Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now and Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today we’re going to talk about a topic that I suppose, in a sense, won’t be surprising given that all of our attention recently has been focused on this ongoing debate about protecting voting rights and getting a voting rights bill through Congress. What we’d like to talk about today is in a sense, what gets people activated? What gets people moving to become activists, to defend rights, to step up and speak up and become politically active? It’s obviously a moment when we want to consider that, particularly when it comes to voting rights, but even above and beyond that, it’s a question what gets people to be politically active that has been in the foreground for a while in the recent past. It’s an important one, particularly given so many of the fundamental questions about the working of American democracy that are currently in the foreground smack in front of us, the question of what it takes to push people to become politically active is an important one for the here and now.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it’s something that you and I both study. That’s really the real question, in the different periods we study is what turns a population that seems generally just to be going with the flow, in some cases quite suddenly into people demanding significant change, sometimes in ways that create literally a political revolution. And that to me is always the most fascinating thing about America in history. How do you get from, yeah, everything’s pretty much okay to I’m in the streets, in a matter sometimes of months and sometimes of years?

Joanne Freeman:

And particularly for a population, and I can even put myself often in that population, just going along with your life and doing your job and being with your friends and your family and having a vague sense that important things are happening in the background. And suddenly you’re meeting up with people and not even just becoming active on your own, but joining up with people to do something in a group matter, which is an even more assertive and aggressive way to become politically active.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, so let’s start here because nothing really happened that is of any interest to us until about 1830. Let’s get right into that period.

Joanne Freeman:

You just do that so you can see my face, basically.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I do. I do. Honest to God, I do. I’ve been writing all day and it’s like, I really could do this because the truth is the reason we picked this topic in part was because of some fabulous stories that you have about that little, what was it? Some sort of unpleasantness between England and its North American colonies. So tell us about-

Joanne Freeman:

The early unpleasantness.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The early unpleasantness, as opposed to the middle period unpleasantness.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, the other unpleasantnesses, yeah.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s right. The subtitle for American history. So tell us about, I’m so sorry to do this to listeners. This might be a good time to turn this off. Tell us about the battle of New Haven and why that is significant in the American revolution.

Joanne Freeman:

I will, but why are you telling people to turn off the program as I’m about to speak?

Heather Cox Richardson:

We set that up like we’re going to have the American revolution and there’s going to be people insisting on drinking coffee instead of tea and all this kind of stuff. And I’m like, no let’s instead of talking about Yorktown or Valley Forge or George Washington or… Let’s talk about the battle of New Haven, but there’s a reason to talk about the battle of New Haven because it brings home the incredible, personal decisions that have to be made in times of tension and ultimately crisis. And it’s a really good way to look at the choices that people had to make during the American Revolution, which is of course when the battle of New Haven happened. But also whenever you have the kind of moment when people have to decide what the conditions are under, which they’re going to live.

Joanne Freeman:

And sometimes it literally is a moment or an action or something happens that pushes people to act in a way that they hadn’t before. The battle of New Haven obviously is one that I’m interested in because there I am in New Haven teaching the American Revolution. And it actually, it’s a wonderful way to teach about the American Revolution on a ground level, because just like you’re saying, Heather, you can see people on the ground making these kinds of decisions that obviously they had not had to make before.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Plus I have to say, I love being able to get you going on a topic you know so incredibly well because there are millions of people who would love to have the opportunity to ask Joanne Freeman questions. And I’m the one sitting in that seat right now, and so I get to be like, wait, wait, who was he? What is he doing? So go ahead and tell us what was going on.

Joanne Freeman:

I will, I can tell you’ve been writing. You are just in a happy writing mood. So writing must have been going well.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh, aren’t I annoying?

Joanne Freeman:

No, it’s good. I’m soaking it up, all the good writing vibes. So the battle of New Haven, the important thing to note about this is, like many places throughout the colonies during the American Revolution, people in New Haven understood what was going on. They kNew that there were these brewing resentments, and then there were these growing fears and there was a sense that lurking out there was the possibility of some kind of a real problem in New Haven as in many places in 1774. So at a very early point in the revolution, average people in New Haven, average townspeople, men decided that maybe it would be smart to hire someone, to teach them military exercises, just in the sense that maybe someday we might need to know these sorts of things.

So wouldn’t it be great to hire a teacher? And the teacher could teach us these basic things about what to act like if we’re going to be a militia, which they did. Now, that’s a pretty extreme action. It shows that people were actually wondering what was happening out there and were willing to come other, these average people in New Haven, and act in this way, but it still was a… Well, this would be a handy thing for us to know how to do. And so we’ll do it with no official instruction to do it. And initially, no assumption about making it official in any way.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So Joanne, how would they have known in 1774 that something was afoot, literally did somebody come read letters to them? And that being said, what would they have been concerned about?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, newspapers for sure were a major way in which people learned about things, but also it was people traveling throughout the colonies. Very early on the battle of Lexington and Concord was hit like a bomb in New Haven, they were stunned. And there are accounts of people who couldn’t quite believe that the British had actually fired on their own colonists, that there had actually been blood shed between British subjects and British soldiers. When I teach that in my classes, I note to the students that in the past, when poking around trying to find accounts of people, hearing that news, you occasionally find someone who’ll say something like I was sitting down to eat when I heard the news of Lexington. And that’s the sort of thing you do years later, you remember precisely where you were when you hear a shocking piece of news.

That’s how people heard the news of Lexington. So that’s the kind of news that set colonists, and in this case, particularly in New Haven, to thinking about the fact that, oh, that thing just happened there and we don’t expect it necessarily to happen here, but who would’ve expected it to happen anywhere. So maybe we should do something to act like we’re prepared for the unexpected someday.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So they start to drill.

Joanne Freeman:

They start to drill, they hire someone to do this. After a while, they decide that maybe they should get some kind of formal recognition that they can actually be a militia unit. They can actually have uniforms and they can figure out how to get weapons. And they’d do this in 1775, that if something really happened, as they put it, they’re anxious for the safety of our country, that they would be able to do something. But what’s fascinating about this to me is we have records of who these people are, these New Haven citizens who came forward to do this. One of them owned a hat store.

One was a barber who is described as a rather eccentric person. And I really don’t know what that means, but I’ve been puzzled by it ever since I discovered it, there was an eccentric barber. There were a couple of sailors, there was a chair maker, there was a man described as a man of leisure, a lawyer, a few grocers, a couple shoemakers, a Saddler. So these are people from various levels of society in New Haven coming together because they have this vague sense that something bad might happen maybe someday. And they want to be prepared in case something happens.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So when they say they’re worried about the safety of their country, what do they mean? Do they still mean Britain or do they mean New Haven or do they mean the colonies or do they just generally mean, we’re scared? Or all the above?

Joanne Freeman:

Some combination of the above. Yeah. I think, they are thinking certainly locally. They’re probably thinking about their colony. They’re thinking about the American colonies, generally and the New Haven town meeting not that long after decides that they’re going to start storing weapons and powder in Yale College. In case they’re ever needed, we’ll know where they are. They’re going to be stored in the library at Yale, right along there, alongside the books, weapons and powder.

Heather Cox Richardson:

All you need is a match and the whole thing goes. I’m sorry. I know it’s not how it turns out, but I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when someone said, I’ve got a great idea. Let’s not put it in anyone’s bar and let’s put it next to the flammable books.

Joanne Freeman:

All of the books. Yeah, that’s true. I do not know how that conversation went. They get ready and there they are feeling like, well, we’re ready in case something bad happens. Now we move ahead in time to July of 1779. And there, at this point we have Ezra Stiles. He’s the president of Yale at the time. And we have his diary noting what happens for these few days in July of 1779. He says in his diary, actually on July 4th, that he had heard news, this goes back to your earlier question, Heather, about how do they hear these things? He’d heard news that there was a British fleet of ships near Bridgeport, Connecticut heading towards New Haven. And he writes a letter asking the, by this point, state of Connecticut to send the militia. But he adds in his diary, I cannot believe the enemy intends landing, right? So he’s like, I heard this news and the British are at Bridgeport, but he truly can’t believe that this is going to happen where he is.

Heather Cox Richardson:

He calls them the enemy. So we’ve gone from the general country thing, and maybe they’re doing something bad to now the British are the enemy.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, absolutely. And we’ve also gone from 1775 to 1779. Yeah. A lot happens and we’ve declared ourselves independent from Great Britain. So from that point on, it’s Americans versus British. So absolutely they would’ve been seen as the enemy. So Stiles goes up to the steeple of the chapel at Yale the next day and he writes in his diary, saw the ships distinctly from the steeple. He says that he can see the boats putting off from the ship and landing a little after sunrise and then notes that he immediately sent college records and papers away, sent his family away, sent a bag of his own things away. He says, militia meeting, Tories come, but clearly he’s still stunned, but he can now see something brewing.

So the British at first come and make a bold pronouncement that I always think has Darth Vader-esque tones to it in which it says the existence of a single habitation on your defenseless coast ought to be a subject of constant reproof to your ingratitude, you colonists. Can the strength of your whole province cope with the force, which might at any time be poured through every district in your country? You are conscious, it cannot. Why then will you persist in a ruinous and ill-judged resistance? So that’s very Darth Vader-y, like surrender now because you’re going to die. It’s going to be bad.

The next day, Stiles rights in his diary that the enemy is parading around New Haven. So they’re making a statement and there begins to be some plunder in New Haven. And I have to add this only because it’s this goofy little thing that reminds you, that what we’re looking at here is ground level actions and decisions. Stiles writes in his diary that, removing my furniture from Yale, I broke my Fahrenheit thermometer, which I’ve had since 1762. I just broke my little favorite, right? Your face looks as stricken as that statement sounds, right? It’s such a, to me, powerful reminder of the reality of this moment and that he broke his favorite Fahrenheit thermometer. His family is fleeing. He’s sending papers away. And for that flash of a moment, he says, I broke my thermometer, I’ve had forever. He spends one day in the middle of all this writing diplomas on parchment. Again, showing you that life is continuing, but meanwhile, the British actually now come into New Haven and begin to plunder.

You have these people in New Haven, they have a sense that something might happen. They’re not all united in their politics. Some of them are siding with the colonists and the “patriots”. Some of them are Tories and side with the British. Some of them aren’t sure what they think. Some of them just immediately flee when things get scary, some of them decide to fight on one side or another. You have a moment when suddenly people have to make a decision, they have to act. They have to choose what they’re going to do. The British come in and here is, again Stiles and his diary. He says, perhaps one third of the adult male inhabitants flew to arms and went out to meet the British. A quarter were moved out of town doing nothing. The rest remained unmoved, partly Tories, partly timid wigs.

So some people act and go to arms. Some people run. Some want to help the British. Some don’t know what to do when they’re just sitting by. And here, you can see people, moment by moment having to make a decision. For example, there’s a man who apparently his wife was ill and couldn’t be moved from their house. And so he can’t move while this is all going on and houses are getting plundered. And apparently this man went to the British in person and said, I’m pleading for you to show mercy, to take pity on me and my wife. And the British officer who he goes to says, are you a friend of the king or not? And this man thinking about his house and his wife says, well, yes I am. And his house is spared.

But from that time on, he’s pretty much an outcast because he was not necessarily a Tory. He said that to save himself and his wife, and now that’s who he is going to be in the town. He made a decision in the moment, had to, did what he thought was the right thing for him and his wife, more than anything else, and then he has to live with that decision. And there’s a lot more detail here about Yale students deciding that they’re going to go out and try and delay the enemy so that they can fend them off. There’s a Yale professor of divinity, Naphtali Daggett, who goes riding out. The students say they see him. He had sworn that he was going to defend Americans against the British.

They see him ride out on his horse to fight against the British. And they cheer him on as he goes. He apparently hides in some bushes and lodges a few shots at the British and then stops because he realizes he’s a lone guy in a bush shooting at the British. So he stops. He says, I decided I was not going to fire anymore. And I’ll quote from him here, “I loaded my Musket again, but determined not to discharge it anymore. And as I saw I could not escape, I determined to surrender myself as a prisoner. I begged for quarter and that they would spare my life. They drew near to me, I think two only in number, one on my right hand, the other on my left, the fury of infernals glowing in their faces. They called me a damned old rebel,” he’s kind of an elderly fellow, “and swore they would kill me instantly. They demanded, why did you fire upon us? I replied, because it is the exercise of war, because we’re at war. And so I fired.”

So people are flinging. Actually, he ends up getting poorly treated by the British, who bring him back into New Haven, but smack at him and beat him along the way. What you see over and over and over again in this not very well known battle of New Haven, is just average Americans of all sorts in that moment, confronting a situation in which they have to respond somehow in which they can see, this is having a direct potential impact on their life, in the moment they have to take action. And many of them do something that they had never done before, which is prepare to fight, take up guns, prepare to fight off the British, which is not really something that these people necessarily had done before, or literally surrender their belongings and run over to the British to side with them.

So it’s not a battle that many people have necessarily even heard of, but the fact that you can see ground level decisions of people taking action and that different people are taking different actions, even within one little town, to me really drives home the way in which sometimes people become activists. It’s not necessarily some long hatched plan in which they, oh, I always knew I would be this kind of activist. It’s more like, well, I was in this moment and this thing happened and it clearly was wrong. And I had to do something and I chose to do X. That’s what you can see here during this one little moment in the middle of the American Revolution.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Wow. I love that. We have more stuff to talk about, but I feel like we could end this right here. I won’t forget that.

Joanne Freeman:

It makes it human in a way that all resistance or activism is, but we don’t always see it that way or realize it that way or experience it that way until we’re in the middle of it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

People often think that the world changes by big impersonal forces, but it’s always individuals who make choices to move the tide one way or another. The piece that I’d like to add to it as we go forward, there’s something really interesting that happens in the lead up to the Civil War, which is similar in that so many Americans are just focused on making a good living and having their farms and working on industrialization and watching this country grow. And they’re really looking inwardly, if you will, to their own economic benefit, really or their religious benefit or whatever, more than thinking about the government and whether or not to defend the government or take up arms against the government.

And there’s something really interesting that happens in the period from about 1820 to 1850, although it really takes off thanks to something that happens at 1830. And that’s that Americans come to believe that their right to representation in their democratic government is being taken away. And it’s known as the gag rule. There’s a really dramatic moment in the 1830s over petitions being submitted to the United States Congress. What happens in the 1820s, first it’s 1820 and this is the reason I was working on this, is that Maine wants to come into the union as a free state. And the southerners will not let that happen without there being a companion state that embraces the institution of human enslavement in order to balance the two in the Senate, because they’ve already lost parody in the House of Representatives.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And in order to stop that from happening, people start writing a petition campaign to Congress to say, don’t do this, don’t tie Maine to a Southern state. We get to be an independent state on our own. Don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this. And of course we get the Missouri compromise of 1820, which brings Maine into the country as a companion to Missouri, which is a slave state. And people are so angry at what they see as the overreach of the slave states in that situation that they continue a petition drive to try to stop the federal support of human enslavement in the District of Columbia.

So by 1834, the American anti-slavery society is really pushing these petitions and they send more and more petitions to Congress, as many as 130,000 petitions in 1837 and 1838, asking Congress to abolish the institution of enslavement in the District of Columbia over which Congress has oversight. And this is always a laboratory for American democracy is because the federal Congress has oversight of Washington DC, it tends to be a place where they try out new policies. So they keep asking and asking that to happen. Now, do you want to take from here what happens with John Quincy? You’re friendlier to him than I am.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, the thing that fascinates me about John Quincy Adams, he comes back to Congress, he’s elected to Congress after his presidency. So he serves out his presidency and then he’s elected back to Congress in 1830 after losing the presidency. And in a sense that could be seen as the high point of his political career. He’s not a horrible president, but he’s not an amazing president, but when he’s in Congress in the House, not the Senate, he actually becomes this hammer, this force among other things against slavery.

He’s elderly by that point, he’s an ex-president, he’s the son of a founder on all of those counts, and I hate to use this phrase, but it’s the best that comes to mind. He’s bullet proof in the sense that you can’t attack physically John Quincy Adams. He’s beyond that because of who he is and what he’s done. And because of that, joined up with the fact that it’s just his nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson once called him a bruiser who loves the melee.

So he’s just that kind of a fighter, but because he’s invulnerable, he really makes it his purpose to do everything that he can to stand up and get in the way of Southern power, what he would’ve called and what many others would’ve called the slave power, to really be a force of resistance to the spread of slavery. And so he very aggressively makes one of his missions in Congress to fight against what comes to be known as the gag rule, which basically says that petitions, memorials and resolutions regarding slavery should be tabled and no further action taken on them. So in essence, it just says, we’re just not going to deal with slavery petitions at all. The idea being that this will calm things down. We won’t have such fierce discussions. We’ll just remove slavery from the conversation.

Heather Cox Richardson:

They don’t want the petitions there because the federal government can’t interfere with the institution of slavery. So they don’t want the petitions presented at all.

Joanne Freeman:

Some people don’t want them, as you said, the southerners, because it shouldn’t be a matter of debate at all. Others are very happy for these petitions to be tabled because if there’s going to be any discussion, it’s going to lead to chaos and maybe even violence and divide Congress, nothing good will come out of that discussion. So for all of those reasons, there are many people willing to line up behind this idea of a gag rule.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But John Quincy Adams continues to insist on presenting petitions. And again, this probably sounds like some aspect of American history that sounds entirely unimportant, but it’s actually really important because he continues to try and present them. So for example, on December 20th, 1838, he presents 50 petitions to Congress. On January 7th, 1839, he introduces 95. On March 30th, 1840, he presents 511. He continues to present them and they continued to be tabled.

Joanne Freeman:

And that’s what he wants the public to see. He wants the public to see the suppression and the silencing and the tabling. At one point when there’s a motion to censure him because of what he’s doing with all of these petitions, his immediate response is, good, because what he wants is the American nation to see this attempt to take the floor from him, to silence him, to push this out of the way. There’s one case in which he goes to a newspaper office, very concerned about a reporter’s account of one of his speeches. And what he’s concerned about, this is in 1839, is that the report has to include what he calls, the desperate struggle to take the floor from him, because as he puts it, that would be much more valuable than content of my speech. He wants Americans to see the slave power trying to enforce its will and silence other people and thus in a way violate their constitutional rights of representation.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that’s it right there, to take a case that probably most northerners didn’t really care about, which was the institution of enslavement in Washington, DC. I’m not saying nobody did, but it was certainly not a huge issue for every American in the American north and say, this is really not just about human enslavement. This is about your rights. This is about your democratic rights. If we don’t have the right to petition and to discuss things on the floor of Congress, we have lost our democracy. We have lost our rights. People, listen to that.

Joanne Freeman:

And he was so savvy about it. He knew that people would not get necessarily as riled up about the problem of slavery as they would, if they felt that their own personal fundamental right of petition, their right of full representation on the floor of Congress, their right of what they would’ve considered to be free speech, all of these things, he was very quick to remind people, your rights were being violated. And when he went back to New England and there were celebrations and commemorations of his acts, that’s what they pointed to. You’re defending our rights. These are our rights. This is us that’s being affected by what’s going on here. Not necessarily the topic of slavery, but people recognizing the impact of what was happening on they themselves.

So it’s worth noting that the gag rule starts out as gag resolutions. It ultimately is made a gag rule. And then in 1844, finally after all of this struggle and Adams and other like-minded anti-slavery abolitionist attackers finally get rid of it, but it takes time and it takes this kind of struggle of making it clear to Americans that it’s a big issue that affects them personally and pushes them beyond what they might have considered to be ideals into bras tax everyday realities of what government to them was supposed to be.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it sets the stage to see the machinations later on of the wealthiest enslavers in their attempts to take over the federal government as part of a longer plot. So that by the time you Lincoln talking about how a house divided can’t stand and how there has been this plot among James and Roger and the carpenters building this house that people were primed to see, yeah, we got ourselves a real problem here, we’re losing democracy. Not just, we’re losing one piece here, one piece here that this is all together an assault on American democracy. I just want to go out and raise a toast to John Quincy Adams now.

Joanne Freeman:

I know. Well, I will say that when I was working on him and writing about him, I enjoyed it immensely because it was so satisfying to see someone be sort of that out and in everyone’s face fighting in this way and doing it in such a savvy manner that he knew if he just spoke only about slavery, he would get less of a response than if he yoked people’s sense of their own interests in as well. And made it clear that democracy was part of what was being attacked here, and democracy in a variety of different ways was what was being debated. But now when we were pondering what we were going to talk about, and we came up with this topic and we were coming up with a variety of different ways to approach people in the past having moments of recognition when they needed to take action, or moments of great savvy, when they realized how to get others to take action, you came up with an incident that I wasn’t necessarily familiar with, but that I want to hear you talk about. And it involves President Truman.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that’s one that I like very much, because I think it echoes both your point about the intimacy of these decisions, if you will, that they are very personal decisions about how one is going to act. But also that getting people involved in activism is often about real concerns about government, about for whom the government acts. And when we talk about the civil rights movement after World War II, we often focus on the 1950s as it really sort of starting to get its feet under it after brown versus board of education, and the attacks on so many black activists and children like Emmett Till, and all the things that happen in those years in the 50s and going forward into the 60s up till at least the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But there was a crucial moment in 1946 that pulls together both the personal decisions that created activism and that larger idea that a government was at stake. And that is the story of what happens in February of 1946, when Isaac Woodard, who is a black Sergeant who had served in World War II has been demobilized in Georgia and he is going home to see his wife and he’s on a bus and we can’t entirely tell what happened on the bus. It is possible that he was with some other veterans drinking on the bus. He was not in any way disorderly, but he asked the bus driver, if he, the bus driver would stop so he could use the restroom.

And the two had words, apparently the words were something to the effect of the bus driver calling him a racial epithet and him saying, hey, don’t talk to me that way. I’m a man, just like you are. He uses the restroom. He gets back on the bus. And when the bus goes over the South Carolina line, the bus driver stops the bus and calls the police and says that this Sergeant has been disruptive on the bus. The police officers led by the chief, a man named Lynwood Shull pulled Woodard off the bus and began to beat him. And they arrested him and threw him into jail. During the night they questioned him, but they also beat him so severely, and this is really horrific, broke his eyes in their sockets with a night stick and beat him so badly he lost a lot of his memory.

And then the next day they hauled him in front of a judge who found him guilty of disorderly conduct and fined him $50. And then Woodard falls out of the picture for a little while because he ends up in a hospital. His family is frantically searching for him. They find him about three weeks later. And when that happens, he begins to work with the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. So the NAACP begins to try and bring attention to Woodard’s case. They start to talk to lawyers of course, but also to popular figures. And one of the ones they talked to is Orson Welles, who’s an actor and has a radio show. And Orson Welles in July of 1946, reads a letter from the executive director of the NAACP, a man named Walter Francis White, who details what happened to Woodard and says, although we’ve had many horrible cases, there’s never been one worse than this. And asked for Welles to publicize the case.

And Welles does that. For the next four episodes, he talks about the fact that South Carolina never did anything to prosecute the chief and his deputy who blinded Woodard. So people begin to pay attention to what has happened to Woodard, in part because it is such a horrific case, but in part because literally this man was defending democracy against fascism days before he ends up on American soil being blinded by a law enforcement officer. So the case is starting to get attention in July of that year. And Orson Welles increasingly keeps talking directly to the chief who has done this, and saying, we know that you’re out there, you’re taking the wrong side on this.

Orson Welles (archival):

Told officer X that he will be dragged out of hiding. We’ve promised him a most unflattering glare of publicity. We’re going to keep that promise. We will build our own police lineup to line up this reticent policeman with the killers, the lunatics, the beast men, all the people of society zoo, where he belongs. If he’s listening to this, let him listen well. Officer X.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And he starts to build up a following behind the idea that something happened to Woodard that shouldn’t have. And a lot of musicians take this on as well. There’s very famous Calypso musician who starts to sing about Woodard and people know the Woody Guthrie song about the blinding of Isaac Woodard. Still nothing happens. Still the state of South Carolina doesn’t actually try to prosecute anything that happened to Woodard. So finally in September of 1946, White who’s again, and the executive director of the NAACP goes to the oval office and he meets with Harry Truman. Now Harry Truman is from Missouri. He’s a Southern Democrat, his early letters to the woman who become his wife are just as racist as one would suspect, but he hears this case and he’s horrified. And he says, I just had no idea it was so bad. We have to do something.

And he turns to the department of justice and he says to them, they must go down to South Carolina and prosecute this case. They must see what happened. So in fact, the chief goes on trial in later November in 1946 in Columbia, South Carolina. And it’s presided over by a judge who was a moderate at the time, but this case is going to make him a civil rights activist. His name is Judge J. Waties Waring. He’s actually the son of a Confederate soldier, but he listens to the testimony of what happened. And he looks at the fact that the all-white jury, because the jury is taken from the polling lists and black people aren’t really able to vote in South Carolina in 1946, and he listens to what he thinks is a travesty of a trial.

And the all-white jury comes back in less than 30 minutes and acquits Shull, even though Shull has admitted to the blinding, he has said that he did it in self-defense. And Waring looks at that and he’s like, this can’t stand. So to finish his story, he is going to start working with the NAACP in order to challenge segregation across the south. And that eventually is going to lead to his cooperation with Thurgood Marshall to construct and then to argue the brown versus board of education decision of 1954, that outlaws segregation. But also, and this speaks to the activism part, the case has so riled up white Americans to believe that this is not the land that they thought they were fighting the World War II for against fascism and its race based hierarchies, that Truman in 1946 puts together the presidential committee on civil rights. Which is going to give a report in 1947, in which he says, listen, we know that theoretically states are supposed to be protecting people’s civil rights, but when they don’t, the federal government must step in.

And in 1957, the committee does produce a report that says exactly that, we need new federal laws. And people got behind that. If you remember, by the time you get to 1965, after the Selma March, where marchers that were marching for voting rights end up getting their skulls cracked by police on horseback and the murder of the civil rights workers in 1963, as people who again, might not have thought they cared at all about what was happening in Mississippi or in Alabama or in South Carolina or in Georgia, looked at what was happening. They said, yeah, we need to step in and we need to do something here because that’s not the kind of government that we think should represent us.

So then by 1965, we get a bipartisan group of American lawmakers voting in favor of the Voting Rights Act. And that activism that put people on the streets to say, no, this is not the kind of government we want, I think that moment where they see an individual, a soldier, a black man who had just put his life on the line for the country against Hitler, being blinded within days of coming home, made people think, this is not the kind of world I want to live in, because if they can do it to him, who are they going to do it to next?

Joanne Freeman:

And it was a real person, right? It was a ground level, real person. So it wasn’t some objective fact that people were grappling with. It was something very real and very human and very ugly that it was hard to turn away from. So it was not what Americans wanted to think was being fought for, but it was also something that was about a person that they could see and understand that this was happening to him. And then as you said, if it happened to him, where else might it happen? So there was the reality factor here. I think that’s part of what’s joining all of these stories together is that people can see some kind of a reality that touches a part of them, that gives what they’re seeing some kind of a deeper resonance. Enough that they feel compelled to act or to encourage action.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s a personal thing that forces people to take a stand in a crisis moment. So in each of these cases, there is a larger force. There is a definition of what it means to live under the governments that they live. But there is the personalization of, this isn’t just about large forces. This is about individuals and I’m an individual, and I may not be able to change the world, but by [glory 00:40:19], I can change this next moment. I can put together a committee to look at changing the laws. I can insist the department of justice go down to the south, or I can just support the NAACP, or I can register people to vote. I can do those things, and in this particular moment, it’s not a luxury, it’s imperative.

Joanne Freeman:

And that’s one of the vital aspects of what we’re talking about here today is, it’s imperative, it’s real. In all the cases we’re talking about, it’s pressing. In some cases, people feel that they’re being pushed into action, rather than that they’re voluntarily striding into action, but that push matters. The fact that they’re feeling compelled to respond to something that in a way they can’t turn away from in one way or another, that matters. And so part of what we’re talking about here in how it is that you get people to want to take political action is not only, do they have to feel that they in some way personally are involved in the cause that’s being debated here, but also it almost has to be at the point where you can’t turn away.

It’s hard to turn away because you can’t avoid the fact that what’s happening is going to impact not just whoever it is you’re looking at, but potentially can spread far beyond that population. And that’s part of, in a sense what we and everyone else is grappling with in this current moment that we’re in, when we’re talking about voting rights, what does it take? What will it take? What do we need to do? What can move people to understand the level of threat to the democratic process that we’re under and to encourage people in this moment because of very real threats and very real sensibilities about what may or may not happen to actually take action rather than to stand back and wait to see what happens next.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, there is a wonderful moment that encapsulates this, I think when somebody writes to Truman and says, stop pushing this, stop pushing the idea of black rights. You’re messing with things, stop dealing with this, in that very broad brush way and Truman in his very Truman way, he’s just so direct. And so excited about things. And he gets his teeth in something, he goes, I know you haven’t thought this thing through and that you don’t know the facts. I’m happy however that you wrote me, because it gives me a chance to tell you what the facts are. When a mayor and a city Marshall can take a Sergeant off a bus in South Carolina, beat him up and put out his eyes and nothing is done about it by the state authorities, something is radically wrong with the system.