In 1965, the Rev. James Reeb was murdered in Selma, Ala. No one was ever held to account. We return to the town where it happened, searching for new leads in an old story.

Bonus

Taking Cover

1 Apr 6th, 2023 52m 7s

NPR's Pentagon Correspondent, Tom Bowman, receives a shocking tip from a trusted source: A deadly explosion during the Iraq War was an accident—friendly fire, covered up by the Marine Corps—and the son of a powerful politician may have been inv

White Lies presents The United States of Anxiety

Jan 31st, 2020 27m 12s

White Lies presents an episode for the new season of WNYC's The United States of Anxiety. The series is about the unfinished business of American history and its grip on our future — their starting point is Reconstruction and its legacy today.

Bonus

Bonus: A Strange And Bitter Crop

Oct 29th, 2019 26m 55s

From the NPR podcast Code Switch: Eighty-five years ago, a crowd of several thousand white people gathered in Jackson County, Fla., to participate in the lynching of a man named Claude Neal. The poet L. Lamar Wilson grew up there, but didn't le

A Dangerous Kind Of Self-Delusion

Jun 25th, 2019 1h 6m

In our final episode, we examine the legacy of the Rev. James Reeb's death. We speak both to his descendants and to those of one of his attackers, exploring how the trauma and the lies that followed it affected both families.

Learn Not To Hear It

Jun 18th, 2019 51m 22s

In Episode 6, we reveal the identity of the fourth man who participated in the attack on the Rev. James Reeb.

The X On The Map

Jun 11th, 2019 51m 5s

In Episode 5, we search for the fourth attacker while digging into the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a black civil rights activist who was murdered in Alabama just weeks before the Rev. James Reeb. Jackson's killer was brought to justice in 201

The Sphinx Of Washington Street

Jun 4th, 2019 44m 59s

In Episode 4, we find a woman who says she knows who killed the Rev. James Reeb, because she was there. She's ready — for the first time in more than 50 years — to tell the truth about what she saw.

The Counternarrative

May 28th, 2019 50m 27s

In Episode 3, we break down the conspiracy theory that emerged after the Rev. James Reeb's murder: that he was allowed to die or was killed because the civil rights movement needed a white martyr.

The Who And The What

May 21st, 2019 57m 52s

In Episode 2, we unravel the aftermath of the Rev. James Reeb's murder: the arrest of three men and the defense brought at trial. We also track down the last living jurors.

The Excludables

Mar 16th, 2023 1h 5m

In our final episode of the season, we start researching the names on the secret list of 2,746 Cuban excludables. What we find confirms many of our suspicions about the arbitrariness of how the U.S. government created the list. Our reporting ta

The List

Mar 9th, 2023 49m 8s

Since we began reporting this story, we've been after a list. A secret list. On it are the names of 2,746 people whom the US government deemed excludable, including the men on the roof. The government has kept this list so secret that at one po

The Trial

Mar 2nd, 2023 42m 17s

In Episode 6, we sneak into the graveyard of the Atlanta federal penitentiary with a radical peace activist to learn more about what happened in the prison in late 1984. A peaceful protest by detainees held in the Atlanta pen resulted in a viol

The Pen

Feb 23rd, 2023 43m 41s

On May 18, 1980, a man named Genaro Soroa-Gonzalez arrived in Key West from the port of Mariel. With no family waiting to sponsor him, he was sent by plane to a resettlement camp at an army base. There he was interviewed by the INS and, a few d

The Entry Fiction

Feb 16th, 2023 54m 56s

When President Carter promised to welcome the men and women arriving on the Mariel boatlift with "an open heart and open arms," he had referred to them as refugees. But technically speaking, they weren't refugees. They were classified as entran

The Rumors

Feb 9th, 2023 51m 40s

During our reporting, we heard one story over and over again: that Fidel Castro had emptied his prisons to fill the boatlift. It's a story that's been told so often and with such conviction that of course it must be true, right? But what if thi

The Boatlift

Feb 2nd, 2023 50m 20s

The story of the men on the roof didn't start with that prison takeover in 1991. It didn't start when they were detained in federal prisons. And it didn't start when the government made a secret list of their names in 1984. Instead, it started

The Men on the Roof

Jan 26th, 2023 45m 5s

It all started with a photograph. A photograph from 1991 of a prison takeover in rural Alabama. A photograph of a group of men on the roof of that prison holding a bedsheet scrawled with a message: "Pray for us." In the first episode of the new

Trailer

Season 2: Trailer

Jan 24th, 2023 3m 17s

In 1991, a group of men took over a federal prison in rural Alabama. But these men weren't prisoners, they were immigration detainees, all of them from Cuba. And none of them were serving time for a sentence; they were being indefinitely detain