White Lies: The Men on the Roof

Embedded

NPR

News, Society & Culture, News Commentary, Documentary

4.8 • 11.8K Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

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.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is Embedded from NPR.
0:04.0	And we are back with another story.
0:07.0	This time, it's the second season of a series called White Lies.
0:11.0	The first season, if you haven't heard it, already go and listen when you have a chance.
0:16.0	It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and it was about the unsolved murder of a white pastor in Selma, Alabama in 1965.
0:25.0	The series reopens the case with new evidence, and tells us a lot about collective memory and racial injustice.
0:33.0	This new season is about a group who the hosts call the Men on the Roof,
0:40.0	the Roof of a Federal Prison in Alabama in 1991.
0:44.0	The Men are Cuban men, holding signs, begging for justice.
0:49.0	Their story tells us a lot about who gets to be an American, and who doesn't.
0:55.0	Here are the hosts, Chip Rantley and Andrew Beck-Grace.
1:01.0	Before we found the man in Vancouver, before we sued the State Department,
1:06.0	before we snuck into the graveyard of the Federal Penitentiary,
1:10.0	and before we received the brown paper package that changed everything,
1:14.0	all we had were the photographs.
1:17.0	We just stumbled onto them.
1:19.0	We were in the photo archives of a newspaper in Birmingham, Alabama,
1:22.0	looking through rows of filing cabinets, each one containing small vanilla envelopes with negatives organized by year.
1:29.0	And we were looking for something else entirely when we found them.
1:32.0	There were an envelopes dated 1991, one envelope read,
1:36.0	Talidega Federal Prison Hostage Situation, and another Cubans take over Federal Prison.
1:43.0	Most of the images inside were unremarkable, cops milling about, press conference with the warden, news vans, all in a row.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.