0:03

Hello everybody, this

0:06

is Daryl Cooper and this is the Martyr

0:08

Made Podcast. So

0:13

figuring out how to begin these episodes

0:15

is always one of the hardest parts of making them

0:18

for me. I don't know if that's true for other

0:21

history podcasters but it's definitely

0:23

true for me.

0:25

As I pondered how

0:27

to open this one, I

0:29

was reminded of an old interview with Lee

0:31

Kuan Yew, the founder

0:34

and longtime leader of modern

0:36

Singapore,

0:37

by the German magazine Der Spiegel back

0:39

in the mid-2000s. Now

0:43

Singapore is a city-state and it's

0:45

carved out of the southern tip of the Malaysian

0:48

peninsula across the Singapore Strait

0:50

from the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

0:53

It's one of the four so-called Asian

0:55

Tigers, the other three being

0:58

South Korea, Taiwan, and

1:00

until recently, Hong Kong.

1:02

If you throw in Japan, you've got these five

1:04

Asian countries that were devastated

1:07

by the Second World War, and

1:09

in Korea's case, the Korean War,

1:11

but which all roared into modernity

1:13

and became very rapidly,

1:16

they became orderly, economically

1:19

powerful, high-tech

1:22

modern states. Now

1:24

if you've ever been to Singapore, I do not need

1:27

to tell you, it is a gorgeous city.

1:30

It is safe, it is clean.

1:34

Coming from the United States, it's almost impossible

1:37

to imagine that a city of that size

1:39

could be run so well. Of

1:43

course, to achieve that result, Singapore

1:46

does things a little differently than we do them here.

1:50

Plainclothes police officers can stop

1:52

anyone on the street and make you produce

1:54

identification. Chewing

1:57

gum is not sold in Singapore. they

2:00

don't want it getting all over the place. In

2:03

my experience they won't stop you for chewing

2:06

gum that you brought from someplace else, but

2:08

if you spit it out on the ground you

2:11

will find out very quickly how Singaporeans

2:13

feel about that.

2:16

Recently they executed someone

2:18

for trafficking two pounds of marijuana.

2:22

They do not play around. I

2:25

remember the first time I'd ever heard of Singapore.

2:27

I was a teenager back in 1994 and it

2:30

was because a young American had been

2:33

caught vandalizing cars and public property.

2:35

Those of you who are old enough might remember this too.

2:38

And in addition to a few months in jail and

2:40

a small fine, and again this is an American

2:42

citizen, he was sentenced to be beaten

2:45

with a cane and that sentence

2:47

was carried out.

2:50

Most Americans would probably say that goes

2:52

a little too far and that

2:54

they would rather put up with a little disorder

2:56

in the streets than what we would consider

2:59

a serious infringement of our liberty, but

3:02

the not inconsiderable number of Singaporeans

3:04

that I've talked to over the years on

3:07

my visits there,

3:08

they would not have it any other way. Under

3:14

the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew, who

3:16

died a few years back, Singapore

3:20

has been a one-party state, not

3:22

a democracy in any meaningful sense of the word. The

3:27

one-party state manages the place like

3:29

a corporation. And

3:33

so the German interviewer wanted to press Lee

3:35

on this question of democracy, which

3:38

of course in the West is considered by most

3:40

people to be an end in itself. It was

3:43

something to be pursued

3:46

and embraced regardless

3:48

of the outcomes it creates. Now

3:52

unlike Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan

3:55

though, Singapore's population is

3:57

not homogeneous.

3:59

not in terms of ethnicity,

4:03

race, or religion. There's

4:05

a Han Chinese majority, but

4:08

large Hindu Indian and Muslim

4:10

Malaysian minorities

4:13

giving Singapore a complex set of issues

4:15

to navigate that the other Tigers don't

4:17

really have to worry about.

4:19

And so the interviewer asks Lee, says

4:22

during your career

4:25

you've kept your distance from Western style

4:27

democracy.

4:28

Are you still convinced that an authoritarian

4:31

system is the future for Asia? And

4:34

Lee says,

4:36

I cannot run my system based

4:38

on your rules.

4:39

I have to amend it to fit my people's

4:42

position. In multiracial

4:44

societies you don't vote

4:46

in accordance with your economic interests

4:49

and social interests. You vote in

4:51

accordance with race and religion.

4:54

Supposing I'd run your system here.

4:57

Malays would vote for Muslims. Indians

4:59

would vote for Indians. Chinese would vote

5:02

for Chinese. I would

5:04

have a constant clash in my parliament which

5:06

cannot be resolved because the Chinese

5:08

majority would always overrule them.

5:11

And so I found a formula that changes

5:13

that.

5:16

Well one way to think about the United States of

5:18

America

5:19

is as one big

5:22

real world experiment to see

5:24

if what Lee says here is true.

5:28

And since the 1960s the points have

5:30

mostly been racking up in favor of Lee's

5:32

position.

5:35

Unlike most other countries, maybe

5:39

all other countries in world history really,

5:43

America since its founding has never

5:45

had a stable core

5:48

population. At

5:50

least not for long before it was swamped by

5:52

new arrivals. And

5:55

sure, at the time of the American Revolution

5:57

our cities were mostly full of Englishmen. But

6:00

within one generation, immigrants

6:03

from Ireland and Germany

6:05

were cramming into neighborhoods old and

6:07

new, displacing

6:09

the old stock wasp, becoming the

6:12

majority population in many big

6:14

cities,

6:15

and in many cases, coming to dominate local

6:17

government and state government

6:19

in many of these places. No

6:22

sooner had the children of the Irish and German migrants

6:25

begun to assimilate, than

6:27

they themselves were swamped by a new

6:29

mass migration, this time of Jews

6:31

and Italians and Slavs and other

6:34

people from Southern and Eastern Europe.

6:37

By the time the children of these migrants had

6:40

begun to assimilate to the American middle class,

6:43

they were soon overwhelmed by massive waves

6:45

of black migrants from the rural

6:47

South,

6:49

and in the case of New York City, Puerto

6:51

Ricans. In

6:53

some cities like Detroit, Baltimore,

6:57

DC, black people

6:59

soon became an absolute majority of the population,

7:02

and this happened in the course of a couple

7:04

decades. Places

7:07

that had always had black populations

7:09

of less than 5%, a lot of the big

7:12

cities up there, 1% or 2%,

7:15

suddenly found themselves with a black population

7:17

of 50%, 60%, 65%. Just

7:21

a massive demographic transformation

7:24

that totally changes the face of a city. In

7:28

places where they didn't quite become the overall

7:30

majority, they became the overwhelming

7:32

majority in large swaths of the city.

7:37

And then finally, today, of course, mass

7:39

immigration from Latin America is

7:41

pushing black people out of neighborhoods

7:43

that they've held down since the Great Migration.

7:49

At each stage of the peopling of

7:51

America,

7:52

Lee would probably have found support

7:55

for his point, for his argument.

7:58

He would go through our history books. pointing

8:00

to passage after passage saying, see

8:02

I told you so. In the

8:05

19th century wasps voted for

8:08

wasps. The Irish voted for

8:10

Irish Catholics. Italians voted

8:12

for Italians.

8:14

Jews just voted for liberals

8:17

of whatever ethnicity, but they they voted

8:19

for them as a block. And

8:21

of course today blacks and Latinos vote

8:23

as a block. Well

8:26

figuring out how to get all these different kinds

8:28

of people to get along that

8:31

was until the 1960s

8:33

or so the central task

8:36

of American politics in society.

8:41

Since the 1960s things have changed

8:44

as

8:45

opportunists have discovered that they can profit

8:47

politically

8:49

by actually generating and fostering

8:51

group conflict.

8:53

And those people always existed but

8:55

there was a there was a cap on their behavior

8:58

due to the norms in society.

9:00

Those people will always exist in any democracy,

9:02

a diverse democracy, but

9:05

for a variety of reasons that style of politics

9:08

has pretty much completely swallowed

9:11

up all other politics over the last few

9:13

decades. The

9:16

British conservative philosopher Roger

9:18

Scruton wrote somewhere that

9:21

the distinction between conservative

9:24

and liberal politics is

9:27

that liberals conceive

9:30

of politics as a means of

9:32

achieving certain goals of

9:36

progressively moving society toward

9:39

some better state where the problems

9:42

that have always beset us over the centuries

9:44

are finally solved. Conservatives

9:48

on the other hand Scruton says conservatives

9:51

understand social problems as permanent

9:53

features of the human condition. And

9:57

so ask a liberal what the purpose of politics

9:59

is and they might tell you the elimination

10:02

of poverty, or the

10:04

elimination of racism, or the promotion

10:07

of scientific achievement, or depending

10:10

on the era of a eugenic population.

10:13

Conservatives follow Aristotle's

10:16

formulation in

10:18

saying that politics is much more like managing

10:20

a friendship. What's

10:23

the purpose? What's the goal of a friendship?

10:26

There isn't really any goal, except

10:29

to make sure that we're still friends, and hopefully

10:31

better friends, tomorrow. And

10:35

so, to a conservative, that's

10:37

the purpose of politics as well. And

10:39

if you don't think that way, you are not a conservative.

10:43

It's rooted in an essentially tragic

10:46

view of the human condition. One

10:48

that assumes frustration and

10:51

suffering and compromise

10:55

are a part of life, and always

10:57

will be. We solve today's

10:59

problems, and new ones will

11:01

replace them tomorrow. Probably new

11:04

ones that are the direct result of your solutions

11:06

to the old ones.

11:08

But as long as we're all still friends tomorrow,

11:12

as long as we're all still talking to

11:14

each other in good faith, then

11:17

we'll be able to meet tomorrow's problems,

11:19

whatever they turn out to be. American

11:23

political history has been a long battle

11:26

between these two perspectives, with

11:29

one holding ground a while, and the

11:31

other pushing back. And

11:33

today, now, for about a century or so,

11:36

the liberal view of politics as a

11:38

means to push society toward progressive

11:40

goals has been dominant.

11:45

Well, as with so many things about

11:47

the United States,

11:49

there's no better place to see this battle

11:51

play out than in the

11:53

history of New York City. Being

11:57

a primary point of entry for new immigrants,

12:01

New York took the brunt of

12:03

the mass migrations from Europe more

12:06

directly than any other place.

12:09

It's a bit different in a city like say

12:11

a Midwest city like Chicago. Chicago

12:14

received new immigrants when they showed up and the

12:16

great waves of European migration

12:19

created bulges in Chicago's growth.

12:23

But between and during those waves

12:25

there was a constant trickle of domestic migrants.

12:28

People from the countryside

12:30

or from small towns or from the big cities

12:33

back east. A lot of times the population bulges

12:35

happened because European immigrants

12:37

were coming into places like New York and

12:40

then the people who were already in New York

12:42

and therefore Americanized a bit

12:45

moved out to Chicago. And

12:47

so that made the bulges of new

12:50

immigrants relatively less conspicuous.

12:54

When waves of immigration crashed

12:56

into America in the mid and late 19th

12:59

century they hit New York City first

13:02

and a lot of those people stayed there.

13:04

And so each wave was felt very

13:07

dramatically

13:08

and permanently changed the nature of the

13:10

place. And this happened basically once a generation

13:13

from the founding of the country. The

13:17

history of New York City politics is

13:19

the history of each of these successive groups

13:22

elbowing their way in

13:24

while the established interests try to

13:27

hold their ground against the newcomers and who the

13:29

established interests are and who the newcomers

13:31

are changes every time.

13:33

First it was the Irish trying to elbow their way

13:35

into a WASP power structure

13:38

and then it was Jews and Italians coming in

13:40

after the Irish had taken over and

13:42

so on and so forth. And often

13:45

this led to conflict,

13:47

like real violent conflict, until

13:49

a new equilibrium was reached that

13:52

allowed everyone to live together in

13:54

peace and cooperation again.

13:57

This pattern held as long as

13:59

New York was a a working class city,

14:02

which is hard to even imagine today. But

14:05

New York was always a working class

14:07

city,

14:08

not just in the composition of its population,

14:11

but in its leadership.

14:12

You had ordinary working people in

14:16

the highest offices in the city government.

14:19

It really was up until the 60s or

14:21

70s, a working class city. Since then,

14:24

industrial workers have been pretty much run

14:26

out of town, and the oligarchs finally

14:28

won their long war for control of

14:31

the city.

14:34

The urban upheavals and riots of the

14:36

1960s

14:38

are viewed by most people today

14:41

as conflicts between black people

14:44

and white people,

14:45

or

14:46

black people in a white system. Partly

14:50

because that's what they did eventually

14:52

become.

14:54

Partly because that's the way Americans

14:57

were accustomed to thinking about civil rights

14:59

and other racial issues since,

15:01

for most of our history, black history

15:04

meant southern history. And

15:06

in the south, things did break down to

15:08

black and white.

15:11

But urban politics in the north was

15:14

always more complicated than that. When

15:18

the great migration of southern blacks into

15:20

the cities began in the early 20th

15:22

century, the black migrants

15:24

were not settling in communities that

15:27

really thought of themselves primarily

15:29

as white. In

15:32

New York City, to stick with the theme, they

15:34

came into a city that was mostly Irish,

15:37

Jewish, and Italian, with

15:39

a wasp upper crust that included descendants

15:42

of Dutch and Germans and

15:44

other northwest Europeans

15:46

for whom assimilation to wasp culture was

15:48

not a big leap. Now

15:51

today, we're entirely programmed

15:54

to think of people in racial terms

15:56

and think of ourselves in racial terms. Even

15:59

the people who claimed

15:59

be colorblind are still reinforcing

16:03

the basic premise of viewing people

16:05

according to color. They just happen to reject

16:07

that.

16:10

But when black people began to push into these cities,

16:13

they were entering into an arena that had been

16:15

defined by an ethnic politics

16:18

that in many cases had only

16:20

recently settled into an uneasy

16:22

peace.

16:25

And so today when we read about incidents

16:27

like the infamous riot when Martin

16:30

Luther King Jr. made his first foray

16:32

into the northern cities

16:33

in 1966 in Marquette Park

16:35

in Chicago, what

16:38

we see today when we look at the pictures or read

16:40

about it or see it in a documentary, we

16:42

see a bunch of white people protesting against

16:44

a bunch of black people who want to

16:46

come live in their neighborhood.

16:48

That's how it's taught in schools. That's

16:51

how it's presented by the mass media. But

16:55

that is not how

16:57

the residents of Marquette Park perceived

16:59

themselves at the time.

17:03

Two-thirds, 30,000 out of the 45,000

17:06

people who lived in Marquette Park were

17:09

Lithuanian Catholic. Chicago

17:12

had a section known as Little Lithuania,

17:15

and it was as Lithuanian Catholic

17:17

as San Francisco's Chinatown was Chinese.

17:21

Upton Sinclair's polemic against the Chicago

17:24

Stockyards, the jungle,

17:27

it centered on a Lithuanian stockyard

17:29

worker. There

17:32

were Lithuanian markets,

17:34

Lithuanian community centers, Lithuanian

17:37

churches that were not just Sunday morning

17:40

institutions but were real centers

17:43

of a tightly-knit and

17:45

organized community.

17:48

And that's what the people who came out against Martin

17:51

Luther King Jr. thought they were defending.

17:55

And it's not necessarily to defend the conduct

17:57

of the protesters, the whole situation.

18:00

was very ugly and unfortunate.

18:03

But from their perspective, they couldn't

18:05

understand why MLK, this

18:08

national figure from the South,

18:10

from far away from what

18:13

might as well have been a foreign country down

18:15

in the South and his coterie of

18:18

activists had brought their operation

18:20

and the attention of the national

18:22

press

18:23

up to Chicago to radically transform

18:26

their little Lithuanian community. They

18:30

couldn't understand the passion against the idea

18:33

of segregated communities. They'd

18:35

always lived in segregated communities

18:37

by choice. This was

18:39

true in all the Northern cities. The

18:42

European ethnics in those cities, whether

18:45

Lithuanians or Jews, Irish, Italians,

18:47

Poles, you name it, when

18:49

they moved into the cities, they took up with their

18:52

own in their own neighborhoods again by choice.

18:55

Immigrants still do this today, and of course they do,

18:57

right? You're brand new to a place. It's

18:59

nice to have the comforts of a local community

19:02

that shares your

19:04

experiences, your traditions, your

19:06

religion, your foods. It's

19:09

part of the immigrant experience. The

19:11

typical pattern is

19:13

that the first generation, the immigrant generation,

19:16

sets up what amounts to a colony and

19:19

transplants a bit of the old country to their

19:21

new home. So there's a little outpost

19:23

of the old country.

19:26

The second generation is raised in America

19:28

though.

19:29

They're comfortable here.

19:31

And they want to venture out into the larger

19:33

society, and they feel the conservatism

19:37

of their immigrant parents to be a burden,

19:40

but they have enough respect for them and

19:42

attachment to their community to stay relatively

19:44

close to home, even as they do

19:46

assimilate culturally.

19:48

And then their kids, the third generation,

19:52

raised in America by parents who were

19:54

raised in America, they

19:56

shed most of the old identity, which

19:59

they associate. less with their parents and more with

20:01

their grandparents. That's a long time

20:03

ago now.

20:05

And they just become plain old Americans.

20:08

But even as this process took place

20:10

with

20:11

the European ethnics,

20:13

their ethnic communities remained

20:15

intact.

20:17

And so when African Americans

20:20

began setting up shop in the northern cities,

20:23

they were moving into places where for as long as

20:25

anyone could remember. The Irish lived over

20:27

there, the Jews lived over there, the Italians

20:30

lived over there, and so forth. And everybody

20:32

thought this arrangement was perfectly logical and

20:35

appropriate.

20:37

It would have been considered wildly inappropriate

20:40

for one of the other European ethnic groups

20:43

to try to move in on the territory of one of the

20:45

others.

20:46

And it was not uncommon for there to be conflict

20:49

when that did happen.

20:52

And so the expectation of many people,

20:54

the optimistic expectation, was

20:58

that black Americans who, of

21:00

course, were not exactly immigrants, but

21:03

culturally and geographically shared

21:06

the immigrant experience, you know, moving from the life

21:08

of a share crop around the Mississippi Delta

21:11

to a big industrial city was

21:14

not much further of a leap than

21:16

coming over here from the Irish countryside.

21:20

And so the expectation was that black Americans,

21:22

whatever problems they may have been having as the

21:25

Great Migration started up, that they

21:27

would follow the same path traveled

21:29

by the Irish and other previous

21:31

immigrants, and then take their place

21:34

as one of several ethnic blocks

21:36

in the city. And

21:39

for a number of reasons which we will talk about,

21:42

that did not happen. And

21:45

the consequences of that failure have

21:48

played a defining role in American

21:51

domestic politics ever since.

21:56

Today's episode focuses on a

21:58

conflict between

21:59

between Jewish and African Americans

22:02

in New York City in 1968. It

22:06

started as a fight over management

22:09

of the New York City public schools of all

22:11

things. A battle between the city's

22:13

teachers union and various community

22:16

activist groups. But

22:19

it grew so intense and

22:21

lasted so long that it consumed the attention

22:24

of the whole city for many months, for

22:26

most of a year,

22:28

and the whole country for

22:30

weeks at a time throughout 1968. And

22:33

it led to waves of violence and

22:35

a split

22:37

in one of the more fruitful political alliances

22:39

in 20th century America,

22:41

namely the Black Jewish Alliance. And

22:45

so this episode, needless to say, is

22:48

going to cover some controversial topics.

22:52

And I will be treading on dangerous ground from

22:54

the very first sentence. Where

22:57

I use racial slurs, and

22:59

there are a few, I'm not going to

23:02

baby you by using euphemisms when they

23:04

come up in quotes, or

23:06

when I speak in vernacular.

23:08

I'm just reading the quotes as they're written.

23:12

But I've tried in good faith to

23:14

tell the truth, and where I voice

23:17

my own opinions and perhaps veer

23:19

occasionally into polemic. I

23:22

have done so in good faith as well. Of

23:24

course, my inbox is always open. So

23:27

if you have a disagreement,

23:29

or a question, or a comment,

23:32

please don't be shy about sharing them. A

23:35

few housekeeping items before we jump in.

23:39

First I would like to thank all of you who

23:42

have subscribed to the Martyr Maid sub stack.

23:45

You guys are how I'm able to do this, and

23:48

a day does not go by

23:50

that I don't appreciate

23:53

it. Those of

23:55

you who are subscribers will be familiar

23:57

with some of the material in this episode, because

23:59

I've been

23:59

writing about it as it's been in development.

24:03

On the sub stack we've had Q&A's on

24:05

various topics

24:07

and the subscribers

24:09

are actually developing a strong community and

24:11

and having great discussions among themselves

24:13

in the comments section and all

24:15

you subscribers I know I've been neglecting

24:18

you guys over the last month or two. It

24:21

just got to a point where I didn't feel like

24:23

I was ever gonna finish this episode unless

24:26

I just isolated myself from the world and

24:29

focused on nothing but this. So this

24:31

episode is the reason I've been neglecting you and

24:33

I will be back in the saddle as

24:35

soon as this one's released.

24:38

So if you'd like to support this podcast,

24:41

subscribing to the sub stack is the best way

24:43

to do it.

24:44

It's just five bucks a month or fifty

24:47

bucks a year

24:48

and if you know I know it's

24:51

tough out there with prices of everything

24:53

going up and so forth if you happen to

24:55

be at a place in your life where you would like to

24:57

subscribe but but the

24:59

subscription fee is just a little out of

25:01

reach right now just shoot me an email at martyrmaid

25:04

at gmail.com and we'll

25:06

get you set up. There's

25:10

already an archive of podcasts

25:12

and essays available only to subscribers

25:15

so new subscribers will have a lot of catching

25:17

up to do. So if you like

25:19

this podcast and would like me to keep doing it

25:22

please do consider signing up

25:24

at martyrmaid.substack.com.

25:27

Next

25:31

as many of you are surely already

25:33

aware but not all of you not

25:35

enough of you unfortunately, History

25:38

on Fire, the great history

25:40

podcast by my friend Daniele

25:42

Bolelli

25:43

is back out from behind the luminary

25:45

paywall.

25:48

I can tell you I don't think I'm

25:50

speaking at a turn here that Daniele was

25:52

reluctant to put History on Fire behind

25:54

the

25:55

paywall a few years ago but luminary

25:58

made it very hard to say no. And

26:00

I

26:01

think that now that he's

26:04

back out in the wild, I

26:06

know I and his other fans, and

26:08

I think he too are very happy

26:10

to be back out in the wild. So

26:13

every History on Fire episode

26:15

is going to be free again. There's

26:17

a great archive on everything

26:20

from the Spanish conquest of Mexico to

26:23

Bruce Lee to

26:25

things that only Daniele could really pull

26:27

off like a multi-episode series

26:29

on the Italian painter Caravaggio

26:32

or the Tupac Shakur of Renaissance Italy

26:34

as Daniele calls him.

26:37

You can find his podcast wherever

26:39

you got this one.

26:40

And when you listen and enjoy it,

26:42

as I know you will, you can get exclusive

26:45

content from Daniele and help support

26:47

that show

26:48

on the History on Fire Patreon.

26:52

And finally, if you guys like Martyr Maid, then

26:55

you should all be grateful to my friend, Jaco

26:57

Willink.

26:59

I was actually about to stop making this

27:01

show a few years back. It

27:03

was just taking too much time and I had a busy

27:05

day job. And it was Jaco who

27:07

convinced me to take the plunge and

27:10

just make a go of doing this thing full time.

27:14

He has promoted the show as well

27:16

as the show that he and I do together, which is

27:18

called Jaco Unraveling.

27:21

And I know the questions are coming in because they come

27:23

in every day. There will be new episodes coming

27:25

soon.

27:27

Same excuse I just gave to the Substack

27:29

subscribers. I've been so obsessed with this for

27:31

the last little while that

27:33

I've just completely shut out the rest of the world.

27:35

And Jaco works more than any person I've

27:38

ever met in my life, so he's hard to pin down too.

27:40

But now that this episode is finished,

27:43

we will

27:45

get back on the Unraveling.

27:47

So look forward to that.

27:50

I owe a lot to Jaco. So if you

27:52

like Martyr Maid, then maybe you owe him

27:54

a little something as well. So it's

27:57

not a big ask, but go check out Jaco

27:59

Podcast. if you haven't

28:01

already it is consistently

28:04

one of the best podcasts out there and

28:06

has been since it got started

28:09

check out the podcast we do together again

28:12

called Jocko Unraveling

28:14

and then check out originmain.com

28:18

even if you don't feel like buying anything right now just

28:20

go check out the website Originmain,

28:23

main with an e like the state Origin

28:26

is Jocko's brick and mortar company and

28:29

they make

28:30

everything from

28:32

super high quality buffalo

28:34

hide boots to archery

28:36

hunting gear, hoodies

28:38

jiu-jitsu gears, jeans and

28:40

a lot more and these are

28:42

high end handmade products they're

28:45

on the pricey side but they will last you a lifetime

28:49

and

28:49

you know one of the things that's always most impressed me about

28:51

Jocko has been, and this

28:54

is not an advertisement in the sense of

28:56

like a sponsorship

28:57

neither is Daniele, I'm doing

28:59

this just because I love these guys

29:02

but one of the things that's always most impressed

29:05

me about Jocko has been his commitment to

29:07

not just making things in America but

29:10

to developing a labor force that has

29:13

real skills you

29:15

know the people who work at Origin know

29:18

how to make a pair of buffalo

29:20

hide boots they know how

29:22

to make a super high quality

29:25

pair of jeans

29:26

and I don't mean they just know how to sew

29:29

the pieces of denim together they know how

29:31

to make them

29:33

as our manufacturing base has been

29:35

shipped overseas for several decades

29:38

a lot of these skills have atrophied here

29:41

in America

29:43

our boots and jeans were being made over

29:45

in Bangladeshi sweatshops and

29:47

in the meantime our own people were forgetting how

29:49

to do it

29:50

and the older folks who actually had the knowledge,

29:52

they were all retiring

29:54

if you were to go start a boot making

29:56

factory today depending on where

29:58

you are in a lot of the world parts of the country, you

30:01

would have a hell of a time finding people with

30:04

the knowledge and skills to actually man your

30:06

shop. You

30:09

know, lately I've

30:10

been watching developments in the artificial

30:12

intelligence space. I don't know how

30:14

much attention you've been paying to that, but they

30:17

are starting to make some AI programs that

30:19

do some pretty scary and pretty impressive

30:21

things. Creative work,

30:23

writing stories,

30:25

making illustrations and music,

30:27

researching and answering questions. And

30:29

they're getting very, very good. Good

30:32

enough that if I was a lawyer or

30:34

an office bureaucrat or yes, a history

30:36

podcaster, I would start worrying

30:39

that my field was going to go the way of blue collar

30:41

factory work in the age of robotics.

30:44

But knowing how to make a high end pair of boots

30:48

is never going to stop being a useful

30:50

skill

30:51

and people who know how to do it

30:53

can look forward to the future without worrying

30:55

that they're going to be obsolesce by technology.

30:59

So this aspect of Jocko's business is

31:02

very important to him and it's something that

31:04

I've always really respected about him. So again,

31:07

check out originmain.com. Oh,

31:10

and if you're a caffeine addict like I am,

31:12

if you can't tell from how fast I'm speaking

31:15

and you find yourself slamming energy drinks

31:17

that you know are probably burning out your

31:19

adrenal glands and doing who knows

31:22

what else,

31:23

check out his Jocko Go energy

31:25

drinks. They're available

31:27

in a lot of stores now, especially in the East Coast,

31:29

Wawa's and some other stores. They're

31:31

my favorite energy drinks and they've improved

31:33

my life actually a lot since I switched over

31:36

to them.

31:37

They're sugar free, but they don't use, you

31:39

know, artificial sweeteners like Splenda

31:42

or NutraSweet. They use monk fruit, which

31:44

is much better, much easier on the digestive system.

31:47

And the boost they give you, you know, Jocko didn't

31:49

go

31:50

the route of just putting 300 milligrams of

31:53

caffeine into it like the reigns or bangs

31:55

that you have out there.

31:57

These give you much less of a high-intensity, high-intensity, high-intensity, high-intensity

32:00

high in crash like

32:02

monsters or rock stars in the rest. You know, Jocko

32:04

Go maybe only brings you up to about 75% of

32:08

where those hardcore ones will, but

32:11

then it'll keep you there

32:13

for longer and much more steadily

32:15

and let you down much more easily.

32:18

So you get less jittery,

32:20

less of that caffeine anxiety.

32:23

So you can actually pound one and sit

32:25

still and focus on whatever it is

32:27

you wanna do. Okay,

32:31

this was the longest introduction in murder made

32:33

history, but we are finally done. One

32:37

final note, I have been talking into this microphone

32:40

eight hours a day for the last several

32:42

days, trying to get this right. So

32:44

if you can't tell my voice is a little shot,

32:48

by the time I get to the end of this thing,

32:50

you probably will be able to tell.

32:52

For that, I apologize. You're

32:54

about to listen to Who's America?

32:57

Part two, inner city

32:59

blues. And I really hope

33:01

you enjoy it. Here we go.

33:07

I'm content to die for my beliefs. So

33:11

cut off my head and

33:14

make me a martyr. The

33:17

people will always remember it. No,

33:23

they will forget. Hell

33:26

does exist. God

33:28

is a thought. God is an idea.

33:33

It is a place. It is somewhere. Hell

33:38

does exist. But

33:41

its reference is to something that transcends

33:43

all thinking. Let's

33:50

go. Why must tear ourselves apart

33:53

for this small question of religion?

34:00

One of the better known Jewish

34:02

American fiction writers of the

34:04

post-war period is

34:06

a guy named Bernard Malamud.

34:11

And like much of the work of other Jewish American

34:13

novelists like Philip Roth and

34:15

Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, a

34:18

guy who Malamud was always remembered

34:21

and thought of

34:23

right alongside, but Malamud

34:25

has fallen off a little bit in terms of notoriety

34:28

compared to those guys. But just like

34:30

their work, a lot of Malamud's is

34:33

about what it's like to be Jewish

34:35

in America.

34:37

I think it was Albert Goldman who said

34:39

that Jews have always been students

34:42

and their greatest study is themselves.

34:45

Well Malamud fits into that tradition. And

34:48

he wrote two stories, well he wrote a lot

34:50

of stories, but two that I'm going to talk about.

34:53

One just before the 1960s began

34:55

and

34:56

one just after the 60s came

34:59

to an end.

35:00

And these two stories bookend a major

35:03

theme of Jewish life during that decade.

35:08

The first of the two stories called

35:10

Angel Levine appeared

35:13

in a collection called The Magic Barrel

35:15

in 1959. It's a short story.

35:18

And the second story called The Tenants

35:21

was published in 1971.

35:25

Both stories take place in New York

35:27

City and both center

35:29

on the unique and complicated relationship

35:32

between Jewish and Black Americans.

35:37

The protagonist of Angel Levine

35:40

is a beat down Jewish man named Manashevitz

35:43

who Malamud informs the reader early on

35:46

has suffered many indignities

35:48

and reverses. And

35:51

just generally he's had a long stretch

35:53

of things not going his way. His

35:57

business was lost to a fire. His son

36:00

died in a war.

36:02

His only other child, his daughter, had

36:04

run off to get married to a lout, Malamud

36:07

calls him,

36:08

and Manashevitz is hardly in touch with her.

36:12

He himself is beset by excruciating

36:14

back aches, and his wife's health

36:16

is declining right before his eyes.

36:19

There was, writes Malamud, little

36:22

hope. But

36:25

then a ray of hope pokes through, in

36:27

the form of a mysterious black man

36:30

named Alexander Levine. An

36:33

interesting character for many reasons, not

36:35

least that Levine is a Jewish name,

36:38

usually, which gives an early hint

36:40

of where the story's headed. Levine

36:43

himself claims to be a Jew. Manashevitz

36:46

really doesn't buy it, not at first, but his

36:48

skepticism softens a bit when he

36:50

hears Levine say a prayer

36:52

in perfect Hebrew. It

36:54

doesn't quite break through his wall of disbelief,

36:57

but it helps. On

37:00

top of being a Jew, Levine also

37:02

claims to be an angel,

37:04

an angel on probation, sent to help

37:06

Manashevitz through his rough patch, sort

37:09

of like Clarence in It's a Wonderful Life.

37:13

Well, Manashevitz doubts this as well, and he

37:15

voices his doubt by saying, so if God sends to me an angel,

37:17

why a black? And so Levine hears this,

37:20

and he

37:22

can see that his help

37:24

is not wanted, or at least not trusted,

37:27

and so he departs, leaving Manashevitz

37:29

to his misery.

37:32

And then one day, Manashevitz's wife, Fanny,

37:35

collapses and seems to be on the brink of death, and

37:37

he, desperate enough to reach for the

37:39

flimsiest lifeline, goes out into the city in search of

37:41

the black

37:43

angel. His search leads him to a synagogue

37:48

in Harlem, and there he finds a group of black worshippers

37:51

bent over a copy of the Torah, discussing

37:53

and sermonizing on its contents.

37:59

on the face of the water, move the

38:02

spirit, from the spirit arise

38:04

demand. A

38:07

bit primitive maybe to a lifelong Jew

38:09

like Manishavitz, but still

38:11

there was an innocence about them and they

38:13

seem dedicated. So his

38:16

skepticism at the possibility

38:18

of identity, of a common identity

38:21

between himself and the denizens

38:23

of black Harlem, it softens a bit more.

38:27

Then his search leads him on a mini odyssey

38:30

of black New York. And as

38:32

he wanders around witnessing scenes

38:34

of suffering and of black people

38:36

being put upon, he gradually

38:39

begins to open to the possibility that

38:41

maybe the idea of a Negro angel

38:43

is not so crazy after all.

38:46

And finally he finds Levine and by this point

38:48

he's so exhausted and overwhelmed that he

38:50

cries out, I think you are an angel

38:52

from God.

38:54

And at that moment, his wife miraculously

38:56

recovers and Levine is released

38:58

from probation and taken up into heaven. When

39:02

Manishavitz gets home to find his wife healthy

39:04

again, he

39:05

gushes to her about what he's seen and he says,

39:08

it's a wonderful thing. Believe

39:10

me Fanny, there are Jews everywhere.

39:15

Now this is a pretty straightforward redemption story

39:18

and the mechanism of redemption for Manishavitz

39:21

is the realization of a common identity

39:24

between himself and Levine

39:28

and of brotherhood between his people

39:30

and Levine's people.

39:33

It's also one of the more direct examples of

39:35

the magical Negro motif that used to be

39:37

in such heavy circulation. In

39:40

many ways, despite the identity of the protagonist

39:42

and the author, the story is Christian in

39:44

its themes,

39:46

very sentimental and focused on

39:48

universal brotherhood, but that's pretty normal

39:50

for Malamud. Manishavitz's

39:54

initial skepticism over Levine's claim

39:56

to Judaism was not really the hard

39:58

part to overcome.

40:00

In fact, Malamud presents it as

40:03

pretty natural that there would be a black Jew, and

40:05

it's really only his claim to be an angel that Manashevitz

40:08

really struggles with, but he has to get past

40:10

the first obstacle to even deal with the second

40:12

one.

40:14

When Manashevitz wanders through Harlem seeing

40:17

black people suffering, just as he has

40:19

been suffering, his revelation

40:21

is one of a deep kinship rooted

40:24

in the common experience of suffering between

40:27

black people and Jewish people, both

40:29

of whose identities and uniqueness

40:32

as peoples to Malamud

40:35

were rooted in their claim to being history's

40:37

greatest victims. This gives

40:39

Manashevitz the faith he needs to precipitate

40:42

the miracle.

40:45

Fast forward about a dozen years, and

40:48

now we're on the other side of the 1960s.

40:51

When Malamud publishes the second story

40:53

called The Tenants.

40:56

The Tenants is a story that would have been

40:58

as impossible for Malamud

41:00

to write in 1959

41:03

as it would have been for anyone to write

41:05

Angel Levine in 1971. Too

41:09

much had changed. Angel

41:12

Levine in 1971, people

41:15

would have laughed it off as a parody of

41:17

the dull sentimentality that had pervaded

41:19

black Jewish relations before the 1960s.

41:24

The theme of The Tenants runs in almost

41:26

the perfectly opposite direction to the first

41:28

story. It's

41:30

about two writers,

41:32

one an established but struggling

41:35

Jewish writer named Lesser, and

41:37

his neighbor in the same apartment building,

41:40

a black man named Willie who's still

41:42

only an aspiring writer. The

41:45

two become acquainted, and Lesser, as

41:48

the more experienced writer, tries to take Willie

41:50

under his wing

41:52

and guide him as someone who's been there and done that.

41:55

But soon enough, Willie

41:57

starts to resent what he interprets

41:59

as

41:59

Lesser's condescension toward him.

42:02

And his resentment takes the form of believing

42:05

that Lesser looks down on him, not because he's

42:07

young or an unaccomplished writer,

42:09

but because he is black and Lesser

42:11

is a Jew. And

42:14

so he becomes increasingly defensive, deflecting

42:17

every criticism or bit of advice

42:19

as an attempt by this Jew to tell

42:22

him what the voice of a black

42:24

writer should sound like.

42:26

In one of their arguments, Willie says,

42:29

you're trying to kill off my natural writing

42:31

by pretending you interested in the motherfucking

42:33

form of it. Though the truth of

42:35

it is you afraid of what I'm gonna write in my book,

42:38

which is that the blacks have to murder you white

42:40

motherfuckers for crippling our lives.

42:43

He then cried out, oh, what a hypocrite

42:45

shit ass I am to ask a Jew of

42:47

a for advice on how to express my

42:50

soul work. Just in reading it,

42:52

you spoil what it says.

42:54

I ought to be hung on a hook till some kind

42:56

brother cuts off my white balls. Well,

43:00

over the course of the novel, Lesser comes to realize

43:03

that the common ground that

43:05

he thought he'd found with Willie

43:07

at the beginning of the story,

43:09

that that was only superficial. And that in fact,

43:12

Willie is a raging anti-Semite.

43:15

He finds a note written by Willie that

43:17

reads,

43:18

it isn't that I hate the Jews,

43:21

but if I do any, it's not because

43:23

I invented it myself, but I was born

43:25

in the good old US of A. And there's

43:27

a lot going on that gets under your skin. And

43:30

it's also from knowing the Jews, which

43:33

I do.

43:34

The way to black freedom is against

43:37

them.

43:40

The novel ends with the two

43:42

men slashing at each other

43:45

in a murderous frenzy, one with an

43:47

ax, the other with a saber, both

43:49

of them screaming racist curses at

43:51

each other as they bleed out.

43:54

It's a brutal scene that Malamud

43:56

intends to represent as a one-on-one pogrom.

44:01

So what happened? What happened between

44:04

those years that

44:06

led to such different

44:10

attitudes of Bernard Malamud

44:12

about the relationship between black

44:15

and Jewish Americans?

44:17

Most of you probably

44:19

noticed Kanye West's recent

44:22

decision to commit seppuku on

44:24

the steps of the Anti-Defamation League's headquarters.

44:28

But long before Kanye went death

44:30

con 3 on the Jews, a

44:33

lot had been written about the complicated

44:36

relationship between American

44:38

blacks and American Jews.

44:40

Although not so much had been written about it recently,

44:43

recently it's been a topic that people have avoided.

44:47

When every so often a black celebrity

44:49

hits the news for saying something

44:52

that causes Jews to feel threatened or

44:54

offended,

44:55

the press treats each story as

44:57

hermetically sealed off from all the others.

45:01

At all costs, they avoid suggesting

45:04

that the incidents might be in any way connected,

45:07

or that they could reflect genuine friction

45:09

between these two groups of people

45:12

rather than

45:13

just the ignorance of Kanye West

45:16

or one misguided individual.

45:19

The Kanye spectacle was a re-eruption

45:22

of an old volcano,

45:24

long dormant and perhaps thought

45:26

extinct. Soon

45:29

after Mount Kanye blew its top, NBA

45:31

star Kyrie Irving got in trouble

45:33

for anti-semitism.

45:36

Before them, it was Jay-Z, Ice

45:39

Cube, Professor Griff of Public

45:41

Enemy, Lupe Fiasco, Nick

45:43

Cannon, Whoopi Goldberg, and

45:46

many more.

45:48

Nick Cannon was fired from his TV

45:50

job, promoting

45:53

the theory that black people are descended from the

45:55

biblical Israelites,

45:57

rather than from Ham, the cursed

45:59

son of Noah.

46:01

Kanye, Kyrie Irving, and Ice

46:04

Cube came under fire for promoting

46:07

the

46:07

OG version of Wakanda Forever.

46:11

Griff, Fiasco, and Jay-Z went

46:13

the more traditional route by suggesting

46:15

that Jews own and control the recording industry

46:17

that signed their checks.

46:21

Now it's comparatively rare for

46:24

celebrities of other races to

46:26

make such a glaring faux pas on the topic

46:28

of Jews.

46:31

It took a bottle of Jim Beam and

46:33

sleep deprivation for Mel Gibson

46:35

to join the rappers and agree out loud that

46:37

Jews control the entertainment industry.

46:40

So what gives? Well,

46:43

it turns out there's a history here, but

46:46

our

46:47

maybe understandable reluctance

46:50

in America to talk honestly about

46:52

groups as groups has

46:54

caused that history to be mostly forgotten,

46:57

even by the people

46:59

implicated in it.

47:03

Until about a hundred years ago,

47:05

black and Jewish Americans still had

47:08

virtually no experience with each other.

47:12

And the same was true of black people and other

47:14

European immigrant groups.

47:17

Most black people still lived in the rural

47:19

South. And by most, I mean pretty much all. While

47:23

almost all Jews, Irish,

47:26

Italians, and the rest of the Euro-ethnics that they had

47:28

settled in the urban North.

47:32

What black and Jewish Americans knew about

47:34

each other was often filtered

47:37

through the lens of popular mythology. In the pre-Civil War period,

47:41

black slaves identified their plight with that of the

47:44

ancient Hebrews toiling under the whips of Pharaoh. And

47:48

Negro spirituals expressed their hope that they would one

47:51

day be led out of captivity into their own promised land.

47:56

By the time the war began, the Jews were forced to go to

47:59

the city

47:59

of Jerusalem.

47:59

At the turn of the century, Jim Crow was in full

48:02

force, and post-reconstruction

48:04

blacks had been relegated in the South mostly

48:07

to subsistence farming, and

48:09

lives that were a little better than their lives

48:11

under slavery, and in many ways, materially

48:14

speaking, they

48:15

were a lot worse for many people. But

48:18

the railroads had been built by then,

48:20

and word began to trickle down to

48:22

some southern blacks that their promised

48:25

land might be just a short train ride

48:27

to the North.

48:29

So they started migrating, and soon the stampede

48:32

was on.

48:33

Between 1915 and 1960,

48:37

some six to seven million black

48:39

Americans migrated out of the rural south

48:42

to the big cities in the North and West.

48:44

It was one of the largest mass migrations in

48:47

human history.

48:48

And as I said in the introduction,

48:50

one whose consequences

48:53

defined much of American domestic

48:55

politics in the 20th century, and really

48:58

even to our own day.

49:01

It's hard to really even imagine it today,

49:04

but Baltimore, Philly,

49:07

Brooklyn, Newark, Detroit,

49:11

St. Louis, Chicago,

49:13

Los Angeles, Oakland,

49:15

when the First World War began in 1914, all

49:18

of those cities that became

49:21

well known in the 20th century

49:23

as hubs of African American life still

49:26

had virtually no black people living in them.

49:30

Even the Ku Klux Klan had shifted its focus.

49:33

The second KKK was founded in

49:35

Atlanta in 1915, but

49:37

it never really caught on in the south.

49:40

Instead it caught on in the West and

49:43

Midwest,

49:44

and in big cities like Chicago,

49:47

Indy, Cleveland, Portland,

49:49

places that still had virtually no black people

49:51

living in them. See,

49:54

like the early progressive movement, the KKK

49:56

of that period was a wasp

49:59

reaction.

49:59

Wasp for you, not Americans unfamiliar

50:02

with the term is what we call white

50:04

Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Just think old

50:07

stock Americans, basically.

50:10

It was a wasp reaction to the

50:12

disorder brought about by mass immigration.

50:16

Decades of

50:18

almost unregulated immigration

50:20

had caused American cities

50:23

to be radically transformed, to multiply

50:25

in size many times over, sometimes

50:28

by orders of magnitude.

50:31

Many cities had been consumed

50:33

by crime and decay and

50:35

had been taken over by corrupt immigrant political

50:38

machines backed by voters who voted

50:40

for their own kind

50:42

or for candidates who pandered to them.

50:46

Millions of immigrants,

50:48

southern European Catholics,

50:50

eastern European Jews,

50:52

central European freethinkers, all

50:55

people who were very foreign and very strange

50:57

to the old stock wasps,

50:59

were now huddling in hastily

51:02

constructed ghettos

51:04

that were black boxes to the people outside

51:07

them and that seemed to the natives

51:09

to emanate filth, crime,

51:12

disease, vice, and disorder.

51:16

Well these were the neighborhoods into which

51:19

migrating southern blacks were funneled

51:21

when they made their way to America's great cities.

51:24

These were the neighborhoods they could afford to live in and

51:27

they lived cheek by jowl with

51:29

Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews,

51:32

and many other people

51:34

who had only recently arrived themselves.

51:37

When the Great Migration got underway,

51:40

most Jews and Italians had only been in

51:42

the United States less than 30 years and

51:45

a majority had been here less than 20 years. In

51:49

those early years of the Great Migration,

51:51

nobody saw blacks as moving

51:54

in on white neighborhoods, at least

51:56

not primarily,

51:57

but on Irish and Italian and Poles.

51:59

Polish neighborhoods. And

52:03

if, as time went on, nobody really spoke

52:05

of Italian-black relations, or Polish

52:08

or Irish-black relations, the

52:10

way that they continue to do to this day about

52:12

Jewish-black relations, that's because

52:15

Jews alone among

52:17

European ethnics managed to

52:19

retain a meaningful sense of group identity,

52:22

while the others just melted into the generic

52:25

American white population.

52:27

Which is another way of saying that they had exchanged

52:30

their ethnic identities for

52:32

a racial identity. From

52:36

the beginning, Jews were relatively

52:39

more tolerant than the other Euro-ethnics

52:42

of the black migrants.

52:45

What they heard about the Jim Crow South reminded

52:48

them of their parents' tales about the pale of

52:50

settlement back in the Russian Empire.

52:53

They knew that blacks had been slaves

52:55

in America, just as Jews had been slaves

52:57

in Egypt, and that both

53:00

of them had survived in their

53:02

own form of exile ever since.

53:07

A strong strain of political radicalism

53:09

told that same story to the Jews who were

53:11

not moved by religion.

53:14

Both groups had gone through their own ordeal

53:16

of integration

53:18

in the American cities they now called home,

53:21

and faced discrimination and

53:23

occasional mistreatment not only from the majority

53:25

population, but from members

53:27

of their own group

53:29

who had preceded them to the cities.

53:33

The Eastern European Jews who began arriving

53:35

in the 1880s were seen as backward, uncouth, immoral,

53:41

and a potentially dangerous

53:43

criminal or radical political element by

53:46

the well-assimilated handful of German Jews

53:49

who had come with the previous generation's

53:51

migration from the German states.

53:59

And they were afraid that the unruly

54:02

behavior of their Eastern cousins would

54:04

ignite the flame of anti-Semitism in

54:06

America. And so they went as

54:09

far as setting up what amounted to training

54:11

centers

54:12

for newly arrived Austro-Jutin to make sure

54:14

that they got started in a productive trade

54:16

to keep them from turning to crime and

54:19

to teach them English and to just generally

54:21

teach them how to behave in their new country.

54:26

The Southern Blacks had a similar experience when they

54:28

arrived in the Northern cities. When they

54:30

got there, they discovered that small

54:32

groups of well-assimilated blacks had

54:35

lived there for years, many of them

54:37

since before the Civil War.

54:39

And these relatively cosmopolitan

54:42

Northern blacks looked down on Southern

54:44

black migrants with the same embarrassment.

54:48

Dark skinned blacks faced discrimination

54:50

and exclusion by lighter skinned blacks.

54:54

Like the German Jews, these assimilated

54:56

Northern blacks had managed to find some

54:59

peace and even some acceptance in their cities.

55:02

And they were worried that they were going to be associated

55:04

with the unruly behavior of their

55:07

country cousins.

55:10

There was also a general prejudice against rural

55:13

Southerners, white or black,

55:15

who were perceived by Yankees

55:17

to be rowdy, vulgar,

55:21

ignorant, and more prone

55:23

to violence and licentiousness. The

55:26

old TV show, The Beverly Hillbillies,

55:30

about an Appalachian family who struck it rich

55:32

in oil and moved out to the big city. That's

55:35

a humorous take on what for

55:37

many years was one of the more open

55:39

forms of bigotry in the country. And

55:41

I would maintain that it still is.

55:44

Even that show, which tries

55:46

not to be too cruel in its presentation

55:48

of the Clampett family,

55:50

made it clear on a weekly basis that

55:52

sure, these people are not bad people,

55:55

they have their charms,

55:57

but they're not people that you want moving into your

55:59

nice manic

55:59

neighborhood either.

56:03

This attitude really came out during

56:06

the 1930s when the dust

56:08

bowl sent migrations

56:10

of displaced southern white farmers out

56:12

to California looking for migrant farm

56:15

work in the San Joaquin Valley.

56:17

The Oakes as they came to be called because

56:19

most of them were from Oklahoma. These

56:22

are the people several John Steinbeck's novels

56:24

like the Grapes of Wrath and of Meissenmen

56:26

are about. The Oakes were

56:28

not a welcome presence to the native

56:30

Californians, not at all. The

56:33

same was true when thousands of people from

56:36

Appalachia began moving up to Chicago

56:38

and Detroit and other cities in the Midwest.

56:42

The Oakes set up tent cities

56:44

on the outskirts of California cities

56:48

and their settlements had a really nasty

56:50

reputation with the natives as havens

56:53

for criminals and rowdy

56:55

drunks and violent men and

56:57

loose women

56:59

much like the reputation of the ghetto

57:01

in

57:01

the suburbs in more recent

57:04

years.

57:06

Sheriffs and police departments would

57:08

harass the Oakes when they came into some

57:10

towns just to let them know that they were not

57:12

wanted around there.

57:14

At one point LA County sheriffs posted

57:17

up at the county line on Route 66

57:20

to block a car train of Oakes coming

57:23

into LA and they forced them to go back

57:25

and head north and find someplace else to go. You

57:29

know these are the kind of things that if there was a

57:31

racial element to it

57:33

would probably have a national day of

57:35

mourning today but you

57:37

know the black people who were part of the Great Migration

57:40

this was just one of the forms of

57:42

discrimination they faced. They faced it

57:44

because they were black,

57:46

because they were from the south, because

57:48

they were rural,

57:50

and because their previous lives down

57:52

south you know again these people were mostly

57:54

sharecroppers, tenant farmers, agricultural

57:57

workers.

57:59

Their lives down

57:59

there had not prepared them for life

58:02

in the big city.

58:06

So there were reasons for Jews

58:08

to feel a certain affinity for their black

58:10

neighbors, but

58:12

tolerance has its limits when underclass

58:15

groups start bumping against each other.

58:19

The black novelist James Baldwin was

58:21

born and raised in Harlem in the 20s and 30s.

58:25

When he was born, black people

58:27

still made up only less than 3% of

58:30

the population in New York City.

58:32

Up from less than 2% at the

58:34

turn of the century, but still a very small

58:37

number, hardly noticed by most people because

58:39

the majority of black New Yorkers lived up in

58:41

Harlem and people didn't get around

58:43

back then quite as much as they do today.

58:47

The great movement of white people to the suburbs,

58:50

which we call white flight in

58:53

response to the influx of black migrants,

58:55

that wasn't even a thing yet

58:57

because there was nothing to fly away from in a city

58:59

that was not only segregated by race, it

59:02

was segregated by ethnicity.

59:06

And yet Baldwin,

59:07

already Baldwin tells us in

59:09

a 1967 essay for the New York

59:11

Times magazine

59:13

that there was already a good deal of friction

59:16

between many black New Yorkers and their

59:18

new neighbors.

59:20

Baldwin opens this essay saying, quote,

59:23

when we were growing

59:25

up in Harlem, our demoralizing series

59:28

of landlords were Jewish and we hated

59:30

them. We hated them because

59:32

they were terrible landlords and did not take care

59:34

of the building. A coat of paint,

59:37

a broken window, a stop sink,

59:39

a stop toilet, a sagging floor,

59:42

a broken ceiling, a dangerous stairwell,

59:45

the question of garbage disposal, the

59:47

question of heat and cold, of roaches

59:50

and rats, all questions

59:52

of life and death for the poor, especially

59:54

those with children.

59:56

We had to cope with all of these as best we

59:58

could. The grocer

1:00:01

was a Jew, and being in debt to him

1:00:03

was very much like being in debt to the company

1:00:05

store. The butcher was

1:00:07

a Jew, and yes, we certainly paid more

1:00:10

for bad cuts of meat than other New York

1:00:12

citizens,

1:00:13

and we very often carried insults home

1:00:15

along with the meat. We

1:00:18

bought our clothes from a Jew, and sometimes

1:00:21

our second-hand shoes, and the pawnbroker

1:00:23

was a Jew.

1:00:24

Perhaps we hated him most of all.

1:00:28

The merchants along 125th Street

1:00:30

were Jewish, at least many of them were.

1:00:33

Of course, many Jews despise

1:00:35

Negroes, even as their Aryan brothers

1:00:37

do.

1:00:38

It is true that many Jews use,

1:00:41

shamelessly, the slaughter of the six

1:00:43

million by the Third Reich as proof that

1:00:45

they cannot be bigots,

1:00:47

or in the hope of not being held responsible

1:00:49

for their bigotry. It

1:00:51

is galling to be told by a Jew, whom

1:00:54

you know to be exploiting you, that

1:00:56

he cannot possibly be doing what you know

1:00:58

he is doing, because he is a Jew. It

1:01:01

is bitter to watch the Jewish storekeeper

1:01:04

locking up his store for the night and going

1:01:06

home, going with your money

1:01:08

in his pocket to a clean neighborhood

1:01:10

miles from you, which you will

1:01:13

not be allowed to enter.

1:01:15

Nor can it help the relationship between

1:01:17

most Negroes and most Jews when part

1:01:20

of this money is donated to civil rights.

1:01:22

In light of what is now known

1:01:25

as the white backlash, this money

1:01:27

can be looked on as conscience money merely,

1:01:30

as money given to keep the Negro happy

1:01:32

in his place and out of

1:01:34

white neighborhoods."

1:01:39

Despite his relatively humble upbringing,

1:01:42

Baldwin's antipathy was

1:01:44

not that of the man on the street.

1:01:48

It was the antipathy of a black intellectual,

1:01:50

which is to say that it had less to do

1:01:53

with the day-to-day frictions between

1:01:55

underclass groups

1:01:57

and the people just visible above them, as he is kind of describing.

1:01:59

I being here, and much more

1:02:02

to do with his offense at the idea

1:02:04

that Jews, especially after

1:02:06

the Second World War, would presume

1:02:09

to usurp the rightful claim of black

1:02:11

people to the top of America's hierarchy

1:02:14

of victims.

1:02:15

In the countless polemics written against

1:02:17

Jews by black authors since

1:02:20

the end of World War II, and there have been

1:02:22

many,

1:02:24

the most common complaint they consistently

1:02:26

put forward is that they're offended by

1:02:29

the temerity of America's prosperous

1:02:31

Jews

1:02:33

to compare their own lot with that

1:02:35

suffered by black people.

1:02:38

The Jews, of course, they didn't see

1:02:40

things that way at all. From their perspective, they were

1:02:42

reaching out to the black community.

1:02:45

They were saying, hey, look, I get it. I'm

1:02:48

with you.

1:02:49

I know I have more or less white skin, but my

1:02:51

history's taught me all about oppression, and

1:02:53

so I understand you

1:02:55

in a way that none of these other white skin people

1:02:57

can.

1:03:00

But increasingly, by the 1960s,

1:03:03

black leaders

1:03:04

and black intellectuals and black activists,

1:03:06

they were not receptive to that outreach.

1:03:10

They saw it as Jews basically trying

1:03:12

to play both sides,

1:03:14

to be white when it was convenient, like when

1:03:16

they wanted to move into a neighborhood with other white

1:03:19

people,

1:03:20

but to play the victimized minority who

1:03:22

understands the struggle and is down for

1:03:24

the cause whenever that was convenient.

1:03:28

Baldwin wrote in that same essay, quote,

1:03:31

One does not wish to be told

1:03:33

by an American Jew that his suffering

1:03:35

is as great as the American Negro's suffering.

1:03:38

It isn't, and one knows that it isn't

1:03:40

from the very tone in which he assures you

1:03:42

that it is. The Jewish

1:03:45

travail occurred across the sea, and

1:03:47

America rescued him from the house of bondage.

1:03:50

But America is the house of bondage for

1:03:52

the Negro, and no country can rescue

1:03:55

him.

1:03:56

What happens to the Negro here happens

1:03:58

to him because he is an American.

1:03:59

American." Baldwin

1:04:04

had titled that essay, Negroes

1:04:06

are anti-Semitic because they're anti-white.

1:04:10

But it was the first part of that statement that really

1:04:12

got people's attention.

1:04:14

Shortly after the essay was published, the Times

1:04:16

ran a response op-ed by Rabbi

1:04:19

Robert Gordus entitled, Negroes are

1:04:21

anti-Semitic because they want a scapegoat,

1:04:24

and it mostly goes downhill from there.

1:04:27

Around that same time, Richard Wright,

1:04:30

the black author who wrote the book Native Son,

1:04:33

said,

1:04:34

quote, to hold an attitude

1:04:37

of antagonism or distrust toward Jews

1:04:39

was bred in us from childhood. It

1:04:42

was not merely racial prejudice, it was

1:04:44

part of our cultural heritage. All

1:04:46

of us black people who lived in the neighborhood

1:04:48

hated Jews, end quote.

1:04:52

Wright said that he and his friends would follow the Jewish

1:04:54

kids around, chanting, bloody Christ

1:04:57

killers, never trusted Jew,

1:04:59

bloody Christ killers, what won't a

1:05:01

Jew do? Both

1:05:05

Baldwin and Wright are writing about their experiences

1:05:08

as kids and young men in the 1930s. A few years before

1:05:10

Baldwin's Jourineat

1:05:15

was published in 1963,

1:05:17

Norman Podhoritz gave the Jewish

1:05:19

perspective of that same period

1:05:21

and that same dynamic in a now famous

1:05:24

or maybe infamous essay

1:05:26

in the neoconservative journal commentary

1:05:28

called,

1:05:29

My Negro Problem and Ours. Podhoritz

1:05:35

attempts to excavate the roots

1:05:38

of his own prejudice

1:05:39

from his childhood experiences

1:05:41

living in one of those neighborhoods where he experienced

1:05:45

the hatred and hostility that Baldwin

1:05:47

and Wright are telling us about.

1:05:51

Podhoritz's older sister was a left-wing

1:05:53

political activist

1:05:55

and so he grew up listening to her lecture

1:05:57

him about civil rights and about

1:05:59

how black

1:05:59

were persecuted and downtrodden,

1:06:03

but to the 12-year-old Pudhorets, it

1:06:05

seemed preposterous to think that

1:06:07

the black kids who bullied him and his friends

1:06:09

every day were the persecuted ones.

1:06:13

You know, a boy's world is very small and

1:06:15

he says, in my world it

1:06:17

was the whites, the Italians and Jews

1:06:20

who feared the Negroes, not the other way

1:06:22

around.

1:06:23

The Negroes were tougher than we were, more

1:06:25

ruthless, and on the whole they were better

1:06:27

athletes. What could it mean

1:06:30

then to say that they were badly off

1:06:32

and we were more fortunate? Yet

1:06:35

my sister's opinions were sacred and

1:06:37

when she told me about exploitation

1:06:39

and economic forces I believed her.

1:06:42

I believed her but I was still

1:06:44

afraid of Negroes and

1:06:46

I still hated them with all my heart."

1:06:52

The bulk of Pudhorets' essay is an itemization

1:06:56

of grievances accumulated by

1:06:58

him against blacks from

1:07:00

his boyhood.

1:07:02

And partisans ever since have debated whether

1:07:04

the essay should be considered a confessional

1:07:07

or an apologia.

1:07:10

His best friend Carl was black

1:07:12

but one day Carl hit him on the

1:07:14

way home and accused him of killing Jesus. Quote,

1:07:18

When I ran home to my mother crying

1:07:20

for an explanation,

1:07:21

she told me not to pay attention to such foolishness

1:07:24

and then in Yiddish she cursed the

1:07:26

goyim and the schwartzas, the schwartzas

1:07:29

and the goyim.

1:07:30

Carl, it turned out, was

1:07:32

a schwartza and so was added

1:07:35

a third to the categories into which

1:07:37

people were mysteriously divided. End

1:07:39

quote. Pudhorets

1:07:43

recounts the time a new playground was

1:07:45

built across the street from his house by the

1:07:47

city of New York. The

1:07:49

park had a baseball diamond and Pudhorets

1:07:52

and his friends were ecstatic for

1:07:55

about a week

1:07:57

and then a gang of black kids arrived and ordered

1:07:59

them to stay away.

1:07:59

from the park. Quote, we

1:08:02

refuse proudly and indignantly

1:08:05

with superb masculine fervor.

1:08:07

There is a fight they win and

1:08:09

we retreat half whimpering half

1:08:12

with bravado.

1:08:13

My first nauseating experience

1:08:15

of cowardice and my

1:08:17

first appalled realization that

1:08:19

there are people in the world who do not seem to

1:08:21

be afraid of anything

1:08:23

who act as though they have nothing to lose.

1:08:26

There thereafter the playground

1:08:28

becomes a battleground.

1:08:30

Sometimes quiet, sometimes the scene

1:08:32

of athletic competition between them and

1:08:34

us,

1:08:35

but rocks are thrown as often as baseballs

1:08:38

and gradually we abandon the place and

1:08:40

use the streets instead. End

1:08:42

quote.

1:08:45

This is the schoolyard manifestation

1:08:47

of the feelings

1:08:49

James Baldwin was expressing in his

1:08:51

Times article.

1:08:54

Most black kids would not grow up to

1:08:56

be a feat homosexual novelists like James

1:08:58

Baldwin,

1:09:00

and the ones in Podhoritz's stories

1:09:03

are of the more common type. Baldwin

1:09:06

wrote screeds for the New York

1:09:08

Times because he could

1:09:10

not bring himself to beat anyone up. That's just not who he was. But

1:09:15

his writings as the 60s war on

1:09:17

were giddy over the idea of black violence

1:09:20

striking fear into the heart of the white

1:09:22

man and give every impression that he would have preferred

1:09:24

to be fighting instead of writing.

1:09:27

Who has not dreamed, Baldwin

1:09:30

asked, of that fantastical

1:09:32

violence which will drown in blood, wash

1:09:35

away in blood, not only generation

1:09:38

upon generation of horror, but

1:09:40

will also release one from the individual

1:09:42

horror carried everywhere in the heart.

1:09:47

But the flip side is that maybe Podhoritz's schoolmates beat him up because they couldn't

1:09:49

write essays for the Times. Another one of Podhoritz's

1:09:51

beatings came after a track meet

1:09:55

among the city's junior high schools. Quote. There

1:10:01

is an athletic meet in which the whole of our

1:10:04

junior high school is participating. I

1:10:06

am in one of the seventh grade rapid advanced

1:10:09

classes and segregation has

1:10:11

now set in with a vengeance.

1:10:13

In the last three or four years of the

1:10:15

elementary school from which we have just graduated,

1:10:19

each grade had been divided into three classes

1:10:21

according to intelligence.

1:10:24

In the earlier grades the divisions had either been

1:10:26

arbitrary or else unrecognized

1:10:28

by us as having anything to do with brains.

1:10:31

These divisions by IQ

1:10:34

or however it was arranged had

1:10:36

resulted in a preponderance of Jews

1:10:38

in the one classes and a corresponding

1:10:41

preponderance of Negroes in the threes,

1:10:43

with the Italians split unevenly along

1:10:46

the spectrum.

1:10:47

At least a few Negroes had always made

1:10:50

it to the ones, just as there had always been

1:10:52

a few Jewish kids among the threes and

1:10:54

more among the twos were Italians dominated.

1:10:57

But the junior high's rapid advanced

1:10:59

class of which I am now a member is overwhelmingly

1:11:02

Jewish and entirely white,

1:11:04

except for a shy, lonely, Negro

1:11:06

girl with light skin and reddish hair.

1:11:10

The athletic meet takes place in

1:11:12

a city-owned stadium far from the school.

1:11:14

It is an important event to which a whole

1:11:17

day is given over.

1:11:19

The winners are to get those precious

1:11:21

little medallions stamped with the New York City

1:11:23

emblem that can be screwed into a belt

1:11:25

that can improve the wearer to be a distinguished

1:11:28

personage.

1:11:30

I am a fast runner and so I am assigned

1:11:32

the position of Anchorman on my classes

1:11:34

team in the relay race. There

1:11:37

are three other seventh grade teams in the race,

1:11:39

two of them all Negro, as ours

1:11:41

is all white. One

1:11:43

of the all Negro teams is very tall,

1:11:46

their Anchorman, waiting silently next

1:11:48

to me on the line looks years older than I

1:11:51

am, and I do not recognize him. He

1:11:54

is the first to get the baton and crosses

1:11:57

the finishing line in a walk.

1:11:59

team comes in second, but a few minutes

1:12:02

later we are declared the winners, for

1:12:04

it has been discovered that the Anchorman on the first

1:12:06

place team is not a member of the class.

1:12:09

We are awarded the medallions and the

1:12:11

following day our homeroom teacher makes

1:12:13

a speech about how proud she is of us

1:12:15

for being superior athletes as well

1:12:17

as superior students.

1:12:20

We want to believe that we deserve the praise,

1:12:23

but we know that we could not have won even if

1:12:25

the other class had not cheated.

1:12:28

That afternoon, walking home,

1:12:30

I am waylaid and surrounded

1:12:32

by five Negroes, among whom is

1:12:34

the Anchorman of the disqualified team. Give

1:12:38

me my medal, mufucka, he grunts.

1:12:41

I do not have it with me and tell him so.

1:12:43

Anyway, it ain't yours, I

1:12:45

say foolishly. He

1:12:47

calls me a liar on both counts and

1:12:49

pushes me up against the wall on which we sometimes

1:12:52

play handball.

1:12:53

Give me my mufucka medal, he says

1:12:55

again.

1:12:56

I repeat that I've left it at home. Let's

1:12:59

search the little mufucka, one of them suggests.

1:13:01

He probably got it hit on his mufuckin pants.

1:13:05

My panic is now unmanageable.

1:13:07

How many times had I been surrounded like

1:13:09

this and asked in soft tones, lend

1:13:12

me a nickel, boy? How

1:13:14

many times had I been called a liar

1:13:16

for pleading poverty and pushed around or

1:13:18

searched or beaten up, unless

1:13:20

there happened to be someone in the marauding gang

1:13:22

like Carl who liked me across that

1:13:25

enormous divide of hatred and

1:13:27

who would therefore say, ah, come on, let's

1:13:29

get someone else. This boy ain't got no money

1:13:31

on him.

1:13:33

I scream at them through tears

1:13:35

of rage and self-contempt. Keep

1:13:37

your fucking filthy, lousy black hands

1:13:39

off of me. I swear I'll get the cops.

1:13:43

This is all they need to hear and the five of them

1:13:45

set upon me. They banged me around,

1:13:48

mostly in the stomach and on the arms and shoulders,

1:13:51

and when several adults loitering near the candy

1:13:53

store down the block notice what's going on

1:13:55

and begin to shout, they run off in

1:13:57

a way.

1:13:59

I do not tell my

1:13:59

parents about the incident.

1:14:02

My teammates, who have also been weylaid,

1:14:04

each by a gang led by his opposite number

1:14:06

from the disqualified team, have had

1:14:09

their medallions taken from them, and they

1:14:11

never squeal either.

1:14:13

For days I walk home in terror,

1:14:15

expecting to be caught again, but

1:14:17

nothing happens.

1:14:19

The medallion is put away into a drawer,

1:14:21

never to be worn by anyone."

1:14:23

End quote. Podhorich

1:14:28

recalls all these experiences, and

1:14:32

not only the pain, but the shame

1:14:34

and humiliation, and

1:14:36

maybe especially those,

1:14:39

in such vivid detail that it reveals

1:14:41

the emotional valence that they still

1:14:44

had for him as an adult writing it.

1:14:48

And you know, in other circumstances,

1:14:51

people would make the case that he came by

1:14:53

his prejudices honestly.

1:14:56

If a woman was beaten by

1:14:59

a group of five men,

1:15:01

or a black was beaten by a gang

1:15:03

of five whites,

1:15:05

and the victim later confessed to having developed

1:15:08

a lasting fear and hatred of all

1:15:10

men, or all whites, most

1:15:13

people wouldn't flinch at that. Most people would sympathize.

1:15:17

They might say it's unfortunate that you feel that way,

1:15:19

but I understand why you would. Hell,

1:15:23

even if Podhorich had confessed to hating Italians

1:15:25

or other white Christians as a result

1:15:27

of bad childhood experiences,

1:15:31

he probably would have been in the clear, and the article

1:15:33

probably would have gone off without too

1:15:35

much notice. You

1:15:38

guys can judge for yourselves whether Podhorich

1:15:40

is exhibiting courage, malice,

1:15:43

or

1:15:44

blind stupidity when he writes,

1:15:47

quote,

1:15:48

The hatred I still feel for Negroes

1:15:51

is the hardest of all the old feelings to

1:15:53

face or admit, and it is the

1:15:55

most hidden and the most overloaded

1:15:58

by the conscious attitudes into which I succeeded

1:16:00

in willing myself.

1:16:02

It no longer has, as

1:16:04

for me at once did, any cause

1:16:06

or justification,

1:16:08

except, perhaps, that I am constantly

1:16:10

being denied my right to an honest expression

1:16:13

of the things I earned the right as a child

1:16:16

to feel.

1:16:17

How, then, do I know that this hatred

1:16:19

has never entirely disappeared?

1:16:22

I know it from the insane rage

1:16:24

that can stir in me at the thought of Negro

1:16:26

antisemitism.

1:16:28

I know it from the disgusting prurience

1:16:30

that can stir in me at the sight of a mixed

1:16:33

couple.

1:16:34

And I know it from the violence that can stir

1:16:36

in me whenever I encounter that special

1:16:38

brand of paranoid touchiness to which

1:16:40

many Negroes are prone." Well,

1:16:46

it's impossible to imagine

1:16:48

essays like this or Baldwin's

1:16:50

running in major publications today, and

1:16:53

I'll let you decide for yourself whether that counts

1:16:56

as a gain or a loss.

1:16:59

P n conclusion

1:17:01

perhaps provoked the strongest

1:17:04

reaction from critics.

1:17:06

He was skeptical that there was any

1:17:09

realistic solution to the Negro

1:17:11

problem, as he calls it.

1:17:14

He thought that years of suffering

1:17:17

and oppression and the resulting

1:17:19

resentment

1:17:22

had warped

1:17:24

and damaged the Negro

1:17:26

mind and soul so

1:17:28

that they themselves would sabotage any potential solutions that

1:17:31

did emerge. That's what he thought. The only solution Podhortz

1:17:33

could offer

1:17:34

was very

1:17:36

radical and, alas, given his own prior admission

1:17:39

to feeling distaste at the sight of mixed couples,

1:17:44

also quite unrealistic, namely to eliminate the Negro altogether

1:17:46

through miscegenation.

1:17:48

Quote,

1:17:55

When I think about the Negroes in America

1:17:57

and about the image of integration as a state,

1:18:00

in which the Negroes would take their rightful

1:18:02

place as another of the protected minorities

1:18:04

in a pluralistic society,

1:18:06

I wonder whether they really believe

1:18:09

in their hearts that such a state can actually

1:18:11

be attained,

1:18:12

and if so, why they should wish

1:18:14

to survive as a distinct group.

1:18:17

I think I know why the Jews once wished

1:18:20

to survive, though I'm less certain as to

1:18:22

why we still do.

1:18:24

They not only believed that God had given them

1:18:26

no choice,

1:18:27

but they were tied to a memory of past glory

1:18:30

and a dream of imminent redemption. What

1:18:33

does the American Negro have that might

1:18:36

correspond to this? His

1:18:38

past is a stigma, his color

1:18:40

is a stigma, and his vision of

1:18:42

the future is the hope of erasing

1:18:44

the stigma by making color irrelevant,

1:18:47

by making it disappear as a fact of consciousness.

1:18:52

I share this hope, but I cannot

1:18:54

see how it will ever be realized

1:18:56

unless color does in fact disappear.

1:19:00

And that means not integration,

1:19:02

it means assimilation.

1:19:04

It means let the brutal word come

1:19:06

out, miscegenation. The

1:19:09

Black Muslims, like their racist

1:19:11

counterparts in the white world, accuse

1:19:14

the so-called Negro leaders

1:19:17

of secretly pursuing miscegenation

1:19:19

as a goal.

1:19:20

Those racists are wrong,

1:19:22

but I wish they were right,

1:19:24

for I believe that the wholesale merging

1:19:27

of the two races is the most desirable

1:19:29

alternative for everyone concerned.

1:19:32

In my opinion, the Negro problem can

1:19:34

be solved in no other way."

1:19:38

Well, as you can imagine,

1:19:40

this passage in particular drew

1:19:43

the ire of many readers, black

1:19:45

and white. The

1:19:47

next issue of commentary ran letters

1:19:50

to the editor, who had the thankless

1:19:52

job of choosing a few from among

1:19:54

the flood that actually used language that

1:19:56

was safe for publication.

1:19:59

Some people congratulated Podhoritz

1:20:01

for his courage to write the essay. Others

1:20:04

were predictably outraged. One

1:20:07

of the latter was the Black author

1:20:10

and Village Voice columnist Joe Wood,

1:20:13

who wrote a blistering essay

1:20:15

in response for a book several years

1:20:17

later in which he accused

1:20:19

Podhoritz of harboring repressed

1:20:22

homoerotic feelings for Black

1:20:24

men, of envy of

1:20:26

the Black penis, of Jewish

1:20:28

self-hatred and many other defects

1:20:31

of body and character,

1:20:32

and of course of racism.

1:20:34

Quote, Podhoritz is

1:20:36

barking from the shadows, gentle reader.

1:20:39

Don't be afraid.

1:20:40

Read the record and see for yourself.

1:20:43

Remember how much the writer envied Negro

1:20:45

strength?

1:20:46

Notice how he fails to mention the

1:20:48

millennia of stigma between Jewish

1:20:51

past glory and imminent redemption.

1:20:54

Notice how easily his lunatic

1:20:56

description of Black experience could

1:20:58

be used to describe Jewish experience

1:21:01

and then dare to follow my reasoning

1:21:03

to its unattractive and obvious conclusion.

1:21:07

At bottom, a profound self-hatred

1:21:10

menace is in Podhoritz's essay. Each

1:21:12

time he reveals his weakness as

1:21:15

whiteness, he is confessing

1:21:17

how much he hates his weakness as

1:21:19

Jewishness, gentle reader. Throughout

1:21:23

his essay,

1:21:24

Podhoritz unwittingly gives readers a glimpse

1:21:27

of the peculiar blend of desire, anxiety,

1:21:30

and racism that informed the Jewish-American

1:21:32

discourse during the Depression.

1:21:35

This collision of impulses is never

1:21:37

better revealed than in the writer's discussion of his

1:21:39

Black playmate named Carl. It

1:21:42

is here that Podhoritz comes closest to

1:21:44

describing how his boyhood world

1:21:46

shaped his ideas about Black people.

1:21:49

The scrape with Carl is perfectly

1:21:51

typical of New York City, where

1:21:54

ethnic class is a routine.

1:21:56

But the incident also condenses nicely

1:21:58

a worldview peculiarly.

1:21:59

to immigrant Jews at the time,

1:22:02

which can be boiled down to a question.

1:22:05

With goyim slamming you from above and

1:22:08

blacks threatening from below, what

1:22:10

is a person to do? In

1:22:13

choosing to open his essay with a spotty

1:22:15

memory of a black boy whose most notable

1:22:17

feature is his moral equivalence to goyim,

1:22:20

Podhoretz dismisses the idea

1:22:22

of a special black moral station.

1:22:25

It is an understandable move. African

1:22:28

Americans history of subjugation has

1:22:31

bestowed a moral authority historically

1:22:33

reserved for Jews by Jews

1:22:36

in Christian Europe.

1:22:37

Since Jewish Americans could basically

1:22:40

be themselves without the kind of penalties

1:22:42

they had suffered in Europe,

1:22:43

a Jewish identity based on that oppression

1:22:46

made no sense. One

1:22:48

way to deal with the result in confusion

1:22:50

was to hate the displacers, the

1:22:53

blacks,

1:22:54

end quote.

1:22:59

And we're talking about kids here,

1:23:00

but the black adults who

1:23:02

had made the move up from the south,

1:23:05

they were like most immigrants in the sense that they

1:23:07

tended to keep their heads down and

1:23:10

avoid conflict and do their best to

1:23:12

conform to their new environment.

1:23:16

Their new circumstances were far from perfect,

1:23:19

but these people were used to Jim Crow and

1:23:21

so it didn't seem so bad.

1:23:24

They all knew from firsthand experience

1:23:26

down south that attracting

1:23:29

negative attention from white people usually

1:23:32

carried very serious consequences and

1:23:34

so they tried to avoid conflict with them.

1:23:37

Their kids were a different story. By

1:23:41

the early 60s that first batch

1:23:43

of black kids born in the northern and western

1:23:45

ghettos,

1:23:47

Baldwin and Wright, the

1:23:50

people Podhorts is talking about, the guys

1:23:52

in school he's talking about, those kids have come

1:23:54

of age by the early 60s.

1:23:57

And they had grown up going to school with...

1:24:00

the kids of working-class white ethnics like

1:24:02

the Podhoritzes. So, unlike

1:24:04

their parents, they did not fear white people.

1:24:08

They understood, like Podhoritz said,

1:24:10

rather, that white people were more likely

1:24:12

to be afraid of them.

1:24:15

Podhoritz relates another incident that happened

1:24:17

after he made the mistake of

1:24:20

answering a teacher's question after a black

1:24:22

boy named Quentin had gotten it wrong.

1:24:25

Quote,

1:24:26

I had seen Quentin's face, a

1:24:29

very dark, very cruel, very

1:24:31

oriental-looking face, hardened, and

1:24:34

there had been enough threat in his eyes to make

1:24:36

me run all the way home for fear that he might

1:24:38

catch me outside.

1:24:40

Now, standing idly in front of

1:24:42

my own house, I see him approaching

1:24:44

from the project accompanied by his little brother,

1:24:47

who's carrying a baseball bat and wearing

1:24:49

a grin of malicious anticipation.

1:24:52

As in a nightmare, I'm trapped.

1:24:55

The surroundings are secure and familiar, but

1:24:57

terror is suddenly present and there's no one

1:24:59

around to help.

1:25:01

I'm locked to the spot.

1:25:03

I will not cry out or run away like

1:25:05

a sissy, and I stand there, my

1:25:07

heart wild, my throat clogged. He

1:25:11

walks up, hurls the familiar

1:25:13

epithet, Hey, mofucker.

1:25:15

And to my surprise, only pushes me.

1:25:18

It was a violent push, but not a punch.

1:25:21

A push is not as serious as a punch.

1:25:23

Maybe I can still back out without entirely

1:25:26

losing my dignity.

1:25:27

Maybe I can still say, Hey, come

1:25:30

on, Quentin. What do you want to do that for?

1:25:32

I didn't do nothing to you and

1:25:34

walk away, but not too rapidly.

1:25:38

Instead, before I can stop myself, I

1:25:40

push him back, a token gesture,

1:25:42

and I say, cut that out. I don't want to

1:25:44

fight. I ain't got nothing to fight about.

1:25:48

As I turn to walk back into the building,

1:25:50

the corner of my eye catches the motion

1:25:52

of the bat his little brother has handed to him.

1:25:55

I try to duck, but the bat crashes

1:25:58

colored lights into my head.

1:26:00

The next thing I know,

1:26:02

my mother and sister are standing over me,

1:26:04

both of them hysterical. My

1:26:07

sister, she who is later to join

1:26:09

the progressive youth organizations, is

1:26:12

shouting for the police and screaming imprecations

1:26:15

at those dirty little black bastards. They

1:26:18

take me upstairs, the doctor comes,

1:26:21

the police come. I tell them

1:26:23

that the boy who did it was a stranger, that

1:26:25

he had been trying to get money from me.

1:26:28

They do not believe me, but I am too scared

1:26:30

to give them Quentin's name.

1:26:32

When I return to school a few days later,

1:26:34

Quentin avoids my eyes.

1:26:36

He knows that I have not squealed, and

1:26:38

he is ashamed.

1:26:40

I try to feel proud, but in my

1:26:42

heart I know that it was fear of what his friends

1:26:44

might do to me that had kept me silent, and

1:26:46

not the code of the street."

1:26:52

Having grown up in many poor neighborhoods

1:26:55

where white kids like me were a

1:26:57

vanishingly small part of the student

1:26:59

population,

1:27:00

and where I learned not to take

1:27:02

a beating too personally,

1:27:06

I sometimes wonder how scenes like this

1:27:09

are taken by people who grew up in more

1:27:11

stable environments.

1:27:13

An unprovoked baseball bat attack

1:27:16

is a pretty traumatic experience for a 12

1:27:18

year old who is not used to violence.

1:27:21

People are saying right now that all 12 year

1:27:23

olds should not be used to violence, but I and

1:27:26

probably Podhoretz can tell you that there

1:27:29

are situations, at least, when

1:27:31

some familiarity with it comes in handy.

1:27:35

Joe Wood, Podhoretz's critic

1:27:37

that I just quoted a minute ago,

1:27:39

he's got a point when he says that

1:27:41

some of these encounters that have so

1:27:43

shaped Podhoretz's outlook

1:27:46

are just examples of typical schoolyard

1:27:49

bullying that happened

1:27:51

to have had a more lingering effect on Podhoretz

1:27:53

because of the racial and political connotations

1:27:56

that they had for him then and in real life.

1:28:01

Wood's point is that

1:28:03

if Podhoritz had gone to school

1:28:05

with only Jews and Italians, say,

1:28:07

then the Italian bullies would have picked on him for

1:28:10

being Jewish.

1:28:11

If he went to an all Jewish school,

1:28:14

Jewish bullies would have picked on him for wearing glasses

1:28:16

or being skinny or something.

1:28:19

And that's true, up to a point.

1:28:22

Like I said, I went to several inner-city,

1:28:24

mostly black schools and I got jumped

1:28:26

more than once by gangs of black kids.

1:28:29

I had my stuff stolen one time

1:28:31

by a kid who was threatening me with a knife.

1:28:34

But I went to a lot of white and Latino

1:28:36

and mixed schools too, and schools with

1:28:38

a lot of Cambodians and Vietnamese and

1:28:41

Laotians and Hmong students. And

1:28:44

I saw that kids got bullied at all of those schools

1:28:47

and that the black schools I went to, black

1:28:50

bullies went after black kids more than they went

1:28:52

after me.

1:28:54

So in other words, those experiences

1:28:56

didn't imbue me with any deep-seated

1:28:59

emotional triggers when it came to race, the

1:29:01

same way

1:29:02

Podhoritz confesses that his experiences

1:29:04

did for him. And

1:29:07

yet on the other hand,

1:29:09

Podhoritz knows something about what he's talking about

1:29:11

too.

1:29:13

Because the fact is, there were Italians

1:29:15

and Jews in his classes and they

1:29:17

weren't the ones bullying him. And

1:29:20

furthermore, he says, the Jews and the Italians

1:29:22

didn't really bully the black kids much,

1:29:24

although the Italians did it more than the Jews.

1:29:29

Now this was still, at the time Podhoritz

1:29:31

and Baldwin and Reiterall talking about when

1:29:34

they were kids, this is still a relatively small

1:29:36

issue.

1:29:37

One that did not touch the vast majority

1:29:39

of New Yorkers. Well

1:29:42

that would change after World War II.

1:29:45

When World War II ended in 1945, there were

1:29:47

about 130,000 black New

1:29:49

Yorkers.

1:29:54

And by 1964,

1:29:56

less than 20 years later, there

1:29:58

were over 1.1 million people. 1 million African

1:30:01

Americans in the city. Just

1:30:03

a massive,

1:30:05

massive influx.

1:30:07

And I don't care who you are. I don't care who

1:30:09

the natives in the city are

1:30:11

or who the migrants to the city are. There

1:30:14

are going to be problems when you move nearly

1:30:16

a million people into a city in less than 20

1:30:19

years.

1:30:21

And those problems are going to be even worse

1:30:24

if the people moving in are not prepared

1:30:26

for life in the city.

1:30:29

Many of the black migrants coming in, most

1:30:31

of them were impoverished,

1:30:33

poorly educated by Southern schools,

1:30:35

functionally illiterate country people

1:30:38

with no real skills that were

1:30:40

useful for an urban trade.

1:30:42

And that's not a dig on them. These people were

1:30:44

mostly sharecroppers or small farmers

1:30:46

down South. And their segregated

1:30:48

schools were

1:30:50

less than ideal.

1:30:53

The same was true of the Irish migrants in the

1:30:55

19th century, by the way. And Italian immigrants

1:30:57

later on. Both of those groups were made

1:31:00

up primarily of poor, unskilled,

1:31:03

illiterate farmers from the hinterlands of

1:31:05

their old countries. And

1:31:07

it was a huge and not always

1:31:10

smooth adjustment to turn those folks

1:31:12

into people who were fit

1:31:14

for urban living. The

1:31:18

black migrants faced a major challenge that

1:31:20

the previous migrants had not.

1:31:24

When the Irish and the Jews and the

1:31:26

Italians showed up,

1:31:28

and there were other immigrants to New York, obviously, but

1:31:30

those were the overwhelming majority of them. So

1:31:32

those are the ones I'll talk mostly about. When

1:31:35

those three earlier groups showed up,

1:31:37

New York City was still not really built

1:31:39

out and populated.

1:31:42

At the peak of the Irish migration,

1:31:44

a huge migration that totally

1:31:47

transformed the city, but

1:31:49

at the peak of it,

1:31:50

almost all New Yorkers still lived

1:31:53

in a little strip of lower Manhattan,

1:31:55

south of what's today Grand Street.

1:31:59

Most of the rest of the world Manhattan, it

1:32:02

was still farmland.

1:32:04

And the same was true in the outer boroughs.

1:32:07

By the time the Jews and Italians started

1:32:09

showing up, things had been built up a lot,

1:32:12

but there was still a lot of room.

1:32:14

And so when they showed up, they didn't have to push

1:32:16

their way into established Irish

1:32:19

Catholic parish communities. They

1:32:21

were able to spread out.

1:32:23

And pretty soon there was a setup where

1:32:25

everyone was basically comfortable with the Irish

1:32:27

living over there, the Jews over there, the Italians

1:32:30

over there.

1:32:31

And where those neighborhoods bordered each other,

1:32:33

the population would be mixed.

1:32:35

That was New York City.

1:32:37

That was most big cities by the

1:32:39

early 20th century. But

1:32:42

when black people started showing up in huge

1:32:44

numbers after World War II,

1:32:46

that situation had changed.

1:32:49

And the city was more or less built and

1:32:52

populated. There

1:32:54

would still be a lot of development, obviously.

1:32:56

The Manhattan skyline would change a lot.

1:32:58

And there were some areas that hadn't been built

1:33:00

up that would be later. But

1:33:03

in general, there was not a ton

1:33:05

of room for newcomers,

1:33:07

especially 900,000 newcomers in less than two decades.

1:33:12

There just wasn't a lot of room for them to take up in.

1:33:14

And as a result, they did have

1:33:17

to push in on established Irish,

1:33:19

Jewish, and Italian neighborhoods if they were going

1:33:21

to find any place to live.

1:33:26

The cities all tried to alleviate the situation.

1:33:29

Big public housing projects went up

1:33:32

all over the country to house so many

1:33:34

new people.

1:33:35

New social welfare programs

1:33:38

and jobs programs were established. More

1:33:40

schools and facilities were built.

1:33:44

But there was just no way that the cities were

1:33:46

going to keep up with the pace of the migration.

1:33:48

And very quickly, the existing neighborhoods

1:33:50

became extremely overcrowded, unpleasant

1:33:53

places to live.

1:33:56

There wasn't enough housing. And the overcrowded

1:33:58

housing that did exist...

1:33:59

started to deteriorate rapidly

1:34:02

from so much population pressure.

1:34:05

By the 1960s, some black neighborhoods

1:34:09

in Harlem were so overcrowded

1:34:12

that, and this is from journalist Eugene Methvin,

1:34:15

if the same density prevailed throughout

1:34:18

New York City, the entire population

1:34:21

of the United States in the 1960s

1:34:23

could be jammed into just three of

1:34:25

its five boroughs.

1:34:28

That is some serious population density.

1:34:32

City services could not meet the needs of

1:34:34

so many people. The infrastructure

1:34:36

couldn't support them.

1:34:38

The economy couldn't employ them,

1:34:41

and the schools could not effectively educate

1:34:43

all their kids.

1:34:45

The other main groups, the Italians, the

1:34:48

Irish, and the Jews,

1:34:50

they mostly got what they needed from

1:34:52

the city because they were politically organized.

1:34:56

They elected politicians to local

1:34:58

government from their own neighborhoods

1:35:01

to go in and see to their needs, and

1:35:03

there would be political consequences if their

1:35:05

needs were not met.

1:35:08

The black people in the city did not have anything

1:35:11

like that yet. They weren't organized

1:35:13

politically,

1:35:14

and so in a city that had been governed

1:35:16

by

1:35:17

ethnic politics for at least a century,

1:35:21

they were the one large demographic

1:35:23

group with nobody working

1:35:25

full time to advocate for them,

1:35:28

which is another way of saying that as a

1:35:30

neighborhood got blacker,

1:35:32

it had less representation in city

1:35:34

government, and so it was more neglected.

1:35:38

And this wasn't even really the result of racial

1:35:41

discrimination so much as it was just

1:35:43

a legacy of how the New York City political

1:35:46

system had been structured over the years.

1:35:49

Ethnic politics, like I said, was taken

1:35:51

for granted as a fact of life.

1:35:54

Nobody talked about identity politics

1:35:57

the way they do today when Irish Catholics

1:35:59

to use

1:35:59

an example, voted for

1:36:02

Irish Catholics from their neighborhood to go represent

1:36:04

them. It was just assumed that that

1:36:06

was how things worked. Because,

1:36:09

and this is something that really is different today

1:36:11

to the point that it's hard for many of us to imagine,

1:36:14

it wasn't just that the city had X

1:36:16

number of Irish people.

1:36:19

It had intact Irish

1:36:21

Catholic parish communities that perceived

1:36:23

themselves and were perceived by others as

1:36:26

communities.

1:36:28

And I don't use that word community in

1:36:30

the loose way that we use it today. I

1:36:32

mean that it was a well-organized corporate

1:36:35

entity with networks and hierarchies

1:36:37

and associations and political advocacy

1:36:40

groups.

1:36:41

The community had a reality of its own.

1:36:44

It wasn't just a collection of individuals who

1:36:46

happened to fit into the same category.

1:36:49

And so that's how things had always been.

1:36:51

But in the early days of the Great Migration,

1:36:54

in the 30s and 40s and 50s, the

1:36:57

black population in New York had not developed

1:36:59

that yet in any significant way.

1:37:02

And so as neighborhoods became blacker, they

1:37:04

had less political influence. And

1:37:07

with less political influence, they were neglected

1:37:09

and began to decline. And as

1:37:11

they began to decline, white people

1:37:14

and eventually middle-class black

1:37:16

people began to move out.

1:37:18

And they took their social and economic capital

1:37:21

with them. Over

1:37:23

the course of just one or two decades,

1:37:26

depending on the neighborhood,

1:37:29

neighborhoods that had been mostly white

1:37:31

became mostly black. Or in the case of

1:37:33

New York City, black in Puerto Rican.

1:37:37

The number of schools in New York City in

1:37:39

which minorities, mostly black,

1:37:41

made up 90% or more of the student

1:37:44

body

1:37:45

tripled between 1955 and 1965.

1:37:49

Brownsville, the Brooklyn neighborhood where

1:37:52

Podhoretz grew up,

1:37:54

it was still predominantly Jewish and Italian

1:37:56

all the way up through the 1950s.

1:37:59

By the late 60s, it was 95% black

1:38:02

in Puerto Rican, 77% black, 18%

1:38:04

Puerto Rican. To

1:38:09

put numbers on that, there

1:38:11

was a Jewish community of

1:38:14

about 175,000 in Brownsville when

1:38:16

Podhortz was growing up.

1:38:18

Still well over 100,000 by 1955.

1:38:22

But by the late 60s, there were only about 5,000 Jews

1:38:26

left in Brownsville.

1:38:29

Other than the minority of beleaguered

1:38:32

mostly elderly Jews and Italians

1:38:34

who remained behind, the only white

1:38:36

people with whom most of the black

1:38:39

and brown majority ever interacted

1:38:41

were

1:38:42

either representatives of authority,

1:38:45

teachers, cops, social workers,

1:38:48

or representatives of capital,

1:38:50

shopkeepers, landlords, pawnbrokers,

1:38:53

and bosses.

1:38:57

So Brown versus the Board of Education, the

1:38:59

Supreme Court decision desegregating Southern

1:39:01

schools, kicked off the Civil

1:39:04

Rights era in 1954.

1:39:08

A year after that, Rosa Parks, an

1:39:10

employee and activist of the NAACP,

1:39:13

had her famous confrontation on a city

1:39:15

bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

1:39:18

She was arrested for refusing

1:39:20

to give up her seat to a white person, and

1:39:22

Martin Luther King Jr. rose to national

1:39:24

prominence leading a year-long boycott

1:39:26

of the Montgomery public transit system.

1:39:30

The Civil Rights movement had its golden

1:39:33

age from about the time of that boycott

1:39:35

in 1955-56

1:39:38

up to about 1964.

1:39:42

In 1959, a series of

1:39:44

sit-ins to desegregate facilities

1:39:46

in Greensboro, North Carolina made headlines.

1:39:51

In 1961, the Freedom Riders, a group

1:39:54

of black and white,

1:39:55

mostly Jewish activists,

1:39:58

rode buses down into the deep south.

1:39:59

to force the issue after several states

1:40:02

and cities refused to abide by the Supreme

1:40:04

Court's

1:40:05

ruling to desegregate.

1:40:08

In 1963, of course,

1:40:11

was the March on Washington for Jobs

1:40:13

and Freedom, better known as the event where Martin Luther

1:40:15

King gave his I Have a Dream speech.

1:40:18

And then in 1964 was

1:40:20

the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and

1:40:22

it was here that cracks started

1:40:24

to show up in the coalition.

1:40:29

Riding on the success of the March on Washington

1:40:31

the year before,

1:40:32

black civil rights organizations in Mississippi

1:40:35

started recruiting volunteers

1:40:37

to spend the summer of 1964 on a massive

1:40:41

effort to agitate, educate

1:40:44

and organize black Mississippians for

1:40:46

that year's elections. White

1:40:50

student organizations from northern universities

1:40:52

wanted to help, and their help was wanted.

1:40:55

But

1:40:55

the organizers requested no more

1:40:57

than a hundred white volunteers from outside

1:40:59

Mississippi for reasons that would

1:41:02

soon become apparent.

1:41:06

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating

1:41:08

Committee, SNCC,

1:41:10

which was the largest southern based

1:41:12

black led

1:41:14

civil rights youth organization,

1:41:17

interviewed white volunteers

1:41:19

to weed out ones with what

1:41:21

they called a John Brown complex.

1:41:25

The ones who made it through the screening

1:41:27

process were warned that they were

1:41:30

not there to save the Mississippi

1:41:32

Negro.

1:41:33

They were there to assist the thousands

1:41:35

of native black activists who had been on

1:41:38

the ground

1:41:39

living and working for years before

1:41:41

the white students arrived, and

1:41:43

who would remain there long after the white

1:41:45

kids went home for the fall semester.

1:41:49

But word got out that something big

1:41:52

was brewing in Mississippi and other student

1:41:54

activists from around the country didn't want to miss out.

1:41:57

And so white civil rights activists like

1:41:59

like Allard Lowenstein started

1:42:02

raising money and recruiting more white students

1:42:04

from universities outside the South. And

1:42:06

pretty soon at least a thousand and probably

1:42:09

several thousand over the course of the summer,

1:42:11

white students were flooding into the

1:42:13

state to do their part.

1:42:16

Most of these student volunteers came from

1:42:18

rich or at least upper middle class

1:42:21

families and were recruited from the top

1:42:23

universities in the United States. And

1:42:25

they brought with them a variety

1:42:28

of motives.

1:42:30

For sure they were moved by sympathy

1:42:32

for Southern Blacks.

1:42:34

No question about it.

1:42:36

But a lot of them also pictured the Freedom Summer

1:42:38

as their own personal hero quest.

1:42:42

Back at Columbia and Cornell

1:42:45

and NYU and Harvard,

1:42:47

the activists who had gone South to work

1:42:49

as volunteers or citizen journalists

1:42:51

in the previous summers, they were the

1:42:54

aristocracy of the student movement.

1:42:57

And a lot of students saw Mississippi as

1:42:59

their one way ticket to cool kid status

1:43:01

back on campus. That

1:43:03

meant they had different goals and were

1:43:05

working on a different timeline than

1:43:07

the local Blacks. Because whereas

1:43:10

the Blacks had been and would be working for

1:43:12

years at the grassroots level in the state,

1:43:15

the white students only had a few months to make something

1:43:17

happen that would give them some good stories

1:43:20

to tell and make their trip worthwhile before they

1:43:22

had to head back to school.

1:43:25

Now it seems I'm being a little

1:43:27

bit ungenerous to the

1:43:29

white activists. Maybe I am,

1:43:32

but I am only repeating the

1:43:34

complaints that would become common

1:43:37

among many of the native Black activists

1:43:39

by the end of the summer.

1:43:42

The sympathy of the college kids for the people

1:43:44

they were trying to help, it was real. I don't wanna

1:43:46

sound like I'm denying that.

1:43:49

But it was also a sympathy that was distant

1:43:51

and detached and could come across

1:43:54

as condescending and patronizing.

1:43:57

When the rubber hit the road and a group of Harvard

1:43:59

lost. students found themselves

1:44:01

in a room full of black Mississippians

1:44:03

with an elementary school education, their

1:44:07

eagerness,

1:44:08

a less generous person would say their impatience,

1:44:11

to move things along often led to them

1:44:14

just taking over the proceedings and effectively

1:44:16

ordering the black activists around.

1:44:19

And you can kind of understand how that could happen.

1:44:21

Even if the person has nothing but

1:44:23

good peer intentions, if

1:44:26

you are a group of students from Harvard Law

1:44:28

with lots of experience in political

1:44:30

organizing with SDS or some other

1:44:32

campus group,

1:44:34

you probably do know better than other

1:44:36

people how to best

1:44:38

get things done.

1:44:40

But you can't just come into someone's home and start

1:44:42

ordering them around no matter what your intentions

1:44:44

are.

1:44:45

And so over the summer months, resentment

1:44:48

and enthusiasm grew side

1:44:50

by side.

1:44:52

When the Freedom Summer failed to achieve

1:44:54

any immediate

1:44:56

political results in the 64 elections,

1:44:58

which is not to say it wasn't a success in other ways,

1:45:01

it opened up the door to a new breed

1:45:03

of black leaders like Stokely Carmichael,

1:45:07

who

1:45:08

started putting out the message that they were never

1:45:10

going to get anywhere following the lead

1:45:12

of bossy white students and philanthropists.