Throughline - Dreams, Creatures, and Visions

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

We are in the season of chaos. It can feel like everything is happening at once: You might be sprinting across an airport; or around your kitchen, with a few too many dishes cooking at once. Your phone keeps pinging — texts, weather alerts, and more and more breaking news. Here at Throughline, we're always going to different places in time and space. So this week, come with us: to another time, another place, another realm. In this episode, we'll be your sonic travel guides on a journey through bite-sized pieces of Throughline's most immersive episodes, from the shadowy world of dreams, to the midst of the Revolutionary War, to the haunting music of Radiohead and their visions of the future.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. We are in the season of chaos. This is the final boarding call. It can feel like everything is happening at once. The doors of the plane will close at 5.

You might be sprinting across an airport. Or around your kitchen with a few too many dishes cooking at once. Your phone keeps pinging, a text from your mom, a weather alert, more and more breaking news. Online conspiracy. Reeling from the devastating floods. From targeting the electric grid. You might feel trapped. Political violence.

Devastating effect. A violent clash. The doors of the place will close. Whatever it is, we're going to take you out of it. Here at ThruLine, we're always going to different places in time and space. In this episode, we've picked a few of our most popular destinations. Six stories pulled from some of our most sound-rich episodes, from the immensity of dreams to the enormous power of a very tiny creature. So immerse yourself. Think of us as your travel guides on a sonic journey to other worlds.

Today's show, Dreams, Creatures, and Visions. Hi, this is George from Venetia, California, and you're listening to ThruLine. Thanks for the history lessons. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees.

Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Part 1. The World of Dreams Three, two, one. Your head hits the pillow, and the journey begins. For much of human history, dreams were considered messages from the deep. They were a source of inspiration, of ideas, and even guided the way many people lived their lives. But beginning in the 16th century in Europe, dreams lost much of their power. The Christian church saw dreams as a possible source of sin. Some philosophers regarded dream interpretation as nonsense.

One writer thought they were merely the result of indigestion. But then, in the late 1800s, in Austria, a man came along who questioned that approach. I started my professional activity as a neurologist, trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. Sigmund Freud was one of the first scientists who thought deeply about dreams and attempted to better understand the science behind them and the emotions and behaviors they conjured. When Freud was a young doctor, he was a scientist. He saw himself as a scientist. This is Siddhartha Ribeiro. He's a neuroscientist and author of the book The Oracle of Night, The History and Science of Dreams. And he was trying himself in different fields of science, of neuroscience. At this time, scientists were trying to understand the connection between the brain and the mind,

the body and consciousness. One of the most common diagnoses of the time was hysteria. It was often a kind of catch-all diagnosis for people, especially women, who might have been suffering from symptoms like depression, anxiety, shortness of breath, insomnia, and even something called sexual forwardness. When Sigmund Freud was a medical student studying hysteria, he came to believe that it was a psychiatric disorder. And after graduating, he opened his own private practice to treat patients and further study the condition.

And until the very end of the 19th century, he was pursuing a clinical work that was very strongly rooted in the neuroscience and psychiatry of his time. But then… His father died. He entered the crisis and had these major dreams. And this is when he undergoes the big change. When he produces his seminal book, The Interpretation of Dreams, and creates a new field of knowledge that we call psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is the idea that investigating the unconscious, often through dreams,

can possibly treat the psychological symptoms patients are suffering, conditions that people still experience today, like depression, anxiety, obsessive behavior, and so on. Using his own dreams and his patients as evidence, Freud put forth an idea in a book called The Interpretation of Dreams that would become his lasting legacy. What Freud did that was so important is that he reclaimed dreams as something meaningful. But even after Freud published his book, it's not like everything instantly changed. Dreams were still mostly dismissed in the scientific community.

Why? Because in the 19th century, science was completely sure that dreams were nonsense, that nobody should pay attention to dreams, that they reflected, at at most bad digestion. What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day, which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes. He would say, dreams have a meaning. They are related to people's lives, they are not something that can be dismissed, but they also cannot be predetermined.

If you want to make sense of somebody's dream, you need to understand that person, you need to listen to that person, you need to share the context of that person. And this is what is done in psychoanalysis and in psychotherapy in general. So Freud was able to say, yes, dreams have a meaning, but this meaning is centered in the dreamer. This idea that people dream for a reason, that it's a way to cope with problems the conscious mind can't do

while it's awake, was radical. That by reflecting on your dreams, you were confronting something deep inside of you that followed like a shadow you didn't know was there. Dreams are meaningful if we pay attention to them. So it's a relationship that we build, not just with ourselves, but with those mental creatures that inhabit ourselves. That was Siddhartha Ribeiro, neuroscientist and author of the book The Oracle of Night. And in the years since Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, there's been research suggesting that what we dream about actually does impact our waking life. Dreams are like that stale taste of sleep in your mouth. When you wake up in the morning, they linger with you, replaying in your head long after

you've gotten out of bed. Sometimes you're returning to a remnant of the past. Sometimes they're a glimpse of the future you wished you lived in. One you might fight to make real. So let's greet our next dreamer, Marcus Garvey, the radical visionary, orator, and champion of Black empowerment and Pan-Africanism. Garvey was born in Jamaica and later moved to New York. Decades before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, Garvey attracted millions with a simple, uncompromising message.

Black people deserve nothing less than everything. And if that couldn't happen in the United States, they should return to Africa. He came to Harlem in 1916, and it was rather fortuitous that he came at a time when there was this burgeoning of the street orators, the ebony sages, as they called them. This is Colin Grant.

I'm the author of Negro with a Hat, the Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey. Colin is also the son of Jamaican immigrants to the UK, and he's our next guide. And it has been said that of the population of Harlem around about that time, 1916, one-fifth of the people in Harlem were from the Caribbean. And so, in a way, Garvey had a ready-made audience. The people who already were drawn to his sound, to the Caribbean lilt of his standard Caribbean voice. Played here by a voice actor.

We are men, human beings, capable of the same acts as any other race, possessing the same circumstances, the same intelligence as any other race. People were just amazed by the great silver-tongued orator in their midst. I mean, Garvey had a voice like thunder. Now Africa's been sleeping, not dead, only sleeping. Today Africa's walking about not only on our feet but on our brains.

Without amplification, Garvey could be heard 10 blocks away from 135th Street to 125th Street. You can enslave for 300 years the bodies of men. You can shackle the hands of men. You can shackle the feet of men. You can imprison the bodies of men. But you cannot shackle or imprison the minds of men. But it wasn't just the power of his voice, it was what he was saying that really drew people in, because he was speaking their thoughts. He was a great romancer and dreamer,

and he articulated in a way that people thought they were hearing themselves. Within a few months, he became the person that anybody with any kind of feeling about wanting to tap into the zeitgeist, that person had to hear Marcus Garvey. He was proud and full of bravado, and his message was equally fierce. Black people should be brash about their pride for their culture, their skin color, their history, and that the only path to liberation was for all African people of the world to unite.

The idea was bold and seductive, and he came up with another idea that would embody the entire movement, a shipping company that would allow anyone to invest in Black empowerment. He called it the Black Star Line. And that idea really caught on. It was an idea that excited, enthralled black people, no matter their station,

from the poorest to the wealthiest, actually. And the Black Star Line was going to be a shipping line that would trade between America, Europe and Africa, but it also would be the shipping line that would lead to the repatriation of African-Americans to Africa. Any black person who could muster the $5 to buy a share in the Black Star Line could become a shareholder. And pretty soon, thousands of them did. Investment in the Black Star Line was historic.

So much so that at every meeting that Garvey spoke, there would be these huge drums, beer barrel-sized drums, and they would be packed full of dollar notes. Even if people didn't want necessarily to go to Africa, they wanted to show their support for this exciting idea. The Black Star Line embodied everything Garvey had preached in Harlem about self-defense, self-confidence, and self-sufficiency. These were poor people, and they bought into the idea, they bought into the romance and the dream of it, and it made them feel important. It made them feel part of something larger than themselves,

and it also felt possible. The thing with such epic, radical dreams is that sometimes they're so big they collapse in on themselves. By the 1920s, the authorities, including a young Justice Department staffer named J. Edgar Hoover, were investigating Garvey. The ships he'd purchased were in disrepair and his allies began turning against him. Eventually, he was convicted for mail fraud, jailed, and then deported back to Jamaica. With the Black Star Line bankrupted, Marcus Garvey's career was more or less over. What he left behind was a promise, one of the most ambitious visions of emancipation,

self-worth, and self-determination that Black Americans had ever seen. This is the great conundrum of Marcus Garvey. He was a great promoter. He managed to excite people, but he was a poor businessman. Fundamentally, he was a great starter, but not such a great finisher. He was a dreamer and a romancer. And the great thing about Marcus Garvey is that he encouraged people to believe in themselves. I mean, it sounds quite small, but it's a quite big thing. When you're at the footstool of society, you are despised. You are the wretched of the earth.

Garvey was saying, fundamentally, you are worthy. His greatest sale was to sell the Black person to themselves. No matter how you choose to look at his legacy, Marcus Garvey's impact on future generations is undeniable. His ideas have remained a powerful part of our culture. Black empowerment and Pan-Africanism were a part of his vision for the future. And Colin Grant says that Garvey remains alive because his ideas live on through the people who still aspire to live the future he dreamed. When I was researching Marcus Garvey, I came across a speech that he gave in Nova Scotia in the 1930s. I was reading

this long speech and towards the end of the speech I came across this line, this phrase, which looked very familiar. And the line was, Mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our mind. We must emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look? So when you sway to Bob Marley and the Wailers, you're really dancing to Marcus Garvey.

That was historian Colin Grant talking to us about the life and mind of Marcus Garvey. Coming up, we leave the world of dreams for a world hidden right in front of us. Hi, this is Suzanne in Minneapolis, and you're listening to ThruLine. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. and they get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor-free. To find out more, head over to plus.npr.org slash throughline. And to everyone who's already signed up, thank you so much. Part 2. The World of Nuisance Pests. They're the little things that plague us. They burrow into the hidey holes, nooks and crannies of our world and make themselves at home.

It's easy to write them off as the vermin we live with. An inconsequential or tiny annoyance at most. But as history tells us, sometimes the smallest foes have the largest impact. For example, we all think we know the story of the American Revolution. People were mad about taxes, the Boston Tea Party broke out, George Washington and his crew took up arms and defeated the Imperial British Army with unconventional tactics. And while some of that is sort of true, there's a big, or should we say small, part of this story that's rarely mentioned. Mosquitoes.

It's 1778, three years into the American Revolutionary War. The first half of the war was fought almost entirely in the north. George Washington and the Continental Army were having mixed success and spent a lot of energy running from the British Army, trying to buy more time. The British are very upset that General Washington won't essentially commit to a decisive battle to end the war. And Washington knows he can't do this because he doesn't have anything. If he commits to a decisive battle and loses, the revolution's over. That's Dr. Tim Weingart. He's a history professor at Colorado Mesa University

and author of the book The Mosquito, A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator. But as long as he can keep an army, however ill-supplied and under-equipped in the field, the British have to defeat and chase this army. All the while, he's desperately waiting for help to come. He waits for his political lords, essentially, in the Continental Congress to get some supplies, get some allies, get some weapons, and hopefully get France on board. This is essentially playing cat and mouse, and it frustrates the British. So, they change their strategy. The British concentrated their forces in the southern colonies of Georgia,

South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. Second in command of this campaign was General Charles Cornwallis, who landed in Charleston with 9,000 British soldiers. And these soldiers come primarily from northern England and Scotland, these British soldiers. So the American soldiers have been seasoned to their colonial malaria. They've had malaria, they've been seasoned to it. Where these British soldiers come over,

they haven't been seasoned to their own English malaria, let alone colonial stew of malaria. And this new set of circumstances in the South forced Cornwallis to adopt some unusual tactics. If you look at his campaign in the South in 1780, 1781, he is zigzagging all over the place. It is one of the strangest marches you've ever seen on a map. And so why is Cornwallis doing this? Is he running away from the Americans? Is he chasing the Americans?

No, he's trying to find a healthy spot for his troops. With a third of my army sick and wounded, which I was obliged to carry in wagons or on horseback, the remainder without shoes and worn down with fatigue, I thought it was time to look for some place of rest and refitment. And he says this repeatedly in his correspondences. He says, malaria is ruining my army. And he's asking British loyalists in the southern colonies where there's a healthy spot. And because they're seasoned, they say, oh, just go that way. And then he gets there and his troops are cut to pieces by malaria again. I am now employed in disposing of the sick and wounded

and in procuring supplies of all kinds to put the troops into a proper state to take the field. I am likewise impatiently looking out for the expected reinforcement from Europe, to enable me either to act offensively, or even to maintain myself in the upper parts of the country, where alone I can hope to reserve the troops from the fatal sickness which so nearly ruined the army last autumn. April 10th, 1781. As Cornwallis was running around looking for a safe, mosquito-free spot for his troops,

he got an order from his superiors to retreat and fortify at the port of Yorktown in Virginia. Yorktown is a little hamlet situated in the tidewater estuaries between the James and York rivers. Essentially, it's rice paddies. It's marshland. So he holds up in Yorktown, and the French Navy comes. They're eventually joined by General Washington and the Americans, and they ensnare the British in Yorktown. This is in August, which is prime mosquito time in prime mosquito country in these marshlands surrounding Yorktown. His army was decimated, and in October, General Cornwallis surrendered. I have the mortification to inform Your Excellency that I have been forced to give up the post and to surrender the troops under my command. The troops being much weakened by sickness as well as by the fire of the besiegers.

In his correspondences, Cornwallis lays some of the blame for his surrender on malaria. He's like, I don't have anybody who can even stand up to fight. He only has 35% of his troops, roughly, who are able to even stand up. Our force diminished daily by sickness to little more than 3,200 rank and file fit for duty. The rest are either sick, dead, or dying of malaria. The siege of Yorktown was the final battle in the war between the colonies and Great Britain, opening the path for the formation of the United States. So in a way, Dianofili's mosquito, the founding mother of the United States. And she deserves to have her nice proboscis face

tucked in between Washington and Jefferson on Mount Rushmore. That was Dr. Tim Weingard, a professor of history at Colorado Mesa University. Okay, so now mosquitoes are supposed to be the good guys, the underdogs that help the U.S. ensure its independence. Yeah, like, what's next? Rats are supposed to be our friends? They're very intelligent.

They're very adaptable. Just like humans. You know, they moved around with us because they can live in lots of different places and figure out how to survive. Yep. We're taking a closer look at rats. During the pandemic, rats reminded us that in the large scheme of things, we're just one more animal in the city. One of our producers, Lawrence Wu, watched it happen in New York City, where he and I live. I mean, what's New York City without rats? He picks up the story. You know, you kind of see the landscape and you're looking for signs of rats everywhere.

Are there burrows there? Is there rat feeding in that corner? So yeah, they're just, to me, like part of the city. This is Dr. Jason Munshi-South. He's a professor of biology at Fordham University in the Bronx, where he leads his own research lab. And since about 2008, when I moved to New York City, I've been studying the effects of urbanization on wild animals and also pest species like rats. Jason's lab focuses on understanding how humans in cities affect wild animal populations in those places.

So I called him up to get a little more insight into what is up with New York City's rats. They're primarily nocturnal. They live in burrows, so they'll burrow into soil and spend most of the day down there. And they build these colonies, almost like villages of related rats. They're highly social. They spend a lot of time with other rats. They have to be somewhere near water sources.

And they are, you know, territorial to some degree. Over time, they'll add more tunnels, and they'll start to connect. They'll sort of overlap with neighboring boroughs. And so it becomes this big tangle. Like a subway, but for rats. So I've seen them, you know, in like New York City parks where there wasn't a lot of control going on, where you could count like 300 holes and you could just watch them coming in and out all day. Seeing all those rats coming in and out of those

rat holes sparked the question, what's going on with rats in New York City? How did these animals get here? And Jason decided to build a whole study around it. The first thing he discovered was that New York City is actually overrun by just one kind of rat, the brown rat. Their Latin name is Rattus norvegicus, which would translate to the Norway rat, but that's a misnomer.

They did not originate in Norway. We don't exactly know why they have that name. Jason and his team decided that in order to find the actual origin of the New York City rat, they had to compare its DNA to other rats in the world to find a match. Kind of like an Ancestry.com or 23andMe, but for brown rats. So he and his team started calling and asking labs around the world to send them DNA samples of their brown rats. We ended up with, you know, like 500 samples all around the world.

And we just decided, okay, let's do this properly and try to understand what major groups of rats exist everywhere and use that as context to understand what rats are in New York City. And what they found was that all the signs were pointing to a place thousands of miles east of Norway. As far as we know, they originated in East Asia. Likely in a region between northern China and Mongolia a couple million years ago. It's likely that originally they were living along like streams, sort of grassy savanna areas where there was water sources. They were probably eating all sorts of things, seeds, fruits, insects, you know, snails.

They've even been found in coastal areas to eat, like, mussels and things. And for a long time, the brown rat kind of did its own thing. So the question is, how and when did our paths get so intertwined? When did they become commensal with humans? Commensal is this Latin term that basically means eating from the same table.

And they probably began utilizing human foods when agriculture began in China. And that was, you know, 11,000 years ago. It seems like brown rats kind of stayed for a while. And they didn't really spread out for a long time, for hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years. And then boom, something happens. Our dates suggest less than a thousand years ago, they got to Southeast Asia. By the time they got there, you know, humans had more advanced ships, and you were starting to see, like, regional trade through the Indian Ocean and even up into Europe. Cities start building up, human populations are expanding,

and you see the brown rat just getting everywhere. But the great brown rat migration didn't end there. In fact, in order for the brown rat to take over the world, they needed to hitch a ride with humans looking to take over the world. Rats would hang around ports, waiting to board ships that were stocked with all kinds of foods perfect for rats to feast on. And it turned out, in the 17th and 18th centuries, there were a lot of ships moving around the globe. It was the age of conquest. The British Empire, the Dutch, the Spanish, the French, they were all moving rats all over the place. In North and South America, in Africa, in New Zealand, in Australia.

And at some point, one of those ships crossed the Atlantic and made its way to the United States. And once they were in all those ports, they just moved inland across continents. And so they hitched a ride with humans. And, you know, we can look at their history as kind of a proxy for human history because humans moved them around. That was Jason Munshi South speaking with ThruLine producer Lawrence Wu. Coming up, we take you on the last leg of our journey into a world where dreams and nightmares meet. The world we live in.

And we'll try and look beyond it. Hi, this is David Waite. I'm out walking the dog in North Middletown, Kentucky. And we, the dog and I, and you, are listening to ThruLine on NPR. ThruWine on NPR. Part 3. The World of Possibilities. Monster, monster. Truckers and other protesters hit the streets. No heat, no water. Right now, the world often feels out of control.

And for many people, that feeling began around the turn of the century. A new millennium was approaching, but it didn't feel like a fresh start. Amid that shakiness, the band Radiohead created their album Kid A and its companion album Amnesiac. They, in many ways, are the band of the turn of the millennium because they captured what that moment represented, what it felt like. It's a little bit like looking through an old photograph album that you've forgotten you had. This is Stanley Donwood, who created all the artwork for the band since 1994,

including the album art for Kid A. But as soon as you look at it, it becomes incredibly familiar, and you can remember all of the surrounding around that album. Repeating once again our top story, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has been removed from power and there are tanks now. We're the children of the end of the Cold War, when there was no longer an enemy.

This is Tom York, a lead singer and a songwriter for the band. When there was no longer someone on the other side of that wall, that wall comes down. The Berlin Wall doesn't mean anything anymore. The wall that the East Germans put up in 1961 to keep its people in will now be breached by anyone who wants to leave. Then you're still left with this fear.

I think about this, and what about this internet thing? Do you know anything about that? Sure. What the hell is that exactly? Well, it's become a place where people are publishing information. If you ain't on the information superhighway, baby, then where is he? What is this thing? What is this thing? How does this work? This was the time of the dot-com boom,

where people were optimistic and excited about this new technology that everyone would be able to use. We definitely felt as if we were living in a world that previous generations just wouldn't have got. You know, the idea that history is over and everything is going to be fine. But it wasn't. Everything was fraying at the edges. The refugees came through in 11 covered trucks. Here on these faces, these broken bodies, hard evidence of the previous day's Serb onslaught on Srebrenica.

History is over. Our last message was that we no longer had time to report anything. into ethnic violence. It was horrible. Who's making these decisions and why are we not involved? Because especially our generation at that time, we were about to have children, we were having children. We had some place in the hierarchy of things. We had some success, we had all these things. But at the same time, most of these important ethical decisions about how does a society look after its weakest,

how does our society see itself in connection with the rest of Europe or the world or Kosovo or Africa? There have been massacres in plenty in the tortured history of Rwanda, but this was something different. This was genocide. Who's deciding this, and why the f*** aren't they asking us? So when we were working on Kid A and Amnesiac,

the shift was not necessarily one of just dread. There's two sorts of shift. There was the dread of the millennia coming up, but there was also a shift which was sort of saying, we now no longer have to talk about this. Everything's already been decided. You know, progress is what it is. There's nothing you can do.

The UN climate change report was 1994. And us being us, I think we would have read that probably. The way I was working at the time was very much lines would go into a hat and get taken out. And when they worked, they worked. So I can't tell you if I was trying to write a song about global warming. I very much doubt it.

I think probably it was more like I was writing down my neurosis or I was listening to someone may have said, we're not scaremongering, the radio's saying it, whatever, and then it gets absorbed and then comes out. In the Kid A album, there is a constant sense of tension and questioning and examination of not just the state of the world, but the climate, the appeal of technology, and how it seemed to have already swallowed us whole.

It was an album that tried to snap you out of this trance. But Tom York says it wasn't just about angst and dread. It was about projecting another world. It was and still is about possibilities. One has to imagine a form of progress or a form of living which is more beneficial to the way human beings want to be rather than being reduced to these two-dimensional avatars that appear on your phone. Like the moment we adopt modes of behavior that mirror our avatars, but we are at the same time now,

finally formulating ways to think beyond that and going, well, hang on a minute, I don't want to be that. It's a challenge many of us still face. How do we find a way through the complexity of a world that feels like it's balancing on the edge of a blade and still imagine a different world for ourselves and for those who come next? And that's where we want to end our sonic journey with you. With someone who imagined a different world for

himself and for all of us, civil rights leader and key architect of the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin. Bayard Rustin moved to New York City in 1937. It was a big change from the small Quaker town he grew up in in Pennsylvania. You know, he could walk along 125th Street in Harlem and see major theaters and Black-owned businesses. This is John D'Amelio, author of Lost Prophet, The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. And Bayard, who is experiencing the feelings and the awareness that he was gay, thought it would be a safe place to be both racially and in the context of a city to explore his sexual desires.

When Bayard first arrived in Harlem, he thought his future would be on the stage, singing. But his career soon took a turn towards activism. The power of the call to social justice and the deep political activism of the Great Depression decade pointed him ultimately in that direction. Influenced by the labor and communist movements during this time, Bayard heard a voice that changed everything for him. I regard myself as a soldier, though a soldier of peace. I know the value of discipline and truth. It was the voice of Mahatma Gandhi. For Rustin in the 1930s, at a time of intense racism in the United States,

the idea that a man of color was leading a movement against the world's largest empire was completely inspiring and, you know, awe-provoking. Bayard immersed himself in interviews and articles about Gandhi. And then experienced almost, you could describe it as a conversion to nonviolence. He believed Gandhi had torn down an empire and changed the nation with little more than words and peaceful protest. I can see that in the midst of death, life persists. In the midst of untruth, truth persists.

In the midst of darknessviolence as he organized protests, marches, and sit-ins. And then, in 1956, he joined forces with a rising star in the civil rights movement. That was the day that we started a bus protest, which literally electrified the mission. Word of the Montgomery bus boycott spread quickly across the country. With Dr. King identified as the key leader, there is obviously concern for his safety. And then Rustin arrives. They begin their discussions about strategy and tactics. And Rustin is explaining more about Gandhian nonviolence, and he informs King that if you are going to adopt this principle

of absolute nonviolence, you cannot have armed guards outside your home. It's simply inconsistent and is delivering the wrong message. Dr. King consults with the people he's working with. He consults with his wife, Coretta Scott King, and they make the decision that, in fact, Bayard Rustin is right. I think it was a very important moment in Dr. King's evolution as a leader in this movement. And it was done in a very quiet and non-assertive way by Bayard. I was an associate of Dr. Martin Luther King for a number of years. Actually, I am the person who drew up plans for his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Bayard, who was 17 years older than Dr. King, taught him everything he knew about Gandhi's philosophy and worked to elevate King's profile to a national level.

But this was the 1950s, when gay men were targeted by the police constantly. And Bayard, an openly gay Black man, was seen as a threat by some within the movement. So he learned how to become the organizer who mobilized other people who then were the ones who had the most visible public presence. And in 1963, when Bayard began to organize the March on Washington, he knew that Dr. King should be the face of it.

Bayard had just a few months to pull together what would become the largest march on the nation's capital. Bayard would tell us to visualize and pull through it the whole day, you know, from the time a participant woke up in the morning until they went to Washington, until they left. This is Rochelle Horowitz, who was part of the organizing team for the march. Folding letters, mailing out mailings, calling people on the phone. It was like the dark ages.

Rochelle was in her early 20s and thought she was maybe in over her head. But she stuck with it for one simple reason. Because Bayard told me I could do it. I mean, that's all. Disagreements came up along the way. But the thing that everyone agreed on was that the march had to be nonviolent. Bayard, I think, knew from day one

that he was going to ask the New York City black policemen to volunteer as marshals. And then he proceeded every day during the march to take a group of them out in the courtyard and back of the Friendship Building and train them in nonviolent crowd control, holding hands and encircling people should there be a disturbance. And when the day finally arrived, August 28, 1963, Bayard and his team woke up at the crack of dawn and watched as 250,000 people who'd come by bus, train, car, or plane streamed into the National Mall. Bayard was a witness to a great change to come.

What is more important to bring about changes in society? Changed individuals or changed social structure? The answer to that is very simple. Because if you don't start out with individuals who are determined to change things, you will never get a political consensus. And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui.

And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and... Thanks also to... Tamar Charney, Ashley Messinger, Micah Ratner, Mara Gassman, and Anya Grenman. And special thanks to our voice actors, Casey Herman, Ron Bob Semple, and Steve Tyson. This episode was mixed by James Willits. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani.

Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org or hit us up on Twitter at ThruLine NPR. Thanks for listening. you give Grammarly to your entire team. Grammarly is a secure AI writing partner that understands your business and can transform it through better communication. Join 70,000 teams who trust Grammarly with their words and their data. Learn more at Grammarly.com. Grammarly. Easier said, done.