There is no internet (let alone social media or body cams) during that era, since Jim Crow in America was still being enforced towards black people at that time, but the civil rights movement is gaining traction (since Martin Luther King was alive). I mean, cop violence has been around for a long time before body cams were invented. How did people hear first hand encounters from those victimized back then without reliance on social media?
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“Hey you fuckin hear what happened to Jim down the road?”
OK, get this: the media used to do its job. Before Murdoch and then other billionaire assholes bought everything up, the media used to let people know, without too much bias and editorialising (of course there was some, but not completely wide-spread in the same direction), what was going on in the world.
Now almost all media is complicit in cover-ups and downright lies. The media doesn’t push back, doesn’t investigate, doesn’t make politicians shit scared like they used to. You have to go back to the mid or early 80s and before to see what media was actually capable of. Watergate toppled a president, but these days a similar scandal would just be a Wednesday.
Of course all this is by design. An ignorant public make for ignorant voters, which in turn makes campaigns a lie-filled popularity contest instead of something they ought to be: a discussion of ideals and policy. Each electorate is effectively a tribe voting on who is going to represent them in congress with the rest of the country. But do your elected representatives actually represent you now? Not generally, mainly because most voters don’t know what they’re voting for and that’s because the media, which ought to be reporting on what’s going on so the public are informed, has failed.
Sorry I seem to have gone on a bit of a rant, but this is something the REALLY pisses me off.
Usually somebody would come busting through the front gate yelling “THE POLICE ARE HERE! DA GONNA BEAT YO ASS!!!” and everybody would take off running.
There used to be this thing called
Having a fucking conversation
Apparently people just don’t do that anymore from how you’re describing the world
Often, it just wasn’t well publicised, which is why police - and people friendly with the police - got away with so much more shit than they could now. If there weren’t a ton of unfriendly witnesses, with no video they could just lie. If there was, the papers had the option of covering it, but the average journalist was friendly with the police. They might just make a gentleman’s agreement that whatever incident was either a regrettable mistake, not worth upsetting the public about, or even that it was illegal but good. Things had to get pretty crazy bad before it got reported.
If you were a black person, you and people you know just very directly felt it. The police could harass or beat you whenever they wanted, which was often enough. And that was on top of the more open racist policies that existed.
Do consider, as well, that informal violence was more normised. Now, if you punch somebody you probably get charged with assault. Then, brawls happened fairly often, and as long as it stayed fisticuffs, it tended to be considered a personal matter. Which meant getting roughed up by the police probably wouldn’t be considered brutality at all until deadly weapons come out, or it’s an extended beating while you’re restrained.
Why do you keep making new accounts to ask the same questions over and over bro?
Bot training? Ask the same stupid question and feed the different answers into the lie machine.
I dunno. I just assume anything stupid is nefarious now :/
I don’t know about the 50’s, but my father and his crew of ex-military hippy activists in the 60’s, used to take pictures of the FBI who were trying to infilitrate the groups as agent provocateurs and/or were photographing the protestors to create dossiers. They then posted those pictures, along with the name of the hotel they were staying at on every lamppost in the downtown area. The FBI tucked tail and left after that. This happened during the Vietnam protests in Missoula, Montana.
Believe it or not, people talk to one another in their communities.
This. Word-of-mouth travels fast, especially in tight communities.
We used to have a thing called journalism. While far from perfect it was a lot better than the sad caricature we have today.
With police brutality specifically, a highly professional, highly centralised, very white and very pro-authority press might not have covered it better.
Are people starting to forget how society worked before social media?
People would congregate and talk. They would go to church or participate in various clubs and social events where they would meet their peers and talk about happenings in their communities. Besides that there were a variety of publications where news would be posted in and spread such as local newspapers, magazines and periodicals.
You have to remember a lot of kids (I say kids and I am only 27) younger than 30 don’t remember a world before social media or we got exposed majorly at like age 10-12 because our parents didn’t give a shit and also had zero computer literacy and therefore didn’t understand the legit consequences of letting kids online all the time. Like yeah your Gen X parents know how to post their backyard ring camera footage and baby monitor recordings on FB and instagram now? My boomer parents barley know how to work a TV remote and they’re pirating all their movies/tv now. Also still paying for cable? I digress…
I had a smartphone when I was like 14, now kids are trained on smartphones and tablets before they can even walk. I’m serious it’s 1000x harder for them to ask for something in real words than send an instant message.
Talk to people, like in person?
Almost like chatting. With text to speech, except without typing anything out. And no keyboards, and no screens, and no computers. And being in the same room, like IRL.
What’s transcribing the speech to text?
The feds
You had to do that yourself. In your head.
With automatic, on device, realtime translation, if talking to a foreigner and knowing their language.
The internet didn’t invent human communication lmao.
Just make a black friend and I’m sure they’d tell you all about it.
Actually, this amazing trick still works to this day!
For a big part, they didn’t. Of course in smaller circles people knew exactly what happened, but nationally it was denied or downplayed and covered up by the South. Until sometimes they couldn’t. Like in the Emmett Till case, who was on a family visit from Chicago and was lynched in Alabama. This got a lot of media coverage nation wide for a change.
thank you for commenting without being a complete asshole for no reason
People make fun of trots and their newspapers, but that was one way.
White people mostly didn’t. Black people talked to each other.
The thing is, white people did talk about it. They bragged about doing it with their friends and family who supported them while anyone who didn’t support it looked the other way because they thought it didn’t effect them. People talk, people have always talked.
Source: I’ve spent almost my entire life living in the Southern US. My grandfather’s generation was basically pure evil and open about what they did. They also raised the Trumpists with their moral perversion.
Yup, good point. White people who were involved and related definitely also knew about police brutality, they just didn’t narrate it as police brutality, but rather as righteous behaviors.
Yeah, racism being well hidden is a much more modern phenomenon. Back then, getting away with it was more about the white people who disagreed looking the other way. Kind of like transphobia or homophobia now.
