Behind the Bastards - The History of American Police and the Ku Klux Klan

Episode Date: June 23, 2020

For years protesters have chanted that the 'cops and klan go hand in hand'. Today, we discuss the very real history behind that, and how it influenced the birth of American policing.FOOTNOTES: KKK in the PD The Red Summer of 1919, Explained At least 2,000 more black people were lynched by white mobs than previously reported, new research finds Extremist cops: how US law enforcement is failing to police itself Yesterday’s Ku Klux Klan members are today’s police officers, councilwoman says The FBI’s Secret Rules Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction The US government destroyed the Ku Klux Klan once. It could do so again Constituting whiteness: The National Horse Thief Detective Association and racial mores in Indiana, 1850–1930 When Watchmen were Klansmen The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Behind the Police, a production of iHeart Radio. Welcome back to Behind the Police, the special mini-series for Behind the Bastards, which is normally a show that I, Robert Evans, do about the worst people in all of history. But for these weeks and these these episodes is a deep dive into the entire history of American police, the greatest bastards of them all. A collection of them. My guest in this journey into the history of policedom is my friend Jason Petty, better known as the hip hop artist propaganda. Jason, how are you doing today? What's up? Happy Juneteenth. The actual day of independence.

You know, yes. The day that like we as a nation kind of sort of started to begin to try to live up to the promises made at our founding, except not for women. We're still waiting for another, there's another independence coming soon. It's been a rough couple of centuries. It's been a rough couple of centuries, guys. Yeah. Yeah. Fun fact, the 13th, the emancipation proclamation was two years before this because the war wasn't done. And still we were waiting on Texas. And still we were waiting on Texas. Yeah. And in some ways still are. Still. Yeah. As a Texan. I think we're still kind of waiting on Texas.

So in honor of, I mean, this, it won't be Juneteenth anymore when these episodes drop. But these two episodes this week, we're we're going real deep into the history of racism and policing. That's that's what these next two episodes are going to be. And then after that, we're going to kind of get back to a broader history of policing and come up to the modern era. We'll talk about the war on drugs and cops and stuff. But but this this is these two episodes are going to be more focused on something that I think is critical, but not very well known to most people. You know, usually there's there's one aspect to which kind of what we're talking about is known today, which is that if you if you wound up at a protest recently, which I assume a lot of

you have, you may have heard the venerable left wing protest chant, cops and clan go hand in hand. And if you're a fan of rage against the machine, I'm sure you're familiar with their their similar lines. Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses. And, you know, you know, we talked a bit about how, you know, the sort of story spreading about slave patrols and how that was the origin of policing and how that was, you know, partly true, but not entirely accurate because it was more complicated than that. This is a case where the the kind of like pithy chance and social media posts and stuff actually are really accurate like that. Yeah. That's what we're going to talk about today. Yeah. So in in

a very veiled defense for everybody else that didn't have to live these realities, like there's some realities, like something like a redlining, like I understand be, I understand that there is a wide swath of people. You have to go out of your way, unless you black to know what redlining is, because it doesn't affect you, you know what I'm saying? So I'm going to give you that. I, I don't know the script, but I know based on what the way that Robert's leading in, I have an idea that I'm probably going to know these stories, but I'm pretty sure you don't because it ain't affected you. You ain't never thought about redlining because you never, there was never a time that your grandparents was looking at a neighborhood and was like, we can't

live here. And it's not because you couldn't afford to live here. It's because you wasn't allowed to live here. You know what I'm saying? So I understand that you don't know this. There's probably things in your life like we could talk about some Native American heritage and stories and such like that, that you probably would have no idea unless you went out in your way. I went out of my way to learn those things, because I understand what it means to be an oppressed person. So strap in, this is about to be earth shattering for you. It's, it's going to be right. Yes. So in the immediate wake of the war, you remember after part one, you know, we kind of ended on slave patrols just turned into police departments. But in the immediate

wake of the war, a lot of the South was, you know, occupied by the United States military, the Union military, and millions of black men had suddenly gained the right to vote for the first time, like kind of right around that same period. And historians generally call the time from 1865 to 1877 in the former South reconstruction. And it was a time of great hope for black Americans. 700 black men were elected to public office, including two senators and 14 members of the House of Representatives, which when you consider that like a huge chunk of those men had been slaves a couple of years earlier, like that's an, that's maybe the, the rapidest turnaround from not from politically being, you know, not a person to being in power that like has ever happened.

1300 black men and women were appointed to various government jobs during this period. Freedmen pulled the resources, they formed companies, some of them fought to receive back wages and even tried to take land from their former masters. It was generally not successful, but attempts were made. And all across the South groups of freedmen also formed militias, sometimes using the rifles with which they had served in the Union army. And obviously, a lot of white folks weren't happy with this. Yeah, it worked. It's like, so they go, you know what, we're just going to let them, you forget that, especially in the South, the vast majority of the population were freed slaves. So just by the sheer numbers, if you let us vote, we're going to

vote in our own people. Yeah, it's you're not going to be in charge anymore. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a numbers. So this was a pickle for the white supremacists. We could say that fairly. Yeah. And outside of the transition of slave patrols to police departments, a lot of white people just sort of on their own attempted to put newly freed black people in their place by using the law to, to, you know, suppress them. Laws were passed throughout the old slave states that banned vagrancy or being out in public without a visible means of support. You might recognize this as the same tactic used a little bit later to stop union workers from organizing in other parts of the country. So that is kind of, we can,

we can see some, sometimes the exact same tactic being used for very different groups of oppressed Americans. But it does, it's the same thing. Like, what if we just make it illegal for them to be outside? Yeah. So in this case, vagrancy laws were used to force black people to take employment, generally a sharecropper. So you make it illegal to be outside without a job that forces people to take jobs. And since like you don't want to go to jail, your choice, like you have to very quickly get whatever job you can get, which means people, you know, the power is in the hands of the person offering you the job, which means they could give you a job that's basically slavery, which is in fact what a lot of sharecropping jobs were. Exactly what sharecropping

was. So again, not quite slavery, but also not nearly as far from being slavery as it really ought to have been. Slavery light. Yeah. Slavery light, a little bit of diet sleep. It's like the Coke Zero of enslaving human beings. Just one calorie. Yeah. It is better for you, but not very much better. Yeah. Not very much better. Yes. And it'll probably give you a brain tumor. Yes. I want to I'll cut that bit out if Coke Zero wants to sponsor the podcast. I will take your money. Yeah. So I want to kick off our quotations in this episode with one from the absolutely critical book that everybody ought to read, The End of Policing by Alex Vitale. Quote, let's go. Anyone on the roads without proof of employment was quickly subjected to

police action. Local police were the essential front door of the twin evils of convict, leasing, and prison farms. Local sheriffs would arrest free blacks on flimsy to non-existent evidence, then drive them into a cruel and inhuman justice system whose punishments often resulted in deaths. These same sheriffs and judges also received kickbacks and in some cases generated lists of fit and hardworking blacks to be incarcerated on behalf of employers, who would then lease them out to perform forced labor for profit. Douglas Blackmon chronicles the appalling conditions of mines and lumber camps where thousands perished. By the Jim Crow era, policing had become a central tool of maintaining racial inequality throughout the South, supplemented by ad hoc

vigilantes such as the Ku Klux Klan, which often worked closely with and was populated by local police. Good little summary of how it all went down. Yeah. Yep. So the motherfucking KKK. Let's come on. Get into it, baby. Now, we've done a whole two-parter on the history of the Klan, the first and the second clan, at least, on behind the bastards already. So if you want a detailed history of both of those organizations, you can check that out. It's in the behind the bastards feed. But I'm going to give a little bit of an overview before we dig into the cop, you know, specific stuff. The KKK formed initially in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1866. The very first Pulaski. That's like saying Pulaski. Pulaski. Yeah. It's a fun name of a town. It's a

shame. Yeah. All of the terrorism. Anyway, the very first KKK cell was formed by a bunch of board drunk and pretty well off Confederate veterans. They dressed up like wizards and they gave themselves absurd titles and went out at night, costumed as the ghosts of Confederate veterans in order to scare freed black people. One of the KKK founders happened to own the local newspaper and he published a bunch of mysterious letters from a grand Cyclops, all of which made the clan seem cool and mysterious and powerful. This early meme, and that's really what the KKK was at the start, spread very quickly throughout the South and soon thousands of white dudes were dressing like ghosts and terrorizing black people, generally while drunk as all hell. Sometimes they

wore dresses. Other times they pretended to be aliens. They did this because it was fun, but also because it made their abuse more impactful. In her fantastic book, Coo Clucks, Elaine Parsons explains this in a way that I think is really important when it comes to just sort of understanding modern right wing street violence and why a lot of it seems so silly, like a lot of the ways they dress up and act are so like on its surface absurd. Quote, Coo Clucks endeavored to portray victims entirely rational fear of their physical violence as though it were superstition or gullibility. The victim tellingly failed to get the joke, allowing himself to be frightened by ghosts or devils. Get the joke. Yeah, they didn't get the

joke. It was funny, I dressed as a ghost and then I shot at you. Yeah. Yeah. You know, while I'm hanging from my neck. Yeah. You get it? Yeah. Yeah. We hung you from a tree and we were dressed as aliens. You don't get the joke. You're so scared of aliens. Yeah. Yeah. There it is. Yeah. Fucking fascists are always the same. Thanks, bud. Yeah. Yeah. At some point, you have to explain to me in one of these bastard episodes, why far right fascists are just not funny. Yeah. It's because it's not funny. It's because comedy, good comedy requires what's the word I'm looking for here? Empathy, right? Like you have to understand other people in order to say things that are funny to them. There it is. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. So. Okay.

Yeah. Many, if not most of these early Klansmen were former slave patrol members and a sizeable number of these early Klansmen, in addition to being former slave patrol members, were also current law enforcement, you know, sheriffs and the like. There was also outside of, you know, even the Klan, just a huge amount of vigilante violence directed against black people during this time. And it all does sort of bleed together. One Edgefield County, South Carolina military officer, like a U.S. military officer stationed in the in the former Confederacy in 1866, wrote this quote, two men white had killed a Negro plus cut the ear off another the evening before about five miles left of my encampment. It is presumed they belong to a regular organized

band of gorillas, which infests that country. It is practiced among these monsters either to kill or mutilate any colored people who unluckily falls into their power. None of the colored people dared to sleep in their houses at night, but had to take refuge in the surrounding country. Some part of the peaceful loyal white population are well acquainted with the haunts of these depredors. But dread them would they betray them as there is no protective power in the country. They are a terror to the loyal population at night. These ruffians besotted with drink, rave and tear like prairie Indians through the streets of the city. The civil law is powerless to protect against such desperados. That's interesting because it gives you an idea

of how terrifying it was during this period, how these people acted. Yeah, it gives you also like a look into the head of sort of, I guess what you'd call like a white ally who was also still really racist against Native Americans. Yeah, I was like, there's a lot like a prairie Indian. That's the one that is of all the whole sentence. That's what I caught where I was like, wait, what? It's like, oh, you're so okay. What do we tell? Yeah, I was like, yeah, it's like the record skipped. Yeah, I was just like, yeah, man, yeah, man, yeah, man, hold up. Yeah, it's kind of like you, you want to be really proud of like Ulysses Simpson Grant because, you know, as flawed as he was, he beat the Confederacy. He was committed to black people not being slaves.

He was committed to them having the right to vote. He did some really good stuff as present for black people. Real terrible record with the Native Americans. Real bad, abysmal. Yeah. So, you know, we have, we do have a couple of founding members of this country that we can be comprehensively proud of, but they're pretty much just Thomas Payne, actually, when you look at white folks. And John Brown. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, John Brown, there was a neat moment in his history where he was like asked by some white folks he lived around to help them clear out a group of Native Americans from the community. And he was like, I'd rather clear your ass out of here. Yeah. Good guy, John Brown. So yeah, civil law was often powerless to stop these kinds of bands

of marauding white terrorists in this, or insurgents really in this period of time. But civil law was also often on board with this kind of violence. So it was a mix of we really have no resources to stop these people and we also don't want to stop these people. And a good example of how this looked comes from the case of Union County, South Carolina. That town included a virulent cell of Klansmen, roughly organized around a local criminal named Bill Fawcett. Now, Fawcett had been a member of another anti-black guerrilla band known to Union troops as Slickers previously. He and his friends seem to have slid rather seamlessly into becoming Klansmen once that was the hip new way to be racist terrorists. Fawcett was repeatedly arrested for

disorderly conduct and violence, but he had good connections to local law enforcement and he and his friends were also tied heavily into the wealthy gentry in Union County. So they never really did any hard time because they were good smugglers and they helped keep the rich people in the county well supplied with tax free liquor. One of the wealthy men who supported Fawcett in his vigil anti activities was James Rice Rogers. He sold the illegal liquor that Fawcett smuggled and he was also the county sheriff in 1870. So that's good. Bring it right back around to the cuffs. And again, we're seeing kind of the same thing. We are seeing in like the big northern cities in this period of time where the police are intimately tied with vice, right? So on the night of December

31st, 1870, Union County was struck by a series of violent raids and this kind of originated from a clash between white and black folks that still very complex. It started when two of Fawcett's men set out to deliver a barrel of illegal whiskey and they were stopped on the road by a checkpoint of black militiamen and these guys were actually from two different black militias who had set up patrols in the area they lived because there were bands of armed clans been writing about and those clansmen had killed people recently. Not just black people but also like white republicans in this period. Let that be a mind bender for y'all. They're killing republicans. Republican meant something different back then. Yeah, sure did. So there's these bands of armed clansmen running

around killing people and so black folks set up militias to protect their neighborhoods, right? So they're doing like armed community self-defense and this group of Fawcett's men start driving up to one of these checkpoints with a barrel of illegal whiskey. And this militia holds Fawcett's men up and they demand they hand over the whiskey. It's kind of unclear if they're just if they just want the whiskey because they're like, oh hey, let's get some whiskey. Or if they're more like you guys are sketchy as hell, you kind of seem like the Klan dudes because these guys were both probably Klan's men who have been riding around and like we want to see what the hell is up. And obviously these white dudes weren't willing to like listen to what a bunch of black militias

said and they write off and so the black militiamen open fire at their wagon. And I'm going to quote from historian Elaine Parsons here. Perhaps it was important to the pickets or those who fired that white men not dismiss their armed demands and drive breezily by. Such pickets were part of how power operated in Union and to mobilize the resources to set one up only to have it dismissed might have serious consequences. Perhaps the shots were not about the whiskey at all. There is some reason to suspect that Stevens, who's one of the men driving that whiskey train, having passed through the organized group would have headed straight to Fawcett, which might well have led to trouble, not unlike that, which was caused by shooting. So like they might have

been worried that these people were going to go back to the Klan and try to organize an attack on the picket. And so and trouble definitely followed them shooting at the wagon. Both the Fawcett's men immediately got out of the wagon and fled, but one of them was caught and he was executed by the militia and his body was posed in a matter similar to how Klan's men in the area had posed recently executed black men Parsons continues. The black militia here was replicating the subculture of collective violence with which Union Counties were familiar. Picketing a road to defend one of their own from attack was conventional Union County behavior, as probably was the shakedown of Stevens. Even shooting after the retreating figures of Stevens and Robinson

as they ran their picket would perhaps not have been particularly abnormal and his gun happy a culture is Union counties. The killing of Stevens made it a much more serious matter, of course. Militiamen, however, might have miscalibrated elites' willingness to support Fawcett's marginal men. Giving Stevens his liminal status, he was a criminal, had the militia been composed of white members, it seems likely that the whole affair would have blown over. Indeed, when Stevens's peer Thomas Jefferson Greer had been shot just months earlier, his assailant, who was another white guy, had enjoyed widespread public support. But again, John Sanders had been a white man. The fact that a black militia had killed a white guy was not okay to local white

elites. And so large armed groups of white men formed up and started confiscating militia weapons from black homes, disarming them first. Here we go. Yeah. So, so like, I get a bunch of pushback from said, you know, right wing anarchists, boogaloo dudes who are like low-key boogaloo but don't want to admit it, you know what I'm saying? Saying like, I don't understand why black people don't arm themselves. Like you doing all this peaceful protest, maybe you should like you yelling at us about being militias coming out here, heavily armed. Maybe y'all should start heavily being heavily armed as if we ain't never thought of that. Just like, like, I would, what makes you think we, that thought ain't crossed our mind yet. You know what I'm saying? Like, do you want me to

go, you did a thing on the Malford Act already? You know what I'm saying? We did that already. But like this, what year is this? What year are you talking about right now? Yeah, it's this, I'm a big, I'm a supporter of not just black people, members of marginalized groups, particularly as we continue to hurtle towards an uncertain future, considering armed self-defense. But like, yeah, that's been done a lot. And historically, there's a lot more armed white people. So it's not the solution. Yeah. It's not the solution. And like, why you think we ain't thought of that? Like, you think we ain't thought of that? Like, this has been tried before.

And sometimes it does work. We'll be, we'll actually be talking about this a few times in this episode. It's not like, like, again, I, I, I'm one of the anarchists being like, consider it, you know, it's not a bad idea. Yes, I'm not saying consider it, but these people talking to me as if we never thought about it. You know what I'm saying? From the fucking beginning. Yeah. From the beginning. What makes you think, like, come on, bro. And yeah, what happens, you know, the black people in Union County are organized and they are armed and white people start going door to door and taking guns out of individual homes. Yes. Yes. And the reality of, like, I, and I love the, the, the part of that passage that was like, this is not abnormal.

Like what, what, what I wish I could run through all of the streets of America and explain is our country, American culture is violent. Like we are, all of your statues are war heroes. Yeah. We're founded on a protest. This is a violent culture and our country, our power structures, they respond to violence. So I just don't like, I'm not telling you this is the right way. I'm just telling you, this is the ocean, you swimming it. You know what I'm saying? Right? Yeah. We are saltwater fishies. That's what we are. We are a violent culture. So you mad at somebody else who's, who's experiencing violence, right? Like, like it's incumbent on those experiencing violence to remain peaceful. Just, it means like, I don't think you want to, you asking me to be a

freshwater fish in a saltwater ocean. Like, I just don't know what to tell you. The water is violent. So this is what's going to happen. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. So the white folks start taking all the guns of the black people who are in militias. And they also arrest dozens of black men, many of whom had no ties to the militias. Now, some of these men attempted to resist, but they ultimately decided that a gunfight would do them no good. They basically were like, hold up in a house that was surrounded by white folks and they had the choice, do we defend ourselves or do we give ourselves up? And kind of the decision was if we defend ourselves, we will either kill or injure some of these white folks and they will be really angry

when they finished killing us because there's a lot more of them and they're going to burn down every black house in the neighborhood. Right? Yeah. There's no, yeah. They, like, white people at this time and at this, and at that time and in this time, but mostly at that time are the kings of elevation. You know what I'm saying? Like, you elevate the moment, like dial the heat up. You know what I'm saying? So these folks, like, give themselves up to save the neighborhood. Now, for several days, the white elites in Union County debated over this list of randomly arrested black men that they had and deciding, basically, we're trying to decide how many of them can we punish and how many of them can we spare without provoking a broader race riot among,

like, because, you know, there were like a chunk of folks in power who were like, who understood, like, most of these arrests are bullshit, but also we have to punish some black people more or less at random. Otherwise, the poor white folks in the county are going to go on a race riot. So there's like, yeah, this big debate with the local elites. And Alice Walker, the head of a local black militia, gets arrested on his way to travel to the governor to warn him about what's happening in Union County. Now, Walker hadn't been present at any of the events that had sparked this, but he was hated by the most racist of the local whites because he was the organizer of a black militia. So local law enforcement decided that his death would go really far in calming the

white mob. Now, Walker had supporters who were ready to rally to his defense armed. But again, he told them not to. He was innocent and he was certain that a court case would bear out his innocence. But he never got the chance to actually, you know, do that. On January 5th, a huge gang of cuckucks, clansmen raided the Union County Jail and abducted five arrested black men who also happened to be prominent local Republicans. Parsons writes, quote, it is not possible to name any of the members of the costumed group. But because though not all of them were on horseback and were costumed, we can imagine that many of the group's members were elites from the size of the group, even if we accept only a cautious estimate, it seems likely that they came from

adjoining counties. There's a good deal of evidence that some of Fawcett's friends were present in a leadership role at this event. And one man who is later named by witnesses to the raid as a leader of the Klan mob that abducted all these black men was Fawcett's good buddy, Sheriff Rice Rogers. So again, yeah, that's how they get into the jail is the sheriff is a clansman and he lets them in. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, obviously what you're expecting happens to these black men and it's tragic. Yeah. And it's possible even that like, so there was one of the things that did happen when the KKK showed up at this jail is they struggled with a deputy to get the keys. And it's heavily suspected by historians, including Elaine Parsons, that this was all kind of an act. And

that it's likely that the deputy who struggled with the Klan after giving up the keys put on a Klan costume and engaged in the raid after being robbed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can totally picture that. Hey, yeah, don't take my key. Don't take my key. Look, I'm doing the right thing. Wow. And it is like, again, a lot. And this this this, I highlight this story because I think specific stories are kind of useful in getting people emotionally involved. But this is one of this happened. We will never know how many times constantly. Yeah. Like the whole idea of a mob showing up at the jail and the officers handing over the keys or straight up just participating in the raid of the jail with Klan robes on was a constant story during this. Yeah. Now, as a rule,

local law enforcement either again, helped actively during the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the good badass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the

date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadioApp, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadioApp, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match, and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadioApp, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or turn to blind eye to clan violence out of fear. Watching from Washington, D.C., President U.S. Grant was shocked by what seemed to be nothing so much as a resurgent Confederate movement in his, you know, in his country. So when he'd come to power, Grant had believed that the passage of the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed black men the right to vote, would solve the problem of securing the rights of newly freed black people. He was taken by surprise by the vicious string of murders that followed black emancipation. In Chattanooga,

Tennessee, a black man named Andrew Flowers defeated the white candidate for justice of the peace in an 1870 election. Despite the fact that this man had just been elected justice, police were nowhere in evidence while clansmen whipped and beat him and told him that no inward would hold office in the United States. Again, common story. Yeah. And thankfully, flowers survived. Yeah. Again. Hey, why don't you just put black people in office? You think we ain't thought of that? Yeah. You got to deal with the problem of mass violence being done to black people in support of white supremacy. Not always by white people, but in support of white supremacy, because we'll talk next week about how having black officers in police departments works,

because it doesn't always work the way you might suspect. No, because white supremacy. Yeah. We talked about the first one. Whiteness is a thing. Yeah. You know what isn't the Ku Klux? Oh, God. Jesus. No, that's not a good way to do this. It might be, though. That's the thing. Yeah. That's the hard part. Let's not analyze that too much right now. Let's just go with from Episode One. Fuck the police. It's time for an ad break. Fuck the police products. Hi, I'm Robert Sex-Reese, host of The Doctor Sex-Reese Show, and every episode I listen to people talk about their sex and intimacy issues, and yes, I despise every minute of it. Yeah. She made mistakes too. That's true. She did kill everyone at her wedding.

But hell is real. We're all trapped here, and there's nothing any of us can do about it. So join me, won't you? Listen to The Doctor Sex-Reese Show every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Make sure to check out Drinkchamps, your number one music podcast on the Black Effect Podcast Network. Hosts N-O-R-E and DJ E-F-N sat down with artist and icon, Yay, which Vulture called one of 2021's most significant interviews. I literally had to go like Thanos, and I don't want to have to be the villain. But when I went and did the Donda thing, Yay returned. And everybody had to sit back and watch the real leader. Check out Drinkchamps conversation with Yay and many more legendary artists each and every Friday

on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. We're back. Oh my gosh. You know what I love is being back from ads, because it means that we can talk more about the horrific history of racism and law enforcement. The terror and trauma that sits inside of my DNA and passed on generationally. Whoo. Yes. Should have had an air horn there. So starting in 1870, President Grant began to lobby Congress to give him power to do something about the Klan. Because again, local law enforcement was actively aiding and abetting the KKK. In 1870 and 1871, Congress passed the Enforcement Acts. These protected the rights of black men to vote, hold office and serve on juries and generally enjoy equal protection under the law. The Ku Klux

Klan Acts, as they came to be known, allowed President Grant to call up the army in order to arrest and break up the bans of disguised nightmare otters. And we're going to be like 99% critical of law enforcement on this podcast, but we got to be fair when it's important to be fair. And federal law enforcement did a pretty decent job on breaking up the Klan. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Full respect. This is where things get really complicated, Prop, because a lot of the credit for this goes to Amos Ackerman, the attorney general of the United States. Ackerman joined the Republican Party after the Civil War and became one of the nation's most strenuous advocates for black suffrage. He was like, black people have the right to vote and hold office and we will,

I will make sure we enforce this with fucking riflemen if we have to. Yes. Historian William S. McFeely said of Ackerman that, quote, no attorney general before or since has been more vigorous in the prosecution of cases designed to protect the lives and rights of black Americans. And here's where things get complicated, because before he was a Republican, before he was the attorney general, Amos Ackerman volunteered and fought in the Confederate army. People have layers of complication. And people are complicated. They in them contain minis. Yeah. And this, if for Amos, this seems to have been like he was, it seems to have been more a matter of like you hear about

these folks who are like really loyal to their state for reasons. Yeah. I have trouble understanding. Like he doesn't seem to have joined the Confederate army specifically to fight for slavery, although he fought for slavery because that's what the Confederate army fought for. But in his mind, I think it was more like I'm really loyal to Georgia. I don't know. I can't get in the head of that guy, but I guess if you can make that up, he tried to afterwards. Yeah. Yeah. I want to give it to the possibility that people, probably hundreds of them at the time, you know, like you said, just was like, look, we're down here. This is what we do. We fighting for our way of life. I guess that's right. And in the middle of that, finally had this like, you know,

this is bullshit. You know what I'm saying? And it was like, but if you're the only as person for miles talking like this, it's probably hard to find some good community and you're probably going to fumble. And then you become this guy to where you're like, Hey, there's one thing I can do. I could probably like dismantle this clan thing. That seemed like a good thing to do. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. If there's a thing that can make up for volunteering to serve in the Confederate army, I guess it's dismantling the KKK. I guess. Yeah. Like, that's a good, that's a good, good try at least. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the worst clan violence was in South Carolina and Grant declared martial law in that state,

citing a condition of lawlessness. He suspended habeas corpus and numerous clansmen were rounded up by federal authorities, including Sheriff Rice Rogers, who we have been talking about. Lot of, lot of sheriffs got pulled up in this. So the Senate held extensive hearings where hundreds of black victims of the clan were allowed to tell their stories to the nation. Under Ackerman's direction, 600 clansmen were convicted and 65 of them sent to a federal penitentiary. By 1872, the clan was no longer a meaningful force in the United States. Frederick Douglass himself said that without President Grant's actions, black Americans would have been trapped again in a condition almost identical to slavery.

That is probably true, but it's also true that Grant kind of botched the landing on this one, firing Ackerman to appease his political rivals and commuting the sentences of some clansmen in a bid for reconciliation. So again, can't stand here, you know, let's be fair. But also, you know, it is fair to say that Ulysses Simpson Grant was probably the best presidential advocate for black rights that existed until at least FDR. Yeah, that's what I was going to say, like, I probably not took a new deal, you know? Yeah, yeah. And even, like, yeah.

Even he got an asterisk next to his name, you know what I'm saying? A couple of them. Yeah. So terrorism was, however, briefly out as a method of repressing black Americans and enforcing white supremacy, or at least terrorism in kind of an organized fashion, because we're going to talk about lynching later. This left the law and law enforcement as the last organized refuge for white supremacists. The black codes had been made illegal in 1868 when the 14th Amendment gave black people equal protection under the law. But in 1877, the first Jim Crow laws began to be passed,

mandating separate public spaces for black and white people. Suddenly, white and black people were now expected by law to use separate schools, libraries, water fountains, and restaurants. The police could no longer arrest black men for voting, although that absolutely still happened. But they could arrest black people for entering white spaces. The Klan was gone, but the police remained. And for decades, they took over the hard work of enforcing white supremacy from the terrorists. In 1915, William J. Simmons, former minister, performed a real act of resurrection and brought the KKK back to life.

Now, Simmons had been a big nerd for things like the Masons and other fraternal societies that were a big part of life back in the day. Clubs where men would gather and dress up in costumes and do silly rituals and generally get drunk. Simmons wanted to make a society of his own. And he decided that reviving the old KKK would be easiest because then he could cash in on the Klan's name recognition and branding. Again, I cover all this in that two-parter that we already did on the show. But before we move on to the cop stuff, the important thing to know is that the second Klan was fucking huge. While the first had been a relatively small group of terrorists, the second Klan had its terrorists, but it was largely a social club that included

millions of Americans at its height. They had a summer camp, like it was not quite the same thing. Let that sink in, guys. They sold branded equipment and stuff. And in a lot of ways, they were basically a pyramid scheme. Simmons engaged a PR firm to help him repackage this old terrorist group as a cool club for families. By 1920, the whole thing had gone viral nationwide. And the Klan did engage in pushing racist laws. But for the folks at the top, I think more than even a force for racism, the Klan was a grift, right? Now, there were a lot of racists in like everyone in the Klan was a racist still. And there were a lot of racists who were like the old Klan's men. Kind of at the top, making money was more the goal than anything else. Yeah.

Yeah. So in 1921, Simmons gave an interview to the Atlanta Journal that was basically his sales pitch to the nation for the Ku Klux Klan from a write up in the National Museum of American History website, quote, while explicitly advocating white supremacy, Simmons played up his group's commitment to law and order, promoted their enforcement of prohibition and even boasted of his own police credentials. He claimed members at every level of law enforcement belonged to his organization and that the local sheriff was often one of the first to join when the Klan came to a town. Ominously, Simmons declared that the sheriff of Fulton County knows where he can get 200 members of the Klan at a moment's call to suppress anything in the way of

lawlessness. There it is. Yeah. And he wasn't blowing hot air when he said this. In Anaheim, California, Klan's men won four out of five seats on the city council, dominating local politics until 1924. They voted to allow officers who were Klan members to patrol wearing their full KKK uniform instead of their normal police uniform. Non-police Klansmen were also allowed to patrol and interrogate citizens in the streets. Hey, I guess once you guys know that Anaheim's where Disneyland is. So just like, let that sink in. Anaheim. That's where Anaheim, for Disneyland is. You want to go to downtown Disney, it's Anaheim. Yeah. The city council of Anaheim, who are 80 percent Klansmen are like, yeah, cops can just wear their Klan uniforms to do their job.

Why not? It's just a club. Yeah. Yeah. And the Klan uniform basically is the same as the police uniform. So like, we're good. I don't understand the problem. Look, you know, this, this is probably something for episode five. But just like when I think to myself, like how anyone can get their brain around, even at that time, after the law done changed, after you fought a war, I just think at the core, it's because you like black people are just, you're still just functional. You're still just a in the brain of the white supremacist at the time. And I think sometimes the standard that's still here now where it's like, you are, you're an appliance. Black people are an appliance. Right. So when you can make an appliance out of our entire bodies, that's slavery, right. So,

and then you move that into mass incarceration to where you like, okay, and segregation and stuff like that. Like who wants to live in the house with their cows, right? Because you're just, and your washing machine doesn't have rights. It's just a washing machine, you know? So when you, if you think of an entire person because of their color as just a function for yourself, and it's not even just black people, it's like even people that like, if you're argument against, you know, supporting immigrant rights, especially immigrants of Latin American, you know, people who's like, well, who's going to pick our cotton or pick our strawberries? Who's going to be, you see these people as an appliance, you know what I'm saying? So when I got my 10,000 new

followers that say and support black voices, I wanted to be like, yo, thank you for coming. Here's 10 other things I am. I'm like, dad, you know, I got daughters, I'm lactose intolerant, you know what I'm saying? I think butter's disgusting. It's because you still see me as an appliance, you know what I'm saying? So if I'm just the cow, if I'm just a function, so even if it's a function of you learning from me, I'm still just, it's still just utility. If it's a function of y'all just supposed to pick our fields, you don't get rights. Y'all live over there and I don't understand why the damn refrigerator wants me to treat it like an equal. You know what I'm saying? Like you're just the refrigerator, like shut up. You know what, man?

Here, we need to figure out something to make the damn cows and pigs understand that they just cows and pigs. You know what I'm saying? So to me, it's like, if that's where your brain goes, damn, I went on a rant. But like, if that's where your brain goes, that's why it's so like mind boggling to these clans people. It's just like, I don't understand why these black people keep asking to sit at our tables. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, yeah, I mean, like, but like, that is sort of, that's, this is a really important thing to understand because Jim, we usually talk about Jim Crow, like white people usually talk about Jim Crow. I'm thinking back to like how I was taught about it. Like, it was this terrible thing that happened that was done

to black people, which it is, was a crime. But also what Jim Crow was is the foundation of law enforcement. Law enforcement in this country was still very much in flux and being formalized when Jim Crow started. It was really fucking new. Like the first police department had only started in 1838. Jim Crow starts in 1877. So US law enforcement in much if not most of this country is founded at this, like more or less at the same time as Jim Crow, which means that US law enforcement is founded in large part to keep the appliances in the eyes of the white elite separated from the white elite. Like that. Yeah. So yes. Back to the script. Important point. Yes. So the second clan was also real popular in Oregon, maybe more popular in Oregon than it was anywhere else in

the country. And patient zero for the Oregon clan was the southern town of Medford, which is not Medford, which is where you go once Shakespeare in the park. Yeah. No, that's Ashland, which is right next to Medford, right? And Ashland is a very different city. It is. But like, yeah, there's great tea houses. I love I actually like like Medford and Ashland are both like right next to each other in both in one of the prettiest parts of Oregon in this one of the prettiest places in the entire planet. Like I've been all over the damn world. I haven't found anywhere. I found some places that are like up there with with that part of Oregon, but I haven't found anything that I find pretty like fucking gorgeous place. Yeah. But also Medford has a real long

history of straight up fascism right into the present day. The mayor of the town of Phoenix, I think it was Phoenix, which is like right outside of Medford, basically a suburb of Medford, the mayor two or three days ago drove his car into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters. The mayor. The mayor. Good Lord. Yeah. So the issues go continue. Yeah. I wish I could see my face right now. The mayor. The mayor. Okay. Wow. So Medford is where Luther Powell, the Klegel sent by the national clan to establish the clan in Oregon, set up the state's first KKK outpost. He gained initial recruits by pointing to the massive bootlegging problem in nearby Jackson County and making the case that the clan could help with law and order. And I'm going to

quote now from a paper by Ben Bruce of Chapman University. Powell sold the clan to potential followers, not as a brotherhood of bigotry, but as a beacon of patriotism, cultural conservatism, and social order. According to Powell, the clan was there to uphold traditional American society against the threat of the roaring twenties. Specifically, Powell emphasized the clan's support for the enforcement of prohibition. In a matter of weeks, Powell had sworn over 100 men into the invisible empire. Most of who were policemen. Clan expert and author David Chalmers describes the clan under Powell as being in the law and order business. Luther Powell's recruiting success in Medford cannot be quantified by lists of names on paper on membership dues

alone. With his newfound support from local police officers, Powell accused Medford County of insufficient prohibition enforcement policies. He then spearheaded the successful recall of the county sheriff. Within a month, the mayor of Medford was dressed in white robes as well. So Medford again, this is and this happens. We're talking about Anaheim and Medford and like we're talking about a couple other cities, but this is happening all over the U.S. We're like whole city governments and the whole police departments are like, yeah, what if we're just clansmen too? This is fine. Yeah. So yeah, Powell's success perfectly embodies what made the second clan much more successful than the first. The first KKK was literally a an insurgent terrorist

army. The new KKK positioned itself as a force for law and order standing alongside the state in order to help keep white people safe. It was a it was again, not a vigilante like terrorist organization, but instead the same kind of designated vigilante force. If you remember that from our first couple of episodes, yeah, designated vigilante force like the police. And that's why it was often like a lot of local clan cells were majority police officers. So Powell moved on quickly from Medford to Portland, as most people who visit Medford tend to do. Within months, the city had thousands of clansmen and it may have garnered more KKK members more quickly than any other city. Now again, this rapid success in Portland came

in part due from the fact that the clan was seen as respectable. Shortly after opening, the Portland clan chapter partnered openly with the Portland Police Bureau. Since the Portland Police Bureau only had 150 men at this point, it considered itself understaffed and the mayor of Portland decided to appoint a vigilante police auxiliary and he allowed the KKK to pick the members. These men received police powers and firearms, but their names were kept hidden, effectively turning themselves into a secret police force. I should note here that during the recent protests in Portland, a commander of the Portland Police Force sent out a directive ordering police officers to cover up their names and replace them with numbers that could only

be traced back to names internally. Just a fun little thing, Portland Police Bureau, same force that partnered openly with the clan. Cool stuff. Oh my god. Portland where there's where on where on Burnside and MLK, you can go to a park of just food trucks and you can get yeah, it's craft like vegan waffles. That's in Portland. Yeah. And the cops are clan members. Exactly. I've heard a lot of cops in clan go hand in hand, chance in the Portland streets recently. Yes. I obviously a lot of people believe that, but I don't know if those people know that literally the Portland Police Bureau had an official arrangement with the KKK in the 1920s. Yeah, I just think it rhymes. Yeah. No, seriously.

Oh, no. Yeah. No, you're literally correct in a very direct way. Not just in a these guys are secretly clan members, but no, no, no, like the PPB had an arrangement. Yeah. Cool stuff. So Astoria, Oregon also had a major clan problem. And this is because it was the most diverse city in the state, which meant at this point didn't mean that it was the most the least lowest number of white people and meant that it had like basically it had the most the highest number of Catholic people who came from weird parts of Europe. Like right there. And again, the second clan in this period, some historians will argue was actually more racist and violent against Catholics and Jewish people, or at least as racist and violent as it was to black people.

Like this is it is like they've broadened their their spate of hatred. Yeah. And obviously it found a healthy. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and

on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth,

his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest,

I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Base of resentful Protestant white people in Astoria. Clan leaders brought in anti-Catholic speakers to rile up the public and they rallied themselves around enforcing vice laws that the police had not handled to their satisfaction. Primarily they went after prohibition violators

and prostitutes. On June 17, 1922, the clan sent both local newspapers and the sheriff a letter demanding that he take action against the whistle in the heart of a local bootlegging operation. Two weeks before the letter, two people had died in a drunken accident after leaving the whistle in. The clan letter to the sheriff threatened to take care of the problem if he failed to do so. On June 19, the KKK sent 50 men into the whistle in. They were met by sheriff's deputies who'd been called ironically by the bootleggers inside. The sheriff arrested both men and the whole incident became something of a local scandal. The clan used it to petition for a recall election which they again succeeded in getting. Their candidate won the recall election giving them control of

Astoria's sheriff's department and soon after they swept local government elections too. Variations of the story repeated themselves all over Oregon and the clan was eventually successful in electing their own candidate for governor, Walter M. Pierce. His regime passed the Oregon compulsory school bill which required all children from 8 to 15 to attend public school. That sounds innocuous enough on the surface, but the purpose of the bill was to destroy all Catholic schools because those were not public. And again, the KKK really hates Catholics. And definitely the Oregon clan is more anti-Catholic than it is anti-Black, but only because there's not a whole lot of Black people in Oregon, right?

It's like 95% White people at this point. So that's why the KKK is so focused on, although they also focus a lot on Japanese and Chinese immigrants and this governor that they elect pushes a bill to basically make it impossible to move to Oregon or work in Oregon as an Asian person. And both the anti-compulsory bill and the anti-Asians bills, those get struck down. And this governor, who is backed by the clan, winds up kind of turning on the clan, not because he's a good guy, but because he thinks that after he gets elected, he doesn't really feel loyal to the clan anymore. So anyway, it's a complicated story. Yeah. So with the clan, I'm just like, man, the more I learn about them,

I'm just like, man, y'all are all over the place. Sometimes I can't even draw, I can't even connect the dots of their hatred. How are we talking about Jews right now? When did we get to that? Or I could imagine, I would love to see a skit where somebody's trying to complain where some new kids in the back of the room at the clan meeting and can't keep up with like, wait, we're talking about Catholics now? What they do? Wait, what's the problem? You know what I'm saying? Like just like, I can't even, I, this is a complete tangent, but I'm just like, yeah, I just, I can't keep up, man. I'm like, y'all are over, just hang, man, at least be consistent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um. Headbreak. Oh yeah, we should, that was smooth.

Thank you. Yeah. Here's, have a, have a handful of products, buckaroos. After 30 years, it's time to return to the halls of West Beverly High and hang out at the Peach Fit on the podcast 90210MG. Join Jenny Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch of the hit series, Beverly Hills 90210 from the very beginning. We get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories that actually happen. So they know what happened on camera, obviously, but we can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera. Get all the juicy details of every episode that you've been wondering about for decades as 90210 super fan and radio host, Sissony sits in with Jenny and Tori to reminisce, reflect and relive each moment from Brandon and

Kelly's first kiss to shouting, Donna Martin graduates. You have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the entire 10 years that we filmed that show and you remember absolutely nothing of the 10 years that we filmed that show. Listen to 90210MG on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tanya Sam, host of the Money Moves podcast powered by Greenwood. This daily podcast will help give you the keys to the kingdom of financial stability, wealth and abundance. With celebrity guests like Rick Ross, Amanda Seals, Angela Yee, Roland Martin, JB Smooth and Terrell Owens, tune in to learn how to turn liabilities into assets and make your money move. Subscribe to the Money Moves podcast powered by Greenwood on the iHeart

radio app or wherever you get your podcasts and make sure you leave a review. I'm Colleen Witt, join me, the host of Eating While Broke podcast, while I eat a meal created by self-made entrepreneurs, influencers and celebrities over a meal they once ate when they were broke. Today I have the lovely AJ Crimson, the official princess of Compton, Asia, Kid Ink and Asya. This is the professor, we're here on Eating While Broke and today I'm going to break down my meal that got me through a time when I was broke. Listen to Eating While Broke on the iHeart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back, we have returned and we're talking still about the Oregon Clan. So the Oregon KKK's success in local and state politics gave them the legitimacy

they needed to feel comfortable carrying out acts of violence. On April 11th, 1922, a 22-year-old Latino man named Sam Johnson was grabbed in the middle of the night by a group of robed clansmen. They dragged him into the forest and they hung him from a tree, quote, not long enough to kill him, but sufficiently long to give him a glance into eternity, according to a local paper. While he lay on the ground recovering, the mob told him that he had to leave town or they would come back and kill him. This semi-lynching was again reported on in the local paper, but no arrests were made. The county sheriff, who was almost certainly one of the men who abducted Sam, called him a bad actor who just hadn't done anything serious enough to

get arrested. So he doesn't have a criminal record, but we decided he was a criminal, so it's fine to hang him from a tree. He got it on him, no, I can see it. The sheriff accused him of bootlegging without any evidence and washed his hands of the case. On March 18th, a Catholic piano salesman named J.F. Hale was assaulted in the same way, taken at gunpoint into the woods and then hung almost to death. This time, the demand was made that Hale drop a lawsuit against another Medford man for an unpaid debt and that he also leave town. The sheriff said the kidnapping, too, was of no local interest, which it's also worth noting that there was a recent, well, last year, a trans black woman who was murdered in the city of Portland

and the death was written off. Well, who died in the city of Portland? The police ruled it a suicide. There's a lot that's shady about it. The family has asked for it to be investigated and the police said that investigating it further was not of local interest. So that's cool. That's a cool thing that, again, got to point out how this never stopped and has never really even slowed down in a lot of ways. Good Lord. Yeah, I'm like, this playbook has never failed these fools. So fucked up. Yes. Yeah. On April 2nd, a black railroad worker who'd just been released from jail over prohibition violation was kidnapped, hung again and ordered to flee the town. As he ran away,

he heard men shouting back at him, can you run inward? While some in the crowd fired at his feet with their revolvers. By this point, local media had begun covering the clan's abductions and outraged articles. One in the Medford Mail Tribune revealed that the state clan leadership had actually sent notes to individual members within the county with instructions on how to carry out these necktie attacks. The clan denied these letters since they had not been sent on official clan letterhead. Again, they had a lot of products. They had a lot of products and services actually in this period. This don't count because it wasn't all letterhead. They sold insurance. Yeah. This is incredible. So Klegel H. E. Griffith, who was the guy who had taken over

the Medford clan, demanded. Can you name his, can you say his title again? Just Klegel. Just Klegel. Klegel. I heard something else. Okay, now go on. I know. I know. I know. Yeah. I'm just, yeah, exercises that women do to keep things. Oh, yes. Yes, it does sound like that. Yeah. Yeah. Now, so H. E. Griffith decided. Thank you for knowing that though, Prop. Thank you. Hey, girl, dad. There you go. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. So the Medford Mail Tribune like writes a letter about how the clan is very obviously behind all this. And the guy in charge of the Medford clan demands that the newspaper give him a chance to respond. And the Medford Mail Tribune lets him release a statement through the paper denying any role in the semi-lynchings.

Gotta tell both sides of the story. Ben Bruce writes, quote, Klegel H. E. Griffith gave an official statement denying any prior knowledge of the aforementioned events as well as the clan's alleged involvement. Griffith accused the local papers of severely misrepresenting the facts. In the same article, Griffith endorsed the clan as a regular fraternal, patriotic and benevolent order that stands for pure Americanism, protection of pure womanhood, free speech and press, free public schools, restricted immigration, white supremacy and law and order and consistently assists all law officers in the performance of their duties. That's cool. Surprisingly, the people of Medford did not believe these denials, or at least enough

of them didn't, that public outrage did force a trial, which occurred nearly a year later. 19 clansmen were charged with participating in the necktie parties as they came to be known. One of the men was the former police chief of Medford. The main witness was J. F. Hale, the piano salesman, but the state decided he was not a reputable citizen, largely because his son had been born out of wedlock. It is the 20s. It's fucking cool. All charges against the clansmen were dropped. You remember last year at that anti-abortion protest where that little boy was eye-to-eye with that Native American man and the whole picture went...

Oh, boy, howdy. Yeah, that fucking thing. So what you're just explaining explains in a lot of ways why everybody looked at that moment and saw two different things, because what the terror that a lot of us are talking about, like why this was so frustrating, was because the ambiguity of this kid's face of just being like he is just a kid, he is kind of smirking, right? And you could say, well, he didn't do anything. He didn't interrupt the guy. He's just standing there looking at him. But if they're at his own protest, it's fine. But when you hear stories like this, what... And I can't say because I'm not in that kid's head and I wasn't there. I'm just saying when I look at it, I see the history you're

explaining. The idea that these boys can function without any impugn... What's the word I'm looking for? Impunity? What's the word I'm looking for? I don't know. But the point is they not finna get in trouble. That's what I'm trying to say, right? So you can always lean back and be like, what? I didn't do anything. And I just remembered how many times in my own life, recognizing that smirk, knowing that no matter what this kid did, no matter how terrible it is, no matter how much evidence I have, he will not be punished. You know what I'm saying? So whether I know what this kid was thinking or not, it's like, this is what America saw. There was two Americas. One side of America saw this kid has... This kid's gonna... There's no matter what, he's not gonna get in

trouble. Nope. And this is why when we finally do reform law enforcement, you know, disband the police and replace it with something better, one of the federal agencies we need is a federal branch that is just groups of people who go door to door and just give people one solid punch in the face when they really deserve it. We shouldn't be sending them to prison. They didn't do a prison thing. But like, you were a dick and now you're gonna get hit in the face. You just need a good slapping. Yeah, yeah, somebody who's German Mackey in the damn face. Yeah, yeah. I think it's backflip, which is like a face in need of a fist is the direct translation. Yeah. Yeah, sometimes people just need to get like, not hard, not enough to do damage. Like, we'll train these people to

deliver like, legally appropriate slaps and punches. But like, you were a dick and somebody needs to fucking smack you. And like, it should be a group of men and women in suits who come to your door and say like, you have been selected to get smacked in the face because you were a dick and you need to know it. That's my suggestion. Not a bad one. Yeah. So Oregon's clan was relatively nonviolent. And I again, this tells you how bad the second clan was, we're calling like lynchings that don't kill anybody relatively nonviolent compared to the clan in Oklahoma, for example, had a horrifically violent clan that also eventually wound up in charge of most a lot of the different state or like local cities and departments, police departments and stuff. And it was also comparatively

nonviolent when you sort of put it against the clan in Indiana, for example. There in Indiana, the KKK was successful in infiltrating a local civilian law enforcement agency, the Horse Thief Detective Association. Now, this odd group got its start in the 1840s, and its members were basically licensed vigilantes with the right to protect property via violence. And as you can guess by the name, they started to prosecute horse thieves, right? Yes. Law enforcement can't catch all these horse thieves, will deputize civilians, will give them the right to like arrest and fuck up people to stop horse thievery. But they also had kind of broader rights to enforce laws. Now, the birth of the automobile reduced the Horse Thief Detective Association to

a somewhat irrelevant group. But when the KKK came to Indiana in the early 1920s, they saw that like there was this organization that civilians who were Klansmen could join and it would give them the right to carry out violence with state backing. So they start flooding the HDTA with membership and they also start giving existing members in the HDTA free and subsidized membership in the KKK because they see that like this weird little organization gives them the right to enforce the law in Indiana without like having to get elected sheriff or anything or put, you know, even recruit police officers. So the Indiana Klan starts pouring money into the HDTA and offering their existing members low priced entry into the Klan. Quote, as sworn members of HDTA chapters,

Klansmen in the state essentially formed an armed officially sanctioned force that would allow them to enact their agenda under the guise of legitimate law enforcement. Now, in his work on the Klan in Indiana, historian Leonard J. Moore details membership records from 1925 that show that over 20% of the state's eligible population, white Protestant native-born males, belong to the KKK. In some counties that number exceeded 33%. In Marion County, which included the city of Indianapolis, over a quarter of eligible men belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, some 25,000 members in total, many of whom held dual membership in the HDTA chapter. Okay, wait, uh, they paid dues? Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, it was a for profit endeavor. Oh,

yeah. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. Which I forgot how lame that even makes it even more lame. Yeah, they're like, they're like, yeah, paid. Yeah, paid to be in here. Mm hmm. Well, yep, lame. It's pretty cool. Yeah. So I'm going to quote again from a historian Leonard J. Moore, quote. Okay. Uh, as horse thief detectives, the Indiana Klan came down on bootleggers, organized labor, immigrants and African American populations in one incident related in Elliott Jaspin's book, Buried in the Bitter Waters. They helped expel black citizens from the mining town of Blandford in Western Indiana. On January 18th, 1923, a young girl from Blandford reported that she had been abducted and assaulted by an African American man. Within 48 hours,

several hundred white townsfolk met and demanded that all black residents leave, beginning with unmarried men who were to be outside town limits by that evening. Within a week, all black residents of Blandford, approximately 50 people had fled. That exodus was overseen by Harry Newland, the sheriff of Vermillion County and himself a Klansman, along with members of the Dana HDTA and the Helt Township HDTA, two of the four chapters in the area. The Helt Township chapter alone included over a dozen members of the clan, including its captain. African American citizens both in Blandford and the surrounding county felt forced to comply and departed in mass. As Jaspin notes, the 1920 census recorded well over 200 black residents in Vermillion County.

In 1930, that number was less than 70. That's an act of ethnic cleansing. That's what we call ethnic cleansing. Yeah. That's what that's called. Yeah. Yeah. So the KKK was active all throughout. And again, think about this. Think about this civilian group with law enforcement powers enforcing white supremacy. When you think about, for example, armed members of far right militias showing up to support the police at protests. Yeah. Yeah. So the KKK was active all throughout the United States during this period, eventually reaching a peak of like four million members. There exists no accurate nationwide count for how many people were forced out of their homes by the clan, how many were assaulted by them or killed by them. Just as

there exists no comprehensive accounting for how often this behavior occurred either with the consent or the enthusiastic help of the police. In either case, it may be a mistake to even attempt to quantify the KKK's part in this specifically because the violence of both the first and second clan occurred within a much broader context of mass violence against black people by white people with the express consent of law enforcement. This violence started up during reconstruction and continued all the way into 1950. We tend to call it lynching today, although it took a variety of forms. And we will never know how many black men were killed during this period. But the Equal Justice Initiative estimates 6,500 at the minimum. These murders occurred at a steady pace with intermittent

eruptions that were spurred on by a mix of economic recessions, war and white resentment of black success. And all that brings me to the story of the red summer of 1919. Have you heard of this prop? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to guess I think because of the show Watchmen, actually, a lot more white people know about Tulsa now, which we'll be talking about in part two. I don't think very many. Well, I didn't know about fucking red summer until like a week or two ago. So yeah. It's part four. Part four. Jesus. Part four for the week. Part two for the week. Okay. Well, okay. Yeah. The next episode, we will talk about Tulsa. We'll talk about Tulsa. This is a yeah. Yeah. Red summer, 1919. Again, this is the type of stuff that like, like I said before,

if it's not in your experience, yeah, you, you'd have to go out of your way to know this. Right. Exactly. But if it is, it's like, this is why I will always hammer like, you know, having a good, strong sense of self, a sense of community, and then having relationships across communities. You know what I'm saying? So that now you don't sound like an asshole when you don't know what the fuck you're talking about because you don't know people from other places. You know what I'm saying? So this is so, so yeah. So anyway, all that to say. And this shit won't be in your textbooks. No. And it's not going to be. It's not going to be. No. You might, you're lucky if you get a paragraph on the red summer in a, in a textbook and not all

text. Mine sure didn't have it. It is in some textbooks because some of the articles I read on it, like we're specifically analyzing how it's covered in textbooks. But again, generally about a paragraph. Now, the red summer is the name given by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson for the months in 1919, when a wave of racist riots, race riots is off in the term, I think racist riots is more accurate, broke out against black communities in Charleston, South Carolina, Longview, Texas, Bisbee, Arizona, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Knoxville, Omaha, and Elaine, Arkansas, at least 150 people were killed in the violence and a hundred or so more lynched. But it's probably more like a thousand dead. You'll hear again, we don't, we're not going to,

we're never going to get a good accounting. And I hope the listeners hear like, as he gets into this story again, just like we said, you know, to the militia folk that are like, how come black people don't arm? And when we say, you think we ain't thought of that, right? Now, as you read, as you listen to this story, when people say, well, how come you don't build your own businesses and support your own community and start your own capitalistic spaces? Let me say, you think we ain't thought of that? Yeah. Yeah. So obviously, you know, clan members were involved with and behind a great deal of violence of red summer, but not not necessarily most of it. Although in Pittsburgh, the KKK chapter posted up notices around a black neighborhood, which stated,

the war is over, Negroes, stay in your place. If you don't, we'll put you there, which is a little ironic because a lot of red summer involved white crowds going into black neighbors coming up, coming to black neighborhood. Yeah, exactly. Mine in our own business. Fuckin' a. Yeah. While plans men were regular drivers of violence during red summer, uniformed police officers played at least as large a role, maybe even a larger one. One of the first riots started in Chicago on July 27th, after a black child mistakenly swam into a chunk of beach that was whites only under Jim Crow. White people on the beach saw this child Eugene Williams and started pelting him with rocks. Every time he would attempt to come to shore, they would throw more rocks at

him. He eventually drowned. This brought a cloud, crowd of furious black citizens out. More rocks were thrown. A white officer showed up, observed the situation and decided to arrest a black guy. Yeah. This, for obvious reasons, helped push tensions in Chicago to a boiling point. The resulting riot led to 38 mostly black deaths, and the police responded with a mix of complete neglect, often allowing the white mobs to do violence and occasional acts of giving a shit, possibly due to the presence of black men on the Chicago PD. The most notable example of this was probably the Chicago police holding back a white mob from burning down a hospital filled with mostly black patients. The only CPD officer to die during the riot was a black man. Red summer actually

continued into the fall, and one of its bloodiest hotspots was Phillips County, Arkansas. On September 30th, a small group of black people gathered at a rural church to organize a sharecroppers union. Two police, white policemen showed up, and they had been sent there specifically to stop the union from organizing. So again, we do have some interchange with what we talked about in the last episode where the police exist to stop unions for wealthy people. Anyway, so they claimed they were looking for a bootlegger. And what happened next is unclear, but a gunfight broke out, and one officer was killed almost certainly in self-defense by the people in that meeting. The local sheriff sent out a call for armed random white dudes to, quote, hunt Mr. Inward, and he did not use the

Inward. Yeah, I mean, he used the Inward, but he didn't, you know, he used the real one, Mr. Inward in his lair. Hundreds of white dudes from all over the area and even from the adjoining state of Mississippi showed up in Phillips County with guns. They opened fire wildly at every black person they saw with the enthusiastic consent and help of the police. Frank Moore, a black farmer, survived the massacre. He later recalled, the white sent word that they was coming down here to kill every Inward they found. There were 300 or 400 or more white men with guns shooting and killing women and children. Now, of course, Klansmen were involved, and some of those Klansmen were likely police officers. But the violence in Phillips County was backed by state and local officials,

lawmen and business owners, not just a vigilante social club. The official death toll was 11 black men and five white men killed. The real number of murdered black people is believed to range from anywhere from 100 to 237. At one point, the white mobs were aided by federal troops as well. Local reporters helped the government cover up the massacre by claiming the violence had been white self-defense against a black uprising. One Arkansas Gazette article opened with the headline, Negro's plan to kill all whites. Ah, Lord, you can just make it up. And yo, like, going into, like, some of these specific communities, just to color some of the story, were becoming a fluid. Especially the ones in South Carolina. They were like, okay, listen,

you don't want to do business with us. Fine. So they was opening banks, selling their own homes, starting their own businesses, growing their own crops. We was like, okay, it's fine. Fine. We don't have to live together. It's fine. You know what I'm saying? And then all of the sudden, somebody just come knocking down. It's like, what are you? And, you know, specifically sparked by that community, sharecroppers, the community being like, we need to agitate together to have a better deal in a legal and constitutionally protected way. Oh, now you're shooting at us. Now you're shooting at us. You're like, okay, wait, okay. So we're not three-faced human anymore. The law applies to us. It seems like this system of sharecropping don't work. Maybe we should work

together and kind of figure out a better way to. I mean, I mean, we we we're citizens now. So we have this right. Yeah. We have this right. Oh, I guess we don't. Nope. Nope. You're shooting us. Okay. Yeah. This is just like the, oh, I was in fear of my life bullshit that cops use every second of every day. They were uprising. You'll hear that again in the next episode, too. Yeah. No, they were minding their own business. I was afraid of a woman sleeping in her own house. What? Yeah. Yeah. It's it's, you know, I'm not a big Chairman Mao fan. But when he said political power comes from the barrel of a gun, he was not incorrect. Like and that's what you see here, right? That's what that's what red summer is. Yeah. Yeah. And I recognize things are

getting a little bit muddled here in this podcast about the history of the police vis-a-vis the difference between the vigilante violence, the KKK violence, the police violence, the police violence that is KKK violence. And that's because very real history is always muddled. And yes, in this period, police were often perpetrators in lynchings and white mob violence against black people. They also more often failed to intervene in this sort of thing. And they did sometimes fight against it, often because there were black officers on the force. But there were in this period, it is important to note, some very brave white officers who were like, this isn't fucking OK. I'm not trying to erase those people. But nationwide, as a coal, police completely failed

to defend black citizens in any organized, meaningful way during the red summer of 1919. White people initiated more or less 100 percent of the violence during the summer and law enforcement consistently failed to protect them. In Washington, D.C., while white mobs marched through black neighborhoods, firing wildly, the police response was so lackluster that the mayor had to call in the military in order to protect the city's black citizens. The individual racism of white officers mixed with the simple reality that police had never been intended to protect poor neighborhoods or businesses in an organized fashion left black people with no option but to protect themselves. And to tell that story in brief, I'm going to quote from an article

in Teen Vogue by Ursula Wolf-Rocka, quote, in Knoxville, Tennessee, armed black men organized themselves to successfully repel hundreds of white rioters that who had already destroyed the county jail with a battering ram and dynamite. In Chicago, African-Americans formed self-defense units after days of white terror in their neighborhoods. Many of these defenders were veterans. Among the 370,000 black men inducted into the army during World War I, who hoped fighting for democracy abroad might finally secure their first-class citizenship at home. The mob violence in Chicago convinced Harry Haywood, a veteran of the all-black 370th infantry regiment, he'd made a mistake. As he explained, I had been fighting the wrong war.

The Germans weren't the enemy. The enemy was right here at home in Washington. Yeah. There it is. Yeah. The muddle is the, I love that you said muddled because that's the point. Yeah. That's the point we're trying to make when it comes to policing in America. It is muddled. I can't, I should be able to tell the difference. I should be able to go. That is the clan. These are the police. I should be. Yeah. And that's our point. I can't tell the difference. That's the point. Yep. Yep. May continue that quote about black self-defense during Red Summer. In Washington, D.C., 17-year-old Kerry Johnson opened fire on men breaking into her home while a thousand white rioters laid siege to her neighborhood. In Aniston, Alabama,

in December of 1918, a black veteran, Sergeant Edgar Caldwell, was ordered out of the white section of a streetcar. He refused, kicked out of the car and set upon by the white motorman and conductor Caldwell shot his pistol twice, killing one of his attackers. Though uncoordinated, when looked at together, these hundreds of moments in and leading up to 1919 read as an awesome display of collective black agency and self-preservation. So again, black armed self-defense often is overwhelmed by, again, the sheer number of white people, their additional resources, their backing of the state. But it also works out sometimes and it saves a lot of lives when it does. So I don't want to be saying, like, it's not a tactic that succeeds. It historically has.

Yes. In 2016, city councilwoman Angelia Williams took to the stage at an NAACP luncheon. She told the crowd that modern racists had, quote, taken off their white hats and white sheeted robes and put on police uniforms. Some of them have put on shirts and ties as policymakers and some of them have put on robes as judges. This did not go over well and she was roundly pilloried by law enforcement officials. A lot of them were like Democrats and a wide variety of elected local Democrats. But if councilwoman Williams had wanted to bring up recent cases of folks who worked forces and also burnt crosses, she would not have had to Google Hard. In 2012, a Little Rock Arkansas officer who attended at least one KKK meeting shot and

killed a 15-year-old black child. In 2015, video leaked of Aniston, Alabama police officer Joshua Dogrell delivering a speech for the League of the South. Now, the League of the South is a neo-Confederate organization and for all intents and purposes, just a dressed up rebranding of the KKK that tries to look a little bit more palatable. These motherfuckers marched with the Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017. Dogrell had joined the league in 1995. He'd been a police officer since 2006. He talked openly about the League of the South to his fellow officers. He advised them to join and he held meetings at a steakhouse very close to the police station. He posted pro-Confederate content on his Facebook, including pictures of early KKK leaders. Dogrell's Klan affiliations

were doubly concerning giving Aniston's history. In May of 1961, the freedom writers had shown up in town to protest to get segregation in Jim Crow. They were assaulted by a mass of Klansmen, who slashed their tires, broke their bus windows, and tried to light the bus on fire with them in it. The Aniston Police Department was headquartered a block away from this, a little closer than the steakhouse where officer Dogrell would decades later hold meetings. Aniston officers failed to arrive at the scene of the crime until hours later. No one was arrested. They may have been late, because a number of them probably had to change out of their robes and into their uniforms. Because they were there. Yeah. Because they were trying to burn the bus down. Yes.

Now, I cannot point you to any specific act of racial violence that officer Dogrell committed while in uniform, as it is damnably hard to get good information on police misbehavior from the very best police departments. And Aniston is not one of those. But significant evidence suggests that officer Dogrell in his membership in what is a Confederate organization is not a one off from an article in The Guardian, quote, although it is unusual to be for a police officer to be so open about his involvement in an extremist organization for decades, anti government white supremacist groups have been attempting to recruit police officers into their ranks. It is something a lot of folks are overlooking, says Vita B Johnson, an assistant professor of law

at Georgetown University. Police forces are becoming more interested in talking about implicit bias, the unconscious racial biases we carry with us as Americans. But people aren't really addressing the explicit biases that are present on police forces. According to Johnson's research, there have been at least 100 different scandals in more than 40 different states involving police officers who have sent racist emails and text messages or made racist comments on social media since the 1990s. A recent investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that hundreds of active duty and retired law enforcement officers from around the country were members of Confederate anti government and anti Islam groups on Facebook. But there is no official record

of officers who are tied to white supremacists or other extremist groups because in the US, there is no federal policy for screening or monitoring the country's 800,000 plus law enforcement officers for extremist views. The 18,000 or so police departments across the country are largely left to police themselves. Now, of course, yeah, that's a good call. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have a suggestion. If they police themselves, why don't we police ourselves? I mean, apparently the system works. Yeah. According to you. Do you want to say it? Like, I just, you can't, people think we, you think we're making this stuff up when we say, yo, cops are racist. I'm trying to tell you, it's racism over there. Like, oh, yeah. Like, I just, what, what possible gain do any of us have

have? Accusing falsely an entire organization to be racist. Like, what, like, what, what do you think my end game would be? There's no, I gain nothing from making this stuff up. Yeah. It's, and again, like people always focus on like, you know, oh, well, you know, that's not that many police officers, you know, when you read them, the numbers like that compared to how many there are. And it's like, well, no, no, those are the ones that individual activists have. Yes. For after hours, probably for each individual officer, tracked down and verified, because again, the government's not looking at us. But also, let's say there's a block party that happens next to your house, right? Yes. 100 people. One of those people shoots you in the arm with a handgun for

no reason. And everyone else in the crowd hangs out around them and does nothing. And you complain about it. And they're like, well, it was only one of us that shot you. Does does that matter? Not at all. They're kind of all pieces of shit, right? You kind of all just let me later. Yeah. Kind of a shit party. Yeah. I don't like you or your home. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. In 2017, a classified FBI counterterrorism policy guide was obtained by the intercept. I don't know how they got this, but there are actually quite a few police FBI agents who are real pissed about this problem and seem to be vigorously leaking information to the press. In a section focused on how the bureau lists individuals on a terrorism watch list, the authors note that quote, and again,

the authors being the fucking FBI, domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers. The FBI goes on to note that they had to alter some of their policies when dealing with local law enforcement to account for the fact that so many of them are members of extremist groups. It's too many, y'all. Yeah. We've had to change how we interact with cops as the FBI because we're scared of you, motherfuckers. One of the justifiable criticisms of the series we're doing is that we're not really going to lean into the FBI much because I've kind of determined to focus on like cops, like normal police, like the folks in the

street, even though there is a very long and well with discussing history of racism within the FBI. We talk about that quite a bit in our two-parter on The Bastards Who Killed the Black Panthers. Yeah, we did. We'll get into it a bit next week, but we're going to focus really on like, you know, beat cops, essentially, what leads them, police departments, just because I can't, we can't do this for like 10 straight weeks. We both have other stuff we got to deal with. Yeah. Yeah. The term ghost skins is often used by white supremacists to refer to folks who basically hide their power level to gain respected jobs in society and advanced white supremacy. Law enforcement is a particularly prized field for these ghost skins because it gives them virtually unchecked

opportunities to do violence to non-white people. One example of this would be a gang of officers within the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department who, in 1991, embarked on a campaign of vandalism and the beating and torturing of black Californians. Have you heard of the Linwood Vikings prop? Yes, I have. Yeah. The Linwood Vikings were a violent neo-Nazi gang that committed arson and murder and torture on black Californians. And the gang was entirely made up of Los Angeles County Sheriff's officers. It was a neo-Nazi gang that was all sheriff's officers. But let that sink in. Let that sink in and now think of the young man who was recently found hung to death in Palmdale, California, and who was declared a suicide by Los Angeles Sheriff's

Department. And then the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department was in a gunfight with his half brother where they killed him a couple of days later. Yes. And that it is reported that the Palmdale chunk of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has what they call the news called cliques within it. Yeah. That you might call them gangs, maybe like the Linwood Vikings, because this keeps happening. Weird. Because this is not history. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. People need to know more about the Linwood Vikings. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, it's, it's cool. We're going to talk about John Burge in Chicago in the next episode. But for right now, the intercept goes on to give a couple other examples. And I'm going to quote from their article again.

In Cleveland, officials found that a number of police officers had scrolled racist or Nazi graffiti throughout their department's locker rooms. In Texas, two police officers were fired when it was discovered that they were Klansmen. One of them said he had tried to boost the organization's membership by giving an application to a fellow officer. He thought shared his white Christian heterosexual values. Now, in 2015, to his very minor credit, FBI Director James Comey acknowledged in a speech that all of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty. Yeah. This is about as close as you're going to get to having an actual member of law enforcement admit that. In fact, the cops in

the Klan regularly do go hand in hand. Yeah. Yeah. So good stuff. Take a deep breath, everybody. Good stuff. Yeah. Breathe out. Woo. Woo. Yeah. Welcome to the rest of us. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to talk about lynching on Thursday. And we're going to talk about how the police defeated lynching by something that's arguably as bad. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I feel wonderful right now. I am. I didn't. We didn't. Should have maybe not scheduled this recording session for Juneteenth. I do feel. I do feel bad about that. I don't know. That's the day. My emotions are all over the place right now. Nah, it's all good. You know what I'm saying? Like, you know, in a lot of ways, like, like we were talking off camera or off camera, off mic, like, yeah, I don't,

I don't know, because it's never actually, we've never had to celebrate this holiday with anybody else. So there's no actual traditions for Juneteenth, except for to think about what all the shit we didn't went through. Yeah. The fact that we survived it. You know what I'm saying? That's usually what you and then we go down a, you know, Crenshaw and eat some barbecue. But I'm like, like, this is actually great. It's like, look, and maybe we'll end it on a high note. It's like, and yet we still exist. Yeah. And yet we still are here, you know. Yeah. And like have been forcing the situation to suck less consistently for a couple of centuries of fighting like trench, like the emotional equivalent of trench warfare. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess a good tradition

for white folks like myself and like Sophie is to is to do this is to spend Juneteenth going like, Jesus Christ. Oh, fuck. We did what? Yeah. Oh, good God. Yeah. Prop, you got any pluggables to plug before we roll out of here? Yeah, prophipop.com. I got a bunch of new merch. California has now required face masks. So I got some face masks there. Oh, yeah. You hear that? Flat Earth or neighbors required by state? Yeah. Yeah. You got Flat Earth or neighbors. Dude. Can we just pause for that? I mean, statistically, we all do now. Yeah. There's like, I had the building make like red signs that say to wear face masks in the elevator. And Karen and Ken, I don't know their fucking names. I hate them. Of course. Of course. Just walk

around like, and then I'm like, hey, how about a face mask? And they kind of just look at me like, I've said something in a language they don't understand and run away. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, go get some coffee. Go get some face masks. Got some new water flasks too. Yeah. Prop has the best merch, you guys. Dude, thank you. And it's all earth friendly. It's all like zero waste. Like that's how I work. You know what I'm saying? Recyclable. The materials are recyclable or is recycled material. You know what I'm saying? I'm out here. I'm out here like being the good part of Portland or earth sensitive. Hell yeah. Well, that's the episode. Go go do some stuff. Yeah. Behind the Police is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the

iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, guys? I'm Rashad Bilal. And I am Troy Millings, and we are the hosts of the Earn Your Leisure Podcast, where we break down business models and examine the latest trends in finance. We hold court and have exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names in business, sporting entertainment, from DJ Khaled to Mark Cuban, Rick Ross, and Shaquille O'Neal. I mean, our alumni list is expansive. Listen in as our guests reveal their business models, hardships, and triumphs in their respective fields. The knowledge is in depth and the questions are always delivered from your standpoint. We want to know what you want to know. We talk to the legends of business,

sports, and entertainment about how they got their start, and most importantly, how they make their money. Earn Your Leisure is a college business class mixed with pop culture. Want to learn about the real estate game, unclear as how the stock market works? We got you. Interested in starting a trucking company or a vending machine business? Not really sure about how taxes or credit work? We got it all covered. The Earn Your Leisure Podcast is available now. Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Rafi is the voice of some of the happiest songs of our generation.

So, who is the man behind Baby Beluga? Every human being wants to feel respected. When we start with young children, all good things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new dad, and host of Finding Rafi, a new podcast from iHeartRadio and Fatherly. Listen every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Cavalry Audio comes the new true crime podcast, The Shadowgirls. I grew up near the banks of the Green River and in the shadow of the killer that bears its name. Prosecutors described him as a serial killer survived. But this podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer. It's about the victims. We stayed in the woods. He always liked to go in the woods. Listen to The Shadowgirls

on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become

the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after

her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.