September 2, 2022 • 19 mins
Holly speculates about how one article about Josephine Cochrane got so many details wrong. Tracy then talks about the details of Canada's currency featuring Viola Desmond.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about dishwashers
this week. That's the thing I am very grateful for. Same.
(00:25):
There are a few a few things I wanted to
talk about, but especially that article we mentioned from where
they got Josephine's name completely wrong and listed her as
Elizabeth Cochrane. I don't know if that name rings a
bell to any of our listeners or to you, but
Elizabeth Cochrane was one of the aliases that Nellie bly
(00:47):
used funny. It just struck me as very funny that
this um, this article very repeatedly called called Lissa with
cochran um. It also when I say it got stuff wrong,
I mean it got stuff real wrong. And it almost
(01:09):
made me go didn't know, I bloy like have someone
confused her with Josephine Cochran and she gave a completely
fake interview. Because there's so much cockamam me stuff that
gets added to the story, including that she was working
on elevators at that point. She never, to the best
of my knowledge or research, ever worked in the elevator industry. Um,
(01:31):
so I really was like, was this a dupe? Did
somebody mess with this poor reporter for not being thorough
enough to fact check who they were talking to and
they just gave them a bunch of fake information. Yeah,
it's so strange to me. When I was in college,
I was interviewed by a reporter from the campus newspaper
about stuff that was coming up for a club that
(01:53):
I was a co president of, and they recorded the interview.
I don't know what happened between that and writing the article,
but it was riddled with error. Uh. They were big errors,
and they were errors that made us look bad and
(02:14):
then made the newspaper look bad. And I still am like,
how how it was as much of a mess as
this article. It's so weird to me, right, I I mean,
we have talked many times about how there was a
little more I shouldn't even say a little more, there
was a lot more commonplace flourish and bias in the press. Um.
(02:39):
That was just kind of like they could, you know,
fill out a story by adding things like you know
that I think this defendant isn't cute, so they must
be guilty. Like, but this was just so weird, just
completely made up of whole cloth. Oh, she's busy at
work on an elevator. What that she had moved to
New York? She not. It was just the weirdest assortment
(03:02):
of strange, strange things. That is very odd. But boy,
that's one of the great things I love about looking
at old newspapers. You find things and you're like, wait,
what And at first I thought, you know, because you'll
have that happen if you're doing like a search through
old newspapers and your search terms will pick up something
that looks like it should be exactly what your subject is.
(03:23):
But when you actually open it and look at it,
you're like, oh, no, no no, no, no, this is a
case of just a duplicate name or something. Nope, it was.
The first part is all about how she invented the dishwasher,
and then it goes into this wild cockamam storys so weird.
It was super weird. We mentioned only briefly because it
only ever comes up briefly in anything I have read
(03:45):
about her. The fact that Josephine Cochrane's husband was an
anti Lincoln Democrat um and was very politically active, and
I don't know if It's one of those things of
once he had passed, which was before she rose to prominence.
She wasn't really involved in any of that anymore, or
(04:05):
if people who wrote about her later, recognizing the importance
of Abraham Lincoln, downplayed any involvement she had in in
the Democratic Party at the time. I don't know, there's
like nothing, it's it's an empty void of information. Um.
So I know it's a mystery for me. It was
one of those things that made me like, uh, you know,
(04:26):
kind of like set up like a mere cat and
go I should investigate this, and I there wasn't much
to fun. Yeah, so I don't I don't know. I
will tell you this, that last thing we read about
Whirlpool donating a dishwasher just gave me a chuckle. And also,
(04:47):
I will note that the the historic marker that was
placed in the nineties also mentions Kitchen Aid dishwashers by
brand and has the its A Aid logo on it.
So some of this is definitely like a corporate quaint
branding thing. Although it is interesting and I am glad
(05:09):
that someone bought her home that wants to restore it.
I think that's a cool project. Um, just in general.
There are many things on historical markers that are not correct.
They're like anytime I'm researching something and there's information that
I find from a historical mark, especially if the marker
(05:29):
is the only place that it says that I'm always likes.
Sometimes it's like a very romanticized or kind of like,
uh like more of the local lore version than what
can actually be substantiated. Yeah, Yeah, I also wish we
(05:50):
need more about George Butter's Yeah, not a lot written
about him, but clearly very important to the entire thing. Yeah,
seems to have known what he was doing and to
have been a good dude. It's not a weasel, especially
since she does call out other men she had to
deal with. Yet she kept him, you know, right by
(06:13):
her side throughout all of their their work together, so
he clearly was was great to work with for her.
She never said anything negative about him that I could find.
There is, as I said, debate about how many dishes
she actually ever washed. Some things will say she never
washed dishes, and others will say, like, no, she probably
actually was doing dishes at home for a long time
before she decided on this, And there doesn't seem to be.
(06:37):
I mean, it's not like people document when they do
household chores normally, so there's not really any definitive evidence
one way or the other. The headline of socialite didn't
want to do dishes is very popular, but frankly, no
one wants to do dishes. I think there are some
folks who get satisfaction over the but like for a
(07:00):
lot of us, as a chore and a not particularly
pleasant Sure. We recently had an issue in our household
where the dishwasher wasn't working correctly, and when the tech
came to look at the dishwasher discovered a plumbing problem
in the kitchen sink that prevented work on the dishwasher problem.
We had to get the plumbing thing fixed first, and
(07:21):
so in addition to the dishwasher being broken, the kitchen
sink was also a problem. And I was like, my
life is too many, too many things to be happening
wrong in the kitchen right now. Yes, yes, when your
kitchen is messed up, it is so disruptive to a
point that for me anyway, and I imagine for a
(07:43):
lot of people it is mentally an emotionally taxing Yeah. Yeah,
Like I just want to fry an egg and clean
up after it. That's all I want. Some years ago,
before we were married, before I had even moved to Massachusetts,
pat ricks landlord decided not to renew his lease, and
(08:04):
so he had like a couple of months to find
a new place to live, which in the Boston metro
area is often challenging, and he had signed the lease
on the new place that he found, and afterwards was like,
wait a minute, I didn't see a dishwasher in the kitchen,
and he hated washing dishes so much that like then
(08:25):
this whole period of angst and difficulty of needing to
unexpectedly move with that without a ton of notice, And
I used some credit card reward points to buy a
little model that went on the countertop that hooked to
the faucet with I remember you telling me about that, uh,
And it was great. I mean it could only handle
(08:47):
like four plates, four bowls, four glasses, and some silverwared
time that was like its max capacity. Um, But that
thing I saw him through the whole time living in
that apartment, and then us moving in together in apartment
that also had new dishwasher, and then I can't remember
if we donated or gave it away when we moved
into the house that had a dishwasher that works most
(09:09):
of the time. I feel like if I had one
that was that little, it would be running constantly because
I make a shocking amount of dirty dishes for one
person personally, because I like to cook an experiment and
I'll be like, I know, for dinner, I'm gonna saute
twelve different things and they each need to be on
separate plates before I recombine them into BA I will say,
(09:32):
in those instances, I usually do try to hand wash
as I go. It doesn't always work, and their often
ends up like a pile in the sink. It's just
a fact of life, dirty dishes. So thank you, Josephine
for making my life easier. You talked about Viola Desmonds
(09:58):
after many, many, many listener requests for an episode. UM,
A couple of things we didn't mention. There were very
there were a bunch of things that got like put
into the outline and cut out that were more related
to her family than related specifically to her. But that
currency that she was featured on the ten dollar ten
(10:19):
dollar bill. It's a beautifully designed bill that one awards
for its design. UM it's also the first vertically oriented
Canadian bank note, which as somebody who lives in the
United States, which nonsensically makes all of our bills look
exactly the same except for like tiny differences. They're all
(10:40):
the same color, they're all the same size. Having one
vertically oriented is like a little mind blowing. Sometimes she
is described as the first woman on Canadian currency. There
was one earlier woman, uh shown with a group. Um,
she's the first, I think, the first woman on a
bill by herself, not as part of a group picture,
(11:04):
so that is just some Canadian currency detail. I uh
really enjoyed reading her sister, Landa. Robson's book called Sister
to Courage. I read both of those books, actually, Sister
Courage and the one that she co wrote with her professor.
And I hadn't initially found Sister to Courage, so it
(11:26):
was something that I got to pretty late in the
in the process. I had thought that it was just
a book specifically about her sister, but it's more broadly
like about their family and how they grew up in
their parents. Um. And originally I had all these uh
like little bits of stories about her parents and her
family life and all I was like, this is not
(11:47):
actually related to Viola Desmond, um, and I need to
cut it out to make more room for things that
are about Viola Desmond. It's interesting to me. One of
the things that I kept thinking about in this episode
is the trickiness of figuring out what the right course
(12:12):
of action is on big issues. Right, because the black
community was split in Nova Scotia over how she should
have handled this. Yeah, Um, that's so difficult and put
someone in such an awkward and hard position because you know,
they probably all intellectually agreed on what would have been
(12:33):
the right thing and what would have been fair and
equal and just. But then it's more complex than that
because we're all hiddens well, and the Nova Scotia Association
for the Advancement of Colored People as a group at
first was also divided about what to do. Like eventually
(12:53):
they unanimously supported the decision to go to court, but
like at first, there was a lot of discussion about
what the right move here. Should we push back, should
we not push back? So like across the board, that
was just something that involved a lot of discussion, and
then people had varying opinions about Um and a lot
(13:14):
of fear that if people did push back, that it
was just kind of cause problems. And I mean that's
come up with other episodes before that. This was an
interesting thing to research. Being from the United States, where
we have talked a lot about racism and a lot
about segregation. I read a lot a lot of stuff
(13:35):
that was written in Canada by Canadians that made comparisons
to the United States. And one of the things that
struck me was that, uh, they tended to describe the
system of Jim Crows segregation in the United States as
how it worked in the United States and the situation
(13:58):
in Nova Scotia and can Nada was different because this
was not something that was legally required and it could
really vary from place to place, And it could vary
from place to place in the United States too, especially
outside of the South, right, a lot of places in
the North did not have specific laws requiring segregation. But
(14:19):
at the same time, like restaurants in New York City
would only hire black waiters for a period to like
try to maintain the appearance of slavery, to like appease
Southern slaveholders who were visit visitors to New York, Like
it was a there's a lot more uh, a lot
more nuanced within the United States. Um that some of
(14:43):
the things that I wrote were like a little sort
of imagined the situation in Canada to be different from
the situation of the United States, when really it was
very similar to the situation in some parts of the
United States. I'm reminded de remember when we did our
episode on the Great Store Derby and the one black
(15:04):
family that was involved, and the father saying he kind
of made the opposite point of like, well, at least
if I were in the United States, this would all
be overt and acknowledged, whereas here everyone wants to act
like this is not a thing and it is. The
Other thing to remember is that there can be laws
and people don't follow them, Yeah, exactly, which is a
(15:27):
problem where I think sometimes we get the reductive teaching
of like history as it relates to racism and slavery,
where it's like and then there was reconstruction. It's like,
oh no, I remember, I feel like I was at
I was at history camp Boston. I was I was
at a history event of some sort, watching people give
(15:47):
their their papers and presentations, and there was a presentation
specifically about after the Civil War, newly freed people trying
to track down their family members, and then they're descendants
trying to go back and reconstruct their family trees. And
one of the things that people were having to just
remind themselves of was that people were not necessarily following
(16:10):
the law. Um, and you when you were trying to
trace through the family tree, you couldn't just assume that
a slaveholder had quote freed everybody at the same time
the way they were supposed to. Like, you couldn't assume
anything about that whole process just because something had been
made the law. All of this stuff folds folds in together. Um.
(16:33):
I like how she read something about Madam C. J.
Walker and was like, I want to do that in
Nova Scotia, Like I want to start my own business.
I want to start schools for people. I want to
train people, And she just did it. Yes, I had
a slight chuckle, which I hope no one thought was
(16:54):
disrespectful or reductive when we were talking about her mom
sewing money into her bra because she was afraid for
her safety. There was probably a much higher likelihood of
a nonsafe situation than what I would have experienced. But
It just reminded me of my own mother, who was
always very anxious and fretful about everything and everywhere I
(17:17):
wanted to go. Of course, as you know, I am
something of a free spirit who does not take well
to being told what to do. So I envisioned myself
having a mother doing a similar thing and being like,
you've got to get over this. Yeah, I'm gonna need
to actually use the money. It cannot be sewn into
(17:38):
my bra One of the stories about her parents that
I put in the outline and then wound up taking
out because um, it was not actually about her, and
it was like the the episode was just becoming bigger
and bigger and bigger, and I was like, there's other
stuff I need to focus on here. Um. Viola desmonds
(18:00):
uh maternal grandfather had moved to Connecticut, her mother had
eventually gone to a finishing school in Boston, and she
had met her father like on a summer break in Halifax,
married him without telling her father, went back home as
(18:22):
planned because she was afraid to tell her dad about
this whole having gotten married without talking to him about it,
realized that she was pregnant, was trying to figure out
how am I how am I going to tell my
dad all this that like, not only did I get
married without telling him while I was on a break,
but also I am like, I'm now expecting my first child.
(18:42):
And somebody sent him a clipping of the wedding section
of the church bulletin. That was how he found out.
And he was like, shouldn't you could just shouldn't go
back home to your husband. Now She's like, yes, in fact,
I should. Wanda Robson described her grandfather as annoyed by
this whole situation. Um, so anyway, oh my gracious, yeah, yeah,
(19:08):
I'm glad I finally got to the Viola Desmond episode.
I think some of the times that we have gotten
requests for her have been times like when she was
first appearing on the Currency and that kind of stuff,
and there's just a lot of stuff out there about her,
and uh, it just took me a while. So Happy Friday, everybody.
I hope your weekend goes well whatever is on your plates.
(19:32):
We'll be back with a Saturday Classic, uh tomorrow, and
then we will be back Monday. Was something new? Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
(19:52):
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about dishwashers
this week. That's the thing I am very grateful for. Same.
(00:25):
There are a few a few things I wanted to
talk about, but especially that article we mentioned from where
they got Josephine's name completely wrong and listed her as
Elizabeth Cochrane. I don't know if that name rings a
bell to any of our listeners or to you, but
Elizabeth Cochrane was one of the aliases that Nellie bly
(00:47):
used funny. It just struck me as very funny that
this um, this article very repeatedly called called Lissa with
cochran um. It also when I say it got stuff wrong,
I mean it got stuff real wrong. And it almost
(01:09):
made me go didn't know, I bloy like have someone
confused her with Josephine Cochran and she gave a completely
fake interview. Because there's so much cockamam me stuff that
gets added to the story, including that she was working
on elevators at that point. She never, to the best
of my knowledge or research, ever worked in the elevator industry. Um,
(01:31):
so I really was like, was this a dupe? Did
somebody mess with this poor reporter for not being thorough
enough to fact check who they were talking to and
they just gave them a bunch of fake information. Yeah,
it's so strange to me. When I was in college,
I was interviewed by a reporter from the campus newspaper
about stuff that was coming up for a club that
(01:53):
I was a co president of, and they recorded the interview.
I don't know what happened between that and writing the article,
but it was riddled with error. Uh. They were big errors,
and they were errors that made us look bad and
(02:14):
then made the newspaper look bad. And I still am like,
how how it was as much of a mess as
this article. It's so weird to me, right, I I mean,
we have talked many times about how there was a
little more I shouldn't even say a little more, there
was a lot more commonplace flourish and bias in the press. Um.
(02:39):
That was just kind of like they could, you know,
fill out a story by adding things like you know
that I think this defendant isn't cute, so they must
be guilty. Like, but this was just so weird, just
completely made up of whole cloth. Oh, she's busy at
work on an elevator. What that she had moved to
New York? She not. It was just the weirdest assortment
(03:02):
of strange, strange things. That is very odd. But boy,
that's one of the great things I love about looking
at old newspapers. You find things and you're like, wait,
what And at first I thought, you know, because you'll
have that happen if you're doing like a search through
old newspapers and your search terms will pick up something
that looks like it should be exactly what your subject is.
(03:23):
But when you actually open it and look at it,
you're like, oh, no, no no, no, no, this is a
case of just a duplicate name or something. Nope, it was.
The first part is all about how she invented the dishwasher,
and then it goes into this wild cockamam storys so weird.
It was super weird. We mentioned only briefly because it
only ever comes up briefly in anything I have read
(03:45):
about her. The fact that Josephine Cochrane's husband was an
anti Lincoln Democrat um and was very politically active, and
I don't know if It's one of those things of
once he had passed, which was before she rose to prominence.
She wasn't really involved in any of that anymore, or
(04:05):
if people who wrote about her later, recognizing the importance
of Abraham Lincoln, downplayed any involvement she had in in
the Democratic Party at the time. I don't know, there's
like nothing, it's it's an empty void of information. Um.
So I know it's a mystery for me. It was
one of those things that made me like, uh, you know,
(04:26):
kind of like set up like a mere cat and
go I should investigate this, and I there wasn't much
to fun. Yeah, so I don't I don't know. I
will tell you this, that last thing we read about
Whirlpool donating a dishwasher just gave me a chuckle. And also,
(04:47):
I will note that the the historic marker that was
placed in the nineties also mentions Kitchen Aid dishwashers by
brand and has the its A Aid logo on it.
So some of this is definitely like a corporate quaint
branding thing. Although it is interesting and I am glad
(05:09):
that someone bought her home that wants to restore it.
I think that's a cool project. Um, just in general.
There are many things on historical markers that are not correct.
They're like anytime I'm researching something and there's information that
I find from a historical mark, especially if the marker
(05:29):
is the only place that it says that I'm always likes.
Sometimes it's like a very romanticized or kind of like,
uh like more of the local lore version than what
can actually be substantiated. Yeah, Yeah, I also wish we
(05:50):
need more about George Butter's Yeah, not a lot written
about him, but clearly very important to the entire thing. Yeah,
seems to have known what he was doing and to
have been a good dude. It's not a weasel, especially
since she does call out other men she had to
deal with. Yet she kept him, you know, right by
(06:13):
her side throughout all of their their work together, so
he clearly was was great to work with for her.
She never said anything negative about him that I could find.
There is, as I said, debate about how many dishes
she actually ever washed. Some things will say she never
washed dishes, and others will say, like, no, she probably
actually was doing dishes at home for a long time
before she decided on this, And there doesn't seem to be.
(06:37):
I mean, it's not like people document when they do
household chores normally, so there's not really any definitive evidence
one way or the other. The headline of socialite didn't
want to do dishes is very popular, but frankly, no
one wants to do dishes. I think there are some
folks who get satisfaction over the but like for a
(07:00):
lot of us, as a chore and a not particularly
pleasant Sure. We recently had an issue in our household
where the dishwasher wasn't working correctly, and when the tech
came to look at the dishwasher discovered a plumbing problem
in the kitchen sink that prevented work on the dishwasher problem.
We had to get the plumbing thing fixed first, and
(07:21):
so in addition to the dishwasher being broken, the kitchen
sink was also a problem. And I was like, my
life is too many, too many things to be happening
wrong in the kitchen right now. Yes, yes, when your
kitchen is messed up, it is so disruptive to a
point that for me anyway, and I imagine for a
(07:43):
lot of people it is mentally an emotionally taxing Yeah. Yeah,
Like I just want to fry an egg and clean
up after it. That's all I want. Some years ago,
before we were married, before I had even moved to Massachusetts,
pat ricks landlord decided not to renew his lease, and
(08:04):
so he had like a couple of months to find
a new place to live, which in the Boston metro
area is often challenging, and he had signed the lease
on the new place that he found, and afterwards was like,
wait a minute, I didn't see a dishwasher in the kitchen,
and he hated washing dishes so much that like then
(08:25):
this whole period of angst and difficulty of needing to
unexpectedly move with that without a ton of notice, And
I used some credit card reward points to buy a
little model that went on the countertop that hooked to
the faucet with I remember you telling me about that, uh,
And it was great. I mean it could only handle
(08:47):
like four plates, four bowls, four glasses, and some silverwared
time that was like its max capacity. Um, But that
thing I saw him through the whole time living in
that apartment, and then us moving in together in apartment
that also had new dishwasher, and then I can't remember
if we donated or gave it away when we moved
into the house that had a dishwasher that works most
(09:09):
of the time. I feel like if I had one
that was that little, it would be running constantly because
I make a shocking amount of dirty dishes for one
person personally, because I like to cook an experiment and
I'll be like, I know, for dinner, I'm gonna saute
twelve different things and they each need to be on
separate plates before I recombine them into BA I will say,
(09:32):
in those instances, I usually do try to hand wash
as I go. It doesn't always work, and their often
ends up like a pile in the sink. It's just
a fact of life, dirty dishes. So thank you, Josephine
for making my life easier. You talked about Viola Desmonds
(09:58):
after many, many, many listener requests for an episode. UM,
A couple of things we didn't mention. There were very
there were a bunch of things that got like put
into the outline and cut out that were more related
to her family than related specifically to her. But that
currency that she was featured on the ten dollar ten
(10:19):
dollar bill. It's a beautifully designed bill that one awards
for its design. UM it's also the first vertically oriented
Canadian bank note, which as somebody who lives in the
United States, which nonsensically makes all of our bills look
exactly the same except for like tiny differences. They're all
(10:40):
the same color, they're all the same size. Having one
vertically oriented is like a little mind blowing. Sometimes she
is described as the first woman on Canadian currency. There
was one earlier woman, uh shown with a group. Um,
she's the first, I think, the first woman on a
bill by herself, not as part of a group picture,
(11:04):
so that is just some Canadian currency detail. I uh
really enjoyed reading her sister, Landa. Robson's book called Sister
to Courage. I read both of those books, actually, Sister
Courage and the one that she co wrote with her professor.
And I hadn't initially found Sister to Courage, so it
(11:26):
was something that I got to pretty late in the
in the process. I had thought that it was just
a book specifically about her sister, but it's more broadly
like about their family and how they grew up in
their parents. Um. And originally I had all these uh
like little bits of stories about her parents and her
family life and all I was like, this is not
(11:47):
actually related to Viola Desmond, um, and I need to
cut it out to make more room for things that
are about Viola Desmond. It's interesting to me. One of
the things that I kept thinking about in this episode
is the trickiness of figuring out what the right course
(12:12):
of action is on big issues. Right, because the black
community was split in Nova Scotia over how she should
have handled this. Yeah, Um, that's so difficult and put
someone in such an awkward and hard position because you know,
they probably all intellectually agreed on what would have been
(12:33):
the right thing and what would have been fair and
equal and just. But then it's more complex than that
because we're all hiddens well, and the Nova Scotia Association
for the Advancement of Colored People as a group at
first was also divided about what to do. Like eventually
(12:53):
they unanimously supported the decision to go to court, but
like at first, there was a lot of discussion about
what the right move here. Should we push back, should
we not push back? So like across the board, that
was just something that involved a lot of discussion, and
then people had varying opinions about Um and a lot
(13:14):
of fear that if people did push back, that it
was just kind of cause problems. And I mean that's
come up with other episodes before that. This was an
interesting thing to research. Being from the United States, where
we have talked a lot about racism and a lot
about segregation. I read a lot a lot of stuff
(13:35):
that was written in Canada by Canadians that made comparisons
to the United States. And one of the things that
struck me was that, uh, they tended to describe the
system of Jim Crows segregation in the United States as
how it worked in the United States and the situation
(13:58):
in Nova Scotia and can Nada was different because this
was not something that was legally required and it could
really vary from place to place, And it could vary
from place to place in the United States too, especially
outside of the South, right, a lot of places in
the North did not have specific laws requiring segregation. But
(14:19):
at the same time, like restaurants in New York City
would only hire black waiters for a period to like
try to maintain the appearance of slavery, to like appease
Southern slaveholders who were visit visitors to New York, Like
it was a there's a lot more uh, a lot
more nuanced within the United States. Um that some of
(14:43):
the things that I wrote were like a little sort
of imagined the situation in Canada to be different from
the situation of the United States, when really it was
very similar to the situation in some parts of the
United States. I'm reminded de remember when we did our
episode on the Great Store Derby and the one black
(15:04):
family that was involved, and the father saying he kind
of made the opposite point of like, well, at least
if I were in the United States, this would all
be overt and acknowledged, whereas here everyone wants to act
like this is not a thing and it is. The
Other thing to remember is that there can be laws
and people don't follow them, Yeah, exactly, which is a
(15:27):
problem where I think sometimes we get the reductive teaching
of like history as it relates to racism and slavery,
where it's like and then there was reconstruction. It's like,
oh no, I remember, I feel like I was at
I was at history camp Boston. I was I was
at a history event of some sort, watching people give
(15:47):
their their papers and presentations, and there was a presentation
specifically about after the Civil War, newly freed people trying
to track down their family members, and then they're descendants
trying to go back and reconstruct their family trees. And
one of the things that people were having to just
remind themselves of was that people were not necessarily following
(16:10):
the law. Um, and you when you were trying to
trace through the family tree, you couldn't just assume that
a slaveholder had quote freed everybody at the same time
the way they were supposed to. Like, you couldn't assume
anything about that whole process just because something had been
made the law. All of this stuff folds folds in together. Um.
(16:33):
I like how she read something about Madam C. J.
Walker and was like, I want to do that in
Nova Scotia, Like I want to start my own business.
I want to start schools for people. I want to
train people, And she just did it. Yes, I had
a slight chuckle, which I hope no one thought was
(16:54):
disrespectful or reductive when we were talking about her mom
sewing money into her bra because she was afraid for
her safety. There was probably a much higher likelihood of
a nonsafe situation than what I would have experienced. But
It just reminded me of my own mother, who was
always very anxious and fretful about everything and everywhere I
(17:17):
wanted to go. Of course, as you know, I am
something of a free spirit who does not take well
to being told what to do. So I envisioned myself
having a mother doing a similar thing and being like,
you've got to get over this. Yeah, I'm gonna need
to actually use the money. It cannot be sewn into
(17:38):
my bra One of the stories about her parents that
I put in the outline and then wound up taking
out because um, it was not actually about her, and
it was like the the episode was just becoming bigger
and bigger and bigger, and I was like, there's other
stuff I need to focus on here. Um. Viola desmonds
(18:00):
uh maternal grandfather had moved to Connecticut, her mother had
eventually gone to a finishing school in Boston, and she
had met her father like on a summer break in Halifax,
married him without telling her father, went back home as
(18:22):
planned because she was afraid to tell her dad about
this whole having gotten married without talking to him about it,
realized that she was pregnant, was trying to figure out
how am I how am I going to tell my
dad all this that like, not only did I get
married without telling him while I was on a break,
but also I am like, I'm now expecting my first child.
(18:42):
And somebody sent him a clipping of the wedding section
of the church bulletin. That was how he found out.
And he was like, shouldn't you could just shouldn't go
back home to your husband. Now She's like, yes, in fact,
I should. Wanda Robson described her grandfather as annoyed by
this whole situation. Um, so anyway, oh my gracious, yeah, yeah,
(19:08):
I'm glad I finally got to the Viola Desmond episode.
I think some of the times that we have gotten
requests for her have been times like when she was
first appearing on the Currency and that kind of stuff,
and there's just a lot of stuff out there about her,
and uh, it just took me a while. So Happy Friday, everybody.
I hope your weekend goes well whatever is on your plates.
(19:32):
We'll be back with a Saturday Classic, uh tomorrow, and
then we will be back Monday. Was something new? Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
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(19:52):
listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Holly Frey
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