The Blindboy Podcast - Kerrymans Tennis Racket

Episode Date: January 23, 2019

How the political thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance drew inspiration from Irish Revolutionaries Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

hello welcome to the blind by podcast if this is your first podcast go back to the very start go back to the first episode and start from there a rusty plow three heads hanging between wide-apart legs, October playing a symphony on a slack wire paling. Maguire watches the drills flattened out and the flints that lit a candle for him on a June altar, flameless. The drills slipped by and the days slipped by and he trembled his head away and ran free from the world's halter

And thought himself wiser than any man in the townland When he laughed over pints of porter Never where he's wanted, Maguire grunts and spits Through a clay-wattled moustache and stares about him from the height. His dream changes like the cloud-swung wind, and he is not so sure now if his mother was right. When she praised the man who made a field his bride, watch him, watch him, that man on a hill whose spirit is a wet sack flapping about the knees of time.

He lives that his little fields may stay fertile when his own body is spread in the bottom of a ditch under two coulters crossed in Christ's name. He was suspicious in his youth as a rat near strange bread. When girls laughed, when they screamed he knew that meant the cry of fillies in season. He could not walk the easy road to destiny. He

dreamt the innocence of young brambles to hooked treachery or the grip, the grip of irregular fields no man escapes. It could not be that back of the hills, love was free. That was an excerpt from a poem written by Paddy Kavanagh, or Patrick Kavanagh, the Irish poet.

And it's an excerpt from a poem called The Great Hunger, which is a beautiful poem. It's about, I don a beautiful poem it's about I don't know it's kind of a critique a critique of rural life you know in the 1940s

in Ireland and The Great Hunger obviously is a name for the Irish famine you know that's what we call the Irish famine but it's not about the famine

it's about a spiritual hunger an emotional hunger it's about a hunger for meaning in a community where the best that can be hoped for you is to own a bit of land

and grow a few spuds but it's also about wanking it's about sexual hunger and that's kind of the most hidden subtext like there's another line in that poem it's about a lad another line about a lad stretching his legs far apart in front of a fire and wanking into the ashes but yeah Patrick Kavanagh was investigated by the guards the Irish police for that poem

because of its potential themes of wanking and I read it because I don't know I was just I was reading some Kavanagh because I'm

as you know I'm writing my second book and I've taken a break from it right now because I'm doing the TV thing but I'll be straight back in writing next month we'll say and prose prose is a big thing about writing obviously prose is prose is the poetic use of the English language and Kavanagh

is a fucking fantastic man for prose the imagery that he can create with just a small amount of words is phenomenal so I'll read Kavanagh to try and get my head back into that space like when you're I said you know in the earlier podcast I speak loads about flow the process of getting into a waking dream state where stories just flow from you but then once the flow is over and you go back the next day to edit what you've written, that's when it comes time for prose. Prose can happen in flow, but prose as well is more cognitive. You can think about prose more. You can get prose through editing.

It might necessarily flow from you. It can do. But yeah, there's just some fucking beautiful lines in that poem my favorite one would be the he was suspicious in his youth as a rat near strange bread when girls laughed when they screamed he knew what that meant the cry of fillies in season he could not walk the easy road to destiny he dreamt and that that's just fucking beautiful. You know, it's talking about kind of the Irish bachelor farmer whose only passion is land

and kind of weary of women because of Catholic guilt. Do you know? Viewing women as poison. A rat near strange bread. And then the beautiful, beautiful you know when girls laughed when they screamed he knew that meant the cry of fillies in season

you know when they were laughing he knew that it meant that they were horny or they were flirting and then it goes he could not walk and there's a pause for the next line the easy road to destiny and he could not walk and then that pause.

That means he's on a boner. That's what I think anyway. It means the man who's so tied down to his land is obsessed with this land, terrified of women, either because of Catholic guilt or, you know, it says that the innocence of young Bramble's to hooked treachery, the belief that women are treacherous. Drilled into him by the priests since birth.

Don't trust her. She'll get seduced by a snake and she'll eat the poison apple and we'll all go to hell. The only thing you can trust is the farm. And he's denying his own sexuality, his own desires. Because of the complicated toxicity of Irish society in the 1930s the 1940s and it's post-colonial too

like not only have you got the Catholic guilt around sexuality but the land obsession, the Irish obsession with land and property, because 1930s, just 10 years after independence, the land was not ours, it was the British people's fucking lands, the British colonist lands, so you have this fear, this terrible Irish fear of, if you get fucking land, you keep it, This terrible Irish fear of, if you get fucking land, you keep it.

You keep that bloody land and it doesn't, ahead of any other desire, you must keep this land. Because it could be taken away at any moment. You know, maybe we still suffer from a bit of that. With the way that property is currently being hoarded in the current housing crisis. But that, yeah, that language is fucking beautiful. Absolutely fantastic. But having said that. There's a thing I often think about.

Like. What. Who would I least like to have a Twitter account. And Patrick Cavanaugh is pretty high up there. I don't think I'd like Cavanaugh to have a Twitter account his poems are fucking beautiful but the man himself the life he lived he really by all accounts

was an absolute prick like my number one person who I definitely would not like to have a Twitter account would be a punk singer called Gigi Allen who used to do shits account would be, it's a punk singer called Gigi Allen who used to do shits on stage and throw it in the audience and I've just seen some footage of him

I don't think he'd be fun on Twitter at all he'd be banned after a day but Kavana like Kavana used to, he had a bit of a drink problem so what he'd do is first off he never paid for any

pints he practically begged or bullied people for money for pints he used to fight with Flann O'Brien he used to fight with fucking Brendan Behan Brendan Behan used to despise Cavanaugh because of the shit that he'd be throwing at him in the pub

he was obsessed with a fella called Oliver St John Gogarty and St John Gogarty he was just kind of like a man about town in Dublin known as a conversationalist if Oliver St John Gogarty was alive today

he'd be very popular on Instagram and he'd probably have a snapchat account and lots of people would follow him and he wouldn't be saying much of any intellectual weight he'd be a social media star but kavanaugh hated gogarty and james joyce in ulysses based a character, there's a character called Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, based on Oliver St. John Gogarty. But Cavanagh anyway, one day he said he called around to Gogarty's house. I think he said it in a paper or something.

No, he said it in his memoir, his book The Green Fool, which I'll tell you about in a minute. He says, I mistook Gogarty's white-robed maid for his wife or his mistress. I expected every poet to have a spare wife. Now, in the 1930s, that is fucking scandalous. That's saying that Gaugherty has mistresses, which he probably did. So Gaugherty went apeshit anyway and sued Kavanagh. And Kavanagh had to pay 100 quid in damages. But one morning in 1938 Kavanagh's book The Green Fool, his memoir had come out and Kavanagh became obsessed with this idea that there was like an organised campaign

against him. So he got up in the morning and started calling into bookshops he went into uh fred hannah's bookshop in nassau street started roaring my name is kavana and i'm an irish poet and i'm gonna wreck the joint if you don't put this my book in the fucking window and hannah who owned the bookshop was like all right grand I'll put your book in the front window and he went around every single he's physically threatening all the book owners saying I'm gonna bash this place up I'm gonna smash it to bits if you don't put my fucking book in the window so most of them obliged um a few of them then had an issue with it Brown and Norland's bookshop when Kavanagh went in pushing things around, kicking books over

threatening they refused it they said they wouldn't even stock the book because they said it was anti-Catholic and it was libelous towards Oliver St John Gogarty and then Kavanagh starts roaring inside in the shop

that he's living in a fascist state and everyone thought that he was just mad fucking delusional you know and he went into another place and the owner says you're not making me stock this book by threatening me you're not going to make me stock it by law and Kavanagh replies and he says the only law that matters is the law of the poet

what a fucking hipster so he eventually ends up uh the guards I think the guards arrested him or accosted him or something because he was going around to every single bookshop in Dublin causing scenes physically threatening people and the guards didn't bother prosecuting him because first of all they believed that he was mad and thought that there was a full-on conspiracy theory obsession from booksellers to not promote his book and secondly the the sergeant said that he consulted with a priest right that's fucking Ireland in 1938 the sergeant was going what will I do about this lunatic poet who's threatening people so the sergeant goes to a priest and the priest had read the book and he said that uh don't prosecute Kavanagh because it'll give him the publicity which he's obviously seeking.

So can you imagine that man on Twitter? Can you imagine, like, the worst people on Twitter are the people who, I think, get incredibly emotional and they can't keep the phone away from themselves. Like Donald Trump is a typical example you know I mean tweeting at four in the morning but it's when incredibly emotional uh very angry and just tweet out insults or very irrational threads and I think it's a good thing that Twitter wasn't around for Kavanaugh. People would be sick of him. And one thing I wonder too,

like, not only would Kavanaugh and Twitter not be good for us, I wonder would it be good for him? Like, we forget that artists are complicated people, you know. We forget that artists struggle with intense emotions. We forget that artists are, you know, the artistic temperament. That artists can be assholes. And in 2019, we do have, we have, I think, an unrealistic expectation that all of our artists have to be really polite, on the ball, politically informed, good people. I don't know where that comes from. I don't know where, you know, our artists have to have this piety about them. But because of cancel culture and shit like that it's clear

this is what we expect from artists and someone like Kavanagh you know the poem The Great Hunter that's a scathing angry critique of

the status quo of Irish society in the 30s it's a scathing angry poem that really you know it gets at some fucking hardcore ideas like, or some

deeply held values of Irish society that he has taken apart with a knife quite angrily and channeling it into his art into his poetry of Irish society that he has taken apart with a knife quite angrily and channeling it into his art, into his poetry, like there's a

I'm going to have to paraphrase this now because I don't know the exact quote but you know Kavanagh was always considered like the poet of the peasant, of the Irish peasant and hold on I'll actually find the fucking give me two seconds and I'll find the quote because I think it's even on his Wikipedia page two seconds so

he was always considered like the the poet of the peasant and there's a lovely quote from him but also you can tell by this quote that he was obviously a bit of a dose he says although the literal idea of the peasant is of a farm laboring person in fact a peasant is all that mass of mankind which lives below a certain level of consciousness they live in the dark cave of the unconscious and they scream when they see the light and that's that's a reference to Plato's cave we covered that in a podcast before you know that the Plato's allegory of the cave about knowledge and seeing the light and not being able to accept knowledge but that's Kavanaugh basically saying that

peasantry is not an economic condition, it's whether you're stupid or not or whether you're educated or not and to a point he's right but there isn't a lot of compassion in his words, there's an anger in his words and there's an anger that permeates

through all his poetry and someone as angry as Kavana if they had if he had access to Twitter would he have even bothered his hope writing poems or would he have been the worst prick

would Kavanaugh instead instead of getting that anger and that energy and constructively using it by himself to create art on a page would he simply use Twitter to non-stop call people bastards all day long

you know would he be able to walk away from the keyboard would he spend his day having really long arguments in Facebook comments underneath the journal.ie? And would he be the guy that when you come across their threads and their comments underneath the journal.ie, you go,

fuck me, this person is smart and this person is witty and this person is really tearing a new arse out of the other person that they're arguing with but ultimately they've just given six hours of their life away underneath a journal.ie article or a Daily Mail article and it's ultimately pointless

you know just arguing with a stranger about something and hoping someone can see. And I think Twitter would have ruined Kevin his life. Someone that angry and that passionate who clearly, you know, as reports say, hanging around pubs fighting with everyone. Put a smartphone into that man's hand

and he is not going to create. Like if you go to the the grand canal in dublin it's one of my favorite statues in dublin there's a statue of patrick kavanagh and it's it's a bench and sitting on the bench is a bronze statue of patrick kavanagh contemplatively looking towards the canal because that's what he used to do. Kavanagh would spend hours sitting down looking at swans, whatever, essentially in a meditative form of self-reflection and thinking and thinking of poems and thinking of ideas. Now imagine that statue.

And there's a smartphone in his hand. He's not going to be looking at the swans. He's going to be. Arguing with another shithead. Underneath the Daily Mail. Article. You know. That he's reading.

At the end of the day. You can only get in so many fights in the pub. Before you have to go home. Before you have to do something with your hands there's no television there's no radio so he was able to channel his incredible ability into the creation of poetry and art i'd say there's many patrick cavanis walking around the place today who simply don't create just angry people online very angry people who are brilliant at twitter they're brilliant at

being mean to people on twitter or being trolls and they're brilliant at taking people ripping people to shreds in comment sections but it's ultimately it's

farting into the universe you know it's not constructing that towards something aesthetic something with aesthetic beauty anyway enough about Patrick Kavanagh because it is time for the Ocarina Pause

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okay this week's podcast isn't, it's not really about Patrick Kavanagh as such it was a little bit about Patrick Kavanagh but I want to speak about something else a little bit because this week

we had Martin Luther King Day the other day Martin Luther King Day so I want to do something around that please some hot takey stuff so like

I don't think Martinin luther king needs an introduction he was the african american civil rights leader who was assassinated and a very important person not just for not just as a symbol for african americans but i for people worldwide. I mean, I previously had on this podcast the civil rights activist Bernadette Devlin Michaliski on this podcast. And she spoke about how the marches for civil rights and the fight for civil rights in the north of Ireland in the 60s were you know directly inspired by what Martin Luther King was doing and other people like him and one theme that I'm continually interested in is the intersection of struggles between we'll say African Americans and then also the historical irish struggle in the episode with spike lee myself and spike spoke about you know going back

to the 1840s 1850s how daniel o'connell you know the ir Irish liberator, the Irish emancipator for Catholics, how Daniel O'Connell and Frederick Douglass, who was an African-American emancipator, he led the movement for the abolition of slavery in the United States. But we spoke about how Daniel O'Connell and Frederick Douglass became great friends and how O'Connell took Douglass to Ireland on a tour on a speaking tour specifically what Frederick Douglass and Daniel O'Connell had hoped for was that during the Irish famine you know just after the penal laws the Irish and incredibly oppressed people with very few rights were escaping to the United States and what Frederick Douglass had hoped for is that he could convince the Irish

people in Ireland that when they arrived in New York that they would support the movement for freeing slaves and ending slavery and to become one and join up with African Americans. Which, that didn't work out too well, unfortunately. It ended in the rather brutal New York draft riots where during the Civil War the Irish people were, Irish Americans we'll say were being drafted to fight in the Civil War which they saw as a war that only existed to free slaves so they brutally took their anger out on African Americans in New York

by lynching and hanging them and you know there's a very brutal and complicated history in America between African Americans and Irish Americans and Irish Americans were not considered in the 1840s and beforehand you know from the 1600s to the 1700s Irish people were not considered white in America at all. The Irish earned their whiteness through acts of brutality towards African Americans. Often that's just how it works. It's if you want to gain approval of the ruling class, which would have been British Americans essentially, you perform acts of brutality against the group that's underneath you to earn approval like a good dog like an attack dog you know um but what I want to talk

about is that the people that would have influenced Martin Luther King the African American leaders and thinkers who Dr. King would have been inspired by specifically I want to talk about a lad called Cyril Briggs Claude McKay and a bit about Marcus Garvey

now what makes all three of these men, what they have in common is all of them are from the Caribbean, the British Caribbean. Cyril Briggs comes from a place called Nevis, a tiny Caribbean island that is ruled by the British. And Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay both come from Jamaica again Caribbean islands

both run by the British now the Irish and African there's a long commonality there going back about four or five hundred years in the Caribbean because of indentured servitude, the first African slaves were brought to the Caribbean. And at the same time, you know, a couple of hundred thousand Irish people

were also brought against their will to work on plantations in the Caribbean. They were not slaves, They were indentured servants. They could work for their freedom. The African could not. The African wasn't afforded humanity. We've spoken about this in previous podcasts. So I won't spend ages on it.

But. There was an Irish and African commonality in the Caribbean. At the start. Then of course what happens is when the Irish become free. The Irish become. Slave masters. Overseersers and some of them slave owners Marcus Garvey, the name Garvey is an Irish name his Irish name comes from an Irish slave master

that his parents had because Africans obviously were not allowed to have their own name or know what their own name would even be. But these three revolutionary figures made their way up to America, around New York, and all three of them are instrumental in what is referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. Now the Harlem Renaissance would be, it's a period from about 1910 into the mid-20s,

and what it is, is a cultural revolution in the Harlem area of New York City, which would have been a very black area. City which would have been a very black area and it's the emergence of a very definite 20th century African American culture the proper roots of

jazz music like what makes the Harlem Renaissance so important is it's the first kind of solidification of African American cultural expression greatly informing mainstream American cultural expression as a whole, okay?

We're talking, you know, 1915 onwards, early 1920s. You know, some of the figures from the Harlem Renaissance, like I said, Claude McKay, then Duke Ellington, you know, some of the figures from the Harlem Renaissance, like I said, Claude McKay, then Duke Ellington, you know, the jazz musician, Josephine Baker, the dancer, W.E.B. Dubois, the writer. And kind of like, if you look at popular culture now,

music in particular, and all the 20th century what it kind of generally is is african-americans do something with music with fashion with dance and then it becomes co-opted by mainstream white culture often co-opted to the point that the original black originators are completely forgotten and only mainstream white artists kind of profit from it, you know. African American cultural expression that has an identity and is I suppose what you could call it is because obviously there was African American cultural expression before the Harlem Renaissance

you had the birth of jazz in New Orleans from the 1860s onwards you had blues music in Mississippi but these still would have been considered almost folk culture they hadn't been I don't know it's capitalized the right word but they hadn't been assimilated we'll say they didn't have a strong identity they would have been folk cultures but the Harlem Renaissance kind of ends all that. And where it kind of comes from is after the abolition of slavery,

there was the Great Migration, which meant that, you know, post-slavery, you know, when after the Civil War, as we know, in the southern states of where the Civil War was lost, even though slavery was abolished, they brought in laws like the Jim Crow laws, which were half based on the Irish penal laws. But the Jim Crow laws, basically, you might as well have been a slave if you were African American

in the southern states during Jim Crow. Segregation,, very little rights, very little ability to own property, to progress. So a lot of black people were just like, okay, fuck this, let's go to Chicago, let's go to Detroit, let's go to New York. And they congregated around Harlem, where they had access to employment.

And the emergence and birth of a black middle class in America. Still, obviously, of course, massive oppression, but not as terrible as it would have been down south. So this cultural movement around African-American identity, new racial consciousness, you know, literature, music, fashion, do you know? Literature, music, fashion, the whole shebang comes out of Harlem in the 20s. So some of the figures that I want to look at,

I'm not looking at music this week, I'm not looking at culture, I'm looking at revolutionary figures. And in particular, what stands out for me is the massive influence of the Irish Revolution, or the revolution isn't the word, the Irish struggle on these African-American revolutionaries, in particular the three lads, Claude McKay, Marcus Garvey and Cyril Briggs. Now, what sets the three lads apart, all of them are from the Caribbean, the British Caribbean, and they were writers. What gave them a kind of a head start is,

even though Nevis and Jamaica were, of course, very oppressive places where you had a minority, white, upper class ruling the majority of the island. Black people in the Caribbean had access to education, to the colonial education. So you have someone like Cyril Briggs arriving up to America with a proper education, the ability to write. This was denied to, we'll say, a black man from Mississippi whose parents were slaves who left for New York to work in a factory. Education wouldn't have been offered to these people. So that's why you see at the centre of the Harlem Renaissance

so many Caribbean people. Cyril Briggs, born in 1888, he founded a magazine called The New Negro Movement and he was a socialist communist who was into the idea of pan-Africanism, you know, an African identity for the African-Americans. And he was very, very inspired by the Irish struggle. He was inspired by 1916, which would have been happening

when he was writing the New Negro Movement magazine. And he was particularly inspired and kept a very close eye on the Irish War of Independence from 1919 to 1922. some bits of writing we'll say from Cyril Briggs to the African-American audience that he would have been writing to all around America but mostly centered around Harlem. So here's one excerpt and it's from 1921. He says the Irish fight for liberty is epic in modern history. It is a struggle that should have the sympathy and support of every oppressed group the negro in particular should be interested in the irish struggle for while it is patent that ireland can never escape from the overshadowing empire so long as england is able to maintain her grip on the riches of africa and india it is clear that those

suffering together under the heel of brit British imperialism must coordinate their efforts if they hope to be free. So Cyril Briggs viewed the Irish as common to African Americans in that the common enemy is essentially the British Empire. Briggs' whole thing was at its root essentially a Marxist reading of things. The enemy is imperialism and wealth and capitalism. He writes again, but a month later, the Irish people and the Negro people have much in common. To begin with, they are both oppressed by stronger groups. He writes again, but a month later, people that only does Great Britain tyrannize over more Negroes and other colored races than are ruled by any other nation in the world but Great Britain is also the bulwark of the Anglo-Saxon

white guards and all of the reactionary things for which they stand and you kind of I feel kind of sorry for Cyril Briggs too, because the Irish Americans in New York at the time certainly would not have been in any way friendly to the African Americans at all. I mean, one of the reasons that African Americans were living in Harlem is they had been more or less pushed out of Lower Manhattan at this point. And the Irish, like, you go back to the 1860s, the 1870s, 1850s, there was an area in New York referred to as the Five Pints District. It's gone now, but it's in kind of lower Manhattan. And the Five Pints was, it's considered one of the worst slums that the world

has ever seen. It was originally kind of middle class housing, but it was built on a very shitty marsh above a pond. So the building started to sink so it was this really stinky smelly shitty marsh that no one would of any decency would live in and who lived in the five points in 1860 were newly arrived irish from escaping the famine who mostly just spoke Gaelic and the other arrivals in the five points were newly freed slaves from the south of America so the Irish and the Africans actually lived together in this extreme poverty in New York and like a lot of like tap dancing do you know tap dancing comes from the five points

tap dancing was it was Irish musicians playing Irish reels and jigs and fiddles and then African Americans dancing traditional African dance

to Irish rhythms and from that came tap dancing do you know so for a while Irish people and African Americans actually lived in kind of this very miserable harmony in New York and what kind of ended

that was the New York draft riots when and a lot of this is covered in the film Gangs of New York and Gangs of New York is inaccurate because it shows the harmony that existed between Irish Americans and

I don't know what you even call them Irish Americans at that point because a lot of them were first generation immigrants, it shows the harmony between first generation Irish immigrants and recently freed blacks or blacks that had escaped via the underground railroad between first generation Irish immigrants and recently freed blacks or blacks that had escaped via the Underground Railroad Martin Scorsese did not portray properly

the extreme violence that culminated in lynchings against the African Americans by the Irish the Irish as well the roots of the modern American Democratic Party they have their roots in the Five Points District the Irish basically formed the Democrats

and the Irish formed the New York Police and that's how the Irish became powerful like the Irish today are all over American politics and unfortunately they're the biggest pricks find a prick in Trump's White House and they've got an Irish second name you know but back to Cyril Briggs you know it kind of breaks my heart about Cyril Briggs that he's writing in his magazine the new negro movement writing to the black people of New York saying to them

check out what the Irish are doing. Check out the Irish War of Independence. This is a common struggle. These are our people. We need to look at what the Irish are doing, support them, and we need to do something similar. And that was Cyril Briggs' whole shtick. In fact, like, one thing he wrote in the magazine, around 1920, I believe it was,

the Irish-Americans who at this point were giving support to the fight for independence in Ireland, they were boycotting any British goods in New York, right? Irish-Americans were going, if it's a British good, fuck that, we're not giving money to the Empire. And Cyril Briggs wrote to his his black readers while the irish in america persist in carrying the war to the enemy's pocketbook in a determined boycott that has given john bull many a sleepless night giving hope to the warriors of ireland the negro on the other hand

goes blindly on unintelligently supporting, by buying their goods. The great enemy of his race, the English, how long will we Negroes of America remain indifferent to the sufferings of our kindred under British rule? So that's Cyril Briggs appealing to black people in America. Stop buying British goods, support the Irish. And the role of the power of Irish America it's somewhat left out of the narrative of Irish independence as we call it independence you know the independence of the 26 counties like one of the reasons that Britain kind of folded to the Irish was pressure from the Americans you know

it was becoming really really unacceptable in 1920 in 1921 that the Brits were seen to be openly brutal to white people essentially in You know, this business that I speak about where the Irish weren't considered white, that's an 1860s, 1870s type of thing. By 1920, the Irish would have been considered white. Whiteness there being a social construct, as in your access to privilege, not necessarily skin colour.

Do you know? We'll see that this today, like, I mean... not necessarily skin colour. Do you know? We'll see that this today, like, I mean, like Romani people, you know, the Romani gypsies, and, you know, Romani people, their skin is no darker than Italian or Spanish people.

But Romanis aren't given access to white privilege they're not even though their skin color is the same color as an italian person or a spanish person an italian or spanish person is considered white a roma person is not do you know what i mean so that's kind of the social construct of whiteness in action that's what i'm talking about and you know this is evidenced in satirical cartoons of irish people in the 1870s up until 1900 1910 in american magazines uh the irish were portrayed as apes you know as monkeys and the irish were portrayed as monkeys alongside af-Americans Irish and African-Americans were in the same cartoons portrayed as monkeys in minstrel shows which

is an American tradition that kind of takes the piss out of black people by aping them um you know there was Irish stock characters in early minstrel shows too. Black people in the 1870s were referred to as smoked Irish. So the Irish, they wouldn't have been considered white in that respect in the 1800s. But by 1920, yes. Now the whole thing as well with Cyril Briggs, not only did he found the newspaper, the New Negro Movement, not only did he found the newspaper the New Negro Movement he also

founded a group called the African Blood Brotherhood who were a secret society based upon the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Republican Brotherhood the IRB, they were the precursor to the IRA

so Dick Briggs was pretty much like he really saw something of value in the Irish struggle and the way that the Irish structured their struggle against British oppression. So he founded the African Blood Brotherhood, which was very much a socialist communist organization to unite African Americans. It would have been a spiritual precursor to the Black Panther Party of the 1960s. One of the most impassioned pieces

that Cyril Briggs wrote about the Irish War of Independence. No people can more exactly interpret the inmost meaning of the present situation in Ireland than the American Negro. The scheme is simple you knock a man down and have him arrested for assault you kill a man and then hang the corpse for murder. We black folk are only too familiar with this procedure. In any given city a mob attacks us unsuspecting and kills innocent and harmless black working men in cold blood now what briggs was referring to there and what it what had angered him so greatly and what he was trying to direct the attention of the african-american

community towards that was written in early 1921 what Cyril Briggs is referring to is Bloody Sunday in Dublin in the first Bloody Sunday on the 21st of November 1920 if British listeners are listening to this, this is something you weren't taught in school

so on the 21st of November 1920 the there was a a Gaelic football match which is you know our national sport it's it's our expression of culture it's Irish culture um the All-Ireland final was on in Croke Park in Dublin. 5,000 people attended. British soldiers walked onto the pitch with 5,000 people, unarmed civilians, men, women, children, and they opened fire with no provocation, a full-on attack, opened fire on 5,000 civilians. 70 people were shot, 16 people killed. These were a mixture of British soldiers and Royal Irish

Constabulary who were as good as British soldiers, you know, they were British police. And it was a response to, earlier on in that morning, Michael Collins had organised to have British spies, like MI5 type lads, were assassinated in Dublin.

So this was the policy in Ireland in 1921. Winston Churchill had created a force known as the Black and Tans and the specific purpose of the Black and Tans was to murder and terrorise civilians, specifically Irish civilians to kill members of the public who are unarmed and to do this as a form of counter insurgency it was a way

in 1918 like Sinn Féin had won the general election by a landslide and the Irish people for the first time because 1916 had been a few years previously the irish people now wanted quite popularly without question independence from britain and the ira were the military force that were the the violent arm of this struggle so winston chartrey was like just shoot the people just just shoot the civilians murder civilians burn them out of their homes terrorize them and this will make them not support irish independence so british soldiers lads 5 000 unarmed civilians 70 of them shot

this is to put this into a modern context this is the Ariana Grande Manchester bombing that's what this is it's people going to an event to be entertained trying to enjoy their culture

murdered, massacred for no reason by forces of the crown and sanctioned by the great Winston Churchill so this is what Cyril Briggs was writing about this is what angered him what was the response

to these people being murdered by the British soldiers, well the response was seven days later in West Cork in an event known as the Kilmichael Ambush. You know, after those 70 unarmed people were shot, my grandfather, two of his brothers, and about 20 of their friends,

under the leadership of Tom Barry. Shot. 17 British officers. Shot and dead. 17 black and tans. And that was the response to Bloody Sunday. And. The monument that fucking.

That is there today is like. On this road. Died. 17 terrorist officers of the British forces and I'm not saying that with fucking pride do you know because war is disgusting and death is disgusting

but I do have a just anger you know in West Cork at the time you know, in West Cork at the time, you know, the police had been told, if any man has his hands in his pockets, that he's to be shot dead,

that's what you're dealing with there, and that's what, Cyril Briggs was looking at, going holy fuck, look what they're doing to the Irish, they're walking into, you know, they're walking into crowds of people,

enjoying a football match, and they're murdering them so Briggs's next statement which I think is a reference to the Kilmichael ambush and what happened he says their resistance is called crime under ordinary conditions it would be crime but in retaliation not only the guilty in quotes but the innocent are murdered and robbed and public property is burned after the kill michael ambush where 17 black and tans were shot dead armed officers were shot dead the black and tans burnt down cork city they burnt down civilian property that was their response so briggs is referring to that and the British also they painted the the West Cork Brigade of the IRA who ambushed the British soldiers they painted them as criminals and they created lies that they had chopped up the bodies with hatchets and all this stuff that never happened.

So that's what Briggs is referring to when he's trying to get, to raise the consciousness of African Americans in New York and also get them to support the Irish people in their struggle. That is your struggle too. But at the end of the article, referring to Bloody Sunday and referring to the Kilmichael ambush and the burning of Cork City, he also says, and this is the heartbreaker, In the United States, Irish influence not only stood behind the mob in Cincinnati, Philadelphia and New York, but it still stands in the American Federation of Labour to keep out Negro working men. All this contains no word of argument against the ultimate freedom of Ireland, which God speedily grant, but it does make us remember how in this world

it is the oppressed who have continually been used to cow and kill the oppressed in the interest of the universal oppressor. And that's the heartbreaker. You know, there's Cyril Briggs trying to rally support for the Irish, but fully aware of the brutality and the racism and the lynching that the Irish Americans are doing towards his own people in his own city in New York. And yet he still supports Irish freedom. Because Briggs takes the socialist Marxist position.

That the way that capitalism works, it pits the poor against each other perfectly. That the best way for systems of power to operate is if that the oppressed groups continually fight each other as a distraction in the interest of the oppressor. And that's what Briggs is looking at. And, you know, in Frederick Douglass's biography and that was written in 18 fucking 15 early you know Frederick Douglass talks in his biography

and the one thing that used to baffle Frederick Douglass Frederick Douglass who grew up a slave on plantations Frederick Douglass used to watch as slaves from one plantation would fight slaves from another plantation over whose master was better. Do you know? If one slave said to the other, your master's not as rich as my master, they would fight. Utterly ridiculous, but that is how these systems of power work to a lesser extent if you look at even you know in Ireland like if you look at the classes of

British soldier that were occupying now the auxiliary division were made up of the officer class they would have been posh but the black and tans weren't, the black and tans were shell shocked World War I veterans who would have been

like the average British conscript for World War I or who would have been sent to Ireland, they were from the slums of Britain do you know very very poor people certainly didn't massively benefit from the wealth of Britain. They were in slums. In fact, the first ever council housing that was ever built in Britain was 1919, I believe, by Neville Chamberlain. only reason is because in World War 1 British soldiers were proven to be less nourished

and less, not as strong as their European counterparts because they were living in slums so council housing was built in Britain to create better cannon fodder for future wars so the system of

extreme fucking capitalism that the British Empire would have absolutely represented, it is expert at pitting the victims of that system, because if you are in a

working class slum in Sheffield and all your children are dying of TB and you're poor and you've no work, you're a victim of the British elite. It is simple as that. In the way that the poor person in the shack in West Cork in 1920 is also a victim of the British system.

But the elite manages to pit these two groups against each other. And that's what happens. That's how this works. and that's what happens that's how this works and that's what cyril briggs is pointing out he's going well here in america the irish were dark poor weren't even considered white the blacks had just come up freed slaves from the south and now here we have it the irish for some reason you know instead of being angry with the capitalist powers that be that are instead of being angry with the draft instead of being angry with the people who are saying go fight a war you blame the African-American for the reason that you have to fight the war in the first place instead of being angry that you, another reason for the draft rights is,

I think the African-Americans were working for cheaper wages. So the Irish were lynching the African-Americans for working for cheaper wages on the docks and they kicked the African-Americans out of the docks and tried to keep the jobs Irish only. Instead of getting angry with the employer who was flaunting the rights, workers' rights, by implying people for lesser money, instead of getting angry with them, the employer, you get angry with the worker who's trying to earn a living and you lynch then the African-American.

You're seeing it in America today still. Undocumented migrants. Undocumented migrants who don't have workers rights or being completely exploited are working without any conditions or rights and then people get get angry with the mexicans for taking the cheap jobs instead of getting angry with the companies that are employing people with no rights this is how that system works and that's that's what cyril briggs is pointing out there another uh black revolutionary you know a member of the harlem renaissance who was very interested and supportive of irish revolution was claude mckay jamaican poet In 1920, Claude Mackay travelled to Trafalgar Square in London and he attended a rally with Irish nationalists. He wore a green necktie

and he was hanging out with Sinn Féin supporters and they called him the Black Irish, Black Murphy they called him. Mackay said, for that day at least I was filled with the spirit of Irish nationalism although I am black Claude McKay wrote poetry about Ireland he had a bit of a run in with Erskine Childers because Childers who you know he

Claude McKay referred to Erskine Childers as the so called rebel because Childers suggested that Ireland was deserving of a system that was suitable for white people so McKay took exception with this going well you know what the fuck do you expect from

what's a country suitable for non-white people Erskine you prick McKay who was you know an essential figure of the Harlem Renaissance and an essential figure of like I said the Harlem Renaissance this an artistic movement based upon a unified cultural identity McKay was explicitly interested in the Irish literary revival, you know, which was late 19th century. The Irish were a people who, you know, 800 years of fucking colonization,

or 700 at that point. Our language, our culture, everything erased, taken from us, and the Irish literary revival, which went hand in hand with Irish nationalism, was an artistic movement, which for the first time said, hold on a second, we're not just British subjects, we're not just peasants,

we're Irish people, we have a history, we have a culture, we have our own language. We have all these things. Let these things inspire a birth an explosion of creativity music sport writing that is a unified cultural expression and we're going to do this so that we can have an idea of who we are what we want and what we want to fight for and that's what to an extent the Harlem Renaissance was the Harlem Renaissance has parallels with the Irish literary revival and there you have it Claude McKay was very much into the Irish literary revival. So in 1921,

Claude McKay returns from London, having hung out with the Irish nationalists, having shown his support for Sinn Féin, having shown his interest in that movement. First thing he does when he gets back to New York, he joins the African Blood Brotherhood, Cyril Briggs' organisation, which is mod he joins the African Blood Brotherhood, Cyril Briggs' organization, which is modeled on the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Another figure of the Irish,

or of the Harlem Renaissance, who was passionate about Irish issues, but at the same time, very cautious, much more cautious than Cyril Briggs and Claude McKay was W.E.B. Dubois, the writer, one of the greatest African-American writers that ever lived. Dubois said in 1919, I must say frankly that there are some sinister anti-Negro influence in the American church largely among Irishmen who oppose the just treatment of Negroes. So Dubois wasn't a huge fan of the two boys with their obsession. And another figure then, very, very important figure, Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican.

Marcus Garvey was a political leader, journalist. Like, Marcus Garvey would have been, like, directly, would have been a hero of Martin Luther King a hero of Malcolm X uh what Marcus Garvey did for African-American identity and pan-Africanism black nationalism like Marcus Garvey's ideas they would have gone on to inform nation of islam uh rastafari movement the rastafarians and then as well in the 1960s the black power movement you know that's how important marcus garvey was and marcus garvey again he was over in london this was earlier about 1914 1915 garvey was obsessed with the 1916 Rising he was a personal friend of Roger

Casement I believe and Marcus Garvey's whole thing is that he admired like 1916 was a massive failure, it was a blood sacrifice Marcus Garvey admired the blood sacrifice of 1916

like he said straight up the time has come for the Negro race Marcus Garvey admired the blood sacrifice of 1916. Like he said straight up, the time has come for the Negro race to offer up its martyrs upon the altar of liberty, even as the Irish has given a long list from Robert Emmett to Roger Casement. So Garvey was very much, what are we doing, lads? Come on, let's have a proper fucking revolution.

Let's give up our martyrs let's start a war and also what Garvey was attracted to he admired Sinn Féin in particular how a lot of the story of attempts at Irish revolution and attempts at Irish independence throughout the years what you find is putting faith or power in an aristocrat

having an like with Home Rule you know with the Irish struggle for Home Rule it's like placing power

like having representatives representing your movement and then saying like a lot of home rule was a lot of power was handed to the catholic church you know it was the catholic church kind of were pro-home rule and also the home rule movement believed that if the irish went and fought for the british in world war one that they would give us home rule or maybe independence and Sinn Féin kind of rejected that and what Garvey admired was kind of the local grassroots campaigning getting the will of the

ordinary people so that you don't need these aristocratic figures leading you this is a people's movement and Garvey specifically was found that very attractive and took that upon some of his into some of his own ideas which became known as Garveyism and again what makes it sad you hear the name Garvey you go geez that's an Irish name was Marcus Garvey some way Irish no he was from Jamaica and you know 400 years ago or whatever Irish people were taken from their land and brought over to Barbados or to Jamaica to work on the plantations. And then they became slave owners or they became slave masters. So Marcus Garvey got his Irish surname because a relative of his had Irish slave masters.

But here he is in 1916 fighting for the cause of irishness and taking inspiration from irish revolution like in in 1919 he named the the headquarters of uh his headquarters of his movement in harlem he named it liberty hall and this was after the the destroyed headquarters of the irish transport and general workers union the irish citizen army so he he called buildings liberty hall after james connelly's fucking uh where the irish citizen army were set up in 1916 this is how much garvey took inspiration and cared about the Irish movement. When things started getting really, really, like really strong in Ireland with the Black and Tans, Marcus Garvey developed a relationship with Eamon de Valera

because de Valera would have been visiting America because de Valera was born in America. So de Valera was over meeting Irish Americans, but he also met with Marcus Garvey. de Valera was over meeting Irish Americans, but he also met with Marcus Garvey. And him and de Valera sparked up a kind of a relationship. What Marcus Garvey did, and this is kind of an embarrassing outpouring of compassion, you know, a heartbreaking thing, like Cecil Briggs.

So Marcus Garvey is looking at the Irish war of independence you know the whole scale massacre and murder of Irish citizens in 1920 the Irish American dock workers are refusing to service any British ship any British ships they have a boycott of British ships. And Marcus Garvey heads down to the docks and he tries to rally all the black longshoremen who are working at the docks to get them to join with the Irish Americans to boycott British ships. And these same African American workers on the docks are going, Marcus do you know what they did to us

fucking 50 years ago we can't access fair labor the Irish control the fucking docks they won't let us have jobs we're on the lowest rung of the ladder and you want us to support what what they're supporting and Marcus Garvey says yes yes do it's a common struggle and Garvey's support for people like Eamon de Valera actually ended up putting Garvey in trouble Garvey was not necessarily being watched and when he started hanging around with Eamon de Valera when de Valera was in New York the earliest incarnation of the FBI then started looking at Marcus Garvey so he put himself at risk for the freedom of the Irish. He said to de Valera, We, the representatives of 400 million Negroes of the world,

send greetings and pray that you and your fellow countrymen will receive from the hands of the British your merited freedom. And then he sent a message to King George V of Britain. On principle, nothing would please the 400 million negro people of the world more except the freedom of Africa than granting the freedom to the four and a half million people of Ireland

so that's how hardcore Garvey was about the situation and I'll wrap up the podcast now because there's so much, I mean, you can go on, like the founding member of the Black Panthers,

Huey P. Newton, and this is one thing, one thing that used to bamboozle me throughout the years. I had a CD from the band Rage Against the Machine when I was a teenager. Now, this was before Google or the internet. And the CD is, it was an album called Evil Empire.

And Rage Against the Machine are, Zach De La Roca is, I think he's half Mexican, half black. All his, he's very communist, socialist, fight the power type of lyrics. So when you open up the CD of Evil Empire, there was a photograph of loads of different books, right? And there were books that Zach De La Roca, the lead singer of fucking Rage Against the Machine was reading. And in there you had Che Guevara's book you had a books by Marcus

Garvey a lot of black nationalist books you had the communist manifesto you had I think the anarchist cookbook was in there you had all these kind of liberational books about freedom and about taking down capitalism and taking down power most of them uh you know the huey p newton was in there who founded the black panthers most of these books were black leaders and their fight we'll say against systems of power and in all these books i was going okay shea guevara all right hue Huey P Newton okay that makes sense that makes sense and in the middle of it all is James Joyce portrait of the artist as a young man and that used to drive me nuts I was going why is James Joyce why is a portrait of the artist as a young man a book that's a novel a

novel why is a novel that isn't a manual for revolution, that doesn't necessarily contain explicit revolutionary ideas? Why is this book amongst all these other books about black liberation and revolution? And for years and years and years I didn't know why. And then eventually I found out, Huey P.. Newton who founded the Black Panthers in his it's either in his biography or an interview he did Huey P. Newton states that

the book that radicalised him was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce because when Huey P. Newton was a young fella he used to go to the library and just read and read and read and I couldn't, I was like what how could a portrait of the artist as a young man which is not necessarily a revolutionary book at all how did that inspire him and what Huey P.

Newton said was now I'm paraphrasing now in that book Joyce directs a lot of his anger against the structural power of the Catholic Church and in the book Joyce through the narrative kind of shows that how the church the Catholic Church colonizes

not only your language, you know not only your personal freedom what you can and can't do through censorship but it also colonises how you think and Huey P. Newton said that Joyce's deconstruction of the full power over your mind and body of, by Catholicism

reminded him of what was being done to black Americans through the system of white capitalism and that's why fucking james joyce's book is in the middle of a rage against the machine album because irish ideas went on to inspire huey p newton too huey p newton would have also been hugely inspired by marcus garvey and claude mckay you know and I suppose the reason the reason I'm doing this podcast and the reason there's a continual thread in my podcasts with tying up African-American history and Irishness is I just I've always had an affinity towards I just I've always had an affinity towards African-American music and I feel that the you know I'm not African-American I've only been to America twice I have no context for

the struggle of black people I haven't a fucking clue but I do think that because I'm Irish I do I understand colonialism I understand post-colonialism. Even though I didn't grow up in a colonised... Like, the 26 counties of Ireland are not colonised. The north of Ireland still is. I didn't grow up under colonisation, but I still grow up with the effects of colonisation. How I speak, I speak in High Barno English, you know? The way that we speak as Irish people it's not

perfect English as the English people would like it to be spoken it's a queer way of speaking the English language that found its way through you know Irish grammar and years and years of having our speech conditioned and even songs

like I've said this loads before Irish rebel songs come out you black and tans come out and fight me like a man tell your wives how you won medals down in Flanders you know that song

that's fuck the police by NWA come out you black and tans come out and fight me like a man that is gangster rap that is straight gangster rap written i don't know when it was written but like we know the most famously we know it by the wolf tones come out you black and tans but that is fuck the police it's the black and tans to irish people the black and tans were the ss they were an extermination squad created by winston churchill to terrorize and shoot the irish people so the song come out you black and tans come out and fight me like a man that's like i'm not afraid of you it's you are a system of power and i'll fight back so when I I would have grown up listening to that as a kid

in my house as a child because my dad would have been listening to the Wolftones so then when I hear public enemy fight the power or I hear NWA fuck the police when I'm a young teenager it's not strange to me

it makes sense it's the same message but it's in a different form of expression. So I immediately, I gravitate towards it. I go, oh, I've heard this before. And as well with Come Out Your Blackened Hands, the intersectional message in it, you know, it's not just about the Irish struggle. The other lyrics in that song,

Come out your blackened hands, come out you black and tans come out and fight me like a man, show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders that's saying to the black and tan tell us about, you were in World War I in Flanders, how did you win those medals tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away from the green and

lovely lanes of Kilishandra and then the lyrics go come tell us how you slew Them poor Arabs two by two Like the Zulus they had spears and bows and arrows How you bravely faced each one with your sixteen-pounder gun And you frightened them poor natives to the marrow. That there is the intersectionality

of Claude McKay, Marcus Garvey and Cyril Briggs. It's the common struggle. That lyric deals with what the black and tans are, you know, the British would have been doing in what was Mesopotamia. You know, Iraq at the time, the Arabs, Lawrence of Arabia. How the British carved up that area with the Sykes-Picot agreement with the French to carve up you know tribal areas in the interest of British

and French Isle in 1916 or how you bravely fetched each one with your 16 pounder gun, the Zulus you know these African tribes who only had bows and arrows but the British who had invented the machine gun and you have to remember with the machine the machine gun before World War

One there was a policy that a machine gun wasn't was too brutal for war and was not to be used on a white man and the British eradicated thousands of Africans on the African continent who were trying to fight for their freedom, didn't have technology, had arrows and spears, and they mowed them all down with the 16-pounder gun, with machine guns. And that's what that song deals with, the brutality of colonialism. And to this day, day you still hear the British

complain about the Germans because the Germans were the first to use the you know they had agreed at the start of World War One that no one was going to use machine guns and then the Germans did it oh and how nasty are they you often find that with some of my British friends when I asked them what what were they actually taught in school about colonialism they say that a lot of my British friends when I asked them what were they actually taught in school about colonialism they say that a lot of what they were taught was how the French and Germans were worse and how the Dutch were worse and how the British

were the ones who stopped slavery but anyway yeah this podcast that'll get me a lot of sponsors this one will get me a lot of sponsors I'm sure I talked for 80 minutes I hope you enjoyed that I enjoyed that

I like you know occasional historical podcast I told you this week I was going to talk about dogs because last week's podcast was about Japanese music. I'll do a dog podcast at some stage.

I just have, I need to find a good enough hot take. So, yeah, this was, this podcast was, I did it because of Martin Luther King Day. And these people were the influence on Martin Luther King. They're people he would have looked towards, and I just think it's interesting for me as an Irish person to see how their ideas are influenced and tie in with Irish culture. That's something that interests me, and I hope you found it interesting too.

God bless, have have crack enjoy yourselves um if you were a british person listening to this i have nothing against you i'm not angry with you i just don't like the colonial system and neither should you either because it also oppresses the british working class like i don't want to not speak about and try and understand my history just because it's uncomfortable to listen to

in the same way that I'm not going to ask a British person to take responsibility for something that happened before they were fucking born but like like Claude McKay before they were fucking born but like like Claude McKay and Cyril Briggs

it's a systematic problem it's a problem with the system and you know the same Winston Churchill who invented the black and tans who are essentially to the Irish

they're like the SS you know they were an extermination squad. Winston Churchill, who thought up and invented the fucking Black and Tans, he also, around, I think it was around 1917, 1918,

he turned British soldiers on striking workers in Britain, in Liverpool, in Glasgow, and on miners in Wales. The miners were striking. He was scared of, like, a Bolshevik revolution. So Churchill said, get the soldiers, put the soldiers and tanks to Liverpool, to Glasgow, and to Wales, and get them to point guns at the unions and point guns at the striking workers.

And no one was shot. But it lets you know who Winston Churchill truly represented. He didn't represent the British people. He represented the empire and industrialists and the wealthy. You know? And I know you've got all that

oh fight them on the beaches shit and fair play to them for having a crack at Hitler but this is what you're dealing with and this is what gets left out of the Churchill narrative so have a good week enjoy yourself

and have a bit of crack for yourself hopefully this particular podcast will get me loads of sponsors yart Thank you. © transcript Emily Beynon Thank you. © transcript Emily Beynon Thank you. © transcript Emily Beynon Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. © transcript Emily Beynon Thank you. so rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m you can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game,

and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com.