THE WEEKLY REVEAL
Saturday, September 13, 2025
|
|
Being Black in America Almost Killed Me Part 2
|
|
|
Scott Olson/Getty
The first time my reporting collided with my personal life was in 2019. I was a senior journalism student at Virginia Commonwealth University, smack dab in the middle of Richmond, which, for anyone who fell asleep in US history class, was the former capital of the Confederacy.
For a capstone class, I was assigned to cover the opening of a Civil War museum. Prior to the assignment, I took a spin through some historical archives to prepare myself.
As a Black girl who spent a good chunk of her schooling years in the South, I was not unfamiliar with the horrors of slavery. I knew, thanks to Ancestry.com, my father’s family has been in Virginia for hundreds of years, thanks to the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
But as I read the brief history of James L. Coghill, a Confederate soldier who died in 1862, it occurred to me that many of the people in this museum might have enslaved my ancestors.
In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised. But as a Black journalist, that feeling of having your own history so intricately woven into the beats you cover is still a jarring experience.
And it’s this feeling that Pulitzer Prize winner Trymaine Lee captures so eloquently in this week’s episode of More To The Story. As my colleagues there report, when Lee began writing his first book, he didn’t realize that the gun violence he was reporting on was such a central part of his own story.
But when he began digging into his family history, he learned about a series of racially motivated murders involving his ancestors.
Lee’s book, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America, soon became more personal than he’d planned. This week, Lee sits down with host Al Letson for part 2 of a conversation about generational trauma, the challenges of being a Black journalist in America, and how learning about his family’s history has changed how he writes and reports on Black Americans killed by violence.
It’s an episode you won’t want to miss. But before you tune in, check out part 1 here.
-Arianna Coghill
|
|
|
Find this episode wherever you listen to Reveal, and don’t forget to subscribe:
|
|
The Strike That Broke a Supermax Prison
|
|
Photo Credit: Nathan Congleton/NBCUniversal/Getty
|
|
At 18, Jack Morris was convicted of murdering a man in South Los Angeles and sent to prison for life. It was 1979, and America was entering the era of mass incarceration, with tough sentencing laws ballooning the criminal justice system. As California’s prison population surged, so did prison violence.
“You learn that to survive, you yourself then have to become predatorial,” Morris says. “And then, you then expose somebody else to that, and it’s a vicious cycle.”
When California started aggressively targeting prison gangs, Morris was accused of associating with one of the groups. The punishment was severe: He was sent to a special supermax unit at the state’s highest-security prison, Pelican Bay.
The facility was designed to isolate men deemed the “worst of the worst.” Like Morris, most lived in near-total isolation. No phone calls, no meaningful physical contact with another human, no educational classes, no glimpses of the outside world. The only regular time out of a cell was for a shower and solo exercise in another concrete room.
Decades later, prisoners at Pelican Bay, including Morris, started a dialogue through coded messages and other covert communication. They decided to protest long-term solitary confinement by organizing a hunger strike. It would become the largest in US history and helped push California to implement reforms.
This week on Reveal, in an episode that first aired in March, we team up with the PBS film The Strike to tell the inside story of a group of men who overcame bitter divisions and harsh conditions to build an improbable prison resistance movement.
|
|
|
🎧 Other places to listen: Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
