White Lies: The Men on the Roof

Rough Translation

NPR

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🗓️ 27 January 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

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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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Gregory from Rough Translation, and if you came here looking for the second part of our
0:04.4	Ukraine collaboration with Radio Lab, we are still hard at work on that episode. It's an episode
0:09.7	that's going to take us to Ukraine on the ground. We're going to hear these really surprising,
0:14.4	very intimate conversations with people about abortion and pregnancy and just making choices
0:20.8	in the middle of a war. So that'll be in the feed next week. Meanwhile though, I know you came
0:25.7	here looking for a story and I've not arrived empty handed. I want to share the first episode of
0:31.1	the new season of the podcast White Lies. So the first season, if you haven't heard it, it's
0:36.6	the stripping tale all about the unsolved murder of a white pastor in Selma, Alabama in 1965.
0:43.6	But this season, well, it's an international story. It's the first chapter in the story of the modern
0:49.7	U.S. immigration system, but it begins with this rescue mission across the Florida Straits that
0:55.3	devolves into a saga of indefinite detentions, prison uprisings, and deportations. If you like
1:02.0	this episode, be sure to follow NPR's podcast embedded to get the whole season. Here are the White
1:07.6	Lies hosts, Chip Brantley and Andrew Beckgrace. Before we found the man in Vancouver, before we
1:15.0	sued the State Department, before we snuck into the graveyard of the federal penitentiary,
1:20.5	and before we received the brown paper package that changed everything, all we had were the photographs.
1:27.6	We just stumbled onto them. We were in the photo archives of a newspaper in Birmingham,
1:31.9	Alabama, looking through rows of filing cabinets, each one containing small and
1:36.3	envelopes with negatives organized by year. And we were looking for something else entirely
1:41.0	when we found them. They were in envelopes dated 1991, one of a low-bred,
1:46.3	taledega federal prison hostage situation, and another Cubans take over federal prison.
1:53.6	Most of the images inside were unremarkable, cops milling about, press conference with the
1:58.4	warden, news vans, all in a row. But then we found the photos of the men on the roof.
	...

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