This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories.

This next story is about a friend of mine. We're close in age, but have

little else in common. Mitchell Rutledge, aka Big Mitch, was born black and poor in Georgia.

I was born kind of brown and middle class in New Jersey. He never met his father. I still talked to my 94-year-old father every week.

He dropped out of high school in his early teens and was illiterate into his early 20s.

I was surrounded by books growing up and finished graduate school in my early 30s.

Big Mitch spent the last 44 years of his life in Alabama prisons for

killing a man. But this is not a story about an innocent man sentenced to prison for a crime

he didn't commit. Big Mitch never denied the crime or made excuses for it.

This is the story of my friend's spiritual transformation while serving his life sentence.

It's also about a friendship only God could have engineered, a friendship that began with

a single Sunday morning call.

Through these weekly conversations, I hope you come to know and love him as much as I do.

Here's episode six, my conversation on February 18th, 2024, where Mitch kick things off,

reading one of his original poems, Invitation to Love.

This is a free call from Mitchell Rutledge

An incarcerated individual

at Alabama Department of Corrections

to accept this free call press

1 to refuse this free call press

...