Here's Where It Gets Interesting - 147. Momentum: The Ripples Made by Ordinary People, Part 2
Episode Date: June 24, 2022On today’s episode of our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, Sharon continues the story of young Thurgood Marshall as he travels to rural Tennessee on behalf of the NAACP and finds... himself on the wrong side of trumped up charges and an angry mob. We also reconnect with George McLaurin and hear about Ada Fisher, two lifelong students who wanted equal opportunities in education and stood firm until they had a victorious Supreme Court ruling. Sharon also catches listeners up with J. Egar Hoover as he begins to transform the Federal Bureau of Investigation, though not without stirring up controversy over his denial of organized crime. What made Hoover so hesitant to pursue mid-century crime bosses? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome to our second episode in the special series, Momentum. And each
episode does build on the episode before it. So if you haven't listened to episode one, go back and
do that now. And today we're going to continue talking about a little boy who was born Thorogood
and in second grade changed his name to Thurgood Marshall, became an attorney
who worked for the NAACP.
I'm Sharon McBann, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast.
So I want to tell you about an incident that happened in the late 1940s following World War II. So prior to Harry Truman's presidency, the U.S. armed forces were segregated.
And so many of the black service members who returned home, having fought the Nazis,
came back to the United States to find that they were still living in the
segregated Jim Crow South. So in February of 1946, a Black World War II veteran named James
Stevenson went to a department store with his mother to pick up a radio that had been repaired.
And there are a couple of differing accounts about what happened with
this radio. One account says that the white repair person charged James Stevenson's mother
money, but the radio still didn't work. And the other account says that the white repair person
sold the radio before they had a chance to come pick it up. Either way, James Stevenson got into an
altercation with William Fleming, who was the repair person. The argument between them went
badly. William Fleming ended up being put through a window. Neither of them were seriously injured.
Both Fleming and Stevenson received fines, but Fleming was well connected. And in short order, he had convinced people to issue a warrant for Stevenson's arrest.
And Stevenson was arrested and police told him that he was being charged with an intent to murder.
This was happening outside of Nashville, Columbia, Tennessee.
This was happening outside of Nashville, Columbia, Tennessee.
And also nearby was a small area called Mink Slide.
And that is where many Black-owned businesses were located.
Many of the people who lived there began to arm themselves.
They were veterans and they felt like the political climate was such that their physical safety was at risk. Lynching was common, and many of them feared that it could happen to them.
There were many other incidents that were happening around the country,
and those incidents contributed to racial unrest in Mink Slide, Tennessee.
Eventually, this came to a head and a white mob formed.
The people of Mink Slide, again, largely Black veterans at this point, said, don't shoot. We're
not going to get into that kind of a conflict here until somebody in the crowd did fire a weapon,
which caused the state police to be deployed. In fact, it's even said that the Tennessee Safety Commissioner, Lynn Bomar,
rode a military-grade vehicle through Mink Slide, telling residents to smile.
More than 100 people were arrested.
Property was seized with abandon.
People's businesses were set on fire by the white mob.
And many people who were arrested faced completely made-up charges.
So two days later, two of the men who had been arrested and were under questioning in jail were reported to have somehow gotten a stash of weapons into the jail and turned them on police.
into the jail and turned them on police. And it just so happened that there was a large number of police officers standing immediately outside of their cell. The large number of police officers
turned and completely unloaded their pistols into the room where the two men were being questioned.
And when one of them would run out of ammunition, others would pass them a loaded weapon. And they continued firing long,
long after both of these men had been killed. So 25 of these black men from Minkslide, Tennessee, were put on trial, and attorney Thurgood Marshall, along with a couple
of associates, came to defend them. There were a lot of rumors at the time that white locals
had intentions of lynching Thurgood Marshall. There was one resident who said in an interview
that is preserved at a university, he said the
word got out that they were going to hang him. And at that time, I went into the courthouse,
I had about five pounds of explosives on me. And on the way out, Thurgood Marshall patted me on
the stomach and said, Are you pregnant? And I said, Yes, but I'm ready to have it at any time.
So after Thurgood Marshall and his associates defended the men, they're driving out of town
and they find themselves pursued by multiple police cars of white officers. Thurgood Marshall
gets out of the car. They put him in the back of a police car. They
tell him that they are arresting him for driving drunk. And this was a completely made up charge.
Thurgood Marshall was not drinking at all. And they told his associates, we're going to take
him down to the jail. You can come deal with it later. Well, his associates were suspicious.
They didn't believe that the police were actually going to take him to the jail. And so they quietly followed the cars of officers as they turned off of the road to the jail one, they're taking him into the woods. They are going to lynch
Thurgood Marshall. And Marshall says that he saw a menacing group of white men waiting for him at
the end of that road. But as soon as they saw that they were being followed by Thurgood Marshall's friends. They decided not to continue and they ended up taking
Thurgood Marshall back to see a judge on charges that he had been driving drunk. And the judge that
saw him was this elderly man who said, breathe into my face, breathe into my face. And Thurgood
Marshall did. And then this elderly judge turns to the police officers and says,
this man has not had a drink in 24 hours.
What are you talking about?
And he set Thurgood Marshall free.
That experience had a very significant impression on Thurgood Marshall.
One of his biographers, Juan Williams, said of him,
he had a newly found fear of white mobs and violent policemen.
And that riot that happened in Mink Slide is part of what prompted Harry Truman to establish something called the President's Committee on Civil Rights.
And that committee was formed to document instances of racial violence and to make recommendations to him about what to
do about racial discrimination in the United States. And in 1948, after reading the committee's
conclusions, one of the things Truman did was sign Executive Order 9981. And that executive order
ended segregation in the armed forces.
I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast
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In episode one, I told you about George McLaurin, who was represented by Thurgood Marshall in his bid to attend Oklahoma University and to receive a PhD. I also want to tell you about another student who came before George McLaurin. Her
name was Ada Fisher. And she was also from Oklahoma. And in fact, she wanted to attend
law school in Oklahoma. She applied and was rejected, just like George McLaurin was, they told Ada Fisher the exact same thing. Oklahoma state law
prohibits the integration of schools. So Ada Fisher was also involved in a lawsuit against
the University of Oklahoma. And guess who she was represented by? Thurgood Marshall. And she argued to the University of
Oklahoma, listen, you have to provide me with the same opportunities to secure a legal education as
you do for other citizens of Oklahoma. This was an area that Thurgood Marshall had a lot of
experience with. He had done very similar things in Maryland in the 1930s. And so the University of Oklahoma
was then ordered to provide Ada Fisher with the same opportunities. And instead of permitting her
to attend Oklahoma University, they created a new law school just for her. A new law school just for her, Langston University School of Law.
And it was found in a couple of rooms in the state capitol's senate building. She was going to be
the only person who attended. And she was like, excuse me, no, this is not equal. Me being the
only student at this university that's found in a couple of rooms
in a government building, this is not equal. And so again, Ada Fisher's lawyers went back to the
Supreme Court, but the person who had been representing the University of Oklahoma was
like, I don't want to go back there again. I don't want to go back to the Supreme Court. I don't want
to face those justices again. And so the university
conceded. And three years after Ada Fisher first applied for admission, she was finally admitted
to the University of Oklahoma College of Law. But again, she found herself facing the same type of
discrimination that George McLaurin had faced. She was forced to sit in the back of the room,
behind a row of empty seats, and behind a wooden railing that was designated as the
colored section. All of the Black students who were admitted to the University of Oklahoma
were provided separate eating facilities, restrooms, separate sections of the library,
roped off stadium seats at the football games.
And those conditions persisted for years.
So let's go back to George McLaurin.
In April of 1950, the United States Supreme Court heard his case.
In June of 1950, the Supreme Court unanimously decided
that the different treatment that was given to George McLaurin and people like Ada Fisher was itself a violation of the 14th Amendment's, such restrictions impair and inhibit George McLaurin's ability to study,
to engage in discussions, and exchange views with other students, and in general, to learn
his profession. The opinion went on to say, those who will come under his guidance and influence
must be directly affected by the education he receives. Their
own education and development will necessarily suffer to the extent that McLaurin's training is
unequal to that of his classmates. State-imposed restrictions which produce such inequalities
cannot be sustained. They're saying that McLaurin suffering such inequalities doesn't just affect
him, it affects all of the other students that he would teach. Because again, remember, McLaurin was
an educator. And this was a signal from the United States Supreme Court that they were not interested in tolerating separate treatment of students in higher education based on their race.
And it was the first chink in the armor, the doctrine of separate but equal. And eventually,
George left Oklahoma to live with his son, who also had a PhD and was a college professor in Los Angeles after Penina died and George McLaurin
died in September of 1968. I told you in episode one that Thurgood Marshall would later become
frenemies with J. Edgar Hoover. He would later become a secret FBI informant. And I want to give you a little bit more history about J. Edgar
Hoover. After J. Edgar Hoover was appointed head of the Bureau of Investigation, he went on to make
the Bureau into one of the most powerful government agencies of its time. And he did this by assembling a group of white college-educated men under very strict rules.
He recruited them to work for the Bureau, and they were not allowed to have alcohol or women.
And they trained to be and believe that they were the symbolic guardians of the country's
laws and morality. They ran a very swift and strong campaign against people like John Dilliger
and Ma Barker and Machine Gun Kelly. And during the Depression era, the public championed J. Edgar Hoover's government agents.
Pop culture sort of played up this idea that they were these smart, sleuthing agents who used the latest technology to catch criminals.
And there were a lot of comic books that came out that were called things like Federal Men in Crime.
And it depicted them solving organized crime rings, which was very interesting because J. Edgar Hoover denied that there were organized crime rings like the that one of the reasons J. Edgar Hoover continued to deny
the existence of the mafia, organized crime families in the United States, is because he
was being blackmailed by them. And what would J. Edgar Hoover be blackmailed about? What could
somebody possibly have on him that he wouldn't want
anyone else to know? J. Edgar Hoover was very interested in removing subversive people and
radical people. He also hated communists. For example, he truly hated Albert Einstein and did
not want him to gain admission or citizenship to the United States.
He had a massive file on Albert Einstein. But ultimately, Albert Einstein was so famous and so
well known for his scientific work that other government officials were like, listen, you can't
just not let him in the country. You can't just say no Albert Einstein, you can't come here.
But that was what J. Edgar Hoover wanted. He wanted
to deny Albert Einstein admission to the United States. Why? Because he was a radical. He was a
communist, and he looked upon people of that nature with extreme suspicion. So some of the
things that J. Edgar Hoover did as head of the newly formed FBI, was previously known as the Bureau of Investigation, and then in
1935, it became the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He formed this very large database of fingerprints.
The FBI really stepped up their recruiting game, and he created and expanded huge FBI laboratories in which the FBI examined and analyzed data. At the start of World War II,
FDR had been very concerned about Nazi agents in the United States and gave what he referred to as
qualified permission to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to wiretap people who were suspected of subversive activities. He did specify that Hoover would need
to get permission from the Attorney General, who at the time was Robert Jackson. But Robert Jackson
loved J. Edgar Hoover and basically gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted.
One of the things that J. Edgar Hoover did was he formed a program called COINTELPRO, which was an abbreviation of Counter Intelligence
Program. And his goal was to disrupt the Communist Party in the United States.
And under J. Edgar Hoover's plan, no one was exempt. He had celebrities watch, people like Charlie Chaplin and John Lennon.
I have to tell you a quick little funny story about Colonel Sanders.
You know, Kentucky Fried Chicken Man?
He was a huge fan of J. Edgar Hoover.
In 1960, Colonel Sanders wrote J. Edgar Hoover a letter praising him for his work,
praising him for eradicating un-American activity. And then a few years later, he wrote to J. Edgar Hoover again and said, can I have an
autographed picture of you? And in 1970, Colonel Sanders invited J. Edgar Hoover to his 80th birthday party. And of course, what was J. Edgar's response to this?
He kept an FBI file on Colonel Sanders.
And in the file, it said,
Colonel Harlan F. Sanders has not been the subject of an FBI investigation.
But then the sentence was followed by two paragraphs
of redacted text. And he began to amass huge amounts of power and huge amounts of information
and dirt on people, politicians, prominent leaders. He spent much of his time in the 1950s and 60s monitoring civil rights groups,
monitoring political activists, people like Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X,
Muhammad Ali, all the while continuing to turn a blind eye and deny the existence of organized crime, even though other law enforcement felt like this is extremely well documented.
And there were even committees like the Special Committee on Organized Crime.
J. Edgar Hoover continued to deny it was a problem, which is very interesting because almost everything
seemed to be a problem for him. People's mere existence seemed to be a problem for J. Edgar
Hoover. Why would he continue to deny the existence of organized crime? Could it be that he was being
blackmailed? And what could he have been blackmailed for? I'll see you in the next episode.
Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you.
And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe
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This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson.
It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder,
and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon.
I'll see you next time.