“The Civil Rights Movement Part 2: Freedom Summer”

“The Civil Rights Movement Part 2: Freedom Summer”

My entire life I heard my Dad say "Freedom isn't free" and perhaps the best application of that is the Civil Rights Movement. It's easy from a place of comfort to not fully understand the risk and sacrifice required for... the right to vote. The right as a black person to have equal and fair access to elections, job protection, education. We are in our own Civil Rights moment now and we can learn a lot from what they didv Sources: U.S. Congressional Records, Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 1866 (Memphis Massacre testimony) FBI Files on the murders of Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, and the Mississippi Burning case (MIBURN) Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records — Mississippi Department of Archives and History (publicly available since 1998) Department of Justice Civil Rights Division records and case files NAACP Anti-Lynching Campaign Records — Library of Congress Congressional Record, Senate filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, March–June 1964 Books — Scholarly and Narrative History: Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (1988). Simon & Schuster. Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (1998). Simon & Schuster. Branch, Taylor. At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (2006). Simon & Schuster. Berman, Ari. Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2015). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2016). Bloomsbury. Anderson, Carol. One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018). Bloomsbury. Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935). Harcourt, Brace. Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986). William Morrow. Hamer, Fannie Lou. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (2011). University Press of Mississippi. Lewis, John, with Michael D'Orso. Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (1998). Simon & Schuster. Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998). Knopf. Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006 (2007). University Press of Mississippi. McAdam, Doug. Freedom Summer (1988). Oxford University Press. Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014). Spiegel & Grau. Tyson, Timothy B. The Blood of Emmett Till (2017). Simon & Schuster. Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892). New York Age Print. Wells-Barnett, Ida B. A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895). Donohue & Henneberry. Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010). Random House. Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). Oxford University Press. Memphis-Specific Sources: Honey, Michael K. Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (2007). W.W. Norton. Mlinar, Zeljko, et al. Memphis Sanitation Strike Archives — Memphis Public Library Special Collections Tucker, David M. Memphis Since Crump: Bossism, Blacks, and Civic Reformers, 1948–1968 (1980). University of Tennessee Press. Wright, Sharon D. Race, Power, and Political Emergence in Memphis (2000). Garland Publishing. Legal Cases Referenced: Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896) Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944) Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (1960) Browder v. Gayle, 352 U.S. 903 (1956) Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013) United States v. Price et al. (Mississippi Burning prosecutions), 383 U.S. 787 (1966)

60. Rights Are Never Given- Civil Rights Part 1

Apologies for the lateness of the post, our dashboard encountered a technical difficulty that showed my podcasts didn't exist and had to be fixed before an upload could happen. Thanks for your patience. After being at Montgomery last weekend I wanted to do a deep dive into what I never learned as a kid. What led to the Civil Rights movement, its danger, its courage. Part one takes us through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and part two takes us beyond. SOURCES * U.S. Congressional Records, Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 1866 (Memphis Massacre testimony) * FBI Files on the murders of Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, and the Mississippi Burning case (MIBURN) — available through FOIA requests and the University of Mississippi's Mississippi Digital Library * Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records — Mississippi Department of Archives and History (publicly available since 1998) * Department of Justice Civil Rights Division records and case files * NAACP Anti-Lynching Campaign Records — Library of Congress * Congressional Record, Senate filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, March–June 1964 * Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (1988). Simon & Schuster. * Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (1998). Simon & Schuster. * Branch, Taylor. At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (2006). Simon & Schuster. * Berman, Ari. Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2015). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. * Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2016). Bloomsbury. * Anderson, Carol. One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018). Bloomsbury. * Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935). Harcourt, Brace. * Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986). William Morrow. * Hamer, Fannie Lou. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (2011). University Press of Mississippi. * Lewis, John, with Michael D'Orso. Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (1998). Simon & Schuster. * Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998). Knopf. * Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006 (2007). University Press of Mississippi. * McAdam, Doug. Freedom Summer (1988). Oxford University Press. * McWhorter, Diane. Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama — The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001). Simon & Schuster. * Payne, Charles M. I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995). University of California Press. * Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014). Spiegel & Grau. * Tyson, Timothy B. The Blood of Emmett Till (2017). Simon & Schuster. * Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892). New York Age Print. * Wells-Barnett, Ida B. A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895). Donohue & Henneberry. * Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010). Random House. * Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). Oxford University Press. * Honey, Michael K. Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (2007). W.W. Norton. * Mlinar, Zeljko, et al. Memphis Sanitation Strike Archives — Memphis Public Library Special Collections * Tucker, David M. Memphis Since Crump: Bossism, Blacks, and Civic Reformers, 1948–1968 (1980). University of Tennessee Press. * Wright, Sharon D. Race, Power, and Political Emergence in Memphis (2000). Garland * Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896) * Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944) * Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (1960) * Browder v. Gayle, 352 U.S. 903 (1956) * Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013) * United States v. Price et al. 383 U.S. 787 (1966)

59. Ronald Reagan Part 2: Reaganomics

We met the carefully curated Ronald Reagan in part 1. We saw the Hollywood grin, the borrowed cowboy myth, the astrologer in the basement, the informant and the corporate lackey. In Part 2, we follow the money. The sale of a new economic dream for Americans during a time of desperate stagflation, unemployment and uncertainty. And what it sold has cost this country more than any single presidency in modern American history. Reaganomics was pitched to Americans as common sense. The government takes too much, thats the problem. Taxes on "job creators" choke the economy, corporations are going to run if you tax them you know. Cut taxes, slash regulation, trust the market — and a tide of prosperity will lift every boat. Cut off the welfare queen and free the small business owner. Trust the rich. Trust the men in suits who already had everything to know what was best for the woman scrubbing the floor at the hospital. He sold it the way only Reagan could, with a tear in his eye, a flag behind him, and a story about a Cadillac driving welfare cheat in Chicago who statistically did not exist. In this episode, we trace what actually happened next. The top income tax rate fell from 70 percent to 28 percent. The estate tax was gutted and capital gains were slashed. Corporate rates collapsed. All the ways the wealthiest among us make wealth were unleashed while the rest of us stayed tethered, shouldering more than our share of the burden. Union membership crashed from one in four American workers to roughly one in ten. Wages stopped tracking productivity. The federal minimum wage was frozen in time. Wall Street was deregulated, manufacturing was offshored, and the bottom half of the country watched its share of national wealth fall from 4 percent to barely 2.5, while the top 1 percent's share doubled. All while the national debt tripled. The mental health system was hollowed out, causing homelessness to explode. And every Republican economic platform since has been some version of do that again. Even Democratic leaders have allied themselves with this ideology in some way. We also dismantle the lie at the heart of it all, that spending on people is waste. Because every credible economist who has actually run the numbers has found the opposite. Every dollar invested in SNAP generates up to $1.80 in economic activity. Every dollar spent on early childhood education returns $7 to $12. Public transit returns roughly $4 to $1. WIC saves $3 in future Medicaid costs for every dollar it spends. Universal preschool, paid family leave, Medicaid expansion, infrastructure, these aren't handouts. They are the highest-return investments any government can make. The math has been clear for forty years. We were just told not to look. Reaganomics were one expensive lie for the American people. In this episode we talk about why we bought it, who profited, who's still paying — and what this country would actually look like if we ran the numbers instead of the mythology.

58. Ronald Reagan Part 1: The Marriage

Three decades before the White House, Ronald Reagan was being assembled in plain sight. This episode traces the apprenticeship most highlight reels skip: the New Deal Democrat who became FBI informant "T-10," the B-list actor who turned a corporate speaking tour into a political movement, and the lapsed Midwestern kid who would one day broker the marriage of the Republican Party and white evangelical America. In postwar Hollywood, where Reagan, as Screen Actors Guild president, simultaneously fed names to the FBI and lent SAG's institutional cover to the blacklist. His October 1947 HUAC testimony was polite; the private file was not. Careers ended on the strength of "fraternal" reports. Then in 1954, General Electric Theater, and eight years on the GE plant circuit under Lemuel Boulware, the hardline VP who handed Reagan a reading list of Hayek and Hazlitt and turned his pep talks into a portable free market gospel. Corporations were buying preachers and performers to sell their "anti-union, low regulation" gospel. By 1962 GE had cut him loose, but "The Speech" was finished and in 1964 it launched Goldwater and, with him, Reagan himself. Finally, the wedding of cross and capital. Reagan, never a churchgoing adult, became the indispensable broker between corporate donors and a politically homeless evangelical electorate. In Dallas, August 1980, he closed the deal with one line: "I know you can't endorse me, but I want you to know I endorse you." That coalition outlived him still runs our country. In Part 2 we talk about the longterm staggering impact of Reaganomics. References Balmer, R. (2021). Bad faith: Race and the rise of the religious right. Eerdmans. Cannon, L. (2000). President Reagan: The role of a lifetime. PublicAffairs. Crespino, J. (2007). The new right and the southern strategy. Journal of Southern History, 73(4), 895–924. Critchlow, D. T. (2005). Phyllis Schlafly and grassroots conservatism: A woman’s crusade. Princeton University Press. Dochuk, D. (2011). From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain‑folk religion, grassroots politics, and the rise of evangelical conservatism. W. W. Norton. FitzGerald, F. (2017). The evangelicals: The struggle to shape America. Simon & Schuster. Hancock, A. (2004). The politics of disgust: The public identity of the welfare queen. New York University Press. Kohler‑Hausmann, J. (2017). Getting tough: Welfare and imprisonment in 1970s America. Princeton University Press. Kruse, K. M. (2015). One nation under God: How corporate America invented Christian America. Basic Books. Levin, J. (2019). The queen: The forgotten life behind an American myth. Little, Brown and Company. Mittelstadt, J. (2005). From welfare to workfare: The unintended consequences of liberal reform, 1945–1965. University of North Carolina Press. Nadasen, P. (2005). Welfare warriors: The welfare rights movement in the United States. Routledge. Nickerson, M. M. (2012). The Reagan administration’s response to the gender gap. Journal of Policy History, 24(1), 115–140. Perlstein, R. (2020). Reaganland: America’s right turn 1976–1980. Simon & Schuster. Reagan, R. (1986, February 15). Radio address to the nation on welfare reform [Speech transcript]. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/radio-address-nation-welfare-reform Rich, C. G. (2020). The “welfare queen” goes to the polls: Race‑based fractures in gender politics. Georgetown Law Journal, 108(4), 1–67. Shilts, R. (1987). And the band played on: Politics, people, and the AIDS epidemic. St. Martin’s Press. Sick, G. (1991). October surprise: America’s hostages in Iran and the election of Ronald Reagan. Times Books. Troy, G. (2009). The great communicator: Media and the Reagan image. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 39(3), 458–470. Unger, C. (2024). Den of spies: Reagan, Carter, and the secret history of the treason that stole the White House. Mariner Books. Wilentz, S. (2008). The age of Reagan: A history, 1974–2008. HarperCollins.

57. Where Do We Go From Here? With Crystal Dawn

In this deeply personal episode, Crystal Dawn opens up about the slow, often invisible process of religious deconstruction. Raised inside a tight-knit faith community where belief wasn't just a doctrine but the architecture of every relationship, Crystal walks us through the cracks that started as questions and widened into a chasm she could no longer pretend wasn't there. Crystal Dawn is a writer and content creator shedding light on the patriarchal systems of harm within evangelical culture. Her experiences growing up a pastor’s daughter, as well as her own deconstruction journey, give her a unique lens… one she blends with research and history to give language to what many people experience in coming out of those spaces. She is currently at work on her first book, forthcoming in 2027. Follow Crystal Here: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crystaldawnalchemy4/ [https://www.instagram.com/crystaldawnalchemy4/] Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CrystalDawnAlchemy [https://www.patreon.com/cw/CrystalDawnAlchemy] Website: www.crystaldawnalchemy.com [https://www.crystaldawnalchemy.com]