Here's Where It Gets Interesting - 162. Momentum: The Ripples Made by Ordinary People, Part 17

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

On the last episode in our series, Momentum, Sharon ties up a few loose ends. The 1950s was a decade full of change, but the Civil Rights Movement didn’t end when the calendar flipped to 1960. Most of the people we’ve followed throughout this series continued their crusade for–or against–civil freedoms well into the next several decades. We hear about Barbara Johns and the next steps in integrated schooling, about Earl Warren and the gains his Supreme Court made in the 60s. We also learn about the reason behind his rift with J. Edgar Hoover, and how the FBI evolved over the years. Finally, Sharon returns to a Civil Rights power player, and we visit her in a new city, and with a new approach to activism. 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

Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome to the final episode in our series, Momentum, Civil Rights in the 1950s. The 1950s was a decade of triumphs and setbacks, of incremental change and the slow evolution of public opinion. But the movement didn't end when the calendar flipped to 1960. Most of the people we followed throughout this series continued their crusade for civil rights well into the next several decades. Let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon. Welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. When we last checked in on high schooler Barbara Johns, she had organized and led a student strike in her school in Prince Edward County, Virginia. The strike led to a lawsuit filed by the NAACP and the county's refusal to integrate schools. Instead of integrating, they closed their public

schools for five years. Barbara, who had received death threats from the KKK for her involvement in the strike, was sent by her parents to live with her aunt and uncle in Montgomery, Alabama to finish high school. Her uncle was Vernon Johns, a well-spoken and popular minister who served the church body at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. It was young Martin Luther King who took over as pastor there in 1954, and Vernon was one of his early mentors. King described Vernon Johns as a brilliant preacher with a creative mind and a fearless man who never allowed an injustice to come to his attention without speaking out against it. Clearly, gumption was a Johns family trait.

Barbara intended to continue her education after high school with the plan to move to Atlanta and enroll in Spelman College, which was one of the nation's premier educational institutions for Black women. But first, she returned home to Prince Edward County for the summer, and she met Roland Powell, the son of a Philadelphia minister who was 13 years older than her. They fell in love, and despite her parents' concerns over the age gap, Barbara married Roland on New Year's Day in 1955. She was 19 years old. Roland eventually followed his father into the ministry and pastored a Baptist church in Williamstown, New Jersey.

Barbara and Roland lived nearby in Philadelphia, where they raised five children. where they raised five children. In 1979, after continuing her education that had been put on hold for a few decades, Barbara earned her bachelor's degree in library science from Drexel University. She worked for two decades in the Philadelphia schools as a librarian, serving the students of the city and ensuring their access to reading material. According to her family, Barbara rarely spoke about her teenage civil rights work in Prince Edward County. Nevertheless, the work that she and so many other children and students did to push for school integration has had a lasting impact on education across the country. Federal laws alone weren't enough to change the way individual school systems operated. It was up to people like Barbara Johns and Linda Brown and Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine

and the thousands of young marchers to take action and refuse to accept non-compliance. They paved the way for a new group of ordinary citizens to become integration activists. The 1960s began with the bravery of Ruby Bridges and Leona Tate and Tessie Prevost, who were young students. When faced with terrifyingly angry crowds, they propelled themselves forward to enroll in school and forced the country to accept that integration was imminent. By 1963, 62% of Americans, that is 73% of Northerners and 31% of Southerners, believed that Black and white students should attend the same schools. And for the first time, a handful of Black students in the states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana attended public school with white students. attended public school with white students. The court system and the federal government would continue to pass laws and make rulings aimed at integrating schools across the country.

After Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court began an era of decisions under what we call the Warren Court. Earl Warren, if you remember, became Chief Justice just weeks before the court began hearing the second oral arguments for Brown versus the Board of Education. He was able to unite the court into giving the unanimous ruling that he felt was so important in that case. Several other key rulings during Warren's Supreme Court tenure earned him a reputation as a liberal reformist judge. That was not a term that he agreed with, by the way. During the 1960s, the Supreme Court turned much of their attention to criminal procedure cases. Historically, criminal procedures

had been mostly decided by individual states. In Mapp v. Ohio in 1961, Warren's court ruled 5-3 that evidence seized by law enforcement without a search warrant could not be presented in state court criminal prosecutions. And in 1963, the court gave a unanimous ruling in Gideon v. Wainwright, guaranteeing all criminal defendants the right to free counsel if they need it. Prior to that ruling, only in federal trials were criminal defendants guaranteed that right. If you were being charged in a state court, you were left to the mercy of state rules. In 1966's famous Miranda v. Arizona case, I have an entire podcast on that, the court held five to four that police must inform suspects of specific constitutional rights, including the

right to an attorney, the right to remain silent, and the right against self-incrimination or the evidence is not admissible in court. Warren also made his mark in what came to be known as the apportionment principle of one person, one vote. In 1964's Reynolds v. Sims case, the court ruled that state legislative districts should be equal in population if possible, and this ruling led to a lot of redistricting in most states. The court also continued to pass many rulings on civil rights cases. The court upheld the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And in a unanimous 1967 decision, Warren's court found in Loving v. Virginia that laws banning interracial marriages were unconstitutional and violated the 14th Amendment. violated the 14th Amendment. Warren issued the ruling stating, under our Constitution, the freedom to marry or not marry a person of another race resides with the individual

and cannot be infringed by the state. When Warren passed away in 1974, it was Thurgood Marshall, then himself an associate Supreme Court justice, who said of him, when history is written, he'll go down as one of the greatest chief justices the country has ever been blessed with. I think he's irreplaceable. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together, we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's my girl in the studio!

in the studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests and we'll be digging

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on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus

tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Chief Justice Earl Warren retired a few years prior to his passing in 1969, having secured his legacy on the court, a legacy that is still resounding today among constitutional scholars. But that did not leave Earl Warren without some controversy. Much of it surrounded a 1964 investigation that became known as the Warren Commission. It was the Warren Commission that ultimately severed the friendly relationship between Chief Justice Warren and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Remember that when the 1,300 pages of FBI documents were released under the Freedom of Information Act, they showed that Chief Justice Warren and the FBI had a cooperative relationship that went all the way back to his time as a

district attorney in California and continued while he was a governor of California. Hoover and Warren had a friendly relationship with Warren, enjoying the perks of the FBI doing him favors, like providing security or sharing confidential information. After the assassination of JFK in 1963, new President Lyndon Johnson appointed Warren to chair the assassination investigation, with seven people assisting him. This became known as the Warren Commission. assisting him. This became known as the Warren Commission. The Warren Commission report, which was released in September of 1964, concluded that President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald alone and found no evidence of a conspiracy. It cited the FBI as taking an unduly restrictive view of its role in preventative intelligence work prior to the assassination. It also said that a more carefully coordinated treatment of the Oswald case by the FBI might well have resulted in bringing Oswald's activities to the attention of the Secret Service.

And let me tell you who did not enjoy those comments. J. Edgar Hoover. He called the report's critique of the FBI unfair. And less than three months later, Chief Justice Warren was taken off of the FBI's special correspondence list, which was a list of prominent men who were perceived to be friends of the FBI and were looped into some of their intel. The friendship between Hoover and Warren began to crumble about a week after the Warren Commission's first meeting. In a memo that was dated December 14, 1963, 14th, 1963, Hoover noted that Warren had been very much annoyed at the information to come out in the FBI report on the assassination. This mistrust and annoyance between the friends grew into contempt. Hoover was not happy about the formation of the Warren Commission. He believed that it interfered with the work that should be delegated to the FBI.

He considered Earl Warren's part in it a betrayal. The FBI began attempting to undermine the commission's investigation by omitting or withholding information from the commission. by omitting or withholding information from the commission. And there are some historians who believe that Earl Warren knew that the FBI was undermining the investigation, but did little to stop it, choosing not to make waves. In 1979, the findings of the Warren Commission that Oswald worked alone was criticized by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. They said that it failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy

to assassinate the president. One of the last entries in the FBI's file on Chief Justice Warren is a letter from Mr. Hoover to Warren after he announced his resignation from the Supreme Court in 1968. Hoover, letting the animosity of the Warren Commission be bygones, wrote, you've contributed untiringly and unselfishly to furthering the best interests of the nation, and your record of achievements will long stand as a monument to you. untiringly and unselfishly to furthering the best interests of the nation, and your record of achievements will long stand as a monument to you. Hoover himself was well past retirement age by 1968. Several presidents had considered dismissing him, with Nixon admitting in 1971 that he feared getting rid of Hoover because of Hoover's potential retaliation if he did. It was a little bit like Hoover knows too much. If we get rid of him, what will he do

with that information? Presidents Truman and Kennedy before Nixon had also expressed interest in replacing Hoover, but ultimately decided that the political cost of firing him was too much to risk. He was still working as the director of the FBI when he died of a heart attack in 1972 at age 77. His career spanned almost 50 years. In the 1960s, after Hoover's FBI sent Dr. King and Coretta Scott King the anonymous letter and tapes, we talked about those in Part 11, the relationship between the FBI and civil rights leaders got worse, long before it got better. got worse long before it got better. In 1965, a white civil rights worker by the name of Viola Liuzzo was murdered by four members of the KKK. The men had chased Viola, who was shuttling Selma volunteers and marchers home, and fired shots into her car after they noticed that her passenger was a black man. The car crashed into a ditch when Viola was mortally wounded by two bullets to her head. Leroy Moten, who was in

the passenger seat, was not struck, but covered in Viola's blood, he lay motionless when Klan members came to inspect the car. It saved his life. The four Klansmen were arrested quickly, and it turned out that one of the men, Gary Rowe, was an FBI informant. The government and the Bureau scurried to do damage control. President Johnson made sure to focus on the positive work the FBI agents were doing in solving the murder of Viola Liuzzo in an effort to detract from the fact that Roe was an FBI informant and thus protected by the FBI. Hoover himself then began a smear campaign against Viola, strategically speaking to the press and saying the puncture marks in her arm indicate recent use of a hypodermic needle. She was sitting very close to that Negro in the car. It had the appearance of a necking party. The FBI continued to spread

rumors that Viola Liuzzo was a member of the Communist Party and had abandoned her children to have relationships with African Americans involved in the civil rights movement. A few weeks later, the autopsy testing showed no traces of drugs in Viola's system, but the information was not brought to the public. The FBI's role in the smear campaign wasn't uncovered until 1978, when Biola's children used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the case documents from the FBI. The family filed a lawsuit against the FBI, but the lawsuit ended up being dismissed, and Gary Rowe was never indicted for his part in Viola Liuzzo's murder. Instead, he was put into the Witness Protection Program

and lived under several aliases until his death in 1998. J. Edgar Hoover also personally ended the federal inquiry into the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four young girls. By May of 1965, the FBI had identified suspects in the bombing and briefed Hoover on their report, but Hoover shut down the investigation. He wrote in a memo that the chances of conviction were remote and told his agents not to share their results with federal or state prosecutors. In 1968, the FBI formally closed their investigation of the bombing without filing charges against any of their named suspects, and Hoover ordered the files to be sealed. In 2013, one of Dr. King's aides, Andrew Young, said that perhaps

one of the sources of tension between the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the FBI was that the government agency had a lack of Black agents. A lack of representation within the Bureau meant that it was white agents who made the decisions and executed the work, with no room for Black experience. Even today, less than 5% of FBI agents are Black Americans. Though there had been a few Black men who worked as special agents during the first half of the 20th century, it wasn't until 1962 that the FBI Academy admitted their first Black recruits, Aubrey Lewis and James Barrow. In a September 1962 interview with Ebony Magazine, J. Edgar Hoover described the expanded recruiting, saying, we want college-trained men of principle and integrity and race is no factor.

Negroes need more heroes to encourage their youngsters. But the change in the racial integration of the FBI was just as slow as it was in the rest of the country, especially while the FBI continued to undermine the work of civil rights activists. There was one prominent activist we've talked about who wasn't on the FBI's radar, at least not to the extent of her contemporaries. The FBI maintains that Rosa Parks never had any significant surveillance or files during her long career as an activist. In fact, they say that only a single file was created by the agency's Detroit office, but it has since been destroyed. Why Detroit? In the summer of 1957, after losing their jobs because of Rosa's involvement with the Montgomery Improvement

Association and the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa, along with her husband and her mother, moved to Detroit, Michigan. Her younger brother, Sylvester, and his wife, Daisy, lived in Detroit and urged them to come, claiming that the city had a more progressive reputation than states in the South. But Parks did not find this to be true. In 1964, she told an interviewer, I don't feel a great deal of difference here. Housing segregation is just as bad. Detroit schools were still mostly segregated and services in black neighborhoods were worse than they were in white neighborhoods. But Rosa didn't stop at complaints.

She got involved. Rosa and her family had settled into a Detroit neighborhood called Virginia Park, which had been chipped away at by highway construction for years. By 1962, the policies that paved the way for this construction and quote-unquote urban renewal, had destroyed over 10,000 structures in Detroit and displaced over 43,000 people, 70% of whom were African Americans. The sweltering heat of July in 1967, several violent confrontations happened between many African American residents of Detroit and the city's police department. The riot, which lasted five days, resulted in the deaths of 43 people, including 33 Black Americans. More than 7,000 people were arrested and more than 1,000 buildings were burned in the uprising.

and more than 1,000 buildings were burned in the uprising. The riot is considered one of the catalysts of the militant Black Power movement. The catalyst for the riot was an after-hours raid at a nightclub. Rosa Parks lived just a mile from the center of the riots, and she considered housing discrimination a major factor that provoked the disorder. She knew Detroit was at its boiling point with so many Black residents uprooted from their neighborhoods. In the aftermath, Rosa began collaborating with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Republic of New Africa. The organization's concentrated on raising awareness of police abuse during the riot. She helped form the Virginia Park District

Council with the goal to begin rebuilding the area, bringing in new Black businesses and revitalizing housing. And Rosa also took part in the Black Power movement, attending the Philadelphia Black Power Conference and the Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana. We can't know for certain what was in Rosa's slim and now destroyed FBI file. A likely guess would be her involvement with the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. her involvement with the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. You may now know that organization by another name, the Black Panther Party. Rosa had befriended Malcolm X during the 1960s and considered him a personal hero. During this time, Rosa was introduced to another man, Congressional hopeful John Conyers. Conyers had been active in the civil rights movement himself, and Rosa began helping him campaign for a seat in Congress.

When he was elected in 1964, he hired Rosa as his receptionist for his congressional office in Detroit, and it was a position that she held until she retired in 1988. position that she held until she retired in 1988. Rosa did much of the daily constituent work for Conyers and focused on socioeconomic issues like welfare education, job discrimination, affordable housing. She visited local schools and hospitals and senior citizens facilities and churches on his behalf and kept Conyers informed of community concerns. In a telephone interview with CNN in 2005, Representative Conyers, who served for a total of 26 terms from 1964 to 2017, recalled of Rosa Parks, you treated her with deference because she was so quiet, so serene, just a very special person. There was only one Rosa Parks.

Thank you, friends. Thank you for listening and for joining me on this journey through the lives of so many civil rights changemakers. It has been an honor to share these stories with you. I'll see you soon. 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 to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review?

Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. 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.