A story of injustice, and the challenges in telling it…

It was recently my privilege to represent Alabama Public Radio at the National Edward R. Murrow Awards Gala in New York City. The Radio Television Digital News Association honored APR with Best Radio News Series for our eight month investigation “No Stone Unturned: Preserving Slave Cemeteries in Alabama.” It was our seventh trip to the Big Apple to receive four national Murrows, and three national RTDNA Unity Awards for diversity coverage.

And that was the easy part.

For Alabama Public Radio, “No Stone” began with a chat in my office. The subject was how to advance the story of the Old Prewett Slave Cemetery near Tuscaloosa. Plenty of stories had been written on the two acre plot of land set up by Tuscaloosa slave holder John Welch Prewett in 1820. But, most of it was based on historical folklore and “what could be?” angles with few facts.

I proceeded with research and was struck by what I found. The results had “public radio” written all over it and I elected to make preserving slave cemeteries in Alabama the subject of an APR “deep dive” journalism effort. Our past topics have included national award-winning efforts on human trafficking, rural health, and the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Doctor Martin Luther King, junior.

Families descended from kidnapped Africans, who were forced into slavery before the U.S. Civil War, often deal with a “lost branch” of their family trees. The U.S. Census didn’t refer to freed blacks as human beings in the nation’s annual head count until 1870. Step one was to see was beneath the surface of the old Prewett Slave Cemetery. APR arranged the first ever ground penetrating radar survey of the site. The burial yard is sparsely dotted with about a dozen plain stone markers. ?APR news asked Len Strozier of Omega Mapping Services in Fortson, Georgia to scan the historic cemetery. He found his first unknown grave within a minute. ?

“Right now, I see an air pocket where a body was buried in the ground,” said Strozier. “As the body is placed in the ground. If it’s not embalmed, or protected with a vault, it all breaks down, It degrades…decomposes—including the wooden casket.”

Within a half hour, he found forty. ????????? ?

Black families, in Alabama and elsewhere, often face unique challenges in finding ancestors who were kidnapped Africans. My family roots are modest. I’m half Apache and rest of my ancestry is a mixture of Irish and German. I can go to an online genealogy site and within minutes track my family tree back to when John Adams was President following the Revolutionary War. By contrast, African Americans descended from slaves in the U.S. can often only trace their lineage to the time of President Ulysses S. Grant, who led troops during the Civil War. More details have to be sought in bills of sale when their ancestors were treated as property.

The differences don’t stop there.

Enslaved people frequently were laid to rest without caskets, burial vaults, or carved head stones. Once families find their enslaved ancestors, their graves are often depressions in the ground.

?“They might not see anything but a rock, they might not see anything but a tree,” explained Ethel Alexander of the Birmingham African American Genealogy Group. “They’re not going to be able to say ‘there’s my great, great, grandfather…slave.’”

Ms. Alexander was among the interviewees who patiently explained to APR the frustration and indignity African Americans often face in tracing their personal histories. Olley Ballard was another. APR met the retired Huntsville mathematics magnet school principal at the twentieth annual workshop of the Alabama Cemetery Preservation Alliance. She was one of only two Blacks in the audience. Most of the other attendees wanted tips on cleaning their tombstones of their ancestors dating back to the Revolutionary War. The point was to be able to put on period costumes, have a parade, followed by a picnic.

Olley Ballard wanted to find where her enslaved great grandfather was buried. A blog from the City of Huntsville admitted that a parking deck was likely built on the site of his grave. Another avenue she pursued was to question descendants of the people who held her great grandfather in bondage on the site of Huntsville’s Greenwood Plantation. Ballard said that kind of strategy rarely works.

“Many times when we make a presentation, we hear things like ‘I had nothing to do with that, that was long before,'” said Ballard. “Because we don’t have a dialog, we don’t connect. So, we don’t know that. So, I think we need to sit down and have honest conversation.”

From a storytelling perspective, there was an issue I felt we needed to address to give this series relevance to a modern audience. Why should anyone care about people who were deceased around the time of the Civil War. To give the story currency, I sought an interview with former World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Deontay Wilder. He’s a local celebrity and he bought a home, north of Tuscaloosa, that’s adjacent to the Old Prewett Slave Cemetery. His neighbors told him about it.?

“You know how when you move into an area, and the neighbors come and meet you and greet you with pies and cakes,’ Wilder observed. “For me, I got greeted with important information. I got greeted with historic information.”

It took “some doing” to get Wilder’s observations. The boxer was preparing to re-enter the ring in a few weeks and press availability was tight, even with the kind assistance of Wilder’s trainer and manager Jay Deas. My target time was at the Tuscaloosa Sports and Tourism Office, where the city was planning to unveil a bronze statue of Wilder. We mentor student journalists in the APR newsroom, and one I issue I try to address is being “politely pushy.” My meeting with Deontay Wilder is an example. On the day of the statue unveiling, I was guided to a portion of the venue where the press was gathering. That wouldn’t lend itself to a one-on-one interview. So, I took the “politely pushy” course. I put on my APR news photo badge and made my way into the VIP reception area. Wilder arrived, and I got five minutes alone with him. One point he made was the impression of visiting the Old Prewett Slave Cemetery for the first time.

“To go down there, you can like feel the energy and the power of it. It’s amazing to know that I have an untended graveyard, I literally mean on the side of me. It doesn’t spook me out or nothing like that,” Wilder said.

Wilder’s comments helped establish that an issue involving people from the mid 19th century can have relevance to listeners in the 21st century. Another possible misconception is that preserving slave cemeteries is a “southern issue” since that’s the region of the country where most kidnapped Africans were held. My research into the issue took me to Bridgewater, New Jersey where efforts are underway to save a slave cemetery which served as the final resting place of some of the nearly twelve thousand Africans forced to work on farms in the so called ”Garden State.”

The production schedule for “No Stone” fell during the 2022 airline travel nightmare prompted by the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, and problems the travel industry had in ramping up to keep up with demand. My travels meant a trip to Newark on Friday, interviews on Saturday, and a return on Sunday.

That is, until my cell phone went “buzz” Thursday night at midnight.

My airline had cancelled my flight which was supposed to change in Atlanta. My new itinerary left Saturday at 9 am. I made calls to change my interview times, rental car, and hotel accommodations.

That worked, until my cell phone went “buzz” Friday night at midnight.

My airline had cancelled my rescheduled flight with a new departure at 5 p.m. on Saturday, with a connecting flight in Miami. Again, I rescheduled my interviews in New Jersey and everything else. This time, the airline delivered. But, I arrived in Newark at midnight, with my interviews set for 8 am that morning. The front desk clerk at my hotel thought I was crazy when I asked for a 6 am wake-up call and check out.

It all worked.

“No Stone” would air just before Alabama voters headed to the polls for next month’s midterm election. One ballot item would remove involuntary labor from the state constitution. This may sound like an issue only among southern states. But, as I mentioned, New Jersey held around twelve thousand slaves at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Lorayn Allen is working to save a slave cemetery in her home state of New Jersey. Allen says convincing her grandchildren that slavery once existed in the Garden State is tough… ?

“They call me Mimi,” said Allen. “They say ‘Mimi, for God’s sake, we live in Somerville, New Jersey.’ I say, do you realize they still have Ku Klux Klan ramblings in certain areas over here. Everything that happened in the South happened here in the North. Make no mistake about it.”

Alabama Public Radio was honored with “Best News Series” for “No Stone Unturned.” The newsroom was honored alongside CBS Sunday Morning, where my friend and colleague Jay Kernis won for Best Innovation for the feature “Oceans Give, Oceans Take. CBS News as also recognized for its coverage of the overturning of Roe Versus Wade, for “Best Breaking News.” ABC-TV’s “World News Tonight with David Muir” won for “Best Newscast” for the network’s focus, also on the conflict in Ukraine. It was my privilege to receive APR’s national Murrow award for its yearlong investigation of rural health, with Muir as the presenter that night.

On a final note, part of Alabama Public Radio’s mission at the University of Alabama is mentoring journalism students. Our graduates currently work for media companies in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Atlanta, etc. My very first intern at APR came up to chat during the Murrow Gala. David Kumbroch is now the Director of Science Communication for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. When working on stories as dispiriting as “No Stone,” remembering the good David is doing after his time at APR will no doubt raise my spirits.