Take 2 minutes to listen to Harry Belafonte in 1963 reflect on the prospects for racial justice in the US. This was 57 years ago. And some people, whose name I shall not mention, wonder why there's so much frustrated anger and violence.

The question "of whether this thing is going to end successfully & joyously, or is going to end disastrously lays very heavily...with a great middle stream of people who have refused to commit themselves or even have the slightest knowledge that these things have been going on."

"And those who have decried demonstrations and have said the Negro is going too far, they are the ones who in fact are being provoked the most by this, because for the first time, and it is only through our demonstrations, that they have come to a level of consciousness."

Joseph Mankiewicz offers this riposte. Why do we call it "the Negro question" when we should call it "the white question, or the white problem?" After Marlon Brando blathers on, Mankiewicz says that "the responsibility has shifted to the white people."

This conversation pairs nicely with this radio broadcast about the March on Washington. This was produced by the White Citizens' Council of Jackson, Ms. Their take on that 1963 event is, needless to say, quite different (and should sound familiar today). https://cdm16631.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16631coll22/id/79/rec/35

These middle class segregationists (the uptown Klan, they were often called) open with the really big question of the day: what's up with all of those liberal elites marching on Washington? <sarcasm>

And also, "How can these people consider themself not free?" (Note: This is before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and only a few months after Medgar Evers was murdered for his work trying to register black people to vote.)

Here we get some shades of the D'Souza/Gingrich/Glenn Beck argument that Obama was an anti-colonial, Marxist radical.

Wouldn't be a moment in the history of American Conservatism without some complaints about the liberal press. Remember, this is 1963. And they're talking about the March on Washington from that year.

Here's where the knives start to come out. It just might be necessary, they say, for white Americans o mobilize to protect the "American way of life" against these un-American radicals.

The conversation ends more ominously with a reference to the supposed revolution that was attempted in Greenwood, MS in April of 1963. They note that they were able to maintain the "racial integrity" thanks to the work of these organized white groups. This was coded language...

Because the "revolutionary attempt" referred to here were the efforts of SNCC to register black people to vote in Greenwood. The organized white people of the area MURDERED one of the civil rights activists, Jimmy Travis. https://snccdigital.org/events/jimmy-travis-shot-greenwood/

Domestic, racial terrorism. That's what this radio show was about, what it was glorifying--the actions of a white man with a gun who took it upon himself to protect "the American way of life" from black radicals he thought posed a civilizational threat. Sound familiar?

Apologies, I included the wrong screenshot above. This is the passage where the Citizens Council ominously talks about the supposed revolution in Greenwood, Ms.