Lee always knew that his father grew up during Jim Crow, but he never really understood what that meant as a child. In school he was taught that Jim Crow was all about segregation - separate but unequal. It wasn’t until Lee started asking his dad more questions about Jim Crow as an adult, that he realized that it was much, much deeper than he could’ve ever imagined. In this episode, Lee sits down with Dr. Ruth Thompson-Miller, a professor at Vassar College and co-author of Jim Crow's Legacy, The Lasting Impact of ...
Lee always knew that his father grew up during Jim Crow, but he never really understood what that meant as a child. In school he was taught that Jim Crow was all about segregation - separate but unequal. It wasn’t until Lee started asking his dad more questions about Jim Crow as an adult, that he realized that it was much, much deeper than he could’ve ever imagined. In this episode, Lee sits down with Dr. Ruth Thompson-Miller, a professor at Vassar College and co-author of Jim Crow's Legacy, The Lasting Impact of Segregation. Together they detail the depths of terror that characterized the Jim Crow era and discuss why it’s important to tell these stories.
Transcript
Lee Hawkins (host): We wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website whathappenedinalabama.org. Listener discretion is advised.
[music starts]
Hi, this is Lee Hawkins, and we’re about to dive into episode three of What Happened in Alabama. It’s an important conversation about the intergenerational impact of Jim Crow, how it affected the way my family raised me, and why it matters today.
But you’ll get a whole lot more out of it if you go back and listen to the prologue first – that’ll give you some context for putting the whole series in perspective. Do that, and then join us back here. Thank you so much.
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Jim Crow survivor. This isn’t a common term, but it’s what I use to describe my father and family members who grew up during this time in American history.
Jim Crow was a system of laws that legalized racial segregation and discrimination through state and local legislation – mostly in the South – for close to a hundred years. After slavery – from 1877 until 1965 – Black people living under Jim Crow continued to be marginalized, even though they were “free.”
Housing, education, and access to everything from healthcare to public parks was all separate, and definitely not equal. This history affected how my father was raised, how his siblings were raised, and – even though I wasn’t born during Jim Crow – how I was raised.
The fact is, there are millions of Black Americans alive today – 60 years or older – who survived Jim Crow and were never defined as a group, acknowledged, or even compensated for their experiences.
Instead, Jim Crow survivors are sandwiched between the anger around slavery, and the glimmers of hope from the Civil Rights Movement. It’s a time that’s talked about in shorthand. We’re taught that the worst of it was separate drinking fountains and bathrooms, and sitting in the back of the bus. But this wasn’t the extent of what my father, my family, and countless others went through. Not even close. So that’s what we tackle in this episode. The lasting legacy of Jim Crow.
Seven years ago, when I was on the phone with my dad, he told me a story about his childhood in Alabama during Jim Crow.
Lee Sr.: Yeah, me and my sister, me and my, uh, cousin be walking to school, and this one little, little ass boy, we knew we could kick his ass, but he'd come over every day and we'd be going one way and he'd be passing us. He'd run into one of us and just push us, just bump us. And we, we couldn't do nothing, man. We were scared, you know? We, you know, we could kick his ass, but we would have had to pay the price.
Lee: So what could happen if you would have beat his ass?
Lee Sr.: Oh, they probably would have hung our asses, man, or anything. See, it wouldn't have been no kid getting in fights, it would have been these niggas touched this white boy. That was always there, Lee.
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My dad was 10 years old when this happened. Only a decade into his life and he already knew what he had to do to stay alive: stay in his place. This was his reality growing up under Jim Crow.
Dad grew up in Greenville, Alabama, a small town of a few thousand people, just about an hour south of Montgomery. His father worked at the railroad and the sawmill, and his mother was a homemaker. They were part of a strong Black community with businesses and churches. And while separate, they interacted with white neighbors in an uneasy existence. But despite all this, Dad was constantly on edge.
Lee Sr.: The white folks that, you know, we literally came in contact with in the neighborhood, my dad used to go over and help them cut trees and mow lawns and stuff like that. Of course, when you went downtown, that's a different story because, you know, you had to give them the right of way, you know.
Lee: So what did that mean?
Lee Sr.: That mean if a white person's coming down the street, you gotta kinda stay over to, out of their way. Don't get close to them. Try not to, you know. Same with the cops, you know, if they on the street, you just walk by them, that's easy, you know what I mean? It was, it was that sensitive, you know.
Sensitive. I always marveled at Dad's word choice.
This sensitivity manifested as fear for his mom, my Grandma Opie Pugh Hawkins. And she passed that fear down to my dad. My relatives described her as a nervous, jittery woman who used to grind her teeth and drink Coca Cola by the eight pack to keep going every day. She taught my father not to trust white people and to be very cautious with them. One of his most vivid childhood memories is from a trip to a local department store with Grandma Opie.
The trip was supposed to be uneventful, just another day shopping for household necessities, people laughing and having conversations as they shop for deals.
Lee Sr.: And they had water fountains in the store, one over there for the whites, and one over here for the Blacks. And I, I didn't care. I didn't know the difference. I went and drunk out of the white one.
Now you might think you know where this is headed. A little Black boy drinks from the wrong fountain, and all hell breaks loose. But that's not what happened. No one even noticed. But all hell did break loose.
Lee Sr.: My mom just went crazy, man. To protect me, she went crazy, because you couldn't miss me over there drinking. So instead of having them come hang me, she did, you know, went into her act, you know.
[music starts]
Grandma Opie unleashed a wrath dad had never seen before – he was four or five years old at the time. Boy, she yelled, swatting him repeatedly on his butt, “I told you not to go near that fountain. That's for the white folks.” This show was a protective instinct.
Grandma Opie only beat Dad a few times as a kid, and every time she did it, it was in public to keep him in line with the rules he was still too young to know or understand. But things were different at home. Grandma Opie and her husband, my grandfather Papa Lum, they never laid a hand on Dad there.
He was the baby of the family, showered with love. Grandma Opie had him when she was 43, and by then she and Papa Lum were past their whooping years. He was Grandma's miracle baby and constant shadow. He even slept in the bed next to her.
Lee Sr.: I never told anybody that, but I did, yeah. That’s what I did, I was in the middle. I only had a little while with her being healthy.
When he was about six years old, Grandma Opie fell sick with kidney disease. She made several visits to the doctor, and dad would wait at home patiently for her after each one.
Lee Sr.: We used to get on our knees every night, every night and every morning, but especially at night. And when my mom was sick, I could hear her praying to God, you know.
Over the years, her health worsened, until eventually, when my dad was around 12, she was confined to bed rest. Shortly after that, family members began visiting from as far as California to pay their respects.
Lee Sr.: She had talked to me a lot before she died.
Lee: And what were some of the lessons?
Lee Sr.: Oh, she's just telling me, ‘I ain't gonna be here much longer.’ You know? And I, it was hard for me to get that in my head. I couldn't even, I denied that shit all the way, you know? But she was telling me that I'm gonna have to grow up faster than I really was supposed to. You know, ‘You're gonna have to try and get along,’ and, you know, ‘Listen to your older sisters and brother.’ She died telling them to take care of me. That's what happened there.
Only a few years ago did I learn the full story behind Grandma Opie's declining health and passing. The main medical facility in Greenville at the time was LV Stabler Memorial Hospital.
It was a segregated hospital, meaning in this case that the same white doctors and nurses treated everyone, but in separate facilities. White folks received their care in a state of the art building. Black folks could only be seen across the street in a little white house with just 12 hospital beds.
This is where Grandma Opie was treated. The last time she visited that hospital, they wouldn't admit her and sent her home. Instead, a few hours after she was turned away, the doctor came for a house visit. He told the whole family, “I'm going to give her this shot, and if it doesn't work, there's nothing more I can do.”
He administered the shot, packed his supplies, and left. No one knows what was in the shot, or what it was supposed to do. Grandma Opie died of kidney failure at the age of 56. This happened in 1961. At the time, life expectancy for black people was 64. For white Americans, it was 71. A whole seven more years of life.
Lee Sr.: You know, that was a real devastating thing for me when I lost my mommy. I just can't even, you know, I, shit, I couldn't, uh, I couldn't make it through that man, you know, ’cause I fell asleep during the funeral, and that was just like, trying to just get it out of my mind, you know? Big sleep came on me, man, and by the time it was over, then I was waking up, you know.
In the nights following Grandma's funeral, Dad stayed haunted.
Lee Sr.: For a whole week or so, I was having nightmares like a motherfucker. That’s one thing. I was going crazy.
Grandma Opie's dying wish was that her youngest children be moved out of Alabama to Minnesota to live with one of her oldest daughters, my dad's sister. Aunt Corrine and her husband LC were in their early thirties when Grandma Opie died and had moved to Minnesota years before.
Aunt Corrine honored Grandma Opie's request. Just two days after Grandma Opie’s funeral, Dad and two of his sisters were packed into the back of Aunt Corrine and Uncle LC’s Ford Fairlane headed up the interstate to start a new life.
I never had the honor of meeting my grandmother Opie, but I thank God for her. She had a strong spiritual intuition. One of my aunts called her “the holiest woman I've ever known.” She had a divine foresight that told her she needed to get her babies out of Alabama.
Lee Sr.: When I left Alabama something came out of me man, a big ass relief. And I didn’t even know where I was going, but it was a big ass, just, man, like a breath of fresh air, man.
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In trying to understand my dad and how he raised us, yes, with love and with care, but also with fear that manifested as belt whipping, I turned to research. I traced this violence centuries back in my own family.
I learned that Grandma Opie’s father was murdered when she was just nine years old. She went outside to see his bullet-riddled body slumped over his mule, with his feet still in the stirrups. And my grandfather – Papa Lum – his dad was also murdered, when he was just five. Both of them were killed by white men who were never brought to justice. This is what Jim Crow means to me: violence and fear.
To connect the dots between my ancestors’ experiences and my own, I read dozens of books and talked to experts, like Dr. Ruth Thompson-Miller. She’s a professor at Vassar College and co-author of Jim Crow's Legacy: The Lasting Impact of Segregation.
She spoke with almost 100 Jim Crow survivors as part of her research, and coined the term “Segregation Stress Syndrome.” This refers to the chronic, painful responses to the individual and collective trauma that Jim Crow survivors endured. Over the course of my research we talked a number of times, but I started by asking Dr. Thompson-Miller why she took on this area of study.
Dr. Thompson-Miller: I went to, um, the University of Florida to get my bachelor's degree in anthropology. And I had this interesting experience. I took a class with this older white gentleman called Dr. Fagan who, I have to say, Dr. Fagan literally did save my life. And so he had said to me that he wanted me to try to talk to people who lived through Jim Crow.
I only knew minimal stuff about it. I mean the history that you learn in school. And so I was naively going out there to ask folks, “How did you cope?,” I mean, “How did you get through the day to day with everything being separated?” And I gotta tell you, what I learned from those folks who were willing to share with me, even through their own pain, was something that has changed my life forever.
Lee: I'd like you to kind of get in deeper into telling us about the research that you did. What kinds of people did you talk to? Who were they?
Dr. Thompson-Miller: Um, well, I interviewed nearly a hundred folks and most of the African Americans that I interviewed were women, um, in their, you know, sixties and seventies, eighties, nineties. Some were educated. Um, some were just domestic workers. So they ranged from, uh, you know, different, uh, socioeconomic statuses. And it took a few interviews before I started getting troubled, like I knew I was looking at something, but I was missing something. And then it hit me one day. I was interviewing this woman in her house. It was the middle of the day, it had to be noon, it was, it was very sunny. And I walked in the house and it was so dark I couldn't even see my, my tape recorder and my pad and stuff. And they had the drapes and everything was really closed up. And so, um, she didn't want to be tape recorded, this woman, she must have been in her seventies, I believe. And I had to constantly reassure her that nobody would know that it was her that was talking to me.
Because people were still afraid, people are still afraid, right? So she told me, this incident that happened to her. I think she was elementary school age. She said that one day she went with her mother to work. Her mother was a domestic worker and she had washed this white man's, you know, shirt, and there was a spot on the shirt that she had missed and she talked about how, you know, he was yelling and screaming at her mother, how afraid she was for her mother. And, um, there wasn't anything that she could do. And her mother was apologizing and begging him to forgive her. And, and my God, and she starts crying. And it hit me what I was looking at.
I was looking at people that were suffering from trauma that's never been addressed. This happened over 70 years ago and she's still emotionally responded to it. And I said to her, “Listen, we can stop. I'm really sorry that this happened to you.” And she said to me, she said, “No, I don't want to stop. I want people to know what I went through.”
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And what these folks really told me was that they never shared things with their children. They kept it all to themselves. Why? Because they really wanted to protect their children. They didn't want their children to be angry. They didn't want them to, you know, to react to whites in a particular way because they knew, as their parents, what these children might experience and they didn't want that for them. And they thought that it would help them to be, for lack of a better word, to live a like normal childhood if they didn't understand what came along with living under this extreme system of oppression.
Lee: I want to interject here because I think that that's a really profound contradiction that you’ve pointed out. And that's the one thing, is that so many of our elders wanted to protect us by not telling us the stories. And that's almost like a coddling thing. But then on the other side, we're we're going to whip them to protect them. And somehow something gets turned off in the brain that makes people think that the best way to go about this is to whip them.
Dr. Thompson-Miller: Oh, my goodness. Absolutely. I mean, listen, I got, I got whipped. You know, my father was always the one that, you know, did it. But I think he felt like he was protecting us because he got whipped really badly by his father and by his stepfather. So this is the way that you're socialized. And you don't even know where this stuff comes from, but it absolutely comes from that connection. There’s hundreds and hundreds of years of history that has gotten us here where we are, the way that we are.
This theme of protection surfaced many times in my conversations with Dr. Ruth Thompson-Miller. It wasn’t just protection through punishment. It was also about shielding some children from the truth of the atrocities they endured – and the fractures it caused in the Black family dynamic.
Dr. Thompson-Miller: There was a, um, a man, uh, that I interviewed, and he told me about kitchen babies. They called them kitchen babies. I said, “Kitchen babies, what is that?” He said, ‘Those are the babies that black women had when they were raped by the person who came to your house to maybe bring ice.’ Or, you know, these traveling salesmen would rape women and they would get pregnant and they would call them kitchen babies.
One woman told me about a particular case in her family where she said her mother and her grandmother, she said, would have gone to their graves with this information, but she had a cousin that told her about a member of their family, a woman who was working, doing domestic work, like, you know, cleaning this woman's house who happened to be the town prostitute.
And so there was this white guy pretty well known in the community who visited this prostitute, a white woman prostitute. And so one day the man came over and the woman was gone. And so he raped the girl. And so she never told anybody what happened to her. She didn't run home and tell her family that he had raped her. But then she got pregnant. And she explained to her family what happened, that this man had raped her. So they were going to go see the man. And the family told her father, you have to send her out of town. You can't say anything to him. Send her out of town. Send her away, let her have the baby, and don't mention it.
And this woman told me that this happened to a lot of women during Jim Crow. And it wasn't women, these were girls, right. And a lot of families kept this stuff a secret, to the point where you had this term called “kitchen babies,” where you have men who, some men would stay even after, um, their wife uh, had a child that was biracial. Um, but a number of men left. And you know, this is something that has always bothered me. This notion of protecting. Protecting the women, the girls in your family. And when that almost seems impossible, I think there's a certain amount of shame in, you know, humiliation. Because, I mean, one thing that most men are socialized to do is to protect. And when you can't even protect your own, what do you do with that?
It’s hard to comprehend. Some Black men could not always protect their wives and children in their own homes. And out in the world, they were scapegoats. Can you explain more?
Dr. Thompson-Miller: I saw an example, and I mean and I had people tell me about lynchings, how, you know, like young men, and I'm sure some of this went on if, you know, a young white woman was fooling around with black guys or flirting or whatever and she got caught, she would say that they raped her. And one woman said, ‘I remember they went in a home, and they took these boys out – they were just boys – out in the middle of the night, and they lynched them.’ And you know, it always reminds me of Emmett Till, and they focus on Emmett Till, but that happened everywhere.
It's really frightening, you know, and I don't think we'll ever know the number of people that have been lynched in this country. They say it's thousands, but, you know, there's so many books about it, but we'll never know how many people really got lynched. That's what I believe. The number’s a lot higher than we really know about.
For me, one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life was sitting at the Legacy Sites in Montgomery as part of my research. One is a memorial that honors thousands of Black people who were lynched or murdered between 1877 and 1950. Their names are on more than 800 columns. To see that little children – four year olds, six year olds – were even lynched, and they all left families behind.
The museum presented story after story of Black people being killed without any evidence or even a trial, or trials by all-white juries. Many were lynched for things like not stepping off the sidewalk for a white person to pass, talking too confidently to white people, for owning land, and for attempting to vote.
And as I passed the rows and rows of names, I thought: if neither of my murdered great-grandfathers' names were on those memorials, how many other thousands of Black people were killed, whose names and stories will never make it into a museum, or be kept secret from future generations by their own families?
Throughout our conversations Dr. Thompson-Miller shared example after example after example of the horrors of Jim Crow, resulting in what she calls, “Segregation Stress Syndrome.”
Dr. Thompson-Miller: You know, the interesting thing about Segregation Stress Syndrome and how I came up with it was, I just looked at the post traumatic stress literature initially. I looked at the fact that like when you're in war, that's an event that happens. So you may be in war for a couple of years and then you come home and you get help and you're out of that situation, but for Black folks, you never get out. And so you went from slavery to Jim Crow, you might not have been in chains, but during Jim Crow, it wasn't much better. Yeah, you were able to have some stuff, but it could have been taken away from you at any given moment, and everybody knew that.
And so it's this collective experience that people are having at the same time with, with no way, uh, and no recourse when bad things happen to you. So you just have to hold it in, you know, you have to eat your anger. And so that trauma, that collective trauma, keeps happening over and over again. And in every day that you live, you're running into something and it manifests itself in different ways.
First of all, you pass it on onto your children, you know, you pass the trauma on. And I suspect that, you know, folks telling me their stories, I didn't realize they were passing it on to me, you know, and with Segregation Stress Syndrome, it's not just, you know, these traumatic experiences. It's this institutional betrayal. So institutions, you know, the judicial system, the medical system, you know, the educational system, they're supposed to be there, uh, for everybody, but unfortunately, when things happened to Black folks, they had nowhere to go. These institutions that were supposed to be there, equal justice under the law, that didn't mean that for them, so now you have this second class citizenship where everything that you believe about, you know, America, it really kind of gets thrown out the window.
Lee: In our last interview and in previous conversations, we talked about your trip to South Africa.
Dr. Thompson-Miller: Yes.
Lee: And you interviewed people and they lived through apartheid. And it started to occur to you that that's what Black people went through in America.
Dr. Thompson-Miller: Yes.
Lee: What do you think about the use of the term apartheid in reference to Jim Crow?
Dr. Thompson-Miller: I mean, I think you have to use it. You can't honestly say that Emmett Till was killed. He was viciously and violently tortured and murdered by people just because he was Black. And if you're uncomfortable with the term apartheid, well, to be honest with you, white South African, they actually were inspired by the system of Jim Crow in this country, which is where they got their system of apartheid.
I remember being a kid in the 1980s and participating in marches against South African apartheid. What I didn’t know is that this system – and also Hitler’s regime – was modeled on Jim Crow.
The dictionary defines apartheid as a policy or system of segregation or discrimination on grounds of race. This definition is applied specifically to South Africa in the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam Webster, but just as easily could have been said about what Dad lived through in Alabama.
Lee: What do you want people to understand about Jim Crow that they don't know already? You know, um, it's important for us, you know, we just talked a lot about the experience of living under it and the impact on families and communities, but if you really were to look back over the years and to feel like there's something more that you want to drive home, that you, the most important thing that people need to know about Jim Crow and Segregation Syndrome and everything that undergirds that, what would it be?
Dr. Thompson-Miller: This is really hard because, you know, I think it, it brings me back to thinking about my father, and I just think it's really important to forgive people for not being honest, um, for hiding stuff that they thought that would be better for you if they did hide it, um, for not fighting back, um, because there's got to be something in particular about people who did fight, who did protest, who did get beaten, who got bitten, and who had water hoses on them that made them do something different.
I'd like to know what that was so we can get it in more people, um, and not be, you know, these passive people that just have this stuff happening to them. So I think I, I would like to, to look at that and, um, just try to figure out a way to get people to heal.
Lee: Which kind of leads me into that next question and that final question, why do you think this research is still important? Why is it so important that we do this now? I just added my piece that I believe that not just white Americans, but Black, Black people, Black descendants of slavery and Jim Crow, but also our brothers and sisters who are immigrants need to know this history.
Dr. Thompson-Miller: So unless you really understand where we've been, and I mean it's an, it's an old cliche, you don't know, you know, if you don't know where you're, you're going, you know, it could happen again or however they say it, but that is actually true, you know, and I think that, in, in order to, to ensure and to help people understand why they do the stuff that they do.
I just want Black folks to really start valuing themselves more. Because what you are saying is like, we value everybody else and want to help everybody else, but we're the last one in line to get valued, even, even by our own people and even by ourselves. And I think that's something that's been, you know, pushed into us from inception.
And, um, people need to talk to their families, um, while you still can. That's all I say. Everybody go interview your grandma, your grandpa, or your auntie, or your uncle who's of age and who lived through Jim Crow, and hear what they went through, and you'll look at them differently, I promise you – in a better way, in a more respectful way, than you do now. That's my advice.
Lee: And that's a wonderful way to end, you know, in the words of Alex Haley, regardless of the opinions that people may have of him, there was one thing that he said that always resonates with me with this work: when an elder dies, it's like a library burned down, and once it's gone, it's gone.
Dr. Thompson-Miller: Yes.
Lee: Sister, thank you.
Dr. Thompson-Miller: Exactly.
Lee: God bless you. I love you.
Dr. Thompson-Miller: Oh, thank you so much. God bless you, too. Love you, too. Be well now.
Lee: Okay.
Dr. Thompson-Miller: Okay. Bye bye.
I don't know if Dr. Thompson-Miller truly understands how grateful I am to her for venturing into this rare area of study around the effects of Jim Crow. It helps me validate my previous understanding that my work and my family's experiences are not an isolated experience.
And it made me feel for my father’s parents. Who wouldn’t be impacted by having their father murdered as a child? When a family member is murdered, so much attention at the time is put on mourning the person in the casket, but what about the health and well-being of the people surrounding the casket – especially the children – who have to find a way to keep going, carrying all that pain? And then, my father’s father was murdered as well.
They did a lot of praying – which in our family, is often seen as enough – but my professional training and experience makes me realize that, on top of faith, therapy, self-care, and other strategies can help. Otherwise we can’t really call this post traumatic stress, because the “post” implies that it actually ended. In my father’s case, he was a middle-aged man before he could even talk in-depth about any of this.
I hope that people whose families have been through any kind of government imposed atrocities and/or apartheid – Jim Crow, the Holocaust, Japanese internment, any kind of apartheid or political persecution, anywhere in the world – can give themselves permission to investigate these atrocities and how they truly impacted their families. I hope they can work on finding solutions together, as families.
My conversation with Dr. Thompson-Miller also helped me truly understand why my father and some of my elders were so captivated with the discoveries I made about our family history. With each passing year, they became more eager to share their memories with a sense of urgency.
Here’s me and my dad talking with his sister, my beloved Aunt Toopie.
Lee: You know, it's important because when y'all are gone, it's over. These future generations –
Lee Sr.: Yeah, that’s true.
Lee: They're not gonna be interested in it. And when, when they get old enough to be interested in it, it's gonna be gone.
Aunt Toopie: That's right.
Lee: All the people who know are gonna be gone. So as a journalist –
Aunt Toopie: That's right.
Lee Sr.: Yeah, and it's gonna be more important even then than it is now.
Aunt Toopie: That's right.
Lee: Right. And I feel like I use all, I'm using all my journalism for other people's stories, so I feel like I need to, um, use it for my family story.
Listening to our discussions about how important sharing family history is, it chokes me up a bit, especially now. Dad and Aunt Toopie are no longer with us.
When I ventured into my family's history as landowners and settlers and how much of the blood of my ancestors was spilled just on the basis of their desire to buy land and live out the American dream, I got an even deeper understanding of how and why Jim Crow was so deadly. That’s on the next What Happened In Alabama.
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CREDITS
What Happened in Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It’s written, produced, and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.
Our executive producer is Erica Kraus.
Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam.
Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga.
Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa.
This episode was sound designed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Landa.
Our fact checker is Erika Janik.
And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.
Special thanks to the O’Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou, and Ziyang Fu; and also thank you to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short.
The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.
You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.
Thank you for listening.
