Jan. 20, 2024 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the Political Cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
I was five and he was six.
We rode on horses made of sticks.
You were black and I wore white.
He would always win the fight.
Bang, bang.
He shut me down, bang, bang.
I hit the ground, bang, bang.
That awful sound, bang, bang.
My baby shut me down.
Welcome back, everybody, to TPC.
We are kicking off now a special series that we will be featuring each month, intermittently, TPC at 20 a retrospective.
We have had so many great interviews over the years.
Really, I mean, I'd like to think every week.
But some are absolutely iconic in terms of their historical nature.
And this is one of them.
I mean, this is one that we still get emails about.
I mean, we conducted this interview in 2008, and people still email about it almost monthly.
Well, it's really the acid test about why is there a political cesspool.
We get interviews of people who have very interesting, unique perspectives, people that actually were at the center of the hurricane, for example, at Selma and at the Montgomery bus boycott, things like that.
We've done all kinds.
But if it hadn't been for the political cesspool, we would never have had this recorded.
It would be lost to history.
And the left wants him lost.
They do not want people to hear what the truth was about Montgomery bus boycott and about Selma.
Now, Officer Lackey passed away about 10 years ago at 90 years of age, but he is the one pictured in that iconic photograph, fingerprinting Rosa Parks.
He had dealings with Martin Luther King, obviously up close and personally.
He was the chief of police in my life.
He was a very successful personal life.
He was the chief of the Montgomery Alabama Police Department.
All right, so, and then he went on into business after he did that for a long time.
Then he went into another business for a number of decades as well.
Well, anyway, back in 2008, even before you occupied the seat you do now, when Bill Rowland was the primary co-host, this was an interview that Bill Rowland, and he's the voice you'll hear when we first start out.
Bill Rowland conducted this interview primarily.
I had just spoken at an event with Officer Lackey in Alabama, and we hit it off, and I invited him on the program.
And this is what it sounded like back in the summer of 2008.
This is an incredible interview that TPC conducted with Officer Drew Lackey, former police chief of Montgomery, Alabama, during the height of the civil rights movement.
And these were his reflections in the mid-2000s.
We'd like to welcome you to the show.
We are pleased, honored, and privileged to have you on the air with us.
Officer Lackey, welcome to the Political Cesspool.
Thank you, sir.
It's all to be with you.
Well, as I was saying earlier, the civil rights movement was hardly the saintly march and holy crusade that has been portrayed by the school books and by the media over the years.
And you've written this book, Another View of the Civil Rights Movement.
In brief, what is your view?
What was the view that you had back in the 1960s while the South was being put through the Civil Rights Movement?
Well, my view was that this So-called civil rights movement headed by Martin Luther King was really a force.
He was using the civil rights issue to raise money and further his cause and have the parties and do his womanizing throughout the country.
And in my opinion, he was more interested in tearing America down than he was with the plight of his own people.
Well, now, Officer Lackey, when Rosa Parks was arrested for violating the segregation laws in Alabama, she did this, as most people know now, it was an orchestrated and a staged event.
But she refused to give up her seat on the bus, but we don't really know anything about the man who she refused to move for this man.
Who was this man, and why was he trying to take that seat in particular?
I think you mentioned this to us at the convention in Alabama.
Well, he was, I don't have his name, but he was an elderly man and, you know, feeble.
And he, you know, he couldn't stand too good and really needed to sit down.
So she wasn't being bullied, in other words, by somebody trying to provoke her into civil disobedience.
This was a legitimate reason for her to give up her seat to an old man who was obviously at least semi-disabled.
That's correct.
Well, now, let me ask you, before Rosa Parks' arrest, had any city, you know, Montgomery, Birmingham, any city had problems with blacks violating the segregation codes like that?
Or did this just suddenly come out of nowhere?
That is, she suddenly is arrested and this seems to just take fire and all of a sudden it's a big civil rights issue.
Well, to my knowledge, we didn't have any problem.
Now, prior to Rosa Parks' arrest, we had two other women that were arrested for the same violation.
One was arrested in March of 1955, and then the other one was October of 55, and then Rosa was in December of 1955.
Of course, we all know that she was hand-picked.
She was the secretary of the NAACP here in Montgomery.
She had lunch with her attorney, Fred Gray, the day that she was arrested.
And she attended the Commerce School in Tennessee, you know, where Martin Luther attended and Abba Nathan and others.
So it was a hand-picked deal from the word go.
Well, of course, other events came out of that.
And as you told us that actually the picture that's on your book, the famous picture, that that was not taken after her arrest for taking the seat on the bus, but was actually taken because of her participation in the Montgomery bus boycott.
What was she doing to get arrested during that boycott?
I want to take a break right there, just very quickly, and add some thoughts.
Well, first of all, it's great to hear Bill Rowland's voice back on this program.
You know, he died over a decade ago himself, and he was just such a seminal part, just such a foundational cornerstone of this program.
And he spearheaded that interview.
I was in the studio that day.
I had spoken with Drew Lackey at an event, and I participate in this interview, but he was the one who prepared for it.
He was the one who took the lead chair in this one and did such a fantastic job.
Now, this is just some of the opening salvos, but a couple of key takeaways early, Keith, is number one, did anybody ever know about this?
Is this taught in the public school curriculum that it was a feeble man, an elderly man who could barely stand, who was the one who refused to give up his seat?
That's number one.
And then Drew Lackey did mention what we knew, but what so few people did, that this was a communist stage production from the get-go.
She was handpicked to play this role.
She was a member of the NAACP, and it was all orchestrated.
Well, you're absolutely right.
I didn't know about all of that.
Let me tell you this: the communist school he was talking about is called the Highlander Folk School.
It was right over the Alabama-Tennessee line in Tennessee in Mont Eagle, Tennessee, run by a communist named Miles Horton.
And basically, what it was was the Paris Island for Civil Rights Workers.
Civil rights workers from the North, many of them Jewish, were funneled into here and taught about the workings of peaceful, so-called peaceful protest and Gandhian dissent.
They wanted you to, everything was being done with an eye towards what the TV cameras would record.
And of course, the media then as now was dominated by Jewish interests.
Jewish interests are largely left-wing.
They were behind the civil rights movement.
Without Jewish money, masterminding, and organization and media control, the civil rights movement would never have gotten off the ground.
But they learned there how to manipulate public opinion.
And she had been there with, and Martin Luther King had been there also.
He was another one of their proteges and star pupils.
They sent them down.
The people in the, for example, the busing, you know, the freedom riders from the north coming down trying to provoke arrests and whatnot.
This was all part of the plan.
And these people were not just innocent people caught up in a situation.
This was mastermind.
This was a plot to basically change American society.
And you said communists back then, you said communists or Jewish.
You have to say what, and I repeat, I'm sorry, I repeat myself because Jewish and communists were basically synonyms back then.
Well, this was the thing.
I mean, it wasn't white southerners who were marching with so-called Dr. King.
It was communists, peacekins, hippies, and overwhelmingly Jews.
Well, like Swerner and Goodman.
Swarner and Goodman were from New York.
But the South was so innocent, they didn't know about this back then.
I don't know if we would have known about it back then.
No, the thing is, basically, they keep it hidden to this day to the extent that they can.
But we're unmasking the fraud.
Let's get back to it right now.
We're going to play four separate clips.
You've heard from one.
Bill Rowland spearheading this interview.
Let's go back to Bill and Chief Drew Lackey.
And she was one of the nattiest people that was involved and indicted for violating the boycott law.
The Deputy Sheriff at Montgomery County, the Frankfred man, he called me and asked me would I be willing to help him the next day because they had these nanny people coming in and I agreed to go up and F him and that's where the when they took that picture.
Well, I was reading in your book.
It always seemed interesting to me that Martin Luther King and some of the other civil rights activists, some of the other civil rights leaders, seemed to be only one phone call away from the White House or from people like Bobby Kennedy.
It seemed that they had access to the highest offices of power when they needed it, and yet in the South, we were struggling against riots and violence caused by these people.
What is your opinion on that?
Why do you think they had such ready access to John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Bobby Kennedy?
Well, in my opinion, they were helping back this movement.
And you're correct.
They had to reg land to Bobby Kenzie, Lyndon Johnson, and President Kennedy.
During the Freedom Rider episode that happened here in Montgomery, I picked up John Siegenthaler out of the street and the hospital about two blocks away and got him to the hospital.
And he immediately called Bobby Kennedy at Hyannisport.
And he had a list in his pocket of all the freedom riders that was on that bus.
So Bobby Kennedy and them were behind it, helped sponsor it and see that it was, you know, followed up.
Well, Officer Lackey, it's again to reiterate what an honor it is to be able to talk with you today.
This is, again, Bill, and for everyone listening around the world today to our broadcast, the ability to speak with someone who was a first-hand witness of this history in the making is an opportunity very rarely afforded to anyone, particularly of historical, an aspect of history that's so important.
And Officer Lackey, I want to ask you about some of the media propaganda of the time.
And I know you mentioned this in your book.
I had the opportunity to, of course, buy this book from you in person in Alabama a couple of weeks ago.
I have read it.
And you address in your book many things surrounding the so-called civil rights movement, but one of which I always thought was so incredible was the fact that the so-called civil right activists were the ones that were the peaceful demonstrators.
And then, you know, according to the network news footage of the time, these peaceful black activists would come into town and the mean-spirited police officers would unleash the hounds and the water hoses and everything else on them.
Is that the way it was?
Or was the truth of the matter a little bit differently than what people would have seen on television?
Well, it was a lot different than what you've seen on television.
I mean, this civil rights movement attracted every black criminal that you can think of, revolutionaries and every thug that you would come in contact with.
And they would Curse the police, spit on the police, do everything they could to try to incite a riot.
And see, Martin Luther King, he used what I call the big lie technique.
He'd go around saying he was preaching non-violence, but violence followed him everywhere he went.
Now, you've never heard of King ever chastising any of you rioters and looters that happened all over this country.
And I can't find anywhere in the Constitution that gives these people the right to burn loot and do the things that they did and be protected under the so-called civil rights banner.
Officer Lackey, excellent answer, by the way, and that is, of course, how I knew it to be, stock footage notwithstanding.
But were you and the entire city of Montgomery Police Department, was there a very real threat that these activists, so to speak, would burn down the city?
I mean, do you think that was their intention and would they have gotten away with it if you had not acted accordingly?
That was their intention to come in and burn the town down.
Now, I believe if we hadn't took the action that we did, this would have happened.
But we decided that we took an oath to protect the lives and property of this city and use that force necessary.
Now, it was unfortunate that we killed a couple of arsenists that were teenagers.
But we had no way of knowing their age.
One of them was 16, one 17.
After that happened, we got a lot of calls that they were going to come in by the bus load and burn the town down.
And of course, I let them know that we were going to use that force necessary to protect our city.
And that they could leave like those other two in a box.
Well, now, Officer Lackey, I notice in your book you talk also about not only the arrests of troublemakers in the civil rights movement, but also Klansmen and other troublemakers who were opposing integration and opposing the civil rights movement.
And that doesn't seem to be covered very much by the history books or by the media either.
That you were not partial when it came to stopping lawbreakers.
No, that is correct.
The news media didn't give us hardly any coverage on that.
And we had to make some arrests of Klansmen, you know.
Our job was to keep law and order, and we couldn't pick and choose, you know.
Well, we got very little coverage, you know, in regards to that.
Well, tell us a little bit about the Freedom Riders, who they were, where they came from, and some of their behaviors while they were under your jurisdiction.
All right, we were going to take a pause right there from these clips.
When we come back, we're going to hear Officer Lackey's answer to Bill Rowland's question about the Freedom Riders.
But let's just take a break.
I got to say this.
To have participated in that interview remains an honor in my life.
And I'm very proud of the work that we do now here on TPC.
The show we've done tonight, the show we did last week, the show we did last month, last year.
I'm proud of the work we did then too, Keith.
We have been consistent from day one through 20 years.
We have never wavered.
We've never backed down.
We've never stopped preaching the truth without retreat, surrender, or apologies, as is our motto.
But listening to that again, and I haven't listened to this in years.
Listening to that again, I hope people who have never heard it before, who have begun listening to this show in recent years, are getting something from this.
But this is a true historical interview.
This is the kind of stuff you should be having on the History Channel.
But what's interesting to me, I think my big takeaway from that last clip was it's the exact same tactics.
The only things that have changed from the 1960s until the 2020s is that the police stand down now.
When they do the exact same thing that the so-called peaceful protesters were doing in the 1960s, now they just let them ransack it.
They didn't do that in the South back then, and God bless them for it.
Well, you can tell by that footage that Drew Lackey was quite aged at the time that he did this.
Thank goodness you stepped in to take his.
Oh, he was already in his mid-80s, yeah.
Right.
But what this shows is that things like the Freedom Rider Incident, which is totally portrayed as a good versus bad and righteousness.
Pure good versus pure evil, yeah.
Yeah.
And it was just a stage production just like the Montgomery bus boycott, like the Selma Bridge incident, everything that they did.
And they're doing it now.
Nothing has changed.
When you listen to Drew Lackey, though, what are you thinking?
I'm thinking that this is the truth.
It just has the sound of truth.
You can tell the sincerity in his voice.
Yeah, this is not.
Because he didn't gain anything from any of this.
No.
There was, you know, when they brought those Freedom Riders down, that was a planned event just like the D-Day invasion of France, okay?
The left in America, supported by the Democrat president and his attorney general, John Kennedy and his brother Bobby Kennedy, were in it thick as thieves.
And they were trying to present a production, a theatrical production for the news media to run.
They knew when they would have to turn on the camera.
They edited it.
For example, if one of the rioters got the best of the policemen, he was beating him up, stabbing him or something like that.
That landed on the cutting room floor.
They wanted to have all this footage of supposedly brutal.
The cameras started.
It wasn't back in the day where you had iPhones.
Everybody could record the thing from start to finish.
The news cameras, ABC, CBS, NBC, the three channels you had back then, they started rolling when the officers retaliated to the attack.
You didn't see the provocation.
Well, see, if you had it to do over again, they would basically, the thing for the Southern policemen like Drew Lackey to do would have been to go after the cameras, okay?
Because they were the ones who were creating this false narrative about what was going on.
They wanted to whip up public opinion against the South and segregation.
And guess what?
You know, why don't they treat January 6th protesters like they did the civil rights protesters in the Freedom Rider incident in the Montgomery bus boycott, the Selma incident, other ones like that?
They do it because they're on the side of the police and the forces of repression in January the 6th.
On the other hand, they were on the side of the protesters.
There was a book written in the late 60s by Marshall McLuhan called The Medium is the Message.
And his idea was that if you control the media, you control the people's perception of reality.
And the civil rights movement should be exhibit one to that.
That's exactly what happened in the civil rights movement.
And what happened was that this false narrative became the official narrative.
And if it were not for interviews like this one with Drew Lackey, there would be no record of what actually happened.
I think it's so important, and this is why I wanted to do it because, again, and I said this once tonight already, when we revisited, I believe it was December before last, so, you know, 13, 14 months ago, the interview with George Wallace Jr., I just thought that there was something really fun about that, playing clips and then talking about it.
And that was such a good interview.
And we've had so many of those that are so old now.
So many years ago, I mean, they're evergreen in terms of their content, but it shows just exactly what we've said: the civil rights movement was the first salvo in the culture.
And the people who are listeners to the show in recent years that have never heard them, we're going to give you 12 shots at it during this retrospective series.
This is number one.
We'll be on.
Pursuing Liberty, using the Constitution as our guide.
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New reports say a prosecutor in Donald Trump's Georgia criminal case paid for the Fulton County District Attorney to accompany him on flights.
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May 24th of 2022 was the awful day that 19 children and two teachers were killed at the elementary school by an 18-year-old gunman.
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Well, welcome back, everybody.
Whether you've heard this interview before or never have heard it before, it's interesting to hear it again.
Keith, you haven't heard this in years and you're enjoying it tonight, no doubt about it.
Now, I just got to say, because we have two more clips we got to play, and they're a little bit longer than the ones we played the first half of the show.
You cannot find this book anywhere.
I have a copy of it.
We actually gave copies of it out during a fundraising incentive, you know, years and years ago.
Well, Antelope Hill, you just heard the ad from Antelope Hill Publishing.
They did an exhaustive search trying to find one of his heirs, one of his kids, that would sign over the rights, and it just ran into a brick wall.
They just couldn't get it done.
And so this is out of print, out of publish.
You can't find it anywhere, but you can find this interview.
We're going to listen to more of it now.
Bill Rowland now asking Chief Drew Lackey about his opinion on the Freedom Riders.
I think he's public knowledge.
About the Freedom Riders, who they were, where they came from, and some of their behaviors while they were under your jurisdiction or on your watch.
What was the Freedom Rider, you know, the whole Freedom Rider situation?
When they came to town, what did you discover about them?
Well, they were very belligerent, and it was apparent that they were, you know, they were looking to have some conflict uh with the police or with other people.
Uh they, you know their mannerisms and their speech and everything uh indicated that they, you know, wanted to stir up a conflict.
Now, see, King, this is one of his tactics that I think he trained his people to do, was to have these conflicts between the police and the demonstrators and so forth.
And then when it was all over, he's going to blame the police for causing the riot.
riot.
Then he would charge police brutality when you put the riot down or or brought order back to the city.
Yeah, this was his favorite uh police brutality.
And if you follow the, go back to Fidel Castro down in Cuba, he started using the same technique in Cuba when the Communists were taking over Cuba.
And of course Martin Luther King was knee deep with the Communist Party.
They came into Montgomery.
Uh, we knew who they were when they, when they came in, and we usually put a tail on them, followed them, and then uh, we did have some luck with the black leadership uh, talking to them about getting these people out of Montamy.
They weren't there to help, to help them.
You know well, you actually met with Martin Luther King at one point, didn't you about?
You know, coordinating uh security or uh trying to prevent some of these problems?
Yeah, I had a, I had a meeting with him and uh, I had a friend of mine over the black uh pharmacists and he set up a meeting and uh discussed uh with King.
Uh, you know, uh some things that we needed to do and he needed to do and uh, at first he turned down uh any security for months and then he, of course, he changed his mind before I left and I told him we could like to give him security.
We couldn't guarantee a hundred percent, but we could cut down the odds on it and he admitted that he could not control you know all of his people, that he had some people in there that was gonna get out of land and so forth, and he said I just, you know I can't control all my people.
Well, I see, here you have a copy of a newspaper article from that time where Martin Luther King, who was preaching peace and nonviolence, actually tried to get a permit for a gun.
Yeah, yeah.
He tried to get a permit for a pistol and he was turned down.
And You know, the s, the so-called peaceful movement, was not what it was cracked up to be.
I mean, these people were out to stir up trouble.
And this is the way that he got the sympathizers and money coming into his organization was having conflict.
They'd even when they'd be marching on our streets, sidewalks, the males would break off sometime and go relieve the shelf on a white person's lawn.
That sounds about right.
If that ain't uh, you know, I mean, that's trying to have a conflict there that, you know, if it was my house, I'd be coming out of there with a shotgun.
Well, most normal people would.
And is this what led you, Officer Lackey, to write your book?
You know, we were talking earlier about another historical aspect and the importance that books and eyewitness testimony play.
Is this what you wanted people to understand?
Well, let me rephrase the question and ask it in this manner.
Why is it important to you that 60 years after the fact people understand the truth about the civil rights movement?
Let me ask you that way.
Well, after I retired from the police department, I went to work with the state and put in 30 years there.
But to read and hear these people talking about, you know, how great King was and all this stuff and not have any negative stuff printed against him, I decided it's time to unveil.
But yours is more than just, and it's so well written and it's an easy read and it's just chalk full of important historical eyewitness testimony.
But much more than the propaganda that one would read about King, yours is an actual factual document, am I right?
That is right.
That is correct.
And you see, Co Reddick King had those FBI files and tape seals in 2027.
And Bill, I'll ask this to you and Officer Lackey.
Do you think that in 2027 they'll even be released?
I don't think they will.
I've tried to get in there and have them released.
And I hadn't had any luck on that, and I don't think they will be released.
If we can get them released now, you could see a lot of these politicians running for cover.
Oh, a lot of the politicians would run for cover.
Well, you know, the standard excuse for not releasing the files on King was that it would ruin his reputation.
I think that's what Coretta Scott King said when she testified before Congress about doing that, sealing the t the records.
But you say that many politicians would run for cover, too.
Oh, yeah, these politicians, these liberal politicians and the liberal news media, they flocked to him and he more or less had them eaten out of his hand.
You know what I mean?
It's sickening when you see it.
See it happen that these politicians are running over each other to try to get to him and do their thing.
All right, so we'll pause right there.
I just want to say, in listening to this, the thought occurred to me, you know, Jared Taylor and I had a trip along with John Friend and Brad Griffin and John Hill to Selma, Alabama.
We spent a day in Selma.
And Jared did two featured pieces on that video as well as an article for Amrin.
We did an entire show on it last summer.
You know, Selma is the true legacy of the civil rights movement.
You go to Selma now and you remember what we told you about it at Amrin and here.
That's the true legacy of the civil rights movement.
And although I never had the chance to talk to him, I found a print interview that a university did with the former sheriff of Dallas County, Alabama.
And Selma is where Montgomery, or where Selma is.
Correct.
And Selma's not too far from Montgomery.
And he talked about everything Drew Lackey's talking about, how the marchers on so-called Bloody Sunday were doing everything they could to provocate the police, to provoke the police, I should say, that they would come into the courthouse and urinate and defecate and all of this stuff to the city buildings.
And it wasn't until the law had had their filling that some of the officers were injured, were injured that they finally started fighting back.
And he was asked in this, what was the most surprising thing to you about what happened in Selma on Bloody Sunday?
Again, so-called Bloody Sunday.
And he said that he never believed that the American people would buy it.
He never believed that the American people would buy the mythology put forth by the media.
He thought that people would either know better or see through it.
And certainly Southerners did at the time, but through the careful cultivation of this mythology, now people just almost take it as gospel truth.
And I thought that that was very sad and also very profound that he believed that the truth would prevail over the media lies.
Well, he was naive, okay?
Nobody really had anticipated the power of media control that was brought home to the American people by the civil rights movement.
There are lots of legacies of the civil rights movement today.
When you look at American cities that have been taken over by black politicians, which are rife with corruption, bribery, and sheer incompetence, that's one of the legacies of the civil rights movement.
Look at the decline of public education in America since 1954 when the Brown decision was handed down.
That's another legacy.
Basically, the decline in public morals that has happened.
You know, look at the movies in the 1950s.
Just pull one out like North to Alaska or Tammy and the Bachelor and compare that to what Hollywood is producing now.
Take a look at like Wolf of Wall Street or Yellowstone and things like this.
You know, there's gratuitous sex all over the place.
That would never have been tolerated back then.
That's another legacy of the civil rights movement.
We need to understand that everything that is supposed to be good is actually bad, but you can't talk about the bad, the decline in morals, the decline in competence, the decline in quality in public education, in governance, in cities that are controlled by black politicians or anything that, you know, that has our popular culture has been debased, and it's all because of the triumph of liberalism.
And the people behind the news media were the usual situations.
And this is the thing, and we got one minute, we got to go back to our final, our fourth and final clip of this interview that I wanted to play tonight.
This is by no means the complete hour-long interview, but we're playing some of the highlights.
And it's that, again, I share your disdain, Keith, for these so-called phony conservatives like Sean Hannity, who rail against liberalism but say that, as you like to put it, the civil rights movement was entirely sacrosanct and certainly a conservative cause of freedom and so on and so forth.
This is the real deal.
Trying to claim that Martin Luther King was a conservative is so laughable.
Well, you know, even the conservatives now, though, are saying, because again, you know, this was something that we did back in the mid-2000s.
Now, in 2024, the worm is beginning to turn.
And I saw one mainstream conservative this week say Martin Luther King wasn't a hero.
He was a leftist and a communist and an atheist.
And that, you know, pretty much something.
If you could add to that, rapist, a sexual and physical abuser of women, he was sitting laughing at one of the people, one of the men in his entourage raping a woman.
So they say.
I believe it.
Well, that's all documented by the FBI.
I don't doubt it.
I'm just saying, I wasn't there.
But I do know the other stuff is absolutely true.
And let's play one more clip with Officer Drew Lackey.
And again, ladies and gentlemen, how about Bill Rowland?
You know, the role he played in our formative years certainly shaped us and gave us a North Star.
And I really appreciate everybody who's ever been a part of our team and production staff.
Bill goes back far enough that he remembers some of these things firsthand.
Well, he was younger than you.
He died too early, but he was, you know, anyway, he was the best among us.
Let's go back.
One more clip here with Officer Drew Lackey.
Who was the worst day for you, Officer Lackey, during the Civil Rights Movement?
What day do you recall as being the most frightening or the most disturbing from a policeman's point of view?
This particular day that I recall, Abenathi and had organized a group and they were meeting at King's Church.
King wasn't there.
And they were going to march from his church to the Capitol.
And they'd already given, put this on, you know, the news media and everything.
And when I arrived at the capital, the white people were all over the lawn and everything else up there at the Capitol.
It's probably at least 10 or 12,000 whites in that particular neighborhood of the Capitol Complex buildings.
It was on the lawn ground there.
And I sent some plane clothes officers to, you know, check it out.
And the majority of them in there were loaded.
It was a kind of a cool day, and they had on overcoats.
And they had shotguns, pistols, you name it.
I mean, it was an arsenal there on the ground.
I called Abenath out of the church to talk to him personally and showed him what he was up against, what we were up against.
And I said, well, ain't no way that we can give you protection with all these people in the arm like they are.
And I'm going to ask you to call off the march.
And he said, no, we had this plan, and we're going through with it.
Of course, the national news media was there, you know, the cover of a sign because they had, you know, announced this thing several days prior to.
So they come out of the church, started across a street there, Decatur Street, toward the Capitol.
And when they did, all these white people started rushing down.
So I called my men to put them back in the church.
And so we made them, made the Abernathy and all his group get back in the church.
And then I told him I would let them leave there maybe six to eight at a time and give them the streets they would have walked down so we could furnish protection.
But that was a close call there because we could have had a bloodbath right there very, very easily.
And of course, Montgomery really was a powder keg, I call it, for some time the least little spark could have set it off.
So we had to really stay on our toes trying to keep the lid on it.
Well, did the white crowd disperse once the civil rights marchers were out of sight and removed from the scene?
Did you have any trouble with them after that?
No, they started dispersing.
They didn't throw bags of feces on you or spit on you or anything like that, I guess.
No, we didn't have any of that.
But when that whole group started coming down, I knew we were in trouble unless we did something quick.
So you saved Abernathy's life in all likelihood and those marchers.
Yeah.
But they never expressed any appreciation for that, I suppose.
Oh, no.
No, they don't ever.
Excellent question.
They don't ever appreciation for anything you do.
You know, it's good.
Well, I think it's certainly apparent that you did your duty, Officer Lackey, during those very difficult and incendiary times, those very difficult and violent times.
You really showed integrity and a spirit of righteousness and being just righteousness.
So we're going to, let me mention that the name of your book again is Another View of the Civil Rights Movement.
Now, we just talk about the book.
You can't find it anywhere.
You can find that interview.
And I thought that that was very interesting right there.
Because, again, you had the people there, the Alabama State Troopers, all of these maligned police officers across Alabama trying to keep control.
And it was interesting what he said.
Now, as I always say, I want to give you the final word on this kid.
We have two minutes left.
With regards to the violence in the South during those years, the thing that was most remarkable to me was how little there was.
And he said that the whites dispersed as soon as they were asked.
There wasn't any of this.
But yes, I mean, the whites had seen the blacks engaging in arson and in the terrorism and all of this stuff.
And so, yes, they were there to protect the Capitol.
Go to Amran.com, type in Selma in the search bar.
You can read about our visit there.
What did you take of that final clip with the interview with Drew Lackey?
Well, I'm glad he brought out about the feces and the urine.
That's what they did to provoke the police to actions that might fit their narrative.
You never had anything like that at Charlottesville.
And, for example, compare.
Well, I think you did.
You actually had the leftists again doing the same old tricks as they do.
I know, but that was never covered by the media.
Sure.
The media is the key to all of this.
That's why if there was no media, we wouldn't have had this peaceful protest demonstration, quote unquote, that they had in the civil rights movement.
Think about this, too.
Compare what Drew Lackey's Alabama police did to the demonstrators compared with what the Charlottesville Police Department did with the demonstrators.
When the roles were reversed.
Absolutely right.
Absolutely right.
That is a monumental takeaway.
But again, you heard him say he was trying to keep them safe as well.
And no credit.
What have you ever heard that narrative?
Well, the Charlottesville police didn't try to protect the demonstrators at all like Drew Lackey did.
They tried to expose them to violence.
And they sat by and did nothing as these people who had a permit in Charlottesville to demonstrate were being attacked physically.
And they had cameras running.
And again, with selective editing, they used that to prosecute several people that were just engaging in self-defense at Charlottesville.
On the other hand, in this situation, the whole purpose of it was to provoke violence against the authorities so that they could basically justify using violence against them and changing the entire situation in the South.
The South should never have apologized for segregation, James.
Segregation is natural and normal among all racial and ethnic groups.
Birds of a feather flock together.
And right now, blacks who said that segregation was so bad, what do they want?
They want segregated dormitories, segregated graduation ceremonies, segregated courses of study.
That goes to show you exactly how hypocritical the whole thing is.
Another anniversary this week.
This was the week in which George Wallace was first inaugurated as governor of Alabama.
So, hey, I tell you what, folks, this is the reason you support the show, I think.
Whether you've heard interviews like this before, maybe you like hearing them again, I think you're enjoying it.
This is going to be part one of a 12-part series, 11 More to Go, some of the most iconic interviews in the pantheon of our 20 years here at TPC.
This was one.
We've got a lot more that you should re-familiarize yourself with as we continue on.
Our eye is on the past, the present, and the future here at TPC.
We monitor it all.
Thank you for being with us tonight.
We'll be back next week.
If the Creeks don't rise and Jesus Tarries, as we like to say, good night.