S6:E29 Segregation Academies (part 1)
Update: I would like to apologize for an error I made in the original version of this story. I stated that tuition payments to private schools are tax-exempt on the federal level. They are not. They sometimes are on the state level. The episode has been edited to reflect the correct information.
Brown v. Board of Education Sparked A Fight Over Schools
When Brown v. Board of Education passed the Supreme Court in 1954, segregationists stepped up their efforts to keep black children out of their schools. If they couldn’t use public schools, they’d establish their own private academies.
In the 60’s the Supreme Court struck down mandatory Bible reading and prayer in schools, causing some Christians to establish private Christian schools. This movement had unfortunate timing in that it lined up with the segregation academy movement. To our shame, many Protestant schools were segregation academies.
Many Protestant Schools Were Segregation Academies
But this story isn’t so easy. In this episode and the next, we’ll explore the strange twists and turns of the private school movements of the 1960s and 70s. They illustrate just how tangled evangelicals are with schools, taxes, and racism.
Sources:
- In Search of Another Country by Joseph Crespino
- Reaganland by Rick Perlstein
- The Evangelicals by Frances Fitzgerald
- Article on Jeffersonian Ideology
- The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro (especially books 1 and 2)
- Oyez.org article about the McCullum Case
- Interview with Austin Steelman, professor at Clemson University
- Oyez.org article about the Plessy case
- Oyez.org article about Brown v. Board
- Department of Labor article about the 1964 Civil Rights Act
- Oyez.org article about the Green case
Discussion Questions:
- What do you think about the supposed “Jeffersonian Ideal”?
- How would a small government change modern life? Try to see it from the opposite opinions that you hold. Would it work?
- What are some of the changes that happened in schools in the 1950s and 60s? How could these changes upset norms in religious circles?
- Why was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka seen as something to oppose by racists? By state’s rights advocates? By some libertarianians?
TRANSCRIPT
Please note that transcripts are generated by AI and NOT checked for accuracy
Chris Staron: [00:00:00] This episode is part of a long series exploring how some evangelicals tied themselves to the Republican Party in the 1970s and 80s. This episode is pretty complicated and refers to people and issues we’ve already discussed this season, so it might be helpful to start at the beginning of Season 6 before tackling this one.
This is Segregation Academies, Okay, deep breath,
let’s begin. With what’s going to seem like a whirlwind of unrelated history that we’ll all tie back together. Okay, so let’s open with some nature sounds. Take us back to the late 1700s and early 1800s.
Thomas Jefferson, famously a slaveholder, had this ideal image of what the United States would be. A country of small farms where the government, largely, stayed out of people’s business. [00:01:00] Well, white people’s business. Rich white men who owned land. That idea was pretty short-sighted. While he may have been against financial speculation and the evils possible in industrialization, he couldn’t have known how crazy things were about to get.
Jefferson was president at the very beginning of the 1800s, when a country of small farms was a safe bet. But he didn’t have any clue about the coming industrial revolution, rapid growth of cities and factories, or the way that agriculture exploded with new technologies. Instead of small farms supporting a family, now there were mega farms competing and driving prices down.
Laissez-faire economics would say, leave the small businesses, the small farmers alone, and the market will take care of itself. Keep the government out of their way. But, if, say, one year was great for [00:02:00] corn, the next year everybody grew corn and the market collapsed.
Because there was tons of corn and not enough of anything else, driving the prices down and nobody made money. So the government stepped in and pushed for crop diversity and quotas to stop price implosion, saving America’s farmers. And this happened in other areas too, where laissez-faire sounded good but didn’t keep up with a rapidly industrialized world.
Like say with the railroads, so mom and pop have all this food that they’ve spent months growing and harvesting, and they wanna send it to distant markets where it’ll fetch a better price. In the 18 hundreds. Trains were the method of doing that, but that meant working with the railroads, which were owned by [00:03:00] monopolies, and these railroad barons did something sneaky.
They cut deals where they charge the small-time farmer mom-and-pop More money to send their crops to the city than they charge the big dogs, making it nearly impossible for mom-and-pop to compete with mega-farms. So the federal government had to step in and control the railroads. Time and again, the feds intervened to protect those without power.
Hardly the Jeffersonian ideal. The same was true for factory working conditions and school standards, speculation on the exchanges, water quality. When the Dust Bowl bankrupted farmers and created an ecological disaster, the federal government stepped in, provided aid, and taught them better techniques to keep topsoil in place.
Consider food purity. This is a little gross, but in the late 1800s, dairy producers sometimes added water and plaster dust to milk to thin it out so they could make a [00:04:00] higher profit. Sometimes, bakers mixed sawdust into bread. The Jeffersonian ideal of small government that let people do whatever they wanted didn’t protect people from having formaldehyde in their milk.
It didn’t ensure fair pricing for train transportation. It didn’t incentivize electric companies to run power to rural areas or feed a nation in the Depression. Jefferson’s ideal fell short when tested against reality. Mazéfer, notably, couldn’t free slaves or enforce integration. Instead, federal troops were sent to the South to enforce the rights of black people.
Something, yeah, Jefferson, a slaveholder, would have been ticked about. All of these benefits to the country didn’t stop some people from worshipping Jefferson’s ideal, especially those running major corporations and trade groups. To them, Mazéfer was American. Anything else? [00:05:00] Oh, we don’t need the government telling us how to run our businesses.
Sure, we barely pay people enough money to survive, but we’ll build a library or university with our name on it, and that’ll make up for it. So when crowds of people protested working conditions, food standards, child labor issues, or to have silver added to the money supply, those who liked the Jeffersonian ideal labeled this activity as something sinister.
It’s socialism or communism. But the truth is that the government often intervened in order to prevent communism. Democracy evolved to a changing world. This upset people with something to lose. Businessmen like myself will learn to be benevolent. We don’t need the government telling us what to do. The market itself will adapt.
Overall, of course, they didn’t. So the government intervened to protect the vulnerable. Then came
Preacher: That the only [00:06:00] thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Chris Staron: The Great Depression. And to pull the country out of the depression, the Roosevelt administration and Congress set out a series of programs called the New Deal.
Rich Person: Home loans for people like me. Jobs for people like me.
Chris Staron: More important for our discussion today The federal government got involved in labor protections for people like me. Protections for working people. By the end of the 1940s, you’ve got child labor laws, the 40 hour work week, help for unions, and on and on.
In just a few decades, the power of the federal government took a big jump. Lots of people loved this. Others, like R. J. Rushdooney, and like Fundamentalist pastor and teacher J. Gresham Machen, saw this as a threat. Was the government gaining too much control over the lives of citizens? This could be especially acute [00:07:00] for a subset of Christians who were afraid of a one world government.
Test of time, here we are, something like 80 years later. Did the government turn communist? Or socialist? Are we controlled by a one world think tank? No. But as the country got more complex, more regulation was needed. People at the bottom of the social ladder gained a voice. They stood up for their rights and demanded change when the Jeffersonian ideal, the laissez faire method, didn’t work.
Some people wanted small government.
RICH MAN: People like me and Lubbe.
Chris Staron: Especially those who stood to lose something with added regulation, or who were afraid that regulation meant coming persecution, like some Christians who feared that religion was going to be regulated.
Preacher: If the government gets too powerful, they’re going to tell churches what to do, and that’s a sign of the end times.
Chris Staron: That sounds extremist, but it did happen [00:08:00] in places like Communist Russia and China. Got it? Small government versus regulation to protect the people. With lots of different kinds of people on all different sides. Bringing us to our main topic. As the struggle over how powerful the government should be escalated, it tipped off two separate, but sometimes co-mingling issues.
Two battles that were parallel to each other, but also intertwined. The move to desegregate public schools and the rise of the Private Christian Academies. Would society evolve on its own to integrate schools, or should the government step in to ensure equality? You’re listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian Church.
We press pause on the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better. I’m Chris Staron, and this is Truce. [00:09:00]
This season, we’re discussing why some evangelicals tied themselves to the Republican Party. It sounds maybe a little weird, but a lot of it comes down to two major categories of irritants, the size of the government, and fear of government intervention in the lives of everyday people.
Now, government intervention had been growing for decades. The New Deal kicked off a wave of legislation and government controls. As I covered in the Boardroom Jacobins episode, Big Business fought regulation through trade groups like the National Association of Manufacturers. Some of these groups reached out to Christians and marketed laissez-faire economics as American and Christian.
Don’t miss that just because we’ve got a lot of ground to cover in these episodes. The reason so many evangelicals believe in small government is because big businesses spent a lot of money to market that [00:10:00] idea. Industry put forward money and lobbying power to marry Christianity and small government when the Bible doesn’t really take a stand on it.
Okay, so hopefully you’re still with me. It’s about to get a little messy. So Congress and FDR dramatically grew the size of the government in the face of the depression. But they weren’t the only ones getting involved in the lives of people. The Supreme Court suddenly stepped up its game as well, causing certain conservatives to to turn against the court.
Let’s tiptoe through some of those important cases. In 1948,
Announcer: we get McCollum v. Board of Education of School District No. 71, Champaign County. This is one
Chris Staron: you’ve likely never heard of. Here’s how it worked. Champaign County, like many others, authorized what was known as Released Time Religious Education.
Austin Steelman: [00:11:00] So, Released Time Religious Education is common practice in a lot of American public schools in the 1940s.
Chris Staron: This is Austin Steelman, assistant history professor at Clemson University. We’ll hear from him later this season when we talk about constitutional originalism.
Austin Steelman: And what happens is the school will release students To oftentimes on school grounds, sometimes off school grounds, seek religious education in their own tradition.
Catholic students can go to a Catholic instructor, evangelical students will go to an evangelical instructor, mainline protestants, etc, etc.
Chris Staron: Often the teachers were hired by third parties, so it didn’t eat up public funds. Classes were voluntary. This was after the Scopes trial, when evolution was taught in many schools.
This may have felt like a good compromise. If they can teach their evolution, then we can take time out to teach religion.
Austin Steelman: For evangelicals and for many people, this is really important. A way to ideologically shape kids, [00:12:00] despite still using the public school system.
Chris Staron: Who gets to teach what to the children of the nation?
Maybe you’ve noticed, but it’s a major theme of the season. Try not to answer flippantly. Who gets to teach them? And what should they learn? Now, going way back, in some places, Christians were very involved in starting free public schools.
Austin Steelman: And evangelicals have been very critical of much of religious private education because it’s associated, first and foremost, with Catholic parochial schools.
Chris Staron: Because this was an era before Vatican II where many Protestants were afraid that Catholics were taking over the country and following orders from the Pope. Released time religious education allowed public schools a degree of flexibility, where parents could get their kids regular religious training.
But a parent, Mr. McCollum, who was an atheist, said his son was ostracized for not attending one of those classes. So he sued the school district, arguing that this practice violated the [00:13:00] First Amendment, where it says,
Joseph Crespino: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.
Chris Staron: And the Supreme Court.
Austin Steelman: But when the court strikes down release time religious education as an unconstitutional establishment of religion under the First Amendment, evangelicals cover this case in large numbers and sound this alarm, really. They’re saying the court’s deviated from the original founding. We use religion in public schools has been common in American schools for a long time.
This is a threat. And they start to say, we need evangelical private schools, we probably need tax exemption for those religious private schools, and we need to push back against the strict interpretation of the Establishment Clause.
Chris Staron: At this point, when we’re talking about private religious schools in the United States, we’re basically just talking about Catholic schools.
This case, as important as it was, didn’t actually set [00:14:00] off a boom of Protestant academies. In 1954, six years after McCollum, there were only about 123 in the country, a tiny amount. Cases like McCollum started the ball rolling, but didn’t generally set off a stampede. But the case did sting, though.
Austin Steelman: Which is really a huge shift for many evangelicals who’d been invested in this notion.
of separation of church and state.
Chris Staron: Especially in Baptist traditions where separation was almost a pillar of the belief. But now, it seemed to some like the government was coming after religion. At this stage, there are public schools, Catholic schools, and we got a tiny number of Protestant schools. Easy enough, right?
Well, it’s about to get a lot more complicated, thanks to, in 1953, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. This was actually five cases wrapped in one. The question? Was it legal for states to [00:15:00] segregate schools? The rule for decades had been that segregation was okay as long as black people were offered equal facilities.
Separate. But equal, from a previous Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson. The thing is, the schools and other public accommodations were not equal. Sometimes black students had to travel far, or the facilities were falling apart or underfunded. Maybe they lacked transportation. With Brown, all public schools were ordered to desegregate.
But there was a lot of wiggle room in the decision. The ruling used specific language for desegregation, which had to be done, quote, with all deliberate speed. Now, what does all deliberate speed mean? In a month? A year? Ten years? Segregationists determined that it can mean, really, anything. The Brown case set off concern in racist communities.
If parents wanted to have their [00:16:00] kids in segregated schools, it was getting harder for them to do that. So, what did they do? They started private schools that didn’t rely on federal funds to operate. The logic went that no federal funds meant no need to abide by the law, thus creating privately run segregation academies.
Okay, so everybody focus up. There’s a reason we spent a lot of time talking about education and taxes this season. Because these segregation academies, like religious schools, wanted to be tax exempt. That way, community members could give money to a private school and receive an income tax deduction. The theory is that if, say, I have children, Our dad’s the best.
They’re so cute. And I want to give them a private school education, the money for that education comes from one place. Me. Like buying anything [00:17:00] else, a hot dog, diapers, or a car, it’s a simple transaction between me and the business. In this case, the school. But, that ignores an important third party. The government.
Because by giving me a tax deduction for my tuition payment, the government is losing out on tax revenue from me. Armed with that deduction, my tax bill is going to be less next year. So, in a way, the tuition for my kids to go to a private school is subsidized by the federal government. This plays into the sneaky sneak nature of non profits.
There’s a prevalent myth at work here, that when private citizens and corporations give to non profits, they’re doing all the funding, not the federal government. It’s a way for we the people to effect change without federal dollars. But really, The tax [00:18:00] deduction component means that the federal government is losing revenue when we write off contributions.
When we write off donations to a non profit, in a way, it’s like having the federal government subsidize our decisions. So the logic goes that by giving segregation academies a tax deduction, we are giving them a government subsidy. We started our talk today with two kinds of schools, public schools, and Catholic ones.
By and large, that was it. Then we expanded to public schools, Catholic schools, and Protestant ones. Then with Brown v. Board, we had public schools, Catholic schools, Protestant ones, and now Segregation academies, and yes, there was crossover. Some segregation academies were also Protestant schools. All of them in one form or another, received some kind of federal subsidy.[00:19:00]
Austin Steelman: Many evangelicals who say they’re interested in the end of segregation also worry partly with McCollum and other cases in the back of their head. That Brown v. Board is still pushing beyond the original meaning of the Constitution in ways that concern them.
Chris Staron: Because the size and scope of the government was getting much larger, far from the Jeffersonian ideal.
More restrictions on business, more protections for unions, not to mention American involvement in the League of Nations and the United Nations. The American federal government was getting bigger and more involved in the lives of citizens. Let’s be clear, they had to do that because we kept being dingbats.
There would have been no need for the Brown decision if we really treated all people equally. But because we don’t, new rules were required, like those to integrate public schools. Soon, we had another Supreme Court decision in 1962, Engel v. [00:20:00] Vital, ending mandatory school prayer. I covered this in detail earlier this season if you want more information, but again, school prayer had not been in every school to begin with.
This decision was unpopular with Catholics and with the public in general. 79 percent of Americans favored religious exercises. The Engel decision was not fought by evangelical leaders of the North or the South at the time. Because, the prescribed prayer in question was so weak. According to historian Francis Fitzgerald, Protestant leaders also saw this as a way to curb Catholic influence in the country.
The switch didn’t flip for evangelicals until the next year, with Abington School District v. Shemp, which prevented devotional Bible readings in public schools. Angry fundamentalist Karl McIntyre wrote,
Rich Person: We understand that a greater issue is at stake than simply Bible reading in the schools. At stake is whether or not America may continue to [00:21:00] honor and recognize God in the life of the nation.
Chris Staron: The 1950s were a time of public religion in the United States. God was being added to the money and the Pledge of Allegiance. The National Prayer Breakfast was established. Monuments to the Ten Commandments were erected across the country. In part, As a way to advertise for the movie, The Ten Commandments.
Billy Graham was seen on television and heard on the radio. Public religiosity was big in the 1950s. Now, at the dawn of the 60s, it was being put to the test. Harold Ockengay, founder of the National Association of Evangelicals, argued,
Joseph Crespino: a neutral or secular state while preserving the nation from dominion by denomination leaves America in the same position as communist Russia.
Chris Staron: In other words, there was concern from evangelicals with large followings that the country was slipping into a forced secularism as Russia had after their revolution, [00:22:00] after such a peak of public religious expression in the 1950s. This seemed like a major blow, but not to everyone. The Southern Baptist Convention at the time supported the angle and Abington decisions because separation of church and state was a hallmark of Baptist tradition.
They passed eight resolutions in the coming years to that effect, as per usual. None of this is simple. Still, these decisions lit the concern of some evangelicals, not all, that the country was headed in a bad direction, and that government was getting too big and was overreaching. This sparked renewed interest in private Protestant schools.
So far, we’ve explored two parallel but separate movements, one for Protestant led private schools, and one for segregation academies. When we return, the federal government closes loopholes. And the South gets creative, blurring the line between Christian [00:23:00] schools and segregationist schools. All this and more when we return.
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Welcome back, this is the Truce Podcast. Today we’re talking about schools, tax incentives, racism a lot for one episode. Which is why it’s gonna be two. So, in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education declares that schools must integrate with, quote, all deliberate speed. And some places, like those in the South, take this to mean whenever we get around to it.
A decade later in Mississippi, public schools were largely still segregated. If someone had the courage to demand that the Supreme Court’s decision be followed, they were met with repercussions. Like in 1955 in Yazoo County, Mississippi, [00:24:00] where 53 parents signed a petition demanding that the local school board integrate according to the Brown decision.
The names of all the people who signed the petition were published in the newspaper, along with their addresses. Many of them faced intimidation and economic reprisals for speaking out, including losing their jobs. A decade after Brown, there were only 11 non Catholic private schools in the state. The decision had caused some movement towards private segregation academies, but not much, because the school districts there kept finding ways around the Brown decision, including intimidating people who tried to have it enforced.
But soon, the tension was ratcheted up even more. That’s because of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Essentially, this act
Joseph Crespino: passed by
Chris Staron: Congress
Joseph Crespino: prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Chris Staron: Crucially for our [00:25:00] discussion today, Title VI put the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in charge of withholding funds from any institution operating on a discriminatory basis.
Like, you know, ahem, schools. If they continued to discriminate, their public schools could lose funding. But these racists had keen PR people. They got to work trying to deflect. They said they weren’t against the Civil Rights Act because they were racists. It was something else. Historian Joseph Resino wrote
Joseph Crespino: when they opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Mississippi Segregationists, who helped coordinate the L lobby against the bill, did not argue publicly that it threatened the South’s segregated way of life.
Though they all privately believed that it did. Rather, they maintained that the bill represented a dangerous and unconstitutional expansion of federal powers. After Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, neither did [00:26:00] Mississippi segregationists defend all white schools in the name of preserving white racial superiority.
Instead, they framed the issue as the right of all parents, white or black, to choose which school their child attended.
Chris Staron: They framed it as a government encroachment on their rights. Someone messing with the Jeffersonian ideal of a small government. Telling individual parents how to raise their children.
Okay, so that was nonsense. It was obviously because of racism. But they kept spinning. One Southern group put out an ad calling the act a
Rich Person: 100 billion dollar blackjack. The civil rights bill. The bill is not a moderate bill and it has not been watered down. It constitutes the greatest grasp for executive power conceived in the 20th century.
Chris Staron: By framing it as a power grab by the president, they avoided the truth. The government was finally standing up to the South, which wanted to lynch black people and segregate schools [00:27:00] without reprisal. The South spun and spun and spun.
Some white Christians fought against segregation, but when they did, the South pulled out an old chestnut from last season. Since so many Christians who fought for desegregation were modernists, people who questioned the miraculous in the Bible and the deity of Jesus, The South spun the story. They even depicted it in a cartoon.
On the left side of the panel is what looks like the 50s version of a hipster. A beret, goatee, checkered jacket. In his hands he carries books reading, social gospel, and how to integrate in ten easy lessons. Above him is a sign that points to Left Wing Theological Seminary. On the right side of the panel is a handsome young man in a suit carrying a bible.
Above him reads, Christian Duty. See the spin? They tried to market that [00:28:00] desegregation, pushed by those modernists, was actually an attack on the fundamentals of Christianity. Again, nonsense. The Bible doesn’t advocate for segregation or small government. That didn’t matter. The spin had real marketing potential.
Segregationists didn’t surrender. To encourage the use of segregation academies, Mississippi used state funds to help with tuition for anyone seeking a private school. An idea championed by Milton Friedman. Remember, he thought that parents should be free to choose which schools their kids attended.
Meanwhile, the private, tax exempt, and thus federally subsidized segregation academies blossomed.
Public school buildings and buses were given to them or sold cheaply, leaving the scraps for Black children in underfunded public schools. Obviously, the [00:29:00] federal government couldn’t sit by. So in 1968, the Supreme Court tightened their case with Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, which decided that the freedom of choice argument didn’t fly.
The school system in Virginia had decided that we would allow students to choose between two schools. One that had been all black, and one that had been all white. When a few black students crossed to the white school, and no white students moved to the formerly black school, local parents sued.
Then came Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education in 1969. Oh, excuse me, that’s not my line.
Announcer: Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education.
Chris Staron: There we go! The Supreme Court finally struck down the with all deliberate speed loophole in Brown v. Board of Education. Holmes County, Mississippi had put in place so many obstacles to integration that it was nearly impossible [00:30:00] without federal intervention.
In this case, all deliberate speed gave way to immediate desegregation. In response, 39 private schools were added in Mississippi in the weeks before the ruling. By 1970, 400, 000 kids were in private academies in 11 southern states. And Black families wisely picked up on this sneaky sneak nature of non profits.
In Holmes County, they objected to the federal tax exemptions of segregation academies. White enrollment in the public schools plummeted from 771 to just 28 the first year after the new rules were implemented. The next year, there were zero white kids in the public school. And because white enrollment dropped, Mississippi cut public school funding and continued to give buildings and buses to private white academies.
William F. Buckley’s National Review published its sympathy for the South as [00:31:00] the North enforced Supreme Court rulings. And the South was getting tired of dodging and weaving, with some people admitting that it would, eventually, So, the strategy shifted. To recap, Thomas Jefferson had this ideal, that the country would be made up of small farmers and that the government would, largely, stay out of their lives.
But this wasn’t possible due to rapid growth of industry. It used to be that there were just public schools and a few private schools, and Catholic ones too. But then, the Supreme Court struck down religious practices in public schools, and Protestants started their own private Christian ones. Something similar happened when the court demanded that public schools be integrated, and racists founded their segregation academies.
And yes, to our shame, there was bleedover between some Protestant schools and segregation academies. All of them, in one form or another, were [00:32:00] subsidized with federal funds. So that, when the US government decided to crack down on segregation academies, that’s where they started. The money. In the next episode, I’ll explore just how they did that.
And to fight back, the South had a pretty innovative, but also, crappy idea. The focus of integration was below the Mason Dixon line. What if they could take desegregation To the North. Make the North feel growing pains and see their own hypocrisy. All of that and more in the next episode.
Special thanks to Austin Steelman. We’ll be hearing from him later this season when we talk about constitutional originalism. I used a lot of different sources on this episode. I’ll have a list of sources in your show notes and on the website. One of the best books I found on the subject was In Search of Another Country [00:33:00] by Joseph Crespi.
I want to take this time to thank you for your patience with this episode and with the next episode, because these are really tricky, difficult subjects, and there’s really no way that one person can address all of this in just two episodes. So have some grace, and please continue to pray for me. If you’d like to help me keep making truce, why not give a little bit to help out?
There are not a lot of other voices in the Christian world treating their audience as intelligent and capable of grasping nuance. Like what’s going on here, why not give a little bit each month to help me make Truce? I can accept check, credit card, PayPal, and Venmo at trucepodcast. com slash donate.
Special thanks to my friends who loaned me their voices for this episode, including Jackie Hart, Marcus Watson of the Spiritual Life and Leadership podcast, and Chris Sloan. Truce is a production of Truce Media, LLC. God willing, we’ll talk again soon. I’m Chris Staron, and this is [00:34:00] Truce.
