What Happened In Alabama?

Real estate accounts for 18% GDP and each home sale generates two jobs. It’s a top priority for state officials and business leaders across the country to build stable communities. In Minnesota, efforts to address inequity that keeps people locked out of the property market are well-advanced. Lee sits down to interview those directly involved.TranscriptPart 3 – Action and AccountabilityLT GOV PEGGY FLANAGAN: An apology is powerful. But in the same way that I think things like land acknowledgements are powerful. If you don't have policies and investments to back them up, then they're simply words.You’re listening to Unlocking The Gates, Episode 3.My name is Lee Hawkins. I’m a journalist and the author of the book I AM NOBODY’S SLAVE: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free.I investigated 400 years of my Black family’s history—how enslavement and Jim Crow apartheid in my father’s home state of Alabama, the Great Migration to St. Paul, and our move to the suburbs shaped us.Community and collaboration are at the heart of this story. I’ve shared deeply personal accounts, we’ve explored historical records, and everyone we’ve spoken to has generously offered their memories and perspectives.Jackie Berry is a Board Member at Minneapolis Area Realtors. She’s been working to address the racial wealth gap in real estate. And she says;JACKIE BERRY: We need to do better. We have currently, I think it's around 76% of white families own homes, and it's somewhere around 25-26% for black families.If we're talking about Minnesota, in comparison to other states, we are one of the worst with that housing disparity gap. And so, it's interesting, because while we have, while we make progress and we bring in new programs or implement new policies to help with this gap, we're still not seeing too big of a movement quite yet.Jackie says there’s a pretty clear reason for this.JACKIE BERRY: Racial covenants had a direct correlation with the wealth gap that we have here today. Okay, if you think about a family being excluded from home ownership, that means now they don't have the equity within their home to help make other moves for their family, whether it's putting money towards education or by helping someone else purchase a home or reducing debt in other areas in their life.Racial covenants were not just discriminatory clauses—they were systemic barriers that shaped housing markets and entrenched inequality.LT GOV PEGGY FLANAGAN In my community of St Louis Park, there is, you know, there are several racial covenants. You know, our home does not have one, fortunately.Lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan is the highest ranking Native American female politician in the country. I asked her about her experience and how it informs her leadership.LT GOV PEGGY FLANAGAN: I can tell you that I never forget that I'm a kid who benefited from a section eight housing voucher, and that my family buying a home made a dent in that number of native homeowners in this state, and I take that really seriously,LEE HAWKINS: You know? And it's powerful, because I relate to you on that. You know, this series is about just that, about the way that the system worked for a group of people of color who were just doing what everyone else wants to do, is to achieve the American Dream for their children. And so I see you getting choked up a little bit about that. I relate to that, and that's what this series is about.Homeownership is more than a marker of personal achievement—it’s a cornerstone of the U.S. economy.Real estate accounts for 18% of GDP, and each home sale generates two jobs. This is why state officials and business leaders continue to prioritize stable and thriving communities.Remember earlier in the series we spoke about some other influential men in the state who were involved in creating the housing disparity gap that we have today.LT GOV PEGGY FLANAGAN: I don’t believe that that Thomas Frankson ever imagined that there would be an Ojibwe woman as lieutenant governor several, several years after he was in this role, and additionally, right? It’s symbolic, but also representation without tangible results, right? Frankly, doesn’t, doesn’t matter. And so, I think acknowledging that history is powerful. I think it has to do with how we heal and move forward. And we can’t get stuck there.MARGARET THORPE-RICHARDS: Thorpe Brothers was very much a part of my childhood and sort of upbringing. But my own father, Frank Thorpe, was not part of the real estate business. He chose to do investments.This is Margaret Thorpe-Richards. Her grandfather is Samuel Thorpe. Head of Thorpe Brothers, the largest real estate firm in Minneapolis, which he helped establish in 1885. I asked her to share her memories.MARGARET THORPE-RICHARDS: My uncle, my dad's brother, Sam Thorpe, the third, also followed in the Thorpe Brothers family business and he ran it until kind of that maybe the early 80s or mid 80s. But anyway, they sold off the residential to another big broker here, and then just kept commercial. While I was growing up you know I was aware about real estate but not actively involved.MARGARET THORPE-RICHARDS: Both my grandfather and grandmother, they were very much, I don't know, white upper class, you know, I remember going to dinner at their house, they weren't very reachable, like personally, so I never really had a relationship with them, even though they lived two or three doors down. And that's kind of my recollection.LEE HAWKINS: Okay. And so, at that time, there was no indication that there was any racism in their hearts or anything like that.MARGARET THORPE-RICHARDS: Oh, I don't know if I want to say that.Margaret’s entry into the real estate business didn’t happen in the way you might expect given her grandfather’s outsized role in the industry.MARGARET THORPE-RICHARDS: I went to my uncle Sam who was at the helm of Thorpe Brothers Real Estate it was still intact and he didn't see the opportunity or the talent that I had which I have to say I always have had I'm not going to be boastful but I'm really good at sales and so he never he never explored that and I think basically that was sexism.We didn't really have a great relationship. My father died early. He died when I was 18. So that also impacted things.It was my mother who's not the blood relative, Mary Thorpe Mies. She went into real estate during kind of the boom years of 2000. She said you need to come. She said, I'll help you get started." And we had a good long run for probably 10 years and then she retired, and I've been on my own until a year and a half ago when my oldest son Alexander joined me as my business partner. So now we're the Thorpe Richards team and he is essentially fifth generation realtor of the Thorpe family.The nature of her family’s role in the origins of discriminatory housing policy is a recent discovery for Margaret and her two sons.MARGARET THORPE-RICHARDS: I really didn't know about these covenants until it was 2019 when, and I was actually on the board of the Minneapolis Area Association of RealtorsI asked her how she felt when she found out.MARGARET THORPE-RICHARDS: I was horrified. It felt shameful.I'm not going to fix anything, but I would like to show up in a way that says I think this was wrong and I'd like to help make it right.I felt like I needed to take some ownership. I also was a little worried about putting a stain on the Thorpe name by sort of speaking my truth or what I feel we have a huge family.So I was reluctant maybe to speak out against, you know, the wrongs. However, I've just been trying to do my job at educating and being welcoming and creating it as part of our mission that we want to, you know, serve those who have not been well -served and have been discriminated and who've had an economic hardship because of the way that things were.I can relate to what Margaret is saying here.MARGARET THORPE-RICHARDS: And that has proven to be challenging as well. I'm not gonna lie. I'm white. I'm not black. So, how do I sort of reach over to extend our expertise and services to a population that maybe wants to deal with somebody else who's looks like them or I don't know it's a tricky endeavor and we continue to try and do outreach.I went through a similar range of emotions and thoughts while writing my book and uncovering family secrets that some of my relatives would rather not to think about. It led to some difficult discussions. I asked her if she’d had those conversations with her family -MARGARET THORPE-RICHARDS: Mm -mm. This might be it, Lee. This could be the conversation. I feel like it's time to say something from my perspective. I have a platform, I have a voice, and I think it needs to be said and discussed and talked about,One thing that struck me in my conversation with Margaret is her advanced-level understanding of the issue. She mentioned the challenge of foundational Black Americans versus immigrants. Families who moved from the South looking for opportunities after World War one and two were most severely affected by these discriminatory policies.Here’s Jackie Barry Director of Minneapolis Area Realtors;JACKIE BERRY: Between 1930 and 1960 and to me, this is a staggering statistic, less than 1% of all mortgages were granted to African Americans across the country. That truly speaks to having a lack of equity to pull out of any homes, to be able to increase wealth and help other family members.Efforts to address this are well-advanced here. Yet, lieutenant governor Flanagan is clear about how much more can and should be doneLT GOV PEGGY FLANAGAN: It's important to acknowledge and to provide folks with the resources needed to change and remove those covenants, which is a whole lot of paperwork, but I think is worth doing. And then figure out, how do we make these investments work? In partnership with community.I asked why the state has not issued an official apology for its role in pioneering structural housing discrimination and whether she see

Racial covenants along with violence, hostility and coercion played an outsized role in keeping non-white families out of sought after suburbs. Lee learns how these practices became national policy after endorsement by the state’s wealthy business owners and powerful politicians.TranscriptPart 2 – Discrimination and the Perpetual FightCold Open:PENNY PETERSEN: He doesn't want to have his name associated with this. I mean, it is a violation of the 14th Amendment. Let's be clear about that. So he does a few here and there throughout Minneapolis, but he doesn't record them. Now, deeds don't become public records until they're recorded and simultaneously, Samuel Thorpe, as in, Thorpe brothers, is president of the National Board of Real EstateFRANCES HUGHES (ACTOR): “Housing for Blacks was extremely limited after the freeway went through and took so many homes. We wanted to sell to Blacks only because they had so few opportunities.”LEE HAWKINS: You know, all up and down this street, there were Black families. Most of them — Mr. Riser, Mr. Davis, Mr. White—all of us could trace our property back to Mr. Hughes at the transaction that Mr. Hughes did.CAROLYN HUGHES-SMITH: What makes me happy is our family was a big part of opening up places to live in the white community.You’re listening to Unlocking The Gates, Episode 2.My name is Lee Hawkins. I’m a journalist and the author of the book I AM NOBODY’S SLAVE: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free.I investigated 400 years of my Black family’s history — how enslavement and Jim Crow apartheid in my father’s home state of Alabama, the Great Migration to St. Paul, and our move to the suburbs shaped us.We now understand how the challenges Black families faced in buying homes between 1930 and 1960 were more than isolated acts of attempted exclusion.My reporting for this series has uncovered evidence of deliberate, systemic obstacles, deeply rooted in a national framework of racial discrimination.It all started with me shining a light on the neighborhood I grew up in – Maplewood.Mrs. Rogers, who still lives there, looks back, and marvels at what she has lived and thrived through.ANN-MARIE ROGERS: My kids went to Catholic school, and every year they would have a festival. I only had the one child at the time. They would have raffle books, and I would say, don’t you dare go from door to door. I family, grandma, auntie, we'll buy all the tickets, so you don't have to and of course, what did he do? And door to door, and I get a call from the principal, Sister Gwendolyn, and or was it sister Geraldine at that time? I think it was sister Gwendolyn. And she said, Mrs. Rogers, your son went to a door, and the gentleman called the school to find out if we indeed had black children going to this school, and she said, don’t worry. I assured him that your son was a member of our school, but that blew me away.In all my years in Maplewood, I had plenty of similar incidents, but digging deeper showed me that the pioneers endured so much more, as Carolyn Hughes-Smith explains.CAROLYN HUGHES-SMITH: The one thing that I really, really remember, and it stays in my head, is cross burning. It was a cross burning. And I don't remember exactly what's it on my grandfather's property? Well, all of that was his property, but if it was on his actual home site.Mrs. Rogers remembers firsthand –ANN-MARIE ROGERS: I knew the individual who burned the cross.Mark Haynes also remembers –MARK HAYNES: phone calls at night, harassment, crosses burnedIn the archives, I uncovered a May 4, 1962, article from the St. Paul Recorder, a Black newspaper, that recounted the cross-burning incident in Maplewood. A white woman, Mrs. Eugene Donavan, saw a white teen running away from a fire set on the lawn of Ira Rawls, a Black neighbor who lived next door to Mrs. Rogers. After the woman’s husband stamped out the fire, she described the Rawls family as “couldn’t be nicer people.” Despite the clear evidence of a targeted act, Maplewood Police Chief Richard Schaller dismissed the incident as nothing more than a "teenager’s prank."Instead of retreating, these families, my own included, turned their foothold in Maplewood into a foundation—one that not only survived the bigotry but became a catalyst for generational progress and wealth-building.JESON JOHNSON: when you see somebody has a beautiful home, they keep their yard nice, they keep their house really clean. You know that just kind of rubs off on you. And there's just something that, as you see that more often, you know it just, it's something that imprints in your mind, and that's what you want to have, you know, for you and for your for your children and for their children.But stability isn’t guaranteed. For many families, losing the pillar of the household—the one who held everything together—meant watching the foundation begin to crack.JESON JOHNSON: if the head of a household leaves, if the grandmother that leaves, that was that kept everybody kind of at bay. When that person leaves, I seen whole families just, just really go downhill. No, nobody's able to kind of get back on your feet, because that was kind of the starting ground, you know, where, if you, if you was a if you couldn't pay your rent, you went back to mama's house and you said to get back on your feet.For Carolyn Hughes-Smith, inheriting property was a bittersweet lesson. Her family’s land had been a source of pride and stability— holding onto it proved difficult.CAROLYN HUGHES-SMITH: We ended up having to sell it in the long run, because, you know, nobody else in the family was able to purchase it and keep going with it. And that that that was sad to me, but it also gave me an experience of how important it is to be able to inherit something and to cherish it and be able to share it with others while it's there.Her family’s experience illustrates a paradox—how land, even when sold, can still transform lives.CAROLYN HUGHES-SMITH: Us kids, we all inherited from it to do whatever, like my brother sent his daughter to college, I bought some property, you know?But not all families found the same success in holding onto their homes. For Mark Haynes, the challenges of maintaining his father’s property became overwhelming, and the sense of loss lingered.MARK HAYNES: it was really needed a lot of repair. We couldn't sell it. It was too much.It wasn't up to code. We couldn't sell it the way it was. Yes, okay, I didn't really want to sell it. She tried to fix it, brought up code, completely renovated it. I had to flip I had to go get a job at Kuhlman company as a CFO, mm hmm, to make enough money. And I did the best I could with that, and lost a lot of money. AndLEE HAWKINS: Oh, gosh, okay. So when you think about that situation, I know that you, you said that you wish you could buy it back.MARK HAYNES: Just, out of principle, it was, I was my father's house. He, he went through a lot to get that and I just said, we should have it back in the family.For Marcel Duke, he saw the value of home ownership and made it a priority for his own life.MARCEL DUKE: I bought my first house when I was 19. I had over 10 homes by time I was 25 or 30, by time I was 30This story isn’t just about opportunity—it’s about the barriers families had to overcome to claim it. Before Maplewood could become a community where Black families could thrive, it was a place where they weren’t even welcome.The racial covenants and real estate discrimination that shaped Minnesota’s suburban landscape are stark reminders of how hard-fought this progress truly was.LEE HAWKINS: I read an article about an organization called Mapping Prejudice which identifies clauses that say this house should never be sold to a person of color.So we had this talk. Do you remember?PENNY PETERSEN: I certainly do, it was 2018.Here’s co-founder Penny Petersen.PENNY PETERSEN: So I started doing some work, and when you you gave me the name of Mr. Hughes. And I said, Does Mr. Hughes have a first name? It make my job a lot easier, and I don't think you had it at that point. So I thought, okay, I can do this.LEE HAWKINS: I just knew it was the woman Liz who used to babysit me. I just knew it was her grandfather.PENNY PETERSEN: Oh, okay, so, he's got a fascinating life story.He was born in Illinois in. He somehow comes to Minnesota from Illinois at some point. And he's pretty interesting from the beginning.He, apparently, pretty early on, gets into the printing business, and eventually he becomes what's called an ink maker. This is like being a, you know, a chemist, or something like, very serious, very highly educated.In 1946 he and his wife, Francis Brown Hughes and all. There's a little more about that. Bought 10 acres in the Smith and Taylor edition. He tried to buy some land, and the money was returned tohim when they found it. He was black, so Frank and Marie Taurek, who maybe they didn't like their neighbors, maybe, I don't know. It wasn't really clear to me,PENNY PETERSEN: Yeah, yeah. And so maybe they were ready to leave, because they had owned it since 1916 so I think they were ready to retire. So at any rate, they buy the land. They he said we had to do some night dealing, so the neighbors didn't see. And so all of a sudden, James T Hughes and Francis move to Maplewood. It was called, I think in those days, Little Canada, but it's present day Maplewood. So they're sitting with 10 acres of undeveloped land. So they decide we're going to pay it off, and then we'll develop it.Hearing Penny describe Frank Taurek takes me back to the conversation I had with his great granddaughter Davida who never met him and only heard stories that didn’t paint him in the most flattering light.DAVIDA TAUREK: It feels like such a heroic act in a way at that time and yet that's not, it seems like that's not who his character was in on some levels, you know.HAWKINS: But people are complicatedThe choices made by Frank and Marie Taurek—choices that set the stage for families like mine—ar

Host Lee Hawkins investigates how a secret nighttime business deal unlocked the gates of a Minnesota suburb for dozens of Black families seeking better housing, schools, and safer neighborhoods. His own family included.TranscriptIntroLEE HAWKINS: This is the house that I grew up in and you know we're standing here on a sidewalk looking over the house but back when I lived here there was no sidewalk, and the house was white everything was white on white. And I mean white, you know, white in the greenest grass.My parents moved my two sisters and me in 1975, when I was just four years old. Maplewood, a suburb of 25,000 people at the time, was more than 90% white.As I rode my bike through the woods and trails. I had questions: How and why did these Black families manage to settle here, surrounded by restrictions designed to keep them out?The answer, began with the couple who lived in the big house behind ours… James and Frances Hughes.You’re listening to Unlocking The Gates, Episode 1.My name is Lee Hawkins. I’m a journalist and the author of the book I AM NOBODY’S SLAVE: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free.I investigated 400 years of my Black family’s history — how enslavement and Jim Crow apartheid in my father’s home state of Alabama, the Great Migration to St. Paul, and our later move to the suburbs shaped us.My producer Kelly and I returned to my childhood neighborhood. When we pulled up to my old house—a colonial-style rambler—we met a middle-aged Black woman. She was visiting her mother who lived in the brick home once owned by our neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Hutton.LEE HAWKINS: How you doing? It hasn't changed that much. People keep it up pretty well, huh?It feels good to be back because it’s been more than 30 years since my parents sold this house and moved. Living here wasn’t easy. We had to navigate both the opportunities this neighborhood offered and the ways it tried to make us feel we didn’t fully belong.My family moved to Maplewood nearly 30 years after the first Black families arrived. And while we had the N-word and mild incidents for those first families, nearly every step forward was met with resistance. Yet they stayed and thrived. And because of them, so did we.LEE HAWKINS: You know, all up and down this street, there were Black families. Most of them — Mr. Riser, Mr. Davis, Mr. White—all of us can trace our property back to Mr. Hughes at the transaction that Mr. Hughes did.I was friends with all of their kids—or their grandkids. And, at the time, I didn’t realize that we, were leading and living, in real-time, one of the biggest paradigm shifts in the American economy and culture. We are the post-civil rights generation—what I call The Integration Generation.Mark Haynes was like a big brother to me, a friend who was Five or six years older. When he was a teenager, he took some bass guitar lessons from my dad and even ended up later playing bass for Janet Jackson when she was produced by Minnesota’s own Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.Since his family moved to Maplewood several years before mine, I called him to see what he remembered.MARK HAYNES: "It's a pretty tight-knit group of people,"Mark explained how the community came together and socialized, often –MARK HAYNES: "they—every week, I think—they would meet, actually. I was young—maybe five or six.LEE HAWKINS: And what do you remember about it? I asked. What kind of feeling did it give you?MARK HAYNES: It was like family, you know, all of them are like, uh, aunts and uncles to me, cousins. It just felt like they were having a lot of fun. I think there was an investment club too."Herman Lewis was another neighbor, some years older than Mark—an older teenager when I was a kid. But I remember him and his brother, Richard. We all played basketball, and during the off-season, we’d play with my dad and his friends at John Glenn, where I’d eventually attend middle school. Herman talked to me about what it meant to him.HERMAN LEWIS: We had friends of ours and our cousins would come all the way from Saint Paul just to play basketball on a Friday night. It was a way to keep kids off the street, and your dad was very instrumental trying to make sure kids stayed off the street. And on a Friday night, you get in there at five, six o'clock, and you play till 9, 10 o'clock, four hours of basketball. On any kid, all you're going to do is go home, eat whatever was left to eat. And if there's nothing left to eat, you pour yourself a bowl of cereal and you watch TV for about 15 to 25-30, minutes, and you're sleeping there, right in front of the TV, right?LEE HAWKINS: But that was a community within the community,HERMAN LEWIS: Definitely a community within the community. It's so surprising to go from one side of the city to the next, and then all of a sudden there's this abundance of black folks in a predominantly white area.Joe Richburg, another family friend, said he experienced our community within a community as well.LEE HAWKINS: You told me that when you were working for Pillsbury, you worked, you reported to Herman Cain, right? We're already working there, right? Herman Cain, who was once the Republican front runner for President of the United States. He was from who, who was from the south, but lived in Minnesota, right? Because he had been recruited here. I know he was at Pillsbury, and he was at godfathers pizza, mm hmm, before. And he actually sang for a time with the sounds of blackness, which a lot of people would realize, which is a famous group here, known all over the world. But what was interesting is you said that Herman Cain was your boss, yeah, when he came to Minnesota, he asked you a question, yeah. What was that question?Joe Richburg: Well, he asked me again, from the south, he asked me, Joe, where can I live? And I didn't really understand the significance of that question, but clearly he had a sense of belonging in that black people had to be in certain geographic, geographies in the south, and I didn't have that. I didn't realize that was where he was coming from.Before Maplewood, my family lived in St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood—a thriving Black community filled with Black-owned businesses and cultural icons like photojournalist Gordon Parks, playwright August Wilson, and journalist Carl T. Rowan.Like so many other Black communities across the country, Rondo was destroyed to make way for a highway. it was a forced removal.Out of that devastation came Black flight. Unlike white flight, which was driven by fear of integration, Black flight was about seeking better opportunities: better funded schools and neighborhoods, and a chance at higher property values.Everything I’ve learned about James and Frances Hughes comes from newspaper reports and interviews with members of their family.Mr. Hughes, a chemist and printer at Brown and Bigelow, and Frances, a librarian at Gillette Hospital, decided it was time to leave St. Paul. They doubled down on their intentions when they heard a prominent real estate broker associate Blacks with “the ghetto.” According to Frances Hughes, he told the group;FRANCES HUGHES (ACTOR): “You’re living in the ghetto, and you will stay there.”She adds:FRANCES HUGHES (ACTOR): “I’ve been mad ever since. It was such a bigoted thing to say. We weren’t about to stand for that—and in the end, we didn’t.”The Hughes began searching for land but quickly realized just how difficult it could be. Most white residents in the Gladstone area, just outside St. Paul, had informal agreements not to sell to Black families. Still, James and Frances kept pushing.They found a white farmer, willing to sell them 10 acres of land for $8,000.And according to an interview with Frances, that purchase wasn’t just a milestone for the Hughes family—it set the stage for something remarkable. In 1957, James Hughes began advertising the plots in the Twin Cities Black newspapers and gradually started selling lots from the land to other Black families. The Hughes’s never refused to sell to whites—but according to an interview with Frances, economic justice was their goal.FRANCES HUGHES (ACTOR): “Housing for Blacks was extremely limited after the freeway went through and took so many homes. We wanted to sell to Blacks only because they had so few opportunities.”By the 1960s, the neighborhood had grown into a thriving Black suburban community. The residents here were deeply involved in civic life. They attended city council meetings, started Maplewood’s first human rights commission, and formed a neighborhood club to support one another.And over time, the area became known for its beautiful homes and meticulously kept lawns, earning both admiration and ridicule—with some calling it “The Golden Ghetto.”Frances said:FRANCES HUGHES (ACTOR): “It was lovely. It was a showplace. Even people who resented our being there in the beginning came over to show off this beautiful area in Maplewood.”And as I pieced the story together, I realized it would be meaningful to connect with some of the elders who would remember those early daysANN-MARIE ROGERS: In the 50s, Mr. Hughes decided he was going to let go of the farming. And it coincided with the with 94 going through the RONDO community and displacing, right, you know, those people. So, at that time, I imagine Mr. Hughes had the surveyors come out and, you know, divided up into, you know, individual living blocks.That is Mrs. Ann-Marie Rogers, the mother of Uzziel and Thomas Rogers, who I spent a lot of time with as a kid. I shared what I’d uncovered in the archives, hoping she could help bring those early experiences to life.ANN-MARIE ROGERS: So, everyone played in our yard, the front yard, the yard light that was where they played softball, baseball, because the yard light was the home plate, and the backyard across the back was where they played football.Throughout this project, we found similar stories of strength, including one from Jeson Johnson, a childhood friend with another Minnesota musical connectio

We have a special episode for you today. We’re sharing an episode of the podcast She Has A Name. Set against the backdrop of the drug epidemic in 1980s Detroit, She Has A Name blends elements of investigative journalism, memoir, and speculative fiction to tell the story of Anita, a sister that Tonya learned about more than a decade after she went missing. It’s a story of loss and redemption, mending broken family ties, and facing the trauma experienced by countless individuals who've lost loved ones to violence.In this first episode, Tonya begins her quest to unravel how a sister she never knew about could end up as a Jane Doe. Here is Episode 1.If you’d like to hear more, you can find She Has A Name wherever you get your podcasts.

In the final episode of What Happened In Alabama, Lee considers the man his father became, despite the obstacles in his way. Later, Lee goes back to Alabama and reflects with his cousins on how far they’ve come as a family. Now that we know what happened, Lee pieces together what it all means and looks forward to the future. Over the last nine episodes, you’ve listened to me outline the impact of Jim Crow apartheid on my family, my ancestors and me. I’ve shared what I’ve learned through conversations with experts, creating connections to how the effects of Jim Crow manifested in my own family.In the process of this work I lost my father. But without him, this work couldn’t have been accomplished.My name is Lee Hawkins and this is What Happened In Alabama: The Epilogue Rev. James Thomas: You may be seated. We come with humble hearts. We come, dear Jesus, with sorrow in our hearts. But dear Jesus, we know that whatever you do,dear God,it is for your will and purpose. And it is always good. We buried my father on March 9, 2019. His funeral was held at the church I grew up in. Mount Olivet Baptist Church in St. Paul Minnesota.Rev. James Thomas: Dear God, I pray that you would be with this family. Like you have been with so many that have lost loved ones and even one day we all know we are going to sleep one day.Thank you for preparing a better place for us.Mount Olivet’s pastor, Rev. James Thomas, knew my parents well, especially since my father was part of the music ministry there for 30 years. It was a snowy day, but people came from all over Minnesota and from as far away as Prague to pay their last respects. I looked at the packed parking lot and all the cars lined up and down the street, and I felt a sense of gratitude in knowing that my dad had played such a strong role in so many people’s lives, not just the lives of his own children and family.Rev. James Thomas: Brother Leroy is probably playing the guitar over there. We can hear him with that squeak voice “yeeeee.” Jalen Morrison: We could talk about Prince, we could talk about gospel music. He was even up on the hip hop music, too, which kind of shook me up. But I was like, okay, Grandpa [laughter] Naima Ferrar Bolden: He really just had me seeing far beyond where I could see. He had me seeing far past my circumstances. He really changed my perspective, and that was just life altering for me ever since I was a little girl. Herman Jones: He just had the heavy, heavy accent. He still had that booooy. But you know,he was always smiling, always happy all the time. You know, just full of life.As I sat and listened to all the speeches that came before my eulogy of my dad, I couldn’t help but recognize both the beauty of their words and the extent to which my father had gone to shield so many of the people he loved from the hardest parts of his life—especially Alabama. It was as if he didn’t want to burden them, or, for most of our lives, his children, with that complexity. Most people remembered and honored him as that big, smiling, gregarious man with the smooth, first tenor voice, who lit up any space he was in and lit up when his wife, children, grandchildren, family, or friends walked into a room. He loved deeply; and people loved him deeply in return. And though he was victimized under Jim Crow, he was never a victim. In fact, after he sat for those four years of interviews with me for this show, opening up the opportunity for so many secrets to be revealed, he emerged as even more of a victor.In our last conversation, he told me he wasn’t feeling well and that he had been to the doctor three times that week, but was never tested for anything. And Dad,  after that third visit, he just accepted it. I do wonder if there was ever a time in those moments that he had a flashback to his mother being sent home in a similar way - 58 years prior - but from a segregated Jim Crow Alabama hospital. I don’t know. I’ll never know.Tony Ware: Yeah. Mine. You know, I would always ask my mom, you know, about Alabama. You know, she was one of the five that came up here. That’s my cousin Tony Ware. His mom was my Aunt Betty. The “five” that he’s talking about were my Dad’s siblings who migrated to Minnesota from Alabama -  my aunts Helen, Toopie, Dorothy, Betty, and my Dad. Tony Ware: They kind of hung around together and they would always have sit downs where they would talk. Get a moon pie, a soda. Hmm. Some sardines.Lee Hawkins: Cigarettes. Tony Ware: Cigarettes, sardines. And they would start talking. And some white bread. And they would sit there and talk and we would hear some of it. I sat in my mom's lap, and you know, they're talking about this, and it's like they just went into a different world. When I was a kid in Minnesota, I loved when my dad’s sisters and their kids would come over. Us cousins would play hide-and-seek and listen to our music while our parents sat around the dining room table, talking and laughing, and listening to their own music. Our soundtrack was always great – Prince, Michael Jackson, New Edition, Cameo – but theirs was, too, with Curtis Mayfield, Aretha Franklin, Jerry Butler, Johnny Taylor, and Bobby Womack. The food was even better. They’d talk over one another, smoke clouding the air under the chandelier, and my allergy-sensitive nose could detect that smell from three rooms away. Sometimes, I’d sneak a quick sip from an unattended can of beer in the kitchen. Despite the bitter taste, getting away with it always gave me a thrill. But then, someone would mention the word “Alabama,” and that festive energy would suddenly vanish.Tony Ware: But I heard Alabama. I heard this. I heard names that I never, you know, heard, you know, because all I knew was my aunt Dorothy, Lee Roy, you know, all I knew was. But then I heard certain names, uncles such and such. And I'm like, Who? Who, what, what? To us as kids, "Alabama" was more than a place—it was a provocative word that brought a suffocating heaviness to our lives. My cousin Gina remembers, even as a child, that mysterious word and the weariness it triggered in her mother. It left her feeling utterly helpless.Gina Hunter: And I would just sit there and listen to them talk about home and all the things that bothered them. Oh, my God. And yeah, it would hurt my feelings because I would see my mom just break out and cry for nothing. They would be talking and a song would be playing and Betty would just kind of get, she'd well up. Lee Hawkins: Yeah. Gina Hunter: And I'm like, Why are they so sad? Why are they so depressed? They they're together. They've got their kids. We're visiting, we're having fun. But it wasn't fun for them.That veil of secrecy our parents kept around Alabama, prevented us from seeing it as anything other than ground zero for, in our family, dreadful despair. Even when they talked about the happy memories— the church revivals that they called “big meeting,”  and picking fresh strawberries right off the vine – it seemed like a thread of fear just wove through almost every story. Tony Ware:I knew something was going on more than what I knew here, you know, at a young age. So. I was always interested in finding out. But through my mom, you know, she she would talk about how nice it was down there, how beautiful it was down there. But she never wanted to go back there.And as Gina remembers– and I agreed– it  colored every facet of how they raised us. As she spoke, I just sat there, marveling at the fact that she could have replaced her mom’s name with my dad’s name, or any one of those siblings, and her observations would still be spot on. Gina Hunter:My mom was and Aunt Helen, they were super, super close. And there was always just a deep seeded paranoia of people in general, just like everything. And I would think, why are these people why are they so scared and nervous and afraid of life and people and experiencing things? It seemed like it led them to live a super sheltered life.The central question of this podcast is, "What happened in Alabama?"What happened was Jim Crow apartheid—a crime against humanity committed by the American government against five generations of Black families like mine. This apartheid lasted for nearly hundred years, officially ending in 1964, and created generations of people who perished and millions who survived. I refer to these individuals as Jim Crow apartheid survivors. However, America has yet to acknowledge that Jim Crow was apartheid, that it was a crime against humanity, and that the millions of people who lived through it should be formally recognized as survivors.In the prologue, I explained that so-called Jim Crow segregation was not merely about separate water fountains and back-of-the-bus seating. Through the accounts of family trauma I’ve shared, we now understand it was a caste system of domestic terrorism and apartheid, enforced by a government that imposed discrimination in every aspect of life through laws and practices designed to maintain white supremacy. The myth of "separate but equal" masked a reality far more sinister and pervasive than what most of us were taught in school.We often think of white supremacy as fringe hate groups, but we’ve overlooked its traditional and far more damaging form—a government-imposed system that oppressed Black people for a century after emancipation. This isn't a distant academic concept or an opinion or a loaded political statement; it’s a fact. This is recent American history, and it deeply impacted our families, controlling every aspect of our lives physically, mentally, and emotionally for five generations after slavery.Since 1837, every generation of my family in America has had a member murdered, often with no consequences for the white perpetrator. The fear, caution, and grief were passed down by those who stood around the caskets, including my father. The daily indignities only compounded this grief, leading to accelerated aging and chronic stress that I believe ultimately killed my f