder in
our hands, that's our phone, thank god, and there are people,
I mean, we've all seen it on social media, people
recording a person down on the ground with their hands
zip tied behind their back. They're cross legged, which is

(11:29):
the position. That's all cop needs to do is put
them put you down like that and you can't move
or do anything. My point is that then someone goes
up and kicks someone in the face when they're already down.
And so that's the kind of thing where for all
the people that would be very dis it's so uncomfortable
to go, oh, but you know, these people mean well,
and we need the police force and all these things.

(11:51):
All that fucking shit gets washed away when you see
how people are treated when the cops don't like them
because they is.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
It's shocking because they don't get to say anymore, well,
just don't resist arrest. They don't get to say that
anymore because it is not Yeah, you and I we
couldnot George Lloyd.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
George Floyd did not resist arrest. He was peaceful the
entire time. They have two angles on his arrest, that's right,
two angles on his arrest. He did everything the cops says, killed.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Crawling away and we saw that fucking god years ago.
I mean, yeah, see, he was not resisting arrest. But
now it's up in your face, it's on you know,
social media, and we're the younger generation who won't deny it.
And it's almost like, I fucking hate saying this, but
like the fact that we're all on lockdown right now

(12:43):
and in this global pandemic, and you know, it's it's
this perfect storm of people who get perfect storm of
like we're all it's almost like we've been priming for
the past two and a half months to come together
and it out there and fucking and show and protest.

Speaker 1 (13:03):
Well, and that's what that guy the most. So if
you live in Los Angeles, you probably saw this clip
or somebody retweeted it. It's incredible because there was you know,
hundreds of peaceful, I would dare say silent protesters standing
outside Mayor Eric Arcetti's house.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (13:20):
It was one of the most mind blowing visuals I've
seen in a while, because you couldn't go, oh, that's
so scary or oh they're they're bad or whatever. It
was people literally standing and not moving and not talking,
just standing in front of the mayor's house, like you
have to know something.

Speaker 2 (13:35):
Huge crowd of people. It was really big, so quiet.

Speaker 1 (13:39):
And it's a super rich area of LA. And then
the reporter goes and finds a neighbor. So it's this
white guy standing there with a mask on.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
Total stunts, looking like normal guy.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
And the second the clip starts, I get mad because
I'm like, of course you find this guy that's going
to start complaining how he can't his driveway.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
Fox News too, so you're like, oh, you're gonna find
the most fucking.

Speaker 1 (13:59):
Right well a Fox News affiliate, Yes, thank you, Yeah,
as opposed to the network. But she says, what do
you think about all these people and what they're trying
to She the way she asked the question, I didn't
love this man, then, in the plainest, clearest way, explains
why it's happening and basically says, when you steal the

(14:21):
land from the Native people and build a country on
the backs of black people and take away all their
freedom and abuse them and don't give them egal rights,
and then you have a president who lets this. I mean,
he basically lays it out clearly and quickly. Yes, in
this way where I was like, who are you? That's
when you start to see that that's the majority, that

(14:43):
that's your average person on the street that we're all
kind of watching these same videos and going, holy fucking shit,
we can't. It can't be this way anymore, I think.
I mean, that's what I like to think.

Speaker 2 (14:55):
I mean, I love that it's such. But for every
one of those I see, I see when I see
white people rioting, spray painting, fucking stealing shit, I get
my blood boils. That's not sure. We're not there to
do that. We're there to support people of color, stand
behind them, stand in front of them when they are

(15:18):
being attacked by the fucking riot police.

Speaker 1 (15:22):
Yeah, we're support, We're support. Right. There's many people who
theorize that's the idea. They're agent provocateurs, they're there to
actually do it, to make it worse. And everyone I
hope saw that video of those fucking girls that were
spray painting in the front of the Starbucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
And that woman walks up and is like, what the
hell are you doing? Give me that? And then they

(15:42):
bitch at her, and I was like, those two girls
are not the kind of people I know that go
to protest. They're something else, because why the fuck are
you doing that? Like what are you doing? And then
if someone comes up and goes don't do that. You'd go, oh,
I sorry, I you know, you would base if you
were of a certain mindset, you'd say sorry. And they
were just like, basically.

Speaker 2 (16:01):
This isn't you, This isn't mass destruction. This is you know,
there's a fucking reason that you should be there, and
there are things you can do to be supportive. The
same thing happened in the fucking sixties and the seventies
with the Vietnam protests. They'd sent that fucking FBI and
CIA was sent in fucking you know, uh, undercover agents
to fuck shit up. That gave them an excuse to

(16:24):
kill people at fucking Ken State, to fucking fire rubber
bullets and to you know, and to make to make
the you know, middle conservative people hate what they saw
and hate it.

Speaker 1 (16:36):
Because it's because it's about optics. But what I think
is fascinating is you cannot you can't. It's very difficult
now to argue with these optics when there are fifty
like basically they look like stormtroopers standing at the Lincoln Memorial.
I mean that visual is just like this. We are

(16:56):
now in the dystopian America that everyone's been holding their
breast about and that's why all of this is. I mean, look,
and we're just again, we're just talking about this off
social media. We're just talking about this as it comes
in and as we're reacting to it. But what's amazing
is this kind of you can feel the slow collection

(17:18):
of we're not letting this happen here, we can't let
this happen here, and the rest of the world is
watching us and supporting it. I mean that fucking protest
in France where they just piled up all those free
mopeds and let them with them on fire, the fucking
scooters like scooters. You're just like, hell, yes, like people
all over the world agree with these protesters, agree with

(17:42):
this action, agree that this whole situation and the and
the administration that is basically has been causing it for
four years, it has to change.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
It's crazy, how go four years ago we put out
a podcast right after that mother fucking piece of shit
got elected somehow, and we're scared and were afraid of
what was going to happen, And suddenly it's all happening
at once.

Speaker 1 (18:09):
Yeah, yeah, but it's.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
This is fucking history. This is it's going to change
from here, Yes, I had.

Speaker 1 (18:18):
A long conversation with my therapist this morning, as I
do many many days a week, and this is my
favorite thing that she said, because I was telling her,
I was like, we're so nervous to even talk about
this because we don't want to be wrong and we
don't want to say some fucking ignorant thing. You and
I've definitely we've done yeah, like that, we've done it
in the past. Or you say something where you're just like, oh,

(18:39):
I think I'm just sharing my thoughts and then fifty
people text you of like, and then you're just like,
then you My first reaction is always like, but I'm
not wrong, and you can't say that I'm that person.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
Or my intentions are this, or my intentions are that.

Speaker 1 (18:53):
She said this, which I love. Do not fear being
wrong because regret wakes you up to what you're not
doing right, which means you have a mind that can
notice things, which means you have a mind that can
change and grow amazing, and that's the key. So that momentary, Oh,
I'm not the person I want to be, or I'm

(19:15):
dumber than I thought I was, or I'm more racist
than I thought I was. Yeah, it's it's you can
track that and then do something about it. There are
people who cannot, and that's why they can't discuss it.
There are people when you experience the rage of the
people who are saying, how dare you support Black Lives matter?

(19:36):
That's a person who is so afraid, they're so afraid
they don't know how they can belong in this world
and they can't change. And I think that's kind of
what a lot of those side of people are saying,
is how dare you make me question myself? How dare
you make me take responsibility for what I've been doing
and getting and benefiting from. It's not it's the whole

(19:57):
argument surprising.

Speaker 2 (19:59):
It's that whole argument of like, well, you know, I
feel like we're starting to wake up of like people
who you know, with the whole thing of white privilege
isn't isn't directed at people who grew up without any
hardships in their lives. You know, It's not that it's people,
it's us understanding that although there were hardships in our lives,

(20:23):
being the color of our skin was never one of them.
And it always is that for people of color. And
I think we're finally waking up to that and understanding,
like even me being Jewish, it's like, but you can't
tell by looking at me, So I have a fucking privilege,
you know.

Speaker 1 (20:41):
And that somebody wrote this really amazing thing that was
being being a racist isn't doesn't translate to anger and
hatred and active So a lot of people go, I'm
not racist because that they're thinking of those horrible people
in the South when the schools were getting integrated, right,
and they were screaming at children, that little girl that

(21:01):
was walking in by herself to that school, and they're going,
I'm not that person, right, But so you're not actively
enraged at people of color, it doesn't mean you're not racist,
because what that means is that you have blind spots
and issues and things where you don't understand the real
world in the way that other people do. And the

(21:23):
thing we're talking about at the moment, because the thing
that is can't continue is black people being killed by
the police because the police can kill them without any repercussions.
That's all right, that's what has to change. And basically,
like the authorities are going not only when we not

(21:44):
change it, we're going to try to kill more of
you total, and that's why people are standing up and
going no, no, not anymore, we can't. We all watched Ferguson,
held our breath and hoped that that small group of
mostly black protesters were going to get it done for
themselves because no one wanted to get their hands dirty,
no one wanted to take responsibility. Yeah, of course, but
we got to. We got we got to. And now

(22:05):
that we I think almost like there's something about the
pandemic that kind of cracked through, so everyone's kind of
seeing this thing where it's just like, oh, yeah, this matters,
and how we're connected to each other matters. Whether or
not people live or die fucking counts to me and matters.

Speaker 2 (22:21):
Yeah, and black lives matter, Black lives matter, Every black
lives matter. Should we say so. We're gonna put up
a bunch of media recommendations on the exactly Right blog,
So go to exactly right dot com if you want
to get some podcast recommendation, book recommendations, film TV things
that you can read to and support and try to understand,

(22:45):
you know a little better, what what your deeply rooted,
you know, secret to you even racist tendencies are. And
it's really important to look at yourself like that and
to understand what you're doing wrong so that you can
can try to be an ally.

Speaker 1 (23:02):
Yeah, and you know, one of the most kind of
like I remember this so well when that crazy fucking
thing happened on our Facebook page and we were just
like what and it was we basically had to shut
it down because it was like there was a racist
flare up and peop it was so crazy and we
didn't really even know what was happening. And when we

(23:25):
were I did this very stupid thing of actually trying
to argue with people on Twitter for ten minutes where
it's like, no, like, we wouldn't do that and we're
not like that, and we're your allies. And this young girl,
I'm assuming it was the person who was in their picture,
me going we're not like this, we're your allies. And
this young woman, I believe she was a young woman

(23:46):
of color who wrote back and said, you don't get
to say you're our allies. We decide. And that's what
made me a stop arguing and b go, oh shit,
I'm actually telling people stuff like this and I don't
know these details. I should I should know that I
should know this if I don't speak the language. I
can't be out here telling people how it is because.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
I don't fucking know and I'm that yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:10):
And it's like, yeah, nobody wants to think they're that person.
Too fucking bad. Just accept it. And now the work
is how.

Speaker 2 (24:17):
Do we change it? There are so many lessons to
be learned right now. If we, including you and I
and everyone is listening, open their fucking minds and ears
and twitter feed and and learn, we can all learn
right now and become better fucking people. Yeah, and for
better people to help to help peopause, yeah, yes, yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:42):
And then in the meantime, if you can give money
and give money, and if not, there's I've retweeted several
and I know there's so many guides out there for
people who if you can't protest, here's a list of
things you can do. If you don't have money, here's
a list of things you can do. I think it's
so exciting that those kinds of lists are being made

(25:03):
for people.

Speaker 2 (25:04):
The shops that black owned, you know, bookstores, restaurants, shit,
in your area, where you can support black owned businesses
and people of color owned businesses is really important.

Speaker 1 (25:14):
Yeah, you don't any kind of frustration or you know,
whatever you're feeling. You don't have to fold in on
yourself and collapse because you're having negative feelings. Right, you
take those negative feelings, you interpret them as energy that
needs to be put towards someone who needs your help,
and then go help.

Speaker 2 (25:31):
And you know why, because fucking capitalism has been here
we go, oh shit, Sorry. All I'm saying is, let's
weaponize capitalism for people of color instead of against them,
which it's been since capitalism existed in this fucking country.
So you can put your money in places that can

(25:53):
support those people who capitalism doesn't fucking work for. Yeah,
So today I'm going to tell you about a really powerful,
amazing badass woman named Ida b Wells.

Speaker 1 (26:11):
Great.

Speaker 2 (26:12):
She was an investigative journalist, an educator, and one of
the founders of the NAACP nice and she's incredible. I
got a lot of information from a bunch of different
really great podcasts and so write these down. One's called
A Brave Space with Doctor Meeks. That's me E e Ks.

(26:33):
A podcast called Black History in Two Minutes hosted by
Henry Lewis Gates Junior. A podcast called The Humanity Archive
by Jermaine Fowler and a podcast called This Is Karen Hunter.
It's a really great podcast, and in this episode about
Ida B. Wells, she talks to doctor Greg Carr and
it's just a really great listen. Awesome.

Speaker 1 (26:54):
Jamaine Fowler is a really funny stand up collmic.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
Also, oh okay, it's a good podcast. And then I
got a articles from the Chicago Tribune, an essay and
the Washington Post by Keisha and Blaine. There's really great
quick video on YouTube. It's like the Ted Talks Educator.
So it's Ted ed and it's it's animated and it's
made by Christina M. Greer and it's great. It's great

(27:18):
to show to kids. I really love it. An article
on biography dot com and Wikipedia, of course, and there's
just tons of articles and tons of books about Ia B.
Wells that go into her incredible life, way better than
I'm about to do.

Speaker 1 (27:32):
But let's start. Okay, So the given is there's so
much Yeah, there's so much great stuff out there, right
that's way better than everything exactly. So here's I think
everyone knows that.

Speaker 2 (27:43):
There's a little tastes and then then go dive deep
in and.

Speaker 1 (27:47):
Then go this is the cliffs Notes.

Speaker 2 (27:50):
This is the Notes podcast sponsored by cliff Notes.

Speaker 1 (27:54):
Remember cliffs Notes.

Speaker 2 (27:55):
No, never even tried to use those, really little I
cared about homework. I wouldn't even do the cliff Notes.

Speaker 1 (28:02):
I remember people passing cliff notes. If you're young, cliff
Notes were basically you were supposed to read Silas Marner.
But you could get a real thin book and just
re yellow cliffs Notes. Yeah, it's yellow with the black
It almost looked like police police line, do not cross tape. Yeah,
and it basically just summed up the book in its
themes and all the stuff that you were going to

(28:23):
get asked.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
Because we didn't have the Internet to there was. It's
like Wikipedia. I feel like Wikipedia is the cliff Notes
of the Internet age, right, Yes, okay, so this is
a Closes podcast.

Speaker 1 (28:36):
If the guy, if the if the guy that sat
in the back row wrote cliffs Notes, if cliff was
in your class, because that's what Wikipedia is. It's that
you could do it too. You can write Wikipedia's right,
that's right, okay.

Speaker 2 (28:48):
So Ida Belle Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi,
on July sixteenth, eighteen sixty two. She's the first of
six children. To James and Lizzie Wells. Ida is born
into slavery. But and you know, the Wells family as
well as the rest of the slaves in the Confederate States.

(29:08):
When the Emancipation Proclamation was declared about six months after
Ida's birth, the Wells family were decreed free. And that's
on January first, eighteen sixty three. So after emancipation, Ida's
parents were super active in the reconstruction movement. Her father,
James became a trustee of the historically black liberal arts college,

(29:29):
Shaw College, which is now Rest College in Holly Springs.
Huh say the name of the college, sorry, Rest College
are Ust?

Speaker 1 (29:37):
Yeah, Okay.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
He was known for his involvement in politics, as was
her mother. They were both really you know, active in politics.
And her father founded a successful carpentry business in Holly
Springs in eighteen sixty seven. So they were, you know,
this this incredible family. And it was at Shaw University
that they sent Ida to receive her early schooling. So

(30:02):
but at the age of sixteen, she had to drop
out because both of her parents and her infant sibling
died of yellow fever within like a day. Oh no,
fucking your parents are dead and you're sixteen and one
of your younger siblings is dead too within a day.
That's how insane it was. And so all her siblings

(30:23):
were going to be broken up and you know, moved
to different family members, and she's like, no fucking way,
they're staying with me. So she drops out of school
finds work as a teacher in a black elementary school
in Holly Springs. She told them she was eighteen and
actually was sixteen. Can I just say, that's how I
got my nipple pierced? So imagine that's that's white privallege

(30:45):
right there. That I was like, I lied about being
eighteen so I could get my nipple pierced. And she's like,
I lied about it being eighteen so I could get
a career as a teacher and raise my siblings and keep.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
My family together.

Speaker 2 (30:56):
Exact amazing, So, you know. So, but then Ida's grandmother,
who was helping raise the kids the other siblings, died
from a stroke. So eventually Wells moves with her two
youngest sisters to Memphis in eighteen eighty three. So in Memphis,
Ada continued to teach, and then during the summertime she

(31:17):
continued her education and then an incident happened when she
was twenty one years old. That was kind of a
catalyst for her activism. So on May fourth, eighteen eighty four,
she's twenty one and she's on a train and she
buys a first class ticket to get in the women's
train area because you can't smoke in there. She doesn't

(31:38):
want to be around these like foul you know, smoking dudes.
And the train conductor it's with the Chesapeake and Ohio
rail Road comes over to her and is like, you
need to give up your seat and go back out
and move to the smoking car. That's where you're black.
You can't be in the first the lady's car. And
she's like, fuck this shit, I bought my ticket, I'm

(31:59):
not leaving, and the conductor you know, grabs her to
throw her out. She bites him, yeah, uh huh amen,
and then is forcefully she's forcally dragged out of the car.
She hires a lawyer. She sues the Chesapeake, Ohio and
Southwestern Railroad company for discriminations. She wins the case in

(32:20):
the state and then it sent up higher and it's overturned.
So but this is something that of course you know,
hits her in her soul. So then she writes a
newspaper article about it for The Living Way, which is
a black church weekly. She writes about her treatment on
the train and how wrong it was, and she gets

(32:42):
kind of publicity in Memphis. So she continues teaching elementary school,
but she starts writing more and more and becomes a
journalist and a writer, and she's offered an editorial position
for the Evening Star in Washington, d C. And she
also begins writing weekly articles for the Living Way newspaper.
So under her pen name Iola, she writes articles attacking

(33:05):
Jim Crow policies, and in eighteen eighty nine, at twenty
seven years old, Ida becomes the editor and co owner
of the Free Speech and Headlight, a black owned newspaper
established by the Reverend Taylor Nightingale. At twenty seven years
old and.

Speaker 1 (33:23):
Co owner co owner as a black woman. That's right,
did you say? Eighteen eighty nine.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
Eighteen eighty nine, twenty seven years old, along with J. L. Fleming.
She's just like, here we go, let's fucking do this.

Speaker 1 (33:35):
Let's do it.

Speaker 2 (33:35):
Uh huh. In eighteen ninety one, Ida so she's dismissed
from her teaching post by the Memphis Board of Education
because of her articles, because she criticizes schools being segregated
and the conditions in the black schools. She's know argues
that segregation means that you know, black children aren't not
getting a fair education and not getting you know, the

(33:57):
type of education they would if schools weren't segregated. Yeah.
So she gets kicked down. So they're like, well then
you can't be a teacher anymore, goodbye. Yeah. So she
is like, fuck this, I'll concentrate my energy on writing
articles for the Living Way and also free speech and headlight.
She's you know, quickly well respected and becomes a well accomplished,
successful woman. She's respected among the community. She's in the

(34:20):
middle class, which is really rare at the time for
you know, a woman. She's not married and she's a
black woman, so that doesn't really happen at the time.
But she's also I think I think a lot of
the podcasts they'd listened to stress this. She's a very
normal woman trying to you know, she's not a savior.
She's dating, and she's bemoaning in her diaries the dudes

(34:42):
she have to date, has to date because as soon
as they find out how smart she is. They're over it,
they don't. They just want a wife, you know. Yeah,
so the same shit that you know, every woman fucking faces. Yeah,
but in eighteen fucking nineties.

Speaker 1 (34:56):
So sorry, but it also makes me think she must
have been such a good writer, like a naturally like
a natural great writer, right if she was that young,
had to drop out of school and then basically picked
it up to go. This happened to me and it
just flowed out of her.

Speaker 2 (35:11):
Yeah. And I think she's writing about the time, which
a lot of you know, there was probably so few
people who had the privilege to do that, to write
about what was going on with in the black community
at the time, and to black people, that her having
the balls to fucking do that just you know, and
having passion. And you can when you read her stuff,
it's clear she has passion. Yeah, she's it's just you

(35:33):
just don't want to stop reading her stuff. Yeah. So okay,
And then the big turning point in her life happens
in eighteen ninety two when a close friend of hers,
she's like best friends with this couple. She's the godmother
of their youngest child. It's a black man named Thomas Moss,
he's lynched, which, by the way, lynch doesn't mean hanged,

(35:57):
lynch means killed by a mob because of race. So
Thomas Moss, he's a family man. He's respected in the
community as well, and he delivered mail by day. But
he's also part owner of the People's Grocery Store in
South Memphis. It's in a neighborhood called the Curve, and
it's kind of this mixed race neighborhood. And of course
right across or like right down the road from the

(36:17):
People's Grocery Store owned by black people is the White
Dude's Grocery Store, and so that's owned by a man
named William Barrett. And it's just, you know, there's like
a fight that breaks out, but you know, between these
two kids in front of his store, and it turns
into this whole fucking maile and people are fighting, and

(36:38):
it's like point farder for a point is it doesn't
matter what started it, but this is the excuse. So
there is on March third, eighteen ninety two, an angry
white mob that includes the local sheriff's office because of
course you know they're part of this group, and they

(36:59):
come long and Thomas Moss, along with two other workers
from the People's Grocer, Calvin McDowell and Will Stuart, are
arrested and jailed, and around two thirty that morning, while
they're in jail, seventy five white men wearing black masks
take the three black men from their jail cells at
the Shelby County Jail, take them to a railyard outside
of town and shoots all three men dead with a

(37:22):
shotgun in a horrific fashion that's reported in the newspaper,
so with so many details that it's clear the newspaper
man was there, you know. Oh yeah, Jesus, that kind
of situation, Okay. And so Ida finds out about one
of her closest, dearest friends being murdered in this way,
she's devastated, and she basically becomes an investigative journalist back

(37:47):
in the fucking eighteen nineties. Yes, she and puts her
own life at risk by spending two months traveling around
the South and she is interviewing people who have had
loved ones lynch to have you know, seen lynchings happen,
who have been their lives have been torn apart by it,
And she just gathers as much information as she can,

(38:09):
and on October twenty sixth, eighteen ninety two, she publishes
her research and a pamphlet titled Southern Horrors Lynch Law
in all its Phases, And she comes to this conclusion
and has this stance that it's from what I can tell,
it's kind of a new argument, which is that what's

(38:30):
not being addressed is that white Southerners are using the
excuse of sexual violence by black men towards white women
as an excuse to lynch black men. But the real
reason behind it is that it's black economic progress. So
she's just like, she calls bullshit that you know, this
black man was flirting with this white woman or they're

(38:51):
secretly dating, or you know he made lude comments at her.
That's a fucking excuse because it makes people who think
they're not racists, Well, he deserved that. He shouldn't have
done that, when really, it's because you opened a competing
grocery store across the street from my grocery store. It's
because you've become middle class. It's because you know, uh,
Emancipation Proclamation happened, and we're fucking pissed about it, and

(39:15):
so we're gonna think of any excuse to go back
to those days, right, that allows us to murder you
because without a fucking trial, without any you know, without
with accusations being just lobbed at anyone, it's just she
calls bullshit on it, essentially. Yeah, So of course her
pamphlet is incredibly controversial. A mob storms the Memphis office

(39:36):
of her paper, The Free Speech and Headlight. They destroy everything,
the printing press, the whole fucking building. But fortunately Ida
was out of town at the time, and so she's unharmed.
But she's warned that she could be killed if she
ever returns to Memphis. So she's like, good riddance, goodbye
fucking later days, goodbye, Yeah, and she vows never to

(39:58):
go back to Memphis again. So inste she relocates to Chicago,
where she continued to distribute her pamphlet, and in eighteen
ninety five she follows up with a with a like
more deeply researched and detailed pamphlet, and it's one hundred
page pamphlet called The Red Record, which is famous, and
in it she described lynchings in the United States since

(40:18):
the Emancipation Proclamation, and it covers black people's struggles in
the South since the Civil War, and you know, she's
in Chicago now, so it's you know, being told to
people who can be sympathetic to what she's arguing. So
The Red Record explored the high rates of lynching in
the United States, which is at its peak from eighteen

(40:39):
eighty to nineteen thirty. She says that during reconstruction, most
Americans outside the South didn't realize, you know, how much
violence was going on against black people in the South,
and she urges black people in these high risk areas
to get the fuck out of town to save their families.
She again connects lynching to sexual violence and shows how

(41:01):
this this myth that's perpetrated of this black man's lust
for white women is being used as an excuse to
murder black men.

Speaker 1 (41:10):
That's what happened for the Tulsa race message. Exactly exactly, Yeah,
it's yeah, right, so many of those stories, it's crazy.

Speaker 2 (41:18):
And it's just a fucking excuse because you're you don't
want black people to succeed. So she includes pages of
graphic accounts about specific lynchings, and she shows that lynching
is a tool of white supremacy to prevent social advancement
of black people. So the Red Record has far reaching influence.

(41:39):
And so both of her pamphlets, Southern Horrors and The
Red Record, the Northerners are horrified by what they read,
and they didn't really know, supposedly, you know, about these lynchings,
and they kind of believed what they had heard out
of the South, which is that you know, this person
deserved it, and it was you know, what's it called

(42:01):
the vigilanti retaliation, retaliation and vigilante justice, which she's trying
to tell everyone it's not so, so, you know, she
starts getting really involved in civil rights. She leads the
opposition against the band. So at the eighteen ninety three
World's Fair World Exposition, there's a ban against African American exhibitors,

(42:26):
and she leads the opposition against that, and then she
starts doing speaking tours in Britain and to campaign against lynching,
and they're like sympathetic and they're like, yeah, fuck this shit,
what's going on in your fucking crazy country like they
are right now, and they're shocked by the reports of
lynching in America already in eighteen ninety four, before she

(42:47):
leaves the US for her second visit to Great Britain
William Penn Nixon, who's the editor of the Daily inter Ocean,
which is a Republican newspaper in Chicago, which, by the way,
the republican doesn't mean the same thing then as it
means now, it's kind of switched. It's the opposite. It
was the only major white paper that persistently denounced lynching.

(43:09):
And she tells Nixon about her plan tour and he
asked her to write for the newspaper while she's in England,
like an account of what's going on. So she becomes
the first African American woman to be paid a paid
correspondent for a mainstream white newspaper.

Speaker 1 (43:23):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (43:24):
So she turns tours England, Scotland and Wales for two months,
addresses audience of thousands. You know, there's these rallies and
among the British, and she gained extensive recognition and credibility
and an international audience of white supporters of her cause.
So back home in Chicago, she marries a prominent attorney,

(43:46):
civil rights activist and journalist named Ferdinand Barnett in eighteen
ninety five and from then on she's known as Ida
b Wells Barnett. But I fucking love this. And in
one of the podcasts I listened to, they point out
how so many black women back then hyphenated their names,
which is so far, Like it's so common these days,

(44:06):
but back then, it's like, no, she was already this.
You know, she was not going to just change her
last name. She had done so much good and so
much work and she was a known you know journalist,
that she just hyphenated it and added his last name.
And fucking kudo's on him, because it sounds like he was,
like cha championing his wife as a badass who could

(44:27):
go out and do her own shit and didn't have
to just have kids and stay home.

Speaker 1 (44:30):
He must have been into it. I mean, that's like
it's a great reminder that that type of man also exists.
So it's like, yeah, I want you to be this
bad ass, right, That's part of why I'm in love
with you. Yeah, the coolest.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
And it seems like she waited to get married un
till she found that person, which is so incredible. He
had founded the Chicago Conservator, it's the first black newspaper
in Chicago, in eighteen seventy eight, and so she began
writing for the paper and later acquired a partial ownership
of it and assume the role of editor there, and

(45:04):
they had Barnett had two children from a previous marriage,
and then together they had four more children, Charles, Herman, Ida,
and ALFREDA. So after brutal assaults on the black community
in Springfield, Illinois in nineteen oh eight, which is a
whole nother fucking conversation, Ida is like, we have to
take action. So the following year, she attends a special

(45:26):
conference for the organization that would later become known as
the N double ACP, the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People, and is considered a founding member. But
even to other activists and other founding members of the
N double ACP, our fucking Ida is a little too
much of a spitfire, and she's a little like this

(45:47):
is taking too long, You're not organized enough, And she's
like a bit of a like how can I say this?

Speaker 1 (45:53):
She wasn't going to wait around for permission to do
it exactly, thank you.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
Yeah, she definitely had that attitude.

Speaker 1 (45:59):
I mean that's with politics too, because a lot of
times it's like we have to go in and then
you have to kind of assimilate and make sure that
everybody quote unquote likes you so that you do so
that you agree and that you get support. But oftentimes
I watched a whole I watched a whole thing on
Twitter this morning about this, where it's like and that's
how oftentimes through politics that this black movements get stalled

(46:23):
out as they're being told if you just wait a
little longer, And that happened with the abolitionists, where in
the beginning they were saying, we'll get rid of slavery,
but slowly and open and literally. I just watched this
video this morning, so this is it's on my Twitter page.
I retweeted it. It's a brilliant woman. Her name's Brittany
Cooper and she is a Britney doctor, Brittany Cooper, she's

(46:45):
a PhD. Tracy Clayton is the person who tweeted it. Originally,
I was just retweeting hers Hi Jracy and it's such
a good thing. But I never thought of that where
it's like they were like, we'll get rid of slavery,
but can you just work ten more years and then
we'll do slowly so no one gets up and they
were like, no, do it now, it's that they.

Speaker 2 (47:02):
Really now everything. You know, you have these powerful people
and you have these powerful ideas, and by the time
it gets through this fucking system, it's all watered down
and it's all sludge. And like we should be listening
at point A of the people who are yelling about
it and not being fucking polite and not being you know,
conservative about their views, right.

Speaker 1 (47:24):
And don't let people like pat you on the head
and let you know that, oh, we're your good friend,
We're going to help you out, and then never do
it or.

Speaker 2 (47:33):
We have our agenda first and once that's concluded. So
in nineteen oh nine, Ida B. Wells is the most
prominent anti lynching campaigner in the United States, and among
other accomplishments, she's created the first African American kindergarten in
her community. She's passionate about women's rights and suffrage as well,
and she's a spokeswoman and an advocate for women being

(47:55):
successful in the workplace and having equal opportunities and creating
a name for themselves. So this is all during the
fucking you know, suffrage movement as well, and she becomes
part of that. So in the years following she focuses
her work on black women's suffrage, and along with her
white colleague Bell Squire, they organized the Alpha Suffrage Club

(48:16):
in Chicago in nineteen thirteen, and it's one of the
most important black suffrage organizations in Chicago, and it's founded
as a way to further rights, voting rights for all
women and to teach Black women how to engage in
civic matters and to work to elect African Americans to
city offices. So okay, So they're working on the Alpha Club,

(48:38):
and at the same time, the National American Women's Suffrage
Association is organizing a suffrage parade in Washington, d C.
They're like, they're the big national fucking you know, Susan B. Anthony,
Everyone's on this fucking who was actually a friend of hers.
But so, right before the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson in
nineteen thirteen, they're planning this big parade and suffragets from

(48:58):
across the country gather to demand universal suffrage. And Ida
was of course planning on attending with her Alpha Suffrage Club,
and the head of the Illinois delegation told Ida and
her delegates that they wanted to keep the delegation entirely white,
so they were like, all right, well, we're doing this

(49:20):
whole thing. It's all for suffragists. We are, we're supporting
each other. The African American suffragists need to go to
the back of the parade, and Wells is like, oh yeah, yeah,
I'm totally gonna fucking do that, and so she goes.
She waits with the spectators in the crowd for the
parade to start, and as the white delegation from Chicago

(49:43):
walks by, she fucking slips under and is in line
with them, and she's like, what's up, motherfuckers. I'm here,
and you're here because partly because I'm here too, so
I'm with you. Yeah, and you're not sending me the back.
That's fucking ridiculous, badass, so awesome. Yeah. Throughout the nineteen twenties,
she continues to fight and support causes for African Americans,

(50:07):
including the right to vote, which she didn't even get
herself until she was in her fifties, and in nineteen
thirty she unsuccessfully sought elective office, and when she ran
as an independent for a seat in the Illinois Senate,
but she doesn't make it. Ido Well's dies of kidney
failure in Chicago on March twenty fifth, nineteen thirty one,

(50:29):
at the age of just sixty eight, and she had
begun writing her autobiography but never finished it, and so
instead it was edited and published by her daughter, ALFREDA.
Barnett Duster in nineteen seventy. It's called Crusade for Justice,
The Autobiography of Ida B Wells. And then she left
behind this heroic legacy of social and political activism. And

(50:54):
since her death, numerous awards have been established in her name,
and the Ida B Wells Memorial Foundation and the Ida
B Wells Museum have been established to protect, preserve, and
promote her legacy. And this past month, in May of
twenty twenty, Ida B Wells Barnett was posthumously awarded a
Pulitzer Prize. No yeah, I can't, the highest award given

(51:18):
in print journalism. She got a special citation for Outstanding
and Courageous reporting. Fuck yeah, how amazing is that?

Speaker 1 (51:26):
In some time?

Speaker 2 (51:27):
That's fucking right. A month ago in twenty nineteen, Congress
Parkway in Chicago, I didn't fucking know this was renamed
Ida B Wells Drive. Congress Parkway. Wow, is renamed Ida
B Wells Drive. And the home that she and her
family lived in was designated a National Historic Landmark in
nineteen seventy four and a Chicago Landmark in nineteen ninety five.

(51:49):
And her great granddaughter, Michelle Dester, who find her on
Twitter She's awesome as well, has published two collections of
Ida's original works, Ida in her Own Voice and Ida
from Abroad. And she recently said about her great grandmother, quote,
the only thing she really had was the truth, and
she used journalism as a tool to not just report

(52:11):
what was going on, but she used her skill as
a journalist to the best of her ability to impact
social change. And that is just a snippet of the
incredible story of Ida b Wells.

Speaker 1 (52:25):
Wow, that's that was great. Thank you, great job.

Speaker 2 (52:30):
I mean, this is not I'm ashamed to say that.
This is someone I really knew about. There are these
incredible people doing incredible things with you know, with no resources.
They just decide to do them because they have to
and it's their calling and despite you know, their parents dying,

(52:53):
despite you know, having to drop out of high school.
And in a lot of these podcasts they listen to,
they talk about how like, don't make this savior because
then it makes people who are just normal. Every day
people think that they can't add anything and they can't
contribute anything, when really it's people who were fucking you know,
normal and use their skills like writing to do incredible

(53:15):
things and just don't fucking give up. They just don't
give up. Even when their entire business is burned to
the ground, they move somewhere where they'll be listened to
and start over. It's just she's an incredible woman.

Speaker 1 (53:28):
Yeah, that was amazing, Georgia. That was It's embarrassing as
a fifty year old woman to be learning about stuff
like this, but better no, better late than never, and
so inspiring, so inspiring. Yeah, oh there was. Also my
therapist also said a thing I really liked. There's a
writer named Rebecca Solnet, and she's saying, in times like this,

(53:51):
when you feel lost and you're not sure what to
do next, instead of looking for if you look forward
and there's nothing that you can see, there's not a
path forward, then look back, see what people did in
the past, figure out what aligns with your values, and
then take the next right step.

Speaker 2 (54:11):
Oh I love that.

Speaker 1 (54:12):
Yeah, I know, like we just have to be helpers.
We just can't. We know we've misstepped and said fucked
up shit and done things incorrectly and all those things
where it's just like, and how do you do it
now at this crucial time better like, at this time
very dire. And so it's.

Speaker 2 (54:32):
Before we thought that intentions were all that mattered. Good
intentions were all that mattered, And now we're learning that
intentions are bullshit. You have to fucking walk the walk.

Speaker 1 (54:43):
It's action at this point where we are now it's
about action, that's right. Well, And so I was worried
about this because I picked this story to do because
June is Gay Pride month, so I picked the Stonewall uprising.

Speaker 2 (54:58):
Hell yeah, now yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:01):
And also because when I picked this, which was like
six days ago, it was like, oh yeah, you know,
uprising and protest, that's cool. You know, that was before
the fucking National Guard got called, whereas you know, the
vibe changed. But what's interesting is then going through it
and reading it, all these things are connected. This is

(55:21):
very much connected to the civil rights movement of the
earlier in the sixties, and that it was kind of
fascinating to actually discover that as I was reading through.
So just to cite some sources, here. History dot com
saved my life on this one. I swear to God
that website. Yeah, like it's if you are slightly unsure

(55:43):
about anything that has happened in the past, history dot
com is your place to go.

Speaker 2 (55:48):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (55:49):
Information, dates, names, accuracy.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
Documentaries, all about it.

Speaker 1 (55:54):
Yeah, they know their stuff, but you can you can
bring up a very easy to consume a kind of
you know, like a short article that just gives you
everything you need to know. It's really well put together.
Thank Youhistory dot com. There's also great articles in Out magazine,
PinkNews dot co dot UK. There's this great article in

(56:15):
the Atlanta called an amazing nineteen sixty nine account of
the Stone Wall Uprising by a writer named Garance Frank Ruda,
and that was from twenty thirteen. That's incredible. The detail
in is in cub is incredible. So we can't really
talk about the Stonewall Uprising until we talk about the
now historic event that took place nine years before the

(56:37):
nineteen sixty Woolworth's launch counter sit in by the Greensboro
for so this basically and for some people this is
you know, just a history refresher, and for some people
this is new information, so we'll just be real basic
about it. This was basically a sit in that was
organized by four black college students named A. Zell Blair Junior,

(57:00):
David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil. And they would
later go on to say that it was modeled after
what they saw Gandhi doing in India with the British colonialism.
But the reason that they took the action was because
five years earlier, nineteen fifty five, fourteen year old Emmett

(57:22):
Till was murdered in Money, Mississippi, for allegedly flirting with
a white woman who was a cashier at the store
where he was buying bubblegum. So relatives of this woman
heard that a fourteen year old black boy had flirted
with her, went to the family member's house. He was
actually from Chicago. He had just come down to Mississippi

(57:43):
to stay with some family and they kidnapped him out
of the house and beat him to death. Fourteen year
old boy and he looks like a baby the pictures
of him, he looks like he's ten. His murderers were arrested, tried,
and then acquitted by an all white male jury after
sixty seven minutes of deliberation. And then a year later,

(58:05):
those same men that were acquitted because they were protected
by double jeopardy confessed to the crimes in an article
for Look magazine, and they were paid four thousand dollars
for the story.

Speaker 2 (58:18):
So the equational one, let's let that sink in. That's
fucking insane.

Speaker 1 (58:23):
It's insane. And then later on the white woman who
was that clerk said he never because one of the
rumors was he flirted with her and he touched her hand,
and she later in like twenty eighteen or twenty seventeen,
she later said right before she died, he never touched me.
And whatever he did, that he did not deserve.

Speaker 2 (58:45):
What he got.

Speaker 1 (58:45):
But of course, you know, I'd like to reach little
to it.

Speaker 2 (58:48):
I'd like to retract saying that it's insane because that
wasn't insane for the times that way, it was not
insane for the time, for the times, And how much
has changed, really, I mean, and yeah, so, and that's
kind of the point, is like if we don't talk
about these stories, and we don't, if we don't know

(59:09):
these stories already, then we can't understand what people are.
So infuriated about right.

Speaker 1 (59:17):
So this the egregiousness of this because this happened in
nineteen fifty five. It wasn't the late eighteen wards, it
wasn't even nineteen thirty. It was nineteen fifty five. So
this was a tipping point for lots and lots of
especially young black people in the South. So on February first,
nineteen sixty, the greenspo of four went to their local Woolworths,

(59:39):
which was segregated. It was a white only lunch counter,
and they sat down and they tried to order. They
of course were refused service because they were black. So
they just then sat there peacefully and refused to leave.
The police were called, but they actually couldn't really arrest
them because they weren't doing they weren't disturbing the peace.
They were just sitting there. And also because these four

(01:00:04):
men were smart enough to be in cahoots with a
white business owner who was helping them out, who knew
they were going to do this, and that white business
owner the second he knew that they were in there
doing it, called the press. So the press showed up
to report what was happening, thus keeping everyone honest, that

(01:00:25):
thus making sure that the police knew that this was
going to be reported as it happened.

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
Yeah, if you see people getting pissed off that you
know that journalists are being fucking shot with rubber bullets
and gassed and fucking arrested, it's because they're not supposed
to be. It's that's just not how it works.

Speaker 1 (01:00:41):
And also what a lot of people are you know,
I've seen this retweeted a ton of times that one
of the checkpoints of knowing an authoritarian regime is taking
over is they vilifying the press and trying to get
rid of the press. Because the press, for as much
as they you know, we can talk about what the
problems in the media, but the essentially they're there to

(01:01:01):
keep people honest. They're there to tell the truth of
what's happening and to make sure that people understand the
truth of what's happening. And the whole assault on the
media with this fake news bullshit of this administration has
just made people go, well, I don't have to believe
what I'm reading, and therefore I choose not to, and
therefore I get to live in this other fantasy world.

(01:01:24):
And now there's stormtroopers on the fucking Lincoln Memorial. Okay,
so what a brilliant move that was by these four
men to go make sure the press is there. Okay,
So they stay there all night, wool Worst closes, they leave,
they go back. The next day, there's more people at
this sit in, and four days later, in addition to

(01:01:47):
the greensborow for the original four protesters, three hundred people
are sitting at this Woolworst asking to be served. And
so at this point, now it's become national news. In
just that shot amount of time, they're saying something is
happening here, and there were people like at this point,
a lot of the people who participated in this protest

(01:02:08):
were arrested for disorderly conduct, trespassing, and disturbing the peace
because this was such a defiant act just simply sitting
and when they're being told to leave or you can't
be in here, I'm sure abused horribly verbally, they just
didn't do it. It was just that act of simple
active defiance of I'm not getting up from here, and

(01:02:29):
so people were definitely arrested. But by this time it
was national news. It was on TV, which was which.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
Then sparked which was new at the time too. To
be actually witnessing this stuff on TV. Correct me if
I'm wrong, but like every family having a TV in
their household wasn't It was kind of a new thing.

Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
Yes, for sure. And then that it isn't like we
were saying before, people can't it's they're just sitting there,
so you can't argue they're asking for it, they did something.
All they're saying is this shouldn't be whit's only segregation,
and these Jim Crow laws need to get We need
to get rid of them. They're so old, and it's
so it's basically killing this country. It's not how America

(01:03:17):
should be. So at that point it sparks a trend
of sit ins in college towns across the South. So
it's now it's not just Greensboro, it's now across the South.
And by the end of the summer of nineteen sixty,
not only that wool Worst, but many other segregated businesses
across the South become integrated. And that is essentially the

(01:03:42):
kickoff of the civil rights movement on the national stage.
And it's because of those four men who basically had
the guts to sit there quietly and just keep showing up.
So six years later, on April twenty first, nineteen sixty six,
inspired by the Greensboro Four, three members of a group

(01:04:08):
called the Matachine Society, which is one of the earliest
gay rights organizations in America, and there are three guys
named Andy Wickler, Dick Leitch, and Craig Rodwell. They stage
what they call a sip in nice play on words wow.
So in the sixties, if you were gay, you could
actually be charged with being quote unquote disorderly just for

(01:04:31):
being served alcohol in a bar. So that meant that
it was legal to deny service to anyone that the
bartender or anyone thought was gay, and the cops could
arrest anyone at a bar if they suspected that they
were gay, or to use the word that was used
at the time, a transvestite. That's what people call themselves
back then. So that word comes up a little bit,

(01:04:52):
which now is problematic, but it was actually the parlance
of the time. So these three guys, Andy Wickler, Dick
Leitch and Craig Rodwell, they decide they're going to go
into bars in Greenwich Village and ask to be served
drinks and then and basically do the same thing of
like get denied and then you know, so they actually

(01:05:13):
went to two bars first that served them because they
didn't seem overtly gay to those bartenders. And then they
got to Julius, so they had to leave because they
were like, ope, that's sipin didn't work. They finally get
as Julius's bar in Greenwich Village and they tell the
bartender they're gay and they would like to order some drinks.
The bartender says, you can't get out, in part because

(01:05:34):
Julius's three days before had been raided. So they're like,
we don't want any trouble. All the cops, you know,
the cops are just in here. So basically, now these
three guys have proof that they're being discriminated against, and
now they can take action against the state liquor authority,
and now they can actually take this to the courts,
and when they do, there's a court case that ultimately

(01:05:57):
makes this type of disorderly charge against gay people illegal,
so they couldn't they couldn't be arrested simply for drinking
at a bar anymore. And it's interesting, like, if you're
interested in this, look into it, because some of those
laws were started because the mayor of New York City
at the time they had the World's Fair was in
nineteen sixty four, and they tried to do a sweep

(01:06:20):
of the city and get rid of all overtly gay
like people, bars, gathering places like, because all the tourists
were going to come in and God forbid.

Speaker 2 (01:06:29):
Right, did you real quick? Did you watch A Secret
Love on Netflix?

Speaker 1 (01:06:34):
No? I haven't heard of it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:35):
It's really good. It's a documentary about these two women,
their lesbians and their relationship, but it talks a lot
about their only friends back at the time were other
gay couples in the sixties and seventies because you were
not allowed to go to bars, so they would just
like hang out at their houses and have parties. But
it's a really good documentary, A Secret Secret Love. Yeah, okay, cool, okay.

Speaker 1 (01:06:55):
But as we all know, just because you changed the law,
that does not mean you change society or the way
society decides to look at people who are marginalized. So
despite this little bit of progress, gay, transgender and other
queer people still have almost nowhere they can go and
just to overtly and out be themselves in a safe environment,

(01:07:15):
with the exception of like a handful of gay bars
in Greenwich Village, which is where a ton of queer
people lived at the time in the city. So the
gay bars that people knew were gay bars operate very
discreetly because New York City refused to grant New York
States sorry, refuse to grant liquor license to gay bars.

(01:07:37):
So basically they're they're trying to get rid of gay
bars by making the operation itself illegal so that the
police can justify raiding these bars and arresting queer people.
But even still, these bars, you know, they serve as
safe havens for the surrounding gay and queer communities. So

(01:07:58):
most notable of these bars is the Stone Wall in
at fifty one and fifty three Christopher Street. So three
member and this is fascinating to me. Three members of
the Genevise mafia crime family by the building in nineteen
sixty six and it had been a straight restaurant and
nightclub and they change it into a gay one. Whoa

(01:08:21):
because they know that there's money to be yeah, illegal
gay bars where they're paying off the cops and everything
is like under the table totally, so to keep a
low overhead, the building is bare bones, walls are painted black,
they're lined with colored lights. There's no running water behind
the bar. Plumbing in the bathrooms constantly backs up. When

(01:08:42):
customers get to the front door, there's a bouncer that
looks at them through a peep hole, and the only
people allowed inside are people who are overtly. It's as
visibly gay, wow, visibly gay for example, like men who
are dressed them or people who bouncer already knows. So
it's almost like a private club in that way. It

(01:09:04):
costs three dollars to get in, and then that is
also two worth two drink tickets once you get inside.
Nice and the main draw of the stonewall in is
that they allow dancing in addition to drinking, which other
gay bars did not.

Speaker 2 (01:09:19):
Allow, because it's men dancing together or women dancing together,
which is.

Speaker 1 (01:09:24):
Over it's too overt exactly, which is also a thing
that later on and I won't get too into it
because it's very it's very interesting, but I don't know
enough about it to talk about. But essentially, there is division.
Once once gay rights and that that movement start up,
there's lots of division within of how you're supposed to
behave right which is, you know, expected and common, but

(01:09:48):
it's really interesting. So it's like we just want to
be accepted, so act like this. And then there's other
groups that are going fuck that ship, which I personally love, okay,
so I always love those people the month. So the
other draft for the other draft for Stonewall is that
it's it welcomes queer people of all races and even

(01:10:11):
underage queer kids, because it's so common back then if
people's families found out they were gay, they'd just get
kicked out of the house and they literally lived on
the streets in New York City. Most of them would
go to the big city thinking they would be accepted there,
and so that was a that was a big part
of it too, homeless gay kids, which is you know,

(01:10:33):
still a big issue today, but you know, especially back
then when it was like, you know, just it was
unthinkable and so and parents felt very justified in just
cutting their child off.

Speaker 2 (01:10:47):
Crazy.

Speaker 1 (01:10:48):
So it's actually an even mix at the Stonewall, and
it's an even mix of white, black, and brown people
ranging in ages from late teens to mid thirties, and
of course for the homeless youth with nowhere else to
go and for other queer people who have been cast
aside by all the people that are supposed to love them.
The Stonewall becomes a home for a lot of these people,

(01:11:10):
a true home, not a second home, their only home.
And other than that they live on the streets. It's
a refuge. It's a beautiful line. Jay wrote this. It
serves as a refuge from the world that refuses to
acknowledge their humanity. So Jay good Job. One such patron

(01:11:33):
of the Stonewall and is a drug queen, a transgender
woman named Marsha P. Johnson. Okay, So Marcia P. Johnson
was born in nineteen forty five in Elizabeth, New Jersey,
and she starts wearing dresses when she's five years old,
which made me laugh so hard. It makes me think
of my beautiful friend Dave Mesmer, who he has pictures
of himself wearing his sister's slip. This picture of him

(01:11:56):
and a slip is what and he used to talk.
He used to tell me about it and go slip
my slip because he would wear it constantly and like
his mom would be like, hey, don't you want to
take the slip off. We're going to the store. And
he's like I have to wear my slip. Yeah, it's
like it's the best. It's that thing of like, if
you have any question about nature versus stretcher, you need

(01:12:16):
to see this picture and gar slip. It's the realness,
It's the true realness. Okay. So anyway, So when Marcia
finally does graduate from high school, she gets gets out
of Elizabeth, New Jersey, runs off to New York City
with just a bag of clothes and fifteen dollars. Oh
my god. Yeah, she gets by doing sex work, barely

(01:12:39):
managing just a five on the streets. But she gets
to be herself finally for the first time, wearing dresses,
loud colors, flowers and fruit and Christmas lights in her hair.

Speaker 2 (01:12:50):
Yah, and Christmas license. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:12:52):
Legend, early legend Marcia P. Johnson. So when and when
people ask her what the pe in her names doany for,
she always says, pay it no mind. So genius. So
she's met, of course, with tons of violence outrage from

(01:13:12):
just the general public. But when she's in places like Stonewall,
she finds her chosen family, other queens and queers and
gays who accept her for who she is, and she's
an incredibly open optimistic, friendly person if you're friendly to her,
and she maintains her Christian religion. She's often seen praying
for her friends at local churches. And this killed me,

(01:13:34):
this quote, she says, Jesus quote is the only man
I could really trust. Ah, he listened to me, and
he never laughed at me. Yeah. And some people even
call her Saint Marcia because she's so generous and so lovely. Now, so,
someone who benefits from Marcia's generosity is a young Latinix

(01:13:54):
queen named Sylvia Rivera. So Sylvia's father left her family
when she was a baby, and then her mother committed
suicide when she was three. As a kid, she lived
with her grandmother, but then when she would dress up
in her grandmother's clothes and makeup, her grandmother would beat her.
So when she turns eleven, she runs away and lives

(01:14:14):
on the streets of New York City. Yeah, horrifying, but
it's such a sadly common story.

Speaker 2 (01:14:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:14:22):
She meets Martia in nineteen sixty three while she's also
working as a sex worker. She said, quote, Marsha was
like a mother to me. And she says that Marshall
always looked out for her, gave her a semblance of
stability and loved her like no one else ever had.
So okay, so those are just we need to meet
those two key players. And now we go to the

(01:14:44):
night of Saturday, June twenty eighth, nineteen sixty nine. That night,
there's about two hundred people at the Stonewall Inn, partying, dancing,
doing their thing. It's one of the only places that
they can go to drink and dance and just be
their fabulous selves. This bar does not have a liquor license.

(01:15:04):
As I said, they're controlled by the Gene's crime family.

Speaker 2 (01:15:08):
So hey, those guys love it.

Speaker 1 (01:15:10):
I just love it because you know, you can pretend.
But that means that they are doing it because they
support of gay people, which is not true. But so
basically they pay off the local cops and to stand
business so purely for appearances. The cops have to raid
the bar every once in a while to make it

(01:15:32):
look like it's all above board. And normally what happens
is one of the mobsters gives the bar owners a
heads up.

Speaker 2 (01:15:40):
They don't. I feel like a Saturday night wouldn't be
a normal time to do it either.

Speaker 1 (01:15:44):
I don't know. Well, no, I mean not according to
this story, because yeah, normally they get the heads up
that the cops are coming, and then they hide the
booze and they tell all the customers, so anybody that
has to leave because they're not out or they're at
risk in some way can run. Well, this time, there's
no warning. So around one twenty in the morning, four
undercover police and four cops in uniform raid the stonewall in.

(01:16:09):
And even though everyone's surprised, raids are so common back
then that the employees and the customers kind of know
the drill. So basically they have to line up while
the cop checks everybody's ID, and then anyone that's quote
dressed like a woman is taken to the bathroom and
checked to quote verify their sex. No, yeah, so demeaning,

(01:16:32):
so such so gross so and then basically anyone who
is wearing women's clothing but doesn't have female genitalia is arrested.

Speaker 2 (01:16:41):
Jesus, there's video of them being like herded into the
patty wagon too. Right outside of like.

Speaker 1 (01:16:48):
I don't know if there's video, I've definitely seen pictures. Yeah,
there's amazing pictures because well, yeah, so, and there's a
lot of pictures in this that Atlantic article that I
mentioned that are great because there's some people who are
enraged and screaming. Then then there's there's people kind of
in the back row that are kind of like laughing

(01:17:08):
and cheering because the thing becomes this event. Yeah, so okay,
so this is what happened. So basically this time, they're
everyone's fucking sick of it. Where it's like these raids
happen all the time, and they're coming into like their
clubhouse basically, you know, they're the one spot they have.
So a lot of the queer patrons just refuse to

(01:17:30):
hand over their ideas or go willingly with these arresting
officers to go get quote unquote checked. So in the
response to the refusals, the police start of course abusing
the Stonewall patrons. So they're dragging, they're getting really physical,
dragging people away to arrest them. They're frisking customers that
they know are lesbians, so they're groping them and molesting them, right,

(01:17:53):
So so tension escalates very quickly. Meanwhile, the police are
also confiscating all the booze they can find, which is
like twenty eight cases of beer nineteen bottles of hard liquor,
but it's so much that they have to call for
a second paddy wagon to come and haul it away
along with these people they're planning to arrest. They release

(01:18:15):
anyone that's not under arrest, and then they force all
the arrested patrons to wait. But the people who are
released just stand around outside waiting to see what's going
to happen, because they're not just gonna like run, which
I really love. So then there's people passing by the
bar who notice what's going on and they stop to
join the group outside and they see what's happening, that

(01:18:39):
it's this raid and that they're you know, these cops
are getting violent, and it's that it's not the normal,
Like what they expect with the stonewall in is like
they do the quote unquote raid and then they go
through the motions and everything's fine because they're paying you know,
they're being paid off to do that. But now all
of a sudden, it's all different. So the group starts

(01:18:59):
is like like not cool with that, obviously, and they
start mocking the police. They're doing fake salutes, they're yelling
shit at them, they're leaning into the femb behavior they're
doing limp wrists and primping their hair. They're also making
fun of the police. They're you know, they're they're directly
mocking the police in their faces and doing all this
really overt shit that normally it's like they normally, if

(01:19:22):
it was a raid, they're shamed into, you know, running away,
not showing their faces or whatever. Well, the officers start
shoving the patrons out of their way, and the patrons
start pushing back, and this tension starts building, and at
one point they very forcefully throw a butch lesbian named
Stormy de Larvay, and they throw her into the paddy wagon,

(01:19:45):
and as they do, she yells to the crowd, why
don't you guys do something? And so they do, and
suddenly rocks, bottles, and bricks are being thrown at the police.
The police are using excessive force to try to restrain
the crowd, but they're completely outnumbered because now the crowd
has very quickly grown and is very quickly involved. Some

(01:20:10):
of the patrons who have been handcuffed that were supposed
to be arrested get away. One of the patrons suggest
that maybe the cops showed up because the owners hadn't
paid them off. Yet, so another one yells, let's pay
them off, and they start throwing pennies at the cops.
Oh fuck, And part of the group tries to flip
the patio wagon over while other people run around and

(01:20:33):
slash the tires of the cop cars. So there's officers.
The officers driving those cop cars jump into them and
drive away with flat tires because they know they know
they're outnumbered. The cops that stay grab a bunch of
the patrons that are handcuffed, and they go back inside
the stone wall and basically barricade themselves in. Now that

(01:20:55):
move itself is one of the reasons things escalated even
further because and they I'll read this quote from that
Atlantic article about how basically the cops were humiliated because
normally they have such a hold over and have such
a power over the quote unquote fairies, which is what

(01:21:17):
they were called back in the day. So the idea
that all these people who they were used to being
shamed and hiding their face and you know, oh my god,
I'm being arrested for this and it's so terrible. Now
they're just like, no, fuck you, and they're the police
are so scared. They have to run back into the
bar being humiliated. But yeah, probably the first time, like
this doesn't happen, especially back then they're fucking with the

(01:21:41):
power structure, and that's when that's when the people with
the power get scared and mad. So essentially, they're not
sure how either the crowd or the police inside set
the building on fire.

Speaker 2 (01:21:53):
Fuck, we don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:21:55):
So they're not sure because it could have been the
crowd outside to make the police come back out. But
there's also a theory that the cops inside did it
because they were destroying the inside of the stone wall
in any way, Yeah, because they had they smashed the jukebox,
they were doing all kinds of shit inside, so they're like, well,
then they probably lit it on fair also, But then

(01:22:17):
the logic of that is like, but they're in there,
so they don't know for sure. There's also a lot
of debate surrounding who threw the first object, because a
lot of people attribute it to Sylvia Rivera, but she's
later quoted saying, quote, I threw the second one. I
did not throw the first.

Speaker 2 (01:22:36):
And I'm sticking to that. That's everyone's you guys, that's
our story from now on. I threw the second one.

Speaker 1 (01:22:41):
I threw the second one. Others say Marsha P. Johnson
threw the first brick, but she later goes on record
to say she wasn't there until two am, when the
building was already on fire.

Speaker 2 (01:22:51):
I love that she shows up fashionably late to write.

Speaker 1 (01:22:54):
She's like, what girls, what's going on? So the most
important thing is that the up rising at the Stonewall
and can't be credited to just one person, because it
really is about the collective effort of this oppressed community
at primarily black and brown, transgender or non gender conforming
people who have been pushed to their limits and have

(01:23:15):
like one of the only things they even have in
the world taken away from them, and that's what sparks
this uprising. So basically everyone there is prepared to defend
their home, and especially this is the era of a
civil rights movement, the anti Vietnam War movement, a general
counterculture influence. The queer people of New York City are
fired up and they've had enough of this shitty treatment.

(01:23:36):
So as the fight rages on, the Tactical Patrol Force
the TPF, which is basically the NYPD's riot control unit,
they arrive to fight back against the crowd and then
and free the police that are inside stonewall. So they
basically they form this formation to try to drive the

(01:23:56):
crowd back to get away from the stonewall in. But
of course now this crowd is on fire, and so
they're cheering, they're mocking the police. Instead of retreating, they
form like a showgirls a style kickline, and they start
doing a kick line and singing.

Speaker 2 (01:24:13):
At the cops, a legit kick line.

Speaker 1 (01:24:15):
Yo yah. Bob Kohler, who is a local gay rights activist,
was there that night and describes what he witnessed quote quote.
I had been in enough riots to know the fun
was over. The cops were totally humiliated. This never ever happened.
They were angrier than I guess they had ever been
because everybody else had rioted, but the fairies were not

(01:24:36):
supposed to riot. No group had ever forced cops to
retreat before. So the anger was just enormous end.

Speaker 2 (01:24:44):
Quote masculine fragility.

Speaker 1 (01:24:48):
So furious and embarrassed, the police rushed the crowd, pummeling
them again with excessive force. By four am, the streets
are mostly cleared and the stonewall in is destroyed from
the inside out. And basically the cops inside that had
been basically they just ripped everything down. They basically were
just basically trying to shut the place down for good,
like there will be nothing left.

Speaker 2 (01:25:08):
Is anyone dead in the fire?

Speaker 1 (01:25:10):
Okay, no, not that I know of. So thirteen people
are arrested, some are hospitalized for their injuries. Four officers
are hurt, but it's minor. The next day they continue protesting,
so people supporters go and they spray paint things like
drag power and legalize gay bars, and we are open
on the outside of the burnt out stonewall in And

(01:25:33):
so now it's Saturday, June twenty eighth, and they the
stonewall actually does open, but this time there's no bouncer,
there's no people. It's people just standing out in the open,
and it's thousands of people gathering in the streets around
this bar. The crowd stretches out to the surrounding blocks
in this neighborhood. So the police arrive on the scene

(01:25:56):
and they're met with more opposition. At one point, Marsha P.
Johnson climbed a lamp post and drops a bag with
a brick in it onto the hood of a cop car.
That's probably why she got the credit for throwing the
first brick, because she that second night, she got up
there and fucking went for it. And I think there
is a picture of her on that lamp post, if
I'm not mistaken. But the battle between quer people and

(01:26:19):
the police continues till four a m. With several more arrests,
and in total, the Stonewall uprising lasts six days, and
it's a mix of peaceful protests, looting, destruction of property,
and total freedom of.

Speaker 2 (01:26:35):
Expression six days in that neighborhood.

Speaker 1 (01:26:37):
Six days, and obviously, like if day two, there's thousands
of people. It's like an event. Wow. So by the
time the uprising settles down, major news outlets have picked
up on this story and they've made it clear to
anyone who's watching, the queers will have their liberation come
hell or high water. And the effects start taking hold immediately.

(01:26:58):
So there's people who once felt hopeless and now they're emboldened.
There's gay demonstrations. You see gay couple holding hands out,
you know, just out and about which did not happen
before this. People dressing totally out of control, like any
way they wanted. I shouldn't say out of control, but

(01:27:20):
like people actually dressing the way they wanted and without
the fear of oh if somebody sees me that I
can somehow be arrested for disorderly conduct just because I'm
dressed like this. So clearly this community they're done with
being in the closet and toning themselves down to make
straight people feel comfortable. In a matter of months, gay

(01:27:42):
and queer newspapers are cropping up around the city. They're
called ones called gay, one's called come Out with an
exclamation point, and one's called gay Power, and their popularity
and readership steadily climbs. Okay, so this is this is
kind of amazing. This is a This is a quote
from that article from The Atlantic, an amazing nineteen sixty
nine account of the Stonewall Uprising, written by Garance Frank Ruda.

(01:28:07):
But what's incredible is Dick Leisch, who is one of
the three guys who did the sip in. Yes he was,
he was planning a trip to London, but he saw
what was happening and went down there so he could
report on it. Oh wow, yes, because he was also

(01:28:28):
a journalist and so yeah, so he went down. So
this is just a portion there's a big, long part
of what he wrote in this article, but I just
pulled this portion of it because it's really cool. So
this is what Dick Leitch wrote about the Stonewall uprising. Quote.
Since nineteen sixty five, the homosexual community of New York
has been treated quite well by the city administration and

(01:28:50):
the police have either reformed or been kept in line
by Lindsay and Leary. Now we've walked in the open
and know how pleasant it is to have self respect
and to be treated as citizens and human beings. We
want to stay in the sunlight from now on. Efforts
to force us back in the closet could be disastrous
for all concerned. The above, while a true evaluation of

(01:29:13):
the situation does not explain while the raid on stone
Wall caused such a strong reaction, why the stone Wall
and not the Sewer or the Snake Pit, which were
other gay bars they were okay. The answer lies, we
believe in the unique nature of the stone Wall. This
club was more than a dance bar, more than just
a gay gathering place. It catered largely to a group

(01:29:33):
of people who are not welcome in or cannot afford
other places of homosexual social gathering. The quote drags and
the quote queens, two groups which would find a chilly
reception or a barred door at most of the other
gay bars and clubs formed the regulars at the stone Wall.
To a large extent, the club was for them, apart

(01:29:55):
from the gold Bug and the one two three Yeah,
the bars, I love it, Drags and queens had no
place but the stone Wall. Another group was even more
dependent on the Stone Wall, the very young homosexuals and
those with no other homes. You've got to be eighteen
to buy a drink in a bar, and gay life
revolved around bars. Where do you go if you are

(01:30:17):
seventeen or sixteen and gay? The legitimate bars wouldn't let
you in the place, and gay restaurants and the streets
aren't very sociable. Then two, there are hundreds of young
homosexuals in New York who literally have no home. Most
of them are between sixteen and twenty five and came
here from other places without jobs, money, or contacts. Many

(01:30:38):
of them are running away from unhappy homes. One boy
told us, quote, my father called me cocksucker so many
times I thought.

Speaker 2 (01:30:46):
It was my name, Oh Jesus.

Speaker 1 (01:30:49):
Another said his parents fought so much over which of
them made him a homosexual, that he left so they
could learn to live together. Some got thrown out of
school or the service for me gay and couldn't face
going home. Some were even thrown out of their homes
with only the clothes on their backs by ignorant, intolerant
parents who'd rather see their kid dead than homosexual. They

(01:31:10):
came to New York with the clothes on their backs.
Some of them hustled or had skills enough to get
a job. Others weren't attractive enough to hustle and didn't
manage to fall in with people who could help them.
Some of them, giddy at the openness of gay life
in New York, got caught up in it, and some
are on pills and drugs. Some are still wearing the
clothes in which they came here a year or more ago.

(01:31:33):
Jobless and without skills, without decent clothes to wear or
to a job interview, they live in the streets, panhandling
or shoplifting for the price of admission to the Stone Wall.
That was one advantage to the place. For three dollars admission,
one could stay inside out of the winter's cold or
the summer heat all night long. Not only was the
stone Wall better climactically, but it also saved the kids

(01:31:55):
from spending the night in a doorway or from getting
arrested as vagrants. Dollars this isn't too hard to get panhandling,
and nobody hustled drinks in the stone Wall. Once the
admission price was paid, one could drink or not as
he chose. The stone Wall became home to these kids
when it was rated. They fought for it. That and
the fact that they had nothing to lose other than

(01:32:15):
the most tolerant, broad minded gay place in town explains
why the Stonewall riots were begun led and spearheaded by queens.

Speaker 2 (01:32:24):
That is so amazing. That was long, but no necessary.

Speaker 1 (01:32:28):
Yeah, because it's that it's dick lightsho It's like they're
basically saying, there's a cast system within this community and
you and you actually went to the one place. You
can't take that, You can't take the one thing people
have away from them. Then they have nothing to lose.

Speaker 2 (01:32:43):
Don't I never fucking never, never fucking underestimate the underdogs
and the fucking discounted and the people who have already
struggled their whole fucking lives. Yeah, there's nothing new, This
is nothing new.

Speaker 1 (01:32:56):
They're so brave, they're so yeah, exactly, they know how
to fight. Yeah, okay. So there's some members of the
gay community, including Marsha P. Johnson, founded the Gay Liberation Front,
which was an activist group dedicated to liberating the gay
people of America. This group gives way to more groups
like it across America and into Canada, and in the
immediate aftermath, there are some gays who say they don't

(01:33:20):
agree with what happened at Stonewall, and this is where
groups like the Mattachine Society fall apart because their efforts
have always been to show straight people that gay people
are quote just like them, and so they want gays
to fit in with the straits and assimilate to their culture.
But queer people involved in Stonewall Uprising, we're saying assimilation

(01:33:42):
plays into the oppressor's hand. Basically, the beautiful thing about
this is being able to be your genuine self full stop,
with not trying to meet the expectations of anybody else.
And that's what transgender activists like Marcia and Sylvia start
fighting for, which is the freedom to be yourself whatever

(01:34:03):
that is, so they make it a point to continue
the work. In the year's following Stonewall in nineteen seventy,
Sylvia and Marshall start an organization called Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries,
which supports queer youth in New York City. By nineteen
seventy two, they've pulled together enough money to purchase a
house which they call the Star House, which is the

(01:34:25):
acronym for the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries ever, and they
use this house to house homeless queer youth, and Sylvia
and Marsha fund the house through sex work so that
the kids who live there don't have to do it themselves.
It's beautiful. The Star Organization also jumps into other equal
rights and anti police brutality causes around the city, marching

(01:34:49):
in protests and supporting other marginalized people in any way
they can. But as they head into the early seventies,
more and more people start to peel themselves away from
transgender gender queer causes. The gay liberation movement starts to
think about trans rights as being too difficult to attain,
so they separate from activists like Marcia and Sylvia and

(01:35:12):
to give the thinking was to give gay causes a
better chance. Then at the Gay Pride March in nineteen
seventy three, Sylvia tries to make a speech but is
repeatedly blocked by other gay activists, and she eventually grabs
the mic and yells, if it wasn't for the drag queens,
there would be no gay liberation movement. We're the frontliners.

(01:35:33):
So shortly after that she attempts suicide, but Marcia finds
her and saves her life. So the Stonewall Uprising very
quickly gives way to the gay rights movement and Pride
celebrations that now start taking place all around the world.
On June twenty eighth, nineteen seventy the queer community in
New York City gathers outside a stonewall for the first

(01:35:53):
annual Christopher Street Liberation Day. They commemorate the stone Wall
Uprising with a march, and Los Angeles and Chicago follow
suit with their own marches, and also San Francisco. That
same year, San Francisco has they have what they call
a sit in. They march down Polk Street and then

(01:36:14):
they have a sit in themselves, and the next year Boston, Dallas, Milwaukee,
and even Paris London, West, Berlin, and Stockholm all host
Pride marches of their own every year. The number of
participating cities grows until we reach the Pride Month celebrations
as we know them today. But as we celebrate Pride,
it's important to remember that we're able to celebrate this

(01:36:37):
in the first place because black and brown, trans gender,
queer and queens like Marcia and Sylvia and more fought
for everyone's liberation. And that is a very rudimentary report
on the legendary protest that was the Stonewall Uprising.

Speaker 2 (01:36:54):
Wow, I did not know those details at all. That
is amazing, isn't that great?

Speaker 1 (01:37:00):
I mean, this is so there's so much more to
know and learn and so many details and but you know, Cliff, no,
it's it's it's a start, But I mean, I kind
of do love this is all it all folds together. Yeah,
there's a lot of brave people out there, and what
we're seeing happening right now in front of us has

(01:37:20):
happened before. It doesn't have to be as scary as
it can sometimes feel, because if you look back in
the past, there have been people who have been so
brave in such insanely oppressive times. And if we can
know these stories and talk about those stories, we can
we can steal a little bit of their bravery and

(01:37:41):
take it now so we can do our work.

Speaker 2 (01:37:43):
And it's it's really inspiring to see that those brave
people have made changes. So what we're going through right
now and the fear and anxiety and stress of it all,
and it's so scary, but it's for a cause and
it and it works, and in the past it's worked,
and that's why it's happening, not just it's not for nothing.

Speaker 1 (01:38:07):
That's right, and it's and it is about. This is
about actually having respect for human life. This is not
it's not about teaching people a lesson. It's not about
being anti this group or anti that group. It's like,
you cannot keep on killing black people with nothing and
having nothing happen because of it. Yeah, that's that's what's
happening today. But that's also it has been happening for

(01:38:30):
so long.

Speaker 2 (01:38:31):
Right, Yeah, just black lives matter, Black lives matter, everybody.
Great job. We really want to hear your fucking horahs
from the past week and what uh what's been going
on for you and your winds? Please email us at
my favorite murder at Gmail, or tweet at us or
comment on our Instagram and let us know you know

(01:38:54):
how how.

Speaker 1 (01:38:55):
This has affected you and what and what you're doing
to help the people that it's that it affects in
the in the real day to day, because that's that's
what's exciting, is they watching people really come together. Thanks
you guys for listening. Stay safe, stay strong, stay sexy,
and don't get murdered.

Speaker 2 (01:39:13):
Goodbye Elvis.

Speaker 1 (01:39:14):
You want a cookie