The Real History of Civil Rights Part 1: A New Constitution

If you ask American teenagers basic questions about American history, you'll quickly discover that they don't know much about it. One Gallup Bowl found that most American teens are unaware that Columbus arrived in 1492, or the two thirds don't know that states' rights were an issue in the Civil War, and three quarters are unaware that the United States gained independence in 1776. More interesting is what they do know. In May 2008, two college professors gave 2,000 American high school juniors and seniors a simple prompt. Starting from Columbus to the present day, jot down the names of the most famous Americans in history. The only ground rule is that they cannot be present. The top three answers were all black, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and, in first place, of course, Martin Luther King Jr., who was named by two thirds of the students. Benjamin Franklin by comparison was named by just 29%. Thomas Edison made the top 10 but was outranked by Oprah Winfrey. A similar survey of college students between 1975 and 1988 had radically different answers. Their top choices, Betsy Ross and Paul Revere didn't even make the top 10 by the mid-2000s. This is because, sometime between 1988 and 1995, things radically changed. National heroes like George Washington and Ben Franklin were replaced with a new class of central figures in American history. As the authors of the study put it by the mid-1990s quote, "African Americans and women had moved to the center of American history. Ask any American who went to public schools between 1995 and today, they'll tell you the central feature of their social studies classes, as history became known, were the histories of slavery and the civil rights movement." They likely remember watching videos like this one in school. We wanted to show you a clip of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech there, but it turns out we couldn't. That's because King's family owns the audio from the speech and they wouldn't let us use it. You might think that's weird. This is America, surely you can use a short sound bite of an extremely famous speech in an educational video. In most cases, you'd be right, but according to our lawyers, we can. In fact, we can't show quotes or read on air any portions of speech is owned by King's estate. It turns out his family has done all sorts of things to stop people like us, including amazingly, releasing the speech as an album so they could secure special music rights. They published his life's work as a book to secure additional rights and recently blocked open AI from allowing users to recreate King's likeness. These gimmicks gave them total control of how King is portrayed in media today. Why would they rig our legal system like that? Well, money is one reason. When CBS broadcast portions of the "I Have a Dream" speech on air, the family sued in the company settled. King's family has made a lot of money, suing media outlets. But another reason is that they want to silence critics like us. They need to protect his legacy and keep making money on it. What they're doing makes it very difficult to honestly reevaluate Martin Luther King Jr. and you're about to see why they don't want people to do that. It turns out the king you've heard of is a carefully curated creation. As a state's efforts perfectly illustrate what the civil rights movement has become, and as we'll show in this episode, what it always was, a gigantic lie. Over the course of this video, we are going to judge Martin Luther King Jr. not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. What you will see will shock you. Some of it isn't suitable for young children. We'll also confront the movement that he spearheaded, for his true aims, a colorblind society, or something far more radical, who'd bankrolled him. What did other civil rights leaders think of him? What unfolded behind the scenes in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963? Was civil disobedience actually peaceful? And most importantly, is America today stronger, more unified, and racially equal than before King's rise? These questions demand answers, and as Americans, we are entitled to a full accounting of the civil rights movement and its consequences. King's movement fundamentally transformed our country and our system of government. That's why we're tackling the topic in two parts. First, the hidden history of the civil rights movement, its key figures, agendas, funding, and scandals, and second, the profound lasting changes to our society and our consulate. This is the real history of the civil rights movement, part one, a new constitution. Soon after making Martin Luther King Day a federal holiday, President Ronald Reagan had some very nice things to say about the civil rights leader. Today is Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. Let us honor him by living the kind of lives that will make this dream his dream a reality. But behind the scenes, and as late as 1983 when Reagan created the new federal holiday, wasn't always certain that it would come to be. The proposal was controversial enough that congressional leaders bypassed committee hearings and rushed to vote on it. They didn't want committee hearings. This outraged North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, who delivered a speech on the Senate floor in which he made some bold accusations. He claimed, for example, that Dr. King, "kept around him as his principal advisors and associates, certain individuals who are taking their orders in direction from a foreign power, foreign to Soviet communists." Dr. King, he said, was a highly controversial figure during his lifetime and remained so today. Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy called Helms' speech "a last-ditch stand against equal justice," and said that he would not dignify the comments with a reply. They reflect no credit on this body. When Helms gave fellow Senators binders full of background research on Dr. King, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan described it as "filth that has been distributed in this chamber." The bill ended up passing, but it was hardly unanimous. So what was so controversial about someone who watered everyone to just get along? Well, as it turns out, there's a lot more to King's story than we've been told. Even Ronald Reagan knew this. While Reagan was praising King and public, he was attacking him in private. When a former New Hampshire governor confronted the president about King's communist ties, Reagan responded, "I have the reservations you have, but here the perception of too many people is based on an image not reality." He added that quote, "We will know in about 35 years whether Dr. King had communist sympathies." And now, eight years later than Reagan expected, we do know. It turns out Helms was right. In 2019, following one of President Trump's declassification orders, thousands of pages of documents related to Mark Luther King Jr. were also made public, primarily FBI transfers. That's how we know that in October 1962, King's top adviser was a man named Stanley D. Levison, who was, according to the FBI, a shrewd and dedicated communist, and King has long been aware of this. The FBI launched his investigation into King not because he was a civil rights activist or because FBI director J. Edgar Hoover hated him, though that's true, but because King was in constant contact with known members of the U.S. Communist Party, the evidence regarding King's communist ties was so strong that the wiretap was personally approved by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, a liberal and political ally of King's. On a visit to the White House Rose Garden, John F. Kennedy told King that the FBI considered Levison a conscious agent of the Soviet conspiracy and that he was under very close surveillance. Kennedy urged King to end his relationship with Levison because it threatened King's reputation and Kennedy's political career. King continued to communicate with Levison anyway, mostly through an intermediary. When the Kennedy's discovered King didn't keep his word, that's when they began wiretapping King's office and his home and his hotel rooms. Why did King insist on staying in touch with a known communist, who the president asked him to stop talking to? One reason is because Levison, who also served as a fundraiser for the Communist Party, was central to King's operations. According to the FBI, Levison was instrumental in making King a national and international figure. James Wood, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Public Relations Director from 1960 to 1962, quote, said that during that period, Levison acted primarily as King's business manager and donated large sums of money to him when funds were low. According to Wood, Levison was very close to King, had his confidence and was one of the few people who could get King alone, given advice and always have the advice accepted. King is a Marxist. IRS documents show that in 1957 and 1958, Stanley Levison, who had first met King only at the very end of 1956, had arranged for King to receive a total of $10,000 in cash gifts from himself. and a close friend, a 70-year-old Alice Rose and Stein Loey. That's the equivalent of nearly $120,000 in 2026. Levison was so close to King that he played a role in determining the date of King's famous march on Washington. Nine days after the march, on September 6, 1963. A federal agent named James Bland, chief of the FBI's subversive control section, wrote headquarters that that Levison described King as a, quote, "whole-hearted Marxist who has studied it, Marxism, believes in it, agrees with it. But because of his being a minister of religion, does not dare to espouse it publicly. King's communist ties were part of a concerted effort to destroy the United States. In the process of surveying King and his communist advisers, the FBI discovered that, quote, "King, who is married, maintains intimate relationships with at least three women, one in Atlanta, one in Mount Vernon, New York, and one in Washington, DC. And that King's extramarital affairs, while posing as a minister of the gospel, leave him highly susceptible to coercion and possible blackmail. And most important, in view of his continued close association and willingness to accept advice and submit to the influence of such communists as Levison and his assistant, Jack O'Dell, we should have as complete coverage as possible of King's activities. In early January 1964, the FBI placed a recording device. In the room at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, where King was staying, according to the transcripts, King and a Baptist minister from Baltimore were recorded discussing which female parishioners, quote, would be suitable for natural or unnatural sex acts. When one of the women in protested that she did not approve of this, the Baptist minister immediately and forcibly raped him. Handwritten notes in the margin state that King looked on, laughed, and offered advice. During the course of his stay at the Willard, King is described as engaging a sex orgy with other reverence, excessively consuming alcohol and engaging in acts, the FBI described as degeneracy and depravity. And one that I before King was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway in December 1964, please recall the King's hotel because a white prostitute was caught stealing money from King's brother, the Reverend AD King. An aide later confided to a friend that King's group was running naked drunk white prostitutes up and down the halls of the hotel. In total, the FBI transcripts we have access to suggest that King was a drunk, a pervert, the likely father of a bastard child and a hot tempered boss who once threatened to jump out a window when a woman refused to tell him she loved him. The audio recordings of these events were bizarrely sealed by a federal judge named John Lewis Smith in February 1977 for a period of 50 years. Presumably, it's a protect King's reputation. Time is nearly up. On January 31, 2027, we'll finally get to listen for ourselves and millions of Americans will likely realize that it's far past time to reevaluate King's legacy and that it might be time to stop force feeding the myth of Martin Luther King Jr. to American school kids. If you spend your days thinking about history, you start to notice that people in the past had a lot of problems, we don't have anymore. Disease, war, terrible plumbing. Fortunately, we have modern civilization now. Unfortunately, though, we still have summer heat and apparently mattresses that make it impossible to sleep. And when you're busy, bad sleep catches up with you fast. One thing history teaches you is that human beings have always understood the importance of sleep. Differences, people used to have very few options when they're sleeping conditions were terrible. If it was hot, you were hot. If your mattress wasn't comfortable, well, congratulations. That was your mattress. We live in the modern world now and there's really no reason to accept that. Since switching to Helix, I'm sleeping cooler and waking up without feeling like I spent the night fighting for survival, the mattress actually works, which seems like a pretty reasonable standard for a mattress if you ask me. Helix has more than 20 mattress models and you take a quick quiz to find the one that's right for you based on how you sleep, your preferred firmness and whether you tend to sleep hot. You get free shipping, a 129 sleep trial and the happy with Helix guarantee plus. Helix is the most awarded mattress brand on the market with testing and reviews from Forbes and Wyard. So we've solved a lot of problems since the days of ancient civilization. You might as well solve your mattress problem too. And right now, listeners of real history get exclusive discount at Helix. You won't find anywhere else. Go to helixsleep.com/walls for 27% off, site-wide exclusively for listeners of this show. That's helixsleep.com/walls for 27% off, site-wide. The United States in the 1950s was a radically different country than the one we live in today. And not in the way as most people would think. For one thing, it was a biracial country with an overwhelming racial majority. 89.5% of population was white and 10% black. 90% of population identified as Christian. The country's population, roughly 150 million at the time, was less than half the population of the country we live in now. New York, not California, was the most popular state. Cleveland was twice the size of Miami. At the time, the city of Detroit was roughly the same size as Los Angeles. You're about to witness the very exciting story of a city and its people. That city is Detroit. It's home of nearly 2 million people. Detroit was known then as the Paris of the Midwest. And back then, it was 84% white. It was among the most prosperous cities in the world with some of the highest standards of living for both black and white residents. Thanks to America's post-war economics supremacy and strong manufacturing economy. Car manufacturing required large workforces, so auto companies offered high wages and colorblind hiring practices. They have been doing the kind of job that strung the luxuries loose for every man. Luxury and freedom. According to political scientist Kevin Slack's book War on the American Republic, Black workers constituted, quote, 20 to 30% of automotive workers in Detroit at the Dodge Assembly plant Black workers constituted an estimated 60% of the workforces. Detroit in the 1950s was the closest America would ever be to economic quality. In 1951, the median income for Black family in Detroit was $3,500, which was just barely below the national median of 3,700. The nation had come a long way since the 1860s. Detroit, an exciting place to be, to live, to grow, to work shoulder to shoulder, regardless of national origin, color, or creep. As it turns out, the mid-20th century was an economic boom time for Black Americans. In 1940, 87% of blacks lived below the poverty line. By 1960, that number had dropped to 47%. In Northern and Western states in 1959, the mean earnings of a working married Black woman were higher than a working married white woman, according to the United States government. Mean family incomes where both spouses worked were close to the same between both races outside of the South. The economist Thomas Sold points out in his book, Civil Rights, Rhetoric, or Reality, that in the decade before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, quote, "the number of blacks and professional, technical, and similar high-level positions more than doubled. In other kinds of occupations, the advance of blacks was even greater during the 1940s, when there was little or no Civil Rights policy." According to Sol, quote, "The Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented no acceleration in trends that had been going on for many years. The percentage of employed blacks who were professional and technical workers rose less in the five years following the Civil Rights Act than in the five years preceding. The percentage of employed blacks who were managers and administrators was the same in 1967 as in 1964 and in 1960. The key factor in Black economic improvement between 1940 and 1960 was the massive migration of Black Americans from low-income areas in the South to high-income cities in the North. The scale of the migration is comparable in scale to the mass influx of European immigrants to Ellis Island." As Slack puts a quote, "Blacks took industrial jobs in cities like Chicago, whose Black population rose 77% during the 1940s and another 65% in the 1950s. It increased from 278,000 to 813,000. Non-white, median annual income had risen faster than that of whites, almost quadrupling from 1939 to 1951. A fact not lost on American business, which estimated a black market of $15 billion. Black started making major cultural inroads. Jackie Robinson made his debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Same year, Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed forces, "The American people as a whole. I know what's right, they know what's wrong, when they act on what's right and what's wrong. And in the long run, this equal rights thing will become a part of the custom of the United States as well as the law." In the 1950s, Hollywood started reducing overt, stereotypical exposure of Blacks and Films and started releasing all Black movies, including Porgy and Bess and St. Louis Blues. The music I play as the music of our people is my finest theirs. Attitudes in Northern and Western states were shifting. Between 1951 and 1959, Oregon, London. Tana, North Dakota, Colorado, South Dakota, Nevada, and Idaho repealed laws against interracial marriage. Minneapolis mayor and future vice president Hubert Humphrey proclaimed this at the 1948 Democratic convention. As the North shifted some parts of the deep south remained radically old-fashioned on race relations. Only about 4% of adult blacks were eligible to vote in Mississippi in 1950 by 1960 had risen to just 5.3% due to poll taxes and literacy tests and intimidation. Public and in some cases private spaces were segregated in Mississippi and Alabama. However, in major cities like Atlanta, enforcement of segregation was less extreme than in rural parts of the deep south. In 1959 Atlanta mayor William Hartzfield called Atlanta "the city too busy to hate." Atlanta wasn't the only place in the south where things were trending towards equality. In 1954 in Washington DC, which was then a majority white city, segregated public accommodations were voluntarily desegregated two years before the historic 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision, according to Seoul. The number of blacks registered to vote in Louisiana rose from 10,000 in 1947 to more than 160,000 in 1956. In Texas, the number of black registered voters doubled from 1947 and 1956. In Florida, it tripled. These are the conditions that not only allowed activists like Martin Luther King Jr. to thrive, but also set the stage for massive nationwide racial conflict. It was life getting better for blacks, not worse, that provoke the most destructive and racially divisive riots in the nation's history. You know, I recently saw the Odyssey, as you may have heard, which is one of the worst movies ever made, but if the movie accomplished anything, it reminded me that you should actually read Homer, because the Iliad and the Odyssey aren't just old stories for English class, they're foundational works of Western civilization. For thousands of years, people have read these stories to understand courage, honor, loyalty, sacrifice, what it needs to be human. And unlike whatever Hollywood decides to do with them, the originals are actually worth your time. That's why Mount Satano Media, the company we've been telling you about, behind finding our words, words that made America, has created the story of the Iliad and the story of the Odyssey. They're beautiful, accessible editions designed to bring the Homeric tradition into your home. Each book is paired with other works from that tradition, along with a reading guide by Allison Ellis, that helps you explore these stories with your family. Most people get a brief introduction to Homer in school if they get one at all. These stories deserve better than that, and they certainly deserve better than Hollywood. Read the stories themselves, find out why they've endured for thousands of years, go to MountSatanoMedia.com and bring the Homeric tradition home. When we opened the episode, we talked about the American icons, who high school students consider the most famous in American history. Number one was Martin Luther King, Jr. Number two was Rosa Parks. This is the story most of those students were taught in school. Parks was a seamstress who was tired after a long day at work. The seamstress, slighten stature, but mighty encouraged. The story goes that Parks sat down in a white-only section of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. When the driver asked her to move, she refused, and was arrested, went to jail. This action sparked a torrent of outrage and inspired spontaneous protests, making her the first domino in what led to a total transformation of the country. But here's the problem. Rosa Parks was not just some meek quiet seamstress who didn't know what she was getting into. She was a professional activist. She joined them on Montgomery chapter of the NAACP as its secretary in 1943, more than a decade before the bus boycott. Five months before her arrest, she attended the Highlander Folk School in Newmarket, Tennessee, which had been set up by the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a major labor union, for training agitators. The classified FBI documents show that the Highlander school's co-founder, Donald Lee West, was likely a member of the Communist Party. Nine months before Parks was arrested, another black woman named Claudette Colvin was arrested in Montgomery when she refused to give up her seat for a white passenger. The NAACP rejected her because she had an out-of-wedlock child. They wanted someone who'd be more sympathetic. Rosa Parks was perfect. She was a model citizen, she was polite, she was employed, and she had extensive training. The reality is that Montgomery in 1955 had draconian laws that treated blacks like second-class citizens, using professionals to confront that system made sense at the time. It also illustrates the level of energy that's been poured into propaganda make. That Rosa Parks is the second most famous figure in American history due to American high schoolers, but that most of those students also don't know her actual story is an insane indictment of America's education system. It's also worth pointing out that Parks was a radical. Parks and her husband attended Communist Party meetings for years. She collaborated with social organizations and domestic terrorists including the black panthers and black liberation army. In 1995 she attended Bruce Farrakhan's Million Man March. She blamed white people for the Detroit riots and said that widespread looting was, quote, "understandable." In her autobiography, Parks described her time at the Communist Tide Highlander School, saying, quote, "I spent 10 days at Highlander and went to different workshops mostly on how to desegregate schools. One of my greatest pleasures there was enjoying the smell of bacon, frying, and coffee brewing, and knowing that white folks were doing the preparing instead of me." According to Parks' biographer Jean Theoharis, in the mid-1990s, Parks had a conversation with a black nationalist lawyer who asked who her hero was, assuming she would say Martin Luther King Jr., given that they worked together. But in fact, she said her hero was Malcolm X because of boldness and clarity, his affirmation of what needed to be done for black people made him her champion. In her own autobiography, Parks wrote, quote, "We always felt that if you talked violently and said what you would do if they did something to you, that did more good than non-violence. To this day, I am not an absolute supporter of non-violence in all situations." One civil rights leader who disagreed with King and Parks was Reverend Joseph H. Jackson of the Olivets Baptist Church in Chicago. Jackson was a major figure at the time in 1953 became president of the National Baptist Convention, the largest black religious body in the nation with roughly six million members. His own church had the largest black congregation in the country with more than 20,000 congregants. In 1964, the New York Times profiled him on a full-page spread of black civil rights leaders that included Martin Luther King Jr. beside him and Malcolm X below him. The historian Taylor Branch called him the Negro Pope and the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier compared him to being the black president of the United States. What made Jackson different than the others is that he opposed civil disobedience, which he saw as, quote, "not far removed from open crime." He thought civil rights should be advanced legally through the courts and political system. Jackson also worked with Chicago's city leadership, including his political ally, Mayor Richard Daily, to preserve the racial distinctness of Chicago's neighborhoods. Basically, he wanted to keep the south side black. He, along with six black aldermen, known as the Silent Six, voted against integrated housing initiatives and other civil rights reforms in the city. Reverend Jackson didn't want to end housing segregation because he believed in economic self-reliance. He strongly supported the idea that black Americans should focus on building themselves up individually and through self-help efforts rather than relying primarily on white people or external forces for advancement. He came from a long line of black intellectuals, including Booker T. Washington, who believed self-help was the best model for improving black lives. It was this kind of thinking that resulted in a lot of black progress that happened between the Depression and the early 1960s. Within Chicago, Jackson's approach of civil rights through law and order was effective. Along with Mayor Richard Daily, Chicago's black residents got expanded public housing, access to prime city jobs, favorable contracts from the city government, and municipal investments into primarily black neighborhoods. Jackson views must have been at least somewhat pervasive among American blacks who kept re-electing him by massive margins to his position atop the National Baptist Convention. Jackson's strategy infuriated Martin Luther King Jr., who hated Jackson and believed the weight of the National Baptist Convention should be used to push his political agenda. In 1960, King Decry Jackson, saying he was, quote, "sick and tired of seeing Negro preachers riding around in big cars and living in big houses and not concerned about the problems of the people who made it possible for them to get these things." For his part, Jackson described Martin Luther King Jr. as "a Howter King philosopher, who was part of a new breed of hoodlums and crooks in the pulpits today. King may not have been a hoodlum, but he certainly was a radical, especially later in his career. The king most students learn about was the one who called for people to be judged by the content of their character, and insisted on non-violent civil disobedience. Less taught is the king who called for, quote, "a radical redistribution of economic and political power." In private, King declared that, "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism." In his book, where do we go from here, King called on Western nations to give 2% of GDP to countries of color, a global redistribution of wealth for the sin of racism. King writes, quote, "insured, white America must assume the guilt for the black man's inferior status. You must acknowledge your white guilt," he says, quote. "Predemption can come only through a humble acknowledgement of guilt, and an honest knowledge of self." King didn't believe in judging others by their individual character. He believed in judging them for their collective sins. It was literally the opposite of the "I Have a Dream" speech. It was a racial shakedown, it was a call for reparations. By the late 60s, King openly hated the United States. On April 4th, 1967, at Riverside Church in Manhattan, King said this. "And I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed and together. I'm having first spoken clearly in the greatest figure of violence in the world of the day, my own government." His mandate started in Selma, and Montgomery, and by the end of his career, had creeped into the rest of the world, of which he said he was a citizen. "I speak as a citizen of the world, or the world as it stands again, at the path we have taken." Even the media at the time were appalled by the speech, Life magazine, called that speech a "demogogic slander" that sounded like a script from Radio Hanoi. The Washington Post said King has done a grave injury to those who are his natural allies, and an even graver injury to himself. When Congress passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act in the mid-1960s, it wedded King's appetite for, of all things, revolution. He told organizers at a conference, "We had been in a reform movement, but after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution. In short, we have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society." He then noted that, "We must recognize that we can't solve our problems now, until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power in his last essay, which was published posthumously by Playboy magazine." King said, "America is deeply racist, and its democracy is flawed, both economically and socially. The Black Revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws, racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws, and suggests that radical reconstruction of society is the real issue to be faced." Would any of this rhetoric be out of place during the woke-up evils of 2020? Are those the words of an America-loving moderate? Someone deserving of a federal holiday? No, not at all. Joseph A. Jackson realized that, and his critique of King had been proven right. In July of 1968, the Chicago City Council renamed South Parkway the major thoroughfare fronting Olivet Baptist Church to Martin Luther King's drive as a tribute to the recently assassinated leader. Jackson reacted with fury. He reoriented the church's main entrance and official address to the cross-street at East 31st, ensuring that neither the church's stationary, denominational materials, nor daily operations, would carry King's name. The new address remained until Jackson's death in 1990. That's what one of the 20th century's most popular Black leaders thought about Martin Luther King's dream. There was a time when owning a cell phone required strategy. Yet a limited number of minutes text messages didn't exist. Then they did, and there was a character limit, and you had to pay for each text. And if you wanted to have an actual conversation, you waited until nights and weekends, because apparently phone calls became cheaper after 9 o'clock. This was considered advanced technology, then came unlimited talk, unlimited text, unlimited data. The phone's got dramatically better. Somehow, the bills stage dramatically expensive. So here's the latest development in the history of wireless service. 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If a black person wanted to vote in Birmingham, he had to pay a whole tax. Demonstrate, study employment, own at least $300 in property, clear a vague moral assessment, and pass a literacy test that included questions like, "If a person charged with treason denies his guilt, how many persons must testify against him before he can be convicted?" Local ordinances segregated everything from restaurants to theaters to very famously drinking fountains. Willie Mays was playing for the San Francisco giants, but in Birmingham, he wouldn't have been able to play against white athletes. When the city was ordered to integrate the parks, it just closed them instead. Birmingham in 1963 was uniquely bad. It was, according to Martin Luther King Jr., the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Against this backdrop on October 20, 1962, King announced that he was going back to Alabama to make a people-to-people tour to recruit a non-violent army for a new front of the attack on the system of segregation in the whole state. The key word he used was non-violent. The term King used over and over again. His strategy of civil disobedience meant breaking unjust laws in non-violent ways. This, he believed, would help convince moderate white people to join his cause. When King got to town, Mayor-elect Albert Boutwell moderated. Quote warned Birmingham Negro citizens against strangers, whose sole purpose is to stir strife and discord here, and then who will leave our citizens to pay the penalty of this discord. The Mayor-elect noted, quote, "I do not need to tell the people of Birmingham that this is an attempt to stage a big show to make headlines throughout the country." At first, the protests didn't generate much news. The local paper, the Birmingham News, reported that King's first march on City Hall, quote, "fizzled with only a handful of Negroes following him to the municipal building. Over time, the crowds grew, with them so did the city's desire to maintain order." On Sunday, April 7, they significantly bigger crowd marched on City Hall. From page two of the paper, quote, "more racial demonstrations were planned for Birmingham today, following a march on City Hall Sunday, which police dogs were used to scatter a crowd of 500 Negroes. Why were police dogs at a non-violent protest?" According to the paper, quote, "police set up a roadblock, two blocks away from a church with the activist organizing." And told them they would be arrested if they crossed the intersection. Demonstrators crossed the street and were halted by police captain G.V. Evans, who told them they were under arrest. While the demonstrators were being loaded in the paddy wagons, police scattered the large crowd of Negroes with police dogs. The dogs were used only after the crowd of Negroes refused to obey officers warnings to move back. A 19-year-old Negro, Leroy Allen, turned to fight a canine dog with a small piece of clay pipe. The dog downed the youth and the crowd started surging forward. Another Negro pulled a knife and about 15 policemen, joined by police dogs, moved in and forced the crowd back on the block. Context here is important. Alabama at the time was bursting at the seams. Just below that article was another about someone's taking a shot at the governor's mansion. President Kennedy announced he was monitoring the situation in Birmingham from his compound outside Palm Beach, Florida. Interestingly, Birmingham's chief of police saw his role as maintaining order by keeping angry white people away from angry black people. "There has been no violence or bloodshed. This has been true because Birmingham police have not permitted white or negro citizens to come in conflict with each other. Good judgment has been used by all of our citizens and cooperating with police officers. Those who have refused to obey the lawful commands of officers have been properly arrested. By April 10th, the city had had enough." At their request, a state court issued in order, enjoining 136 Negroes and eight of their leaders, including King, from further participation. King and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy called the order unconstitutional and immediately called for a mass march at noon on Good Friday. That day, April 12th, King and Abernathy attempted to march to City Hall and were arrested for contempt of court. Next to the pictures of King's arrest in the paper, was a statement from local pastors and rabbis who complained, quote, "We are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely, just as we formerly pointed out that hatred and violence have no sanction in our religion and political traditions. We also point out that such actions as incite hatred and violence, however, technically peaceful those actions may be, have not contributed to the resolution of our local problems." Referring to the fact that the city had just adopted a new governance model that had taken power away from hardcore segregationists, they said, quote, "In Birmingham, recent public events have given indication that we all have opportunity for a new, constructive, and realistic approach to racial problems." The letter infuriated King, who from his solitary confinement cell in the Birmingham City jail, wrote, quote, "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride towards freedom is not the white citizen's counselor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice." King noted, "While Mayor-elect Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists. It is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. As time passed, the protests kept coming and so did the arrests. On April 20th, King was released from prison. His first move was to hold a press conference. He filed a class action lawsuit in federal court to block the state courts from preventing protests. Mayor-Boutwell promised to give immediate and determined attention to resolving the difficulties that face us." King responded to the overtures by unleashing black children upon the city. May 2nd marked the start of the Children's Crusade, in which over 1,000 black students skipped school to march downtown. On May 3rd, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy issued a statement saying, quote, "The timing of the present demonstrations is open to question. School children participating in street demonstrations is a dangerous business. An injured, maimed, or dead child is a price that none of us can afford to pay." Kennedy noted that the new mayor had already made clear his intention to resolve the difficulties facing the community. King didn't care, kept the pressure on, and the children out. On May 4th, the paper reported, firemen reportedly hosed down a crowd of Negroes, waving and throwing rocks, sticks, and bottles as racial demonstrations flared, drumming him. Police dogs were brought up, but most of the time were held behind the firemen. They chased away two Negroes armed with rocks who attempted to climb on a car. Several firemen were struck in a barrage of missiles, but none was injured seriously. Police wore hard hats for protection. The Reverend James Bevel, a civil rights leader himself, told the paper, "I saw at least 25 Negro men with guns." According to the article, one Negro teenager ran toward a group of policemen and struck an officer in the chest with a rock. The policemen chased the youth down and hacked them across the back with his Billy Club and let them go. It was, as we like to say now, a mostly peaceful protest. Now, it's worth pointing out that spraying down protesters wasn't a novel tactic. Cops had been using it against white people to disperse riots, protests, and strikes for decades. In 1912, officials in Lawrence, Massachusetts used firehoses on striking workers at a textile mill. When Communists led a rally against a Ford Motor Company in 1932, the Dearborn Michigan Fire Department sprayed them down with firehoses. In 1937, striking auto workers in Flint, Michigan turned firehoses on cops to prevent them from stopping the strike, but let's go back to Birmingham in 1963. If Mayor Boutwell was right, that outside agitators had come to town with the goal of making headlines around the country, then they had accomplished their mission. Photographs and video footage made the national news and horrified northerners. On May 9th, the Birmingham news reported that, "At least 18 officers and firemen, two newsmen and five Negroes have suffered injuries requiring medical attention in racial demonstrations beginning here on April 5th. The city's fire chief had been struck by bricks and many more firemen were struck, but were protected from injury by their helmets and thick coats." The next day on May 10th, protest leader city officials and business representatives reached an agreement that included the desegregation of lunch counters, fitting rooms, drinking fountains, and restrooms in downtown stores. The hiring of black workers, the release of jail protesters and the formation of a biracial committee for further talks. The local paper reported that some 300 Negro demonstrators were still in custody and were being released as rapidly as bonds could be made as a racial truce, ease tensions in Birmingham Saturday. The reduced tensions lasted just one day. On May 11th, 1963, multiple explosions rock Birmingham, targeting the hotel where King was staying as well as his brother's home. The police used tear gas to disperse crowds of black and white people. The mayor declared that this city will not tolerate violence, especially the dastardly hit and run bombers who wreak vengeance without regard for life or property. It wasn't enough. Race riots broke out immediately. According to the Birmingham news, quote, "A white woman Mrs. Dora Hanks was taken to university hospital after being hurt when a rock was thrown through the windshield of a car in which she was riding." A white taxi cab driver was reportedly stabbed. Tires were slashed, police were attacked. Within a day, 28 blocks were sealed off by law enforcement after rioting our sin and hand-to-hand fighting by Negroes and police. President Kennedy sent federal troops to bases near Birmingham and drafted an executive order to federalize the Alabama National Guard. The point of going over the details of King's Birmingham campaign is to point out that the civil rights movement was not peaceful. King constantly paid rhetorical tribute to the idea of nonviolent protest. This made King more moderate than other civil rights leaders, some of whom were openly militant. The Black Power activist, H. Rapp Brown, told the supporters that violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America's culture. It is as American as cherry pie. He died last year while serving a life sentence for the murder of a sheriff's deputy. And part of King's mainstream appeal is that he preached nonviolence, but as the Birmingham campaign shows, even nonviolent protests led to the hospitalization of police officers. As Christopher Caldwell notes in the age of entitlement, quote, "The riots were the civil rights movement, not the whole of it, certainly, but an important element of it." Over time, a news cycle was born. Whether it was justified or not, when police killed a Black person, the media would cover the story. Race scriptures would come to town and cry racism. And the Black population would rise up and then they'd burn their neighborhood down. Usually, the worst violence happened after civil rights leaders had major victories. Two weeks after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, a New York City policeman shot and killed a Black teenager named James Powell. The cops had Powell attacked the police officer with a knife. Powell's friends said that he was attending a peaceful protest. Body cameras didn't exist back then, so for six straight nights, Harlem burned. Hundreds were hospitalized. Then riots broke out in Rochester and Jersey City. In an August 1964 survey, 87% of respondents said they hurt the Negro cause. Now, they were wrong, of course. In every case, violence led to major concessions to the demands of the rioters. What started as riots in Watts in 1965 and in Detroit in 1967 and eventually became a full-fledged rebellion by 1992 in Los Angeles. The police officers were filmed severely beating Rodney King, a career criminal who was high and drunk, a regular PCP user, and had led police on 110 mile-prow or high-speed chase. When riots broke out, King said this. Can we get along? Can we get along? By the turn of the century, it seemed like the answer might finally be yes. But when America elected a Black president, 2008, the riots came back. In 2014, Ferguson, Missouri burned down after a police officer shot gentle giant Michael Brown when he attempted to pull the officer's gun. In 2015, Freddie Gray died in police custody. We also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well. Half the officers who were charged were black. The riots finally reached a fever pitch, of course, after the death of George Floyd in 2020. Even MLK, this posed champion of non-violent protests, who looked at Gandhi as a model, had this to say about riots to CBS's Mike Wallace in 1966. I think we've got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. In January 1967, when asked if Negroes would be better off, if they would take advantage of the opportunities that have been made available, rather than spending so much time testing, 83% of respondents said they'd probably or definitely agree. But to many Black Americans, those opportunities just were not good enough. If white people did not deliver everything, they wanted. The violence would come back, just to ask Dr. Mark with the King Jr. about how long it will take will depend on the federal government, the city halls, about various cities, and on white America to a larger extent. The version of Martin Luther King Jr. most kids are taught about is a man who believe that making the laws colorblind would save the soul of America. It's conservatives who generally promote this myth. They love selectively quoting from his "I have a dream" speech. But King did not believe in colorblindness at all. In his "I have a dream" speech, King used for the first time a term familiar to audience is up today, people of color. This was one of the first signs that a movement which had begun in 1950s to end injustices against Black Americans would, by the turn of the 21st century evolved into something radically different, as Christopher Caldwell notes in his book The Age of the Title Man. This was a very significant change. "People of color was a harbinger of what later came to be called intersectionality, a philosophical sounding term of the political strategy of bundling different minorities into a coalition. It was a way to bundle up all the various non-white groups into one package to promote a new narrative of victimhood and oppression. It was all on one." King championed this vision of white men versus everyone else as early as 1963 when in his letter from Birmingham City Jail. He described, quote, "Black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America, and the Caribbean. The United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. The yellow brothers of Asia and South America had nothing to do with the Jim Crow South, and yet here was King riding from a Jail cell in central Alabama, sowing the seeds for a new coalition, where the only thing the members had in common was that they were not white. Most Americans at the time didn't pick up on this and probably wouldn't have believed it if you built a time machine to go back and tell them what ended up happening. When King wrote that letter, the heart-seller law that radically transformed America's demographics hadn't passed yet, America was a 90 percent white country. People in it didn't realize that by 2024 white children would be a minority among their multiracial peers. The extent that civil rights policy became the law of the land, it was a first primarily because of unelected judges who ruled by decree. The first major case is also one of the most famous versus Brown versus Board of Education. The question in this case was whether the policy of separate but equal schools for black and white students was Constitution. The unanimous court found that it was not and ordered the desegregation of every school in the nation. It was a profound move at the time, regardless of what you think of the outcome, and surely most people today oppose legally segregated schools. The court's decision was not based in logic. Instead, the justices relied on, quote, "quality of which are incapable of objective measurement and intangible considerations, which amount to a feeling of inferiority among black students's status in the community to support these intangible considerations, the court based its opinion not on precedent or the text of the Constitution, which are tangible." But on a pseudo-scientific psychological study that found that black children preferred white dolls. The study was later disproven. It was a period of extreme decadence and radical judicial activism. Before John F. Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, legislative progress on major civil rights reforms was slow. Kennedy overwhelmingly won the black vote in the 1960 election, but he was hesitant to burn political capital on civil rights legislation, but a wave of protests in 1963, plus pressure from civil rights activists and union leaders, forced his hand. "We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and as is clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities." When Kennedy gave that speech, 49% of Americans approved of a new civil rights law that would promote racial equality in public places, compared to 42% who disapproved and 9% who had no opinion according to Gallup. "Are we American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to erase?" He was proposing what would become the most significant piece of civil rights legislation in the period the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The law's central feature was the forced integration of public spaces, but it also banned unequal voter registration requirements, segregation in schools, and employment discrimination. Similar proposals had languished in committee for years. The catalyst for its passage was Kennedy's assassination, which his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, used as a pretence to hammer the bill through Congress. "The moral oration of our eulogy could more eloquently honor the president's Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he called so long." At the time, most Americans believed the country was moving too fast, Christopher Caldwell notes that in August 1963, the month of the March on Washington, when Kennedy was still alive, 50% of Americans said the country was moving too fast on integration, versus 10% who said "not fast enough," ratio of 5 to 1. That ratio fell 2 to 1, 30 to 15% in January during the debate on the Civil Rights Act. But in October on the eve of election, it was back over 3 to 1, 57% to 18%. The law was sold to voters as something that would punish racist whites in the South, in fact reflected by how Congress voted on it, or the 90% of Northern members of Congress voted yes, and more than 90% of the Southern members voted no. Riding the co-tails of Kennedy's assassination, and thanks to Johnson's talent for intimidating members of Congress, it passed overwhelmingly. "I'm about to sign into the law the Civil Rights Act of 1964." To ensure the bill had popular support, its sponsors made bold promises about what it would and would not do. Almost everything they said ended up not being true. When opponents claimed the law would lead to racial quotas and affirmative action, the bill's manager, Senator Hubert Humphrey, claimed quote, "I will eat my hat if anyone can find language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin." Quotas at the time were extremely unpopular, even the NWACP opposed them. And yet, almost immediately after the law passed, lawyers and government bureaucrats started instituting systems of racial quotas. I wonder if Humphrey likes his hat, rare, or well done. When Florida's Democratic Senator George Smathers expressed concern that the bill might lead to a busing, Pennsylvania Republican Hugh Scott responded saying quote, "Does the Senator not agree that there is nothing whatever in the bill which relates to the transportation of school children by bus from one district to another? I find nothing in the bill which pertains to any such provision." Humphrey claimed if the bill were to compel it, busing, it would be a violation of the constitution, because it would be handling the matter on the basis of race and it would be transporting children because of race. New York Senator Jacob Javits said anyone who used the bill to promote busing quote would be making a fool of himself. And yet, two years after the law was enacted, it was used as the legal basis to implement nationwide busing. Where the politicians promoting the bill intentionally lying? Or did they not know what they were doing? It's impossible to know. But we do know that their sales pitch worked. One Gallup poll from October 1964 found that voters supported it 59% to 31% nearly a two-to-one margin. Notably after the law was enacted, 40% of northerners either disapproved or were undecided on the law. But bizarrely, they also didn't want it enforced. Three months after it was signed into law, Gallup asked Americans if the government should enforce the law. The results are shocking. 62% of Americans wanted gradual enforcement of the law, versus 23% who wanted it to be strictly enforced. As Christopher Galwell puts it, fewer than a quarter of Americans actually did want the law to be enforced. Those findings were replicated by other pollsters, including one that found only 90% of Americans wanted vigorous enforcement of the law. By May of 1965, Gallup found that 45% of Americans believed that the federal government was moving too fast, an integration compared to 14%, who said it wasn't fast enough, roughly the same. Public skepticism and the desire to delay enforcement made no difference. Almost immediately after passage it became clear that the Civil Rights Act was a major coup for lawyers and bureaucrats. Turns out the law wasn't colorblind at all. The law wasn't primarily directed at segregationists, in the south. Exactly one year after he signed the Civil Rights Act into law, Lyndon Johnson announced that it wasn't enough. "This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom, but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity, but human ability. Not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a result." In 1965, Johnson signed executive order 11246, which ordered government contractors with more than $10,000 in business to set up affirmative action programs in order that wasn't rescinded until 60 years later, when President Trump eliminated it at the start of his second term. The actual text of the Civil Rights Act includes things that were radical then, but are familiar now. Section 706 notes that if the courts find that a business is, quote, "intentionally engaging in an unlawful employment practice," then it could order such an affirmative action as maybe appropriate, practically speaking, that meant the courts now had a role to play in investigating the employment practices of almost every business in the country. This represented the birth of the modern HR department. By 1971, a unanimous Supreme Court completely reinterpreted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by banning race-neutral colorblind aptitude tests and instituting a new framework. From then on, the courts would address systemic barriers that resulted in disparate outcomes, like how requiring job applicants to have a high school diploma made it so fewer blacks got hired. The brief period of colorblind civil rights was over. Like Johnson himself, the court had shifted from looking at fairness to looking at outcomes. Going forward, the Civil Rights Act banned not only overt discrimination, but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation. In the words of Christopher Caldwell, quote, "Just half a decade into the civil rights revolution, America had something that it had never had at federal level, something the overwhelming majority of its citizens would never have approved, and explicit system of racial preference. It was a total and complete transfer of power from the old constitutional system, which was based on the participation of voters, to a new system, which was based on an emerging group of diversity activists, lawyers, and media figures. Governance, according to Caldwell, was now based on a model of executive voters' litigation and court redress. In fact, civil rights law is not law, in any sense of the word. Law must be universal and enforced, and in America, passed by elected representatives. The Civil Rights regime consists of layers of agency rules, administrative guidelines, interpretive memos, judicial statutory construction, and cryptic judicial doctrines. And all of these are subjected to special interests that evade the democratic process. The new system was directly at odds with the old constitution, which allowed property owners to assert their rights and guarantee, among other First Amendment rights, a freedom of association. Those rights were incompatible with the emerging order. If the government could force a hotel owner in the South to have black customers, then surely it could also force a Christian bakery owner in Colorado to make a cake for a gay wedding. And over time, that's exactly what happened. The Civil Rights Act, which was supposed to be a remedy for Jim Crow laws in the South, ended up becoming a new legal framework to advance the rights of Asians, Hispanics, homosexuals, women, transgender people, the elderly, and literally every single group except white heterosexual men. As called well, put it quote, "If the spirit of the law was to humiliate Southern bigots, then the letter of the law put the entire country, all its institutions, under the threat of lawsuits and prosecutions for discrimination. Americans may not have realized at the time, their country had changed dramatically. The early changes had massed political implications. In the 1966 midterm elections, Republicans seizing upon growing skepticism of the Civil Rights Act and other major liberal reforms of the 1960s picked up 47 seats in the House of Representatives, three Senate sides, including one in Tennessee, and eight governorships, including in Arkansas and Florida. Liberal Democrats were totally routed. Political upstarts wrote a wave of discontent and response to the Civil Rights Law. California elected a fervent opponent of the Civil Rights Act, who said quote, "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others and selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so." His name was Ronald Reagan, and he won Los Angeles County by a 14-point margin because his message appealed to white working class voters in 1972 while running a campaign focused on law and order and a southern strategy. Richard Nixon won a landslide 49-state victory. 12 years later, Ronald Reagan, the supposedly arch-conservative governor of California, did it again. But both men failed to roll back or even limit the excesses of what had happened to the country in the 1960s. No matter what American voters did, no matter who they elected, nothing seemed to change. There was no democratic way to roll back the new regime of the Civil Rights. The legal and bureaucratic apparatus kept expanding regardless of how they voted. The era of democratic self-determination was over. The old constitution had been replaced with a new one. If you enjoyed this episode, you won't want to miss its sequel, Streaming Now, on Daily Wire Plus. The real history of the Civil Rights Movement, Part 2, the looting of America, watch it now, available only on Daily Wire Plus.