The lynching of Thomas Finch
When reporter Stephannie Stokes first visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which commemorates victims of white supremacist violence in the American South, she saw several victims’ names she recognized. Many had been killed during a so-called race riot that took place in Atlanta in 1906. (“Really,” Stokes points out in this week’s episode, “it was a white mob that killed 25 black people.”)
But one name puzzled her: Thomas Finch. The year of his death was 1936.
No further information was provided alongside Finch’s name, so Stephannie, who covers inequality and racial discrimination for WABE in Atlanta, started digging. She uncovered evidence that Finch was lynched by Samuel Roper, a prominent Atlanta police officer who would later go on to lead the Ku Klux Klan.
These revelations came from a nearly forgotten report by an organization called the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, which advocated against lynching alongside the NAACP. The city of Atlanta never followed up on this report. When Stokes asked University of Georgia sociology professor E.M. Beck, who has spent decades developing a lynching database, why that was, his answer was simple.
“It's an all-white power structure,” he said. “And so you've got to ask what is it in their interest to try to pursue these things, especially if it involves the police. And I would say that they have no interest in it.”
When Stephannie brought her findings to the Atlanta Police Department, officials wouldn’t talk to her, or even acknowledge that the case was a lynching. The office of Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms only offered a short written statement.
HEAR THE EPISODE
How we built our Reveal Reporting Networks
In the spring of 2018, a small group of Reveal reporters and editors kicked off a series of meetings to address a problem none of us had anticipated: After asking for leads about work-based rehabs across the U.S., we’d received more than we could ever handle on our own.
Reporters Shoshana Walter and Amy Julia Harris had been covering the issue tirelessly for more than a year. Along the way, they used email, social media and digital tip forms to solicit readers’ stories. Even though the work had created major waves – it spurred investigations and lawsuits, and earned a Pulitzer finalist nod – Harris and Walter were still struggling to understand its scope nationally.
Our solution, Reveal’s Rehab Reporting Network, launched in August 2018. Its goal: connect local reporters with tips about exploitative work-based rehabs in their communities. Journalists who joined the network gained immediate access to dozens of leads from across the country, as well as an in-depth guide to investigating them, authored by our reporters.
In the month after it launched, the Rehab Reporting Network picked up more than 200 members who worked at a variety of outlets, from local public radio stations to national newspapers. They immediately got to work investigating facilities in Oklahoma, North Carolina, Washington and elsewhere.
For a moment, the network seemed to have done its job, creating an avenue to deliver substantive tips to reporters who could quickly and confidently chase them down. But in the middle of solving one problem, we’d also exposed another – this one dizzyingly large and endemic to investigative reporting as a practice: There’s always too much damn stuff.
What we found in our reporting on work-based rehabs applied to pretty much every story we covered: When investigative reporters dig deep into an issue, they collect massive amounts of information (data, documents, interviews), evaluate it, and then begin the daunting task of shaping it all into a coherent narrative. It’s nearly impossible – unless they are planning to write 40,000 words or produce a 16-hour documentary – to avoid narrowing their focus and shaving away intriguing details. As a result, important communities get neglected; important voices go unheard. This process, at its most extreme, is a bit like taking the first bite out of a watermelon slice, then throwing the rest away.
Soon, our new question became: How do we stop wasting watermelon? Our focus began shifting away from the singular problem of work-based rehabs and toward something larger. We started looking for the collaborative potential in nearly every investigation we produced.
Thus, our Reveal Reporting Networks were born. If you’re a local reporter interested in joining, you can do it here.
|
|
|
Fact-based journalism is worth fighting for.
|
|
|
Documents show: Forwarding this email to a friend will help you both take it easy.
|
|
|
|
