June 4, 2026 • 52 mins
In 1967, segregationist lawyer Jack Kershaw swore out a warrant against George Ware, an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. By the end of the week, a congressman was denouncing Ware on the house floor as an outside agitator. But what is an outside agitator? What do we mean when we blame unrest on these untrustworthy outsiders? Where does that idea come from? And is it even true?
Sources & Further Reading:
https://belonging.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/ARCHIVE/kerner_commission_full_report.pdf
https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
https://www.crmvet.org/docs/sv/670400_sncc_nyc-newsletter.pdf
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/274/538/1574803/
https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/GSB/id/10262/
https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal67-1311343
https://www.nytimes.com/1967/08/09/archives/official-changes-testimony-on-antiwhite-school.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1967/08/30/archives/sedition-charges-dropped.html
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2020/07/27/a-brief-history-of-dangerous-others/
https://dailynorthwestern.com/2020/11/12/audio/defining-safe-defining-the-outside-agitator/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Coll Zone Media. On May twenty second, nineteen sixty seven,
George ware took the stand in a crowded courtroom in Nashville, Tennessee.
Whare was twenty seven years old. He had graduated from
Tuskegee University with a master's degree in biochemistry in nineteen
(00:23):
sixty five, but he quickly abandoned the job he got
up north after graduation for something he thought was more important.
He went to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
as an aide to chairman Stokely Carmichael, and by nineteen
sixty seven he was planning Carmichael's college speaking tour as
the national coordinator of campus programs. That was the job
(00:47):
where was doing when he'd been arrested in Nashville a
few weeks earlier. On the stand, he calmly denied having
incited a riot. He was cross examined for hours about
the beating he'd endured in the hands of the Nashville police.
He denied having called the officers monkies, and he denied
(01:09):
egging the crowd of black college students on by yelling
things like let's get the white police. He had no
idea who owned the pistol police had charged him with
carrying How could he know he hadn't carried it at all?
No one had the police found the gun in someone
(01:30):
else's car that he'd ridden in briefly that day. Criminal
charges related to his arrest in April were put on
hold pending a verdict in this lawsuit, which challenged the
constitutionality of Tennessee's riot and disorderly conduct statutes. Everything was
still in limbo when George Ware returned to Nashville in
August of nineteen sixty seven, but some people weren't content
(01:54):
to wait. They wanted that terrible outside agitator arrested immediately,
so segregationist lawyer Jack Kershaw convinced a local judge to
arrest the civil rights activist on a trumped up charge
of sedition. I'm Molly Conger and this it's weird, little guys.
(02:35):
Today we're circling back to a story that i'd cut
from an older episode. I was sorry to have cut
it then, but it just didn't feel like there was
a neat spot for it in the episodes I was
writing about Jack Kershaw in April. It's funny, though I'm
never done with any of these stories. I'm never really
(02:56):
putting them to bed at the end of a series.
I still keep tabs on old characters and storylines. I'm
keeping an eye out for echoes of these stories in
current events, just waiting to weave those loose ends back in.
They all fit together, sometimes in surprising ways. And I
(03:18):
arrived back at this story this week in a roundabout
sort of way. The actual story here is fairly brief.
I'd put it off to the side, thinking maybe I'd
have time to do a minisot about it one day.
I mean, Jack Kershaw having Stokely Carmichael's aid arrested for
sedition is a wild thing to stumble across and then
(03:41):
just discard. So in the summer of nineteen sixty seven,
Saint Anselm's Episcopal Chapel and Student Center in Nashville received
a small government grant. The city had received a pot
of federal funding for an ty poverty initiatives, and grants
(04:02):
were awarded to various programs at the local level. Nashville
gave a few thousand dollars to Saint Anselm's to run
a summer program for black youth. They called it Liberations School,
and most of the volunteers of the school were also
organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNICK. The
(04:23):
summer program at Saint Anselm's borrowed from curriculums SNICK had
already used successfully in their Freedom School programs during the
Freedom Summer of nineteen sixty four. The Liberation's School opened
its doors in late June of nineteen sixty seven. By
early August, the program's insurer had dropped them, and the
(04:43):
Liberations School was shut down. A Nashville Police captain named
John Sarrace had complained that the school was a hotbed
of anti white hatred and that SNICK volunteers were using
the program to indoctrinate children and foment rebellion. But how
on earth did one silly little complaint end up the
(05:04):
subject of Senate hearings, New York Times headlines, and a
sedition charge. Because John Sarace made his silly little complaint
in a Senate hearing on Civil disorders in August of
nineteen sixty seven, the Senate Judiciary Committee was already hearing
testimony about the civil unrest that had shaken the country
(05:26):
that summer. Sarach, as the head of Nashville Police's intelligence
division went to Washington to testify about a riot that
had taken place in Nashville in April, and John Sarach
blamed SNICK for those riots. He was having hard time
moving on, so when he saw volunteers from that organization
(05:47):
tutoring children in a church, he told the Senate committee
that the group was using federal funds to train ten
year olds how to engage in violent riots. They weren't.
They weren't doing that, I mean, obviously right. Federal officials
(06:08):
visited the school and found no evidence of Sarach's claims,
but it didn't matter. He'd already won. The volunteers from
SNICK were hardly strangers who attempts to thwart their efforts,
so they adapted. They couldn't use the church anymore, but
kids can learn anywhere, and they moved the classes to
(06:30):
a public park. In the summer of nineteen sixty seven,
SNICK was involved in active litigation against the city of Nashville.
The trial had been held in May, but the panel
of judges wouldn't issue their decision until October. Back in April,
there had been several days of unrest that coincided with
(06:51):
the week that stokely Carmichael gave speeches at three Nashville
area colleges. This is often abbreviated as race riots ensued
after a speech from Stokely Carmichael or Stokely Carmichael gave
a speech that sparked riots, But that isn't entirely true.
(07:13):
The civil disorder in Nashville in April of nineteen sixty
seven started at a bar across the street from Fisk University,
where Carmichael had given a speech several days earlier. So
I think it's less that his speech directly caused police
to overreact to a drunk bar patron, leading to a
(07:35):
crowd of angry college students escalating into police responding poorly
to that crowd of protesters. And it's more likely that
Stokely Carmichael chose to give his speeches in places where
conditions like this already existed. He's not telling those black
college students in Tennessee that racism exists and the police
(07:56):
treat them unfairly. He's there talking to them because they
already know that. It's likely that whatever happened there that
weekend would have happened anyway. Stokely Carmichael's speech didn't cause
this to happen, and whatever kicked it off, the violence
that followed wasn't unique. It happened in more than one
(08:20):
hundred other cities that summer, and Stokely Carmichael wasn't giving
speeches in all those towns, but in Nashville and in
quite a few other cities, SNICK got the blame. Several
of the people arrested that weekend in Nashville were SNICK organizers,
(08:41):
including George Ware. The group quickly filed a lawsuit challenging
the constitutionality of the state's riot and disorderly conduct laws,
and Where's criminal charges were put on hold pending the
outcome of the lawsuit. So in Where arrived in Nashville
in August of nineteen sixty seven, he hadn't actually been
indicted yet on the charges from his April arrest. He
(09:05):
had testified at the civil trial in May, but the
case wasn't decided yet. And here's where the newspaper reports
get a little spotty. I mean, it's strange. Actually there's
information that's missing here, and no one seems to acknowledge it.
On August twenty first, nineteen sixty seven, George Ware was
(09:28):
the guest lecturer at the Liberations School in the Park,
and it seems like reporters were not allowed close enough
to actually hear what he said to the children. Evening
editions of local newspapers published on August twenty first say
no reporter got close enough to hear anything until the
very end of the lesson, and no reporter published anything
(09:51):
that sounded particularly inflammatory. But the next morning, George Ware
was arrested. According to those same newspapers, two local attorneys
in Nashville had gone to a judge to request that
an arrest warrant be issued on a charge of sedition.
(10:12):
Jack Kershaw told reporters that he and his friend Charles
Galbraith had acted on their own as citizens, a cryptic
sort of comment that he doesn't elaborate on, but Kershaw
says they took it upon themselves as private citizens to
petition Judge Daniel Boone, that is a real judge, apparently,
(10:34):
to issue this arrest warrant. So these same papers that
had just the day before all agreed that no reporter
got close enough to hear what was said at the
Liberation School appearance. They're now publishing Jack Kershaw's claim that
George Ware had made a very inflammatory comment to a newsman.
(10:57):
The AP story says, without evidence or outside corroboration quote,
Gershaw said the warrant was based in part on Where's
statement to newsmen that black people have to achieve power
by any means necessary. I mean, first of all, we
have to acknowledge that that's a really innocuous statement. But
(11:18):
that's apparently not the issue here. So maybe George Ware
said this in an interview he gave after his speech.
That's totally possible, right, But if he said it to
a reporter, Gershaw is saying this remark was given to
a newsman. If George Ware said this to a reporter,
(11:41):
why didn't anyone report it? It only appears in print
coming out of Jack Kershaw's mouth. No reporter published a
story about hearing George Ware say this or anything like
it in a speech or interview on August twenty first.
So Jack Kershaw made it up, fine, right, I mean,
(12:05):
if you listen to the Jack Kershaw episodes, you know
he's a liar. He's a racist and a liar. Of
course he would make something up about George Ware. What
difference does it make? It sounds like something George Ware
would say, and he had said much spicier stuff on
the record many times before. But this is so odd,
(12:32):
and the thing I think is the actual truth here
doesn't seem worth lying about unless you're very afraid of
being caught hanging out with civil rights activists.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
George Ware had said to me sometime a week or so,
I had him the man.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
He had.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
I decided to have a little snake fundraiser at my house,
and so we invited a number of my friends over
to just hang out, meet, to snack. People, get on
the list, contribute to money, people hoped.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
And where were these friends?
Speaker 3 (13:22):
Are these childhood.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Friends, friends from college, law school?
Speaker 4 (13:26):
They were maybe then current friends, some lawyers, some just
people on you and who weren't lawyers, the sort of
a liberal set of sort of a liberal.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Set, I thought, that's Reber Bolt, the white Nashville area
attorney who represented George Ware back then. The two were
good friends, and Bolt was involved in the civil rights
movement for many years in the mid nineteen sixties, George
(14:03):
Ware often stayed at Bolt's house when he was traveling
through the Nashville area.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
And what he's.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Getting at in that oral history recorded in twenty eighteen,
is that George ware did say whatever it was that
Jack Kershaw told that judge, but he didn't say it
to a reporter. He said it to State Legislator Charles Galbreth,
the other attorney who swore out the warrant with Kershawvalbreath
(14:34):
had somehow gotten an invitation to the fundraiser that they
were holding at Bolt's home this Saturday night before where
a speech on Monday, and Galbreth hadn't simply overheard this remark,
He'd approached where at the party and asked him to
explain the Black Power movement. Charles Galbreth and Jack Kershaw
(14:56):
set him up on purpose, and the the best they
could bait him into saying was We're going to win
by any means necessary. But Jack Kershaw managed to convince
Judge Daniel Boone that this again very innocuous statement somehow
met the standard for sedition a Tennessee state statute that
(15:20):
outlawed any advocating, abetting, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability,
or propriety of the overthrow or destruction of the United
States or Tennessee State government. Again, it just seems so
odd that Kershaw went with the by any means necessary,
(15:42):
comment and even stranger that he went for the sedition charge.
It just seems like there would have been easier ways
to catch him up. Declassified FBI files for Stokely Carmichael
and Snick show that J. H. R. Hoover was getting
multiple memos a day every day for weeks around this
time about the feasibility of charging Stokely Carmichael with sedition
(16:08):
after his recent trip to Cuba, a trip that George
Whare accompanied him on. So it's strange timing that Jack
Kershaw would invent a fake sedition case against Where the
same week that Jay Hadgar Hoover was blowing a gasket
about the impossibility of charging Stokely Carmichael with sedition. The
(16:32):
FEDS did strip both men of their passports that week,
though a weird coincidence. Maybe Where spent a few days
in the local jail before a pastor paid his five
thousand dollars bond. A week after his arrest, his attorneys
filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Tennessee's sedition law,
(16:55):
but they made it clear they'd dropped the case if
Where wasn't indicted. That same day, August twenty eighth, a
Florida congressman invoked Where's name and a speech on the
House floor. Representative William Kramer of Florida was a huge
proponent of the Anti Riot Act, a bill that would
pass the following year, and in this speech in August
(17:19):
of nineteen sixty seven, Kramer argued that the Riot Act
was necessary to thwart the outside agitators responsible for the
race riots that had been happening all summer, outside agitators
like Stokely Carmichael and George Ware. Kramer noted that the
pair had recently visited communist Cuba, and now where is
(17:42):
back in Nashville. Just a day later, a grand jury
in Tennessee declined to indict where on the sedition charge,
and the whole saga was over. Snick lost their lawsuit
against Nashville over the unrest in April. And Where did
end up getting indicted on the inciting a riot charge
for that incident? He paid a fifty dollars fine and
(18:07):
the sedition charge incident never really comes up again. It
was just a strange side quest. In my notes about
Jack Kershaw, the racist lawyer who built the world's ugliest
Confederate monument out of spare parts from a bathtub factory.
But if you'll indulge me for a minute, I want
(18:30):
to talk about how I ended up thinking about George
ware in nineteen sixty seven again this week, because again
I filed this away from minisode and then I moved on.
Wasn't writing about Jack Kershaw anymore. This little tidbit was
going to stay stuck in my notes, But these little
snippets of history keeps sneaking back up on me. If
(18:54):
you haven't already seen the other episode in your podcast
app of choice today, there is a brief tribute to
my friend Laura Sullivan. She passed away last month and
I went to her funeral last week. She was an
absolute legend in the field of anti fascist research and
a genuine force of nature. I mean, it's just it's
(19:16):
a huge loss for the whole world, even if you
didn't know her. After the funeral, sitting in a little
plastic chair in the reception space of the cemetery, we
were just chatting remembering Laura, of course, But given the
kind of person Laura was, you can probably guess that
it was a room full of people whose passions matched
(19:38):
hers tracking right wing extremism. I couldn't tell you how
the topic turned to George Lincoln Rockwell, but I swear
I wasn't the one that brought it up. Maybe because
we were gathered there to honor our friend, an anti
fascist whom we'd all loved dearly and lost too soon.
(19:58):
Maybe that reminded some one of Rockwell, the Nazi leader
assassinated by his own best friend. Because loving each other
is something we've always had Over the Nazis. They just
can't do it, but it's part of the fabric of
what we do. But of course, as soon as someone
(20:19):
brought up Rockwell, I offered up a few Rockwell facts
for the table. You know, I'm up to date on
my lore. I'd forgotten to tell you this listener's. But
George Lincoln Rockwell's assassin died on Christmas Day last year.
John Patler, who by then had perverted back to his
original Greek surname pat Solos, died two weeks shy of
(20:42):
his eighty eighth birthday. That whole story, how the son
of a Greek immigrant became an American Nazi, shot his
hero and lived out the last half of his life
in obscurity. That was all covered in a series of
episodes last fall. But I was thinking about Rockwell's death.
So on our way home from the few roll, my
friend God and I stopped off at a nearby landmark
(21:04):
of sorts, this strip mall where George Lincoln Rockwell was
assassinated in nineteen sixty seven. It's in Arlington, Virginia. It
was on the way home. I'd studied maps and pictures
of the area pretty extensively when I was writing about Rockwell,
but i'd never been. It turned out it was very unremarkable.
(21:27):
We took a selfie. The funeral was on Friday. Usually
by Friday, I've got a really good idea what I'm
writing about. I'm deep into my research, my notes are
a mess, but I've got a vision. I didn't when
I got up Friday morning, knowing I was going to
(21:47):
spend most of the day in the car. I'd read
half a book and then decided I didn't want to
write about it, and I didn't have any other ideas.
But when I got home that night, I was thinking
about the summer of nineteen sixty seven. I mean, I
started thinking about it because I'd gone out of my
way to go stand in a strip mall parking lot,
(22:09):
just to see if it made me feel anything because
a Nazi got shot there in August of nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
It didn't.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
But thinking back to sitting there in those little plastic
chairs at the cemetery, reminiscing about Nazi rallies and police riots,
where we'd bumped into each other over the years, chatting
about current events, parting ways with well wishes for continued
safety at the rallies. We'll probably see each other in
the future. I was thinking about the whole summer. I
(22:40):
was thinking about this summer, the summer of twenty twenty,
the summer of twenty seventeen, and the summer of nineteen
sixty seven. They have a lot in common. The summer
of nineteen sixty seven got the nickname the Long Hot
Summer because between April and August of nineteen sixty seven
(23:01):
there were outbreaks of violent unrest and over one hundred
cities across the country. I'm not gonna call them race riots,
because what does that even mean? A race riot, racial tension,
racial violence, racial unrest. These are useless terms designed to
erase the reasons people were protesting and the motivation for
(23:24):
the violent reactions to those protests from law enforcement. But
it was a long, hot summer, and I wonder if
we're due for one.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Two.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
I got home, I was thinking about Darryl Lamont Jenkins.
He's Laura's longtime friend and collaborator, the founder of One
People's Project. He gave such a beautiful eulogy the funeral.
I hadn't seen him in years. Those years have not
been kind to most of us. But as we said
our goodbyes, he told me he was headed back out
(24:11):
to Delaney Hall to cover the protests outside the iced
attention facility in Newark, New Jersey. Reports of cruel treatment
inside the facility and hunger strikes of sparked protests outside
the facility, and things have been getting pretty violent. Federal
agents and state police are hurting people inside the facility
(24:33):
and outside on the streets. On Saturday, New Jersey Governor
Mikey Cheryl gave a press conference about the ongoing situation.
Speaker 5 (24:44):
We know that people from outside the state have been
interfering in the protests and escalating them. Five of the
six people arrested last night by state police were from
outside New Jersey and some national extremist groups have become
involved in the protests here today, to the people coming
from out of state to create chaos and dangerous situations,
(25:05):
you should not be.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Here outside agitators. Huh, that's what she's going with. It's
such a tired trope. I mean, you hear it all
the time. It's very popular. A lot of people believe
in it, sort of no true Scotsman fallacy for protesters
(25:27):
you don't like, And I'm sure you can come up
with a few anecdotes to support a belief in the
idea that all misbehavior at political protests is the work
of a dastardly outsider. But it isn't true. You can
believe it, you can feel it, but the data shows
it's not true. And I would argue it wouldn't matter
(25:51):
if it were. It's a concept we've always carried with us,
this desire to blame unknown outsiders for bad things that
happen in our communities. We are good people. Our home
is a good place. Bad things do not happen here
because we are good people. We treat our minorities well.
(26:11):
If something bad has happened here, it's because some wicked
external force has disrupted our peaceful way of life. Right.
We heard it all the time in the summer of
twenty twenty. Anytime a protest went sideways, it was outside agitators.
There's no need to point the finger at police violence,
because then we'd have to talk about the fact that
(26:33):
that's what the protests are about. So just blame someone
from out of town. But the idea wasn't new then.
In twenty twenty, plenty of commentators pointed to the history
of the phrase and the Civil rights movement. Southern cities
were all quite sure that their black populations had been
perfectly content until those rabble rousers showed up. Black panthers
(26:58):
and communists and big city agitators from up north, and
before that, well, factory workers and farm workers and working
class people all over the country in the nineteen twenties
and thirties never would have organized for better working conditions
if not for those damned socialists and communists and Bolsheviks
and paid professional organizers coming from the big cities to
stir up trouble. Everybody was perfectly satisfied with the way
(27:21):
things were before those outsiders showed up. Nobody here in
our town ever wanted a union, ever wanted integration, ever
wanted civil rights, ever wanted freedom until those outsiders came
to town. I was well familiar with the way the
trope worked in the sixties against civil rights activists, and
(27:44):
I asked my husband where he thought it came from,
and he suggested the thirties, recalling that it was leveraged
against union organizers. We were both right, but we were
both wrong. I mean, the idea is probably as old
as civilization itself. Right, We've always feared the outsider, the
(28:05):
unknown change. But I was curious about the phrase, so
I popped the words outside agitators into the search bar
in a few places where I might find old newspapers
and books and magazines, it's slavery. The answer is slavery.
(28:28):
The American concept of the outside agitator was invented to justify, defend, protect,
and uphold the institution of chattel slavery. The phrase starts
occurring with the exact same meaning it holds today, all
of a sudden in the mid eighteen fifties. Most of
(28:48):
the uses of the phrase I found in the mid
eighteen fifties were specifically in reference to Kansas at the
height of the Bleeding Kansas Conflict, the bloody battle over
whether Kansas would be admitted as a free ray slave state. Now,
in the eighteen fifties, he wasn't yet as famous as
he would go on to become. But they're talking about
(29:10):
people like John Brown. The original outside agitator in American
politics is John Brown, and the phrase became a part
of the standard vocabulary for talking about meddlesome abolitionists in
the years leading up to the Civil War. In April
of eighteen sixty, almost exactly a year before the war began,
(29:33):
Caleb Cushing, a Democratic politician from Massachusetts, gave a speech
that was published in quite a few newspapers. He was
ostensibly responding to a rather odd book, a pro abolition
text written by an extremely racist white Southerner, Hinton Helper's book,
(29:55):
The Impending Crisis of the South made a purely economic
argument for abolition without recognizing any inherent dignity or humanity
in black people. But that's a strange journey for another day,
because it barely matters what Helper wrote, because Cushing's speech
quickly went off the rails and became a rebuttal to
(30:15):
abolitionists thought more generally right. So he starts out talking
about this book, but really he's just saying all abolitionists
are incoherent and wrong. I can kind of tell he's
not speaking to Hinton's book directly, because he makes a
snide remark about how all abolitionists love Toussaint l'vature, and
(30:38):
I don't think a white supremacist wrote fondly about the
hero of the Haitian Revolution. Nevertheless, in his speech, Cushing
rails against the foolish abolitionists, saying, quote, all these visionary,
scatterbrained abolitionists who parade up and down the country with
their imaginary self conceited, self sufficient, omniscience and omnipotence, All
(31:00):
these outside agitators of slavery have given us no solution. Abolish, abolish,
they say, but they have no solution how to do it.
And when the war was over and slavery had been abolished,
well it was the outside agitator again, stirring up trouble
(31:21):
among these newly freed populations of the South. In an
October eighteen sixty five issue of the Baton Rouge tri
Weekly Gazette, a bizarre op ed opens with the bold
claim that the white Southerner cares deeply about the best
interests of the newly freed black population. Quote this, we
(31:43):
believe every intelligent member of the colored race will concede,
nor can they, in reality be made to feel otherwise,
notwithstanding all the undue interference to the contrary on the
part of outside political agitators, who from selfish and unworthy
motives would fain delude the color into the belief that
they are their best and truest friends. So the author
(32:07):
of this piece is saying, we you are former slave masters,
are your best and truest friends. These outside political agitators,
these abolitionists, these people from the north who wanted to
free you, they're lying to you. They have an ulterior
motive in manipulating you. The article warns the freed population
(32:30):
that things will be worse for them if they trust
those awful northern agitators. Quote If, on the other hand,
it should unfortunately turn out that evil counsels are allowed
to prevail, and the Blacks be placed in a position
to be bandied about as a mere football in the
hands of artful demagogues, they will make for themselves a
bed of thorns. There's no author listed I assume it
(32:55):
was written by the paper's editor. But it's a fascinating
document language that I don't feel great about repeating, but
I think it's important. Here here in eighteen sixty five,
some Louisiana newspapermen is warning the newly freed black population.
But if they don't cozy up to their former masters
(33:15):
and tow the line, if they start getting big ideas
about equality and get in bed with these big city
northerners and their promises, they'll be replaced by immigrants. I mean,
this could have been written today. You just swap a
few words out, dumb it down a little bit because
people aren't quite so literate. These are reactionaries saying to
(33:38):
the black population, stay in your place, or things will
be worse for you. Right, they're pitting them against a
different oppressed population, in this case Irish immigrants. It's really
no different than the way they talk to black people
today about Latin immigrants. Stay in your place, deal with
(34:00):
what you can get, because someone else will do the
job cheaper, will exploit someone else. If we have to quote,
if the Negro would remain here as an inferior, not
demand too much, and perform for reasonable compensation end quote,
He'll be fine. But if he quote listens to the
(34:23):
few fanatics who preach political and social equality to him
and aspires to govern rather than be governed, end quote,
he'll be driven out by the flood of immigration. The
author is threatening to replace freed slave labor with cheap
and abundant Irish labor. Again, this is the way the
(34:44):
Republican Party talks to Black voters about Latin immigration. The
people who are preaching political and social equality, right the
Democrat Party with their DEI, they're bringing in the illegals
that are replacing you. It's the same one hundred and
fifty years later, they're saying the same thing. I could
(35:06):
go on. There's an article in March of eighteen sixty
seven in The Times picky un in New Orleans blaming
a disturbance at the polls on outside agitators. The city
was at the time rather violently resisting reconstruction again and
again from the eighteen fifties through the twenty twenties. The
(35:29):
outside agitator is blamed for instigating the conflict. Without this outsider,
everyone would be happy with the way things are. The
people here were fine with slavery. They were fine with exploitation,
they were fine with low wages, they were fine with segregation,
they were fine with police brutality, they were fine with
people being abused in a detention center. Everyone here was
(35:51):
fine until someone came down here and put ideas in
their heads. They're being manipulated. They don't want these things
on their own accord. The idea took shape in defense
(36:20):
of slavery, and that's still its truest form. It's not
just this general idea that outsiders are to blame for
our problems, and the American conception of the outside agitator,
it carries with it the baggage of the eighteen fifties,
this idea that the black population just isn't smart enough
(36:42):
to want anything, to do anything, to organize themselves in
any particular way, unless they've been riled up and pointed
in a particular direction. And obviously that's not true. Obviously
all people have intrinsic value and dignity and the desire
for freedom. But that's what you're saying when you look
(37:03):
at these uprisings in nineteen sixty seven and you say, well,
that's the work of outside agitators. That's what you're saying,
when you look at the uprisings in twenty twenty and
you say that that was the work of outside agitators,
you're saying that people cannot look around themselves where they live,
in their own lives and see injustice and want something else.
(37:29):
Before the long hot summer of nineteen sixty seven was
even over, President Lyndon Johnson established the National Advisory Commission
on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission after
its chairman, Otto Kerner. Johnson wanted to get to the
bottom of these riots, what's causing them, whose fault were they,
(37:49):
and how can we make them stop. Johnson was a
big believer in the outside agitator theory. In nineteen sixty eight,
the Commission released a four hund page report. The report
was based on months of investigation, including sending teams of
field researchers to twenty three cities where unrest had occurred.
(38:10):
Those field teams interviewed more than twelve hundred people, people
who'd been arrested, people who'd watched the riots through the
living room windows, city officials, police officers, national guardsmen, leaders
in the Black Power movement. They talked to people on
all sides and people on no side, And they took
formal depositions from another one hundred or so people and
(38:31):
solicited testimony from experts in various fields. Do you know
what they found? Do you know what this government appointed
commission concluded was the cause of these one hundred sum
odd race riots in the summer of nineteen sixty seven. Racism,
(38:52):
the unrest was the result of systemic inequality. That's what
the report says. In the report's introduction, they put it
pretty plainly, quote, our nation is moving toward two societies,
one black, one white, separate and unequal. Reaction to last
(39:13):
summer's disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division.
Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life.
They now threaten the future of every American. This deepening
racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed.
Choice is still possible now it was the nineteen sixties.
(39:39):
So throughout the report there's language that isn't what I
would choose today. But I was shocked that a government
report in nineteen sixty eight came to conclusions like this.
I mean, the conclusions and the recommendations of this report
are so far left of the current Democratic Party PLATF
(40:01):
that you'd get kicked out. You couldn't run on this,
You couldn't say this in public. The Commission recommended as
a solution for the problems identified in the report, massive
investment in the black community, jobs, education, mass transit, millions
(40:22):
of new units of affordable housing, police reform, expanding anti
discrimination laws and enforcement, giving the EEOC and Title seven
more teeth, Getting the Department of Labor to work with
unions to expand black membership in trade unions and apprentice programs.
Expanding the civil service focusing on recruiting, hiring, and training
people from disadvantaged backgrounds, creating a million new public sector jobs,
(40:47):
Federal reimbursement for private sector employees engaging in certain job
training programs, Committing to actually ending segregation, using federal funds
to hire and train teachers to ensure that all school
districts and all students have high quality educators. Expanding access
to early childhood education, universal preschool, more financial assistance for
(41:10):
higher education, Removing restrictions on welfare eligibility, and establishing a
system of income supplementation that would lift all working people
and mothers who do not work out of poverty quote
to aid in saving children from the prison of poverty
that has held their parents. Are you fucking kidding me?
(41:33):
Nineteen sixty eight, Donald Trump would have had the FBI
raid Auto Kerner's home at four am and charged him
with conspiracy to commit DEI. And in nineteen sixty eight
President Lyndon Johnson wasn't super pleased with the Commission's findings.
He preferred the outside agitator narrative. It's easy to arrest
(41:57):
a scapegoat, It's much harder to invest in black communities,
I guess.
Speaker 3 (42:04):
And Bobby just gave hell today for not carrying out
the Turner Commission study. Well, I didn't realize when I
parted Turner that this son of a betch from New York,
Lindsay would take charge. He did take charge, and he
recommended I hire two and a half million people on
federal payroll. And I just I have not worried to
(42:27):
reflect on Kerner and criticize the commission. At the same time,
I couldn't embrace it because I've got a budget.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
That's LBJ. In March of nineteen sixty eight, complaining to
Dick Daily, the mayor of Chicago, The Bobby he's referring
to here is Robert F. Kennedy Senior, who at the
time was challenging Johnson in the presidential primary. Johnson withdrew
from the election a few weeks later, and Kennedy was
assassinated in June. A Democratic nominee ended up being Hubert Humphrey,
(43:03):
and segregationist Third Party Canada George Wallace got way too
many votes for my taste, and Richard Nixon ended up
being the president. It was a weird year, but the
commission found that outside agitators didn't cause the unrest. They
weren't even a factor. They were, by and large, according
(43:25):
to the data, not even real. Across the data collected,
ninety percent of people who'd been arrested in these incidents
were local residents. Of that remaining ten percent of arrestees
whose home address didn't match the city where they were arrested,
most of them resided in the Greater Metropolitan Area. One
(43:50):
percent of people arrested during all the civil disturbances in
nineteen sixty seven resided in a state other than the
one where they were arrested. The outside agitator is a myth.
It's a story we tell ourselves because the real answer
is too scary or too expensive, or it implicates us.
(44:13):
The root cause of those uprisings was systemic racial inequality.
Nobody was tricked into believing that people just looked around
their own lives and saw what was happening. The solution
the Commission identified was investing in making society more equal.
(44:34):
Out of towners didn't throw the first rock, and it
wouldn't have mattered if they did. But I think I
do have to say a good word for the outside agitator,
not this imaginary violent instigator, but the protester who felt
moved to show up somewhere where harm was being done
(44:55):
to a stranger. It feels a little cliche, I think,
to quote doctor Martin Luther King, Junior, But maybe that's
something that I feel because a lot of work was
invested in making me feel that way. His message has
been deluded and defanged by this constant stream of bland,
(45:15):
out of context quotes. When doctor King said injustice anywhere
is a threat to justice everywhere, he wasn't asking you
to write your congressmen about some faraway harm. He was
responding directly to allegations that he personally was an outside
Agitator from his letter from Birmingham jail. Quote, I am
(45:41):
in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets
of the eighth century BC left their villages and carried
there thus saith the Lord far beyond the boundaries of
their hometowns. And just as the apostle Paul left his
village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ
to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so
am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond
(46:05):
my hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the
Macedonian call forraid. Moreover, I am cognizant of the inner
relatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly
by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens
in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
(46:27):
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied
in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly
affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live
with the narrow, provincial outside agitator idea. Anyone who lives
inside the United States can never be considered an outsider
(46:49):
anywhere within its bounds. So when I say the trope
of the outside agitator as a racist myth, I mean
the idea that all unrest is caused by an outsider
who stirs up trouble that would otherwise not have existed.
That's a myth. No one's riling up the locals and
(47:10):
tricking them into riding. That's fake. But none of this
contradicts the very real contributions to the struggle from people
who saw injustice and went where that injustice was. They
didn't provoke otherwise docile locals to take action against their will.
They stood shoulder to shoulder with people who already fighting
(47:34):
because they all wanted the same thing. People like Viola Luzo,
the white mother from Detroit who drove down to Alabama
to volunteer with the march to Montgomery. She wasn't announcede hegitator.
Her own husband tried to convince her that's what she
was doing. He told her before she left, it's not
your fight. And do you remember what she told him.
(47:59):
It's everybody's fight. It's everybody's fight. And she fought that
fight and she died for it. James Reed Jonathan Daniels,
James Cheney, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman. They went where the
fight was because they believed they had a duty to
do something about it, and they were martyred for it,
(48:22):
and the klansmen who killed them called them outside agitators.
Thousands and thousands of people got on buses and trains
and took turns driving all night to get to the
Deep South to do their part. Back then, those aren't
outside agitators. Those are people who believed the world could
(48:45):
be good. You have to believe that too. We have
the same duty today. You can't sit idly by in
your hometown and not be concerned about what happens outside
of it. Because we are caught in that inescapable network
of mutuality. We are tied in that single garment of destiny.
(49:07):
They want you to believe it's impossible, or maybe just immoral,
to care about things that don't directly affect you. They
want you to believe it's wrong, it's somehow suspect, maybe
even a crime, to cross state lines to show you
care about what happens to our neighbors. Because the people
being abducted and abused by my federal government are my neighbors,
(49:32):
no matter where they're being snatched up. So the outside
agitator isn't real. But at the same time, maybe we
all have a moral duty to be the outside agitator
of their nightmares. Just a quick note before you finish
(50:02):
writing me that email. I have used the name Stokely
Carmichael throughout this story for clarity's sake, because that was
his name the time of these events. Stokely Carmichael changed
his name to Kuame Turre in nineteen sixty nine. The
majority of the sources I used for this episode, including
oral histories from those who knew him, used Quame Tourey's
former name when writing or speaking about this time period.
(50:26):
I understand some sources do opt to use his chosen
name throughout, regardless of the time period being discussed, but
since he was not the primary subject of the episode,
it seemed more straightforward to use the name that you
would find if you clicked through to view any of
the linked sources. Nashville cop John Sarrace died in February
of twenty twenty five. He was eighty seven years old.
(50:48):
According to a statement from the Rutherfurd County Sheriff's office.
He died after a thirteen days stay in the hospital
due to complications from an existing medical condition. Sarrace was
in the sheriff's custody when he died, following his arrest
in January of twenty twenty five on charges of reckless
homicide related to the shooting death of his wife, Sharon Rodgers.
Sarrace and of course, segregationist lawyer and bathtub sculptor Jack Kershaw,
(51:14):
died at the age of ninety six in twenty ten.
George Ware outlived him by two years. Weird Little Guys
It's a production of Coolshoe Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched,
written and recorded by me, Molly Conger Park. Executive producers
are Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. The show is edited
(51:37):
by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was
composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird
Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely
read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guy's subreddit. Just don't post
anything that's going to make you one of my weird
little guys.
Coll Zone Media. On May twenty second, nineteen sixty seven,
George ware took the stand in a crowded courtroom in Nashville, Tennessee.
Whare was twenty seven years old. He had graduated from
Tuskegee University with a master's degree in biochemistry in nineteen
(00:23):
sixty five, but he quickly abandoned the job he got
up north after graduation for something he thought was more important.
He went to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
as an aide to chairman Stokely Carmichael, and by nineteen
sixty seven he was planning Carmichael's college speaking tour as
the national coordinator of campus programs. That was the job
(00:47):
where was doing when he'd been arrested in Nashville a
few weeks earlier. On the stand, he calmly denied having
incited a riot. He was cross examined for hours about
the beating he'd endured in the hands of the Nashville police.
He denied having called the officers monkies, and he denied
(01:09):
egging the crowd of black college students on by yelling
things like let's get the white police. He had no
idea who owned the pistol police had charged him with
carrying How could he know he hadn't carried it at all?
No one had the police found the gun in someone
(01:30):
else's car that he'd ridden in briefly that day. Criminal
charges related to his arrest in April were put on
hold pending a verdict in this lawsuit, which challenged the
constitutionality of Tennessee's riot and disorderly conduct statutes. Everything was
still in limbo when George Ware returned to Nashville in
August of nineteen sixty seven, but some people weren't content
(01:54):
to wait. They wanted that terrible outside agitator arrested immediately,
so segregationist lawyer Jack Kershaw convinced a local judge to
arrest the civil rights activist on a trumped up charge
of sedition. I'm Molly Conger and this it's weird, little guys.
(02:35):
Today we're circling back to a story that i'd cut
from an older episode. I was sorry to have cut
it then, but it just didn't feel like there was
a neat spot for it in the episodes I was
writing about Jack Kershaw in April. It's funny, though I'm
never done with any of these stories. I'm never really
(02:56):
putting them to bed at the end of a series.
I still keep tabs on old characters and storylines. I'm
keeping an eye out for echoes of these stories in
current events, just waiting to weave those loose ends back in.
They all fit together, sometimes in surprising ways. And I
(03:18):
arrived back at this story this week in a roundabout
sort of way. The actual story here is fairly brief.
I'd put it off to the side, thinking maybe I'd
have time to do a minisot about it one day.
I mean, Jack Kershaw having Stokely Carmichael's aid arrested for
sedition is a wild thing to stumble across and then
(03:41):
just discard. So in the summer of nineteen sixty seven,
Saint Anselm's Episcopal Chapel and Student Center in Nashville received
a small government grant. The city had received a pot
of federal funding for an ty poverty initiatives, and grants
(04:02):
were awarded to various programs at the local level. Nashville
gave a few thousand dollars to Saint Anselm's to run
a summer program for black youth. They called it Liberations School,
and most of the volunteers of the school were also
organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNICK. The
(04:23):
summer program at Saint Anselm's borrowed from curriculums SNICK had
already used successfully in their Freedom School programs during the
Freedom Summer of nineteen sixty four. The Liberation's School opened
its doors in late June of nineteen sixty seven. By
early August, the program's insurer had dropped them, and the
(04:43):
Liberations School was shut down. A Nashville Police captain named
John Sarrace had complained that the school was a hotbed
of anti white hatred and that SNICK volunteers were using
the program to indoctrinate children and foment rebellion. But how
on earth did one silly little complaint end up the
(05:04):
subject of Senate hearings, New York Times headlines, and a
sedition charge. Because John Sarace made his silly little complaint
in a Senate hearing on Civil disorders in August of
nineteen sixty seven, the Senate Judiciary Committee was already hearing
testimony about the civil unrest that had shaken the country
(05:26):
that summer. Sarach, as the head of Nashville Police's intelligence
division went to Washington to testify about a riot that
had taken place in Nashville in April, and John Sarach
blamed SNICK for those riots. He was having hard time
moving on, so when he saw volunteers from that organization
(05:47):
tutoring children in a church, he told the Senate committee
that the group was using federal funds to train ten
year olds how to engage in violent riots. They weren't.
They weren't doing that, I mean, obviously right. Federal officials
(06:08):
visited the school and found no evidence of Sarach's claims,
but it didn't matter. He'd already won. The volunteers from
SNICK were hardly strangers who attempts to thwart their efforts,
so they adapted. They couldn't use the church anymore, but
kids can learn anywhere, and they moved the classes to
(06:30):
a public park. In the summer of nineteen sixty seven,
SNICK was involved in active litigation against the city of Nashville.
The trial had been held in May, but the panel
of judges wouldn't issue their decision until October. Back in April,
there had been several days of unrest that coincided with
(06:51):
the week that stokely Carmichael gave speeches at three Nashville
area colleges. This is often abbreviated as race riots ensued
after a speech from Stokely Carmichael or Stokely Carmichael gave
a speech that sparked riots, But that isn't entirely true.
(07:13):
The civil disorder in Nashville in April of nineteen sixty
seven started at a bar across the street from Fisk University,
where Carmichael had given a speech several days earlier. So
I think it's less that his speech directly caused police
to overreact to a drunk bar patron, leading to a
(07:35):
crowd of angry college students escalating into police responding poorly
to that crowd of protesters. And it's more likely that
Stokely Carmichael chose to give his speeches in places where
conditions like this already existed. He's not telling those black
college students in Tennessee that racism exists and the police
(07:56):
treat them unfairly. He's there talking to them because they
already know that. It's likely that whatever happened there that
weekend would have happened anyway. Stokely Carmichael's speech didn't cause
this to happen, and whatever kicked it off, the violence
that followed wasn't unique. It happened in more than one
(08:20):
hundred other cities that summer, and Stokely Carmichael wasn't giving
speeches in all those towns, but in Nashville and in
quite a few other cities, SNICK got the blame. Several
of the people arrested that weekend in Nashville were SNICK organizers,
(08:41):
including George Ware. The group quickly filed a lawsuit challenging
the constitutionality of the state's riot and disorderly conduct laws,
and Where's criminal charges were put on hold pending the
outcome of the lawsuit. So in Where arrived in Nashville
in August of nineteen sixty seven, he hadn't actually been
indicted yet on the charges from his April arrest. He
(09:05):
had testified at the civil trial in May, but the
case wasn't decided yet. And here's where the newspaper reports
get a little spotty. I mean, it's strange. Actually there's
information that's missing here, and no one seems to acknowledge it.
On August twenty first, nineteen sixty seven, George Ware was
(09:28):
the guest lecturer at the Liberations School in the Park,
and it seems like reporters were not allowed close enough
to actually hear what he said to the children. Evening
editions of local newspapers published on August twenty first say
no reporter got close enough to hear anything until the
very end of the lesson, and no reporter published anything
(09:51):
that sounded particularly inflammatory. But the next morning, George Ware
was arrested. According to those same newspapers, two local attorneys
in Nashville had gone to a judge to request that
an arrest warrant be issued on a charge of sedition.
(10:12):
Jack Kershaw told reporters that he and his friend Charles
Galbraith had acted on their own as citizens, a cryptic
sort of comment that he doesn't elaborate on, but Kershaw
says they took it upon themselves as private citizens to
petition Judge Daniel Boone, that is a real judge, apparently,
(10:34):
to issue this arrest warrant. So these same papers that
had just the day before all agreed that no reporter
got close enough to hear what was said at the
Liberation School appearance. They're now publishing Jack Kershaw's claim that
George Ware had made a very inflammatory comment to a newsman.
(10:57):
The AP story says, without evidence or outside corroboration quote,
Gershaw said the warrant was based in part on Where's
statement to newsmen that black people have to achieve power
by any means necessary. I mean, first of all, we
have to acknowledge that that's a really innocuous statement. But
(11:18):
that's apparently not the issue here. So maybe George Ware
said this in an interview he gave after his speech.
That's totally possible, right, But if he said it to
a reporter, Gershaw is saying this remark was given to
a newsman. If George Ware said this to a reporter,
(11:41):
why didn't anyone report it? It only appears in print
coming out of Jack Kershaw's mouth. No reporter published a
story about hearing George Ware say this or anything like
it in a speech or interview on August twenty first.
So Jack Kershaw made it up, fine, right, I mean,
(12:05):
if you listen to the Jack Kershaw episodes, you know
he's a liar. He's a racist and a liar. Of
course he would make something up about George Ware. What
difference does it make? It sounds like something George Ware
would say, and he had said much spicier stuff on
the record many times before. But this is so odd,
(12:32):
and the thing I think is the actual truth here
doesn't seem worth lying about unless you're very afraid of
being caught hanging out with civil rights activists.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
George Ware had said to me sometime a week or so,
I had him the man.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
He had.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
I decided to have a little snake fundraiser at my house,
and so we invited a number of my friends over
to just hang out, meet, to snack. People, get on
the list, contribute to money, people hoped.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
And where were these friends?
Speaker 3 (13:22):
Are these childhood.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Friends, friends from college, law school?
Speaker 4 (13:26):
They were maybe then current friends, some lawyers, some just
people on you and who weren't lawyers, the sort of
a liberal set of sort of a liberal.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Set, I thought, that's Reber Bolt, the white Nashville area
attorney who represented George Ware back then. The two were
good friends, and Bolt was involved in the civil rights
movement for many years in the mid nineteen sixties, George
(14:03):
Ware often stayed at Bolt's house when he was traveling
through the Nashville area.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
And what he's.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Getting at in that oral history recorded in twenty eighteen,
is that George ware did say whatever it was that
Jack Kershaw told that judge, but he didn't say it
to a reporter. He said it to State Legislator Charles Galbreth,
the other attorney who swore out the warrant with Kershawvalbreath
(14:34):
had somehow gotten an invitation to the fundraiser that they
were holding at Bolt's home this Saturday night before where
a speech on Monday, and Galbreth hadn't simply overheard this remark,
He'd approached where at the party and asked him to
explain the Black Power movement. Charles Galbreth and Jack Kershaw
(14:56):
set him up on purpose, and the the best they
could bait him into saying was We're going to win
by any means necessary. But Jack Kershaw managed to convince
Judge Daniel Boone that this again very innocuous statement somehow
met the standard for sedition a Tennessee state statute that
(15:20):
outlawed any advocating, abetting, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability,
or propriety of the overthrow or destruction of the United
States or Tennessee State government. Again, it just seems so
odd that Kershaw went with the by any means necessary,
(15:42):
comment and even stranger that he went for the sedition charge.
It just seems like there would have been easier ways
to catch him up. Declassified FBI files for Stokely Carmichael
and Snick show that J. H. R. Hoover was getting
multiple memos a day every day for weeks around this
time about the feasibility of charging Stokely Carmichael with sedition
(16:08):
after his recent trip to Cuba, a trip that George
Whare accompanied him on. So it's strange timing that Jack
Kershaw would invent a fake sedition case against Where the
same week that Jay Hadgar Hoover was blowing a gasket
about the impossibility of charging Stokely Carmichael with sedition. The
(16:32):
FEDS did strip both men of their passports that week,
though a weird coincidence. Maybe Where spent a few days
in the local jail before a pastor paid his five
thousand dollars bond. A week after his arrest, his attorneys
filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Tennessee's sedition law,
(16:55):
but they made it clear they'd dropped the case if
Where wasn't indicted. That same day, August twenty eighth, a
Florida congressman invoked Where's name and a speech on the
House floor. Representative William Kramer of Florida was a huge
proponent of the Anti Riot Act, a bill that would
pass the following year, and in this speech in August
(17:19):
of nineteen sixty seven, Kramer argued that the Riot Act
was necessary to thwart the outside agitators responsible for the
race riots that had been happening all summer, outside agitators
like Stokely Carmichael and George Ware. Kramer noted that the
pair had recently visited communist Cuba, and now where is
(17:42):
back in Nashville. Just a day later, a grand jury
in Tennessee declined to indict where on the sedition charge,
and the whole saga was over. Snick lost their lawsuit
against Nashville over the unrest in April. And Where did
end up getting indicted on the inciting a riot charge
for that incident? He paid a fifty dollars fine and
(18:07):
the sedition charge incident never really comes up again. It
was just a strange side quest. In my notes about
Jack Kershaw, the racist lawyer who built the world's ugliest
Confederate monument out of spare parts from a bathtub factory.
But if you'll indulge me for a minute, I want
(18:30):
to talk about how I ended up thinking about George
ware in nineteen sixty seven again this week, because again
I filed this away from minisode and then I moved on.
Wasn't writing about Jack Kershaw anymore. This little tidbit was
going to stay stuck in my notes, But these little
snippets of history keeps sneaking back up on me. If
(18:54):
you haven't already seen the other episode in your podcast
app of choice today, there is a brief tribute to
my friend Laura Sullivan. She passed away last month and
I went to her funeral last week. She was an
absolute legend in the field of anti fascist research and
a genuine force of nature. I mean, it's just it's
(19:16):
a huge loss for the whole world, even if you
didn't know her. After the funeral, sitting in a little
plastic chair in the reception space of the cemetery, we
were just chatting remembering Laura, of course, But given the
kind of person Laura was, you can probably guess that
it was a room full of people whose passions matched
(19:38):
hers tracking right wing extremism. I couldn't tell you how
the topic turned to George Lincoln Rockwell, but I swear
I wasn't the one that brought it up. Maybe because
we were gathered there to honor our friend, an anti
fascist whom we'd all loved dearly and lost too soon.
(19:58):
Maybe that reminded some one of Rockwell, the Nazi leader
assassinated by his own best friend. Because loving each other
is something we've always had Over the Nazis. They just
can't do it, but it's part of the fabric of
what we do. But of course, as soon as someone
(20:19):
brought up Rockwell, I offered up a few Rockwell facts
for the table. You know, I'm up to date on
my lore. I'd forgotten to tell you this listener's. But
George Lincoln Rockwell's assassin died on Christmas Day last year.
John Patler, who by then had perverted back to his
original Greek surname pat Solos, died two weeks shy of
(20:42):
his eighty eighth birthday. That whole story, how the son
of a Greek immigrant became an American Nazi, shot his
hero and lived out the last half of his life
in obscurity. That was all covered in a series of
episodes last fall. But I was thinking about Rockwell's death.
So on our way home from the few roll, my
friend God and I stopped off at a nearby landmark
(21:04):
of sorts, this strip mall where George Lincoln Rockwell was
assassinated in nineteen sixty seven. It's in Arlington, Virginia. It
was on the way home. I'd studied maps and pictures
of the area pretty extensively when I was writing about Rockwell,
but i'd never been. It turned out it was very unremarkable.
(21:27):
We took a selfie. The funeral was on Friday. Usually
by Friday, I've got a really good idea what I'm
writing about. I'm deep into my research, my notes are
a mess, but I've got a vision. I didn't when
I got up Friday morning, knowing I was going to
(21:47):
spend most of the day in the car. I'd read
half a book and then decided I didn't want to
write about it, and I didn't have any other ideas.
But when I got home that night, I was thinking
about the summer of nineteen sixty seven. I mean, I
started thinking about it because I'd gone out of my
way to go stand in a strip mall parking lot,
(22:09):
just to see if it made me feel anything because
a Nazi got shot there in August of nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
It didn't.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
But thinking back to sitting there in those little plastic
chairs at the cemetery, reminiscing about Nazi rallies and police riots,
where we'd bumped into each other over the years, chatting
about current events, parting ways with well wishes for continued
safety at the rallies. We'll probably see each other in
the future. I was thinking about the whole summer. I
(22:40):
was thinking about this summer, the summer of twenty twenty,
the summer of twenty seventeen, and the summer of nineteen
sixty seven. They have a lot in common. The summer
of nineteen sixty seven got the nickname the Long Hot
Summer because between April and August of nineteen sixty seven
(23:01):
there were outbreaks of violent unrest and over one hundred
cities across the country. I'm not gonna call them race riots,
because what does that even mean? A race riot, racial tension,
racial violence, racial unrest. These are useless terms designed to
erase the reasons people were protesting and the motivation for
(23:24):
the violent reactions to those protests from law enforcement. But
it was a long, hot summer, and I wonder if
we're due for one.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Two.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
I got home, I was thinking about Darryl Lamont Jenkins.
He's Laura's longtime friend and collaborator, the founder of One
People's Project. He gave such a beautiful eulogy the funeral.
I hadn't seen him in years. Those years have not
been kind to most of us. But as we said
our goodbyes, he told me he was headed back out
(24:11):
to Delaney Hall to cover the protests outside the iced
attention facility in Newark, New Jersey. Reports of cruel treatment
inside the facility and hunger strikes of sparked protests outside
the facility, and things have been getting pretty violent. Federal
agents and state police are hurting people inside the facility
(24:33):
and outside on the streets. On Saturday, New Jersey Governor
Mikey Cheryl gave a press conference about the ongoing situation.
Speaker 5 (24:44):
We know that people from outside the state have been
interfering in the protests and escalating them. Five of the
six people arrested last night by state police were from
outside New Jersey and some national extremist groups have become
involved in the protests here today, to the people coming
from out of state to create chaos and dangerous situations,
(25:05):
you should not be.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Here outside agitators. Huh, that's what she's going with. It's
such a tired trope. I mean, you hear it all
the time. It's very popular. A lot of people believe
in it, sort of no true Scotsman fallacy for protesters
(25:27):
you don't like, And I'm sure you can come up
with a few anecdotes to support a belief in the
idea that all misbehavior at political protests is the work
of a dastardly outsider. But it isn't true. You can
believe it, you can feel it, but the data shows
it's not true. And I would argue it wouldn't matter
(25:51):
if it were. It's a concept we've always carried with us,
this desire to blame unknown outsiders for bad things that
happen in our communities. We are good people. Our home
is a good place. Bad things do not happen here
because we are good people. We treat our minorities well.
(26:11):
If something bad has happened here, it's because some wicked
external force has disrupted our peaceful way of life. Right.
We heard it all the time in the summer of
twenty twenty. Anytime a protest went sideways, it was outside agitators.
There's no need to point the finger at police violence,
because then we'd have to talk about the fact that
(26:33):
that's what the protests are about. So just blame someone
from out of town. But the idea wasn't new then.
In twenty twenty, plenty of commentators pointed to the history
of the phrase and the Civil rights movement. Southern cities
were all quite sure that their black populations had been
perfectly content until those rabble rousers showed up. Black panthers
(26:58):
and communists and big city agitators from up north, and
before that, well, factory workers and farm workers and working
class people all over the country in the nineteen twenties
and thirties never would have organized for better working conditions
if not for those damned socialists and communists and Bolsheviks
and paid professional organizers coming from the big cities to
stir up trouble. Everybody was perfectly satisfied with the way
(27:21):
things were before those outsiders showed up. Nobody here in
our town ever wanted a union, ever wanted integration, ever
wanted civil rights, ever wanted freedom until those outsiders came
to town. I was well familiar with the way the
trope worked in the sixties against civil rights activists, and
(27:44):
I asked my husband where he thought it came from,
and he suggested the thirties, recalling that it was leveraged
against union organizers. We were both right, but we were
both wrong. I mean, the idea is probably as old
as civilization itself. Right, We've always feared the outsider, the
(28:05):
unknown change. But I was curious about the phrase, so
I popped the words outside agitators into the search bar
in a few places where I might find old newspapers
and books and magazines, it's slavery. The answer is slavery.
(28:28):
The American concept of the outside agitator was invented to justify, defend, protect,
and uphold the institution of chattel slavery. The phrase starts
occurring with the exact same meaning it holds today, all
of a sudden in the mid eighteen fifties. Most of
(28:48):
the uses of the phrase I found in the mid
eighteen fifties were specifically in reference to Kansas at the
height of the Bleeding Kansas Conflict, the bloody battle over
whether Kansas would be admitted as a free ray slave state. Now,
in the eighteen fifties, he wasn't yet as famous as
he would go on to become. But they're talking about
(29:10):
people like John Brown. The original outside agitator in American
politics is John Brown, and the phrase became a part
of the standard vocabulary for talking about meddlesome abolitionists in
the years leading up to the Civil War. In April
of eighteen sixty, almost exactly a year before the war began,
(29:33):
Caleb Cushing, a Democratic politician from Massachusetts, gave a speech
that was published in quite a few newspapers. He was
ostensibly responding to a rather odd book, a pro abolition
text written by an extremely racist white Southerner, Hinton Helper's book,
(29:55):
The Impending Crisis of the South made a purely economic
argument for abolition without recognizing any inherent dignity or humanity
in black people. But that's a strange journey for another day,
because it barely matters what Helper wrote, because Cushing's speech
quickly went off the rails and became a rebuttal to
(30:15):
abolitionists thought more generally right. So he starts out talking
about this book, but really he's just saying all abolitionists
are incoherent and wrong. I can kind of tell he's
not speaking to Hinton's book directly, because he makes a
snide remark about how all abolitionists love Toussaint l'vature, and
(30:38):
I don't think a white supremacist wrote fondly about the
hero of the Haitian Revolution. Nevertheless, in his speech, Cushing
rails against the foolish abolitionists, saying, quote, all these visionary,
scatterbrained abolitionists who parade up and down the country with
their imaginary self conceited, self sufficient, omniscience and omnipotence, All
(31:00):
these outside agitators of slavery have given us no solution. Abolish, abolish,
they say, but they have no solution how to do it.
And when the war was over and slavery had been abolished,
well it was the outside agitator again, stirring up trouble
(31:21):
among these newly freed populations of the South. In an
October eighteen sixty five issue of the Baton Rouge tri
Weekly Gazette, a bizarre op ed opens with the bold
claim that the white Southerner cares deeply about the best
interests of the newly freed black population. Quote this, we
(31:43):
believe every intelligent member of the colored race will concede,
nor can they, in reality be made to feel otherwise,
notwithstanding all the undue interference to the contrary on the
part of outside political agitators, who from selfish and unworthy
motives would fain delude the color into the belief that
they are their best and truest friends. So the author
(32:07):
of this piece is saying, we you are former slave masters,
are your best and truest friends. These outside political agitators,
these abolitionists, these people from the north who wanted to
free you, they're lying to you. They have an ulterior
motive in manipulating you. The article warns the freed population
(32:30):
that things will be worse for them if they trust
those awful northern agitators. Quote If, on the other hand,
it should unfortunately turn out that evil counsels are allowed
to prevail, and the Blacks be placed in a position
to be bandied about as a mere football in the
hands of artful demagogues, they will make for themselves a
bed of thorns. There's no author listed I assume it
(32:55):
was written by the paper's editor. But it's a fascinating
document language that I don't feel great about repeating, but
I think it's important. Here here in eighteen sixty five,
some Louisiana newspapermen is warning the newly freed black population.
But if they don't cozy up to their former masters
(33:15):
and tow the line, if they start getting big ideas
about equality and get in bed with these big city
northerners and their promises, they'll be replaced by immigrants. I mean,
this could have been written today. You just swap a
few words out, dumb it down a little bit because
people aren't quite so literate. These are reactionaries saying to
(33:38):
the black population, stay in your place, or things will
be worse for you. Right, they're pitting them against a
different oppressed population, in this case Irish immigrants. It's really
no different than the way they talk to black people
today about Latin immigrants. Stay in your place, deal with
(34:00):
what you can get, because someone else will do the
job cheaper, will exploit someone else. If we have to quote,
if the Negro would remain here as an inferior, not
demand too much, and perform for reasonable compensation end quote,
He'll be fine. But if he quote listens to the
(34:23):
few fanatics who preach political and social equality to him
and aspires to govern rather than be governed, end quote,
he'll be driven out by the flood of immigration. The
author is threatening to replace freed slave labor with cheap
and abundant Irish labor. Again, this is the way the
(34:44):
Republican Party talks to Black voters about Latin immigration. The
people who are preaching political and social equality, right the
Democrat Party with their DEI, they're bringing in the illegals
that are replacing you. It's the same one hundred and
fifty years later, they're saying the same thing. I could
(35:06):
go on. There's an article in March of eighteen sixty
seven in The Times picky un in New Orleans blaming
a disturbance at the polls on outside agitators. The city
was at the time rather violently resisting reconstruction again and
again from the eighteen fifties through the twenty twenties. The
(35:29):
outside agitator is blamed for instigating the conflict. Without this outsider,
everyone would be happy with the way things are. The
people here were fine with slavery. They were fine with exploitation,
they were fine with low wages, they were fine with segregation,
they were fine with police brutality, they were fine with
people being abused in a detention center. Everyone here was
(35:51):
fine until someone came down here and put ideas in
their heads. They're being manipulated. They don't want these things
on their own accord. The idea took shape in defense
(36:20):
of slavery, and that's still its truest form. It's not
just this general idea that outsiders are to blame for
our problems, and the American conception of the outside agitator,
it carries with it the baggage of the eighteen fifties,
this idea that the black population just isn't smart enough
(36:42):
to want anything, to do anything, to organize themselves in
any particular way, unless they've been riled up and pointed
in a particular direction. And obviously that's not true. Obviously
all people have intrinsic value and dignity and the desire
for freedom. But that's what you're saying when you look
(37:03):
at these uprisings in nineteen sixty seven and you say, well,
that's the work of outside agitators. That's what you're saying,
when you look at the uprisings in twenty twenty and
you say that that was the work of outside agitators,
you're saying that people cannot look around themselves where they live,
in their own lives and see injustice and want something else.
(37:29):
Before the long hot summer of nineteen sixty seven was
even over, President Lyndon Johnson established the National Advisory Commission
on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission after
its chairman, Otto Kerner. Johnson wanted to get to the
bottom of these riots, what's causing them, whose fault were they,
(37:49):
and how can we make them stop. Johnson was a
big believer in the outside agitator theory. In nineteen sixty eight,
the Commission released a four hund page report. The report
was based on months of investigation, including sending teams of
field researchers to twenty three cities where unrest had occurred.
(38:10):
Those field teams interviewed more than twelve hundred people, people
who'd been arrested, people who'd watched the riots through the
living room windows, city officials, police officers, national guardsmen, leaders
in the Black Power movement. They talked to people on
all sides and people on no side, And they took
formal depositions from another one hundred or so people and
(38:31):
solicited testimony from experts in various fields. Do you know
what they found? Do you know what this government appointed
commission concluded was the cause of these one hundred sum
odd race riots in the summer of nineteen sixty seven. Racism,
(38:52):
the unrest was the result of systemic inequality. That's what
the report says. In the report's introduction, they put it
pretty plainly, quote, our nation is moving toward two societies,
one black, one white, separate and unequal. Reaction to last
(39:13):
summer's disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division.
Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life.
They now threaten the future of every American. This deepening
racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed.
Choice is still possible now it was the nineteen sixties.
(39:39):
So throughout the report there's language that isn't what I
would choose today. But I was shocked that a government
report in nineteen sixty eight came to conclusions like this.
I mean, the conclusions and the recommendations of this report
are so far left of the current Democratic Party PLATF
(40:01):
that you'd get kicked out. You couldn't run on this,
You couldn't say this in public. The Commission recommended as
a solution for the problems identified in the report, massive
investment in the black community, jobs, education, mass transit, millions
(40:22):
of new units of affordable housing, police reform, expanding anti
discrimination laws and enforcement, giving the EEOC and Title seven
more teeth, Getting the Department of Labor to work with
unions to expand black membership in trade unions and apprentice programs.
Expanding the civil service focusing on recruiting, hiring, and training
people from disadvantaged backgrounds, creating a million new public sector jobs,
(40:47):
Federal reimbursement for private sector employees engaging in certain job
training programs, Committing to actually ending segregation, using federal funds
to hire and train teachers to ensure that all school
districts and all students have high quality educators. Expanding access
to early childhood education, universal preschool, more financial assistance for
(41:10):
higher education, Removing restrictions on welfare eligibility, and establishing a
system of income supplementation that would lift all working people
and mothers who do not work out of poverty quote
to aid in saving children from the prison of poverty
that has held their parents. Are you fucking kidding me?
(41:33):
Nineteen sixty eight, Donald Trump would have had the FBI
raid Auto Kerner's home at four am and charged him
with conspiracy to commit DEI. And in nineteen sixty eight
President Lyndon Johnson wasn't super pleased with the Commission's findings.
He preferred the outside agitator narrative. It's easy to arrest
(41:57):
a scapegoat, It's much harder to invest in black communities,
I guess.
Speaker 3 (42:04):
And Bobby just gave hell today for not carrying out
the Turner Commission study. Well, I didn't realize when I
parted Turner that this son of a betch from New York,
Lindsay would take charge. He did take charge, and he
recommended I hire two and a half million people on
federal payroll. And I just I have not worried to
(42:27):
reflect on Kerner and criticize the commission. At the same time,
I couldn't embrace it because I've got a budget.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
That's LBJ. In March of nineteen sixty eight, complaining to
Dick Daily, the mayor of Chicago, The Bobby he's referring
to here is Robert F. Kennedy Senior, who at the
time was challenging Johnson in the presidential primary. Johnson withdrew
from the election a few weeks later, and Kennedy was
assassinated in June. A Democratic nominee ended up being Hubert Humphrey,
(43:03):
and segregationist Third Party Canada George Wallace got way too
many votes for my taste, and Richard Nixon ended up
being the president. It was a weird year, but the
commission found that outside agitators didn't cause the unrest. They
weren't even a factor. They were, by and large, according
(43:25):
to the data, not even real. Across the data collected,
ninety percent of people who'd been arrested in these incidents
were local residents. Of that remaining ten percent of arrestees
whose home address didn't match the city where they were arrested,
most of them resided in the Greater Metropolitan Area. One
(43:50):
percent of people arrested during all the civil disturbances in
nineteen sixty seven resided in a state other than the
one where they were arrested. The outside agitator is a myth.
It's a story we tell ourselves because the real answer
is too scary or too expensive, or it implicates us.
(44:13):
The root cause of those uprisings was systemic racial inequality.
Nobody was tricked into believing that people just looked around
their own lives and saw what was happening. The solution
the Commission identified was investing in making society more equal.
(44:34):
Out of towners didn't throw the first rock, and it
wouldn't have mattered if they did. But I think I
do have to say a good word for the outside agitator,
not this imaginary violent instigator, but the protester who felt
moved to show up somewhere where harm was being done
(44:55):
to a stranger. It feels a little cliche, I think,
to quote doctor Martin Luther King, Junior, But maybe that's
something that I feel because a lot of work was
invested in making me feel that way. His message has
been deluded and defanged by this constant stream of bland,
(45:15):
out of context quotes. When doctor King said injustice anywhere
is a threat to justice everywhere, he wasn't asking you
to write your congressmen about some faraway harm. He was
responding directly to allegations that he personally was an outside
Agitator from his letter from Birmingham jail. Quote, I am
(45:41):
in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets
of the eighth century BC left their villages and carried
there thus saith the Lord far beyond the boundaries of
their hometowns. And just as the apostle Paul left his
village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ
to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so
am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond
(46:05):
my hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the
Macedonian call forraid. Moreover, I am cognizant of the inner
relatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly
by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens
in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
(46:27):
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied
in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly
affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live
with the narrow, provincial outside agitator idea. Anyone who lives
inside the United States can never be considered an outsider
(46:49):
anywhere within its bounds. So when I say the trope
of the outside agitator as a racist myth, I mean
the idea that all unrest is caused by an outsider
who stirs up trouble that would otherwise not have existed.
That's a myth. No one's riling up the locals and
(47:10):
tricking them into riding. That's fake. But none of this
contradicts the very real contributions to the struggle from people
who saw injustice and went where that injustice was. They
didn't provoke otherwise docile locals to take action against their will.
They stood shoulder to shoulder with people who already fighting
(47:34):
because they all wanted the same thing. People like Viola Luzo,
the white mother from Detroit who drove down to Alabama
to volunteer with the march to Montgomery. She wasn't announcede hegitator.
Her own husband tried to convince her that's what she
was doing. He told her before she left, it's not
your fight. And do you remember what she told him.
(47:59):
It's everybody's fight. It's everybody's fight. And she fought that
fight and she died for it. James Reed Jonathan Daniels,
James Cheney, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman. They went where the
fight was because they believed they had a duty to
do something about it, and they were martyred for it,
(48:22):
and the klansmen who killed them called them outside agitators.
Thousands and thousands of people got on buses and trains
and took turns driving all night to get to the
Deep South to do their part. Back then, those aren't
outside agitators. Those are people who believed the world could
(48:45):
be good. You have to believe that too. We have
the same duty today. You can't sit idly by in
your hometown and not be concerned about what happens outside
of it. Because we are caught in that inescapable network
of mutuality. We are tied in that single garment of destiny.
(49:07):
They want you to believe it's impossible, or maybe just immoral,
to care about things that don't directly affect you. They
want you to believe it's wrong, it's somehow suspect, maybe
even a crime, to cross state lines to show you
care about what happens to our neighbors. Because the people
being abducted and abused by my federal government are my neighbors,
(49:32):
no matter where they're being snatched up. So the outside
agitator isn't real. But at the same time, maybe we
all have a moral duty to be the outside agitator
of their nightmares. Just a quick note before you finish
(50:02):
writing me that email. I have used the name Stokely
Carmichael throughout this story for clarity's sake, because that was
his name the time of these events. Stokely Carmichael changed
his name to Kuame Turre in nineteen sixty nine. The
majority of the sources I used for this episode, including
oral histories from those who knew him, used Quame Tourey's
former name when writing or speaking about this time period.
(50:26):
I understand some sources do opt to use his chosen
name throughout, regardless of the time period being discussed, but
since he was not the primary subject of the episode,
it seemed more straightforward to use the name that you
would find if you clicked through to view any of
the linked sources. Nashville cop John Sarrace died in February
of twenty twenty five. He was eighty seven years old.
(50:48):
According to a statement from the Rutherfurd County Sheriff's office.
He died after a thirteen days stay in the hospital
due to complications from an existing medical condition. Sarrace was
in the sheriff's custody when he died, following his arrest
in January of twenty twenty five on charges of reckless
homicide related to the shooting death of his wife, Sharon Rodgers.
Sarrace and of course, segregationist lawyer and bathtub sculptor Jack Kershaw,
(51:14):
died at the age of ninety six in twenty ten.
George Ware outlived him by two years. Weird Little Guys
It's a production of Coolshoe Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched,
written and recorded by me, Molly Conger Park. Executive producers
are Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. The show is edited
(51:37):
by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was
composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird
Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely
read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guy's subreddit. Just don't post
anything that's going to make you one of my weird
little guys.
Host
Molly Conger
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