Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Rebecca Felton: The First Female Senator (was also a pro-lynching activist)

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

After the Civil War takes everything from her, Rebecca blames her woes on rich white planters, which weirdly causes her to become a pro-lynching activist.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

World Zone Media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that you're currently listening to, about our first female senator technically. Rebecca Felton, who when we ended part one, just did the whole Scarlett O'Hara thing standing in the ruins of the home that she loved, right? We actually have a little bit more of the war years to talk about here. But we'll get through all of that. But first, our guest, Samantha McFey.

Sam, you want to plug your pluggables up at the top? Yes, I am the host, one of the host of, Stuff Mom Never Told You, also part of the IHeart Network. We have a book, Stuff Mom Never Told You. We have an account on Instagram and Blue Sky. I believe he says Mom Stuff. Sweet. Excellent.

Unlike what the title says, we don't talk about moms or mom stuff. That's good. Just so you know. It's not my strong suit either. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus. From $94 a month, price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year

term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. On Raiders of the Lost podcast, we explore cinema like no one else, including huge interviews with stars like Ryan Gosling on Project Hail Mary. It was like the Josh shark. Didn't always work, came with its own problems. That's what made it great. The cast of obsession. On set, there was so much magic happening with each scene we were putting together. Deep dives into classics like 2001 a Space Odyssey or Fight Club, plus weekly episodes on all industry news. Listen to Raiders of the Lost podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more, follow at Raiders of the Lost podcast and at TikTok

podcast network on TikTok. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia. AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more.

Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song. Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. A.A.O. Rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam J.

And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and Iheart women's sports. We're breaking down the biggest headlines. Naomi Osaka, showing out. Shout out to you, Naomi. The viral moments. I've been obsessed with Kashan Rock's boxing journey. She looks good. Her combos.

are swift and the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports because everyone watches women's sports listen to everyone watches women's sports on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast so yeah let's let's get into the civil war right uh anyway the war years initially spared the first felton plantation right it quickly though turned out that the flower of southern manhood was somewhat less suited to warfare than they had anticipated and so in short order the felons were ripping up their fine clothing and carpets to make uniforms and cold-weather gear. Eventually, they fled ahead of the Union Army to a shack near Macon. Becca later wrote this of her feelings upon leaving the home that she had built, and buried

the first of her children at. When I reached the gate, I picked up the springs that had been a part of my dead child's fine baby carriage, also the arm of a large parlor mahogany chair that had also been burned. Desolation and destruction everywhere. Bitter grinding poverty. Poverty, slaves all gone. Money also.

We certainly paid the price while we were in refugee conditions. right so very soon she loses almost everything the slaves aren't actually gone she leaves behind like 15 of them to manage her her farm and decatur but they're not going to have like a lot of people around them past this point for the war years they're kind of like actually now living like poor people right the their their their circumstances changed immediately right as did a lot of very wealthy families okay so this reminds me of the scene with scarlet o'hara going i'll never go again. I know way too much about this book and movie. We haven't yet yet had that point, but we will. We will soon. So the fact that they've moved

to Macon does not protect them, the war brings disease, which hits the Felton family like a machine gun. After the fall of Atlanta, a measles epidemic ravages the state, and it kills her five-year-old son and six of the people that she still owned. Not long after their farm was ransacked by Confederate soldiers fleeing their defeat at the hands of General Sherman. Rebecca was enraged. She saw this as evidence of the mass failure of Southern manhood, warriors who had been so boastful before, now looting their own people as they fled in despair. And as this is happening, there's a terrible fear building among elite white women of rape, right, at the hands of Union soldiers, at the hands of Confederate soldiers, and at the hands of newly freed or escaped slaves, right? There's a lot of the, and these panic are being stalked by the Confederate media who's saying that, like, well, if the lines fail, if the union gets here, who's what will happen to all your women. right? They are being told that, too. This isn't just something that they're making up.

Now, late in the war, Union soldiers occupy and raid Rebecca's making property. And will the felons get by without being subjected to any physical harm themselves, not all the people on the farm are so lucky. If you ask a body of soldiers to occupy an enemy farm or town or whatever, some of them are going to rape the civilians there. No military in history has ever occupied a defeated enemy and avoided this. In fact, U.S. soldiers on bases in Japan today commit rape on locals regularly enough that it is a well-known type of news item in Okinawa, right? This happens like every year up there, sometimes more than once a year.

Like South Korea, too. It's, yeah, South Korea. It's why, again, be real careful when you put soldiers places because this happens. This is just a side effect. Now, this whole of Southern womanhood recoiled at stories of wealthy plantation ladies being raped by white or black soldiers with stories true and false of the latter spreading particularly rapidly. In late 1863, as Union soldiers neared Cartersville, Confederate propaganda warned civilians about widespread atrocities, particularly those that would surely be committed by black

soldiers. Rebecca wrote, The conduct of the enemy has been destitute of that forbearance and magnanimity which civilization and Christianity have introduced. Clothing of women and infants is stripped from their persons. Helpless women have been exposed to the most cruel outrages and to that dishonor, which is infinitely worse than death. That's how she's referring to rape, is it's worse than death. It's like worse than murder because that's your only valuable asset as a woman. Obviously, it's okay when it happens to the enslaved, but oh, my God. It's not okay, but it's very different.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So this is before she'd even had a lot of real contact with enemy soldiers, certainly before her farm was plundered. So we can see this is her mostly repeating things other people had told her. And again, when she's actually captured and, actually exposed to the Union Army. She's never harmed herself, but she is forced to stand by while Union troops rape some

of the women that she had previously owned. They do that, right? Now, here's the, here's a reality we don't talk about at the end of the Civil War often enough, which is that there were a ton of rapes by Union soldiers. The reality is that the vast majority of the women in the Confederacy who were raped after the war were black. Rich white women still enjoyed higher status than formerly enslaved black women. and even General Sherman made occasional efforts to protect specific Southern ladies he knew and admired.

Meanwhile, newly freed black women rarely enjoyed powerful patrons. However, they did take advantage of one benefit that was new to them, the right to press charges against their assailants. Now, that doesn't sound like much to modern ears when we're talking about a bunch of women who have been raped by soldiers in a fucking war zone necessarily, right? That maybe not sound like much consolation. And we all know how flawed the legal system is and how particularly bad it is it gaining justice today for rape victims. But you have to remember something, which is that prior to emancipation, there was no law at all that said these women had a right to say no. So there is something important in the horror of all of these post-war rapes because this cannot have been the first time many of those women were raped. Rebecca herself writes about how common it was for white masters to do that.

But it was the first time any of these women had the ability to be. to report their rape to someone and actually see the rapist punished. And as is always the case, we must assume that the majority, almost surely the vast majority of such rapes, went unreported and thus unpunished. But by the end of the Civil War, more than 400 Union soldiers had been court-martialed after committing sexual crimes. Their victims included both white and black women, and both women and girls, I think the youngest was five.

I want to quote now, yeah, I want to quote now from an article in the European Journal of American Studies by Susan Barber. and Charles Ritter. Procedurally, Union Judge Advocates, the men who prosecuted cases before the court's marshal, were instructed to follow the law in the state where the crime took place. Since most of the crimes occurred in southern territory, this meant that black women could be prohibited from bringing sexual assault charges against a white assanglement and barred from testifying against him in court, since this was the law in all southern states. However, U.S. court martial panels never prevented blacks from testifying against whites or blacks on the

basis of race, thus giving black women for the first time a legal voice with which to accuse white women of sexual violation. This was an extremely progressive policy to establish, and it was sanctioned at the highest levels of the United States government. And this is another really interesting story that we don't tell enough. In her book, Southern Horror, Crystal Feimster relates the story of Lieutenant Andrew Smith of the 11th Pennsylvania Cavalry, who raped a young black girl. General Benjamin Butler, who read the verdict when he went to court, summarized the case with an admirable degree of rage. A female Negro child quit slavery and comes into the protection of the federal government, and upon

first reaching the limits of the federal lines, receives the brutal treatment from an officer, himself a husband and a father, a violation of her person. He sentenced Smith to 10 years hard labor and said the man was lucky not to be executed. After Macon was captured, the war was over for the Felton's. Rebecca declared, I can run no further. I have nowhere to go. The people she and her husband owned counted for most of her property, and without them she was nearly broke, with just enough props left in the field to survive the winter. Southern defeat had been so total, so humbling, that Rebecca reacted to it in an undeniably appropriate way by blaming all of the men in her society.

And it was totally her fault. Southern women didn't vote. Like, say what you know, about how morally complicit they are. They didn't have a choice in the secession, really. Right. Right. She knew all along, she said. Yeah.

And the way Rebecca saw it, they'd broken the social contract. I want to quote from a piece in the Smithsonian magazine by Laura. in Maloney. According to historian, Leanne White's, Felton believed upper-class women had kept their end of the antebellum gender bargain by mining their place in society while their husbands had broken theirs. By refusing to compromise on slavery and engineering secession, these men had triggered a series of events that would forever undermine their ability to offer protection to their dependence. Rights, whites, and gender matters, civil war reconstruction, and the making of the new South. As a result, elite women were exposed to forces that had long molded the lives of most southern

women. A change in fortune, Felton was eager to reverse. And yeah, I think that's a really fascinating way to look at it for her like kind of running into some of the right ideas for the completely wrong reason. Right. Yeah. In her own book, Feimster points out something I think is worth adding. Southern men, especially the planter elite, Felton argued, had put the profit of slavery before the protection of Southern womanhood, whereas elite white women had held up their end to the bargain to the point of unsexing themselves. Southern. Southern manhood had failed miserably. White women all over the South had been left unprotected, and some had even suffered rape. And when she talks about unsexing themselves, once the men go

away, the women running these plantations, start carrying guns and weapons. They're not supposed to. They think it's gross. It's uncomfortable to them. They're unsexing themselves. And we did it to help the war effort, and you still couldn't beat the fucking North. We did our end, dude. And you failed? How dare you? And a bunch of us got raped, right? That is this, this rage is going to, like, directly fuel a big chunk of the post-reconstruction lynching epidemic. This is where a lot of it starts. And a lot of these, like, rich white women and these men who feel also really angry and furious at themselves for not having been able to stop any of them. And not at themselves.

They blame a specific group of people. Right. Right. But a lot of anger is building here. And that's really, that's going to get let out very soon. Immediately after the South lost and the Civil War ended, a wave of malaria, hit Georgia and that it touched the Felton family particularly hard. It killed the last of her five born children, leaving her with only a stepdaughter and her husband. She was 30 years old. So at age

30, she has had five children and they have all died. She has lost her houses, all over money. Things are not well. She is pissed. All of her people. Okay. Oliver. All right. Yeah. Yeah. And her husband, you know, goes back to work after the war. She has to get a job after the war and they slowly struggle to rebuild their lives. And as she is like working and finding ways to make money for the first time and try helping to support her family, she gets angrier and angrier at these planters who had thrown not just their wealth, but their children, her children, away for nothing, right? They didn't just throw away the slaves and the money in the houses.

They threw away her kids as she sees it, right? And she's not wrong to see it that way. Despite the dire circumstances after the war, the Felton slowly but surely began to thrive in the newly reunited states. In 1784, William Felton ran for Congress and was elected as a Democrat. He would be reelected twice. His constituents were the small farmers he called neighbor, and his campaign manager was Rebecca Felton. Her hatred of Southern elite men did not extend to her husband, who had, like her, thought the war a terrible idea.

And who genuinely respected her ideas, right? That's amazing. She's like, hey, fuck Whiteman. But not my husband. But not my husband. It's not my man. It's not almond. Sophie.

No. It's not all men. No, she, because she has a good relationship with her husband, and I think he respects her mind. Like, he lets her do stuff. You have to keep our opinions. Yeah. He lets her, I mean, they become kind of a power couple after this, right? Rebecca and William kind of defy the odds and seem to have been a perfect.

This might be the most functional relationship. We've ever covered on Behind the Bastards. They support each other. We love a good supportive couple. They really do. Rebecca travels with her husband to D.C. and acts as his secretary. She also writes his speeches for him and over. Over time, she gets to consult and help draft actual legislation.

So she's actually helping to write laws because she's her husband's in Congress. She grows more and more confident over the years in the idea that women ought to be able to have a say in the affairs of the nation. And her involvement did not go unnoticed, per the Smithsonian magazine. After William won his third campaign, one newspaper announced, Mrs. Felton and Dr. reappointed. Is they doing that founder of Reddit and Serena Williams thing or whatever? Oh, yeah. Yeah, Mr. Felton, Mrs. Felton, and Dr. Reelected. Yeah.

I like it. Williams' opponents attacked his wife's involvement after she appeared in an 1876 rally, an editor dubbed her attendance a disgusting spectacle. Her promotion of a prison reform bill in 1887 caused one legislator to christen her, the political she of Georgia, a reference to the sorceress queen who dominates men in H. Writer Haggard's 1886 novel, She. Misogyny haunted even. her even in death. In his 1960

biography of Felton, historian John Talmadge described her as a belligerent feminist, though he admitted he wouldn't dare to write a word about her if she were still living. You gotta respect that. You gotta respect that. Look, that's iconic. I wouldn't talk shit if she was still alive, though.

She scares me. She's dead not. Yeah, belligerent feminist. Hot, right. You know what? It's not going to be quite as hot as you're thinking. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. No, she sucks. She sucks.

Parts of it are going to be good. But being scary. But women be scary? Yeah. She's undeniably got some mojo. So the whole time her husband's in Congress, William was engaging with American politics and culture pretty much the only way a woman could while still maintaining any degree of agency. She wrote.

If you wanted to influence the culture, that was your way as a woman in this period of time. You know, books, fiction, letters in magazine art. articles, whatnot. She puts out hundreds and hundreds of letters to the editor and articles in magazine. She's writing every day, columns on the issues of the day and just sending them off. And she attracts a fan base and launches a newspaper with her husband. After William loses his fourth re-election campaign, Rebecca joins the women's Christian temperance union and starts campaigning on her own for prohibition. She'd made the choice not to become a drinker as a girl, perhaps spurred on by scary memories of drunken southern men. She saw prohibition, like many did,

as a way to protect women. And women of all races, right? Drunkenness is the enemy of women because all these men are getting hammered at bars and they're coming back and they're beating the shed out of us and doing other terrible things. They're not able to work. They're not able to take care of their families.

That's the attitude of a lot of these prohibitionists. And Felton is a prohibitionist because she sees alcohol as harming women, right? I'm seeing a lot of parallels between this power couple and, like, Meatbell, Ron, Ron DeSantis and his wife, Casey. because, yeah, because, like, you know, Casey was such a big part of his campaign and part of his career when she was like an ex-journalist. It's really interesting. Yeah, yeah, you get these power. And this is kind of going in the reverse direction where once his political career fades out, Rebecca gets more famous, actually, right?

So she's, you know, getting to be an activist. She likes her early activism in favor of prohibition. she enjoys organizing people, she's good at it. So she finds another issue to fight for, and decide she's going to become an activist pushing for reform of Georgia's convict leasing system. Now, thankfully, this is not around still, but it existed much longer than it should of. Georgia's convict leasing system was a particularly hideous bit of post-war fuckery by

rich whites. In order to replace lost slave labor without paying, Georgians pioneered using prison labor to recreate the good old days. From the new Georgia encyclopedia, some George. Georgians saw the prisoners at the state's penitentiary in Millageville as the solution to their problems, a workforce that could be formally controlled. Georgia leaders were also concerned about costs associated with operating a penitentiary as the prison population increased and included many more African Americans. In an effort to resolve these issues, officials during Reconstruction 1867 to 76 approved the leasing of prisoners to private citizens. Of course.

And so like, this is just slavery with extra steps, right? Right. I mean, it's kind of still happening today. We do a version of this today. Yeah. Yeah. This was just even more direct where you're just, you're just renting them. Rinting out parties.

You're just getting handed these people who have to work for you. And the old evils reasserted themselves at once. Although it was agreed that the convicts would be treated humanely, reports to then governor Rufus Bullock indicated that least convicts were being overworked, brutally whipped, and killed. So that's great. So I'm assuming this leads to the change. gang type of narrative. This, yes, chain gangs are a descendant from this. Yes, and the reason why

the convict leasing system comes to an end and it gets replaced by the chain gang system has a lot to do with Rebecca Felton. Because this system is such an abomination, Rebecca was correct to battle against it. Felton had once considered slavery justified by God, and she was still a huge racist.

So perhaps she fought so hard against this system, not because it was right to do so, but because she hated the rich, white planters that benefited from it more than any even more than she was racist. I kind of wonder that. Like, is this, it was it all the, that this is unjust? Or was it just like, no, fuck you guys.

Like, I lost everything. You don't get to sneak your way into having it back. How dare you start over and do that again? Yeah. How dare you fucking try again? After all you put my family and I through? Absolutely not. Yeah, I, maybe I'm not giving Rebecca enough credit here.

But I have to kind of wonder how much of the case that was. And you know what else I have to wonder, Samantha? What? Whether or not the products and services that support this podcast are involved in human trafficking. Robert. No way to know. Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit.

Visit bell.com for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Thurrects. together in I heart women's sports. Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days.

So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is, like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest

stories across women's sports. Saka, showing out, she beat. Sabalinka. Shout out to you, Naomi. You get the palm, Naomi. You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it.

Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports on the IHeart Radio app. Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us or rather you know them. Tony and Candice, Nina and Lance, Spike and yes, the chicken. We've played a lot of icon.

characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chryssel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody.

I thought he was going to write. I thought you were all going to write a song for it. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo, rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook.

Every episode we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers. The show is famously super accessible so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stiller. The definition of what is a movie has kind of changed anywhere too, right? What do you think it is now? It's images and words being spoken, captured by some sort of technology. Danny McBride. He loves Nova.

Oh, that's fantastic. And you make it on, you make your own. That's great. I call him Terro Reed. It's a good name. They're all named after cast members of American Pie. Yeah. I call, I don't, I never looked up if she was in this, but I call him Leachie Sobieski.

Yeah. I don't think she was an American Pie, but I still like that. Haven't looked it up. She was prominent around the same time. Yeah. Then Mary Steenbergin. Why are you guys talking to me? I'm worried.

Did you understand the movie? It's so down to me that you think I don't understand your little play game. I just really, I get it. I'm trying to set you up for success here. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So, Rebecca's becoming a big activist now. She's trying to get rid of this convict leasing system.

She galvanizes the Women's Christian Temperance Union against this horror, and she whips up support via petitions and article. She gets thousands of women engaged, involved in protesting this, and she plies all of her political connections and plays a central role in launching a crusade to abolish convict leasing. Now, the end doesn't come rapidly, but as time goes on, a mix of changing economic conditions and relentless media attention by Rebecca and other activists build support for legislation that abolishes convict leasing in 1908, right? And obviously, again, the chain gang system kind of proceeds from this, you know? And there's an argument that they really mostly stopped because it wasn't economically viable anymore. But we'll give Felton like a qualified thumbs up for that piece of activism, right? It's still the right fight.

Sure. I mean, it was helpful, but for why? And it would also prove to be her last entirely good turn. On August 11, 1897, Rebecca gave a speech in Savannah on the struggles poor white women faced on farms. These included rape, she insisted, and pointed out. that just last week, three black men had been lynched after being accused of rape. This had become increasingly common after the war as a reaction to the freedom of black men and fears of violation that had rooted in the South since the war's end.

Rebecca traced lynching back to slavery, and she was right on that. But she also saw lynching as justified because she viewed blackmail rapists as a plague. Now, in 1892, journalist Ida B. Wells Barnett had published an investigation into lynching called Southern horrors, lynch law in all its phases. Wells points out that less than a third of lynching victims were ever actually accused of rape, regardless of what the mob said. Most lynchings were complete farces of justice,

often carried on with economic motivations. And this is a long quote from Ida B. Wells, but I think it's really worth reading, and this is her kind of making the case against lynching making any sort of sense. On March 9, 1892, there were lynched in this same city, and she's talking about Memphis,

three of the best specimens of young since the war Afro-American manhood. They were peaceful, law-abiding citizens and energetic businessmen. They believed the problem was to be solved by eschewing politics and putting money in the purse. They owned a flourishing grocery business in a thickly populated suburb of Memphis, and a white man named Barrett had one on the opposite corner. After a personal difficulty, which Barrett sought by going into the people's grocery, drawing out a pistol and was thrashed by Calvin McDowell, he, Barrett, threatened to clean them out.

These men were a mile beyond the city limits and police protection, hearing that Barrett's crowd was coming back to attack them Saturday night, they mustered forces and prepared to defend themselves against the attack. When Barrett came, he led a posse of officers, 12 in number, who afterwards claimed to be hunting a man for whom they had a warrant. That 12 in citizens' clothes should think it was necessary to go into the night to hunt one man who had never before been arrested or made any record as a criminal has never been explained. When they entered the back door, the young men thought the threatened attack was on and fired into them. Three of the officers were wounded, and when the defending party found it was officers of the law upon which they had fired, they ceased and got away. 31 men were jailed and thrown in jail as conspirators,

although they were all declared more than once that they did not know they were firing on officers. Excitment was at a fever beat until the morning papers. Two days later announced that the wounded deputy sheriffs were out of danger. This hindered rather than help the plans of the whites. There was no law on the statute books which would execute an Afro-American for wounding a white man, but the unwritten law did. Three of these men, the president, the manager and clerk of the grocery,

the leaders of the conspiracy, were secretly taken from jail and lynched in a shockingly brutal manner. The Negroes are getting too independent, they say. We must teach them a lesson. Right? And that, Ida B. Wells is pointing out the real motivation for lynching. Isn't there's all these crimes that have to be stopped. White women are in danger.

No, it's some guy wants something a black man has or a black family has. And just screaming rape and then murdering them or dragging them out of a jail and murdering them way easier than anything else, right? By far the best move to go to, you know? that's what this is all about. Rebecca Felton doesn't agree with that, though. She thinks she knows what better than Ida B. Wells, because Rebecca is terrified constantly of being assaulted, like many women of her station,

because they've got fucking PTSD, both from being assaulted and from having to have armed themselves during the war and constantly live in fear of being raped or violated, right? This is part of why rape worked so well as an excuse for lynch mobs. Confederate propaganda had drilled people's heads full of stories of free black union soldiers committing wanton rape. In places like Memphis and Macon,

no woman like Rebecca would doubt a cry of rape aimed at a free black man. As that peace in the Smithsonian explains it, Felton blamed the lynchings on democratic politicians who plied black men with liquor at the polls, as well as on the failure of religion and the courts to prevent crime and deliver justice. If white men couldn't protect women's dearest possession

from the ravening human beasts, Felton said, then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary. That is the key Rebecca quote. A week. Yep. Because white men are not protecting us from being raped, and we're mostly being raped by white men, we need to have lynch mobs go out and kill these people. That's where she lines on.

And you can see how her previous life led her here, right? So is she assuming, like, she's just ignoring the fact that a chunk of the PTSD came from white men. Like, I know she's mad at them. So she's just lashing out of her to go. Yeah. So she just has to lash out in men. Right. And she knows she's not going to be pointing against white men, so might as well do this.

And she's angry at all of them, but only one type of man is going to face lethal consequences for her anger. So when Rebecca, she's cool. Oh, she's so cool with it. Now, when Rebecca had railed against drunkenness and spousal violence and convict leasing and argued in favor of the vote for women, she had attracted a following. As a pro-lynching advocate, she drew an even more dedicated following because, Feeding fear and anger is one of the fastest ways to get famous, especially if the fear you stir is against a subject your society already despises. It's just like a pro lynching advocate is such an insane thing to be. That is.

What? Lynch forever. That's the Rebecca Felton attitude. Yeah. So this all comes to a terrible head in 1898 in the port of Wilmington, North Carolina. Wilmington was one of those communities where after the war, black people had been enormously successful in creating businesses and jobs for themselves, right?

Think about Black Wall Street in, I think it was somewhere in Oklahoma. Since Wilmington was mostly black and they could vote now, they also started getting elected to local government and came to dominate it, in fact, which enraged some of the white citizens. So most people in this town are black, they're starting to organize and they're starting to win election and take over local government.

because they make up the majority of people. Now, they are not hostile to the white community, and not all of the white community is hostile to them. In fact, there's a chunk that they're organizing with because the black community in Wilmington has no beef with their neighbors. In fact, white and black working class populists in Wilmington had created a new political movement

that they called fusion, right? It's one of those fascinating, really hopeful stories in the post-war period that has a tragic end, but the fusion movement in Wellington is a really interesting case. I want to quote from an article in Humanities, the magazine for the National Endowment for the Humanities, by Janine Latice in 2025. Here's how she explains the fusion movement. White populists and black and white Republicans formed joint electoral tickets on shared priorities.

Black men served on the board of aldermen as city treasurer, city jailer, and city coroner. Ten of Wilmington's 26 police were black. So they're not just because most people in town are black taking up all of the winning most of the elections. they built an electoral compromise with poor whites, and they are getting elected based on shared priorities, right? It's exactly what politics ought to be, you know? So did they call it fusion? Because that's like, such a like contemporary word to me.

That's interesting. Yeah, that's the term that a lattice uses for. And that's the only term I've heard used for it. So I have to assume you can hear some like writing about it. I think that's just like, yeah. I love that. They wouldn't have meant it in the nuclear sense, obviously. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. It's a fucking amazing story, right? But obviously because this is a reconstruction era story, we also know it's going to end badly. And Rebecca is a big part of why. But the short story is that. While things are going pretty well, for most people there, there's a bunch of rich and formerly rich white men who were like, wait a second, I have to listen to a black man now. We don't have all the power. Let's do a coup d'etat.

Right? Let's coo this out. So they start practicing to form mobs with the goal of forcing black officials out of office. and making anyone with any wealth and power leave in order to break the black communities back so that they can rule the ashes. They start doing this in the summer of 1898. The inciting incident is a speech that Rebecca Felton gives earlier that year in which she attacks white men for failing to stop, quote,

the black beast rapist. She expressly argues that lynching is necessary to protect white women, and it was up to those failed white men to found their courage and do it. If it needs lynching to protect women's possession from the ravening human beasts, Then I say Lynch, right? This is where that comes from. Now, her words are reprinted, as they often were, all over white supremacist newspapers that had started popping up in Wilmington.

To fight back, Alex Manley, the editor of the city's most influential black paper, The Daily Record, published an article and wrote, The Black Beast Rapist? You mean all the white people raping black women? Basically, like, that's a big part of his article. Is that like, you're talking about, like, rapists, like, y'all, like, the rape is coming from one direction here, right? You're the real rapist.

Right. Like, that's kind of manly. starting point, but he also addresses Felton directly. Quote, A Felton from Georgia makes a speech before the Agricultural Society at Tybee, Georgia, in which she advocates lynching as an extreme measure. This woman makes a strong plea for womanhood, and if the alleged crimes of rape were half so frequent, as his off-times reported, her plea would be worthy of consideration.

Mrs. Felton begins well, for she admits that education will better protect the girls on the farm from the assaulter. This we admit, and it should not be confined to the white any more than to the colored girls. The papers are also filled often with reports of rapes of white women and subsequent lynchings of the alleged rapists. The editors pour volumes of aspersions against all Negroes because of the few who may be guilty. If the papers and speakers of the other race would condemn the condition of crime because it is crime and not try to make it appear that the Negroes were the only criminals, they would find their strongest allies and the intelligent Negroes themselves, and together the whites and blacks would

root out the evil of both races. So Manly is saying, hey, instead of just like blaming us for all of this, We know you're doing the most of the rape of like your woman. What if we all get together as a community to stop all of the rapists in our mix? You know, white and black? Because rape's just like a problem that we have as a society and we should deal with it together. Right. He's a very reasonable guy, this manly. This drives people insane.

Among other things, he's just said that like, hey, it's fine if white and black people have sex and it's not rape. And he's also saying that like, what if we work together to fix this problem that is clearly something we both have? That is all so offensive to these white white. supremacists. Yeah. He already said all the things. To work with, how dare you? Yeah. How fucking dare you? Yeah. So this drives people crazy. As Janine Ladis writes, his editorial was reprinted throughout the South, further enraging the white elite, with threats against man and threats against Manley's life poured in. All that summer, Rebecca Felton continued to beat the drum about the necessity of lynching to protect white women from black rapists. She gave speech after

speech and wrote her customary blizzard of articles contributed to an already feverish pace of white supremacist press on the same subject. So the business leaders, the white leaders of Wilmington, had their own paper, News and Observer, which they used to print a bunch of white supremacist's propaganda. They also started buying up and hoarding a shitlet of guns. They started making calls to burn barns. They started bringing in racists from surrounding states, particularly a bunch of racists from South Carolina who called themselves red shirts. These guys would pull black men out of their homes, torture them, threaten to kill them, do anything they could to stop them from voting and basically say, hey, you need to get the fuck out of town if you want to be safe. On November 7th at the

county courthouse, Confederate Civil War veteran Alfred Moore Waddell gave an incendiary speech. Men, the crisis is upon us. You must do your duty. The city, country, and state shall be rid of Negro domination once and forever. You are the sons of noble ancestry. You are Anglo-Saxons. Go to the polls tomorrow. And if you find a Negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls. And if he refuses, kill him. Shoot him down in his. tracks. So, cool. Horrible.

Yeah. This is a bad place for an ad, but here it is. Wee. Get Bell, Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. What's up, fam?

I'm sports journalist. Chambers. Hey, what's up y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week.

Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka showing out, she beat. Sabalinka. Shout out to you, Naomi. You get the palm, Naomi. You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it.

Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports. On the IHeart Radio app. Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us, or rather you know them. Tony and Candice, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, The Chicken.

We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea?

We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. Well, I thought he was going to write. I thought you were going to write a song.

I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo, Rewatch on the I Heart Radio. radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Every episode we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers.

The show is famously super accessible so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stiller. The definition of what is a movie has kind of changed anywhere, too, right? What do you think it is now? It's images and work. being spoken, captured by some sort of technology. Danny McBride. He loves Lowe.

Oh, that's fantastic. And you make it on, you make your own. That's great. I call him Terro Reed. That's a good name. They're all named after cast members of American Pie. Yeah. Oh, gotcha.

I call, I don't, I never looked up if she was in this, but I call him Leachie Sobieski. Yeah. I don't think she was an American Pie, but I still like that. Haven't looked it up. She was prominent around the same time. Yeah. Mary Steenbergin. Why are you guys talking to me?

I'm worried. Did you understand the movie? Why are you talking so down to me that you think I don't understand your little play game? I just really, I get it. I'm trying to set you up for success here. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So, on election day, redshirted mobs roared through the town of Wilmington,

threatening black men and tossing out ballots, destroying black men. destroying ballot drops. They also burnt down businesses, including Manley's newspaper. They, like, burnt that whole newspaper office down, and they beat and shot and murdered dozens. After the election went their way, because no other votes were countered, they issued a white declaration of independence and announced that they would never be ruled by black men again. And unfortunately, the Wilmington coup has a long-standing effect. Before the coup, Wilmington was 56% black.

Today, it's something like 15% black. Newspapers referred to it as a black uprising or riot until the 1950s. And the death toll is generally excited between 60 and 300. We will never know for sure, right? This is a nightmare. The loss of so much wealth and community, it's one of the things that's still affecting people to this day is the destruction. And this isn't the only town that gets destroyed like this by racists.

60 and 300 is such a wide range. Right. Yeah. Well, they're not keeping note of how many they're killing, right? That's not their business. Yeah. So Fulton herself celebrated the massacre afterwards, telling a journalist, The slanderer, manly, should be made to fear a reaper's rope rather than occupy a place in New York skyscrapers.

Basically, that guy shouldn't have gotten away. We should have hung him, you know? If he ever comes down here again, make sure you do that. She kept on advocating for lynching for years. Although in time it grew obvious that even her lynching didn't do anything to stop white women from being raped. She never apologized. She just kept advocating for the vote for white women. In fact, as the cause of suffrage grew more popular in the early 1900s,

she argued that white men should support suffrage so that white women could use their vote to maintain white power and supremacy. William died, her husband, in 1909, but Rebecca kept going. By 1920, she was a very old woman and very widely respected in Georgia politics. Women had the vote now, and Rebecca started insisting that the first female elected leaders were inevitable, if not something she expected to see. Then 1922 comes along, right? And this is going to be like this moment of kismet for Rebecca. The junior senator from Georgia, who's going to be running in that election, gets sick

and dies very suddenly. And the governor, Thomas Hardwick, has to appoint a replacement until there can be an election. And since Hardwick is going to run in that election, he knows he needs a political advantage. Right. He wants, number one, he wants to appoint someone to that job who won't run for governor against him. And he also wants to get votes from women who can just now vote, right? So he's trying to get the female vote. And he figures that, like, even if I oppose the 19th Amendment, if I appoint this lady Felton to like a kind of symbolic position, then, you know, that'll burnish my reputation with a lady voters.

If I make her technically a congresswoman for like a day, then maybe I'll get the ladies vote. Unfortunately, the Senate wasn't expected to be in session before the election that would replace Felton, and she didn't bother traveling to Washington to take the oath of office. But then, like, she's not really planning to do anything about this. It doesn't sound very interesting. But then the president calls for a special session of Congress to work on a ship subsidy bill, and Hardwick loses his election. So first off, he's not really worried about competing against anyone anymore.

And second, there's going to be a session through which Rebecca Mises. actually get a chance to speak. So she starts lobbying to everyone who will listen to her of like, hey, if you really want to get the ladies vote, if you really want to show that you're serious about this, make me a senator for a day, it'll mean something to all the women out there who know what's going to happen eventually, right? And she's very good at this. She's very good at campaigning.

She's very good at getting people, you know, to come around to her point of view on things. There were a lot of objections at the time. And according to newspaper coverage. at the moment, like when this is all happening, if a single senator had objected to her being given that job for a day, it would have all failed. And a bunch of people had said like, yeah, I'll vote against letting a woman be on the Senate floor. But when it actually happens, none of them do fuck all to stop anything.

Like they're not actually willing, but just says something there too. And she gets inaugurated as a Senate gallery. And there's just tons of women watching. There's thunderous applause. I'm going to quote from Smithsonian Magazine discussing this moment. The next morning, moments before she stepped down, she addressed her Senate colleagues, thanking them for the chivalric welcome, and telling them that though she was just now a remnant of the Old South, she was the happiest woman in the United States. As Gidlow explains, after the 19th Amendment became law, black women were subjected to humiliating literacy tests, made to stand in line until polls closed and even told that election officials wouldn't register them. The historian's attempt has identified at least one woman in Alabama who is sexually assaulted for attempting to vote.

Black activists like Mary Church Terrell and Fannie Lou Hamer organized to fight voter suppression. But laws prohibiting voter discrimination on the basis of race weren't passed until 1965. The first black woman senator, Carol Mosley Braun of Illinois, was elected only in 1992. So Felton gets to have her great moment and be the first female senator and go down in the history books. But it is a long time before that kind of even that possibility exists for a black woman. right, but it does come finally in 92. Felton, after her brief period of time in Congress, goes back to Georgia and dies of pneumonia, 94 years old.

Ninety-four. Ninety-four. Ninety-four. Yes. 94. This lady never died. What the fuck. Long, long life.

94. Her evil fed into her body. Yeah. She ate the souls of others, obviously. Yeah, yeah. Kind of dead. Kind of dead. Maybe that's why she liked the lynching.

She needed those souls to live. Oh, my. God. That's the first female senator. Rebecca felt. How we feeling? So a wonderful, like, she massacres. She loved a good massacre.

She did love a good massacre. Come on. Who doesn't like a good massacre? I like a good massacre. She liked a bad massacre. I'll say that. I'm just saying, I feel like it was a bad day for me to wear my root for women's shirt because I'm not. Not always.

Not always. Nor should you 100% of the time dress them in. politics. Sometimes they're Rebecca Felton. I mean, we have many, many women that were like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Sheesh. How does some, it's just baffling that she ate the soul of the dead. How did she get so many things wrong when foundationally she had so many things right?

That's a very complex character. She's smart and observant enough that she can't not see who the. real fault lies with her. She knows it's the white men and she never disagrees with that. But once the white men are gone, she also is going to look and blame at this group of people, particularly black men, who are really upsetting the status quo around her that she values and her own position in it, you know? And I think kind of that's what's going on here. And I think also there's just this this sense of the reason why she's so violently in support of lynching is she believes it's net, someone has to do something because of how badly the white men failed in protecting these women. Right. Now it's my job.

I think is kind of her attitude. In general, I feel like she's like, I have to punish someone. Men. It's definitely men. I know that I can't do white men because they're too powerful for me. Like so as a person who's observant and knows how to gain power, which we see in like every type of like superhero movie, like the evil person has someone underling who kind of understands this is wrong, but I'd rather be with you and get some rewards from you than punished with them. Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

I think you really pretty much perfectly nailed it there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting, too, because obviously the suffragette movement does break down. There is a big chunk of it that's like, I think white women should be able to vote. Right. And there's a chunk of it that are like, no, we should all be voting.

And it's interesting that how Felton arrives at supporting the vote in the first place is just because, like, well, we can't trust these. white men anymore. Right. We got to take this into our own hands to defend ourselves and our whiteness. A big chunk of the suffragettes, the leaders were cool with the black men even, some of the black men. She's like, you know what, you can be a token. Definitely no black women, though. Definitely no black women. Well, anyway, plugables to plug. Okay. I love, yay. Yes, I am on stuff. Mom never told you. We also talk about some dark things in history, to be fair. we've had a whole episode about ice and how awful that is. And it's ongoing because, you know, it's awful.

So if you want to listen to stuff like that, we also talk about historical things that could be a little more fun or at least uplifting because we know it's dark and dim and oh my God, why. We also have a book where we talk about a lot of things about feminism and intersectional feminisms over, so phanimisms over like all of history. So, yeah, you can check that out wherever you find books, all the books. Independent bookstores are best, though. Check that out. And, yeah, check out us next week when we'll be back with someone else bad. And a friend of both our pods, Bridget Todd, has a new audio book coming out. Love at First Prompt, AI in the Future of Intimacy.

It explores AI relationships from sex and romance to friendship, grief, and emotional support. And what happens when big tech begins to commodify our most intimate relationships. So check it out. We go on our show once a month talking about this stuff. We love her. We love Bridget. Excellent. We do.

All right. All right, everybody. Bye. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every

Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel. YouTube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking. On Raiders of the Lost podcast, we explore cinema like no one else, including huge interviews with stars like Ryan Gosling on Project Hail Mary. It was like the Jaws shark. Didn't always work, came with its own problems. That's what made it great. The cast of obsession. On set, there was so much magic happening with each scene we were putting together. Deep dives into classics like

2001 a Space Odyssey or Fight Club, plus weekly episodes on all industry news. Listen to Raiders of the Lost podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more, follow at Raiders of the Lost podcast and at TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia, A.O. rewatch, our brand new podcast. where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together,

breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guestores, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysler, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song.

Well, I thought you were all going to write a song for it. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia AEO rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl,

Sam J. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. We're breaking down the biggest headlines. Naomi Osaka, show it out. Shoutouts to you, Naomi. The viral moments. I've been obsessed with Kashan Rock's boxing journey. She looks good. Her

combos are swift. And the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook.

Every episode we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers. The show's famously super accessible so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stiller, Danny McBride, Riz Ahmed and Mary Steenbergen. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed human.