The Men on the Roof

White Lies

NPR

True Crime

4.7 • 12.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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 season of White Lies, hosts Chip Brantley and Andrew Beck Grace go searching for answers to the questions raised by this photograph. Who were these men? What on earth had made them want to take over that prison? And what became of them after? As they search, they uncover a sprawling story: a mass exodus across the sea, a secret list, and the betrayal at the heart of this country's ideals. Want to hear the next episode of White Lies a week before everyone else? Sign up for Embedded+ at plus.npr.org/embedded.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Before we found the man in Vancouver, before we sued the State Department, before we
0:06.2	snuck into the graveyard of the Federal Penitentiary, and before we received the brown paper
0:10.9	package that changed everything, all we had were the photographs.
0:16.4	We just stumbled onto them.
0:17.5	We were in the photo archives of a newspaper in Birmingham, Alabama, looking through
0:21.7	rows of filing cabinets, each one containing small vanilla envelopes with negatives organized
0:26.6	by year.
0:27.6	And we were looking for something else entirely when we found them.
0:31.1	They were in envelopes dated 1991, one of a low-bred, taledega, federal prison hostage situation,
0:38.2	and another Cubans take over federal prison.
0:42.4	Most of the images inside were unremarkable, cops milling about, press conference with
0:46.9	the warden, news vans all in a row.
0:50.1	But then we found the photos of the men on the roof.
0:56.3	These were taken on a hilltop hundreds of yards from the prison.
0:59.8	They were taken with the telephoto lens, so the angle of view is very narrow, the images
1:03.6	are blurry, especially around the edges.
1:06.6	The show group of men standing on top of the roof of the prison.
1:10.4	You can't really make up their faces, but they're holding bed sheets with messages scrolled
1:14.2	across them.
1:15.9	Please media, justice, freedom, or death, leads one.
1:20.3	Another simply, pray for us.
1:23.7	These images have been here in this filing cabinet unseen for decades.
	...

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