Behind the Scenes Minis: Bad Goals and Spirit Clothes

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Today we returned to the five oh four sit ins to talk about some of the specific people involved in it, which we haven't done before. Yeah, and also talk more about the Rehabilitation Act of nineteen seventy three, because the vast majority of what people talk about with that today is that language at the end. Yeah, that's you know about section five oh four. There's not a lot of discussion about the tone of the overall Rehabilitation Act of nineteen seventy three. It to me, there's a very nineteen seventies piece of legislation. Right, It's a lot of vibes in that legislation. Yeah, Like there's I mean there's not, like we said, there's stuff in it that was good. It is good to have funding for things like interpreters for deaf people and requirements for government agencies to have interpreters who can talk to people who need an interpreter. Right, All of all that part is good. Yeah, But there's the the whole underpinning is basically that the goal is to quote rehabilitate people and the right the goal is to have a vocational outcome, meaning a job, and like that is not it's the law acknowledges that that's not necessarily going to work for everyone. Some people cannot work for whatever reason, that there's not an accessibility plan that will make work accessible to some people. But the like, the vibe of the law is definitely that, like, the goal is a vocational plan for as many people as possible. I watched the movie Crip Camp Yeah over the weekend because I had, like, it has crossed my radar many times and I just had not had the opportunity to watch it, and so since it was relevant to this episode, I didn't realize how relevant it was to the episode because I didn't realize how much the movie was going to talk about beyond the years of the people at the camp. Right. It's a really good movie, it's a really good documentary. I noticed after I have watched it that its MPAA rating is an R and I found that frustrating. It is not an R rated movie to me. Do you know why you didn say like for the following reason that says something like some strong language and sexual situations, and I I will freely admit I am not a mo I'm not a person that assigns film ratings. That is not my job. I do not have all of the standards in front of me of what goes into those ratings. But there have been various past documentaries that have looked at biases in those ratings and how the same sexual situation will receive a stronger rating depending on who it's involved, like who is Like, if there's a sex scene that involves a white man and a white woman, that might be like a PG thirteen rating, and functionally the same scene involving two black men might that might be, Oh, we gotta rate this are And so my gut response to this rating is that it was probably rated this way because there are a couple of different conversations about sexually transmitted diseases, and I think the idea of disabled people being sexually whole fulfilled people made reviewers uncomfortable, yeah, and led to it being what I felt like was a harsher rating or a stronger rating than after watching the movie I really felt like it needed. Yeah. There's also the like I mean, ratings have long been problematic in a variety of ways. Because even even in addition to the things that you just mentioned, like different people being involved in that leading to different rating, it also depends on what reviewers looked at it. Yeah, sure, and their own biases and their own things they may or may not be squinky about. I mean, theoretically they have training in their objective enough in their job, but like, no one can remove all of their bias in any any way, you know what I mean, none of us can. They all have hear it biases, and so that also leads to another layer of like, yeah, this isn't always fair and sometimes it doesn't make any sense. Yeah. Yeah. I just felt like, ultimately that was not an R rated movie to me. I mean, if you were gonna watch it with your kids and you maybe want to have a conversation with your kids about topics like genital lice and kind of rhea. I'm laughing because the conversations around it in the movie, some of them are hilarious, Like there is just this candor about the fact that, like there was a crabs outbreak at the camp and some of the discussion of it is funny, and that's I was laughing. But anyway, I see, I found myself laughing for the selfish reason of I never have to have these conversations with my cats. Like there's a reason I'm not a parent, and it's because I'm not equipped to be a parent. Yeah, I would not be a good one. And one of one of the reasons is that I wouldn't be good at conversations like that. Yeah. Something else that struck me about the movie, which you know, this camp existed in The Catskills from I think I said nineteen fifty one to nineteen seventy seven, something like that, and there's a lot of footage from the camp when it was in operation, recorded by different people. Some were filmmakers who went to the camp to record things, some were campers or staffers themselves who recorded things. So there's a lot of like very nineteen seventies footage from this camp. And one of the things that struck me is that, like this was a camp for disabled teenagers and a lot of the people on staff. Some people on staff were not disabled, but some people on staff were. And still a lot of the things in the camp, like the things they were having to do to make things accessible. It's like there was not a lift to lift for people to go swimming. Oh yea yeah, yeah, like to get into I don't remember if it was a lake or a swimming pool, but whichever it was, to get into it, people were physically lifting you into it. Right, People were physically be carried onto and off of buses because the buses did not have a lift or a wheelchair ramp or anything like that. Yeah. And so this is, you know, a time of history that you know, I would be I'm not quite old enough to remember the late nineteen seventies because I would have been two and three years old. But when I got into my slightly older elementary years and then into my more adult years, seeing how many of those types of accessibility things have become more common, and then how many things there still are that are just thrown together. Yeah, Like, in some ways we've come a long way and in some ways really not. Yeah. I think too. We have the benefit because we get to travel for work to foreign countries on occasion. Two we also see like globally how things haven't have not been handled sure, which like is very eye opening. It's something that I will confess I probably didn't think about enough until my husband, for a while worked for a company that provided and also enabled vehicles to be accessible. So like some of them where we will just sell you an accessible vehicle. But in other cases people would be like, I have a car. I love my car, but now I cannot drive my car anymore because I have had like an accident or whatever and I or I've had a progressive illness and I can no longer drive it. And they would basically like convert that vehicle, right, And so now everywhere we go, Brian is always like, that's not that's not compliant, that's not complab but he points it out because he's hyper aware. And now I have become much more aware about it. Something I see often that my hate is people who park their cars in the striped off area that is for a wheelchair lift. Red rage, absolutely hate it. It makes me so angry. I also notice occasionally I'll be staying at a at a hotel and for whatever reason, they will have put me in a room that is meant to be accessible, and sometimes like it will just jump out at me, how like, yeah, there's a grab bar in the bathroom, but it's not in a place that would allow a person to transfer from a wheelchair to the toilet, it's in a weird place that like, that's not helping anyone. Or I remember being in a room that was supposedly accessible one time, and there was no way that a person who was using a wheelchair would have been able to get to the closet where their clothes would go. And it was like there was no there was not a wide enough passage around the bed. And it's like there's so much of that stuff. So like there are places where like regulations have not been put into place correctly, like places where it's like we installed a grab bar and the grab bar is not in a good place. Yeah, it's like they're they're going through a checklist to retrofit a space that was never designed. Yeah, with that in mind, and it doesn't technically they meet the requirements, but it doesn't really help anybody. And then you have folks like my mom whose needs are greater than what the requirement is. Right, So, like traveling any distance away from home is really hard for my mom because she doesn't just need an accessible bathroom. The accessible bathroom needs to have enough room for a lift to fit into it to transfer her from a chair to the toilet. Yeah, and even when she had more mobility and she was using a walker rather than using a power wheelchair. She was traveling with my dad one time and they stopped at a rest area and she went into the accessible stall and there was no way for her to get into the stall and get onto the toilet, and also closed the door behind her. Yeah, which was number one embarrassing. Yeah, And then number two, a stranger came in and decided that my mom needed help and would not take my mom's assurances that mom needed help. And this person who met well, just it was worse than if my mom had just been allowed to handle her own hygiene. I will say I have a cool version of this, okay of a retrofit that I saw, Yeah, at a resort where they had expanded the resort, and at that point they had enough surplus rooms that they could retrofit one whole portion of it. And what they did was to accommodate people like your mom. They combined two hotel rooms into one, so the bathroom was enormous and had tons of space. Yeah, and that way like, and the doors were wide and there was like ample room to maneuver around whatever kind of vehicle or assist lift you had, and I was just like, I know, this isn't feasible for every hoteler resort, Yeah, but this is incredible, and I wish I hope they teach other places how to do this, because yeah, it was like, oh, this is all actual functioning things that I read. I wish I could remember where this was, but I read an article somewhere that was about just really reimagining public restrooms. Yeah, because there are a lot of people who need a restroom for a lot of different reasons. Like there are parents who need to change a diaper, and there are people who use wheelchairs or walkers and like need enough space and the ability to get onto you and off like all of this stuff. You know, maybe you have a job interview and you need to use the bathroom to change your clothes. Maybe you have a religious requirement to do some kind of like washing of your hands and face over like a lot of different reasons that people need to be in the bathroom. And it was envisioning this public bathroom space that would be able to meet all of these needs for all of these different people. And of course it was like a spacious space that had privacy and had room for all of these different purposes, and I was like, that bathroom seems so amazing to me and so unlikely to ever be implemented at scale because everybody wants to save money and have less room dedicated to those kinds of things. Yeah, I mean another area that gets problematic is not even in a public space, but like there are huge tracts of neighborhood developments that were built during a period of time in the US when in real estate you kept the bathrooms as small as you could to maximize the living areas of the home, and those are really really hard to retrofit because like there just is not a place to expand out a wall unless you lose two thirds of your kitchen or you know what I mean, or give up a bedroom. And like I think, and I hope, I mean, part of this is just like the mansion of it all right that now even you know, relatively middle of the roadhouses have almost palatial bathrooms in many cases. But like when I think about some of the ones, like the neighborhood where my husband grew up, the tiniest bathrooms on earth, and I remember thinking when I first saw them, like, how would anybody get in here? If they had any kind of like even if they were on crutches temporarily, how would they make you know what I mean? Like, there's so many instances of spaces that are built like that that are private places and not even public spaces that need to be considered. Yeah, And I have had a conversation sort of the conversation in that I have said, we need to think about where we are going to live when we get old, right, because there will be a time in our lives when we will not be able to manage these stairs, right. And Patrick is like, we will have one of those chairlifts put in, and I'm just like, Babe, I don't think one of those chairlifts is actually going to work in this stairwell that was built almost one hundred years ago. It seems unlikely to me. And you know, that's one of the things about buying a house that's more than one hundred years old. Yeah. I do have a friend who I met in the weirdest circumstance, quite accidentally in New York. But she is in her seventies. She lives in England in an old house, and last year she's perfectly like she's spry as can be, she can get around anywhere right now, sure, but she recognizes that's not always going to be the case, and it's sooner rather than later, and she doesn't want her kids to have to deal with figuring it out. So like she put in her own elevator last year and yeah, in the future when I needed, I have it, and right now I can just enjoy it. I'm like, yeah, right on. Yeah, A very long time ago, I had some friends who had a house built for their family to live in, and they had that house built with the mindset of we're probably going to live here for our whole lives and at some point probably a parent will come live with us, and so they built a house to have enough space to do that, and also to have an elevator that went from the first floor to the second floor of their home. Yeah, which, of course you know, was incredibly smart, but also something that came with a lot of privilege to be able to afford a house that size with an elevator in it, Right, That is the other thing, like, not everyone is in a position where they can make those adjustments. Yeah, And we haven't really talked at all how incredibly expensive being disabled us so so expensive like prohibitively expensive. Yeah yeah, yeah, like my mom's wheelchair costs more than the last car that I bought. Yeah, we also didn't I hope that this was obvious from the episode itself. We didn't call it out specifically, but I just also wanted to say that, like, disability rights and LGBTQ rights have gone hand in hand the whole time. Yeah, and so the fact that we're at this point now in US history where there are attacks on DEI and those attacks are targeting trans people and gay men and lesbians, other queer people, also disabled people, like that is not new. That is stuff that has been going on this whole time. Yeah. The other thing that always makes me irate though, is that any I almost hate calling them accommodations because it makes it sound like, oh, we have to go out of our way to do anything that is put in place to make places accessible and fair and equal benefits everybody. It helps everybody. Yes, It's not like whenever people make the argument in any of these things that like, oh, why should everybody else have to go, and I'm like, because you're also benefiting, fool, Like I don't this is so easy? Yeah. Yeah, even like in ways that are just benign and like thoughtless. Right, if you are in a city that has really good curb cuts everywhere, things like deliveries get easier, things like just walking around for people that do not have any any issue, walking gets easier, like so many things improved. Parents with their strollers, life is easier. It's so silly that anybody would think that that was so now, yeah, infringing on their yeah, day to day life. It's like it's only making your life easier too. Yeah. Well, and there are still like there's so much stuff with the ADA that still isn't fully implemented, with a lot of that full implementation still boiling down to well, it's too expensive to put ramps everywhere. And it's like, y'all thought it was a reasonable expense to build stairs for non disabled people when you first built the building, So right, there was money for that. We come, there's not money for this. I have the same argument sometimes about things involving parking and bike lanes. There's money for a parking lot, there should be money for a bike lane. Yeah, but that's just me. And if I see you parking in a handicap stripe zone, fury, I'm I'm probably going to say something really unkind to you because you will have deserved it. Yeah, I don't remember. This was when I was still living in Atlanta. I was out with a friend and we went we were growing to some store somewhere and there were two striped off spaces that were the wheelchair lift spaces, and both of them had a car parked in them, and they were just at like a cell phone store or something like. They like it was one of those parking lasts that kind of served a bunch of buildings. And I remember leaving ugly notes on both of their windshield because I was like, this is unacceptable. If a person is in a van and they need to get out of it, they cannot because you have chosen to illegally park your car here. Yep, just to be closer to the store because there was plenty of other spots. Yeah. Anyway, strong feelings interconnected things for me to be mad about. I did really really love and got quite choked up about it. I got choked up about many things in this episode, but I had not realized and really really loved the whole aspect of how much the Black Panthers got involved. Oh yeah, and that they were feeding everybody. I just oh, the heartwarm. Yeah, so good. We've talked about the Black Panthers on the show before, and I don't actually remember like where we talked more about the Black Panthers and starting the breakfast program and all of this other stuff, because so many people, particularly so many white people of a certain age, have been told that the Black Panthers were dangerous and associate them only with being armed black men. And number one, there's reasons for the armed people needing to protect their own neighborhoods, Like there was a reason for that. It was not something they made up. And then number two, like so much of what they were doing was like we're going to start a health clinic and we're going to screen everybody in this neighborhood for sickle cell. That's going to help make people's lives better. And then when it came to the five O four sentence, just part of the thing being like you are fighting for liberation and we're going to help you with that. Yeah, I love it. We talked about Grave Robin this week. We did this isn't necessarily a January themed thing, but just got interested in it, and that's how it goes, this is very interesting to me for a number of reasons. So when I was doing Criminalia, we did an entire season about grave robbers. Although that was mostly like people that stole bodies and right sold them to science in many cases, what was very interesting to me was that while people were certainly upset in those instances and the many stories we told, the reaction in Salt Lake, based in significant part to the concerns that the deceased after life had been adulterated, was much greater than in some a lot of the other cases where people actually stole bodies. Yeah. I have researched, and I just found that fascinating. Yeah. Yeah, I had a number of mental questions happening as that. I was like, is that there are some religious and spiritual traditions that like the idea is the state of your body at your death is what it is in the afterlife, and so it's really important that like people's bodies be intact. Yeah. So I had this sort of mental question of, like, is the issue that if they arrive in heaven with no clothes, that they are naked forever? Yes, and that like, is it impossible to put on clothes in heaven if you didn't have them already. And I just thought about that for a while. People have different beliefs and that they can be different from one another. It's and that was just like a curiosity. But then I also was really fixated on like how there were boxes and boxes of clothes, because my first thought was, oh, obviously he was going to like clean up these clothes and sell them in his shop. But when he apparently had boxes and boxes of them far more than he was selling in the shop, I was like, Okay, what what was your deal here, sir? What are theories? Yeah, it is one of them, just like an unusual morbid fixation on people's clothes. Okay, no, minus from personal experience, the those are unfinished objects in his sewing rooms. What they thought? Okay that I had. I had another thought as well. One I think probably he was getting clothes at a faster rate than he was turning them over, because like he seemed to recognize he would go back and dig them up pretty quickly after their initial burial, right, But he also seemed to recognize that, like you have to let some time elapse before you refurbish this and put it up or sale or use it in some way in your tailoring business to lessen the likelihood that someone will recognize it. Yeah, So I really think it was a he was not good at managing material in material out right. Think that was part of it, Okay, Yeah, I was sort of mentally divided between poorly thought out criminal enterprise and psychological fixation, or maybe some combination of both. I think something has to happen in your head where you normalize it, and then he probably it didn't seem weird. And of course I have eighteen I don't know how many there were, the numbers never specified, but of course I have eighteen boxes of dead people clothes that I took off of them after they were buried in my living room. Of course that's what I do. That's just what we're doing. Yeah, Like, there's a weird thing. But I I I mean, I don't, I don't know. We don't have any of his own words other than what is relayed secondhand through accounts like Dewey's, and he sure about what he said. So it's a little we don't know. It's all guesswork. Yeah. The questions that you had about concerns about nudity in the afterlife. Oh yeah, some of those were also in that Brigham Young sermon that I didn't want to quote the whole thing, but he mentioned specifically. He brings up an interesting example, which I guess is from a real situation, but we don't know of having seen a young boy talking to some women who were really distraught over this whole thing, and the kid's take was like, hey, you know, garments get destroyed in a variety of ways, like people that burn in a fire if they're devout and their you know, like the angels will put their clothes back together for them, it's gonna be okay. And like Brigham Young even mentions that you know your close degrade in the in the grave, and like it's fine. When you get to heaven, you know, the higher powers will have taken care of that. They have tailoring skills, they will they will bring those disparate threads and fibers back together and you will be a okay. I did find that that whole sermon very reassuring, Like in tone, it was just like, oh, that's very very He took a really like he was like, I don't want to talk about the horrible stuff because it's horrible right, and it's hard for any of us to understand that. How can I make you guys less scared? Right? And I'm like, oh, this is actually pretty interesting. I love the ghost part. The ghosts are not asking you for clothes. The ghosts don't need pants. They're fun. Yeah. Yeah, I just thought that was very, very entertaining. The child logic involves there involved there reminds me a little bit of when I was a kid growing up in the late seventies early eighties, kind of in the era of hijackings in yeah, the world of air travel. A thing that I was told in Sunday School, and other people I know who were in other denominations in other states were also told in Sunday School was that if you were on the airplane and the airplane got hijacked, the hijackers would demand that you spit on the Bible, and if you didn't spit on the Bible, they would kill you. A great thing to tell impressionable young children. And my thought at the age of you know, five or six, was like, I mean, if the choices spit or die, I like, I bet God would forgive me, right, I think God would forgive me for showing up naked at the gates of Heaven. Be fine, You're getting a robe. It's all good. Yeah. I don't know, none of this is in line with any of my current thought about what happens when we die, but like, yes, for kids, you know, when you're a child, things make sense in a certain way. Yeah, we mentioned it a little bit in the show, but it sent me in this weird spiral where there are not a lot of newspaper mentions of this whole thing that are contemporary to it. Okay, And at first I thought I was losing my damn mind. I'm like, is my all of my databases broken? Are all the archive sites that I use somehow broken? And some of it was that I was using his name Jean, and a lot of them had anglicized in mentions. But also then I was reading one particular paper and it specifically said there's not a lot of newspaper coverage from when this was going down, and that was on purpose, because everybody was freaking out already. Yeah, And I was like, aha, I understand, Like the first thing that I found is that Brigham Young sermon. Yeah, Like when I say, the first thing I had looked at other things. But that was the earliest mention in the papers that I found, because there were people just already concerned. It had already spread so quickly. And I think, personally, this is my speculation that Salt Lake because it was new, because we know it was founded as a religious community and as a haven for people that felt they were being persecuted. I think they were worried if they ran something like that in the paper, it would get picked up nationally, oh sure, or internationally even, and that word would spread that their church had this very ugly problem with one of their converts. They had raised up as like evidence of how wonderful their religion was and how it could offer people things that they couldn't find elsewhere. I think it might have been a little bit of image management. That is strictly my speculation, right, that makes sense, But they really don't talk about it till later, And it also makes sense, I mean, and this continues to be relevant today, like the decisions that are made in news reporting of is this story going to help people or harm people? And if it's going to harm them, is it newsworthy enough that it still needs to be published? Right? And so it's possible that some of that may have been going on too, even though the state of journalism and journalistic ethics totally different in the nineteenth century versus today, Well so was the state of the law. Right, this is a total extra judicial solution of using air quotes. In my head like, well, I guess we got to exile them because they were also worried. It never came up specifically in any other research, but I had another speculative theory that there were concerns that if they did execute him and bury him, that his grave would be constantly tampered with. Oh sure, in a retribution move. And I also just think nobody wanted to kill somebody as a solution. Yeah, it was a very fascinating, very fascinating thing. I was wildly entertained, which sounds grizzly, but just right. Looking at the psychology of a community dealing with this was very interesting to me. Yeah, I I When you sent me the outline and I read it through, I was also fascinated, and like it wasn't It wasn't really a morbid fascination, but more of like a wow, this story is has so many turns that I did not expect. Yes, I I did chuckle when I first read nobody thought about the fact that he would take apart the Yeah, no, nobody. I guess it's one of those things where like, if you do not have a devious mind, it never occurs to you that that could happen. Somebody might build a boat. Somebody will just take this shack apart and make a boat out of it. Yeah, make a little raft for themselves. And who knows. He could have just drowned in his escape and write, or he could have, you know, lived a weird life after that. I don't know. Who knows. We don't know, but I'll be thinking about this one for a long time. Yeah. Weird way to start the new year, I know. But here we are. If you are about to head into your weekend, I hope that it is as relaxing as possible, that you deal with no big questions of morality or any kind of problem that might cause you to have to think about what its implications are to your faith or your afterlife. I hope everybody's cool to each other and that you get to eat delicious things and relax, and that the new year is treating you as well as it possibly can, given the weird times that we live in. If you are not off this weekend, I still hope you eat a lot of delicious things and that you are surrounded by love and kindness. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday we will have something for rand new. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.