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Gammie plans this afternoon check out people every day, a new podcast from My Heart Radio and people will break down the day's most talked about stories, bring you exclusive interviews, get a free throw shooting contest.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's out there somewhere, and this is stuff you should know, NAACP Edition.

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That's right. I was thinking about this while I was researching Chuck. No one ever says NAACP. I've never heard anybody say everyone says NAACP, which I think kind of gives the whole thing kind of like a like an old friend kind of feel to it. You know what I'm saying?

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Well, yeah. I mean, since you brought that up, there have been people questioning the name in modern times of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And some people have floated African-Americans. So in NASA, I guess could be. A way that you would say that, but they this is, I think, from 2007, so the the leader of the NAACP at the time, I think there's a there's so much in the name, so much currency at this point.

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Yeah. That switching it is kind of tough.

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And also, he said, you know, we're kind of about the rights of many kinds of people, so we don't want to just say African-Americans. So, yeah, and there's lots of lengthy articles, but it seemed to make sense.

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And from actually what I've what I've read is that the NAACP is kind of in this lengthy process of kind of reinventing itself or re-establishing itself. And it seems like one of the things that they are starting to kind of go for is especially economic equality for all people. So that really kind of jibes with, you know, this, that it's almost like they grew into the name finally now in the 21st century, which is surprising. It's kind of neat.

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Yeah.

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Should we hot back in the old Wayback Machine? It's been a little while. We got to put some air in the tires first.

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But yes, that we get in that thing at all last year. I don't think so, which is surprising. You know, we should have been getting that thing every day. I know. And we totally didn't. But OK, so here we go. We're getting in the way back machine.

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All right, well, we're going to go back to let's go back to 1999. You might as well go back to when the organization was founded. And the reason why was because, well, for lots of reasons. But I think the sort of inciting incident was in August of 1988 when in Springfield, Illinois, there were two gentlemen arrested on suspicion of rape and attempted rape and murder. And the cops there were a little afraid of what might happen, because as you will see in this episode, there was a tendency for extra judicial violence, a.k.a. lynchings, to happen if people got worked up.

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So they said, let's get these guys out of here. Let's take them to another town.

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The mob of people show up and realize that they have been moved and did not take kindly to that and rioted in Springfield.

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Yeah. So like, as a result of this this Springfield riot, there were like 2000 black residents of Springfield, Illinois, who were displaced. They just didn't have homes anymore because they've been burned to the ground. Six people were murdered, two people were lynched. Two innocent men were lynched, basically as stand ins for the two men that they had originally intended to lynch.

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Yeah, 16 people ended up losing their lives over those three days. And nine black people, seven white people, five died from conflict with the state militia that was called in in two white people died by suicide. And for many, many years, up until I think CIMMYT recently, the seven white people that died, those deaths were attributed to to being killed by black people that were there. And that is not the case. They were literally rewriting history in that case.

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Well, one of the other big things about this, too, is aside from the fact that it happened and this was you know, this happened with enough frequency like that, it was a it was a real problem. But one of the other things about these these, you know, race riots or massacres of black residents, usually that evolved out of a lynching was that they went unpunished. Oftentimes they were uninvestigated. There just wasn't much, if anything, done about them.

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So they kind of it became clear that this is a larger issue is already very clear among the African-American community in the United States. But it kind of caught the the attention of some connected white social justice activists who were working at the time, too.

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That's right. So in 1999, a man named WBB Du Bois, which is one of the great all time names, oh, you've got three initials and that's what you're going to roll with. And Dubois, a pretty killer name, too. But he was a humanities professor. He was a writer. He was the first African-American to earn a doctorate degree from a university in the United States, Harvard, no less. That's right. He got together with 40 other social activists in New York.

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And it was you know, it was mixed races. It was a group of black people and white people, mixed religions. There were Jewish people there. It was described as a group of black and white activists, Jews and Gentiles and the Library of Congress. And they chose February 12th to get together because that was Abraham Lincoln's birthday and that is where they established their first charter as a group.

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Yeah, the first time they met, they were not considered the NAACP. It wasn't until their second meeting, the first time they called themselves the National Negro Committee. And then in 1910, when they met again, they said, well, let's call ourselves the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And the NAACP was officially born, although they considered the actual founding back in 1939. And like you said, yeah, there was it was multiracial, multiethnic and white people were involved because they were very much concerned about the quality of life and the the viability of getting ahead for African-Americans in in the United States at the time and for this organization to really kind of find its legs and find its footing and survive its crucial first few years.

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It needed very well-connected, very wealthy white supporters. And so there was an integration at the highest levels. And then eventually, within a few years, it was kind of like, OK, it's you know, it's time for us to step back. We've we've established this thing. And it can kind of go indefinitely from here. Yes, so getting back to that charter, I think the words are pretty important. It said it was to promote equality of rights and eradicate caste or race prejudice among citizens of the United States to advance the interests of colored citizens, to secure for them impartial suffrage and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the court's education for their children, employment according to their ability and complete equality before the law.

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And I think it's pretty important because it really kind of laid the groundwork for what I mean, you know, there have been all sorts of activist groups over the years in the African-American community, and there's was always sort of about let's attack this in the courts and let's attack it from let's attack these systems in the courts that are, you know, where the cards are so stacked against us by law. And let's get some of these laws overturned.

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Yeah, that was I mean, that's still been their strategy basically throughout. It was it was the strategy from the beginning and it still is today, which is in not in opposition, but it's it's complementary to other strategies like direct action, which is like, you know, going to a counter and sitting in and protest a segregated lunch counter or not giving your seat up on a bus. And, you know, during the civil rights areas, we'll see like the NAACP had an involvement, direct action.

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But it's always been known as like this, like just shooting for the biggest trophies of all, you know, like change, fundamental change at the national level legislatively. That's what they've always kind of been about. The NAACP.

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Yes. So some of these some of the folks in the very first group, the first president was a constitutional lawyer named Moorfield Story, a great man. There was a woman named Florence Kelly, who was also an attorney who worked a lot in an employment reform.

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Do you remember her from the Frances Perkins episode? She was the woman who inspired Frances Perkins. I do. She was great. Yes, she is great. Who else?

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Well, there were you know, they needed to make some way in the press. That was sort of one of the big problems at the time, is, you know, lynchings were being covered in the press. A lot of their rights that were being trampled on weren't covered in the mainstream press. So they had a good group of writers, essayist, journalist that would get in there. And they would you know, they would they founded their own paper, which was huge.

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The crisis, which is still around today, their magazine, but mainly just trying to get recognized in mainstream newspapers with their work.

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Yeah. Again, some of the early supporters and people who were founding members had big time connections in the press, like one guy, Oswald Garrison Villard. He was the publisher of the New York Evening Post and The Nation magazine. So he could very easily get stories about things like lynchings into his his paper in his magazine, where other other places wouldn't print that kind of stuff. And then, yes, the subscribership of the crisis crew had a bigger and bigger impact.

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So, yeah, kind of part and parcel, it seemed like with this legislative action was generating public support through the press, kind of like this two pronged approach.

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All right. Should we take a little pause for the cause? Yeah.

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All right. We're going to take a break and be right back to talk about some of their early successes right after this.

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The Therapy for Black Girls podcast is your space to explore mental health, personal development and all of the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, Dr. Joy Hardan Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. And I can't wait for you to join the conversation every Wednesday. Listen to the Therapy for Black Girls podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

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Take good care. Gammie plans this afternoon. Check out people every day.

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A new podcast from My Heart Radio and people will break down the day's most talked about stories, bring you exclusive interviews, get a free throw shooting contest and I'm all made seventeen free throws straight and beat us all and introduced you to real people who are making a difference in their community.

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Listen and subscribe to people every day on the radio or wherever you get your favorite podcast. So if you look at some of the early successes in the first part of the 20th century, one of the big ones you can point to is in Oklahoma in 1910, where they had a state regulation that limited the rights of black citizens to vote.

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It was a grandfather clause basically where they said you need and I think we talked about this in the voter suppression up. Yeah, for sure. But you need to be able to pass a literacy test in order to be eligible to vote unless you had a grandfather who voted in 1866. Right. And side note, this is before black people were allowed to vote in Oklahoma. So they basically were saying, if you're illiterate and you're white, you can vote.

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If you're illiterate and you're black, you can't.

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Yeah, the Oklahoma law was particularly egregious. It was one of, I think, like seven or eight states that had a grandfather clause.

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But Oklahoma said not only if your grandfather could vote in 1866, if he lived in another country in 1866 and would have been eligible to vote or could vote in that country, you you're grandfathered in. So basically, as long as you weren't black, you could you could vote even if you were illiterate. So the NAACP filed suit against this in a very famous case called Gwinn versus the US. And Gwen was named after Frank Gwen and who, along with Jayjay Bill, were a couple of elections officers who had who had basically been charged with disenfranchising black voters through the grandfather clause.

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And the Supreme Court heard this and said, you know what, this is this NAACP group. I've not heard of them before, but they present a pretty good case. So we're going to go ahead and overturn this grandfather clause. And, you know, this is 1915. The NAACP had only met for the very first time six years before. And all of a sudden they're overturning race based discrimination laws about voting at the Supreme Court. And that definitely caught the attention of people in the civil rights community for sure.

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Yeah, that's why I mean, it's when you look back through history, this the states rights argument that we still hear today is such a tricky thing because, you know, states should be allowed to do a lot of things as they see fit.

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But you can't you can't disenfranchise voters, willfully disenfranchise voters. And that's when the federal government comes in and people start crying foul that they want to be able to run their elections their way. Right. Which means we don't want black people to vote. And you just can't do that.

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You know, I've been thinking about this recently since we did our Klan episode because I noticed that every time the Klan went away, it was after the federal government intervene because the states wouldn't. Right. And something I came up with, like it's a good rule of thumb or good litmus test, is does this law discriminate against anybody's right, anybody? It doesn't matter what group it is. Forget the group, take the group out of it. Is it a discriminatory law?

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And I cannot think of a single instance where a discriminatory law would be beneficial for the greater good of all of the country or for the health of the of democracy.

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I just I can't think of one unless you're discriminating, discriminating against somebody's right to discriminate against somebody. Maybe that would be the case. But that seem to be a pretty good rule of thumb to me that I just came up with. Does the law discriminate? Yes. Or then it's probably a pretty bad law.

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Hey Josh.

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Twenty twenty. Twenty two. Twenty twenty twenty two. Twenty two. Yeah.

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That's about how far into the future I should try my hand at. What is that. What year is that. I mean I don't know but we're all just basically wisps of ones and zeros.

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I think by then another big thing that kind of happened early on, it was we talked about birth of the nation in our episode on the Klan and the NAACP got together and said, let's boycott this terrible movie. And the boycott didn't do a lot in terms of shutting anything down in terms of birth of a nation. But it did draw them some finally some mainstream publicity and got them written up in newspapers at least.

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Right.

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So, I mean, they had some early successes and especially with overturning the grandfather clause. But I don't know if it was after this or around this time. They they really kind of redoubled their efforts back on to the original intention, which was to do something about lynching, to get an anti anti lynching law, national federal law passed in the United States.

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And what's crazy? Is that that still hasn't happened and that as recently as June of 2020, we we failed to do it yet again, which is just nuts to me. But the NAACP was really trying to get this to get legislation passed that, you know, even back then, it just made sense. Now, today, it's just shameful that we don't have something. But the thing that kind of redouble their refocus, the NAACP efforts on anti lynching legislation was the lynching of a teenager named Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas, in 1916.

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And even as far as lynchings go, this was particularly gruesome.

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Yeah, I mean, not only was the act gruesome, which was he was tortured, hanged, set on fire and beaten, but it was in front of oh, estimates range from eight to seventeen thousand people like basically the size of a small, you know, hockey arena, medium, medium sized hockey arena.

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Like, I'm not going above medium well.

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I'm trying to think these days, how much does like your average NBA hockey arena home? It's more like twenty twenty thousand. How?

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I don't I'm such a terrible judge of anything like that. So let's just say a medium sized hockey arena. I think that got it across.

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And the only reason I'm saying that is because it's if you try and if you go to a pro sports game or a big concert, try to imagine that many people gathered together to watch a man, a human being, be burned and hanged in front of your face. Yeah, and I try to put myself in the not in the mindset, but out of all those people, like how many of those fifteen thousand people were 100 percent fully charged, do this, do this.

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And how many as it happened were like, oh my God, what has happened to us as human beings and Americans like, were there any people there that regretted what was going on?

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I'm sure some and if they didn't regret it during this, I'm sure some regretted it afterward. But I think one of the things that made Jesse Washington's lynching so disturbing to the rest of the nation was that it was reported that there was a carnival like atmosphere where people were enjoying themselves and enjoying their time, gathered together with all the other residents of Waco and lynching this this teenager and the NAACP sent an investigator there to to basically document the whole thing.

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And she came back with this report that became something called the the horror of Waco or the Waco horror. And the NAACP said, we're going to we're going to get this out there. We're going to tell the world about this. And they they definitely did. And it had a really big impact.

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You know, what it reminds me of is is the only thing I can compare it to these days is when a a high profile death row inmate is executed and outside the prison, they have those parties and stuff. Yeah. You know, I don't want to wade into the the capital punishment debate here, but there's something about that blood lust that just feels really gross to me. Yeah.

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And that's my official statement. When you're talking about somebody's life and vengeance, any time vengeance is driving things, it's usually time to take a pause and reflect on what you're doing. You know, I've got all the rules of thumbs coming out today, Josh.

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Twenty twenty, twenty two. Yeah. So, yeah.

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So they, they put out these pictures, like you said, were covered in mainstream newspapers. And, you know, I think it shocked the country, obviously not enough, but it was a big wake up call, I think to a lot of people what happened in Waco and the NAACP was able to to really pivot on this and bring up something like the dire bill, which I think was the first piece of anti lynching legislation sponsored by Leonidas. Another great name, Leonidas Dyar, Republican congressman from Missouri that died in the Senate.

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I think it passed the House in two and then died in the Senate after a filibuster from the Southern Democrats.

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Yes, the Dixiecrats and I was just the first of many, many attempts. Yeah. Apparently over by the middle of the century, there were 200 anti lynching bills that were introduced and died in Congress just by the mid century. And like I was saying, as recently as June of twenty twenty, there was an anti lynching law that was that passed the Senate unanimously, 100 zero. And then it went over to the House where it passed four hundred and fifteen, 410 to four, then the only thing the House did was change the name to the Emmett Till anti lynching law, which means then it had to go back to the Senate to be passed again because that one changes had been made, the name had been changed.

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And when it got back to the Senate, Rand Paul from Kentucky said, I don't feel good about this, even though he was part of the unanimous Senate that had passed it unanimously just before. And no other change was made except for the name. And that really ticked a lot of people off. But still to this day, that law was blocked in the United States. Still does not have a law that makes lynching a federal crime.

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Yes. So if you want to I mean, this was really big news. So I'm sure a lot of people know about this. But if you're curious about Rand Paul's defense was he said, quote, This bill would cheapen the meaning of lynching by defining it so broadly as to include a minor bruise or abrasion. Our national history of racial terrorism demands much more serious than seriousness than that. So what he was contending was he wanted he wants the language changed because in the language now it says the standard in federal hate crimes is serious or I'm sorry is bodily injury.

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And I think he wants it changed to serious bodily injury. In other words, if someone gets punched in the face, it would be cold and considered a lynching in the way it's written now. And he said there should be substantial risk of death and extreme physical pain in order to qualify as lynching. Otherwise, he said, it disrespects what real lynchings were.

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So take that for what it is for what it's worth. The Senate formally apologized in 2005 for failing to outlaw lynching, so they apologized in two thousand five and still it hasn't been put forward on the books.

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Yeah, so the like we said, the NAACP for decades and decades leading up to the civil rights era, was very much focused on preventing lynching and getting lynching outlawed and bringing attention to the huge, massive issue of lynching in the United States. They had a flag that they would unfurl outside of their headquarters in New York whenever a lynching was reported to said a man was lynched yesterday, which I read it. Yeah, I read it. And I was like, wow, that's you know, that must have been something that I saw a picture of it.

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And it's one of those ones where a picture is worth a thousand words. I can see it. It really drives home what they were doing and really kind of makes you.

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Really, like the NAACP, like, yeah, go get them, you know, let's get lynching outlawed. Yeah, I mean, you talked about the numbers over that time period. The 4000 plus comes out to more than one lynching a week in the United States over that period that was like verified, known and reported. So, I mean, clearly, you know, probably more than that. So, yeah, this is happening literally on a weekly basis in the United States.

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Someone is going out on their own vigilante style and hanging, not always hanging. A black man, sometimes worse.

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Yes. I mean, if you can sometimes they would just burn the whole black section of town down. Like in 1917, C.S. Lewis saw a race massacre just like there had been in Springfield not too long before. So, like, yeah, it wasn't just lynching, it was just mob violence and enforcement of segregation. I think the thing that set off the St. Louis riot was a black family moved into a white neighborhood, if I'm not mistaken. That was the instance that set it off.

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So, yeah, it was a yeah, that was a real problem. Racial violence was an even bigger problem than it is today, back before the civil rights era.

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Right. So during the civil rights era, obviously, the NAACP is going to be very active, saw some really great successes there, sort of leading the way, lobbying in the capital, trying just scores and scores of cases in the courts, helping people register to vote, taking part in Mississippi's Freedom Summer in 1964. If you don't know you know the name Rosa Parks and know what she did, you may not know that she was the Montgomery NAACP secretary.

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So she actually worked for the organization? Yeah, I don't remember.

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Do we do a whole episode on Rosa Parks and the bus boycott or was it part of another episode? We did.

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I can't remember all of our videos and everything is just a big stew in my head at this point.

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Well, we did a we did the one on the Freedom Schools for sure.

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And I don't remember what we did, but we talked a lot about Rosa Parks and I don't know if it was her own episode or not. If not, she deserves an episode. But yeah, she she was a secretary for the NAACP in Birmingham or Montgomery. I'm sorry. And if you start to look at some of the big events of the civil rights era, you start to realize that, oh, wait a minute, that was an NAACP field officer or those person those people were, you know, members of the local NAACP branch.

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There were a lot of, like, legal strategies in cases that were launched by the NAACP that appeared to just be direct action, like Rosa Parks had had enough and wasn't going to get up that day. That that when you peel back the layer a little bit, this is part of a larger strategy of trying to force lawsuits and court cases so that they can go all the way up to the Supreme Court. And sometimes they were very, very effective.

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Yeah, I mean, notably in the mid 1950s, they set their sights on the school system and separate but equal. They wanted to take that down and Brown versus versus Board of Education, you know, one of the landmark cases in the history of this country, Thurgood Marshall, an NAACP lawyer who was actually later on in the late 60s, became the first black Supreme Court justice. He argued that segregation in public schools is I mean, it is flat out very clearly unconstitutional.

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And this is one of those times where every justice on the court agreed and said, yeah, that that that is not constitutional in any way.

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Right. So I think they said that we that we need to desegregate with all all haste. I can't remember the exact wording, but it was it was vague enough that it was likely split.

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Yeah. Like what exactly constitutes lickety split, like sherds faster than a turtle's crawl. But is it as fast as a hare running and the Supreme Court. Huh. But that there was a huge backlash to that. It wasn't just like, you know, especially the southern states were like, all right, you know, we had a pretty good run at a segregated school system. It's you know, it's it's run its course and now it's time to desegregate.

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That's not at all how it went. At the very least, local municipalities and even states tried to come up with new laws that provided loopholes to segregation. Some states said, well, fine, maybe we'll just abolish public schools altogether and then we don't have to follow this this federal law any longer. There were there was physical violence. There was just a tremendous amount of pushback to. The idea of desegregating schools and the whole thing, like, really kind of found its fruition at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, which was I don't I don't know if it was the first high school to be desegregated or if it was just the one that that was the the the most Nutt's or the first one that was the most nuts.

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But the the governor of Arkansas said, not on my watch. And he called out something like 10000 National Guard troops to be there on the first day of school, I think September 4th, 1957, to block the entry of the kids who are known as the Little Rock nine, nine African-American high school students whose bravery is just breathtaking when you stop and think about it, who were trying to go into this newly desegregated high school to go to class. And they were blocked for something like, I think, 20 days before they could finally make their way in.

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Yeah, this was after the Little Rock School Board unanimously voted to integrate their schools. They were going to start with high school that year and then follow the following year with junior high and elementary school. And like you said, those nine and not only brave kids, but, you know, families of those kids because they all had to endure what was coming. Obviously, they tried and it got this is the part that's really confusing because Governor Faubus went to Newport, Rhode Island, to meet with President Eisenhower about this.

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It's described as a brief meeting. And Eisenhower supposedly thought that Faubus had agreed to enroll these students and said that, you know, to go ahead and keep those troops there to keep everything safe. And I don't know if that was a genuine misunderstanding. I read lots of accounts of this and it seems to have been a misunderstanding. He got back to Little Rock, though, and there was a court order on September 20th from a federal judge that said, you've got to get those troops out of there.

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Right. And let these kids go to school. And they slipped them in, literally slipped them in the side door and a full scale riot erupted. And he, you know, he allowed this violence to happen, couldn't stop it. And they called up for federal help at that time. And that's when Eisenhower had to step in and issue executive order one seven three zero, which calls the 101st Airborne. Yeah, the white troops of the 101st Airborne.

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They withdrew the black troops and they they didn't stay there all year, but there were army units there for the remainder of the academic year. Yeah.

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And one one of the Little Rock nine was a senior and he graduated, became one of the first African-American students to graduate from public high school in the US or from an integrated high school.

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I think four of the nine who didn't, four of the eight who didn't graduate were willing to go back the next year. The others are like, forget that man. This is crazy because you really need the army to enforce it. Yeah, I mean, one one girl was pushed down the stairs. One girl had acid thrown on her face. They were berated and harangued on a daily basis, not just by students, but by parents and stuff.

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It was just one of the ugliest chapters of American history was desegregation of schools and desegregation in general. But schools in particular because we're talking about kids here, you know, I'm saying kids who are being subjected to that is the one about enough for adults, too. But for, you know, even teenagers on down, it's just disgusting. Should we take another break? Yes. All right.

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We are going to take a break and we're going to come back and wrap it up with the post civil rights era years and where we stand today with the NAACP right after this.

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I've got one word for you, Tom Cruise, on this new weekly podcast meeting, Tom Cruise, we're going to talk about Tom Cruise. We're going to talk to people who have met Tom Cruise. Why? Because Tom Cruise is the greatest movie star of all time. Is he, though? Shut your mouth. Everyone who has met him has an amazing story to tell. And that's where he met Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise. When I hear the bathroom door open and it's Tom Cruise.

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Hey, everybody, I'm Jeff Meacham. You might know me as Josh Open Hole from TV's Blackish. And I'm here with the ghost of my Maverick. Hey, I'm Joel Johnston. You might know me as Archie and the Marvelous misses me. And I'm Alec Love. And you may know no one knows you from anything. Listen, we love Tom Cruise. We are inspired by Tom Cruise. But while we live and work in Hollywood, we've never actually met Tom Cruise.

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So we're going to talk to some people who have and maybe one of them will lead us to the man himself so we can have our own stories of meeting Tom Cruise. Does he really have to just ski about Tom Cruise? Not. All right. Are you here?

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Listen to meeting Tom Cruise on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

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Or wherever you listen to podcasts, there's exposure one already.

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So, Chuck, the NAACP definitely had a huge hand, along with a bunch of other groups, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, just a lot of different groups to help get some massive legislation passed. Remember, we said from the outset the NAACP had always been focused on social justice and change improvement in the lives of African-Americans through legislation, through basically federal government intervention, saying, OK, everybody's equal now and we're going to enforce that.

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And they they did it. They got it passed with the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing Act, the sweeping reforms that were passed in the 60s. They basically achieve their goal. And what's ironic is from almost that point forward, they were like, oh, OK, well, how do we how do we proceed from here? And there's been a lot of opportunity for people to take pot shots at the NAACP and question the relevancy in the post civil rights era, which I think when you really kind of dig into it is generally unfair.

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But in some cases it's been warranted, too. And you can make a case that the NAACP is still to this day trying to figure out their their bearings again in a post civil rights era.

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Yeah, this kind of started in the 70s when there was a bit of an ideological shift in protest and how that looks. And instead of in the courtroom, we did a great episode on the Black Power or we did it Black Panther, but it was part of the Black Power movement. Yeah. And that was a little more in fashion at the time, a little more in-your-face kind of activism. The NAACP, I think, was sort of looked at a little bit.

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It's like, well, now that you're at your grandfather's organization, I got the impression, too. Yeah.

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And like, we want to we want to get up in your face and really make some news and make some change that way. I think revenue stayed pretty high in the mid 70s until they started getting hit with a lot of lawsuits. There were always in court defending things, as well as those trying to get legislation passed and and prosecuting things. But that left them on the verge of bankruptcy. At one point, there were a couple of high profile presidents that were fired.

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There were allegations of financial mismanagement. They had to lay off a lot of its workforce in 2007. And so it's just it's been a little bit tougher road to hoe since the civil rights era in 2004. The IRS got involved because they are a nonprofit and they said you're supposed to be a nonpartisan group here. And you're saying things in particular the speech in 2004, which is pretty much very anti-Bush. Right. And you can't do that as a nonprofit.

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So. Right. It's been sort of a more irregular path that they've been on and they've been trying to find their way, I think.

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Yeah. The NAACP is kind of been stuck in this between a rock and a hard place thing where they're accused on one side of being way too moderate and not really active enough. Then the other side, they're accused of being anti Republican, you know, and they actually came out against that IRS threat. And investigation was a two year investigation into whether or not they should hold their five, once three status. And they they came back. They blasted back rather than just kind of taking it.

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They said, well, wait a minute, this is the Bush administration's IRS saying we shouldn't be talking smack about President Bush or criticizing President Bush. That seems fairly politically motivated. And the IRS ended up dropping their investigation and they kept their five agency three status. So good for them on that tip. But one of the other big problems I read, you kind of said like there was this, especially during the Black Power movement in the 70s. They were criticized as not being in your face enough of being just too bureaucratic and slow moving.

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This same exact accusations are being leveled against them still today. Sure, very much in the face of the Black Lives Matter movement. And one of the big problems that the NAACP has is there's a it's a really centralized organization. There's like, I think 22 hundred branches across the United States. There's a lot of different branches to keep up with. There's a 64 member board. It's amazing that they get anything done. But that that huge that that large board has a big a lot of control over the individual branches.

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Like apparently, if you're a branch, if you want to go out and join like a march, you know, against the death of George Floyd or against police brutality or something like that, you want to get into the streets. You have to get permission from the NAACP board first. And that board is aging. As well, and there's a lot of criticism about it being slow moving, about it being out of touch and about it being way too bloated a bureaucracy to have a big impact like it needs to have on the immediate lives of black people and people of color in general today.

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So there's a huge transition that the NAACP is undergoing right now. And I don't know that they have found their way, but they seem to be rather aware that they do need to find their way again, because it's an organization that depends largely on membership dues. And if people think you're relevant or don't even realize you're still around, they're not going to join and give you membership dues and it's going to make it harder to actually get anything done.

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Do I need to say it, please, to Josh Clark, streamline, get rid of that red tape. Josh Clark, 20, 20, 22 instead of like that. Next guys like peace sign for victory thing. I'm going to somehow replace my fingers with all thumbs. That's going to be the rule of thumb every which way. I love it. In 2011, NAACP really kind of formalized their march into the twenty first century. I guess about 11 years too late, not too late, but calendar wise.

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And they said that their focus were what they call the six game changers, which right now are economic sustainability, education, health, public safety and criminal justice, voting rights and political representation and youth and young adult engagement. And they're still at it these days. You can see them protesting, litigating, lobbying. It might be over Confederate statues in public squares. It might be in the form of doing a sit in and the office of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

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It might be, you know, reaching out to Black Lives Matter and people who were part of that organization to see how they can work together. They're trying they're doing their best. I think now it's about a half a million members, but twenty nine million dollars as an organization. And what did you say? It's more than two thousand branches. Yeah. Yeah, which is that's a big lumbering organization, you know, it is one of the other problems I saw that they were running into is that, like I said, they were kind of victims of their own success.

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When you're agitating for legislation, when the legislation gets passed, what do you do next? And one of the things that the NAACP is credited for is paving the way for African-American officeholders. And I was reading something from Juan Williams, who I guess is conservative now. He defected from NPR over to Fox years and years ago. But he was saying that the irony of the election of Obama and other black officeholders is that it makes the NAACP seem less relevant because then people say, OK, you know, the NAACP got these these guys into power and now we we can rely on them to make the changes that the NAACP has been trying to make.

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And so it's kind of like, yeah, there's they're there. They've achieved the changes that they've wanted to. But now they have to figure out, OK, what's left, what what else needs to be focused on and how do we change that following the course that we've plotted in the organization that we've we've structured for ourselves. So these can be really interesting to see what the NAACP does over the next 10 or 20 years.

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I think the six game changers is a pretty good foundation. I agree.

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So huzzah to the NAACP. We're glad that we live in a world that they're around, although we're sad that we live in a world where they're needed, you know?

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Wow. Boy, do I need to say it.

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I just grew an extra thumb. OK, well, since Chuck does laugh like that, I think everybody, it's time for Listener Mail.

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This is from a six year old. And if you want to get on listener mail, just be six. That's my advice. Yeah. Hi, Josh and Chuck. My name is Christopher.

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I'm six years old and from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. My mommy introduced me to your show recently because I am very interested in learning about everything and I love your podcast. Cool. Um, this kid is like basically my daughter's age, by the way, who could could not care less about what I do.

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Well, that's actually not true, but she certainly doesn't listen. OK, I had maybe question on the that she said. Is that Josh?

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No, she didn't. So it's also I can't remember who I was interviewing, but she said that every time. No, she wondered if it was you.

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Was it Mark Ruffalo? Because people say I sound like Mark Ruffalo now. But he tweeted about us once, didn't he?

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A Trail of tears. No Navajo code talkers. OK, yeah. You get him on the show. Yeah, you do. Uh, I really like the episode on Origami. It's one of my favorites. I also really like the one on Monopoly and also the one about peanut butter.

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I think the more I listen, the more favorites I'll have. Have you done an episode on Harry Potter? If you have it, maybe you should. I'm reading through the books now with my mommy.

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It's adorable. I'm hoping that you might read my letter on Listener Mail and I'll get to hear it if you do. Can you tell me which episode? But if not, that's OK. I just want to let you know that I think you guys are really interesting and smart.

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Love, love, Christopher Train and then get this. My mom had to type this for me, but I told her what to write.

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Nice dictated by Christopher was pretty great. Thanks a lot, Christopher. We appreciate you. We have not done a Harry Potter episode, but maybe we will someday. And if we do, it will be because you asked for. How about that? Great.

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And Chuck, we just got to introduce a six year old to the history of the NAACP. I love it. Yeah. So if you want to be like Christopher and get in touch with us and tell us that you're six, you better be six. If you say that, you can hit us up via email at Stuff podcast and I heart radio dotcom.

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Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts, my heart radio is the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I was Deputy Mayor Carlos Miller, Squashy Gilbane, and we are of the 85 self show and we've got some of the best guess where we had to change. Tip came. Jay Prince came. Yeah, everybody. Everybody can. But guess what? You got to catch up on all the episodes that you missed, like Fabo Killer Mike the like Busta Rhymes.

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He bust a couple of times.

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Listen to the eighty five s show on the radio app on Apple podcast or wherever you get your iPod.