The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to have you all with us. My cohost today is my colleague Mike Fox, who hosts Stories of Resistance for the Real News and covers Latin America and world issues. Today we’re talking with David Hollinger about free Speech, the movement that happened to Berkeley and the fight we have now for Free Speech in America. David Hollinger has written many books, including Protestants Abroad, how Missionaries Tried to Change the World, but Changed America after Cloven Tongues of Fire, Protestant Liberalism, and Modern History and Science, Jews and Secular Culture. Among many of the books, he’s the former president of the Organization of American Historians and the Preston Hotchkis, professor of History Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley, and joins us now to talk about free speech in the World today and what it was like then in 1964 when he was an active participant in the free speech movement that took over Berkeley and Shook the nation. So Michael’s good being together again, and welcome to the program, David Hollinger. Thank you. Lemme ask you to describe the free speech movement in Berkeley at that moment and what was happening. Let’s start there.

David Hollinger:

The issue that brought it up was the remarkably myopic perspective of the regents of the University of California and the administration, which was to prevent speech on campus that advocated political action. And so as a result, all these rallies would occur right at the edge of the campus. So you’d stand up on the street and then you’d have a couple thousand people on the campus listening. And so the idea was, this is absurd. We ought to be able to speak on the campus about political advocacy. So this is what triggered it, and more and more people got involved, and it’s true that the civil rights movement experience of the South was very important. There were lots of people, not only Mario Savio, but others who had been involved in Mississippi Summer. So the connection was there because what kind of political adequacy did you want?

Well, we were advocating against racism. The other thing, and this is I think less widely understood today, mark, is that it was a struggle over the character of the university. And the idea was that the university ought to be a place where people can have all of these political arguments out in the open that’s not talking about what goes on in the classroom, which is a somewhat different set of issues, but we ought to be able to have free inquiry out there arguing as we want all over the campus. And as the movement went on, it was very exciting because this sort of civic stuff about civil rights and anti-racism merged with the academic stuff. And so there was a sense of community in that a lot of US students graduate and undergraduate and especially junior faculty for a while, shared these values. And so the sense of community that had emerged even at the end of October, fairly early in the process was very strong.

And I think the thing that began particularly to affect me was that I realized that we, in the free speech movement, we had a deeper and more accurate understanding of what universities were than the Regents did, and then the administration did. Now, Clark Kerr was actually a damn good university president. He did a lot of very good things, but he wasn’t very good on this. And our local Chancellor Strong wasn’t very good either, and the regions were terrible. But the feeling that we had by will into November was that there were so many things that came together. So there was a sense of almost peace emotionally speaking that even though we were loud mouths and saying a lot of stuff, the community that we had based on our academic commitments on our civic commitments pulled together very nicely. And the culmination of it, and this is a part of the free speech movement that I don’t think is widely enough recognized today.

The culmination of it was when the faculty Senate and Berkeley has the strongest faculty senate of any university in the United States. So when these guys speak, it means something. And on December 8th, they voted eight to one to support our demands. So here you have a case of the students saying, this is what the university ought to be. And rather than our feeling in a state of tension with the faculty, it turned out they agreed. So the sense of harmony that was possible, which you couldn’t do very much. Well in a lot of the later movement stuff when we were involved in the anti-war movement, I mean the issues were different, didn’t have so much to do with the character of the university, but the free speech movement was very much about universities and about civil rights and about free speech.

Marc Steiner:

One of the things I thought as you were saying this, is that this is direct line, which is really important from the Civil Rights movement to the free speech movement and the actors who came and did that. That’s right. And from there to the anti-war movement that exploded not long after.

David Hollinger:

Oh, absolutely.

Marc Steiner:

There’s a direct connection between all those things.

David Hollinger:

No question about it. And when the anti-war movement comes along, a lot of us that had learned our politics in the free speech movement were right there in the anti-war movement from the beginning. And the Berkeley anti-war movement was very vocal early on. I mean, the same was true at Michigan and a couple other places, but we were out there partly because of the political experience that we’d already had. And the anti-war, of course, broadened the constituency. I mean, you had the civil rights thing, but not everybody who was interested in the Vietnam War had also been that committed to civil rights. I mean, nobody was against it, but it’s a different set constituency. And you began to get draft age geist. So the draft comes up. And so that we had all these big rallies against the war where we drew on the free speech tradition, and we were very glad to be part of a tradition of political dissent in the country.

But again, there was a kind of harmony about it because most people that we knew were against the war. Now, in the case of the anti-war movement, though, you do have factions that develop as you get along. And so you get the weather underground and you get people that are, well, from a more mainstream point of view, very far out. And these were honest debates. They were debates though within a movement that was very clear that the United States proved itself to be an imperialist operation, and we wanted to restore the best things about the United States and its role in the world that were being betrayed by Vietnam. But you know all this, you were in the war, anti-war movement.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, I was deep into it. Deep it. There you go. And on the fringes of the weatherman though, I didn’t go underground. Oh, really? Oh, okay. Yes, but Oh, Mike, I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Michael Fox:

No, it’s fine. David, if you will, could you just take us back? Imagine that we’re in the heyday of this free speech movement. We’re there on campus, what do we see? Take us to a protest. Take us just to a moment, describe the scene.

David Hollinger:

Well, okay, the Spro Hall Plaza where Savio and various other Worthies would be speaking, you’d have several thousand. Of course, crowd assessments are often contested, but I can remember times when it was shoulder to shoulder all the way from Bancroft, which is the closest street to the South, all the way up to Sayer Gate, which is the part of the campus that enters the other buildings back to where the stairwell goes down to the lower level. So I don’t know, were there five or 6,000 people at those rallies? I think there might have been, but it was this feeling that we really did have this act together, and there were a number of rallies like that. I would say the anti-war rallies were bigger than the free speech rallies, but they were part of the same thing. The free speech rallies began small and gradually increased over time.

And among the things that helped them, actually helped them grow were these faculty members that used to show up and speak. So Savio and Suzanne Goldberg, these others would make their thing Betina Aptekar, and there would be several thousand there. And then John Sill, he died a couple of weeks ago in these nineties. Now John Searl was later expelled from Berkeley because of sexual harassment. Alright, so he’s famous now for that. But in 64, he was one of the faculty members that was the most vocal in defending the free speech movement. So you’d be standing out there and then suddenly after one of the free speech committee members spoke, suddenly you’d have John Sill up there, or you’d have Robert Bou poet from the speech department, or you might have, I think Henry Smith finally spoke at some of these. You’d have a number of the leading faculty members.

So the atmosphere as I’m describing it, is this gradual mix of civil rights driven activities displayed by speakers who were in Mississippi Summer to a more comprehensive, multidimensional constituency signaled by the changes in the speakers that you would get from time to time. Now, that applies to the main theater of the action. But to speak a little bit more to your question, Michael, the free speech movement also exists in little pockets of discussion all over the campus. You’d have a lot of people eating lunch at the dining commons, and the discussion was, of course, about these issues in free speech. And there would be somebody would come along who was, there was a guy named Rusty who would come along where I often ate lunch, and he would say what was going on in the free speech committee?

And then we would ask him questions, gee, don’t you think the leadership should do this or that? Well, I don’t know. We discussed that and so-and-so was against it, and you never know what Betina is going to say. Okay, so there’ll be these kinds of casual interactions. The reason I stress that is that if you only focus on the main theater of action, you miss out on how deeply this whole movement affected random conversations among people all across the campus under almost any circumstances. Now with regard to classrooms, I remember we were all very strict about this, and I remember my Bob Deloff great Colonial American professor. I was in his seminar that semester, and when we went to Havelin Hall for his class, this was Puritanism all the way. We did not use class time to talk about the free speech movement. However, we all knew that Bob Little was a strong supporter of the movement. We would talk to him before class, then after class, professor Litoff, is the Senate going to act on this? We heard that the Senate was having an emergency meeting on Tuesday. What’s going to happen? Well, it looks pretty good because several of the leaders of the Senate have come around and are much more positive toward the FSM than they were two weeks ago. Oh, I use that as an example of how on the edge of the academic experience this would come up. Anyway, I hope that answers your question.

Michael Fox:

Absolutely. I think it’s just incredible how important this was happening at Berkeley, but how important, what an impact this had over the entire country. David, how old were you at the time?

David Hollinger:

Let’s see, I was 23. That was my second year. Second year of graduate student. I was born in 1940, born in 1941.

Michael Fox:

Amazing. Did you understand the significance of what was happening, what you were participating in?

David Hollinger:

I understood that it had some significance because there were just so many people with so many different backgrounds that were involved in it. And also we were getting national press, not always friendly. So I guess I would say that I was as aware of as the next guy that this was an interesting thing to be part of. So yeah. Yeah. I guess the reason I’m hesitating is that I don’t want to claim to have today’s assessment of what its significance is necessarily, but at the time we thought that we were, as they say, making history

Marc Steiner:

And you were making, I think you did. That’s right. Fast forward for a second and thinking about the free speech movement, the name of it, what it stood for, what it stood for on campus, the ability to speak out and how that relates to what we face today and what has happened in this battle for free speech, which we don’t talk about much in terms of free speech, but clearly there is a suppression going on and there’s this rightwing takeover much of our country, and how that moment talks what we’re facing now in terms of this whole battle around free speech, what does it mean to people now?

David Hollinger:

Yeah, I think that a challenge there is to recognize that the free speech movement was able to engage this at a high level of generality. That the free speech conversations that we have in our own time involve refined arguments about whether or not to say from the river to the sea is hate speech, refined arguments as to whether somebody’s failure to speak out with sufficient vehement after October 7th constitutes a deep moral failure. So there’s a back and forth a lot about Israel and Palestine that adds a different dimension. Is antisemitism free speech? Well, some kind of speech is protected and some not. So you have all these arguments about what the First Amendment actually protects. Now, all of that gives today’s conversation about free speech, a different aspect. And although guys like me would like to say, oh yes, we figured this out for all time.

We didn’t face this. And as a consequence of that today, a lot of the discussion about the First Amendment is quite refined. And I think of the writings of Robert Post, the former dean of the Yale Law School, who writes eloquently about free speech doctrine, our own law dean here at Berkeley, Irwin Chesky, who’s done a couple of columns in the Times that you might’ve seen. He’s also very good on this. So these people engage harder issues. I would say it was easy for us. The other thing is that nowadays wise heads are quick to point out that academic freedom and free speech are quite separate things. We didn’t make that much in the earlier days. Now it’s recognized that academic freedom protects professionalism. It protects an ability of instructors to maintain the truths that they want to tell, even if there’s somebody coming in from the outside that doesn’t like those truths, so that the academic professionalism is quite different than just free speech on the streets.

So that’s a distinction that’s been made post is particularly good at talking about the difference between academic freedom and free speech, even though they are definitely allied and they have part of the same large ideological tradition going back to Milton and all that. But you refer to the stuff about what’s happening today and the struggle of universities to protect themselves. Now, just this very, this morning, I saw that Arizona had joined many of the other universities in refusing the so-called compact by which the federal government promises to fund the research on your campus if you sort of clean up your act on Middle Eastern studies and other things like that. So I’m glad that we’re fighting that. I don’t know what will happen at Vanderbilt and Texas, but most of the universities have stood up against that right now, given what the Trump administration is trying to do to universities to reduce them to vocational and technical institutions, to deprive them of the critical role that universities have traditionally played in fomenting democracy, they really are trying to do that.

So that means that this is the hill to die on. The universities are right, this is the hill to die on. This is the worst crisis that we’ve had since 19 16, 17, 18 in terms of the political opposition to universities. When Charles Beard resigned at Columbia and there were a whole series of quarrels over World War I, this is by far the worst thing that’s happened since then. And universities are much more central to American life than they were at that time. They have a lot more authority. They affect many more things. So it’s important that we take a stand, and I’m very glad to see that many of them are, but not all. And we’ll see how some of these other people come in the next little while. So if that’s what you’re asking about, yes, I think that’s a really huge issue of our time.

Marc Steiner:

So one of the things Mike and I talked about before this conversation started was the work you’ve been doing on the evangelical and the communicable movements. Oh yeah.

David Hollinger:

Right.

Marc Steiner:

And how that struggle now with the rise of kind of right wing religious movements in our country affect the notion of free speech. How do they affect it and how does all that tie together? What does that mean for where we are?

David Hollinger:

Well, a lot of the influence of evangelicalism on American politics has been this mannequin approach of absolute good and absolute evil, and that’s part of the biblical tradition that they rely on. I mean, even Jesus of Nazareth used to say, if you are not for me, you’re against me. That’s from a point of view of biblical scholarship, a little bit of an outlier among Jesus’s comments, but it’s a part of the tradition. And the more ecumenical Protestants, the Congregationalists and the Methodists and so forth, they never actually did that. And in modern times, the ecumenical Protestants have been quite okay with plurals democracy. We might say that they should have done this or that thing differently. But you can’t say that the National Council of Churches, the Christian, the Methodist Church, are enemies of plurals democracy. You really can’t say that. Whereas a lot of these evangelical spokesmen are very absolute and they don’t want to compromise. Josh Hawley, the Senator from Missouri, is a bonafide Christian supremacist.

So when he says that the government of the United States has got to be subject to Christianity, that Jesus is the Lord of all, and we need to make sure that this is the case in every government in the world, including ours, well, that’s not a circumstance where you have a lot of back and forth. So I’d say that the Evangelicalism has made it harder for plurals democracy to function because it promotes this mannequin stuff. Now, it’s important to note that Republicans didn’t need evangelicals to begin to think this way. Back in the nineties, Grich and Pat Buchanan circulated a series of instructions for the Republican Party. We’ve got to stop treating the Democrats as colleagues. We’ve got to demonize them that way. We’ll get more votes. Now, that was not grounded in evangelicalism, but one of the reasons that evangelical voters have been such an easy mark for right wing Republicans is that they bring this mannequin to public affairs.

So when the Republican leaders then cultivate all these evangelical voters, that kind of absolutism, that plays very well. And I think one of the striking things of really the last half century since Reagan really is how the Republican party, which doesn’t begin with that particular interest in religion at all, it finds that the evangelical voters are its most reliable constituency. So if you’re able to get all these evangelical voters every time, it’s kind of silly from a political point of view, speaking instrumentally not to use them. So I think that’s been a major disincentive for a lot of Republican leaders to go against some of Trump’s stuff, because Trump’s style, his own Manican style, plays very well with a lot of these evangelicals who, and you go back, if you look at the history of what evangelical leaders were saying in the 1940s, fifties, sixties and seventies, even though they didn’t have the political clout that they have now, they said that we evangelicals have either got to go off by ourselves and not be part of this, or we have to take it over.

What does it mean to take it over? Well, we’ve got to get rid of all this new deal regulation. So you have a lot of evangelical leaders like Harold Chenal, the first president of the National Association of Evangelicals during the 1940s and fifties. He’s saying this stuff all the time. So it’s a little bit frustrating. Now, when you read a lot of the journalists who think of this as a fairly recent phenomenon, you need to understand that evangelical protestantisms leaders since World War II have voiced anti-regulation, anti pluralistic arguments all the way through. So the Republicans sort of back their way into this. I mean, this is the party of Earl Warren got saved the mark, but yet what has is that they gradually get sucked in. So really you can say that for the first time in American history, we have a major political party with a vested interest in keeping the educational level of voters low. And the evangelicals play into that because the educational level of the evangelical voters is low, low, you can count on them. And a lot of demographic demagogic arguments that might not work as well elsewhere work very well with that constituency. So I think that the influence of evangelicals in American life is a very big thing, and it extends well beyond free speech, but that’s one of the things that it does. You don’t want free speech if you figured everything out.

Michael Fox:

That’s right. That’s right. You have to stick in line, David. So you just segued into exactly where I want to go. I’m really interested in this cross section between say, fake news and disinformation. And this question of how the Republican party now wants to keep people uneducated. How do these things go hand in hand? What does it mean for free speech in and accurate and truthful speech? Because the other thing that’s been under attack in a lot of ways,

David Hollinger:

I think that the ability of the Republicans to control the flow of information for a lot of Americans has profound consequences. Classic free speech theory as developed by Mill. And as all of us in the free speech movement did this, and Mario Savio always wanting to have everybody argue back and forth and come to an agreement was based on a vision of a community of inquirers and speakers that would argue back and forth, and somebody would point out this or that fact this or that fact. And the idea was that you could persuade somebody that you disagreed with. You might say, oh, come on, don’t you understand the following? And then you’d quote various things that actually happened. And then somebody might say, well, yeah, we’ve got to deal with that. Whereas now the Republicans can count on a lot of the voters that they count on.

Those people are not going to learn a lot of the truth telling things. So it’s fine for Stephanie rule and her friends on M-S-N-B-C to go over what the facts are and how the Trump administration during a given day has told 20 lies. Okay, well, the people that watch M-S-N-B-C that take Politico, that read the New York Times or the Post or the Globe, they get that. But a lot of these voters don’t see that. And as long as the Republicans can control the information flow, not only Fox News, but Sinclair, I know there are a lot of rural areas in the country, rural and small town areas where the media is now controlled altogether by these national conglomerates. I mean, the local newspapers, local TV stations are either gone or bought up. So that’s something that has happened in the larger political economy of the United States.

And it frees the Republicans to lie and lie and lie, and they know that there is no accountability with regard to the particular segments of the population that matter. So we might say, oh, but these are obviously lies. And look at all this, it’s been refuted. I mean, the New York Times has a list of 27 lies that the administration has told today. Okay, well somehow that doesn’t get through. Or if it does, there’s so much identity politics and tribalism on the part of the Trumpites that they will not believe it even when it comes up. I remember I was reading one of these reporters was going around interviewing Trump voters, and he says this Trump voter. Now with regard to January 6th, there are a whole lot of police officers who are actually hurt that day and injured by the demonstrators. Oh, that’s not true. That’s false news. Close the door.

Speaker 4:

Right.

David Hollinger:

Okay. So even when there’s an effort to do it. So I’d say that the tribalism and the identity politics is part of this. The control of the media is also part of it. And I think it helps in terms of understanding how we get here to realize that when the Republicans choose the Southern strategy back in the days of Nixon and Reagan, when they choose the Southern strategy, they end up deciding that they don’t have to appeal to highly educated voters in the States with the highest educational level. So by 2016, which is before Trump, before Trump, the Republican party had so abandoned the states with higher education that of the 32 senators that represented the Northeast and the Pacific Coast, only two were Republicans. And these our states like New York and California that used to produce Republican governors and senators of genuine stature. But once the Republicans found that they could win with the southern states and with the Midwest and the mountains, then they did that.

And there were also these educational and religious coordinates because even though the Southern strategy was based ultimately on race, that you wanted to appeal to voters who were uncomfortable with the Civil Rights Act and with integration, that’s the way it started. It turns out that many of the voters in those same states are also evangelicals. By far the highest percentage of evangelicals are in those states, the old Confederacy plus Oklahoma and Kentucky. And they’re also the lowest educational level. So it’s not only that less than 20% of the population of those states are college graduates, much less down to 14 and 15% in some states. But also the quality of the secondary education is not as great. So the Republicans backed into this trap, I would say, by which their electoral fortunes depend increasingly on voters that are not well-educated and that are as evangelicals not terribly committed to modern standards of epistemic plausibility.

So the educational and the religious components fit together. But the reason I stress that is that I think that our press accounts generally, there’s a lot of stuff on evangelicals and their threat to democracy, but that all this goes back to the southern strategy and a decision that the Republicans made. So evangelicalism has actually not changed that much in the last 70 or 80 years. What’s changed is the Republican Party, the changes that have occurred in evangelicalism are mostly those that come with getting greater power. They have more power. Now, evangelicalism has changed in that. Yes. But the line that you have coming out of evangelicals is not that different than you would get from Harold AK in 1942.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah, I mean, it seems this is great. And I think that it’s as if everything has been turned on his head from the moment, the free speech movement and the fuel, the civil rights movement that fueled the free speech movement came out of the church. It did. And the ecumenical church and the church that fought That’s right. And that everything is get twisted and turned around, and with Trump attacking free speech at universities, attacking universities and all of that, and the evangelicals taking precedence inside the Christian world, at least publicly.

David Hollinger:

Well, that’s right. And Martin Luther King, Jr. Whatever else he may have been, was a standard issue ecumenical Protestant. He was trained at Boston University by some of the greatest liberal theologians of the time.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, he was. Yes.

David Hollinger:

And and the other people that he worked with were supported by these liberal Protestants. The letter from the Birmingham Jail is published in the Christian century, and this was at a time when the evangelicals were still holding their meetings in places where there was segregation and where quite hostile things about the civil rights were being published in their magazine. Now, one of the things that happens to give more authority to the evangelicals is the gradual secularization process. So as the liberal Protestants, the ecumenical Protestants, the Methodists, the Episcopalians, and the Congregationalists and so forth, as they lose members from the 1960s on down through the end of the century, the country loses what has been the most important countervailing force against evangelicalism. And so you no longer have people like Reinold, Nebo, Harry Emerson, Fosdick, a lot of the great Protestant thinkers who were okay with plurals democracy, and they’re gone. They don’t have that much authority. So Christianity is increasingly recognized as what the evangelicals do and the decline of the liberal Protestants. And it’s not absolute. I mean, we have bishop buddy trying to defy the sovereign. So there are flashes of this. I’m not saying that that movement is dead, but the diminution of liberal Protestantism and the enlargement of the authority that goes with ecu, with evangelicals, that has a lot to do with where we are today.

Michael Fox:

David, mark was just mentioning how everything is kind of turned on its head at this moment. And I think it’s interesting how Trump will use the discourse of free speech to attack free speech. That’s right. One of the first things he did on January 20th was to sign his new free for free speech that now I’m finally going to bring free speech for you. How intertwined is Trump’s discourse around free speech or controlling the message and teachings at universities kind of tied into this large authoritarian like Trump’s attempts to take back or take over universities and gear them in one direction at the same time, use this discourse around free speech, but his definition of free speech, how intertwined are those two things?

David Hollinger:

Well, what happens is that Trump uses a lot of generic ideals like merit and free speech and diversity, and he claims that he represents them and that the academic establishment has betrayed those ideals. And so free speech is somehow that’s not allowed unless it’s enunciating the stuff that he wants to advance. So I think a lot of the commentators have observed that a strategy of the current Republican party, especially Trump, is to take some generally accepted ideal claim it for their side and accuse the other side of not doing it.

So you claim that the other people are weaponizing the Department of Justice. So you Trump weaponized the Department of Justice and you say, it’s actually the Democrats that did this. We’re just fighting back. The conversation is about free speech. Follow that same pattern. Oh, they did it first. And it’s consistent with Steve Bannon’s program is that you have to confuse people, do everything you can to confuse people so that somebody who’s not following this that much, and a lot of the Trump voters, all the social scientists tell us, a lot of ’em don’t follow politics that closely. They hear, oh, well, so-and-so’s for this. But then the other side is too, well, who knows what’s going on here. So it’s calculated to confuse and free speech is a cardinal example of how that happens. I would say also, Michael, that that’s part of this conversation about what it means to be conservative.

And when they say that they want universities to be more responsive to conservative ideas, well what do they mean by that? And sometimes they will seem to say, oh, well, we want things to be done on the basis of merit. Well, most universities are saying, we’re doing that. We don’t always get it right. There are disagreements about what counts as merit, but we’ve got an apparatus for that so we can figure this out. Whereas the Trump people are saying that we’ll decide what counts as merit and they will disregard the quite fine grain stuff that’s been going on in universities. They’ll also say something like, well, we have to make sure that economic ideas and basic political ideas of a conservative nature are present in universities. Well, Milton Friedman’s type of economics is actually quite well represented, but the constant claim that universities are in the pocket of left wingers is just such a crock.

It’s really so frustrating. We had an interesting experience here on the Berkeley campus that I think is relevant to this. There was a wealthy Republican donor, wonderfully loyal to us, and we speaking corporately, we at Berkeley appreciated his support. And he said that he thought that there ought to be an endowment for a lecture fund for people who would come here and articulate conservative ideas. Well, we tried to explain to him that we already do quite a lot of that, but he was very determined to do it. And if I may put it this way, we were glad to take his money. So what we did, we established this lecture series and we brought in these various people that were associated with conservatism in some way or another. But here’s the thing, I think every single person that we brought in during my five years on that committee had already spoken at Berkeley, had been invited here by the econ department, by the law school,

By the sociology department. So the lecture fund showcased this and showed in a very visible way our openness to this. But in terms of the intellectual culture of the campus, it really didn’t change that much. Now, that’s not to say that universities have handled questions of merit and free inquiry perfectly. I mean, I think this whole thing about requiring DEI statements for faculty, which they did for a while, I think that was a violation. I mean, that’s basically a political test. So the sort of left wing parts of academia succeeded in getting some of the administrations to actually impose a political test for a while. We had a little bit of that at Berkeley. I fought it, a lot of other people did, and it’s now dead in the water here. What it amounts to is we speaking corporately, gave all these hostages to universities critics, and we sort of turned academic freedom and free speech over to them as issues.

And we who were the custodians of these things weren’t true enough to them. So all this to say that the right-wing critique of universities is not like 100% wrong, but university capacity for responding to it, making these changes ourselves is greater that I think than is acknowledged. What I wish would happen a little bit more often is that there would be publicity given to a remarkable document of the year 2020 at Princeton University where 300 faculty and students and some staff I guess signed a petition saying that Princeton should basically be reconstituted as an engine for social justice. And that departments that had hired X percentage of blacks and Hispanics would be rewarded with more hiring lines and departments that hadn’t would be penalized until they came around. But it wasn’t only just hiring, there were a whole series of specific steps that the petitioners in 2020 demanded.

Now, the president of Princeton did not adopt this. He fussed with it a little bit. He sort of temporized, but he did not adopt it. But now the significance of that document of 2020 is that this is exactly what the right wing critics complaint about. It’s there. However, it did not tramp. It did not take over Princeton. Princeton was able to stand it down similarly with things that have happened elsewhere. Now, what I would like to see is that universities would defend themselves today by giving publicity to that the right wing claims that their people in academia that want to do away with academic freedom and free speech and just turn it into engines of the left wing, the way Brett Stevens and the New York Times colonists are always saying, are there people that want to do that? Yes, we should say yes, there are these people, but we are defeating them. We speaking corporately, the academic establishments of university is not going that way. Now you can find cases like this DEI statement where we went too far in that direction, but they’re not, that doesn’t happen at Berkeley now. Doesn’t happen a lot of other places.

Marc Steiner:

And I really want to appreciate the time of goodness today and being with us here at The Real News, David Hollinger, it’s really a pleasure to talk with you and to do this co-hosting, my colleague here, Michael Fox. Very good.

Michael Fox:

It’s been such a pleasure. So thank you so much, David. I really, really appreciate it. David, can I ask you to, now that we’ve spoken for an hour, can I ask you to introduce yourself?

David Hollinger:

Well, I’m David Hollinger and I’m now emeritus professor at the University of California Berkeley, which is how this event starts because my experience in the free speech movement, and I guess I’m one of the last survivors being aged 84 of people that are still around that was involved in it in any way. I’ve had much of my career as a historian at Berkeley, although I taught for a number of years elsewhere. I was at the University of Michigan for a while. I taught at Oxford. I was at the State University of New York, and most of my writings have been in the field of American intellectual history, broadly conceived. So I’ve written about the history of religion, about the history of philosophy, about the history of academic institutions, and it’s a pleasure to be here.

Michael Fox:

I have one more question and is, you mentioned something which was an interesting parallel for me, and how in 1964, part of the impetus for the creation of the free speech movement was because you all were protesting and protesting racism and standing up for the Civil Rights movement and whatnot, and they wouldn’t let you do that on campus.

David Hollinger:

That’s

Michael Fox:

Right. And we go fast forward here 80 years, and we see Palestine encampments that are on campus being demolished. We see people like il, the Trump administration is trying to support him. Do you make these parallels? Is this clear for

David Hollinger:

You? I think that there is that tradition. Of course, not so much complicates it or clouds it, but something we have to take into account is that some of the folks that are allied with these Palestinian voices that are being inappropriately purged and silenced, some of these voices have said inappropriate things about Jews. In other words, just because they don’t like something that Israel has done, they’ve racialized it. And I think that universities and our society generally is right to say, you can’t do that. You can’t go around grabbing the MEA off of somebody’s door just because you don’t like what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza. So that makes it a little bit different. But I don’t want to overplay that point. And I think your sense is exactly right that a lot of the Palestinian voices that are being silenced today are being silenced inappropriately.

Michael Fox:

David, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate it. I’m glad this worked out. Finally. I know we’ve been talking for weeks. Thanks guys.

David Hollinger:

Alright,

Marc Steiner:

Pleasure to

Michael Fox:

Take care, David. Take care. Bye.

Marc Steiner:

Thanks to Cameron Granadino who are running the program today, audio editor Stephen Frank for working his magic producer Rosette Sewali for all her working research that makes her program sound good, and the Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. So please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you allwith us on this podcast. We’re going to journey back to the Civil Rights Movement in America to not onlyrecall the importance of that struggle and how it changed the trajectory of our country, but also to look atpolice and political re oppression today. That in part, is a result of the pushback against the advancementsmade by the Civil Rights Movement that smashed racial segregation and opened the doors of equality inAmerica. We’re joined by Judy Richardson and Joshua Clark Davis. Joshua Clark Davis is an associateprofessor of US History at the University of Baltimore. His latest book is Police Against the Movement.We’re telling the story of the 1960s civil rights struggle to its work against police violence, and it’s really a pre-history of both Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements that emerged over a half a century later.

He’s also the author of From Head Shops to Whole Foods, an Exploration of Black Book Sellers, naturalFood Stores, feminist Enterprises, and other businesses that emerged from the movements of the sixtiesand seventies. He’s an award-winning researcher winning awards from the Full Bar program, the NEHPublic Scholars Program, and is written for the Atlantic, the Nation Slate, jackin, Washington Post andTeam Vogue. And Judy Richardson was the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,known then as sncc, where she risked her life to in segregation and face down racist power in Georgia,Mississippi, and Alabama. From 1963 to 1966, Judy Richardson still fights for a better world and hasbecome an award-winning author and producer. She produced the Frederick Douglass Visitor Center filmfor the National Park Services. She’s currently working on four museum films, including those for theCivil Rights Museums in Memphis and Atlanta. And in 1968, she co-founded Drum and Spear Bookstore,one of the largest African-American owned bookstores in the country, which she was an associateproducer, education director for the seminal PBS series. Eyes on the Prize, she continues to producedocumentaries and is a co-editor of the book, hands on the Freedom Plow Personal Accounts by Womenin sncc. She’s a member of the SNCC Legacy Project Board and a visiting professor at Brown Universitywith an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore College.

So I want to welcome you both.

Judy Richardson:

Thank you.

Joshua Clark Davis:

Thank you.

Marc Steiner:

So I’d like to begin with both your reflections as a historian, but your reflections, Judy, as someone wholived through the Civil Rights Movement, to give our audience a sense of what that was like, what itmeant to be in the Civil Rights Movement, what we faced. I want to bring that forward to what we facenow, but talk about what it was like to be a young woman, a young person facing down, the police, facingdown segregation in the South in our country.

Judy Richardson:

Well, I think it’s very important to connect us, and because of SNC was the only youth-led civil rightsorganization working in the south at the time. We had grown out of the sit-in movement, so it was DianeNash and John Lewis and Marion Barry, and a number of other folks. But we were all, as I was 19 yearsold when I come in and I’m coming off of Swarthmore’s campus. But what was amazing to me, it’s notjust the staff people whom I joined when I first come into Cambridge, Maryland and then go into thenational office, it is also the local people who really guided and guarded us. And the guarded us is alsoequally important. I mean, when we go into Mississippi, when Bob Moses goes in, he’s going into anorganization that is started by returning World War II veterans, the Regional Council of NegroLeadership.

It’s Medgar Rivers and Amzie Moore, and a number of folks who were much more at risk than I wascoming out of Tarrytown, New York. I mean, I could go back home. What was amazing to me is thatthese are people who had experienced lynchings, who had experienced all kinds of incredible violence,and not just physical intimidation, but also economic because they were landowners. They were deniedloans for the crops. So I come in and certainly we experienced a lot of violence. I was shot at, I was jailed,it was all of that. But what gave me the courage was not just all of these young people who surround me,and it’s like, okay, if they can keep doing it, then I can keep doing it. It wasn’t just that. It was also theselocal people in hands on the Freedom Flower are 52 women. Their stories of being in the movement.

Joanne Christian Mass talks about how Mama Dolly, for example, who was in southwest Georgia, she’sstanding under a spotlight with a shotgun inside our black and white SNCC workers. But she is guardingthem so that any vigilantes who come near her are warned, look, if you come, you got to go by me. So itwas that kind of courage. So yeah, I can talk about what I felt being in jail. I can talk about maybe beingafraid and all of that, but it’s important also to get in the local people who were part of that.

Marc Steiner:

I think one of the things you said is really important people to understand, even though the movementitself in the South was nonviolent, when we protested, went to jail, we didn’t fight back. We stood to endsegregation, but the people around us, many of them, the farmers were armed and protected people. Andnot

Judy Richardson:

And not just the farmers. Not just-

Marc Steiner:

Farmers. I know not just the farmers. Right. The townspeople too. Yeah. Yeah. And I think people don’tknow that end of the story at all. It’s really important. Josh, let me turn to you. So you created this book,Against the Movement. Let’s talk a bit about what threw you into this and how it relates to what happenedin the South and where we are now.

Joshua Clark Davis:

So I started writing this book in 2017, and at the time, the Movement for Black Lives was reallyaccelerating and heating up. I had moved to Baltimore at the beginning of 2015, and then Freddie Graywas killed a few months later, and then the uprising and all those protests happened. And so that was kindof a front row seat to police violence, but also organized movements against police violence. And thething that really struck me was that a lot of the media around BLM was characterizing it as this is a newmovement that’s picking up, or the Civil Rights movement ended. This is continuing the struggle. This iscompleting the unfinished work of the Civil Rights movement. And it really got me wondering, okay, sowhat did the Civil Rights Movement do in the face of just suffocating police violence? Because we allknow these iconic images from Birmingham and Bull Connor’s henchman with the attack dogs or theEdmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

But I was wondering, is that really true that the Civil Rights movement didn’t really resist or protest orpicket or fight against police violence? And the more that I researched it, the more that I found actuallythe whole movement didn’t necessarily directly confront police violence, but large parts of it did,especially the more radical parts of the movement, especially SNCC C and especially Core, the Congressof Racial Equality. And they didn’t just focus on physical violence, but over time they expanded theirconception of violence to include trumped up felony charges, surveillance, infiltration, legal violence. Wecould call it state repression in some ways. They were building a lot on earlier critiques that were comingfrom communists and socialists from the Red Scare and even earlier. But also I think the big thing thatkind of struck me in doing this work was we think about state repression and the civil rights movement assomething that FBI did as something that Hoover did. And we have totally overlooked how much localpolice departments all over the country, south, north, east and West, were very eager to sabotage thismovement. Again, most often with kind of sophisticated trickery because they looked to Bull Connor andthey saw that he really embarrassed

Marc Steiner:

The head of police, Alabama.

Joshua Clark Davis:

Yes. The public safety director at Birmingham, Alabama, who infamously sent out attack dogs, told hismen to open up the fire hoses, attacked black children. It went not only on national tv, internationalimages all over the world today, we would call it going viral. And it just was a total defeat forBirmingham and a total victory in many ways for Dr. King and the SELC. Most police chiefs learn fromthat and said, we’ve got to do something much more sophisticated than that. So that’s where I came intothis book, and that was the story that I wanted to tell to reshape how we think about the Civil rightsmovement, to reshape how much they only endured police violence, but fought it. And to also reshapehow we think about state repression. It’s not just federal, it’s not just Hoover. It’s happening in local policedepartments all over the country and not just the South.

Marc Steiner:

So lemme do this in two parts here. I want to come right back to what’s happening now with repressioninside the police departments and red squads and what they did then and what’s happening now. But Iwant people to get a sense of how dangerous it was to be in the Civil Rights Movement. I remembered, Ithink if I have it correctly, somewhere of 64, it’d be three. It gets muddled sometimes in my head, but anumber of civil rights workers were killed, not just Goodman and Cheney, others were killed. It was adangerous, dangerous thing to do because you had the forces of the clan just to rave against you whothought of nothing but killing a civil rights worker. It meant nothing. I only people really understood thesense of real danger that people experienced and what risks they took to end segregation and end that kindof blatant racism in this country.

Judy Richardson:

No, absolutely. And I think it also in some ways goes beyond fighting against that segregation. Whatwe’re really doing is fighting to empower people who were powerless at that time, who had no voice. Andso it really is about gaining power in your communities. And the other part of that is that yes, it wascertainly targeted at people who were trying to get, I mean, one of the things that SNCC is focused on ishow do you get black people registered to vote without getting them killed?

How do you get them registered to vote without getting them killed? And so because Herbert Lee hadbeen killed trying to register vote by his white neighbor who had lent him money for his farm, for HerbertLee’s farm, but says, if you don’t stop messing in this voter registration stuff, you’re going to get killed.And then he, the white person Hurst white state legislator in Mississippi blows Herbert Lee away in thetown square of Liberty, Mississippi. And this was a neighbor. So certainly there are attacks going againstthe movement and against us as civil rights workers, but a lot of times it was also random. I mean, therehad always been a history of random violence against black people because the whole point as it is todayis to say, no, you don’t even have to be doing anything. You don’t have to be doing anything that weconsider dangerous.

We are just going to arrest you, beat you up jail you just for being who you are because we want you toknow we have the power and we can then exert this violence against you at any time we feel like it.Which of course is what you’re seeing with immigrants, with undocumented workers and stuff. It is not,oh, you’re doing anything. It is, we have the power to take you out anytime we want to. And it’s thatrandom violence that we always also had to gear against and to protect ourselves and our mental healthagainst, which is, you keep going, you got to keep going. Otherwise they win and they can’t win becausethey’re wrong. So there was that part too.

Marc Steiner:

You want to add something, Josh?

Joshua Clark Davis:

I think the one thing I would add that was important for me in this research really to emphasize was asJudy just explained, there were just plenty of white people attacking the Civil rights movement. And it’sreally important to keep in mind how in many places law enforcement was colluding with so-calledvigilantes, and that was the case in the Freedom Rides. And certainly people on the Freedom Ridessuspected that when the police took their sweet time to show up after vigilantes greeted them at busstations and beat them to a pulp, but later federal courts confirmed this, yes, there was a degree ofcollusion between Alabama police departments and unquote vigilantes. Same thing with Goodman,Cheney and Schwar. You mentioned them. And so we often remember the civil rights murders as thework of maybe segregationist low nuts. The clan, the vigilantes, and we don’t adequately remember themas state supported acts of violence against the movement in Philadelphia, Mississippi. It was a localsheriff’s deputy who facilitated and assisted local clansmen from capturing Goodman, Cheney and schhoner. And one of them ended up going to federal prison. They could never get a murder conviction inMississippi state courts, but he was convicted of violating those three civil rights workers civil rights.And so again, our memory is of vigilantes loan segregationists, but we’re often leaving out the fact thatlocal law enforcement facilitated some of these very, very brutal and in some cases, lethal attacks.

Marc Steiner:

Go ahead, Judy, please.

Judy Richardson:

One of the really great things about Josh’s book, and I love this book by the way-

Marc Steiner:

It’s a great book.

Judy Richardson:

But one of the great things is that he points out what many of us understand now, which is it’s not just anindividual bad apple in a police department. It’s not just because a particular cop like Chauvin, that hebeats George Floyd and holds him down for eight and a half minutes. It’s not because he hasn’t hadenough sensitivity training, right? It is because there is a culture of racism that imbues that wholedepartment. And it’s one of the things we understood when we were going south. And it’s also what Iunderstood when I was working at the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice in NewYork during the eighties, and Mrs. Eleanor Bumpers and Howard Beach and whatever, all of thatreminded us that it’s not just because a particular cop is in aberration, he or she is part of a culture ofwhite supremacy. And what’s wonderful about Josh’s book is he has this great scene because he storytellsas well.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, he does.

Judy Richardson:

So it’s not dry recitation of facts and stuff, but he has this wonderful piece where he talks about the NewYork Police Department, and of course we had to deal with them when I was there in the eighties with theCommission for Racial Justice. And they had all these protections around them, and of course they hadthe media supporting them. And most of the media, which Josh also goes into assumed that what thepolice were telling them was correct. They never checked with demonstrators or anyone else. But Joshhas this wonderful scene on Easter. It was annual breakfast of the police department. Yes. And that theybring McCarthy and Eugene McCarthy, the horrible red scare man. But maybe Josh can talk about that. Imean, I just love that scene. Yeah.

Marc Steiner:

Josh, go ahead.

Joshua Clark Davis:

Yep. Senator McCarthy, they brought him in one year, but the scene was basically, it was an EasterSunday roast that was hosted every year annually by Irish police officers in the NYPD. And it wastypically marching in uniform, it was drinking, it was eating a roast, but they started bringing in theseright-wing speakers. And in 1964, the commissioner came in to speak to all of them in its hundreds ofpolice officers in the newest Hilton Hotel in New York. And basically the commissioner said, you guyshave been working so hard, so valiantly, and there are these three so-called civil rights protesters who areunfairly attacking you. One of them was Malcolm X that he condemns. One of them was mostlyforgotten, but very fascinating tenant organizer named Jesse Gray.

And one of them was the chapter leader of the Bronx Chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, and hisname was Herb Calender. And the commissioner in front of hundreds of police officers said, these threeguys are making your lives hell. And they are basically exploiting the good cause of racial equality toattack you all. Within weeks, the NYPD’s Secret Political Intelligence Unit, the Red Squad, the Bureau ofSpecial Services, hired two African-American police officers to infiltrate black activist groups. One ofthem, his name was Gene Roberts, and he was sent in to infiltrate Malcolm X’s Circle. If you’ve seen thehorrible pictures of Malcolm X’s murder, he is kneeling on the ground next to Malcolm X in LifeMagazine. He was working as his bodyguard. It’s pretty unlikely that he was involved in the assassination,but he was right there on the same day that Gene Roberts is hired by the NYPD and sent into theseactivist groups.

Another guy named Ray Wood was hired to go infiltrate Herb Calendar circle in the Congress of racialequality to go volunteer at that chapter to say, I want to make a difference to spy on him and to try to prodhim into self-defeating acts. They end up trying to do this crazy scheme to do a citizen’s arrest of theMayor of New York, Robert Wagner, and it lands Herb Calendar in the psychiatric ward at BellevueHospital and takes him out of the movement for almost a week. But it’s like that through line, that culturethat Judy was just referencing, it’s kind of all fun and games. It seems like it’s Easter Sunday Roast, buthow the commissioner uses that to kind of declare war on these activists, and then within a month how theSecret Red Squad is sending its people into these activist groups. You can connect the dots.

Marc Steiner:

And one of the things that I, as I was hearing in the book and thinking about our conversation today washaving these numerous flashbacks. Every city in America, almost every city in America had a red squad.They were setting people up across the country and charging them with all kinds of absurd charges andputting some people in jail. We had people here in Baltimore who actually were sent to jail because of theRed Squad back in the early seventies. So I mean, this piece of history about what the activists faced inSN C and Core and what happened as the movement grew and more folks organizing in cities is part of ahistory people don’t know and the dangerous people felt and how that really did change America. And inmany ways, I think what we’re facing today is part of a blowback against what happened then.

Judy Richardson:

No, absolutely. I mean, the folks in power now really do want to turn it back to basically pre 1940s andFDR and President Roosevelt. I mean, they want to turn it back to an all powerful white group, and weknow what that white group is. So I mean, I guess one of the things that I often get when I’m talking tostudents is that they don’t understand that we weren’t just talking about, well, we want to sit next to you ata lunch counter, right? It’s not just about that. It is about the vote, which of course we’re getting aSupreme Court decision, which will probably strike down the remaining the one final remaining stool inthe Voting Rights Act. That was the crown jewel of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And what they want todo is go back to a time where you did not have black and brown people in the numbers that we have.

And with any kind of power, they’re fine with folks working and working in their homes and working intheir fields. What they’re not happy about is having black and brown people particularly, or poor whitepeople in any positions of power where they are affecting change and where they are speaking forthemselves. So they want to go back to another time and they’re willing to do whatever it is. What’samazing to me, I think about this time, and it is different for me, is that you don’t even have moderateRepublicans. I mean, you don’t have anybody. They have taken off all the guardrails. You’ve got anabsolutely right wing Supreme Court. What is good about what we have now is we have a window, and itis a small window, but it’s a window where we know about the tools that we have used in the past. Andwhat I appreciate is that little by little you’re seeing people coalesce in the way that we did. For example,when you talked about the Red Square, one of the things Ms. Baker, and that’s Ms. Ele Baker, who wasour political mentor. She’s the one who brings all the young people together in 1960 that forms theStudent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee sncc. And she was our excellence and organizer, and Joshmentions her in his book,

But what she kind of let us know is that we should not be afraid of the Red Scare. And so she was friendswith the Braden’s, a Carl and Anne Braden, and as a matter of fact, the only newspaper that was allowedto cover that first organizing conference in April of 1960 of S ncc of what Become s NCC was theirSouthern Patriot and other people. NAACP said, no, we don’t want anything to do with anybody whoseems to be tinged with the Communist Party. Same thing with SCLC, with sncc. We said, whoever willlet them come as long as they abide by our direction, the kind of things that we want to do and havedecided by consensus in our meetings. So Ann Braden for example, is she comes, she covers that firstmeeting. We did not have that, and I remember, I think it was Ms. Hamer, but it might’ve been Ms. Blackwell. When Bob Moses goes into Mississippi, one of the things hetalks about is how the FBI and others are saying, don’t work with those SNCC people because they’recommunists. And what Black Mississippians said was, honey, if these are communists, bring more of ’emwith us because they’re the only ones who are working with us. So they did not have that thing. Now whatyou get is Antifa, you get oh, Jewish voice for Peace and Antifa, and so all these people are terrorists, andso we’re going to lock ’em up. What the movement understood at that point is you work with the peoplewho are willing, who agree with your goals, who agree with the way that you want to move to change thisto a more righteous and just society. And so whoever will let them come.

Marc Steiner:

I’m thinking about the moment we’re facing today, and I started really reflecting as I was reading the bookand thinking about our conversation today on the end of Reconstruction in America, when the dream ofproperty and voting rights for black Americans was part of a struggle, and hundreds of black folks werekilled in the South during reconstruction, and they ended reconstruction and began, I think about themovement that in this country from the thirties through the sixties and early seventies, it really changedAmerica ended segregation and sort of building a new world in this country or attempting to, and how justlike the end of reconstruction that was this pushback from what became the clan from these right-wingraces of the day in the 19th century is what we’re facing now. And I was just wondering, historically,thinking about the book that you wrote, thinking about the experiences that you’ve had in the Civil RightsMovement, how you talk to people now about what we face in terms of the history of the Civil rightsmovement and what happened before that, I think we’re in that moment and that’s critical, and it’s thatdangerous as it was at the end of reconstruction.

Joshua Clark Davis:

Right now, a lot of people are reaching back to the Red Scare to try to understand what’s going on withthe attacks on

Marc Steiner:

You talking about from the 1950s Red Scare.

Joshua Clark Davis:

Yeah, from the 1950s. I mean, that seems to be the historical comparison. Most people reach back to say,this is happening today. It’s the attacks on Antifa, the attacks on people who just won’t celebrate CharlieKirk, the attacks on a historian who attends a conference on socialism, and yet that’s important to thinkabout the Red Scare, but I think what’s also important to remember is those weapons of state violence thatthe United States government and local law enforcement used against communists in the Red Scare, theyused roughly the same playbook against the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. The difference is thattoday there’s this kind of political consensus, and it’s probably sincere on the left and not so sincere on theright, but the way in which the Civil Rights movement is upheld as one of the greatest acts of self-correcting democracy in this country, but the techniques of trying to slander people, of trying to get themfired, the techniques of surveillance, the ways in which local law enforcement are working with ice, inmany cases, the way in which vigilante right wing activists are often trying to get people into legal troubleor get them fired.

It doesn’t just go back to the Red Scare. It goes back to these weapons that were used against the civilrights movement. And we haven’t really had the same historical reckoning in this country about how locallaw enforcement attacked and sabotage the Civil Rights movement. When we talk about state repressionof the Civil Rights movement, we talk about Hoover versus King, the FBI versus certain groups, andthat’s not to diminish what they did at all, but we really kind of put this supernatural villain, j EdgarHoover, on this pedestal. It’s almost like he was so evil, and thank God that finally the FBI was takenfrom him literally when he died. And we haven’t really thought about how local law enforcement didmany of those same things. So today, I think one of the dangers potentially is to fixate exclusively on thefederal government and on Trump, and no way are we going to diminish that threat.

But if we don’t think about how in many cases local law enforcement and local officials are assisting themand sometimes even unwittingly, so I was hearing about how even in cities and states where they haveprotections where the sheriff won’t work with ICE or the police officers won’t have a rule against workingwith ice, they still have often collected data that ice, even without those authorities’ permission, may beable to access an online databases, license plate readers. So it’s almost like there’s an unwitting way inwhich local law enforcement may be assisting federal attacks on immigrants, on the activists who arestanding up with immigrants, things like that.

Judy Richardson:

Could I just also, just because you had mentioned reconstruction, and it’s not just the segregation, again,it’s about power, right? Because in reconstruction, one of the things you have is this finally black peoplegetting into positions of power. You had Lance k Bruce who was a US Senator. You had state legislatures,you had whole black communities. And I know because we’ve done a number of films for HistoryChannel and PBS on this, and what you had was really amazing communities, the people who had neverseen freedom before, never known it before, and they’re building 200, 300 member communities farmingthe land. They really have been promised the 40 acres and the mule. And so they have the churches, theyhave the schools. Those were usually the first two things that always go up churches and schools becausethey understood the need for education. But all of it is around how do we sustain ourselves and not onlysurvive, but also build communities and be able to protect ourselves.

So it’s not just, well, we were segregated, it’s also we are building power. That’s what seemed sodangerous to the white vigilantes, both state controlled, both those who are former Confederate officersand officials and whatever, and just regular white supremacists. That’s what was so dangerous for them. Itwas the building of power within these black communities. I would also mention what’s interesting whenyou see some of the tactics people are using now to try and monitor these ice arrests, and it’s similar to meof what we did when we were in sncc, which was the friends of SNCC organizations. So for example,when somebody would get arrested in Greenwood, for example, Mary Lane gets arrested, I would then, orsomebody in the national office in Atlanta would call Mrs. Shaw, a black woman in Chicago.

Who would then get on the phone to the sheriff in Mississippi in Greenwood and say, I know I’m callingfrom, and she always had a very proper voice, Mrs. Shaw. But anyway, she would say, I know that youhave Mary Lane in your jail, and she better come out the same way she went in, because at that point, youwant people to know you don’t get to just do whatever you want to do because you say, I have the powerand there’s nothing you can do about it. What we were doing with our friends of sncc, Chicago,Philadelphia, San Francisco, wherever we were, you would have people call in from all of these areas tothat sheriff and say, we know you have this person in your jail and we are going to be watching you. Andthat’s one of the things that you get now with these community and neighborhood alert systems wherepeople are using their thank goodness for cell phone cameras, getting the ice officials, getting whatever’shappening, not confronting them because then the person doing the camera will be arrested as well, butmainly recording what is going on. And that’s the kind of thing that we were doing even at sncc, what I’mhearing around in the DMV and what’s interesting is to see neighborhood watches and that they’re goingout and they’re saying the ice is on the corner and that people are then going out and recording and gettingthe names of the person that they have arrested. Those kind of small, it seems small, but it’s reallyimportant.

Marc Steiner:

I think what you just described is really critical. I mean on two levels. One is historically what happenedin the civil rights movement and how it was much more than people sitting at their lunch counters. It wasan entire universe connected across the country of people who were fighting to answer irrigation andfighting to protect civil rights workers. People don’t really realize it’s more than just the people who rodethe bus and did the voter registration across the country. And I think that there’s so many ways thisconversation can go there. I was been thinking of this a lot after reading the book, what that momentteaches us about what we face today and how to organize. Because I mean, if you think about Americanhistory, the reason I raised reconstruction before, a lot of it revolves around the emancipation movementsin the black world and repression against those movements. And whether it’s reconstruction or whetherit’s the civil rights era and now, and I think what we face now is probably the most dangerous moment inthe last 50 or 60 years in our country. It’s almost as if 1960s Mississippi is taking over America. So Iwonder what you both think about what that says to us and what does it say about what we face today andhow we have to organize.

Joshua Clark Davis:

I think one of the things that remains the same, and Judy was just talking about this, but it’s like thepeople who are pulling out their phones and videoing ice who were also videoing police in 2020 and overthe long course of BLM, a lot of people will think, oh, well that reminds me of the Black Panthers policepatrols. And it does. But one of the things I talked about in this book was that that idea was even olderand that you had folks from SNCC who were doing police patrols as much as a year before the Pantherswere in places like la. You had folks in Seattle doing that. I think the larger point is that, I mean, anylawyer worth their salt knows the law will not save you. However, I think we can probably all agree aswell that you cannot ignore legal tools and legal weapons and the way that the law can be used to destroymovements and the way in which sometimes and narrow opportunities movements can use a law todefend themselves.

One of the key parts of organizing today that you’re seeing is documenting, it’s researching. We’re livingin this world of what some people call big data policing. It’s the predictive algorithms, it’s the data mining,it’s the fake cell phone towers. It’s why organizers have to take technological steps to protect themselves.But it’s also why organizers really, it’s hard to do this. Movements move fast. Protests, rallies like you’vegot to show up on the day at the time you’re talking about people’s lives, like with Kmar, with any of thesefolks who are being disappeared. And research and documentation can be very slow work, but it’ssomething that movements are going to do with a view of long-term change. Because if you’re notdocumenting these acts of state repression and state violence, then there’s no hope of getting any recoursefrom the law. Again, the law will not save you or save us, but there still is this tremendous need to try tofigure out what the state is doing. And that goes at a pace sometimes that isn’t really the same pace as onthe ground organizing, but it’s something the civil rights movement was doing. It’s something the Pantherswere doing. It’s something even that communists were doing in the thirties and forties. We’ve got todocument what the state is doing against us and against other people, whether they are organized leftists,whether they’re people of color, whether they are black communities, brown communities, because wehave to tell this story also at the very least historically and maybe in some instances legally.

Judy Richardson:

Yeah, I absolutely agree with what just said. I would also say a lot of folks understand this is a differentmoment that it’s, I would say even more dangerous than what we encountered during the movement withall the violence. That was,

Marc Steiner:

Let me nterrupt for one second. Could you say something really powerful just, and I want to explore whatyou mean by that. I mean the danger people face we face in the civil rights movement was life and deathat times people were killed and beaten. So talk a bit about what you meant by that.

Judy Richardson:

Right, and just exactly where I was about to go ahead. Absolutely. For example, when we were there,there were certainly 63, 64, 65.

What you’ve got is exactly what you said, mark, which is that basically the white supremacists who reallycontrolled southern legislatures, and it was their delegations in the Senate and the US House. So it wasSenator Eastland and Senator Stanis. It was all of them. But now they control the White House, theycontrol the Supreme Court. They have a lot of the appellate courts. Now, the federal judiciary, when wehad DC disorderly conduct stuff, when it would go to the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, we knew that wewere safe. That was the court of last resort, and they would always find for us, well, now that is one of themost, if not the most conservative courts in the whole appellate system. They have control of all threebranches of government now. And you also have no real independent Republicans. You had New YorkCongress people and you had California and some of them in the GOP who were Republicans, but youwould not have been able to get, for example, a Watergate prosecution now because all of them arelockstep with this idiots who was in the White House.

So it’s a very different ball game. And I think one of the things that we have to do is go outside of thenormal way that we usually organize, which tends to be kind of siloed within our own little group ofpeople and the folks we know. And we’re going to have to unite with a lot of different kind of folks whoagree with the kind of world we want this to be. And it’s not just in America, it’s not just in the us. It’s allover. Because of course, what happens here, as we’ve seen with Argentina, as we’ve seen with Brazil, theyare affecting other countries. And the absolute white supremacy that you’ve got now in Italy, it’s all over.And so we explore it. This country exports white supremacy. One of the films I’m involved in now is aJim Crow museum. And what’s amazing to me is that in the 1840s, Jim Crow, the one who starts the JimCrow caricature, he goes to London in the 1840s, specifically as Jim Crow, as a caricature of black peopleto go on the London stage because he wants to show the people Britain in the 1840s.

These are the kind of black people that you say should be freed. No, no. What he is doing is exportingwhite supremacy in the 1840s. And you can see in some of the newspaper reports of the time that thewhite Londoners are agreeing with him, oh, that’s what black people are like in the United States. What Ithink we have to do is start talking to each other and understanding that that whole thing, I know there’s alarger quote that people use, but I love the James Walden quote, which is, and he says this to AngelaDavis in a letter when she’s still in jail and he says, if they take you in the morning, they will come for usthat night. That whole idea that don’t think just because, oh, they say they’re going after Antifa or they’regoing after so-and-so or they No, and I never thought that I would actually quote Winston Churchill, buthe actually said Appeasement is like feeding the alligator and hoping you are the last one he eats because he will eat you.

There is a sense we got a little window now where we have got to come together and just forget all theold, whatever little barriers we used to have between organizing with each other. That’s why I likeIndivisible. That’s why I was on the last March. I would be on the next one, except that it’s during the timethat we’re going to be at politics and prose, but we’ve got to show up. So you do the demos becausepeople need to see, not that he cares, the people in the White House don’t care about us, but they do careabout folks who are in swing districts and when their people start really understanding what’s going on.And it’s also education. I think we need to also, in addition to not giving up on public education, we havegot to support our teachers. Our teachers are under assault and so are our librarians. We have got to go tothose board meetings, school board meetings, and anything that will protect these people who are tryingto teach the truth.

Marc Steiner:

So just to kind of bring our discussion to a close here, I could stay here for hours doing this. I think it’sreally important. I really want to pick up on what you were just saying, Judy and both of you were sayingabout what we do at this moment. You’re both historians, and I think that looking at, as I was sayingearlier, our history, what happened in reconstruction, what happened to us after civil rights, the change inAmerica, the explosion of a more democratic country after the civil rights movement that took place. Andthat’s why we’re having this pushback now. And one of the things that happened in the sixties and earlyseventies was organizing, whether it was in the south or working class communities here in Baltimore orToledo, wherever that was, wherever it is, people organize and build something. So I’m curious what as amovement elder, not you man, you’ll get there. Let’s just talk about what those lessons tell us about whatwe should be doing right now.

Joshua Clark Davis:

Well, first of all, Marc, thanks for saying I’m not old. I appreciate that.

Marc Steiner:

You’re not old man. I have kids your age.

Joshua Clark Davis:

My students would object to that very strongly. But I think tying some of these comments together, I thinkthere’s an argument to be made that most progress in America, in American politics have been inmoments where there was something kind of like a popular front where liberals were willing to work withleftists. I think that describes reconstruction. I think that describes how socialists and communists fromthe late 18 hundreds through the early decades of the 19 hundreds basically helped to shape theprogressive movement, how they helped to shape the new deal. And I think there’s a lot to be said. That’swhat happened in the Civil rights movement where radicals, some of them socialists, some of themcommunists, some of them non-aligned radicals like Ms. Baker, were able to get liberals who believed inthe system to listen and work with them. And a lot of times liberals will not do that. And I think that’sreally probably one of the few ways to get out of this mess. Now, where police violence is a perfectexample. Communists, socialists, non-aligned radicals were talking about police violence as far back asthe thirties. And most liberals didn’t want to have much to do with it.

Especially by the fifties. They said, that’s kind of a communist cause because once you start questioninglaw enforcement, then you’re questioning the government. But it was really the activists of the sixties, likesnick, like core, they weren’t necessarily socialists and communists and in most cases they were not. Butthey were willing to talk to them, to listen to them, to kind of take a don’t ask, don’t tell approach and tosay we’ve got to actually pull the best ideas. And many of them were very, very left wing, but it was kindof not getting wrapped up in these labels about organizing. And I think right now that some of what’shappening around the anti-ice stuff where there’s some really great organizations and kind of left groupsthat have been organizing around this for decades, and now we can question how long it takes somepeople to wake up.

But it is important to try to reach people through narratives about things like how ice destroys families,how ice hurts children, how ice, yes, how it hurts everyone from all over the world. But there are somepeople who they’re going to listen more when we kind of take this approach of showing the human toll.And so I think that’s so important right now is finding ways in which hopefully people who are liberal,maybe left leaning, maybe even close to political middle, how are they going to finally be able to workwith people who are further on the left around some of these major issues, like the right of undocumentedpeople to just have lives in this country without having their families and their livelihoods totally just tornapart by being disappeared. So that’s one of my hopes.

Judy Richardson:

Yeah, no, I would agree. And I also think that we’ve got to start building increasing the reach of ourcommunities. I think some of us usually work with this group or that group, and I think we need tobroaden it so that you have more coalition building, you have more support of folks that normally youwouldn’t really be paying attention to. I think there needs to be more black brown coalition in that waywhen you have people like Anne Braden, you could say also Poor white, I’m not sure where that comesin. Although the new guy up in Maine who is running against Susan Collins is interesting to me. And thenalso there’s this group out called Red Wine and Blue. I always keep trying to call them red wine andvinegar, but it’s red wine and blue. And I go on their zooms.

Marc Steiner:

Would recall what Red wine and-

Judy Richardson:

Red wine and blue, and these are folks mainly white suburban women in Ohio who started off becausethey were upset about the book banning in their kids’ classes. And they’ve expanded now. And they alsowere very important in terms of in support of abortion rights and choice in Ohio. So they were doing that.But they do monthly zooms, but it’s local organizing. It is bring your neighbors in for a cocktail. That’swhy the red wine, right?

Marc Steiner:

Got you.

Judy Richardson:

Bring them in. Cause you cannot organize on social media. You can get people in for demonstrations, butthat is not the way you’re going to get long-term organizing. People need to see you. It’s one of the thingsthat we knew when we were in Mississippi, in Alabama, Southwest Georgia, wherever, that if people aregoing to trust you with their lives, and that’s what it’s coming to now. I mean because when you putpeople on a list and say, we are going to come after you because we are going to call you a terrorist noweverybody is at risk now. And so people need to know, I’m putting not just my life, but also my livelihoodand the live and livelihoods of my community on the line. I need to know who you are. I need to be ableto trust you. And I cannot do that if I only know you through Twitter or X or Instagram or whatever.Those small group community meetings are really, really important. That’s why like Teaching for Changeand in education project, again education. I go on there monthly meetings, they do a teach the BlackFreedom Struggle series because what we need to see is other people who are like us, but also to see us, tosee us and to feel a sense of community and that community is going to be really important movingforward.

Marc Steiner:

So much the two of you have done. So lemme just conclude this way. A, we’re going to talk some moreabout your book. We thinks moving and get deep into it. It’s important. B, I want people to really go backin history and think about where we came from, what we struggled for, where we are. Google oen, noprize. Look at the documentary series that Judy Richardson helped produce and make for this country towatch. And because we are facing a time of real danger and I think we have to rebuild the movement andit’s happening as we speak. And I think, so checking this book out, looking at that series from PBS andreally understanding what we’re facing that our two guests are talking about is really critical to where weare. So I want to think-

Judy Richardson:

Could I add one other thing, which is that we didn’t stop working. So SNCC people now have SNCC legacyproject.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah. Oh, please. Yes.

Judy Richardson:

Since it last, since 2014, I mean, we have been working with young activists. We did a project out at 2015at Duke University around voting rights with the larger piece of movement for Black Lives, talking aboutthe importance of the vote as one tool. Just one tool for gaining power, but it’s always thisintergenerational thing. We have three projects going now, a Mellon project. We have the toolkits that wedid through NEH before they shut off the money in the middle of as we were going into one of theHBCUs that we were working with. But we have a great website, which is SNCC legacy project.org andlots of information there as well as free downloads of the SNCC and grassroots organizing. I mean, thereare six wonderful organizing toolkits. Organizing kits.

Marc Steiner:

Okay, so here’s what we’re going to do. We have to conclude this conversation now, but we’re going totalk more about the SNCC Legacy project here on the Marc Steiner show and get these generationstogether. We’re going to talk more about your book here on the Marc Steiner show as well, becausebuilding this movement and fighting back and organizing for the future is really critical. The two of you’regreat examples crossed generationally of that. And I want to thank you both for spending the time with ustoday and we have more work to do. So thank you all so much.

Judy Richardson:

Thank you, Marc.

Joshua Clark Davis:

Thank you, Marc.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, let me thank Judy Richardson and Josh Davis for joining us today. And thanks to DavidHebden for running the program. Our audio editor, Stephen Frank, our producers Roset Ali, who aremaking it all work behind the scenes and everyone here at the World News will making this showpossible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover.Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to JudyRichardson and Josh Davis for joining us today. So for the crew here at the Real News, I’m Marc Steiner.Get involved, keep listening, and take care.