(mutters)
Got to shoot my own stuff 'cause of COVID.
That looks good.
Light looks good. All right.
All right. Let's begin.
Shit.
I forgot to put on pants.
(sighs)
? ?
Oh.
Well, hello there.
Welcome to CP Time,
the only show that's for the culture.
Today, we'll be discussing the history of Black spies.
Or as I call them,
incog-Negroes.
Usually I have another camera over there.
This is gonna take some getting used to.
Anyway, I know that usually when you think of spies,
you think of white folk like Jason Bourne,
James Bond,
or Jack Bauer.
Hmm. The spies are all white guys with the initial J.B.
Oh, my God. Justin Bieber.
But, in actuality,
Black people have a long history
of running intelligence operations.
For example,
you may know Harriet Tubman
for her work freeing slaves in the Underground Railroad
and for popularizing the bandana.
But what you may not have known was that,
during the Civil War,
she worked as a spy for the Union Army.
That's right.
Harriet Tubman was a spy,
and she had a great strategy for being ignored
by the Confederates.
It was called being Black.
At one point, Harriet Tubman led 300 Black soldiers
in a raid on Southern plantations.
Can you imagine how terrified slave owners must have been?
That was actually when they invented blackface.
They put it on and said, "Yeah,
go get those slave owners."
Another Black spy you may not have known about
is James Wormley Jones,
who, in 1919,
became the FBI's first documented Black special agent.
In 1922,
Jones infiltrated a Black nationalist organization
led by Marcus Garvey
and helped get Marcus Garvey convicted of mail fraud.
So Jones didn't just break barriers
for Black people in intelligence--
he also used that intelligence
to put Black people behind barriers.
He was the original Tekashi69.
He spied on Black people.
Like a bitch.
But Black folk didn't just spy for the U.S. government.
There were also spies like Josephine Baker,
who moved to France in the 1920s,
where she became a world-famous singer.
When the Nazis invaded France in World War II,
Baker smuggled secret messages and maps
for the French resistance.
When she heard something valuable,
she would write it down,
pin the note to her underwear,
and relayed the information back to Paris.
And that's harder than it sounds.
One time, in grade school,
I tried pinning a secret note to my drawers.
Ended up pinning my booty cheeks together.
Suffice it to say,
the school nurse was very aware
about my secret crush on Tricia.
Well, that's all the time we have for today.
I'm Roy Wood Jr.
This has been CP Time from Home.
And, remember,
we're for the culture.
We got to tell the feds about Justin Bieber.
Somebody need to call Joe Biden.
Oh, my God. Joe Biden's a J.B., too!
These spies are everywhere!