It Could Happen Here - Remembering 1968: The Holy Week Uprising and the Riots a Nation Forgot

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Mia talks with James and Gare about the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and their part in the Great Uprising that stretched from 1963-1972.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. call zone media it's riot time when it could happen here this is this is the podcast that you're listening to it's about this is this one's kind of about bad things this is this is about a bunch of riots in the past i'm your host be along with these james and garrison hello hi man so one of the kind of i don't know the trends of 2024 is everyone looking at this year and going this is 1968 again there's campus occupations that are anti-war protests there is a democratic national convention that is expected to be extremely hot and so one of one of the things that we are doing in the run-up to the Democratic Convention is we are going to go do some episodes about 1968. And we are eventually going to do episodes about the Columbia campus occupations and about the DNC. say unfortunately this is actually not unfortunately this this mostly rules i don't know some of it's bad but in order to talk about this and this is this is the part of this whole thing that has been

completely forgotten right you know there's there's become this kind of like i don't know state cult isn't quite the right word but there's become this sort of like professional institutional history of 1968 where like all of these universities like proudly have banners from like 1968 protests um everyone has been like you know incredibly willing to embrace the legacy of the anti-war movements and the campus occupations and you know like in insofar as they tell people not to embrace things it's this stuff about like you know you hear this constant screaming about don't repeat the 68 convention but there's one part of this story that has is just gone has been excised from the historical record it is extremely clear that no one wants you to remember it whatsoever and that is the

holy week uprising do you do you two know have you two heard of the holy week uprising not before you started talking about it in our work meetings i'm familiar with it uh i've covered it in u.s history courses before not as that name i think people might be more familiar with if you describe the events yeah so the other name for is the mlk riots which is a week i mean okay so it's okay yeah yeah, okay, so, and I should be clear about this. Okay, so there are really two things going on here. There is one, the, actually, it's usually thought of as about a week, but it's actually longer than that. There's like a couple months of rioting in various places over the assassination of MLK.

The other thing that's going on here is a wave of urban rebellion. And when I say urban here, I'm not just talking about, you know, like Watts or Detroit or Chicago, like these like giant urban cities, which is how, you know, insofar as anyone ever talks about writing in this period is about these large urban centers. No, they are writing in Milwaukee. urban centers no they are rioting in milwaukee the most intense fighting that we're going to talk about in this episode happens in york pennsylvania in this period for about uh it's about 1963 to roughly by by 1971 72 it's kind of over there are a staggering number of urban uprisings. I'm going to read a quote from a book called The Great Uprising, which is about this sort of period. Between 1963 and 1972, America experienced over 750 urban revolts.

Upwards of 525 cities were affected, including nearly every one with a Black population over 50,000. The two largest wave of uprisings came during the summer of 1967 and during Holy Week in 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In these two years alone, 125 people were killed, nearly 7,000 were injured, approximately 45,000 arrests were made, and property damage topped 127 million dollars or approximately 900 million in 2017 dollars if you can even stretch this out to like um can i just give you to spin i put on this in my history class and then and then we can we can continue yeah okay so the way i perceive this is the process of decolonization begins uh like in the colonies and it comes back to the metropole. And we see this physical decolonization in places like Algeria. And then the impact of witnessing

that returns to the metropole along with the theories that, if you want to say they decolonize the mind, I think that that's an acceptable way. And this sort of struggle and even the aesthetic right like the aesthetic of the battle of algiers is present in some of these uprisings like and you can stretch it out to like you know i like to talk about wounded knee but the second occupation of wounded knee in 1973 i think you could also see that as part of this decolonization struggle and at least that's my uh yeah that's my angle on it yeah and i think there's definitely a lot of like i don't know there's a lot of inspiration taken there i think the way it's usually seen in the u.s is as this is the sort of i don't know it's kind of as it's seen as this kind of this is where everything went

off the rails after the civil rights movement which isn't what happens yeah and the other way i think it's a scene and this is i don't know a lens that i is kind of useful to talk about this but kind of isn't is about the sort of quote-unquote long 1968 so you know we're gonna be covering a lot of 1968 stuff on this show you know so like there's obviously there's 1968 in france i think i think if you want to look at the origin point of the sort of like wave of uprisings that are specifically 1968 and that aren't sort of like the decolonization arc, I think it probably starts in China with the January storm in 1967. But on the other hand, sort of – and this you know one of the things about this period is everything is happening so much at the same time right like we have a lot of experience about this but like you know as the january storm so the january storm uh is this part of the culture

revolution where mao kind of loses control and mao kind of incites a bunch of these like a bunch of workers in shanghai to like take the city. But then they actually take the city, and they run the party out, they run the PLA out, and for a brief period of time, Shanghai has just been taken by its working class and is not being run by the party, and there's this whole, like, you know, massive

series of struggles, the kind of struggles. But the thing about the sort of the way 68 is understood is, you know, some people even include that. But these riots, specifically the Holy Week riots, are almost never talked about as part of this process, which I think they obviously are. And I think part of the reason we're talking about them now is that you can't understand the Columbia campus occupations. You can't understand the kind of politics that's going to come after this. You can't understand the DNC. You can't understand the kind of politics that's going to come after this you can't understand the dnc you can't understand like the rise of black radicalism like none of this is

comprehensible at all unless you understand these riots because this was the uprising that sort of kicked everything off it's also this is a very hard thing to write about because like this i've had the time of my life trying to put this together because this thing should be like 35 hours and i don't have 35 hours i have 30 minutes so uh that that being said let's get into why these are happening um so obviously there is the civil rights movement happening you know 1965 you get you get the voting rights act we've had some civil rights acts, but comma, if you are like, you are a part of the black working class in 1960s America, a society is still unbelievably racist. Like they're like, you know, on a, on a very basic level, there's a bunch of people walking around calling you the N words. You are restricted to the shittiest jobs available. Assuming you can find work at all.

shittiest jobs available, assuming you can find work at all. One of the biggest ones, and this is something that was a very big focus of the kind of later civil rights movement that kind of has been erased from the historical memory, was the struggle over housing. I'm going to read another thing from The Great Uprising. SNCC field worker John Baptiste, who took over for Robinson and Hanson, described many of the homes in the Second War. This is in Cambridge, which is one of the places where there's really intense rioting both uh we'll talk about this in a little bit but both in 63 and in 67 describe many of the homes in the second ward as nothing more than converted horse barns corn cribs and company shacks which lacked hot running water flush toilets and electricity separate and independent

investigations by federal officials confirmed batista's claims we were shown block after block of tottering single family frame structures often lined along dirt roads and generally with little or no setback which is like they're they're like directly on the street right like you open your door and you're on the street. Crowded almost against each other, and on small lots sometimes of no more than 50 or 60 foot depth, reported one U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development official. These dwellings were obviously obsolete and in disrepair, with tumbling porches and steps. Many were without inside toilets, and in several instances, the outside privy served more than one family. Hot water is rarely available, and several are without inside water.

Overcrowding is a common pattern. So, you know, this is the kind of, like, this is one of the centers of these struggles, that these people are living in, like, 1930s barns. And this, you know, there is a sort of staggering amount of anger about this um and and the other the other aspect of this is that you know okay so these people are living in like places that are not fit for human habitation also they're on average 56 percent more of their income goes to rent than white than uh than white people pay to rent, which means that – and this is also – one of the things that's happening in this period is that there's a bunch of money for white people that the government is giving them, are giving people loans and subsidies and tax credits to go buy houses. have is a situation where like if you are black basically all of your money is being absorbed into rent there is no possibility of you like saving or you know like saving to buy a house like other than the sort of like ramshackle shit that you're in like the conventional civil rights movement right you're sort of like non-violent marches this hasn't done shit to deal with any

of these problems you're also dealing with really, really intense labor discrimination. You know, and I mean, these are things like, like there's this kind of like example in Baltimore where, you know, you'll have union locals that are literally all white locals, right? And they will cut these deals with management where they'll be like, well, management will hands like hiring and firing power over to the unions. And the unions go, oh, great, okay. And this is a negotiated thing between the two.

The unions are like, okay, only union members can work at the shop, which in theory is good. But in practice, what this means is because these are all white unions, right? They've now created a system by which you can just not hire black people ever. Yeah, the Brianna Wu method. Oh, God. Yeah. can by which you can just not hire black people ever yeah the uh the brianna woo method oh god yeah you know it's a reference to a terrible tweet that hopefully people haven't seen oh god yeah and you know the the other things that are sort of happening here right is so in theory desegregation is supposed to be happening in practice that shit is not happening people are making people are doing these like you know like white

progressives are giving these speeches about how like ah segregation is like ending where we're like integrating quickly and it's not happening and all of this kind of you know all of this sort of fuel and also and obviously this sort of immediate spark of a lot of a lot of these uprisings, particularly in 67, is that as as happens today, you know, you all statistically have lived. I don't know why I say statistically. All of you have lived through this. All of you probably have been to at least one protest. That is, this is that the cops just murder people. and all of this sets off a set of kindling and is going to lead to a simply staggering wave of uprisings but first do you know what i won't lead to a simply staggering set of

uprisings if you if you buy them it's the production and consumption of created needs as described by herbert mar. That's right, James. Yes. For more on that, here's these ads. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs,

the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all.

It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,

better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge, and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every

week to understand what's happening in the tech industry, and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So we are back. All right, so let's start actually talking about some of these riots okay so i've mentioned before that these riots are happening in a lot of places that are not like that are not typically considered and we're actually not going to talk sort of stunningly for thinking about this we're not going to talk about the watts riots which are probably the biggest and most famous of the riots in this period we're not going to talk about detroit either even though that was another really big one,

because you can go out and you can find a bunch of people kind of talking about these. We are going to start in Omaha. If Quirrell good things begin. Yeah, but again, this is something that's very important, is that this is not just a sort of uprising of the urban ghettos, which is how it's very explicit. This is literally the just a sort of uprising of the urban ghettos, which is, which is how it's like very explicit. This is literally the language that is used at this time to,

to describe what's happening here. But like, no, this is happening in a bunch, like again, Cincinnati and Omaha is interesting because it has one of the, one, a very,

very common, the, one of the other big sort of rallying points in this era is price gouging. So, you know, if you're, if you're in one of these, like, like 90, One of the other big sort of rallying points in this era is price gouging. So, you know, if you're in one of these like 99% black communities, like the one white person who is there is the shop owner. And the thing the shop owner is doing is the shop owner is gouging you for food because you don't have any other options to buy food from. So they're going to gouge you and they're going to give you like the worst products you can ever you've ever seen in your life and so by 1966 people are just fed up with this um there there start there start to be sort of protests like specifically at these white stores

uh there's a bunch of people you know throwing rocks at the cops yeah and so you know so i mean okay the other thing that's very important to understand about these places is that these riots don't just start out of nowhere right but these are mostly places where there have been existing civil rights movements and they kind of just ran into a stone wall you know one of the big things in this period too and this is something that like like you know this is what ml uh mlk and the poor people's campaign was sort of working on at the at the same time was you know these these these demands for job programs and so people are you know marching around they're doing like pickets.

Omaha, like has Malcolm X come speak at one point. He's talking about like, you know, like you get these protests, people like marching outside of Safeway saying like, we want jobs. And these protests start getting attacked by the police. And this is something that, you know, this is something that has been happening to these nonviolent sit-ins. I'm going to read a passage from the book then the burnings began from there

omaha police wallace's quote-unquote goon squad and spectators began to beat the protesters out of the auditorium using batons and metal folding chairs reeling from the attacks african-american youth retaliated in the streets so like like, they'll be in meetings with the mayor or whatever, and these fucking mobs will start just beating people with chairs. The goon squad, you say? Yeah, God.

Reminds me of the, we've been running ads to Freeland and Peltier all week, but the guardians of the Aglala nation literally call themselves the goons i'm guessing they're incredible not not the people participating in this particular no yeah no many many such cases in this era yeah and this gets to another aspect of of these of these rights is that a lot of them aren't started by writers they're started by a bunch of what like

a white mob showing up and attacking people and so you know in in omaha and this is something that we're going to see a lot uh that is something that kind of doesn't happen as much now is like they just the cops just fucking kill people in the streets when protests are happening um in omaha they like they just they murder a kid with a riot gun and this you know this sets off like ask sort of you know, the patterns that we're sort of used to seeing of like these sort of escalating riots. And this is a very kind of familiar riot, right? Like I think we've all had the like, okay, so the police attacked a bunch of people, so it caused a riot kind of thing. Yeah, so now a riot starts.

Yeah. And this is a relatively nonviolent riot, which is to say that people are mostly throwing stones and Molotovs. That is absolutely not true of a huge amount of the rest of these riots, and particularly as we sort of get closer to Holy Week. Something that is very important about the 1968 riots that is not true about any riots that we've ever lived through is that not only are people extremely well armed they are the state's monopoly on violence in 1968 is nowhere near as powerful as it is now people will just fucking shoot and one of the constant things you read about when you're reading about these riots is that is you know every police account has police like like screaming about snipers and like i didn't believe this right because i was reading this i was like okay whatever other police right they talk about snipers all the time

you see this in radical accounts too where people will talk about like well yeah like the national guard and watts will be talking about how they're taking sniper fires they'll start shooting machine guns and like the ruse of build i got buildings right but no it turned like this was real people actually were like doing this and you know i i i And I was really sort of on the fence about this. Was this actually happening? And then the next thing I read was an interview with a guy who'd been a black nationalist and starts talking about how they were using all of their dynamite stores and how they didn't have fuses for the dynamite.

So they had to plant the dynamite and then retreat across the street to shoot at the dynamite so the dynamite would go off it sounds like a fun exercise yeah it was it was nuts it was like like the the kinds of stuff these people were doing um is is sort of just really it's it's it's really staggering this like you say the state just didn't have that same monopoly on on violence like there was it didn't have the overwhelm just didn't have that same monopoly on violence. Cops didn't have the overwhelming force that they do now. They didn't possess tanks. And it was a lot harder to trace gun purchases in the 1960s because not everyone used credit cards. So it made it a whole lot easier for folks to have and keep guns.

Yeah, well, the other thing is, this is something that played into some of the the naacp like chapters in the south that were the sort of like black working class chapters is that like so if you were if you were an nra chapter you could just buy at a really cheap bulk rate a like surplus m1 garons from the u.s army and ammo and they would just sell it to you yeah you can still buy them at a pretty cheap rate through the cm yeah yeah but you could buy like like really large quantities of them as long as you were sort of like you know there there was this kind of like popular like popular like gun marksman culture that we don't like we have an like our gun culture is kind of insane and this was like a very different thing from yeah definitely

and you had like like rob williams was the um the uh are you familiar with rob williams yeah yeah he wrote a book called negroes with guns he was the uh he was the leader of the nra chapter right in monroe but then yeah also a member of the uh naacp which like the nra has has pivoted a long way from what it was yeah yeah well and part of what's happening here is people are just kind of like picking up whatever institution they have and using it to like build a movement tool yeah yeah so all right we're gonna we're gonna move on from sort of omaha and cincinnati like you know so we're we're gonna start talking about some of the i guess you'd call like the uprising proper so i guess before we fully head into this,

it should be noted that there there's, it's generally, you know, I talked about this before. There's generally the way these riots were understood as, as a thing that is discontinuous from the civil rights movement. And that's just not true. A lot of the civil rights movement,

like things that people now think of as like nonviolent campaigns, weren't like a lot of the stuff in uh oh my fucking god like a lot a lot of the fights in louisiana like are just straight up riots yeah and one of the important sort of bridge figures here is gloria richardson who's i wish we could do like an entire episode about her right now but that'll have to wait till later um she is a civil rights activist in cambridge and her movements like you know like she is in a lot of ways that like kind of dedicated to nonviolence. But she's very explicit that we're going to do armed self-defense and a lot of the stuff that she leads. I mean, this is, you know, getting back to like 1963, like the civil rights stuff that she's doing is extremely effective.

And a lot of it is just straight up riots to the point where like there's a very uh thing for the civil rights era called the treaty of cambridge where like she and her people agreed to like stop rioting and this the city agreed to just completely integrate but by the time he gets to 1967 they haven't done it and so the riots started off in cambridge again and you have this incredibly sort of hot like summer over the course of 1967. There's this, like, enormous wave of riots. And, you know, like, Cambridge is a famous one, but, like, Detroit's another big one. And this, I don't know, this should have given people warning that there would be, you know, giant uprisings if anyone did anything to MLK. But apparently it didn't.

And, you know, you know what else i won't i don't know set off i've already used the you know what else won't set off massive waves of uprisings pivot i really i really didn't prepare good enough pivots for this what won't assassinate a civil rights leader we can't promise that we we cannot promise that no companies would never do anything like that. What are you talking about, James? Certainly not the meal kit delivery service that we can't mention by name.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests

and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun.

Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists

in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we are back. So, all right we are back so all right it is now officially time for holy so on april 4th 1968 mlk is giving is you know like he he is preparing to support a bunch of striking sanitation workers

and they fucking kill him who the they is is kind of unclear mlk's family later sued the u.s government to make the government prove that they didn't have they weren't involved in the assassination the government paid them one dollar instead so you know make of that what you will but what what did happen is that you know he he was he was killed by white people and this this detonates a fucking nuclear weapon in in the u.s you know reading accounts of me it reminds me of the the first week of the george floyd uprisings in 2020 not one of people remember this there's this picture of this guy in philly with an elmo like wearing wearing like an elmo uh like head yeah and he has his fist raised and he's standing in front of a bunch of things of fire like this this is this is what that looks like i'm gonna read a quote from one of the people

who was people who was there i mean i was sad when i first heard the news of king's death but not but not like the world around me the city was burning and i'm walking through the city and the city is burning and that's what we wanted this was our time i mean fire all around my house i mean my house almost got caught on fire when I was living because 7th Street, the whole block was burning. And it was just, we thought we were in a war. Again, simple. Simple. One of the interesting parts about this is that a lot of civil rights leaders, and this is not just true of, like, obviously the moderate civil rights leaders are trying to tell people not to riot.

But even, like, Stokesley Carmichael, like, comes out to the crowd and tries to go like, please don't like don't riot. Don't do this. And the crowd basically tells him to fuck off and does it anyways. And the fact that they killed MLK, who was, you know, MLK was, I mean, like even at that time, like the sort of living human symbol of nonviolence, he was also the symbol of cooperation, him. It is a kind of psychological blow. That I don't think we've ever experienced. Like maybe if you took like. If you took like Trump's election. Like on at the same time as a 2020 uprising.

That like maybe. Maybe kind of captures. What people are feeling in this moment um and i want to read another account i want to read an account that's it's it's sort of secondhand account by this priest is like a catholic priest in in a largely black area this this is from the great uprising yet other observers saw the uprising as a clear protest against the persistence of racial inequality father richard lawrence an activist priest whose catholic parish served many blacks recalled encountering one of his parishioners on the street

after the revolt had begun father you don't understand i know you've been with the demonstrations and all that sort of thing the parish parishioner explained to Loyance. But you were born white, and you can't really totally understand. I mean, I've done the civil rights thing too, you know it. I've been there. I've been to the marches, I've been to the rallies, you name it. Nobody's listening. His parishioner continued. Murdering Dr. King was just the last straw that nobody's listening.

We can go on demonstrating as long as we want. No one will listen. I don't know what to try next, but maybe blood flowing in the streets is what it takes. Maybe some of his blood with some of my blood flows in the streets. Then maybe the man will listen. Maybe not, but I've got nothing left to try. I don't care if I got killed. I've got two kids and I'm not going to have them come up in the world i came up with up and i'm just not going to have it and this is this is i think a really important part of these riots is that these are people who had fought who had fought for a decade and over it i mean at this point it's about a decade and a half of struggle they've done everything they've done strikes they've done boycotts they've done sit-ins. They've voted. They got the right to vote. They marched. They did civil disobedience. And the product of this is that they're living in a dilapidated house with a shitty job, and then they fucking killed MLK. And the country burns. guard straight up is there are there are there are like there are just straight up military occupations in an enormous number of cities dc is occupied by like the 503rd military police

battalion national guard and famously the 82nd airborne so like the the regular u.s army is being sent into to like to like is being sent into these cities the level of sort of burning here too and this is the thing that's i i think kind of the most famous part of these riots is they burn staggering parts of cities. There are, I mean, just like unbelievable numbers of buildings are burned. And people sort of – people go out to fight. People are shooting at the police. The police are shooting back at them. I mean, there's – I wasn't able to find the footage one of my friends was telling me about like there's there's footage

from from news people in new york of like a guy shooting outside of a window and they have footage of like a police like SWAT team basically i think it's like still pre-swap like a police like team coming in just killing him and you know i mean richard m daly famously has has a who's the the mayor of chicago has a shoot to kill order you know his his words are quote shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a molotov cocktail and quote shoot to cripple or maim anyone looting any stores in our city jesus it's really fucking bad and you And this is something that's about these riots. If you look at even the Watts riot, or if you look at 2020,

if you look at 2014, the Baltimore uprising in 2015, there were people having a good time. This is always a thing in riots. There's always someone who's having a great time. Fucking no one. I read dozens and dozens and dozens of interviews of people from people from the holy week uprising every single person involved in

this is having the absolute worst time of their lives that's like on every single side right that everyone is fucking miserable and you know but but part part of what's happening here too is these are these these uprisings are also about vietnam because you know a lot of these people either have been sent to vietnam or like their families have been sent to vietnam black people are dying at an unbelievable rate in vietnam and these people come back and they're like well we're gonna fucking die anyway so i'd rather die i'd rather go out fighting the cops than you know than than dying in vietnam um and and also you know what i've been talking a lot about kind of like the the snipers and the windows but one of the most common ways people get killed

well okay probably most common ways they get trapped in a burning building which is terrible but one of the other really common ways is that these are these are gunfights you know we kind of saw this in 2020 but there's a bunch there are like white store owners are like popping out of their businesses to take pot shots at at protesters and like they're you know one of the people that they interviewed was a guy who had been like walking past a store and the guy had pulled out a gun and shot him and he had he had managed to knock the guy next to him got shot so he took out a bolt off and like burned the store down and this is a lot of the kind of dynamics of this right or like it's not just that people are furious it's not just the people sort of you know like people want this world to burn it's that like they are

very directly responding to the fact that the like white people also fucking lose their minds when this starts happening and you you get this degree of sort of of urban conflict that kind of you know we don't really have this now not here yeah like like even even our riots are like largely non-violent like people don't shoot it out with the cops or each other in the same way that like you know like like it happens sometimes like this is happening fucking all over the country like this is happening in like like like you know like like fucking small ass cities in the midwest there are people getting in gunfights right you know and so eventually okay so what the other very important thing about this that is that's really interesting and not marked upon very much is that okay so like obviously the police in chicago go fucking feral right the national guard commanders come in and like the general the national guard

goes okay you motherfuckers you're gonna kill someone none of you are allowed to have loaded weapons you're not allowed to have loaded weapons and i mean these guys don't stay like they have bayonets on their rifles this used to be a thing like they used bayonets as a form of like like a weapon they just fucking stab you with a bayonet and you know their bayonets were ordered to be covered and because of this the guard doesn't actually kill anyone during this during the 68 riots unlike the 67 riots where they fucking murdered a bunch of people. And this was a really smart decision by

the National Guard people, because if they had started actually shooting into these crowds, like, this wouldn't have been one week of really intense rioting that ends with the Civil Rights Act, which we'll talk about. Well, it doesn't end with the Civil Rights Act, but like, you know, it sort of gets that. This have been like apocalyptic on a scale that i i don't

think anyone kind of like has the capacity to imagine but instead they kind of you know there's really intense riots they kind of they kind of wind down over the course of a couple of months. They wind down faster in a lot of ways than 2020 did. But on the other hand, that is not the end of these riots. And the thing I want to close this episode on, well, we're going to talk about... Actually, okay, let's talk about the Civil Rights Act first, because it is a very, very weird piece of legislation. So like five days into... No no uh seven a week into the riots congress passes the civil rights act of 1968 and this is a very very weird piece of legislation um i mean it's obviously there's something that's been like frantically like scrambled out because

like this you know the like there are just straight up armed uprisings in a huge portion of the united states and congress's response so they passed the fair housing act um that's like that's probably the most famous part of this bill um it is very i mean it it it has done it's not like a perfect piece of legislation but it has done a staggering amount of good right and it is in some, a direct answer to the protesters' demands, right? Like it does improve discrimination of sort of housing. But it's also – okay, there's a bunch of stuff about the Bill of Rights applying to indigenous people that is good, but we'll cover that. I don't know.

Maybe if we do an aim occupation episode we'll talk about that more later that's kind of outside the scope of this one but the other part of it is this absolutely deranged like conspiracy thing about like because like the so the line you know the the line here as it was in 2020 that this is all being caused by outside agitators so part of this thing is what's known as the riot act which is uh it bans like quote travel and interstate commerce with the intent to incite promote engage or participate in or carry out a riot um it's not used very much but this is like straight up a conspiracy theory right so it's a conspiracy theory about what happened in the 1967 uprising in cambridge so like that that uprising like that's the thing that produced spiro agnew who was like a nixon's deranged vp who nixon picked to be so deranged that no one would

assassinate him because assassinating him would put spiro agnew in charge but like agnew agnew had been like a liberal like he'd been a liberal republican but then there there were these riots in cambridge 68 in in 67 and the the narrative that comes out of it is what happened was a black power leader named h h rap brown came in gave a speech and then there was like riots right and this is this is the standard line for like 70 years uh what actually happened was that he gave a you know rap gives rap brown h rap brown gives a very militant speech right like he does give a speech telling people to burn a school down like he's saying you need to like five people but then everyone just goes home

as h rap brown is you know they're like dispersing uh this young woman asked to like be escorted home she doesn't get beat up by the police and so h H rap Brown, 30 people like, okay. And so they, they try to go home and the police walk up to them and start shooting them with shotguns. H rap Brown gets hit by a fucking shotgun blast. And that, that is the boy. It was after that, that the rioting started.

Right. So, you know, so that's what actually happened. But, but the, the memory of it is that it was like, Oh,

like these, these, like these black nationalists came in and they started this riot. And like, this literally is now law in the US. And this is very famously, at the end of this episode, we're going to talk about who this was used against. But before we need to do that, I need to make it clear. These riots don't end in 68, right?

And in fact, I think the one that is the most intense of these is York. In York or Pennsylvania, which I promised promised you the beginning of this episode we were going to do and that is in 1969 because again like the the the conditions that cause these urban uprisings like haven't changed so you know like the the the immediate flames of sort of like of the holy week uprising like of this rebellion by mlk sort of you know eventually trickle out but there's just more of them there so this this is another oneK sort of, you know, eventually trickle out, but there's just more of them. So this, this is another one.

What, one of the things you come across when you research this is that like every single, the conventional, like accepted public narrative, but why these started, they're all wrong. This one. So it's generally attributed to this black kid lying,

but being set on fire. And like that did happen, but this kid's like 14. Right. But what actually happened was that there were two black guys talking to a black police officer and two members of this like white power white supremacist street gang like walked up and shot them both and this kicks off a series of shootings brickings and fistfights between black and white people like all over the city and this is a kind of this is also the other kind of right in this period like we don't really have this anymore

like there but you know there are places where just effectively straight up race wars start well you know one of the things that happens here this happens in a lot of cities they'll just be like a bunch of white people in a van driving around shooting at people out their windows and we sort you know like this happened in portland right but it was like they were shooting paintballs these guys are just shooting actual guns like out their windows any black people they see on the street right there's there's so a crowd of like eventually like protests start and like this this crowd of like pretty well-armed black people and this uh and and like a line of cops are facing each other

and you know this is one of these there's two sides to the story the cops claim that the crowd just started shooting at them like everyone in the crowd claims that the cops shot at them first and they started shooting back and so there's just this fucking shootout between the cops and this giant crowd there are like there are reports of cops like just set up on the rooftop of a factory just shooting everyone they can find. White gangs are firebombing black houses. One of the, I don't know, an incident that should be infamous, but I've never fucking seen talked about anywhere, is a fucking police armored truck. There's a bunch of people who have come out to their lawn to figure out what the fuck is is going on and a police armored truck rolls up and just starts shooting them and so you know people and people start

shooting back and there's a bunch of like like people eventually get sort of tried for this and one of the you know one of the things people talk about is like yeah there's like 20 guys in their houses like having a shootout with this armored car because the armored car has just fucking started murdering everyone and you know the sort of remarkable thing about this i mean one of the remarkable things about this is that literally the day before this happens all of these cops had been at a police training seminar about the best way to respond to civil unrest amazing and the police seminar and they are like correctly because this is actually if you are the police the best way to handle one of these sort of uprisings, you know, they're told in no uncertain terms, the best way to do this is do not confront the crowd.

Do not shoot at the crowd. Like, you know, okay, like, do like containment, but don't go, don't like walk up and fight them because that will make people fight them back. And then literally the next day, they are having running shootouts with like the entire black population of this town and you know like york is a place that has had civil rights movement stuff before this it also has you know again like it has i mean just literal white power like street gangs who the police are i mean the police literally just call them the boys like that that's how that's how that's how tight these people are right but and this is the thing you know one of the notes i want to close on is that like a lot of the focus and i i get why

people focus on this a lot of the focus from sort of radical accounts of this period is about you know because these riots these uprisings like these are this is the crucible in which sort of black power is forged in and so there's a lot of attention paid to sort of like black power like people who are going to become black power leaders and people influenced by these movements like doing armed self-defense and that is true and that is important but also just regular ass people are also doing this right like the guys the the the the 20 guys who are having a shootout with a police armored vehicle they are just like some of them are vietnam vets but like they're just they're they're just regular people who saw the police fucking roll up like into like roll up on a

fucking house and start shooting people there is a sense in you know in this period that the thing that guns are for are to protect you from the government right and people actually believe this like jfk you know i want to uh there's a really good article in strange matters called the double counterinsurgency that's about this that talks about how jfk literally gives a speech where he talks about like again who is a liberal gives a speech about how like yeah we need guns to defend itself against the tyranny of the government and yeah like if you are a black person in york in 1969 and you are watching the police from an armored vehicle shooting people on their front lawn the response people had was okay we're gonna die here we're gonna die in vietnam and so i'm so I'm choosing to die here fighting the cops

and that's I think that's important I think because a lot of you know a lot of what we're going to talk about next right are these student radicals and everyone now looks at these student radicals and goes these people were

insane these people were stupid these people didn't understand what was happening. There was no way a revolution was ever going to happen. And they're wrong. Those people are fucking wrong. What these people were watching, right? They were watching this. They were watching hundreds of cities going into open revolt.

They were watching people having shootouts with the cops. They were watching people. People tended not to shoot at the national guard because people had enough military experience to realize if you try to shoot the national guard you're not going to win because they have machine guns and stuff but people did it still right there are still numbers of this they are watching they're watching armed uprisings in basically every mayor every major in mind and not even major every like minor american city has one of these and these people assume that this is the revolution and that you know like that this is the opening stage of the revolution that is coming and they weren't they weren't wrong to think that

like it didn't happen but it's not that these people is like you know it's not these people were sort of naive or foolish it was they They had the same rational reaction to what they were seeing that the FBI and the Nixon administration did. And I think that's the place I'm going to close. So I think the next one of these episodes is going to be about the Columbia student occupations. but the one after that well I might do basic skating there but we are eventually going to get to the DNC part and I promised you the thing about the people who were charged under the riot act yeah so the people who are going to

the most famous people who are going to be charged with this like interstate riot shit are the Chicago 7, 7 people arrested at the Democratic National Convention so when we come back in however long it takes to do the rest of the 1968 so if we do before we get to that we we will come back to to this civil rights act uh fucking over a bunch of people's lives i'm gonna look forward to that

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