Walter Riley [rebroadcast]

Good morning. It's Tuesday, August 11th, 2006. This is up front. I'm Brian Edwards-Tieger. Coming up. We felt safe when we were in Blacktown. I, you know, many of the people there were related to me by blood and others related to me by marriage and others were friends of folks who had been there and some. of the major families had been there in that neighborhood for a long time. We were folks who lived with repression, and we resisted it to the extent that it came in contact with us, and we had a sense of being part of a community. An hour with veteran civil rights attorney Walter Riley. We'll talk about his upbringing and political education in the Jim Crow South. about how mass movements navigate political differences, and about whether I love boosters did a good job explaining dialectical materialism. It's all next, after the news. I'm Max Bringle with these headlines. Congolese health officials say 2,000 people have died in its latest Ebola outbreak. They're calling it the fastest Ebola outbreak on record. More from Chris Ochamaringa in Kinshasa. The DRC had another outbreak in 2018, where 2,300 people were killed in two years. It ended in 2020, 2020. But this one was just declared on May 15th, and we're already seeing more than 20,000 people dead. So there's a lot of concern, and the international community has called for a stepping up of all the major pillars. They have urged donors to also contribute money so that they can be able to contain this outbreak. That's Chris Ocha Marenga. a magnitude seven point four earthquake rocked columbia on monday killing at least one hundred eleven people thousands are listed as missing ben thomas reports Search teams dug through the rubble in Cali, Colombia after a 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck collapsing hundreds of buildings. By Monday afternoon, people have begun reporting their loved ones missing on digital databases, one listed more than 2000, the number steadily climbing. The epicentre that was Chocco. Barbara Mello with World Vision. It's very known for its poverty, so a lot of people are in it right now. She tells Sky, children are of particular. concerned. We ask adults to know how to react, imagine the children. The desperate scenes recall the search is still ongoing in neighboring Venezuela. After it was devastated by powerful back-to-back earthquakes in June, they killed more than 6,300 people. I'm Ben Thomas. The Ukrainian military says Russian aerial attacks killed at least nine civilians.

in connecticut a one-time insurgent who challenged a famed centrist from the left is now being challenged from the left himself in the governor's primary and south carolina holds yet another primary this one to select a successor to the late republican senator Lindsey Graham the bug fire burning on the nevada california border has prompted evacuations in both states Fire officials said Monday it was human-caused. It's burned more than 16,000 acres and prompted evacuations. Cal Fire said the bug fire started on Saturday east of Highway 395 and south of Bringman Road in Lassen County near Reno. When it was first reported, it had burned roughly 50 acres, but the fast-moving fire swept around 800 acres in its first two hours of burning. Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo declared a state of emergency for areas of Washoe County and the Reno Sparks Indian Colony. The San Francisco Public Defender's Office called on police leadership and the Police Commission on Monday to act on findings in a report that found officers used excessive force during a wrongful arrest in 2024. The public defender's office said the incident took place on July 4th of 2024 after an officer made a mistake entering a license plate number and believed he had identified a stolen vehicle. San Francisco police officers would then proceed to smash the driver's window, drag the driver out, and pepper spray him. Actions that a San Francisco Department of Public Accountability report says were excessive. Sunny today in the San Francisco Bay area highs in the 70s, lows tonight in the 50s. In the Central Valley, sunny, highs around 100, lows tonight in the 70s. Those are the headlines. I'm Max Pringle on KPFA. Just past 708 in the morning. The show is up front. My name is Brian Edwards Teakert. I'm actually on vacation this week. Couldn't get someone to cover today. So I thought this would be a good occasion to give a nod towards the Black August celebration of Freedom Fighters by re-airing the interview with Walter Riley that we recorded in June. Hope you enjoy it. You're listening to Upfront. I'm Brian Edwards Teakert. Very pleased to welcome back to KPFA's airwaves, Walter Riley. Many of you know him as a longtime civil rights attorney and a fixture of struggles for justice here in the Bay Area. Some of you may know him as Boots Riley's dad. His very long journey from an upbringing in the Jim Crow South through the civil rights movement, 60s radicalism, socialist cadre organizing, and more. is the subject of a book just put together by our friend and colleague Jesse Strauss. It's entitled Civil Rights and Structural Attacks, Conversations with Walter Riley. Thanks for speaking to us. Thank you for having me here. Why don't you start by telling us about where you grew up?

I grew up in Durham, North Carolina. I was born in 1944. So you might realize that it was very different than we might think it is today. But it was the Jim Crow South, and I grew up in a rural family. My folks had been tenant farmers. My parents got married in their teens. Mother born in 1912, my father born in 1909. And their experiences in their communities was quite different. Their experiences were the experiences of people who had grown up also with their parents being farmers, tenant farmers, and tobacco was the crop. Tenant farming is the same as sharecropping. I have 10 siblings, so my parents raised 11 kids. The older kids spent more time in the farming. By 1950, when I was a 6 years old, we were no longer farming. They were no longer farming. And my father was a construction worker. Growing up in the 50s, I became aware of what the world was like to some extent. I remember the Eisenhower election. I remember the Seuss-Cannell incident. I remember the importance of those things and that weren't factors in my sense of what the world was. Some of the things that stand out I've talked about before was the murder of Matt Parker, the lynching of Matt Parker. a historical incident when that was basically done on television. Prior to Mac Parker, I was aware of Emmett Till. And the murder of Emmett Till helped to shape my sense of my place in the world, what I could do and what the limitations were. So by the time of the advent of... more open civil rights in the phase of the late 50s, I was ready for. I am curious because a lot of our listeners will be more familiar with your more recent decades about those formative experiences. Could you describe what the tenant farming relationship looked like? And like what kind of impression did it make on you about how the American economy works? Well, more people are probably aware of tenant farming as sharecropping, and that's the same thing in North Carolina, called it that tenant farming, but in the rest of the southeast, it's sharecropping. The nature of the economic relationship is that the farmer or the farming family rinse the farm. pays rent to an owner, a landowner, land owners in the time that I was growing up was generally the big families who had been around before the Civil War and after the Civil War. And a lot of the big farms were owned by those same people who were political leaders, big families in North Carolina, white families, who had owned and enslaved folks. Actually, I lived in a community that was...

fairly close to the places where my family folks lived during enslavement. And the house that I was born in in 1944, my family lived was a building that enslaved folks lived in. And the community where I grew up was not the same place where my family lived when I was born, but was where I'm close to the... house that my great-grandmother had lived in as a slave. So I saw those buildings as I walked around and lived in the neighborhood and many people. The older people in the neighborhood had grown up knowing enslaved folks. Obviously by 1909 when my father was born, anybody that was 40 years old, 45 years old had lived with enslavement, black and white. that was around. And the community of Durham at the time that we came in contact with living in the country or county would have been folks who didn't come in recently, so they all knew the history of slave had lived through and experienced it. By 1944 and 40s and 50s, those folks were still around, a lot of those people who knew firsthand what it was to have family members that lived. as enslaved people and those who had lived in communities where enslaved people lived and lived and worked beside them and those who had enslaved folks. A lot of the names in the black community were the same names as the slave owners. And there were plenty of Atkins around that my father, my mother came from. So sometimes we could see the names of folks on the streets. street names of people who had enslaved people. And they were symbols, symbols to me of a world that did not see me as a human being that has not treated my ancestors as humans, as treated as chattel, to be sold, to be owned, to be property. And when we were counted by our government, we were counted only for the purposes of allowing white people, white men, to have a boat. And that was the nature of the society that we lived in. When I start to talk about it, in my mind's eye goes back to the visuals of that neighborhood. of that community, of the people, and some of the actions. So I sometimes think about that in such a way that it doesn't keep me, my thoughts, trained to the responses to the Kirstens. Your father was the tenant farmer? My father and mother, the family is a tenant, you know, that's how they... How the product is produced. In this case, it's tobacco. Tobacco was the cash product, but most of the area around Durham County. Durham was the center of the cigarette-making industry for North Carolina. Big factories liquid miles, you know, that made cigarettes just a feel. My father would...

talk to a landowner and say you have a farm there that nobody is farming, or you have a farm that maybe it's not producing as well, and you're looking for someone else to farm it. And I have a family. So a farmer, usually the head of the family being a man, was not the only one that the landowner negotiated for. Landowner negotiated for the entire family. The farmer... the male, the farmer, the wife, the farmers, the children, and everybody who was involved on the farm. So that was the nature of everything. Kids were often engaged in one aspect or another of the tobacco growing, whatever the crop might be. But tobacco being the crop, we had work to do. We had work to do. We had work to shovel, hoeing to tobacco to keep the weeds from taking over. to make sure that the worms, tobacco worms, didn't eat up the tobacco. We had to help bring the tobacco in as kids. And if a child was old enough to plow, walk behind a horse or mule, and plow a field, they generally were doing that. That was the nature of farming. working from set up to sundown and generally somebody had to be around after sundown to ensure that the productive workers were healthy and able to go back out in the field the next morning that required an entire family operation and how did the pay work the pay there was no such thing as somebody handing out money to you on a weekly or monthly basis at the end of the season tobacco was harvested And the farmer, the tenant farmer, took the biker to the market and sold it to a, more often a middle person. And that middle person would then sell it to the factory. The farmer then, having gotten whatever they got for their pallets of tobacco, had to then pay the landowner for the use of the land. often stakes the farmer for seeds and fertilizer and often to help pay some other bills that the farmer might have. But there was no utility bills because we didn't have lights. You might know historically that the Tennessee Valley Authority didn't the electrify rule North Carolina until in the late 50s, by and large. And we lived the bicaricine light. We had outhouses. Most people in my neighborhood had out of houses and often didn't have access on their own property to water. So people had central places of going to get water and wells. So the farmer then paid the landowner for all of the products, the landowner had given the farmer and often they ended up with just enough money to survive. And often they didn't survive. That's to some reason why sharecroppers moved around a lot. My own experience was from 1944 where I was born. We had three other places that we lived before we got our permanent house in 1950. So there was constant moving. And my father was considered.

For my memory, for folks, as a good farmer, and my mother was a hard worker, and all the kids worked hard. You described something that blew my mind about how this worked under that first landowner, that the landowner would determine at the end of the season after the crop was sold what the profit was and what share of the profit would go to your father. I'm sure there were discussions someplace or another when people made their agreement. I'll take 60 and you'll get 40% of the profits or I'll take 70 and you get 40%. But always in the calculation of 60, 40 or whatever that calculation might be, the people who had the power determined what the break would be. And if you can determine what the cost of all of your investments is. The tenant farmer does not have any real power there. And the owner of the land had all the profit. And that always did well. How did your father get out of that situation? My father decided that along with my mother, I remember very clearly my mother saying she didn't want us to the young kids to work so hard. My oldest brother. had worked real hard, and she remembers him out there plowing. I have this visual of her describing him plowing when he was very low, and it hurt her heart, she said. But by 1950, we were no longer, 1950 we moved into our house that my dad had been able to put enough money together, and my mother working had been put enough money together to buy a house. to have ownership or property was something that was very important to a lot of folks and certainly to members of my family. My mother's oldest brother was a farmer that many people in the community looked to to determine what they should do in farming. People who have lived in rural communities to remember the thing called the farmer's albinac. And the farmers, the albonex, is just based upon a lot of empirical experiences that people have, when to plant, what weather looks like, the kind of weather we can foretell, what we think is going to happen in terms of the tobacco crop or the vegetable crops or the wheat crops based upon experience. My uncle, Charlie, was one of those people that the alberneck. Every year, growing up I was aware, would refer to Charlie Atkins is now starting to slaughter. Charlie Atkins is planting. It is time to harvest the tobacco. This is a winter in January that's going to be very difficult because Charlie Atkins hasn't started to plant his seed bed yet, but he didn't own his property. He died on his tractor. And when he died, the owner of the land, evicted his family after all the years of him working. How did you wind up on your first picket line? I went to town very often from living in the...

rural area, which was still at that time, Broughtown, I would go to town to pay bills. In town, we had to pay for rental TV. We paid on clothes that people had put down payments on, layaway. My sisters would do layaway and my mother would do layaway and somebody is working all day. They don't have time to go in. I would go down to... put some money on easy loan, where my parents, I remember that, had gotten a loan to buy a refrigerator. If they lost or failed to make payments for a week or two, that refrigerator was repossessed, and they had to start all over again, and that was a way of life, because many people... economic circumstances been what they were. We're not always able to make every payment on time. And the predatory loan system that was so prevalent at that time still is in many communities. Whereas you mess the payment, repossession. So kids would be enlisted to go make payments. So it was my turn. By this time when I was 12 and 13 years old, they'd go make these payments. And I would go down to make these payments. And I walked from one place to the other. And I walked past this picket line that was at Cres, at S.H. Cres, right at the corner of Main Street and Mangum. And there was a picket line at S.H. Cress. And that picket line was because they didn't hire people. And they had a separate water fountain, and they had separate. eating facilities and going downtown to pay was a day's job and we often had to stop someplace and they want black stores downtown because we won't allow to have black stores downtown and certainly no place to buy soda or coffee and soda fountains was very popular I mean so there was a picket line in protest because we spent a lot of money at the five and dime store buying trinkets cheap clothes and kitchen wear and any number of things. And they thought that it would have an economic impact. They would cause Crest to make a change. And so they had to pick a line. I saw the pick a line and I said I want to be part of it. What are you guys doing? I mean, and they said, you know, why they were there. They were young adults. And they said, but you can't join because you're too young. We don't want to get in trouble. We had to be aware in the era of the civil rights movement that if picket lines or civil rights actions involve minors that. we could expect some kind of reaction from the police department and local authorities to talk to claim that adults are taking advantage of minors or misusing minors or any number of things. And the policy was not to have very young folks involved. But that went on for some months or maybe a year or so. So by the time I was 13, I joined the picket line anyhow.

And nobody was going to physically throw anybody off because everybody was obviously happy to have someone else join, but they wanted it to be clear of their taking, made it clear what the policy was. So I became involved. I became involved on a regular basis. I started walking to town just to be part of the picket line. And from that, I became aware of why we were picketing, what was happening within that movement. This is like in the mid-50s to the late 50s, and by 1958 and 59, I was very much aware of what had happened. We had had the experience, as I mentioned before, in Batil and the Montgomery bus bar cut. Mac Parker and the movement was blowing up in terms of young folk becoming very actively involved. By 1960, I was playing a leading role in the movement. And we were actively involved with supporting actions across the state. And by 1961 or so, we were actively involved in organizing and supporting actions in other states. I kept thinking about this part of the book later on when you discuss the debates that were happening in radical cadre organizing circles about how to build a mass movement and when it's adventurism to do spectacular public acts before the masses are ready to join them. Just wondering, like, if you thought back to your own experience that your entry point. to the movement was the fact that some other folks threw up a picket line and you happened to cross it. Yeah, I came across. I happened on the picket line because somebody else had set it up. And it's because they had the courage to take in action that before that I hadn't thought of. This program is up front on KPFA. My name is Brian Edwards Teakert. Our guest is veteran civil rights attorney Walter Riley. The new book about his very long life in the movement, co-authored by Jesse Strauss, is entitled Civil Rights and Structural Attacks, Conversations with Walter Riley. We'll continue ours in just a few minutes. Right now, it's approaching 7.30. Time for the news. i'm max bringle with these headlines a magnitude seven point four earthquake rocked columbia on monday killing at least one hundred eleven people thousands are listed as missing ben thomas reports search teams dug through the rubble in collie columbia after a seven point four magnitude earthquake struck collapsing hundreds of buildings By Monday afternoon, people had begun reporting their loved ones missing on digital databases, one listed more than 2000, the number steadily climbing. The epicenter that was Chocco. Barbara Mello with World Vision. It's very known for its poverty, so a lot of people are in it right now. She tells Sky children are of particular concern. We ask adults to know how to react, imagine the children.

The desperate scenes recall the search is still ongoing in neighboring Venezuela. After it was devastated by powerful back-to-back earthquakes in June, they killed more than 6,300 people. I'm Ben Thomas. The Ukrainian military says Russian aerial attacks killed at least nine civilians. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky says Moscow is receiving military help from North Korea. using its ballistic missiles in an attack in Zaporica that killed six people. Three more people, including a teenager, died in another attack. Volodymyr Zelensky claims Russia is scaling up missile production and recruitment for a new offensive. The Institute for the Study of War says Ukraine's missile defense shortages give Russia an advantage. Meanwhile, Russia intercepted nearly 400 Ukrainian drones overnight. The bugfire, burning on the Nevada-California border, has prompted evacuations in both states. Fire officials said Monday it was human-caused. It's burned more than 16,000 acres in prompted evacuations. Cal Fire said the bug fire started on Saturday east of Highway 395 and south of Bringman Road in Lassen County near Reno. Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo declared a state of emergency for areas of Washoe County and the Reno Sparks Indian colony. U.S. stocks are hanging around their records, while oil prices keep swinging on uncertainty about when the Iran War will allow crude to flow freely again in the Strait of Hormuz. the s and p five hundred was flat today and near the all-time closing high it set at the end of last week crude briefly jumped above ninety dollars before pulling back towards eighty seven on continued uncertainty about the iran war sunny today in the san francisco bay area highs in the seventies lows tonight in the fifties in the fifties in the central valley sunny highs around one hundred lows tonight in the seventies those are the headlines i'm max pringle on k pf a

Around 7.33 in the morning, the show is up front. My name is Brian Edwards Teaker. We're spending the hour with veteran civil rights attorney Walter Riley. The new book about his life and upbringing in the Jim Grove South is civil rights and structural attacks. When we broke for news, we had just gotten to his entry into formal political activity through the NAACP in Durham, North Carolina. Let's go back to the interview. The... Early civil rights movement, the NACP in particular, was trying to build a movement during a climate of intense anti-communism. So was not involved in a lot of things you came to be known for, international solidarity, class-based struggle per se. How did you come to those things? And then period of the 50s, I don't know why, but I was very much impressed with what had happened at the Suez Canal. Raffaunch was, if people don't know who he is, looked at it. You were a big reader. I was a reader. I was a reader. I read books, and I read the newspaper. And in fact, I sold a newspaper called Grit magazine, Door to Door. And as part of my selling that magazine, it was a weekly newspaper or monthly newspaper. It was certainly not an adventurous political magazine, but it was one that a lot of folks read. And it talked about issues from a different point of view than I was adjusted to, but it made it possible for me to question things. So I was aware of this. And I think part of it because I went to a black school, a segregated school, it was black and segregated from its inception to the time I graduated. It was first of the 12th grade. And I remember that one of the things that happened in my school, my principal. He was involved politically and he was concerned about what was happening in the presidential election. I remember that very clearly that it was something that was raised in the school. I was aware of Korean War because my oldest brother had gone off in 1949. And I remember the day before he shipped out, he was at home. My mother and he walked up and down the road, crying, going off to fighting Korea, and I wanted to know why. And later, before the war was over, I had a better understanding of what was happening. I became aware even as Korean vets came back to Braggtown, not in the shape that they were when they left. I had uncles who had been in the World War. Two, my dad's youngest brothers, two of them came back not the same people. And one never, never survived his trauma and lived a very long time from World War II until actually just a few years ago. But he was never able to hold the job. And he was a presence in my life.

And the tragedy of what a kid was to go off to a war and doesn't return to his parents as the kid he was. So I was paying attention. So by the time I was in the mid-50s at 10 years old paying some attention to what was happening in the world around me, I was aware of... The anti-communism, you know, there was the news of the hearings, those things I paid attention to. And when I got into the movement, I wondered, you know, if the U.S. hates Russia so much, which was what it was called, we didn't call it the Soviet Union, but if they hated it so much, and it treats me and my folks in this particular way. Why shouldn't I look at what they are saying about the kind of world they wanted to build? By the time I was in the movement, I was disappointed that the Soviet Union didn't play much more of a role in being helpful, at least, in terms of propaganda. around the civil rights movement. Their propaganda and their political relations had a lot more to do with gaining positions and PR nationally, but not enough about having impact on the movement that I was connected to. But I was still aware of what was happening with Marion Anderson. I was aware of the opposition to Paul Robinson. And I was aware that there were activities in North Carolina where people were trying to organize and they were called communists. And because they were being called communists, I wanted to pay some attention to them because what they were doing were organizing for a better life. And when they were attacked in the newspapers, they were being attacked because they criticized America. And criticizing America was something that I was ready for. The testament to the organizing power of repression. Yes, absolutely. You encounter people who have very different political tendencies. Medgar Evers, the assassinated. field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi, Malcolm X, when he's still part of the nation of Islam. You work with Floyd McKissick, who went on to become an adherent of black capitalism and an endorser of Richard Nixon. I'm curious how the differences got navigated within movement circles. I think each one becomes a little bit different in terms of the trajectory of the individuals. I met Malcolm X at a period when he was still in the nation, but he was moving. It was just a year before he moved away from the nation. And our discussion then was about how you build movement, how you...

navigate the world of white superiority of racism and what changes we should look for. With Megger Evers, it was a discussion around how to situate myself within the NAA CP. I met Meggers as at the 1962 National Convention of the NAA in Atlanta. We were in a struggle at that time to get the national leadership to show a lot more support for and respect for the youth movement and the directions of the youth movement. And to understand our need for direct action, putting up picket lines, bar cut, sit-ins. and support for, in many ways, the labor movement that we were coming in contact with at the time. I was a go-between between our chapter in the labor organization in Durham when I was in high school. And a lot of the philosophical arguments before the late 50s and early 60s was that we had to. the NWCP had to engage in legal act, legal strategies, which of course was very important that led to the cases, particularly Brown, the Board of Education and other cases that the NWACP was a major part of, but also in strategies that included negotiations and meetings with leaders and communities and with often political leaders in an area, whether it's a city or state, meeting with the folks that were declared representatives of the black community. The youth movement that came in the late 50s was we don't start out by having negotiating meetings with these folks. We want to show them that we have power. We say we want it now. You either change your hiring policy and we put in the picket line up tomorrow. And we would do that and they'd lose money. The same thing with the movie theaters. The same thing with McDonald's or the other stores. Those were economic campaigns. The organizations had different approaches towards it. We prevail as a direct action group. McGaravis himself was a direct action advocate and had been criticized in the NAA for being a direct action advocate. And so when we were at this convention, we were talking about that and we had on the floor fight at the convention. And we went out the largest group at the convention and we walked out. The youth group movement walked out. And I was being housed at the clock campus at that time. And Megarevus came over and said, hey, let's talk. And he talked about the need to have the ability to stay in the argument, to stay in the room, to continue to make the fight, and that changes would come. It was a conversation with someone who even at that moment I respected because he didn't come at me. He was, hey.

You don't know what you're doing, you don't know what you're talking about, which often happens with those of us when we are older or think that we know more. Megger Evers was able to listen to me and understand my frustration. So my conversation with him was hours and hours on the night of this convention, and he had left the convention floor himself to talk to me. for that purpose. And it had an impact. It didn't make me go back to the meeting, but it did mean that we had a better role in the organization. With Floyd McKissick, he became a Republican and supported Richard Nixon. I mean, I know the discussion that occurred because in the 1950s, black people who were Democrats because of Roosevelt. Many had been Republicans before Roosevelt. They were Democrats because of Roosevelt and the Democratic Party must have most oppressive party around. Every Democratic leader in North Carolina was a racist dog at the time, even those who were being touted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as being progressive. The Democratic Party local leadership were the old families in North Carolina. A lot of black folk who wanted to see a change said that we got to become Republicans. So there was a Republican movement in the late 50s in North Carolina. Floyd McKissick didn't become one of the time, but it was a discussion among us. But in 1960, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was running, the discussion was still. very much a hot topic in the movement in North Carolina among the folks I knew. Was it Nixon or or should it be Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made this speech that was so inclusive. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talked about a change in the world. He talked about, you know, a new approach to democracy that seemed to include us. So they were able to push back this movement. But by the late 60s, it was fairly clear the Democratic Party that had opposed the Freedom Democratic Party that had been in opposition to Fannie Lou Hamer, the Democratic Party, that those Democrats were winning votes across the country. And it's understandable to me that someone who was playing a role in the movement could say, I'm tired of this and I want to do it. By this time, Floyd McKissick had been chaired of the Congress of Racial Equality. and various folks in the Congress of Racial Equality had gone to the wrong side, to the dog side by that time. But I still have a tremendous respect for Floyd McKissick because That's the attorney that I work with. I had a desk in his office. It was in his office that I met Malcolm Max. It was in his office. I was able to spend a lot of time with a lot of people. It was in his office. And there's his work that I met Jim Farmer, who I got to know who was, you know, the leader of the of Corps and had a different outlook about the work that has to be done. Floyd McKissick is the person that.

gave me support when I was under attack by members of my community for being too radical, being too active. These things are not discussed in the book. I wanted to survey some of the broad themes that came up in the book that I thought were interesting. One is guns. Guns for self-defense make an appearance in your story. Well before the Black Panthers hit the stage and come up again and again from outside your father's house to when you were living in Chicago. I'm curious about your relationship with guns, how you think about them politically. I think that it's complicated here. It's complicated in my household. discussion. I think that though, if we don't have guns in our community, we are likely to be more readily attacked. I think that guns in our community are not dealt with well enough because they are often used against our community. particularly in the urban areas. In the South where I grew up, everybody in my neighborhood, every household, I would say, probably had guns, not just a gun, but guns. My parents, they had guns for hunting, which was a part of helping to provide for the family. They also had a sense that guns were a part of their protection. My father told stories of the KKK writing when he was the kid. and I think he always felt he needed to have something to protect himself. I was given a gun when I was about nine or ten years old. Not everybody, my family had him, but I was given one at 22, single-shot rifle. At one point when my wife, Candy and I were living in Durham, sleeping, and we had a whole bedroom to ourselves. My father said, Cootie, you got to, yeah, you have to keep that gun under your bed. My brother had given that to me. And I did reluctantly. What two sheriff's, sheriff car pull up across from our house on the road one day. And I remember distinctly my dad said, Cootie, go get your gun. And my dad told me to get my gun, I got my gun. and he walked out with me to the end of the driveway. I don't know what I would have done, but I was there with my dad, and I was going to be with my dad, whatever happened. And he was determined that he was going to confront these guys. And I think he probably knew that he would, in one way the other, be supported by other members of his family. Certainly his brothers would have supported him. He knows that, but they weren't around. He felt a certain sense of strength and dignity. And he said, you know, don't get out of that car. He cursed. Said that to the sheriff or to the sheriff's vehicle. Yeah. They were on the other side of the road from us, but he was on his driveway. He was on his property and he said, you know, don't. And they didn't. They didn't get out and they didn't come after us again either.

This is a, you describe this as a kind of a black neighborhood, one road in, one road out. Every family presumably armed for a ways in either direction. Exactly. I think that it was true. I mean, there were many, many, many folks who had had incidents with guns in that, in that community. So one way, the other way, it was one road that came in, came all the way through and came out at another end. and there were no exits along the way. They had been one exit at one time, but it was closed off and never maintained. So it was like shut down. It was between the black community and the white community within, you know, quarter mile or something from the main road. But otherwise, it was the main road through Braggtown. And we felt safe when we were in Braggtown. Many of the people there were related to me by blood and others related to me by marriage and others were friends of folks who had been there and some of the major families had been there in that neighborhood for a long time. We were folks who lived with repression and we resisted it to the extent that it came in contact with us and we had a sense of being part of a community. That was the community that we lived in. When I lived in Chicago, I lived in a neighborhood where there was a lot of gang activity. Cops were very repressive in Detroit in Chicago. One of the major gangs was the Blackstone Rangers. historically. The Blackstone Rangers were very powerful, very large, and created a lot of discontent, at least, in the various communities in opposition with some folks, but were also very violent. But they also got millions of dollars from the federal government. And individuals that's a whole history. People can read it. You can research it's the Black Stone Rangers. And a number of them have talked about it themselves. And they became a force in the community that was driving a lot of police policy. They were violently attacking folks. They were trying to build their gangs at the same time with the contradiction. They were getting support. And the police were allowing them to do what they wanted to do. people were getting hurt. So in my neighborhood, people decided that we didn't like the police, the way they were policing our neighborhoods, and we didn't like the way they were allowing these gangs that were coordinating with them to attack the community. We armed ourselves. We got a radio system set up to a radio system set up. We moved from house to house. We had, you know, miles of houses signed up in communities that we signed up. And we patrolled. We patrolled at night because people were running up into houses recruiting and terrorizing families and saying, your child is coming with us to be part of our group. And we said no. And we were prepared to fight that.

And we were prepared to organize that around a political basis because I was in Progressive Labor Party at the time and people knew it. And I had been organizing around welfare rights and housing rights and had been organizing in the auto industry and working with still workers. So we had a base of folks who were both still workers. with decent jobs and a sense of their own sense of power and self, and auto workers who were well-organized in unions, and we had housing rights workers, welfare workers who were organized. We had one of the biggest welfare organizations in the state, in fact, PL members became the leaders of the statewide organization, social workers, and welfare workers, and we were doing housing organizing. So when we organized and were part of this defense of our community, people understood and accepted it. And there were just a lot of kids a part of it. We had to fight. There were times when there were shootouts. Nobody ever got shot that I know of. But we were able to protect our communities. And in that sense, it's a position that working people have to have when we deal with the violence of the state in the institutions that support the state. We don't have organizations in Oakland that are run by the police as the stones were not run by the police, but playing the role of the police. But we do have to protect our communities and we protect ourselves. And I think that's part of the work. So I don't know if that answers the question that becomes very complicated. At this point, I am not organizing folks to have guns. I am not. in favor of prevalence of guns in our community. But I'd say that in the South, I would never go there and organize folks to get rid of guns. Walter Riley, I can't let you go without asking about your son, Boots, Riley. You're a product of a lifetime of political education, and thanks to you, so is he. I'm curious how good a job you think he does explaining dialectical materialism in I Love Boosters. I think that it's fairly direct and straightforward. I like it. I think that, you know, dialectal materialism becomes a basis for a lot of discussions. I've had lots of study groups myself, listen to other folks talking about, but I thought it was right on. I liked it. You think it works having it just be like a device where you hit a button and the dialectical materialism happens right in front of you? No, I don't think it's like that, but I think it's explaining what it is. Hitting a button doesn't do it. And I think that one of the things he tries to do in the movie is to get people interested in the idea, a way to look it up. So it's not... so easy as creating contradictions by some device. But I think it gets people to think. And dialectal materialism is, you know, a long-term study. But if you can get some hook where it catches you, understanding that there's a contradiction, when contradictions are playing against each other, it decides the nature of the thing. The outside forces have an impact.

But it's the internal contradictions that decide whether or not a rock is hard rock or decide whether or not people will fight together or not. It's the internal contradiction that decide the nature of anything. And I think that I liked it. I liked it. I thought it was good. But one of the things that happens in movies and anything that you can talk for an hour and an hour and a half is that... You can't become that clear because all requires study. And I'm sorry that I talk for too long and take up too much time. My answers are never short. I'm just sorry I have so many more questions. Walter Riley, what a pleasure. Thank you for spending so much time with us. Thank you. Thank you. And I just love the way you get me into things. So it's nice. Maybe another time to talk about other kinds of things. There are more chapters of the book to go through. We've been speaking to Walter Riley, a long-time veteran civil rights attorney here in the Bay Area. The new book that is centered around his life in times is entitled Civil Rights and Structural Attacks Conversations with Walter Riley. It is co-authored by our friend and colleague Jesse Strauss and has an introduction by the aforementioned Boots Riley. That does it for today's show. Upfront, it airs weekday mornings at 7 a.m. We post information about our topics and guests at KPFA.org. To get in touch, email up front at kpfa.org. A big thanks to our producer, Kimya Akbari, and to Teresa Wears Bianca, who's been filling in for her this week. Our engineer is Kirsten Thomas. My name is Brian Edwards-Tickert. Stay up and stay tuned for Law and Disorder with Kat Brooks at 8.

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