What Happened in Alabama? is a series born out of personal experiences of intergenerational trauma, and the impacts of Jim Crow that exist beyond what we understand about segregation. Through intimate stories of his family, coupled with conversations with experts on the Black American experience, award-winning journalist Lee Hawkins unpacks his family history and upbringing, his father’s painful nightmares and past, and goes deep into discussions to understand those who may have had similar generational - and present day - experiences. What Happened In Alabama? is a series to end the cycles of trauma for Lee, for his family, and for Black America.
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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.
EP 10: Epilogue
Episode 10
Wednesday, July 17, 2024 • Duration 26:08
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 father. Yes, Jim Crow apartheid killed my father.
Still, I’m encouraged because I have the platform to tell this aspect of the story. Sharing this story has been extremely difficult, but I’ve been lifted not just by my faith and ancestors but also by my family, their support, optimism, and determination. With this new information, we live with the awareness of the effects of slavery and Jim Crow, striving to break their negative cycles and be empowered by the accomplishments of our families who found ways to thrive despite the oppression caused by those crimes. Telling this story has fortified my resolve, reminding me that our past is not just a story of struggle, but of relentless triumph and dignity. For generations, we have managed to thrive together as a family. By infusing even more consciousness and evolution into our families with each generation, we can continue to thrive.
That’s why I’m grateful for my cousins, including my first cousin, David Stanley, the son of my dad’s sister, Aunt Weenie, who articulated this sentiment powerfully during an interview with my cousins, my father's sisters' children.
David Stanley: I think it’s a new form of freedom, OK. And even though they faced the backwardness of Jim Crow and all those things that our ancestors went through, they still had their dreams and dignity. And no matter what happened, it's not about the environment around you, it’s the environment inside of you. ‘You're not going to stop us. We're going to continue to grow. So by doing that, they said, ‘Okay, you know what? We are going to plant the seed, our offspring, okay?’ You can do this in our generation during this time, but guess what? There's another generation coming up.’ And that triggers all the way to us today. And then you got your nieces and your nephew, and then you got grandkids, et cetera.
Lee: Yeah.And your kids have all master's degree and PhDs. And then your wife is a superintendent of a school district.
David: That's right. Yep. So they left their seed, they left their vision. And my point is that I believe that they are all up in heaven smiling down on us and really proud of us.
David: I have to go and take that trip to Alabama and bring my children with me and my grandkids with me, because it's vital. Because you put that out there, I really appreciate that. That’s something that’s definitely going to be done ,and I think that’s something that we all need to do, to rekindle and reconnect and do those things. The past can’t hurt you, but my point is that by being in the present right now, now we can solidify our future, you know what unapologetically. And do the things they were always yearning to do, in their lives. And they couldn’t do them. But they can do them through us.
Lee Hawkins: A lot of it is facing your parents' fears,that’s what it id. for them as well. My dad really loved Alabama. He did. And my dad would talk about that in a very nostalgic way, but also the fear was still there. And so when I started going to Alabama, I was going for him as well. Not to mention, I have had a couple of people in the family say, ‘Oh be careful down there.’ And Aunt Toopie even said, ‘You went in that field? You went to that cemetery?’ That fear was on me when I first went to Alabama. The last trip that we went to, I did it with family.
Walking through the cemeteries and the landscapes of Alabama alongside my family who live there transformed my mission, helping me to finally lay my father’s fear to rest.
Lee Hawkins: Mary Ruth’s Southern Food for Southern People Made with Love. I love that. That slogan.
Marvin Smith:Welcome to Mary Ruth's. Thank you for coming.
Lee Hawkins: You got some grits on the griddle huh.
Marvin Smith: Oh I got it all. Got me some grits, cheese grits, patty sausage, salmon croquettes, link sausage, bacon. Whatever you ask for we'll cook it. Pancakes, whatever. Hey, we aint Burger King but you can sure get it your way though.
Group: [Laughter]
There’s so much energy in the cafe.
I feel the family. My family.
We spend a couple hours eating together. Mapping family connections. People come into the cafe, some grab their food and take a seat, some join us. A woman walks in the door and she recognizes me…. not because she knows who I am, but because of my resemblance to her husband, he’s also a Pugh.
Erica Page: Y'all got a line that will not just go away. It's strong genes. You'll have strong and strong. Yes, cause I have a daughter and a grandson. Oh, God. Looks just like him
Her name is Erica Page.
Lee Hawkins: You know, Uncle Ike Pugh?
Erica Page: We went to the house several times.
At one point, someone pulls out a family reunion book. It’s a laminated, spiral bound scrapbook. Someone put a lot of work into making it.
We’re flipping through the pages together….
Lee Hawkins:My grandma was Opie Pugh.
Erica Page: I know the name.
Lee Hawkins:She was. Well, she was Ike's sister.
Erica Page: I know. I know the name.I means she's in the book.
We find pictures of our Pugh ancestors, Uncle Ike and my dad’s mom, Grandma Opie. I’ve seen these photos before through my research into the family tree.
But suddenly, Alabama feels different from the times I visited before for research.
I am not surprised that the shift in my relationship with Alabama was guided by my family members who chose to stay rather than migrate north. They stayed and evolved Alabama to the point where both Montgomery and Birmingham now have African American mayors. They, and the millions of Black people who stayed, led a movement that benefits all Americans today.
In discussing the hardships my family endured there, it is important to recognize that the progress of our people and our nation is largely attributable to the activism of the courageous Black Americans who stayed and fought. These same Black Americans welcomed me back to Alabama with open arms and support, encouraging me to move forward with this project. They reminded me not to be resentful or afraid to come home, to give Alabama a chance, and to offer it the same benefit of the doubt and acknowledgment of complexity that I give my country.
Understanding that it was our families, the Black descendants of American slavery, who led the movement that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ending Jim Crow apartheid and bringing America closer to liberty and justice for all, reinforces the reality that, despite significant trauma, we have remained a solutions-oriented people, some of the most effective activists this nation has ever known.
Their legacy and courage have shaped Alabama and America and their spirit of irrepressibility continues to inspire me.
In my forthcoming book, "I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family History Set Me Free," published by HarperCollins, I will strive to capture not just the stories of trauma but how we can continue to conquer it as a family, a Black American community, and a nation. Inspired by the spirit of my ancestors and my father, who transcended the limitations Alabama tried to impose on him, I will continue my journalism on several issues discussed in this series.
These include exposing and addressing the long-term effects of corporal punishment in homes and schools, the impact of childhood trauma on the health and well-being of children, encouraging school districts to implement policies of mandatory consequences for hate speech and harassment, and highlighting economic and health inequities along racial lines. I will also focus on the plight and power of Jim Crow apartheid survivors as they strive to quell the ripple effect of historical atrocities on their families.
The question now is, what can we all do as a nation to recognize Jim Crow as a crime against humanity and to support the millions of Americans over 60 who lived in the South during this unfortunate period? How can we make our homes, schools, and society safer for the generations of children and grandchildren coming behind them?
Together, we can acknowledge our past, honor the strength of those who came before us, and build a future filled with hope, determination, and joy. Let us rise with the resilience of our ancestors and create a world where every child can dream freely and every family can thrive.
Lee Roy: You've run the game and you know the Lord and you're doing your thing, man. And that's the best you can do as far as I'm concerned. You have to keep your heart and your head up. I don't know this thing about being proud. I know the Lord and I know the Lord loves me. So if I'm proud, man, please forgive me and if I shouldn't be, but it is a poor dog that don't wag his own tail, son, when you're trying to reach your goals, I'll put it like that, you know.
Lee Jr.: Right on. Well, okay buddy, I'm going to hit it, but I'll be in touch, okay?
Lee Roy: Yeah, keep going, man, I'm loving it. I'm loving what we're doing, Lee.
Lee Jr.: Okay, love you, Dad.
Lee Roy: Okay man. Love you. Bye.
CREDITS
EP 2: Meet the Hawkins
Episode 2
Wednesday, May 15, 2024 • Duration 38:21
Growing up in a middle-class suburb in the 1980s often felt idyllic to Lee. It was the age of crank calls and endless summers playing outside. The Hawkins kids were raised by their parents to excel in everything they put their minds to — and they did. They were model students at school and in their community. But at home, a pervading sense of fear and paranoia governed the household. In this episode, Lee sits down with his younger sister Tiffany to discuss the tensions at home. Later, he talks with psychotherapist and trauma expert Brandon Jones to uncover the roots of his parents’ fears, and how it dates back to slavery and the Jim Crow era in the United States.
Lee Hawkins (host): We wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website, WhatHappenedInAlabama.org. Listener discretion is advised.
Hi, this is Lee Hawkins, and we’re about to dive into episode two of What Happened in Alabama. This one’s about family and how policies impact parenting. There’s a lot to get into. But you’ll get a whole lot more if you go back and listen to the prologue – that’ll give you some context for the series and this episode. Do that, and then join us back here. Thank you so much.
[music starts]
Family. There are so many variations of what this unit is. For me, it’s mom, dad and my sisters. No matter what your family looks like – be it blood or chosen – there’s a shared experience of people who know you inside and out, who’ve seen you grow. There’s a common language for your memories, an ease when you’re together.
This journey I’ve been on to understand how I was raised and the histories behind who I am today starts with the people who know me best and have seen me at my highs and my lows. They bear witness to stories in the far reaches of my mind and fill in the gaps when my recollection isn’t clear.
EP 1: Prologue
Episode 1
Wednesday, May 15, 2024 • Duration 32:02
When journalist Lee Hawkins was growing up, his father, Leroy, would have nightmares about his childhood in Alabama. When Lee was in his 30s, he started to have his own nightmares about his childhood in Minnesota. These shared nightmares became a clue that set Lee on a decade-long genealogical journey. In this episode we meet Lee and his Dad, and through them, we discover the roots of What Happened in Alabama?, and reveal the stakes of daring to ask the question – and all the questions that followed.
Transcript
Lee Hawkins (host): We wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website, WhatHappenedInAlabama.org. Listener discretion is advised.
In 2004, when I was 33 years old, my dad called me for the first time in a year. I remember it so well. It was a Saturday. It wasn’t long after his retirement party, which I missed, because we weren’t talking.
[phone ringing]
A year may not sound like that long to some of you, but you have to understand, my dad and I used to talk every day. He was my best friend.
We stopped talking because I asked my parents to go to therapy. I wanted them to confront some things from our past that had started haunting me as an adult, but they refused. And then a year later, Dad called. That one call turned into hundreds over several years. And what he told me, would change my life forever.
Lee Sr.: I really haven't shared any of this shit with anybody, you know. But what it - I'm sorry I'm goin’ back in that shit. But you know everybody's life isn't as peachy as people think.
My name is Lee Hawkins and this is What Happened In Alabama: The Prologue.
[music starts]
Before we go much further, I need to tell you how uncomfortable this makes me. I’m a journalist and a writer; and as journalists, we’re taught to tell other people’s stories — but this story, well, it’s all about me and my family. So that takes me out of my comfort zone, but I’ve learned over the years that sometimes the most powerful story you can tell is your own.
Introducing: What Happened in Alabama?
Tuesday, April 30, 2024 • Duration 04:50
What Happened in Alabama? is a series born out of personal experiences of intergenerational trauma, and the impacts of Jim Crow that exist beyond what we understand about segregation. Through intimate stories of his family, coupled with conversations with experts on the Black American experience, award-winning journalist Lee Hawkins unpacks his family history and upbringing, his father’s painful nightmares and past, and goes deep into discussions to understand those who may have had similar generational - and present day - experiences.
Transcript
My name is Lee Hawkins. I’ve been a journalist for 25 years. I research, listen and ask ALOT of questions.
My story begins in 1980s Minnesota. In the Twin Cities suburb of Maplewood. We were a Black family living in a predominantly white neighborhood.
Naima: Oh, Maplewood. It was, it was really interesting.
It certainly was.
My childhood was marked by so many things.
Watching our backs on the walk home from school.
Getting our hair cut in the Black neighborhood.
And church on Sundays.
[MUSIC IN: Lee sr singing “Whose on the lord side”]
Leroy Hawkins: Alright Who's on the lord's side?
That’s my dad, Leroy Hawkins Senior, singing at our church.
[MUSIC OUT Lee sr singing “Whose on the lord side”]
He taught me how to sing. We played music together. And he really believed in me
Lee Sr: Cause when you grew up, everything, you touched was great.
Ep 9: Death by Jim Crow
Episode 9
Wednesday, July 10, 2024 • Duration 01:00:03
Lee revisits his father Leroy’s final moments in the hospital, and tries to parse out what really led up to his father’s death. Later in the episode, Lee talks with Natalie Slopen, an assistant professor at Harvard University, about ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and how they can contribute to shortened life expectancy. Lee also speaks with Dr. Nathaniel Harnett, a neuroscientist and the director of Neurobiology of Affective and Traumatic Experiences Laboratory at McClean Hospital, about childhood trauma and how it disproportionately affects Black children.
TRANSCRIPT
My name is Lee Hawkins and this is What Happened in Alabama.
This episode is very emotional for me because we’ll be revisiting the details of my dad’s death. My sister, Tiffany, recorded some of our exchanges with the intensive care doctor and nurse in our father’s final hours. It’s difficult to listen to some of it, so sensitive listeners, please take care. I want to understand how the stressful experiences my father had growing up as a child under Jim Crow apartheid affected his health as an adult, and the role I believe racism-related stress played in his death, first in Alabama, but later in Minnesota. The conversations in this episode connect the dots between the Adverse Childhood Experiences of three groups: the twelve generations of enslaved Black people in the US, the five generations of Black people who, like my father, lived through Jim Crow, and the millions of Black American descendants of both who are alive today.
But, if you’re joining us for the first time, you’ll get a whole lot more out of this episode if you go back and listen to the prologue first - that’ll give you some context for putting the whole series in perspective. Do that, and then join us back here. Thank you so much.
Lee: Don't put our father through any pain with restarting his heart. We know you wanted that and we agreed to that. So now this is where we are…
Roberta: We just want our time with him
It’s 3:30 in the morning on February 28th 2019. My entire family - my mom, two sisters and me, are in my dad’s hospital room. I had been sleeping in my hotel room down the street when my sister Tiffany woke me up to tell me that the night shift doctor wanted to meet with all of us. Four days earlier, he was rushed to the hospital by helicopter after his heart had stopped at the Buddy Guy concert he’d gone to with my mom. It was a date night. They were celebrating their 50th anniversary. Though they were able to restart his heart a few times, his condition wasn’t improving.
Ep 8: Maplewood, USA
Episode 8
Wednesday, July 3, 2024 • Duration 01:08:58
When Lee’s parents moved to Maplewood in the mid ’70s, they were part of a wave of Black families integrating into majority white suburbs. They were seeking opportunity and safety, but were often met with hostility and racism. In this episode, Lee sits down with Christopher Lehman, a professor of ethnic studies at St. Cloud State University, to understand what pushed Black families to want to integrate white suburbs and how they were received. Later, Lee sits down with some childhood friends who grew up in Maplewood, to break down what it was really like being a Black boy in a white Minnesotan suburb in the 1980s and 1990s.
TRANSCRIPT
We wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse, and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website, WhatHappenedInAlabama.org - listener discretion is advised.
My name is Lee Hawkins and this is What Happened in Alabama.
Today we’ll be going back to Maplewood, in particular my high school days. I have many fond memories of that time. I was elected class president all four years, I had a bunch of friends and my weekends were always full, but there were a lot of difficult times too. The racism I experienced in Maplewood was rough. And I wasn’t alone. Today, I’m joined by some brothers I grew up with. Not my biological brothers, but we’re united by our shared experiences. I call them the Maplewood Crew and we’ll be breaking down what it was like to be a Black boy in Maplewood in the 80s and 90s.
But, you’ll get a whole lot more out of it if you go back and listen to the prologue first - that’ll give you some context for putting the whole series in perspective. Do that, and then join us back here. Thank you so much.
When my dad moved to Minnesota from Alabama, his family settled in the city of St. Paul, in a neighborhood called Rondo. After he married my mom, they purchased a home in a suburb called Maplewood. Other black families had started moving into the community after the development of a highway cut through Rondo and displaced more than 600 families. My parents were just under 30 when they got to Maplewood. They were young, hopeful and growing a family. To them and other black families who moved there in the 60s and 70s, Maplewood represented opportunity and upward mobility, a chance for their kids to flourish in ways they weren’t able to.
EP 7: Spare the Rod
Episode 9
Wednesday, June 26, 2024 • Duration 01:01:45
Whooping. Spanking. Beating. Whatever you want to call it, corporal punishment was a central part of Lee’s upbringing. Growing up, he was made to believe that it was a Black custom but as an adult he began wondering if it ended up doing more harm than good. In this episode, Lee speaks with Dr. Andrew Garner, a pediatrician who has studied the effects of corporal punishment on children, and how the nervous system is altered by it. Later, Lee speaks with Geoff Ward, a Professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, to discuss how corporal punishment has extended beyond the home, and into schools.
Transcript
We wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse, and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website, WhatHappenedInAlabama.org - listener discretion is advised.
Hi - this is Lee Hawkins and we’re about to dive into episode seven of What Happened in Alabama. This conversation is about corporal punishment in homes and schools. Beating, spanking, whooping, whatever you call it, that’s what we’ll be talking about. This is very personal to me because it’s how I and so many of my peers were raised. We were taught that it was not only normal, but necessary. Today we’re going to get into the short and long-term effects of corporal punishment on the physical, mental, and emotional development and well-being of children, often following them into adulthood. It’s a heavy and important topic But you’ll get a lot more out of it if you go back and listen to the prologue - that’ll give you some context for the series and this episode. Do that, and then join us back here. Thank you so much.
In February 2019, I had my final interview with my dad for this project. We talked for over 3 hrs. I had a deadline to hit, and because I had so many interviews already recorded I did one final interview with him, just to get specific questions answered without having to go back through all that tape. He did the final interview – and he answered some extremely difficult questions, with compassion, regret, and especially grace.
Lee: And so how did you get into the whooping thing? Like you beating us with your belt? What made.. Like, where did you get that from?
Juneteenth
Episode 8
Wednesday, June 19, 2024 • Duration 00:42
We'll be back next week!
Transcript
Hey everyone, this is Lee Hawkins. Thank you so much for listening to What Happened In Alabama?
We appreciate your attention and don’t take it for granted.
We wanted to give you a heads up that the show will be taking a short break this week with no new episode today - Juneteenth. The history of this day is a complicated one, but to me, it symbolizes our stride from enslavement toward freedom. And though the struggle continues, it is important to mark this milestone for what it meant to our ancestors.
We’ll be back next week on Wednesday June 26th, with episode seven.
So join us then.
And again, thank you so much for listening.
EP 6: The Slave Codes
Episode 6
Wednesday, June 12, 2024 • Duration 52:01
Rules were a major part of Lee’s household growing up. But it wasn’t until he started to dig into his family’s history that he began to realize that the rules that he was expected to follow had a long, dark history. In this episode, Lee speaks with historian Dr. Daina Ramey Berry to better understand the life of Lee’s great-great-grandmother Charity, an enslaved woman, and learn about how the slave codes and Black codes shaped her life, and the lives of her descendants. Later Lee speaks with Professor Sally Hadden to learn about the origins of the slave codes, and how they’ve influenced the rules that govern our modern society.
Transcript
We wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse, and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website, WhatHappenedInAlabama.org - listener discretion is advised.
Hi - this is Lee Hawkins and thanks for joining me for episode six of What Happened In Alabama. In this episode we dive into the slave codes and Black codes - what they were, and how they show up in our current day to day. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to go back and listen to the prologue first. That’ll give you some context for putting the whole series in perspective. Do that, and then join us back here. Thank you so much.
INTRO
Even when we don’t realize it, life is governed by rules. We often say we “should” do things a certain way without knowing why. The truth is, many actions have root causes that trace back to how we were raised and what we were socialized to believe – both by our families and the societies we live in.
In dictionaries, rules are described as explicit or understood regulations governing conduct. We see these guidelines in everything from the order and cadence of the written and spoken word, to how we move from A to B on the roads, or the ways different sports are played - the “rules of the game.”
But “rule” also means to have control or dominion over people or places.This was the way of colonialism around the world for centuries. And this control manifests as laws and codes that yes, create order, but can also have the power to suppress freedoms - and instill fear to ensure compliance.
Growing up in Maplewood, Minnesota, there are a lot of memories. Understanding myself means understanding my parents, my grandparents, and all the people who came before them.
[musical intro]
I’m Lee Hawkins, and this is What Happened In Alabama. Episode 2: Meet the Hawkins.
[music starts]
In many ways, I grew up in a picture-perfect American family: mom, dad, three kids. Me and my two sisters, Tammi and Tiffany.
Tiffany: I would be outside from sunup to sundown playing with the neighbors. We'd always have a game of kickball or softball, fight over, you know, whose ball it was or if the person lost the game, they’d take the ball and want to go home or kick it over the neighbor’s fence. I mean, we really had a great time with that aspect growing up.
That’s Tiffany. Looking back on our childhood with her brings back so many great memories. We were children and teenagers of the '80s, and that was an almost magical time to grow up in.
Tiffany: You know, we'd go play in the woods or you know, ding dong ditch or, you know, the phone calls that we would make pranking people. I mean, these are things that could have –
Lee: Oh the prank calls on the three-way? Oh man.
Tiffany: Yeah, you know, I was really mad when they came out –
Lee: That was some funny stuff though.
Tiffany: That caller ID really messed us up, you know, caller ID ended all of that. [Lee laughs] Because we used to really get people in some binds there. I mean, if social media was out there, we coulda made tons of money off of those calls that we were genius –
Lee: Oh man, we would be blowing up. [Tiffany laughs] We would be so rich if we were, if social media was out now, our show would be the bomb. Our prank call show. [Tiffany laughing] Oh my gosh.
Tiffany: Yeah, it would’ve. It would've.
Like I said, we had fun as kids. But there were some tense times, too. Mom and Dad were strict.
Tiffany: You know, it's just like them coming home from work. Like, is, are all the chores done? Like, what kind of mood are they gonna be in? Like, are we gonna get yelled at or beat today, or you know, what's gonna happen? You never knew. You were constantly having to live with this, you know, fear. And you had no control over how, what was gonna happen.
Lee: Right, and then our parents would come home, and they were like military inspectors, and they would go over – Mom would go over and make sure if there was a, you know, if there was a smudge on the mirror, then that meant you were gonna go – she was gonna come into your room, drag you out into the living room, and beat you down. And tell you, [yelling] “There was a smudge on the mirror!”
Tiffany: [laughing] It's so crazy because, yeah.
Lee: And we laugh now because there’s that thin line between comedy and tragedy, right, that’s what they say. And I think that now that we made it out – we made it out, Tiff. We made it.
Tiffany: Yeah. But for the grace of God.
Our parents raised us to be perfectionists. We were super high achieving kids. Both Tiff and I were elected class president, me four consecutive years, Tiff three consecutive years. She was the homecoming queen and a star athlete. And I was known more for my activism and was elected YMCA Youth Governor of the State of Minnesota. We had lots of friends and were often thought to be role models. But at home, we were sometimes seen as falling short, and the penalty for that was the belt, or verbal tirades from our disappointed parents.
It’s a hard thing to talk about, because I can’t in good faith paint my parents as evil monsters who just wanted to abuse us, because they weren’t. In fact, they didn’t see it as abuse. And neither did we. We were a close family, and we loved our parents, and I know they loved us. Our parents were and are good people. They were active in the church, they were amazing neighbors, and they made a lot of sacrifices to raise us into the productive citizens we’ve become. That said, they, like a lot of our Black friends’ parents, could be really mean. Over time, my research into the history of my family and my country, revealed an explanation for that.
Before I go too deep into this, I should mention that Tiffany and I – and our family’s experiences – don’t represent that of the whole Black community. We’re speaking about ourselves.
The terror our family went through during enslavement and Jim Crow made our parents feel that they needed to be brutal with us. A few months ago, I sat down with Tiffany to talk more deeply about how we were raised trying to make sense of our parents’ fear and trauma and how it impacted us. The focus on hard work, getting ahead and the American Dream – all things Mom and Dad thought would keep us safe.
You’ll also hear parts of my conversation with Brandon Jones, Executive Director of the Minnesota Association for Children’s Mental Health. He helps us process how this tension between some Black parents and their children manifested as trauma in every generation going back to slavery. We had to follow the rules, and the penalty of not following those rules was almost always violence at home and social condemnation in the world outside. The interviews with Tiffany and Brandon helped me see it so much more clearly.
Tiffany: You know, being the youngest comes with a lot, where I had siblings – and you and Tammi were, I think in that day and age, were quite a bit older than I was, but not really because, you know, five and seven years older. But we were, still had this closeness.
Lee: And what do you remember about me? How was I as a kid?
Tiffany: You were very animated. I remember that you were always very talented at everything you did. You could sing and dance, and you were always a leader, a leader of the pack. You were never, did the same as everyone else, and I thought that was a great thing. You also were mischievous, I think. [laughs] At times you could be: “Oh, Lee Lee.” “Oh, what's Lee Lee done now?”
Lee: Right. ’Cause we called it “hyper.”
Tiffany: He's always getting in trouble.
Lee: On my way to prison.
Tiffany: Yeah, well, yeah. [laughter]
Lee: Or to get killed by the police. One of the two. ‘We better whoop his ass.’
Tiffany: The paranoia. Yeah.
Looking back, I now see we were under a lot of stress, even though we also had fun as kids. But the pressure to never make any mistakes – under the threat of the belt – was constantly weighing on us. The understanding was that if we messed up as kids – even buying a candy bar without getting a receipt – that would go on our records and could be brought back by white people, even years later, to destroy our futures and lives and careers as adults. So we avoided a lot of trouble. But when we did really well, especially against white kids, our mother sometimes seemed reluctant to celebrate with us. It was almost as if our success and our confidence and our belief in ourselves as Black kids sometimes frightened her.
Lee: Did you feel supported when you were achieving all these things?
Tiffany: No. You know, at times in, I had, you know, two different – and depending on which parent you were talking about, I mean, Dad supported us in everything. But there were still limits to that. I mean, I felt like they were glad to have something that was keeping me busy and out of trouble. But never really embraced the fact that that could have been something that I took a lot further. I'm not sure why Mom was like, you know, with pretty much anything that we did almost, as to keep us in our place in some way, she would also make it, always make it feel like, ‘Yeah, that's great and everything, but it's not really that important,’ you know? ‘It doesn't mean anything.’
Lee: And also, ‘Why do you think that you can be this or that?’ ‘Why do you think –,’ you know? Did you get that? I got that all the time, right in the midst of accomplishing things.
Tiffany: Oh, I got that a lot. Or, ‘Why do you have to be –,’ yeah, ‘Why do you have to be always doing stuff?’ Like, ‘Can't you just be satisfied with this?’ Like, ‘Everybody else isn't doing that.’ That was another thing that drove me crazy, is hearing about what everybody else's kids were doing. And it was like, ‘Yeah, but I mean – and that's great and I'm glad that they are – but do you see what I'm doing? Everybody else's kids aren't doing this.’
Lee: But that was when we would get beat.
I remember a time Tiffany had a big track meet leading up to the state tournament. But it coincided with a family trip down south. When they picked me up on the way down, I asked Tiffany how her track season was going. When she told me she’d qualified for this meet, I was furious, because it was a huge opportunity. I didn’t understand why my parents didn’t let her go to the meet and join us on the trip later. But Tiffany and I knew not to push.
Lee: You and I have talked about the play Fences – August Wilson's Fences – and Troy Maxson and how he despised his son coming home saying, “Dad, I got a football scholarship, and they're gonna pay the way. They need you to sign off for me to go to college for free,” and Troy Maxson said, “You're not going.” Because he was a major league, he was a Negro League baseball player, and his dreams got dashed and he really resented the opportunity and the freedom of that next generation.
And I always look back, and I think back to how Mom used to tell us about Grandpa Buddy, which was so hard to hear, because Grandpa Buddy was so supportive of us, but she would say that Grandpa Buddy thought she should just get married and not go to college or anything. “You're just a woman, so just go get married. Why should I spend money on college?”
And so it seems like in our bloodline – not on Dad's side of the family, but definitely on Mom's side of the family – every generation kind of resented sometimes the next generation's opportunities of, you know, that it was like, ‘Yes, I'm providing this for you, and we're going to make sure you have braces, and we're going to make sure that all of your needs are met. We're not gonna hug you. We're not gonna tell you we love you. We're not gonna baby you, we’re gonna beat excellence into you. But then when you become excellent, we're also gonna resent you because we didn't have the same opportunity that you had.’
Brandon: Well, we have a lot of old parenting techniques that were picked up and conditioned from slavery that have continued on. Doctor Joy DeGruy talks about this in her book, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.
Brandon Jones is the executive director of the Minnesota Association for Children’s Mental Health. He also consults for other organizations in developing culturally relevant and trauma-informed mental health services for children throughout the state. When I told him this story, he immediately recognized the connection to slavery and Jim Crow.
Brandon: One of the things that really just blew my mind is the downplaying of achievement of our children in kind of – it's, it's in a, it's in a joking way, but it was a protective measure on the plantation where you would have Black parents, mostly mothers, who would downplay the achievements of their son or their daughter because they didn't want their child to be sold off or moved to another part of the plantation where they couldn't keep an eye on them or protect them.
Lee: Right, they would have a talent for playing the violin or something, and the fear was that Massa's gonna sell him to be, and say, “Oh, this Negro plays the violin and he can work during the day,” and get a pretty penny for that person and then they'll be separated from the family.
Brandon: Right. So there was a protective measure to keep kids close to their parents.
Hearing that from Brandon actually made me feel a lot better, because when I was a kid, I just thought our mother hated us. But it’s not that simple. Looking back, I now see she was under a lot of stress, working a full-time job as a nurse and a health coordinator at a major corporate assisted living center, raising us, taking care of our dad, and being the matriarch who made a lot of sacrifices for us. And quite often, she’d have chest pains, which is a telltale sign of a heart attack.
And I’d say 90% of the time she complained of chest pains, it would be because we upset her; usually if we disagreed with her, were perceived as talking back, or even if we looked at her in a certain way she didn’t like. That really scared us, but it horrified our dad. He would transform into an attack dog and just haul off and slap us, and then order us all to get into the car so we could take our mom to the emergency room. It got to the point where that scenario just kept playing out. Tiff and I couldn’t tell if she was really having pains or if she was using it as a weapon of punishment. We were scared for our mom. And for ourselves.
Tiffany: Yeah, I can laugh about it now, but it was actually terrifying as a kid because, you know, I can remember several times that she did this, but one in particular when she pulled that having chest pains thing. And maybe she was having chest pains, maybe that was a sign of her anxiety, but I also know that she knew how to use that to play that card with Dad. You know, the ambulance was called, it was all of this. And Dad looked me in the eye, and he said, “If anything happens to my wife, I'm gonna kill you.” And I believed that. I mean, he was so scared that something was gonna happen to her. And it scared me so much that I caught a cab from there and left, because I was afraid that something was gonna happen and Dad was gonna kill me.
Lee: Other moms that we knew, if someone threatened their child, especially their husband, and said, “I'll kill you,” then they would say, “No, don't do that. Don't do that.” And a lot of black women that we know from the church would have said, “Uh uh, you're not gonna threaten my child's life.”
[Tiffany laughing]
Lee: But our mom was just like silent, like, and she would look at us like, ‘Yeah, see? He’ll kill you for me. He'll kill you for me.’
Tiffany: Yeah, it would give her fuel. And we didn't know enough then. And also I feel like we – they knew how to isolate us in that way. We were fearful of ever communicating what we were going through at home, because one of the reasons, I think we didn't even realize that this was not normal behavior because we knew, you know, other friends that would say that their parents spanked them. We thought we were getting spanked, you know? It wasn't until later we realized this was a lot more than getting spanked, I mean, ya know? And so then that's when I realized when I did start sharing with people and they would be looking at me like, ‘Are you crazy?’ Like, ‘What are you talking about?’ Like, ‘That's horrible.’ Like, people would be affected. And I'm like, ‘Why are you so affected by that?’ That's not a normal spanking. This is not normal behavior. But I didn't know that until after. We never could tell family business. You remember, we were always told that? “Don't tell family business.”
[music starts]
And of course, years later, my father opened up about how, when he’d beat us, he’d scream, “Don’t ever disrespect your mother! I would give my life for five minutes with my mama!” And be beating us and going into a whole explanation of how sweet and kind his mother was. And the more he’d say, the harder he’d swing that belt. His mother died of a kidney infection when he was just 12 years old, and I think when she died, he never got over the pain and the guilt of feeling like he didn’t protect his mother. So he wasn’t going to let that happen again in his adult life. I guess he addressed that pain by protecting our mother from us. I wish my dad would’ve just talked about his grief and explained what it felt like to be in that helpless position and how much losing his mom affected him. Maybe if he did, life at home would’ve been more peaceful.
Tiffany: I'm sure there were a lot of people that had no idea that this was going on in our household.
Lee: Mom to this day to me has said, “We've never beat you with the belt. We never hit you with the belt. We only spanked you.”
Tiffany: Yeah.
Lee: And we were hit hundreds of times with the belt.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Lee: And to this day –
Tiffany: With a belt, comb, shoes thrown at us.
Lee: Slapped –
Tiffany: I mean –
Lee: Slapped across the face.
Tiffany: Slapped. Tackled.
Lee: Thrown down the stairs.
Tiffany and I both got the belt. But we were also sometimes punished in different ways, depending on the parent, and depending on the moment.
Tiffany: Through therapy, I realize some of the things, some of my paranoia, some of, you know, the anxiety that I have were triggered from situations that happened during my childhood. So like getting locked in a house that you couldn't leave, and if there was a fire, would have burned in. Not being able to access the phone if there was an emergency because it was blocked so that you couldn't make calls out. There could only be calls that were coming in. You know, being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night…[laughing] this is almost embarrassing to say – because someone ate the Breyers ice cream. I mean, like –
Lee: But Tiffany, like, okay, so you said that it wasn't until you started talking about it with other people that you started to realize that this was not normal, right? But I remember when I was a kid, I think part of the reason I didn't completely implode at that time and it took like many, many years later for me to break down was because I thought, ‘Well, we're Black kids.’ Mom and Dad programmed us, and I guess society programmed me – I don't want to speak for you – but it programmed me to believe, ‘This is what Black kids have to get. I'm a Black kid. And being Black, Black people –.’ And mom would say, “This is a Black custom. We whip our kids. This is what Black people do.” And so I just believed that because I'm Black, I have to be beaten because this is our heritage and this is who we are. And Black kids are not allowed to have that level of freedom.
[music starts]
My parents were among the approximately 70% of Black parents who believe in hitting kids. Out of all the ethnic groups in America, Black households believe in it at the highest rates, and in the 17 states where corporal punishment is still legal in schools, Black children are hit more than children of any other race, and their parents are most likely to sign forms allowing teachers to strike their children. Once again, I’m not saying this is the case for all Black families, but in my home, and in the homes of many of the Black kids I grew up with, it was framed to us as being a Black custom. I asked Brandon Jones about this.
Brandon: Unfortunately, due to our own historical trauma and our adaptation of intergenerational trauma that has become culture, spankings or whoopings have become primary. And what ends up happening is you have a lot of kids who are spanked or whooped as a first approach towards discipline without other methods of means happening. And you get a lot of shame as well that takes place when parents don't whoop or beat or use corporal punishment to their children. Other Black parents or family members will encourage you to do so or ask you, “Why are you not spanking your child?” Or, “Why are you talking to your child about what's going on? That child needs their butt whooped,” and things of that nature. Like these are very common conversations and interactions that happen within the Black community.
In hindsight, a lot of the reasons for my whipping was because I was often asking questions. Yes, as a student leader, but especially as a Black kid. I wasn’t afraid to speak out. I never felt like I couldn’t compete, or any anxiety about being Black and having lots of friends of all races. And my parents would say, “Be careful at that school. Watch what you say, and don’t get cocky with these white people.” And I feel like I got punished for not being afraid and staying in my place, for that unapologetic curiosity and confidence to ask questions and express opinions. And of course, I made it worse by becoming a journalist.
I was in my thirties before I began to question the way we were raised. Until then, I think I too believed that Black kids needed to be treated this way, to keep them out of the criminal justice system or to be able to work in corporate America without being kept out because they stole a candy bar from Walgreens when they were nine. But Tiff was much smarter and braver than me. She knew it was wrong as a child. As a parent, she broke that cycle in our family and talked a lot about the need to focus on healing.
Tiffany: A lot of people have been through different childhood traumas that are horrible, but it's what you do to try and reverse that. So I’ve spent most of my adult life, and I know you have too, trying to heal, you know, and sometimes it's exhausting going to a therapy session and coming home and all this stuff is drug up and, you know, you just feel defeated. But I also know that it has caused me to be a better mother. Because that was my biggest fear, is when I started having children, I did not want to repeat the cycle. So I haven't, I never spank my my children. And I try to, you know, talk to them about things. And I always want them to feel like they could come to me about different things.
Now, there were times when I'll say, and they'll, they could tell you too, like I saw little Lee Roy or Roberta in me, you know, especially with, like, the explosive, you know, or yelling. And that would make me feel horrible, you know, some of the things, the verbal things that I've had to catch myself saying. But the difference between that is that, you know, once I was able to calm myself down and really critically think about what had just happened, I will always give someone an apology about my behavior and how that impacted them. It doesn't mean that it didn't affect the person, you know, because words hurt. But I have, you know, tried to live a life where I'm not continuing the cycle. And I just constantly working on it. You know, there's things that still trigger me.
Lee: Right. And I remember when you and Tammi started having kids. That was when it triggered something in me that made me confront Mom and Dad. Because I was also afraid that they were gonna try to beat them, to beat my nieces and nephews. And I remember I was vicious, you know, I was, I had a vengeance in me and saying, ‘Don't you dare repeat that cycle another generation.’
Tiffany: Mm hmm.
As a journalist in 1999, around the time Tiffany and I started recognizing all this, that was when the first version of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study came out, showing that traumatic childhood experiences can stalk people and increase the likelihood of mental illness, substance abuse, and chronic health problems. Subsequent updates to the research showed that childhood trauma can shorten life expectancy. That’s when I started thinking consciously about how adults – of all races – have this responsibility to protect children. But that doesn’t mean trying to beat safety into them.
And yes, there are political, social, and economic realities that caused my parents to legitimately worry. But it’s my hope that for new generations, we put down the belt and find a way to give a child a peaceful home without screaming, violence, and constant uncertainty about when the next outburst could happen.
That said, this is a very complicated conversation to have, because despite it all, I wouldn’t be the person I am today without my parents, my dad especially. And I’m talking about all the good things – his unwavering encouragement and belief in us, his omnipresence in our lives, and his undeniable devotion as a husband and a father. My sister Tiffany feels the same way too.
Tiffany: I get people that tell me all the time about the way that Dad changed their life or how invested he was in them. And even just to, like, call them and say, “Hey, remember what we talked about, that thing you were going to do? Did you ever do it?” You know, he was always a great person for that.
Lee: He was an incredible motivator. He was someone who wanted to see us go to the next level and far beyond what he could have ever dreamed.
For our whole childhood, our dad’s life before us was a mystery. We couldn’t even ask about it. We just knew the basic facts. He was born in Alabama and moved to Minnesota after his mom died when he was 12 years old. But beyond that, any clues about his childhood would appear at the most unexpected times.
Tiffany: I still have never seen a picture of him as a child. And any time I did try and bring things up, like, “What was your mom like or your dad like?,” we would either get told to be quiet, not by Dad, but by Mom, like, “Shhh, don’t, we're not gonna talk about that. You know that it's really hard for your dad.”
Sometimes having these kinds of conversations about the difficult things that have happened to us can feel like poking an old wound. But I believe that the wound needs to breathe before it can be healed. And that’s really what this conversation with Tiff was. It was healing.
As part of this project, I also talked with my mom. She sat down for an interview on the fourth anniversary of our dad’s death. She answered some very hard questions about why she was so hard on us, and she cried, because it was a tender day.
And I realize now it’s not fair or true to make the blanket statement that our mom didn’t support us. For example, she came out and did the interview – not because she was dying to do it, but because she did it to support me and this podcast.
And the conversation with Brandon really helped me further process the reality that our mother was afraid that our success would make us targets for white racists. Yes, when we were younger, she pushed us to excel. But once we got older and got into the limelight in spaces where it mattered, it was frightening for her.
Lee: What were your fears for me as a Black boy in Maplewood?
Roberta: It was because of the, we just don’t know how other people would accept you. And one of the things about it is that you were really outspoken and all that, but some, they hated, I mean some were haters. And we, and their parents too. But we were afraid for you, that something would happen. Because things have happened.
That’s the complexity of coming from a family like mine. Our mom may not have shown up in the way some people think a mother should. Still, I believe she did love us. She worked hard, sacrificed and gave us what we needed. And I’m grateful for that.
I’m grateful for my sisters. Tammi prefers her privacy, but she still came out with Mom and talked with us, for me. And Tiffany, too. This couldn’t have been easy for my baby sister. She didn’t show up because she wanted to be in a podcast talking about her life and her childhood pain. My mother showed up for her son, and both of my sisters showed up for their brother. For me.
Lee: I love you so much, sis.
Tiffany: Aww I love you, too.
Lee: I want to thank you for the courage that you've exhibited in everything you've done to support me in this at times where I was so alone.
Tiffany: Yeah. And I just want to say thank you for the opportunity, because this has been healing for me, and I know I’ve thought about you a lot, I’ve prayed for you. I can’t imagine what it was like with all the research that you’ve gone through. Having to be there and go through and process all of the things while your regular life is going on and then in the midst of this, to lose our father. I think this is an important part of your legacy, and I think it is going to really change the way that people view things. But yeah, the time has come.
[music starts]
All of this encouragement, this support, that’s what love looks like to me. And I’m so happy about that. During this whole process, I had so many family members who poured out a lot of memories and feelings, facing up to parts of their Black experience that they may not have ever discussed. Especially my dad. And all of that, really, was the starting place for all this.
When I started working on this project, I knew I’d have to go back to where it all started with my dad in Alabama. But I had no idea even where to begin. So I started researching and asking questions, and pretty soon, I realized that this was so much bigger than him. It’s not just his story, it’s America’s story.
Credits
What Happened in Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It’s written, produced, and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.
Our executive producer is Erica Kraus.
Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam.
Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga.
Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa.
This episode was sound designed and mixed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Landa.
Our fact checker is Erika Janik.
And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.
Special thanks to the O’Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou, and Ziyang Fu; and also thank you to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short.
The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.
You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.
Thank you for listening.
Next time on What Happened in Alabama.
He died tellin’ them to take care of me, that’s what happened there.
There’s a reason why you’re killing each other. There’s a reason why, you know, you don’t have land. There’s a reason why, you know, they’ve criminalized your body and put you in prison for free labor.
So let’s start at the beginning. Back home in Maplewood, Minnesota, where I grew up.
[game sounds]
Maplewood was that suburban American dream – the white fences, green lawns and ranch-style houses.
It was the 1980s, so my two sisters and I were always either playing outside or in the house listening to music. My favorite was the handheld Mattel Classic Football 2 game. I used to play that thing all day.
[game sounds]
We lived and went to school in a predominantly white neighborhood, but we also spent a lot of time in our Black community in Saint Paul, where our church was, and many family and friends lived. Having that balance was a real blessing.
A lot of the childhood joy I experienced as a kid was fueled by the time I spent with my Dad and my grandfathers. Playing drums and singing at music gigs. Going to the “Brotherhood Breakfast” – which was a pancake and waffles extravaganza that my church organized for Black fathers and their sons. We talked about everything from the Muhammad Ali-Larry Holmes fight to Prince’s latest hit.
[barbershop sounds]
Getting lined up at Mr. Harper’s Barbershop – basically one of the few places for a Black man to get a haircut in Saint Paul. And on Sunday we went to Mount Olivet Missionary Baptist Church.
[church music starts]
Lee Sr.: [singing] Who's on the lord's side?
That’s my dad, Lee Roy Hawkins Senior, singing at our church.
From the time I was a little kid, it was always me and him. Lee Senior and Lee Junior. Lee Roy and Lee Lee.
But there was something bubbling up under our picture perfect surface.
[foreboding music starts]
Sometimes, my dad would have nightmares. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to his screams. He’d wake the whole house. I’d hear my mom shouting, “Lee Roy, you’re having a dream! It’s okay, you’re having a dream!” She’d say it over and over and eventually he’d wake up and calm down.
Like most boys my age, I idolized my dad. I thought he was the most fearless person on Earth, and that he wasn’t afraid of anything. So hearing him scream out like that told me that whatever he was dreaming about had to be pretty fierce.
I knew better than to go in that room during those nightmares, but one morning, I somehow found the courage to finally ask him, “Dad, what were you dreaming about last night?” He hardly spoke. He just looked down at the floor and said, “Alabama, son. Alabama.”
My father was born in 1948 in a small town in Butler County, Alabama, during the height of Jim Crow. He rarely talked about it or what happened while he was there. But Alabama was always with us. It’s like he’d packed it into his suitcase when he moved to Minnesota. In his screams at night and in the things he didn’t say.
I couldn’t explain it back then, but it also showed up in how he punished us. Like this one time back in 1979 I was eight years old, and as usual, playing my video game.
[video game noises]
It was a Sunday. I remember because we’d just come home from church. My dad was in the kitchen putting mayonnaise on a bologna sandwich, and I was in the living room, when suddenly…. TOUCHDOWN!
[video game beeps]
I jumped up man, and I ran over to dad in the kitchen. And I told him, “Dad, dad, I scored a touchdown!”
[dark music starts]
Instead of congratulating me, he snatched the game from my hand. He threw it down on the ground, and then he picked me up and body slammed me to the linoleum floor. Hard.
And then he just started screaming, “Do it on the field! Do it on the field!”
Looking up at him from the floor, I was completely bewildered and confused. As an eight year old kid, I had no idea why he’d done that.
Like many Black kids we knew, we got the belt whenever we did something wrong. If I try to estimate it, I definitely got whipped with a belt over 100 times throughout my childhood and my teenage years. Both of my parents whipped me with inexplicable anger. You didn’t always know when their tempers would be triggered, but when they were, you couldn’t forget it.
There was a sense of fear of the outside world that hung over our household constantly. When we’d get punished, our parents would tell us that it was to protect us, to keep us from being killed, by the police, by white racists, or even someone from our own Black community. I could sense it in my Dad’s nightmares. But I didn’t think about it too much until I started to have my own nightmares as an adult.
The summer of 2003, I was a journalist in my early thirties, and I’d just landed a job at the Wall Street Journal covering General Motors from Detroit.
I had a new apartment, strong friendships and my loving family – my two sisters, my mom, my dad. They all lived in suburbs around the Twin Cities. My parents still lived in Maplewood. Like always, I talked nearly every day to my dad on the phone.
I was, in a lot of ways, fulfilling my dreams. But at night, something was happening. I’d fall asleep, and then, I was eight years old again, getting body slammed by my dad. I started having these dreams like multiple times a week. And each dream focused on that same attack.
I would wake up sweaty and disoriented, still thinking from the vantage point of that eight year old kid looking up at my dad’s face from the floor. Every time it took a few minutes for me to realize that I wasn't still that kid. That I was an adult. I was far away from Minnesota. And I was in my own home.
There was one particular night when I realized that the nightmares were seeping into my daily life. I was at a bar with my friends.
[bar sounds]
The bar was packed. We were standing around tall bar tables, and everyone was talking over everyone. It smelled like Grand Marnier. As my friends talked, all of a sudden their voices became distant.
I was standing next to a table, trying to laugh along with everybody, but my mind's eye was on that 8-year old version of me – that little boy who kept springing up in my dreams. I was admonishing myself. I kept thinking over and over about what I could have done to protect him.
And then, I leaned back, and suddenly, I was on fire. My shirt had caught the flame of a small candle that was burning on the tabletop. My friend Marcus jumped into action. He started putting out the flames on my arm with his hand while everyone else took a step back.
A little later, Marcus made a joke about it and we laughed, but I could tell my friends were baffled, wondering how could I be so out of it that I’d set my arm on a burning candle.
What in the world is going on with me? Why can’t I stop thinking about stuff that happened two decades ago?
That year got harder and harder for me. The endless replay of this past memory, the brain fog, the anxiety, the disorientation, and the anger. The weight of it all became overbearing. So much so that one night I was screaming at my father in the dream. When I woke, I knew I needed to confront my parents. Immediately. I reached for the phone.
[phone ringing]
I tried to catch my breath while it rang. When my mother answered, I shouted, "Put Dad on the phone!" My heart was pumping outside of my chest. My fists were clenched, and I felt like I could punch through the wall.
When he answered, I asked him if he remembered body slamming me to the floor when I was eight years old over a game I was playing. He just sat there listening to me breathing and said, “I don’t know. I did a lot of crazy things.” My mom started screaming into the phone, telling me I was being disrespectful.
I told them I would stop talking to them forever unless they went to therapy first. They refused. So I hung up the phone. And I didn’t talk to my parents for over a year. I was committed, and I was done with them.
[music starts]
And during that time, I tried to confront my nightmares. I went to therapy. I exercised and started meditating. I did all the things I could do to manage the stress on my body and my mind.
And I thought about that conversation with my parents a lot, about how all I had wanted was to know why. Why did they treat me like that as a kid? Intellectually, I knew that in that particular instance, they were trying to teach me a lesson – a lesson that even at eight years old, I had to hurry up and become a man.
That’s what “do it on the field” means – that Black boys need to make real-world accomplishments if they want to be successful in life. I understood this, but I didn’t understand why my dad felt he needed to body slam me. And then my dad called.
He told me he’d missed me at his retirement party, and he’d missed all of our hours-long chats. He apologized, and said that he understood that I had been taken for granted, and that I had every right to be upset about everything that happened to me as a kid. It was our separation that made him realize that. He told me he and my mom were ready to go to counseling. And I was too.
Lee Sr.: Yeah, but see I got a lot of memories down there that I really didn't wanna deal with, you know? They’ve been living in this survival, get what you can bullshit all these years, man, it’s been like that my whole adult years. Been putting out fires, man, my whole life. My whole adult life.
There were so many questions I wanted to ask my parents growing up. Questions about them, about their lives. And about how that affected the choices they made in raising me and my sisters – choices that were imposed on us by our own country, and our country’s perception of our place in it.
I started with my dad. His life in the south was a mystery to us, and I wanted to know what happened to him. What happened in Alabama?
Lee: Tell me about your earliest memory in Greenville and what it was like to grow up there.
Lee Sr.: Lived in a little house…had two or three rooms and a kitchen. My dad built the house.
When I started working on this project in 2014, Dad really opened up about his life in the Jim Crow south. And I was blessed to be able to record some of our interviews.
Some of what he shared were beautiful memories of this little boy we’d never seen pictures of. He shared fond memories of Alabama, especially the baseball field he played on. His team would play during the day. And sometimes Negro League legends like Hank Aaron and Satchel Paige would play there at night.
Other memories were super hard for him to revisit. But he courageously kept opening up. He told me about something he’d always been too pained to talk about: how the loss of his mom in 1961, when he was just 12 years old, changed his whole life.
Lee Sr.: You know, that was a real devastating thing for me when I lost my mommy. I just can't even, you know, shit, I couldn't, I couldn't make it through that man.
And how it felt when, after his mom's death, he moved north to live with one of his older sisters and her husband in Minnesota
Lee Sr.: When I had left Alabama, something came out of me, man. A big ass relief. And I didn't even know where I was going. But it was a big ass, just, man like a breath of fresh air, man.
Later, he expressed the regret, confusion and rage he felt when he returned to Alabama at 27 years old, when I was just a baby, to bury his father – who was killed.
Lee Sr.: I was looking forward for him to see you guys. And I was always thinking I had more time, you know, because he was a healthy guy, man. He was a healthy man.
And how hard that return was, for many reasons.
Lee Sr.: It was horrible because somebody had killed him, and people were looking at us like trying to figure out what we were gonna do about it. And I was saying, fuck, I got to get through this and get out of this motherfucker. You know, I ain't got time to look for no murderer.
As he told me these stories, I realized that my father knew very little about his own upbringing. He had left Alabama at such a young age, and because of that there were so many secrets that were kept from him – and these were the secrets that showed up in his nightmares as an adult. The ones he kept from me.
As a journalist, for me, one of the hardest things is to know there’s a story there, but to not be able to break it open and just tell it. It was nagging at me, and I knew something had happened in my family to make my parents so extremely fearful for themselves and for us. So in 2015, I took a DNA test.
Lee Sr.: And that thing, you know they say, if you don't know where you come from, how the hell you know where you going?
For years, I had believed that the stories of Black families like mine were irretrievable, but with the help of that test, my father and I went to work filling in that family tree.
I embarked on a genealogical journey for myself, but also for – and often with – my dad.
[phone ringing]
Lee Sr.: Hello?
Lee: Hey, Dad.
Lee Sr.: Yeah. Hey, man.
Lee: Can you hear me okay?
Lee Sr.: Yeah. You’re good.
Lee: Okay. Good, man. Good. Thanks a lot.
Lee Sr.: Oh, yeah. Let’s get it.
I dug into archives and sifted through census records. I’d call him up when I found new information.
Lee: I'm looking at this um, hmm. This genealogy shit is crazy.
Lee Sr.: Well, I'll be darned.
Lee: Did you realize that when your mom's father was killed, she was nine?
Lee Sr.: She was nine?
Lee: She was nine.
Lee Sr.: No, I didn't know that.
Lee: But, you know, your dad has, in the census, he had a couple brothers and sisters that were listed as mulatto.
Lee Sr.: Oh, goodness me.
The project became so much bigger than discovering our family. It turned into an exploration of American history that no one really likes to talk about: the aftermath of slavery and Jim Crow, a history that shaped my family's experience in America.
This is a story about some of the more tragic parts of my family and my country’s history. The parts that, amid all the love and the closeness, were buried and rarely if ever discussed. It’s about my journey to uncover and understand those tragedies.
I did hundreds of interviews. Some of them with family members, others with genealogists and academics on everything from the intergenerational effects of the Holocaust on survivors and their descendants, the effects of slavery on Black America, and even the mental health of the children of people who have been incarcerated or murdered. Even when it didn’t seem like it, every interview I did was also a means to understand our family history and in turn myself, so much better.
Brandon Jones: Well, we have a lot of old parenting techniques that were picked up and conditioned from slavery that have continued on. Doctor Joy DeGruy talks about this in her book, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.
Prof. Christopher Haveman: There was no real justification – moral justification – for it other than whites had the racist premise that they were civilized and the Indians were “savages” and that the whites could make better use of the land than Indians.
Dr. Ruth Thompson-Miller: And for folks who think that, you know, that was like 50, 60, 70 years ago, we've gotten past that – oh, no, no we haven't. The people who lived through it suffered through the violence and everything that went along with being an American living under a system of Jim Crow. They haven't recovered.
The punishments, the belt, and the nightmares that haunted me and my father — I knew they couldn’t be isolated incidents. They had to be echoes of a deeper shared history. A history that is alive in all of us today.
[music]
For four years, my dad and I kept calling each other up on the phone to talk through my most recent discoveries. In 2019, he did an epic three-hour interview. It was planned as the last interview that I’d need for him to get it done.
Since Dad and I were both still actively involved in music and had just recorded a Christmas song together, we were both looking forward to doing more. I told him I’d come to Minnesota to produce a song for him. And I thanked him for going so deeply into the past with me – that I was proud of him, and that he’d done an amazing job. He asked me, “Son, is there anything else you need?” I said no, but I’d see him soon.
Lee Sr.: Alright man, thanks for the call, man.
Lee: Okay, talk to you later.
Lee Sr.: Keep on keeping on. Love you.
Lee: K, love you. Bye.
[phone hangs up]
Shortly after that, he and my mom went to celebrate their 50th anniversary at the Buddy Guy/Mavis Staples concert, and he had a massive cardiac arrest, right there in the concert venue. Four days later, on February 28, 2019, he died. It was devastating.
I think about my dad and the dynamic duo we were. And just like the music we made together in our life, this project was largely inspired by him. Even though it was hard for him at times, he did it, yes for himself, but especially for me. It was the greatest gift he could ever give me. And his unexpected death completely changed the story for me. For all of us.
Roberta: He went through so much in his life. Went through so much. He did.
This is my mom, Roberta Hawkins. She met my dad while they were both hanging out at McCarron’s Lake in Roseville, splashing around on the beach with friends. They were just 14 year old kids. And that concert my dad had the cardiac arrest at was one of the many date nights they went on, this time, in honor of their 50-year wedding anniversary. That teenage love just grew stronger and stronger.
On a cold, snowy afternoon in Saint Paul, I sat down with my mom and one of my sisters for a conversation. We’d rescheduled our meeting because of a blizzard earlier that week, so the day we recorded this just happened to be a significant one.
Lee: Today is the fourth anniversary of Dad's death, and it’s just a coincidence that we’re here today talking. Can we reflect on what this means for us?
Roberta: One thing, great memories. Great memories. But it's, it's hard because I miss him so much, and life isn't the same.
When we sat together on the anniversary of his death, the pain of losing him was still very raw for us. We reflected on dad — and how we missed and loved him.
I’ve come to understand that all of the grief, all of the racism and all of the stressful experiences that started when he came into the world as a child of Jim Crow stayed with him until the day he died.
When I think about my dad in the context of American history, I recognize that the country that we all loved – and he defended as part of the Air Force – refused to love him back. Our country, which I also love so deeply, sought to destroy my family by forcing them to live under this brutal caste system for five generations following Emancipation.
That’s one of the reasons I’m here. I continue with this project, day after day, because I know that without intervention and education, history can repeat itself.
I’m doing this for my father, and for my ancestors and elders. But especially for our Black children, and their families. Because the process of breaking the cycles born out of slavery and Jim Crow that many of us inherited and internalized has to start inside of our families.
The beauty and the power of our people, and our true, authentic Black identity of unwavering excellence and dignity that comes from those family members who came before us, that’s the part we need to celebrate and to keep.
Lee: What does family mean to you, and what do you want people to know about you and the family, our listeners?
Roberta: I think family means everything, because that's one of the reasons that we can survive, with family. And we all go through a lot. And this has been the hardest part of my life, is – even with my husband gone, and knowing how much he went through in his life. And he was a wonderful, wonderful husband and father. And I just don't know. It's very difficult even to go day to day without him, because he was my best friend, too.
When my dad died, I lost my best buddy, a father and a mentor. And in many ways, he was a partner in all of this. He needed to do this work. We needed to do this work. And I believe it’s necessary for any cycle breaker, not just for my family but for many other American families.
I hope that this podcast can serve as an inspirational blueprint for others looking to discover, investigate and understand their own family history. We can no longer bury the dark parts of American history because it makes people feel uncomfortable. For none of us are responsible for the sins of our forefathers, and we can’t rewrite the past. But we certainly can shape the present, and most importantly, the future.
This story is mine, yes, but it also belongs to you.
[music]
Credits
What Happened in Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It’s written, produced, and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.
Our executive producer is Erica Kraus.
Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam.
Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga.
Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa.
This episode was sound designed and mixed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Landa.
Our fact checker is Erika Janik.
And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.
Special thanks to the O’Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou, and Ziyang Fu; and also thank you to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short.
The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.
You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.
Thank you for listening.
From the time I was a little kid, it was always me and him. Lee Sr and Lee Jr . . . Leeroy and Lee Lee.
But while my dad was happy at church, nightmares interrupted his sleep sometimes. He’d wake up screaming, startling the whole house. It scared me so much as a kid.
One morning, I got the courage to ask him what he was dreaming about. He just looked down at the floor and said, “Alabama, son. Alabama.”
Lee Sr.: When I had left Alabama, something came out of me, man. A big ass relief. And I didn't even know where I was going. But it was a big ass, just, man like a breath of fresh air, man. And that's the way I felt.
Born in 1948 in a small town in Alabama, he never talked about the place, but for my Dad, Alabama was always present…
In my mid 30s, I started having my own nightmares.
I tried to ignore them, but couldn’t. I had to find out why I was being haunted.
Did it have anything to do with my dad?
To answer the question, I went into journalist mode. I had deep conversations with my dad, family members, and even experts, all to to understand what happened to him... and to me
Lee Sr: I really haven't shared this shit with
anybody. You know..
Ruth Miller: It’s going to take a whole lot of truth telling for folks to really understand. And i think it’s time now because people are passing on, and if we don’t document this history it’s going to be gone.
Zollie Owens: I may not have money in my pocket. But if I have that land that is of value, that is money.
Zollie Owens: My kids can fall back on this land, they'll have something
Lloyd Pugh: I’m looking at the will of John Pugh. One woman, Judy worth $200. One young man name Abraham. $400. I mean, that's the proof of our line owning slaves.
Lee Hawkins: Do you feel guilty about it?
Lloyd Pugh: No.
While I started to unravel questions for myself, as a reporter it’s never just about me. This journey revealed a part of American history we haven't talked much about. The aftermath of Jim Crow.
Ruth Miller: That trauma, That collective trauma, keeps happening over and over again. And every day that you live You're running into something.
It’s a history that’s shaped my and other families’ experiences in America. AND how my parents raised me as a Black kid in my own country.
Roberta Hawkins: We were afraid for you that something would happen, because things have happened.
Asking questions can lead to answers that lead to healing. And that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.
Daina Ramey Berry: There's so much strength and power in this history.
Daina Ramey Berry: If you look at history as a foundation, the foundations that were laid are still what have built our houses.
This is “What Happened in Alabama?”, a new podcast from APM Studios.
I get answers to some of the hardest questions of how things came to be for many Black Americans, and the truth that must come before any reconciliation can happen.
First episode drops on May 15th.
The ICU room was slightly smaller than a college dorm room. It had a curtain instead of a door and a window that faced the hospital entrance. Every day, I could see Dad as I approached the room, with a bunch of tubes connected to his upper body. An intubation tube protruded from his mouth, and a breathing tube came out of his nose. An electronic panel behind his head monitored every sign of progress and every setback. Those four days were an emotional whirlwind. My dad still looked youthful with his hair parted on the side as always, and that gave me a little hope. But his kidneys were another story. A dialysis machine had been moved into his room. He wasn’t talking, but there was a good chance that he could hear all the conversations happening in the room.
Eventually, the doctor walked in to give an update. “Your father is a very sick man,” he began. “We see cases like this, and the survival rate is very low. There are so many possibilities with this. His lungs aren’t clearing up, and we’re worried he could develop sepsis at some point. He’s on dialysis now, but if we take him off, he’ll stop functioning within two hours. His organs are shutting down.”
I thanked him for the information and then gave him our position. Knowing that our father was a God-fearing man who would want us to exhaust every option before pulling the plug, we were standing by our consistent position that we were going to keep praying for a miracle and that we wouldn’t be stopping dialysis at any point. I told him that we appreciated the work they were doing to keep him as comfortable as possible and that we wanted to continue until his situation improved or his heart or organs shut down naturally. We made it clear, once again, that the only way we would allow them to discontinue treatment was if my father’s heart was to stop again. Using a defibrillator at that point would have been brutal.
The doctor’s position was that we should just trust him and the medical staff and that every person–including my father–would want his or her family to stop dialysis at this stage. I felt resentment towards them. They were culturally clueless, just blindly assuming that Black patients and their families trust medical institutions. Our decisions to embrace our faith and our father’s faith, and exercise our father’s wishes and our legal rights were paramount.
We felt that the doctors weren’t listening to us.
Our mother, who had been a nurse herself for decades of her career, knew my dad was likely in his final hours. But as we sat there, we knew she needed a little time and that she’d probably never forgive herself if she stopped dialysis at this stage. She was grieving the likely loss of that handsome boy she met at the beach when they were just fourteen. She’d known and loved this man for nearly sixty years, had children and grandchildren with him, and was squeezing his hand as they loaded him on the helicopter. She just needed to sit with her family, and pray, and think.
Lee Hawkins: I know that in the industry there's a lot of concern about that and how families, particularly in our community, you know, are treated. And we appreciate your concern. You know, our position as a religious family and you've dealt with religious families before here. So that's the situation and we really appreciate you.
Tiffany: Know it's human nature. It's my heart. My father. I didn't expect to wake up today and get this pain. And so this is why.
Lee: And if my father didn't explicitly say.
crosstalk: Anything, he wanted to go. He didn't.
Lee: Measure that. He didn't if he didn't explicitly say that he didn't want you to do anything, you know, he said he wants.
Roberta: And he told us.
A doctor ran up to us and told us that, as a last attempt at saving our father, he was going to do something he’d never done in his career before: Put my father on two kidney dialysis machines and run them, simultaneously. He ordered everyone out of the room and commanded his staff to hook the other machine up.
Only minutes after they did that, the code blue rang out, and my father was gone.
If you check the records, my father’s cause of death was cardiac arrest. He was 70 years old and had survived prostate cancer and Type-2 diabetes for years. But in the end, his heart wasn’t strong enough to withstand his weight, his stress level, and his three decade battle with obesity.
In the years since he passed, I’ve realized that it’s much deeper than what was written on his death certificate. This podcast was inspired by my research for a forthcoming book -– I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free, which set the stage for me to interview my dad for four years about his time in Jim Crow Alabama, and to do extensive research about everything that’s been covered in this podcast. Through all of that work, especially the books I read, the related journalism fellowships I completed, and the discussions I had with experts in psychology and neurobiology, I realized that my father’s fate might’ve been determined much earlier than that one day in 2019.
As part of my research, I came across a 2014 study from Harvard, published in the journal Epidemiology, that examined the health effects of Jim Crow laws on Black and white populations in the U.S. from 1960 to 2009. Researchers looked at data from all U.S. counties, focusing on people born between 1901 and 2009, and assessed the racial differences in premature mortality, defined as death before age 65. The study found that in 1960 36% of the U.S. population lived under Jim Crow laws, with 63% of Black Americans affected.
1960 was just one year before my father’s mother, my grandmother Opie, died of kidney failure at 56. Her death is why my father moved from Alabama to Minnesota, to live with his older sisters up north.
Black folks born between 1921 and 1945 in Jim Crow areas were 20% more likely to die prematurely compared to those outside these areas. Throughout the study period, Black people were about twice as likely to experience premature death compared to whites, regardless of Jim Crow laws. The highest risks were for Black people born between 1901 and 1945, while there was no clear pattern for whites. The study concludes that Jim Crow laws have had a lasting impact on premature mortality among Black Americans, and their abolition has not eliminated the racial disparities in premature death rates over the past 50 years.
Born in 1948, my father lived five years longer than age 65, so compared to many other Jim Crow survivors, he was fortunate. But compared to Black men as a whole, my father’s death at 70 fell short of the average life expectancy for a Black man, which, according to the CDC, was 71 1/2 years. In comparison, the life expectancy for a white man was about 76 years. I would have given my life savings for my father to have been given that extra year and a half , and my right arm for an extra 6 years. I believe Jim Crow – for all the chronic stress it caused my father from the moment he opened his eyes in Alabama– took that from me. I can’t prove definitively that Jim Crow killed him, but all of the research, all the science, and the studies I’ve seen– combined with my understanding of the toll racism took and how hyper cautious it made him, I would never rule it out. It would be easy to dismiss the dozens of cities and counties across America that have declared racism a public health crisis as some sort of “woke” agenda, but my knowledge says otherwise.
To deal with life’s calamities, secrets, and stresses, my dad didn’t turn to alcohol, cigarettes or drugs. Instead, food was where we found our joy. In fact, the last time I saw my father in-person was at the Old Country Buffet, a place where our family and tons of other Black families would often go after church– dressed in our Sunday best– for food and fellowship. On any and every given Sunday, I made sure to load up on three or four plates of fudge covered ice creams. I was never scolded for that, because my dad was doing it right along with me.
And it wasn’t until I became a journalist that I learned chronic stress from childhood trauma and racism can lead to food addiction as a coping mechanism. These stressors trigger the body's fight-or-flight response, releasing stress hormones. Elevated cortisol levels increase cravings for high-fat, high-sugar foods, providing temporary comfort and relief. Food becomes a way to self-soothe, creating a cycle of emotional eating. Additionally, repeated exposure to trauma and discrimination can disrupt the brain's reward system, making people more susceptible to addictive behaviors. In my father’s, my sister Tiffany’s, and my case, this sometimes resulted in compulsive eating.
We may not look like it, but just like my father, Tiffany and I have struggled with food addiction too.
Tiffany Hawkins: I feel like in some ways, you know, my weight has always fluctuated through my adult life, but it's because of an unhealthy relationship with food.
As kids, eating was one of the few escapes we could indulge in and not get scolded for.
Tiffany Hawkins: If there is a celebration or getting together with family, there was going to be a lot of food. And that you had to eat. If you didn't eat, they'd say, ‘Oh, you acting funny.’ And it's like, No, I'm just not hungry, but. You're still going to eat anyway.
Since our mom was a nurse while we were growing up, she was very conscious of the dangers of processed foods and sugars, and she tried her best to limit them. But this was the 80s, and many families kept soda, potato chips, and hot dogs in the fridge. Our mom refused to buy us the sugary cereals other kids had, but I’d still wait until she wasn’t looking and sprinkle a whole tablespoon of sugar over my Cheerios. If she caught me, she was surprisingly chill about it. Sometimes she’d even give me a rare laugh, and just say, “Put the spoon down, Lee Lee.” Food– even if it wasn’t always healthy– was one of the few things my parents were relaxed about, like a lot of parents and grandparents of that era.
Lee Hawkins: We could go in the refrigerator and just stuff our mouths with…
Tiffany Hawkins:...as much. As we wanted….
Lee Hawkins: Do you remember the eight packs of Coca-Cola in those bottles that we would tell.
Tiffany Hawkins: The bottles that were returnable.
Tiffany Hawkins: And we'd have the crush in that Coca-Cola and yeah, we could pick them. You can mix and match Mountain Dew. Yeah. We always had that in the house
In the days after my father died, family and friends started coming to the house from everywhere. Bless their hearts, they were determined to feed us. In the classic spirit of church and the community, they began showing up with piles and piles of food.
Tiffany Hawkins: I'm grateful for them reaching out. And people are bringing food to the house and whatnot. But we had so much food, Lee, when dad passed away. Pies, chips. These were from great places, fried chicken, corn man, ribs. And like.
Everything, food, food, food, food, food. But I was in. There eating, eating, eating, eating, eating. And probably during that time, I mean, not only from just eating them, but the grief of losing Dad and whatnot, I gained a considerable amount of weight and I had to get off.
I was so touched by it, so appreciative. But I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. I just couldn’t. Seeing my dad succumb in the way he did made me research and think more intentionally about the dangers of clogged arteries, and as far as I was concerned, the day he died was the first day of the rest of my life, when it came to my health. I vowed to be even more health-conscious.
Tiffany: You were smart. You would bring your own salad over or something. You would stop and go and get something.
Lee Hawkins: Sis, I wasn't smart. I was scared.
Lee Hawkins: We hadn't buried Dad yet. And then that was when I learned that diabetes makes your arteries weak and you know, and that that led to his cardiac arrest. So I was actually scared. And, mad, like, I agree with what you're saying, I mean I was angry.
Lee Hawkins: I said it's like bringing heroin to someone's house who just died of a drug overdose and just bringing heroin and crack and all of the high sugar. That's what was brought to our house.
As I stood over the kitchen counter, looking at all the pies, casseroles, and other delicious food, I couldn’t stay angry at our loved ones for long. I was more mad at myself than anything. The only reality separating me from my dad was that I still went to the gym. Inadequate rehab after a knee replacement made even walking painful for Dad. I closed my eyes and thought of all the times he told me later in life, “Boy, stay in that gym. Don’t turn out like me, son.” He kept playing basketball into his fifties, while I gave it up in my thirties in favor of weightlifting, swimming, and running. But I got all of that from my dad. For decades, he was in that gym. He just couldn’t stop eating. And eventually, the food won.
If I had stopped working out, I would have been overweight too, because I’ve been addicted to candy and ice cream for most of my life. It all goes back to being that kid.
Whenever I’d get a belt whipping from my parents, they’d beat me for five minutes, then walk down the hallway to their bedroom and slam the door. I’d lay there, often not wanting to get up, and the only motivation I had was knowing I had some money in my room and my bike in the garage. I’d get up, grab that money, and tear off on my bike to McDonald’s, ordering a soft serve vanilla ice cream cone or a chocolate fudge sundae. Sometimes I’d have both, or two large chocolate malts. The ice cream was like a memory eraser. I escaped to that feeling of joy, which was just what I needed to ride back home and act like nothing happened. Because if I went home and acted sad, my parents would get mad and accuse me of having an attitude. They called it “acting smart.” Ice cream made the pain fade away. It helped me turn the ache of my heart into a smile.
And on some of those nights, as I massaged the raised welts on my arms and legs in my room, I’d walk out and see my dad in the living room, sitting by the record player all alone – quiet – with his eyes closed.
He was always playing this one song.
Tiffany Hawkins: Yeah, the Sadie song he would listen to and he would listen to it on repeat and it was a song about their mother. Her name was Sadie. And, you know, don't you know we love you, Sweet Sadie. But it's really a sad song. And yeah.
Lee Hawkins: Sweet sadie. Don’t you know we love you sweet sadie. [singing] Yeah, of course.
And we knew that he had to be reminiscing about our Grandma Opie, his mother – the grandmother we never got to meet.
Tiffany Hawkins:I'm sure that it had a lot of significance to Dad absolutely it did. How could it not? And I think just how as a child, like dad was dealing with a lot, Have you thought about like when we would celebrate like Mother's Day or Father's day? Like how he must have felt?
And now, when I think about the pain– not just the emotional but the physical pain — that I felt when we lost our father, I can’t imagine how he went through the loss of his mom at 12 years old. My dad was the baby of the family – and a very sensitive man – who was coddled a lot more than I was, and he was much closer to his mother than I was to mine. When he was alive, those memories and death dates of his parents and even the siblings who had died before him would pass by, without him ever saying anything to us about it. I guess he’d mourn in silence, and we were clueless– and now I see that we were insensitive, because we rarely if ever asked about them– and he just kept quiet about it.
I think about those days all the time, especially now that our dad has passed away. In the US, we celebrated Mother’s Day and Father’s Day last month and the month before. When Dad was alive and we celebrated those holidays, the loss of his parents was never acknowledged. We never talked about what he went through.
Tiffany Hawkins:I wonder how many of those days he did take his aggression out in that way or he ate something that he shouldn't have been eating.
It made even more sense years later, when I did a national fellowship for Reporting on Child Well-Being and we studied and heard from experts on the short and long-term effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACES. And it was there that I learned about the ACES test. Anyone can take it and it’s pretty straightforward, like a checklist, a yes or no test.
The study measures ten types of childhood adversity, including five types of family dysfunction: witnessing violence, experiencing violence, having a household member who suffers from alcohol addiction, having a household member who has been incarcerated, and experiencing poverty. Later studies expanded the list of potential stressors to include experiences such as social injustice and racial and economic disparities.
Each type of trauma, including physical and sexual abuse, was assigned an ACE score of one. For example, a child who experienced racism, lost a parent, and witnessed violence, would have an ACE score of three.
The study showed that with each additional childhood adversity, children became more susceptible to obesity, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, marital discord, suicide, and other challenges in adulthood. The more stressors a person experienced, the higher their risk of medical, mental, social problems, chronic illnesses, and early death as an adult. Compared to those with zero ACEs, the study said “Individuals with an ACE score of four are twice as likely to be smokers, twelve times more likely to attempt suicide, seven times more likely to be an alcoholic, and ten times more likely to inject street drugs.” Those with an ACE score of six have a lifespan that is 20 years shorter on average.
This research highlights the profound impact of childhood adversity on long-term health and well-being.
These are all challenges that Natalie Slopen, an assistant professor at Harvard University, considers critical in shaping the mental and emotional capacities of a child into adulthood. I met Professor Slopen as part of the Fellowship training, since she specializes in research around adverse childhood experiences, or childhood trauma.
Natalie Slopen:And this is a phrase that's used to reflect a variety of early childhood experiences that are known to have a harmful impact on child development at the population level.
In recent years, researchers and public health advocates have discussed how exposure to racism and discrimination can increase the risk of developing toxic stress and ACE-associated health conditions. Studies indicate that experiences of racism are significantly associated with other ACEs and can exacerbate or compound their effects, leading to negative health outcomes, like the ones I mentioned earlier.
At the population level, ACEs are used to understand the prevalence of various health outcomes across different groups of people, like why there are higher rates of heart disease in the Black community. But the implications are what drew me in.That data gave me extremely important context because, for all my life, I’d wondered about my father's siblings and other adults I knew who died in their forties and fifties. Anecdotally, I had many examples of people who’d dealt with heart disease, cancer, and/or Type-2 diabetes at young ages, but I never knew about the role that stress—especially during childhood—could play in raising a person’s chances of developing these chronic diseases so young.
I asked Dr. Slopen about the effect that growing up during Jim Crow, or facing racism in a predominantly white environment could have on a person’s long-term health and well-being.
Natalie Slopen Experiences of interpersonal or structural racism absolutely fit within the definition of adverse childhood experiences for those types of life experiences that we can imagine, lead to negative health outcomes. What was unique about the ACEs study is that it was able to document this, dose response relationship across a very broad range of health outcomes, mental health outcomes, behavioral health outcomes such as smoking or high risk sexual behavior or alcohol consumption, in addition to chronic disease outcomes that, had not been broadly recognized to be associated with early life experiences, such as cardiovascular diseases or cancers or, inflammatory, conditions associated with aging.
After I did the reporting fellowship, I asked my dad if a doctor had ever sat him down and asked him about his childhood or any of the adversity he’d faced. I remember it vividly because, before learning about this, it hadn’t occurred to either of us—or his doctor, apparently—that the stress building up in a child’s system could be inextricably tied to disease later in life. In my father’s case, no doctor knew his background well enough to develop an intervention strategy to help prevent diseases like his diabetes, prostate cancer, and the heart disease that ultimately ended his life.
When my grandparents were five and nine years old, both of their fathers were murdered by white men who were never brought to justice. They faced trauma before they even had a chance to live any life. I wonder if that played any role in my grandma dying of kidney complications at only 56 years old.
Lee Hawkins Can ACEs kill a person in terms of looking at life expectancy numbers and what we've seen?
Natalie Slopen There is data to show that adverse childhood experiences shorten one's lifespan at the population level. All of our work that is typically referenced is talking about populations, and not individuals. But on average, we know that adverse childhood experiences are associated with poorer health and premature mortality.
While Dr Slopen’s data focuses on population-level trends rather than individual cases, I recognize that individual stories can illustrate how specific trauma events can negatively affect someone's health.
Hearing this helps me understand my father’s situation as a child, so much more.
It makes me think about when my dad told me that he slept through his mother’s funeral. As that twelve year old kid, he didn’t know how to process all that grief, so his body just kicked in and took him out of the situation temporarily. But when he woke up, his mother was still gone. And I don’t think he was ever able to find a proper or healthy way to grieve– if that even exists– he just carried it around in his body– everywhere he went, for another 58 years.
Lee Hawkins: And what are the symptoms that people can see both as children and as adults? How does it present?
Natalie Slopen: When people begin to study this among young children, they often look at social and emotional developmental outcomes, such as ability to learn, ability to self-regulate within, you know, in peer to peer settings, in schools or at home. As children become adolescents, often, we can observe associations between adverse childhood experiences and mental health outcomes, as well as physical health outcomes such as sleep, weight gain, as well as, there can be changes, to the expression of certain genes potentially that could alter trajectories of health with implications for later chronic disease outcomes. You know, I think there's a lot of questions in the scientific literature about how it's the case that some people experience tremendous hardships and still manage to be excelling and highly functional in ways that others who have experienced similar hardships are not. You know, we don't fully understand how some individuals are more resilient than others yet, but that's an area that people are really trying to learn a lot more about, because it could give us insights and strategies to be able to help individuals, experiencing early life trauma to, to go on and have healthier futures.
Even as a kid, I never thought complaining or expecting anybody to ever come and save me from anything would serve me well. And while I did have to endure challenges like constant belt whipping, hate speech, and needing to have a police escort to school because of those white supremacist letters, my family was economically stable, I had two parents, and was also rooted in a strong, Black community.
Yet, I was still considered "at-risk" by some standards. I didn't fit the usual idea of an "at-risk" kid since I grew up in the suburbs with both parents. What set me apart and kept me from becoming just another statistic were the people who supported me. Unlike many kids who suffer long-term effects from childhood trauma, I had a dedicated support system, mostly from my Black community and a few white teachers who genuinely believed in me. That support made all the difference. Without that support, I probably would have had a much harder time as a child navigating through all that, because disparities in race and income often play a role when it comes to ACEs.
Natalie Slopen: So we know that exposure to adverse childhood experiences is not distributed equally across the population. So, individuals from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds and marginalized racial and ethnic groups, tend to display higher ACE scores in our epidemiologic literature, even using the traditional ACE measure that we've talked about that may even miss types of childhood adversities that may be more common among certain subgroups of the population.
Lee Hawkins: What do you think our listeners need to know about ACEs to understand why it is important?
Natalie Slopen: It's really important to understand that early life experiences affect health and development across the entire life course, so childhood provides this foundation for everything that follows. Our entire life course is rooted in our early experiences and these experiences shape our opportunities to learn and to develop physiological systems to maintain health over time. I also think it's really important to emphasize that there's strong literature to suggest that supportive, healthy relationships can be protective in the face of experiencing adverse childhood experiences. And so we don't want to create a fatalistic story around adverse childhood experiences. On average, children who experience adversity are at risk for worse outcomes. But this does not have to be the way things unfold. And there are things within social environments that can be done to protect individuals and to help promote positive health even in the face of adversity.
I believe my grandmother’s insistence that her youngest children be moved out of Alabama made all the difference for my dad. None of his older brothers who stayed back in Alabama made it to age 70.
The question now is, how much of the trauma we experience comes from environmental factors? There’s a growing camp of researchers investigating the extent to which trauma can be transmitted epigenetically. That means that trauma can cause changes in how our genes work without changing the genes themselves, often due to environmental influences. This raises the possibility that the effects of trauma could be passed down to future generations, impacting their health and wellbeing even if they haven't experienced the trauma directly.
While I hope it is not the case that we can inherit the trauma of previous generations, I am curious about it. I consider it an extremely worthy area of study that could significantly impact our understanding of trauma and its intergenerational effects, and how it can be addressed in the future.
I asked Dr Slopen about this too.
Natalie Slopen: There is a lot of research, actively being pursued in both unique samples of adults as well as animal studies to understand the intergenerational transmission of trauma experiences and how epigenetics may be one pathway by which trauma may have consequences across generations. So people have been doing this work, looking at epigenetic changes in samples related to with Holocaust survivors. So it may be the case that trauma leads to changes in gene expression.
If we find that there are epigenetic intergenerational effects, families who might be impacted include those who survived atrocities such as slavery, Jim Crow, the Holocaust, internment camps, genocides, and personal traumas like having family members murdered. These families could benefit from comprehensive support systems including mental health services tailored to address inherited trauma, educational programs that acknowledge and teach about these historical events, and community resources to build resilience. Early intervention programs focusing on childhood development and family support could help break the cycle of trauma. Promoting healthy lifestyles, including proper nutrition and regular exercise, can also counteract negative epigenetic influences. Additionally, policies aimed at reducing socioeconomic disparities and ensuring access to quality healthcare can further support these families in overcoming the lasting effects of their ancestral traumas.
Lee Hawkins: Thank you - I really appreciate you so much.
Natalie Slopen: My pleasure.
As a child, my father would have scored high on the ACEs study.
While the ACEs study looks at populations, not individuals, it’s clear that the traumatic events my father and grandparents endured reflect the kinds of experiences the study examines.
The grief from those losses devastated them and influenced the hyper-cautious way they raised my father and his siblings in the South. The reality of never feeling safe in Alabama shaped my father’s view of America and its racist laws and practices. These experiences led my father to traumatize me at times, believing that his harsh methods were necessary to prepare me for life. That’s the intergenerational aspect of this.
Reflecting on my grandparents and my father’s experiences in Alabama, and the impact on me, I wonder about the mental health implications. I wasn’t the only Black kid with Jim Crow survivor parents who thought as my dad did. I’m not naive enough to believe that the parents of today, many raised by Jim Crow survivors, wouldn’t take a similar approach with their own children. Even though times have changed, the problems and inequities facing our community often haven’t. That’s why, in thinking about mental health, I wanted to know if and how these experiences impact Black children disproportionately. I was pleased to find that one researcher has studied today’s Black children to measure the effects.
Dr. Nathaniel Harnett is a neuroscientist and the director of Neurobiology of Affective and Traumatic Experiences Laboratory at McClean Hospital at Harvard. His work focuses on how a traumatic and stressful event impacts the childhood brain.
Nathaniel Harnett: How does it affect the structure of the brain? How does it affect the way that we respond to other events in our lives? And part of the goal of my work really is to understand or figure out if we can figure out how trauma impacts the brain. Can we then use that information to figure out who's likely to develop PTSD after they get another traumatic event or experience something that's highly stressful.
His latest research looks at how these kinds of experiences in childhood are tied to racial disparities.
Nathaniel Harnett: So the study that we're talking about looked at about 12,000 kids, from across the country who are white or black. And we looked at a number of measures related to structural inequities that might be tied to structural racism, things like the relative advantage of environments that kids were growing up in and how much conflict there was in the home. What were the incomes like of their caregivers? And so part of the work that we've been doing over the last three, four, five years now is really trying to get at how do these sort of adverse childhood experiences that we might have had when we were younger shape how we respond to another traumatic event? And does that affect our likelihood of developing PTSD? And what is it really doing to the brain at a fundamental level?
The data showed that Black children were subject to more material hardship and had less access to resources as a result of structural and institutional racism.
Harnett: And what we're finding really is that that disparity, those discrepancies in experience, directly impact brain regions that we know are important for regulating how we respond to stress and for determining sort of our outcomes after a traumatic experience. For the kids that we looked at they're still so young that the differences we're seeing don't exactly look just like PTSD. But they're also, again, they're really young. We looked at the number of PTSD symptoms they had. And there was a difference between white and black kids, where black kids endorsed more PTSD symptoms. But we're talking about like 1 or 2 symptoms, not like the whole cacophony needed for a diagnosis of PTSD, but the patterns that we're seeing in childhood part of the worry is that if we're able to see these differences at this age, at really only nine, ten years old, and they stay in these environments, they stay in these deprived neighborhoods, they stay in areas where they're going to experience more racism, they're gonna experience more hardship that those differences might accelerate as they get older. And then it really is going to look a lot like what you see in individuals with PTSD.
It's important to understand that racism-inspired trauma can transcend class boundaries. Throughout my life and career as a journalist, I have come across many Black children who weren't struggling financially but still dealt with significant trauma. These children often faced abuse at home or as the result of being physically beaten by educators at school, racism in their communities, and were frequently punished more severely in school settings. I don't use the word "microaggressions" when talking about Black kids in suburbs because there is often nothing "micro" about the aggression they face when they are one of the few students of color, and this impact often goes unnoticed and unprotected. I've met children in suburban areas who endured outright hostility and others who experienced racial profiling by law enforcement despite their family's affluence. I've also known Black kids who were murdered by other Black people from our own community, who came from families with solid financial footing. The reality is that systemic racism, violence, and intraracial discrimination can affect Black children from any socioeconomic background, leading to significant psychological stress and trauma.
Lee Hawkins: You know, obviously racism transcends the economic experience. Is there any room for you to study kids who are Black who are, you know, even in boarding schools or or in prep schools. I mean, because the black we see it in corporate America with black people being the only person in the room a lot of the time. Is it possible that some of these experiences also affect the minds of black children, like being the only black kid in a school?
Nathaniel Harnett: Yeah, I think the racialization of an individual and the then associated racism really does transcend economic class. It interacts with class and poverty and money and things like that. But it's unique in those different situations. And I agree with you that we can study the impacts of poverty, of outcomes of structural racism, but we're going to need to start to think more intersectionally as to, you know, how do black individuals at different socioeconomic classes deal with the racism that they're experiencing or the different impacts. And how might that be different between black men and black women who have to shoulder different burdens? I think as our research matures, as we move forward, we really do want to get more granular, more in-depth, more intersectional, and really start to tease apart what's happening so that we can best represent all individuals.
Lee Hawkins: Yes. And I thought it was interesting and critical that high up in your announcement, when you announced the research, you said physicians and scientists tried to demonstrate that African-Americans were inferior to justify discrimination and systemic racism. Challenging that narrative with data is incredibly important. We need to rewrite that unfair history, right? And that's often what people miss when they talk about, you know, black people in America as the inequalities amd the foundational aspects of the way that, you know, social and economic stratification, white supremacy and all of that being inextricably tied. Why was that important to make sure that you said that so high up in your release?
Nathaniel Harnett: I think that as you sort of mentioned, one thing that we like to do in psychiatry and medicine, in dealing with mental health disorders is we like to treat everything as if it's an individual problem. Right? Like if someone has PTSD, it's because they were exposed to a traumatic event. And what we have to do is we have to give them yoga or medicine or cognitive behavioral therapy or something to treat them in particular. The reality of the situation is that the neighborhoods that people are growing up in, the experience that they're having, they're not random. You know, these are a result of historical. They have strong historical roots. There are policies set in place to segregate people so that they would have different experiences. And that has long standing effects even now. But we have such a tendency in our field in medicine to be like, well, these are just different groups at base level, right? There's white and there's black. There's nothing else to think about there. But really, I think it's not that people's skin color determines how their brain is going to function. It really is the case that it's the experiences they've had that are driving that brain function. And if we can accept that, if we can understand and really come to terms with the fact that the experiences that people are having are not random, it means that in order to fix these disparities, to fix these discrepancies, to fix these effects on the brain, we have to take much more of a structural approach. We have to actually change systems to bring about better brain health.
Lee Hawkins: Have you been able to when you talk about kids being exposed to violence and family conflict, was corporal punishment any part of your research?
Nathaniel Harnett: That’s such a good question. Corporal punishment was not something that we looked at in particular in this study. We know that things like corporal punishment can lead to or contribute to the development of other psychiatric disorders, and poor emotional regulation habits. And so is it the case that what parents end up doing to try to help their kids in some way hurts them, too? I think that's a really important research question as we think about how do we really understand all the impacts of early life adversity on the brain.
Corporal punishment is legal and prevalent in many homes across the nation and seventeen states still allow educators to hit students in public schools.
I wonder if the fact that Black children experience higher rates of corporal punishment contributes to higher rates of PTSD among Black children. And frankly, it bothers me that this possibility isn’t being extensively researched. But I also wonder, how would this research be perceived, especially since because of racism, so many people believe physical punishment is a necessity for Black children. Would this research be controversial and criticized? And, if so, would any institutions still support it?
In 2019, the American Academy of Pediatrics' took a stance against spanking. That same year, the New York Times published an article from author and journalist Stacey Patton, about Black pediatricians opposing the stance. The doctors felt the policy didn't separate spanking from abuse and could unfairly target Black communities, increasing fears of law enforcement and child protective services. The fact that even some Black pediatricians fought to defend corporal punishment against Black children, despite all the science proving the harm it causes, underscores how deeply rooted this practice is.
Nathaniel Harnett: I think that the reaction to the research has been mostly positive, but a little bit mixed. On the one hand, there are a number of people who I think are reacting to this and saying, yeah, we knew this. We didn't really, did we really need a study to tell us something that we already knew? We knew that racism and structural inequities were harming us. So why do we need this? We need to focus on doing something. And I'm not going to say I entirely disagree with that, I understand. Differences in prioritization.
Lee Hawkins: I disagree with it though. I'll say I disagree with it. Why do we need studies about cancer? Why do we need studies about diabetes? Why do we need … so we can solve the issue. And if there's no real empirical data to back up.
Nathaniel Harnett: Right.
Lee Hawkins: Then how do we solve it? Right? I mean, can you explain, I mean, can you explain why you did this research right?
Nathaniel Harnett: No. And I think you're you're absolutely right. We really just need data. But I think that having a body of work that just show people, look, when we have unchecked structural racism, when we have unchecked individual racism, we have all these inequities in the country. They're having a real impact on our kids' health. And if we want to fix that, we have to do something about it.
Lee Hawkins: So does some of this coincide with the Adverse Childhood Experiences data that shows that if you have 4 or 5 adverse experiences, you're likely to have shortened life expectancy, cancer, diabetes or heart disease. I mean, it seems like this is all part of, all part of that, like understanding how all of this is inextricably tied.
Nathaniel Harnett: Yeah. No, I think you're right. I think this is all connected. I think the discrepancies we see across medical outcomes, across mortality, across psychiatric disorders, it's all tying back to these experiences that we're having as we're kids and younger. And of course, the unequal distribution of those childhood burdens that disproportionately affect black and brown individuals.
Lee Hawkins: And what will this arm us with now? What are the solutions?
Nathaniel Harnett: I think that's always the hard question of what can the brain actually tell us about what we should do next? I think if anything, the most … the most immediate thing that I would hope for is that this data serves as a call to action for people that want to address childhood adversity, structural racism, other aspects of systemic inequities that affect black and brown individuals and really affect all kids. Because I think that, as I mentioned before, just having individual solutions to these problems like therapy or medication, that's not really going to help the structural issues. Getting medication isn't going to help the fact that you're growing up in an area that has been historically redlined, and therefore you don't have access to quality education or other things that are going to set you up well for life because of things that were set in place in this country that are now outside of your control. Doing yoga doesn't stop the fact that there's police brutality. I think part of what I'd like people to do with this work is recognize there is a real whole body brain impact from these effects, and that we really need to start stepping up to move towards actual structural change.
Lee Hawkins: Nate! Keep it up, brother. We just need you more than ever. So thank you.
Nathaniel Harnett: Thank you so much.
Lee Hawkins: Seriously, man
Nathaniel Harnett: Thank you so much again for having me. I appreciate it.
Understanding Adverse Childhood Experiences helped me better understand the trauma of my grandparents, my father, and my own. Jim Crow's racial violence took my grandparents' fathers and health inequities led to my grandmother’s early death, causing my father to lose his mother as his parents did. This trauma, from an early age, made them aware of the caste system’s injustice, causing my grandparents to fear for their children and my father to fear for me.
This fear led to me receiving over 100 beatings as a child.
That fear is why it took me years to stop having nightmares about them, as a grown adult. These beatings made me a jumpy, nervous child and haunted me into adulthood, despite having more basic rights and privileges and economic stability and opportunities than my father and grandparents.
Still, some form of post-traumatic stress haunted each generation, dating back to my enslaved ancestors. In modern times, if beatings at home and school could be contributing to trauma in Black children today, it's tragic. But there's hope. If research were to show it to be true, our community would be able to consciously reduce this disparity by rejecting this as part of our identity and by fighting to give our children a reprieve from violence, at home and at school.
I hope for a future where the impact of ACEs, especially those related to systemic racism, is fully acknowledged and addressed to an even greater extent. This means more research focused on Black communities and creating culturally sensitive support systems. By doing so, despite the factors beyond our control, we strive to help reduce the cycle of trauma and to provide healthier environments for all children.
And, we did flourish.
As a student leader, I was in the news quite often.
Everybody was proud… My parents, my friends, my favorite teachers, and my coaches. But some people hated it.
Sophomore year, I was doing a lot of guest speaking at schools, churches, and public events. I was doing a lot of acting back then. This time, it was a one-act play, where I delivered the last speech that Dr. King gave to a group of Black Sanitation workers in Memphis, the night before he was killed. And that generated publicity.
That year, there was an article in a Minnesota paper headlined, “Student Brings Meaning to Black History Month,” with a big picture, after I spoke to some kids at a school.
A few days later, I got called down to the principal’s office. I figured it was about a student council matter, or sometimes the news camera crews would call about doing a story. But when I got to the office, those nice sweet ladies who worked in the office said hello and handed me a manila envelope that was addressed to me. I’d never received mail at school before, so I opened it right away and inside of it were letters, and cut out pictures of my face, with bible verses written all over them. The sender didn’t sign their name.
I can still feel the eeriness, standing there, looking at myself on the page. In my photo I had a flattop and a young, naive smile. In that moment, I realized someone out there had to be stalking me. All the letters repeated the same theme: That so-called race-mixing was a form of racial genocide akin to the holocaust. They warned that God did not create mixed race people – that sinful man did – and to destroy God’s races is to hate God.
I read this trash and I kept thinking about my parents, and how they told me as a kid, “Somebody’s always watching you, so watch yourself.” It could have been anyone. Neighbors across the street, teachers at the school, the police, really, anybody. I didn’t know who to trust, so I took the letters home.
I was almost afraid to tell my parents, out of fear that they would tell me I told you so, and that all my activism and speaking out against racism had led to this, and was going to get the whole family killed, as they’d always feared. I knew they would be scared. And man, they really were.
Lee Hawkins: So, you know, that white man that sent me those letters?
These letters gave my father flashbacks to his life in Jim Crow Alabama in the 1950s. That only made my parents even more determined to believe that by cracking the whip and enforcing the rules, they could keep us safe.
Eventually, it was decided, by the police and my parents, that I would need a police escort to school. My whole family was on high alert. For a few days, as I rode to school with that officer, I asked him to let me off at a side door because I didn’t want my classmates to see me getting out of that car. I tried my best to hide the fact that I was on edge, because I assumed the letters could be from someone with ties to the school, and I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing they had gotten into my head. I only told a few classmates, those who I, for some reason, believed would never send me that racist propaganda.
[PAUSE]
The letters continued to come in for the next few days and eventually, they stopped. What I didn’t know was that the person who sent those letters was under investigation by the FBI. And in 1988, they finally found him.
Lee Hawkins: He was at West Publishing for many years.
Lee Sr: Oh, okay. That sounds right.
Lee Hawkins: Yeah. Elroy Stock.
Lee Sr: Wow. What's his name?
That’s me and my dad reflecting on this period during one of our many interviews.
Elroy Stock had sent over 100,000 letters to people over the years. His letters didn’t just focus on Black people. He clipped out articles about indigenous people and whites. And he lamented the number of Asian and Indian children entering the country for adoption. And to find convenient targets, he scoured and clipped newspapers – sports articles, wedding announcements, birth announcements, and then mailed out his racist rants.
[PAUSE]
It all took a toll. I stressed, but I accepted it as a part of life for any Black person who wanted to excel in a white world. I’d read stories about the pioneers who had fought racism, like Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson faced, and I just assumed that anybody who was Black and breaking barriers was going to get hated on.
But being Black in a neighborhood that was more than ninety percent white was a new phenomenon for my dad. Though the population of Minnesota as a whole was largely white, the Rondo neighborhood, the part of St. Paul that he and his sisters moved to when they first came to Minnesota when was 12, did have a strong Black community. So when he grew up and had his own family and moved to Maplewood, it had to be a bit of a culture shock.
When my parents made the move from St. Paul to Maplewood in 1975, they were part of the wave of Black families who’d left cities for the suburbs. Between the 1960s and 1970s, the suburban Black population increased nationally by almost 30%.
CHRIS LEHMAN: And so it was important that after African Americans had the chance to finally do what they had aspired to do and spread their wings and make opportunities available to their children.
That’s Christopher Lehman, he’s a professor of ethnic studies at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota.
In my research, and speaking out to my Maplewood friends and cousins, I began to understand the distinct nuances of growing up Black in a white suburb in the 1980s. I reached out to Professor Lehman to get a better grasp of the factors that led to Black families moving into white suburbs and the racial dynamics they faced when they arrived.
My research and my personal experiences show me that because my dad was raised under apartheid in Alabama and racism was waiting for us in Maplewood – our move to the suburbs was loaded with all kinds of tension between the parents and the children. They were thrusting us into a world they knew nothing about – one they were often afraid of. And that made them more afraid for us, especially when we began to thrive socially and academically. This world that was so unfamiliar to them was one we thrived in – and that, I believe, is what both mystified and frightened them. But at the same time, they wanted the American dream. My dad used to say, “when those teachers teach the white kids, they can’t make you close your ears. If you’re in the same classroom, they can’t deny you the education they’re giving their kids.” My parents were determined to give us every opportunity they didn’t get.
Lee: My father had a family tragedy, and he was one of the many Black people who moved north and then to the city of Saint Paul from Alabama when he was 12. And he and my mom purchased one home and then another home in Maplewood before they turned 30. I mean, they were very young. There were other Blacks that we knew who had already moved, and they were very focused on pursuing the suburban American dream as they saw it. Some Blacks had made the move earlier, but the few Blacks we knew who moved to Maplewood and other suburbs did so in the 1960s, in the early 70s. What were the reasons that led Back people to move into the suburbs? And how does that connect to the Great Migration, and also to the breaking up of Black communities across the nation?
Lehman: From about WWI until the 1970s. The African-Americans who had the means to leave the oppression of the Jim Crow South did so. But moving to the North did not mean that African-Americans could live wherever they wanted to in the North, and cities set aside neighborhoods just for African-Americans. And then the smaller cities, or small towns, some of them were sundown towns that banned African-American residents from within their borders altogether. There were some sundown towns in which African-Americans could go in and work from 9 to 5 and just have to be out of the town once the 5:00 whistle blew. And then there were other, more severe sundown towns where African-Americans were just not allowed to set foot at all, no matter what time of day. And the Civil Rights Act of 1968 made sundown towns illegal, it made illegal the practice of redlining, in which the federal government withheld money to go to FHA loans in specific neighborhoods that were African American. So once the Civil Rights Act of 1968 makes the worst aspects of discrimination against African-Americans and housing illegal, that opens up all sorts of neighborhoods in which African-Americans are finally able to tap into greater wealth and resources of a higher quality.
Lee: And even though the federal government made those measures to open things up more to Black people to move into suburbs, they still faced a great deal of resistance, correct?
Lehman: Yes. That's right. One of the things that African-Americans faced when moving into these segregated neighborhoods was white flight. There were European Americans who decided that they needed to move to another suburb, one in which they believed that they would have their property values protected because they believe that if a neighborhood became desegregated, no matter how many African-Americans moved in, then the property value of a house in that neighborhood would plummet.
Lee: What dynamics were at play? What was the racial climate like and how were we received?
Lehman: It depended on the communities. There were some that were either indifferent or perhaps even somewhat welcoming to their new African-American neighbors. Worst case scenarios would be outright hostility and violence. And perhaps the most infamous case of this doesn't even have to do so much with people moving into a neighborhood but just with the issue of bussing in 1974, in Boston, and this was not even about people moving into each other's neighborhoods, but just going to different neighborhood schools. And that was enough for students, and sometimes their parents be throwing bricks at kids that were on buses and so forth. So it it depended on the location, but it could, it could get very violent.
Lehman: African-American parents had to deal with the issue of safety, because moving into this suburb, they had to figure out, where can we take our children in town besides where we have to take them, the school, where they can be relatively safe. And so it would take parents a while to try to figure out who could they trust in town to be sociable, if not pleasant, around them and around their children. And who can they go to if they need some kind of respite as well, especially other African-Americans who have paved the way.
Looking back now, I’m realizing how much of a culture shock it must have been for my dad. First, he came from a totally different culture in Alabama– to icy cold Minnesota. And then, from a city with a relatively healthy Black population into a one of the whitest places in America. Though my dad was friendly and kind to everybody, it didn’t matter the race, he was hard-wired to innately distrust white people, and now he was moving his young family to a place that was basically Scandinavia 2.0.
My family was part of an organization called Jack & Jill of America, which is basically a national group of Black mothers working for the betterment of Black children. And when I was a teenager, I became the teen president of Jack & Jill’s Midwest region, so I became friends with Black kids from all of the country – and it was my first time visiting and knowing Black families who lived in suburbs that were largely Black….just outside of Detroit and Chicago and Philly. And I used to feel so happy for my friends from those places, because they got to live where they wanted to without having to sacrifice all the good music and all of the Black culture that we had to leave Maplewood to get. They used to have to send me the house music mixes from their cities because the signal of the Black radio station in Minneapolis didn’t reach Maplewood. That’s how white it was.
Lee: Can you explain the similarities and differences between the experiences of Blacks who moved to largely white suburbs, as opposed to those who moved into the suburbs that had more Blacks?
Lehman: Well, certainly when you had – when there were African-Americans who moved into exclusively European-American suburbs, then they are the ones who are breaking the the color barrier, as it were. So they don't have any models or any previous African-American neighbors to to try to draw from, they have to set the template themselves. And they have to create the resources that other people can later use when they move in. So when you have places when or where African-Americans are moving into suburbs that have an African-American population, however small, then they can at least network with each other, they can pool their resources, and they can figure out ways in which they can cope with living in this community, where there are not a whole lot of people who look like them, but at least there are a few.
Lee: Yes, and that was our experience. You know, we, my parents, I told you my parents purchased two homes before they turned 30. The first home was in a predominantly white area, and the next home was in this, still in a very white community, but in our little enclave there were more black people. There was some black families who had purchased homes in that area, and there was a lot of collaboration and a lot of camaraderie between us, and we looked out for each other. So I definitely see that as something that I look fondly on as a matter of fact, because it was really hard and it would have been a lot harder without the other black people who lived in our midst. And obviously we read a lot about the Little Rock Nine and Ruby Bridges and the hyper visible, more iconic black symbols, symbols of integration in the South. But my own experience informs me that there were thousands of black kids integrating schools and communities across the nation, and many of them, like me and my sisters and my friends. You know, we didn't have a lot of visibility, but we were experiencing racial vitriol and hate speech every single day almost, without the benefit of a police escort or a National Guard troop behind us. We had to figure it out. And at times it could be very disillusioning for us and also for our parents.
I think it’s noteworthy and really quite fascinating that Professor Lehman and I lived in different parts of the country but, because we were Black and living in the suburbs in this period, we had a lot of similar experiences. He gave me an academic structure to the lived experiences of my family and many others, across the United States.
I call my generation the integration generation. There’s a lot that goes into that term, but one attribute of this group I’ve defined is that we were among the first Black children to integrate America’s suburbs, which, for many of us, was a major step forward for us and our families. But we also faced the racist backlash of being the first. And that backlash was quite often fierce. We were constantly tested, and if we wanted to be successful in Maplewood and in our lives after, we had to constantly be thinking three and four steps ahead of everyone around us. I recently sat down with three Black men from Maplewood who went to the same high school as me, but at different time periods. There were about four or five years between me and them – older and younger – and we didn’t have precisely the same experience, but, like most Black people in suburbs like Maplewood, we all knew each other and our paths did cross. But what’s funny is, even when our paths weren’t crossing, when we compare notes, we finish each other’s sentences. It was therapeutic for me to sit down with these brothers – not just to validate each other's experiences but also to figure out how to process it all these years later, and to know I wasn’t alone.
DiAndre Hodges went to high school with my sister Tiffany. He was several years younger than me, so we weren’t in high school at the same time. He moved to Maplewood from St Paul and he remembers how different Maplewood was, as soon as he stepped his first foot inside the city limits.
DiAndre Hodges: I moved to Maplewood ‘86. My sixth grade year. Coming from actually Oakdale.
Lee Hawkins: So, John Glenn.
DiAndre Hodges: So, yeah, went to John Glenn. My first year there. I think maybe the second half of the year is when everything started kicking off.
Lee Hawkins: Right, okay.
DiAndre Hodges: So moving there, we're thinking, okay, life is, you know, cool. But it was a culture shock.I'm young, so I don't see the racism until I get to, my sixth grade year at John Glenn, second half of the season, second half of the year n-word started coming out. I didn't know what that word was. Real talk. I didn't know what [n-word] was, so I'm being called [n-word ] and I'm not understanding it. So when I'm going home explaining to my mom, okay, I'm being called [n-word ]. What is that? So now my dad from Mississippi, he sat me down. He's explaining it. He's like, “There's racism.” Um, Dad, I don't know what it is, but I know I'm being called [n-word].
Marcel Duke: It seems like it changed so dramatically, even though I have the same stories.
That’s Marcel Duke. I knew him because he lived next door to us, and we literally grew up playing kickball, baseball, and hide and seek with Marcel and his sister. They were some of our day ones. And, you know, even though life moves on and everybody goes in separate directions once they get older, you never forget those people. I love those people, because they, well, they’re my people.
Marcel Duke: .. like, Mark Haynes and I.
Lee Hawkins: Yeah, tell me.
Marcel Duke: That's my partner, ace boom. I mean, we did everything together and we'd always walk home on County Road B and my dad would say, “You got to be careful on that road. You got to be careful on that road.” Well, you got called the n-word constantly walking down that street. You know, then cars would slow down and sometimes we’d look at each other, take off running, whatever. And then this particular night we're walking home, it's dusk, and my dad worked for the phone company, and he ran the motor pool downtown Saint Paul. He called it ma belle. And, so he would always take me down there and teach me about cars and stuff because he used to own a garage down on University, and, so, I got good at looking at cars, and I'd always challenge myself to could I figure them out and get the license plate number? So we got called those names so much I used to just okay, everyone that would say that I’d look at the license plate number, look at the license plate number. So this particular we're walking down County Road B and then we go split in the middle. And then he'll go back home. And then I'll you know, right in front of John Glenn. Then I keep walking. Then he'd go back home and we'd take off running and sometimes. And so we hear the n-word, and then we look back and the car does a U-turn. Up by the football fields, by the football field at John Glenn. And then he does a U-turn right there at the right turn. So he dips in, comes back. And so me and Mark are looking at each other. Well, they punch it and then they throw beer bottles. And for some reason we, we jumped on the ground. I want to say Mark got hit in the back with one. So we dealt– we dove on the, in the grass and that was the first time really somebody really threw something like that and really like like they were going to get us, you know, usually they just keep driving N N, N, N [n-word], you know. Right. And then you just like, dang, you know, and you have to go home and talk about it amongst your family and stuff. Right. So this particular day, it just so happened when I jumped on the ground and I look over and Mark, I look back at the car and the car’s stopped, I look at the car. I know the year and the license plate number. And then it, we took off running and they drove off.
So I run in the front door. They're playing spades. I run up, he's like “what's up, what's up?” So he, everybody gets up from the dining room table and walks to the front door. I see the car go u left up the hill, big hill up John Glenn on the on the on the west side. there. So, my dad said what happened? So I said, they threw these bottles and they hit Mark and Mark ran home. My dad would always say, did you get the license plate number? I said yes. And so I say it to my dad. They go to playing cards or whatever, and I wouldn't leave the front stairs. And in my mind, being a young person, I just kept saying, the car is going to have to come back. They live around here. Yeah, but in my young mind, I'm just thinking that I'm just like, well, they're going to come… County Road B is the main drag.
DiAndre Hodges: Yeah, it's gonna come back.
Marcel Duke: And so it's going to come back.
Marcel Duke: True story. A car is coming back down the hill, way up there, and I'm sitting on the stairs, it's probably 2 or 3 hours later. I run in the house. My dad said, what's up? I said, dad, the car's coming down the hill towards County Road B. It’s coming down Hazelwood. And so my dad calls my brothers up. We all walk on to the front yard. The car stops at the stop sign. Puts his blinker on to take a left. The passenger calls us all the n-word. Takes a left, and a left into the apartments.
DiAndre Hodges: Into the apartments.
Crosstalk: Uh oh.
Marcel Duke: We all head over there now. Now. My chest is way out, but I'm sixth grade or right? Third, fourth, fifth. You know, we're new money.
Marcel: But my brother's...
Marcel Duke: I'm sitting there going. Oh, we talk–
Marcel Duke: So I wanna see my dad in action.We go through the lot there where the the swing sets and stuff were. So we get over there, and they are sitting on the hood of their car. So we're approaching. So the driver jumps in the car. But the other dude was a little, it was like he he wasn't going to, let's just say run or get in the car. So I, I knew my dad was carrying a pistol.
Lee Hawkins: I bet.
Marcel Duke: So I remember him putting it in his pocket, though. And I. I just remember him going over on the driver's side, and I thought he was going to strike the driver. But what he was doing is reaching in and pulling out the car keys. So even the dude covered up. But really my dad was strategic. All he did was reach in pull the keys out. Call the police. We waited a few minutes and the Maplewood police came.And treated us like S H I T.
Crosstalk: Right wow.
Crosstalk: What did you expect? Why did you do that?
Marcel Duke: Yeah, because my dad said, I want to do a citizen's arrest. And he made me carry the bottles over and everything. And I knew and I knew everything. And I saw the piece of paper I wrote down the license plate make model, color, all that. And the police acted like, just blew it off. Never took a report. Nothing. So that was our first experience with the Maplewood police.
Jason Johnson: At, at that time, a lot of the officers treated us like shit.
Marcel Duke: Yes.
Jason Johnson was the little brother of a brother and sister that Tammi and I were close to. He lived about five blocks from us, a few houses down from my maternal grandmother and across the street from one of my cousins. In other words, we’re not blood related, and we weren’t in high school at the same time, but we are family. I remember Jason being that tough little fella who used to tag along with his older brother and us, who, despite being so much younger, was never afraid to play tackle football with no pads, and wouldn’t hesitate to take the basketball right up the center to the hoop in games of 21. But when we got together as adults, he told a story I’d never heard before – one that made me sad, both that I wasn’t there to help, and that it happened at all. But I wasn’t surprised.
Jason Johnson had a scary encounter with the Maplewood police when he was just 14 or 15 years old.
Jason Johnson: DiAndre’s right there. We had some other family members with us, we was all going to the store we was all riding our bikes, and I was the last one behind everybody. Mm hmm. And but so we could see down the road an officer was coming up and he see that everybody was crossing the street. He sped up. Yeah. He said vooooooo, right? So by the time I'm getting in the middle of the street, I'm thinking. I'm thinking I'm about to get hit. I basically close my eyes. I brace for impact because that's how close the car was. It barely grazed the back of my tire. And he didn't even stop at all. It's like he was trying to. If he could hit me, he'd have been like, oh, accident, this and that. And it went right by me. It was the grace of God, the guy didn't bite me. And he he didn't slow down one time. He got to the corner, spread around. We tried to look at license plate. We're all sitting there like, Oh, man, everybody like, man, Jay, you okay? Like, they all thought I was going to get hit too.
Lee Hawkins: How old were you, Jason?
Jason Johnson: I was like. Like 14, 14, 15. And. And after that, I mean, I was so not only was I scared, but I was I would say for at least two or three days, it was hard to sleep because I was really thinking about me. Man, I can see the middle of the car, I can see the officer I mean, just the look, it was just so fast. And just as I turn my head and I'm like, man, he's about to hit me.
I remember hearing that some of the first Black folks moved to Maplewood in the 1950s.The narrative we were taught is that all the racism was concentrated in the South, but some people in Maplewood, like in many suburbs across the nation, tried to keep Black people out by using tactics like putting racial covenants in property deeds that forbade the sale of the property to anyone outside the Aryan race, and even burned crosses and left dead cats on people’s doorsteps. But that didn’t stop Black people from coming. In fact, some Black people lived close to each other, in enclaves. And from that period of the 1950s to when I was there in the 1980s, the few Black families who were there were known for our carefully manicured lawns and pristinely kept houses. I’ve heard that some white people even made up a name up for this. They called it, “the golden ghetto.”
Lee Hawkins: We were coming into a community that was really affected by Black success. A white working class, sometimes working poor.
Crosstalk: Yeah.
Lee Hawkins: Right. Community that would see all of these Black people coming in. And what was it you talked about? Cutting grass. I cut grass. You cut grass. We all cut grass. And why did we cut grass? Because our family wanted our lawns impeccable.
Marcel Duke: Yeah. Yeah.
Lee Hawkins: Remember that?
Crosstalk: Yeah.
Lee Hawkins: How all the Black people have beautiful lawns. Beautifully. carefully, manicured lawns. And a lot of that was the pride of who we were. But it was also, we don't want people to say that.
Crosstalk: Exactly.
Lee Hawkins: That the black people are lowering the property value.
Lee Hawkins: I remember when I was a kid, once I really took over the lawn, and that was really my primary responsibility, getting it to be beautiful. And then as soon as the snow would, would melt and we would get it, and all the Black people would have the sprinklers going, and chem lawn.
Crosstalk: Yeah yeah!
Lee Hawkins: You were ready to get at it, to have the dopest lawn..
Crosstalk: Yup. Yeah.
Lee Hawkins: They would drive over our lawn.
Marcel Duke: Yeah.
Lee Hawkins: And then you would go. And then there would be two tire marks.
Marcel Duke: Yeah. Yeah.
Lee Hawkins: Across the front of it. All up and down the street.
Lee Hawkins: And so then the Black people started putting rocks in front of our house all up and down Hazelwood.
Marcel Duke: Yeah we did that too.
Lee Hawkins: And then my white friends would come by and say why do you have rocks in front of your house that are that are colored the same color as your house?
Marcel Duke: Yep.
Lee Hawkins: It was the whole thing, that they – that was the only way we could stop people from driving over our lawns. Yeah. And this was circa 1970s, 1980s Maplewood, USA.
We had to be three different people in one day. We were constantly on the look out – watching our lawns, watching for the police, watching for whatever might come our way next, while also striving not to get too cynical or jaded – to still be able to trust that many of the white people in our community were not out to get us. And then, when we crossed into St. Paul’s Black community, that was a totally different experience. I brought the best version of myself to church, and probably the worst self-perception of myself when I went and hung out with some of the kids I knew from my cousins and my friends in the city who had nothing to do with the church, or at least were trying to act and be hard. We had to adapt to certain situations, while striving to be as true to our authentic selves as we could. And looking back now – wow – that was exhausting.
And what’s funny is that you could be studious, preppy, and playing the tuba or singing Fiddler on the Roof in the school play, and the chances are that if you raised your voice, a lot of the white boys were going to be afraid of you. I never understood that, but sometimes, I admit, I used it to my advantage. And I thought it was fascinating that Marcel and I had never had a conversation about that, but he said the same thing once we sat down and started reminiscing.
Marcel Duke: I would go home and talk to my parents. Why are they afraid of us? I'd always say that to my parents. Why are they always afraid of us? My brothers and sisters…They always are afraid of us. And I can't fight. I've never been in a fight before. No one inherently is born and you know how to fight. But in their eyes, they felt my brothers and sisters and me, were tough guys. We were always tough. And I'm like, I'm not tough.
I talked to them about the pressure we often felt to conform to the stereotypes that other people – Black, white and all races – imposed on us, in terms of what defined a real Black man. Studying the Slave Codes and the Black Codes of the past – the rules that governed every aspect of Black life – I now know that rules like forbidding Black folks from reading and writing were internalized by much of American society over the generations. And that, I believe, led up to this feeling that I and so many other Black boys I knew back then held, that we had to live down to these stereotypes at times, to prove how so-called Black we were. If we had only known the history back then.
Lee Hawkins [00:31:46] Let's unpack that, because I think that this is the dichotomy of of the Black male experience. You know, Du Bois talked about double consciousness and how, we have to be three different people.
Marcel Duke [00:32:00] Exactly. Yeah.
Lee Hawkins [00:32:01] On any given day. And I think that.
DiAndre Hodges [00:32:04] Even to this day, yes.
Lee Hawkins [00:32:05] When I was coming up, it was, you know, I got fed all the positive affirmation of what it meant to be a Black man at church and in the Rondo community. It was excellent. It was being a nerd. It was academics. It was all of those things. But then on the other side, it was a real nigga too. If you wanted to be a real nigga.
Marcel Duke [00:32:28] Yeah, yeah.
Lee Hawkins [00:32:28] You needed to have.
DiAndre Hodges [00:32:30] The aggression.
Lee Hawkins [00:32:31] That you needed to show that. Right? Or you weren't real. You weren't a real black person. And that came from the black community, too. And the white people. And I, a lot of times, I believe now I'm not going to say the whole Black community. I'm going to say there were a lot of Black people who were not exposed to the positive side of Blackness and then took their definition of what it mean, what it meant to be Black from racist white people that we went to school with. And so the pressure to always conform, I mean, if you were speaking proper English. Or you got an A on a paper, well, you're acting like a white boy.
Marcel Duke [00:33:11] Yeah. I got that constantly.
Lee Hawkins [00:33:13] You're not really Black.
Marcel Duke [00:33:14] Yeah. Yeah yeah.
Lee Hawkins [00:33:16] And tell me about that. Was that ever was, did you ever feel pressure to be hard? Yeah. Because you're a Black man?
Marcel Duke [00:33:24] Especially when I got older.
DiAndre Hodges [00:33:26] I'll just give an example now. At this age. Yes. A boiler tech over in south Minneapolis. So where I would work over there, it was like, right off of, Linden Franklin and all of that.
Marcel Duke [00:33:40] Right?
DiAndre Hodges [00:33:41] So over there, I'm cool with, all of my people over there. Right? But I speak proper.
Lee Hawkins [00:33:48] Right
DiAndre Hodges [00:33:49] So when I speak proper, I'm not Black enough when I'm over there and I'm just. No, I'm just as Black as you are. But I speak proper. That's the way I was raised. Yeah, but if I come out to the suburbs, I'm a threat. I'm a n-word. I speak too Black. You know what I mean? So how do you navigate around that. There is no navigating around it. Just like you just said. Now you have to be three different people. When you pick up a phone or you go to to a job interview, right? You don't have that bass in your voice when you even when you're– “Okay. Yes, I’ll come.” See how the voice changes.
Marcel Duke [00:34:23] Right.
DiAndre Hodges [00:34:23] If you take the bass out–.
Marcel Duke [00:34:25] Yes, I'll. Okay. I'll be there. Yes. Okay. What time. Yes.
DiAndre Hodges [00:34:28] And then you show up and then I'm like in Black.
Marcel Duke [00:34:31] Yeah. Right.
DiAndre Hodges [00:34:32] Well, you, you know. I'm black, Okay. Yeah. See, so then one of the things that we deal with now and, and I think when we were younger, so like the Rondo Day area area, I came from, McDonough projects. Yeah. But my, grandma Roberta, King, she stayed in the Rondo Days. So our house is one of the houses that was taken away. Yeah, when they was building the freeway. So that's how I remember that. Dealing with that side of always being over there was totally different from going back out to the suburbs. I mean, it was like two different lives. Like when you're over there, you fit in with your community of your Black folks. Yeah. But then when you go out to Maplewood now, it's the culture shock again.
Lee Hawkins [00:35:19] Right. And I used to say, we used to get built up in the Black community and then torn down in the white community.
DiAndre Hodges [00:35:24] Yes
Lee Hawkins [00:35:25] Your self esteem had to be very high. I had a lot of people who thought, “Oh he’s so arrogant, he’s so conceited.” You know, and maybe I was, because I had to be.
Marcel Duke [00:35:26] Yes.
Lee Hawkins: I had to be at a level 11 because I knew, when I walked into the school, my goal was to be the class president, they’re going to try to knock me down to a 7 or 8.
Marcel Duke [00:35:57] Yeah, 100%.
[break]
Lee Hawkins [00:41:15] But what I'm saying when you grow up in this. Yeah. You know, it was, you know, there were, there were some people who were really well off, but it was mainly a white working class community. And there was a lot of resentment with us coming in and, you know, so I was very curious about the other side. Of what was happening to these kids at home.
DiAndre Hodges [00:41:40] At their homes?
Lee Hawkins [00:41:41] Yeah. Because you knew their parents were racist, too. Right. Because you can't teach, a second grader isn't going to know what a [n-word] is unless somebody taught him that.
Marcel Duke [00:41:49] Yeah, right.
Lee Hawkins [00:46:48] I have done a little reporting into the lives of some of the kids who used to call us [n-word]. Some of them were in prison. Had parents who were in prison, later in life, because they came from a childhood trauma environment. One kid that I knew had a mother who was a heroin addict, and a father who was incarcerated, and lived with his uncle, and I didn't know why he lived with his uncle. But when I, you know, when we got older, I actually wanted to call him, to have him participate in this podcast and about the time that I was going to call him, he overdosed and died. And so you never know what people, I feel like people were threatened by us. But it wasn't just physical. It was the idea of..
Marcel Duke: Presence
Lee Hawkins: Who are these [n-word] in our community? They're taking something from us.
DiAndre Hodges [00:49:02] Even teachers would even tell you, you make a good garbage man. You make a good this. You know you won't be this, but not, you know, maybe go be a doctor or something. No, no, no. n-word, how dare you think that you're going to be a doctor?
As part of my research, I contacted Cassie Block, a woman who was the little sister of three older siblings who were around the same ages as me and my sister Tammi. She went to school with DiAndre, and they were tight. But I initially called her, because I wanted to get some insight about her brother Nick, who was my older sister’s age, two years older than me. He was known to call Black kids n-words, and it was too bad, because he really could be a nice kid. But I always sensed that he had his own struggles, though I didn’t know what. And wasn’t able to ask, because several years ago, he was killed in a motorcycle accident.
Reconnecting with these fellas and other friends from back in the day in Maplewood has been quite cleansing for me. Cassie’s corroboration of the facts that we always knew were true – but would be hard for people outside of our Maplewood experience to believe – is key. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry about this, but the truth is, the word of the white woman still carries a lot of weight in America. We can talk about how racist Maplewood was all we want, but for some people, unless a white woman comes along and vouches firsthand for what she experienced, our sharing of our experiences might just sound like a bunch of Black men complaining, saying woe is me.
Lee Hawkins [00:49:46] You know, it’s been really cleansing. It's been really cleansing to look at it. And one of the reasons I wanted you to call in was first to validate, because I think it's going to be really hard for people to accept what we're saying, you know? And so and, of course, you know, the power of the word of a white woman still carries weight in America.
Crosstalk: [00:50:08] Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Lee Hawkins [00:50:08] So we appreciate that you called in, to validate the word of the brothers right. So, but but also to bring us into the psychology of racism, you know, in, in what it's like to be on the other side. And I know that you and I spoke about some of the things that your brother was going through, that when we were.
Cassie Block: Yeah.
Lee Hawkins: You know, that it wasn't just that he was a blistering racist, that he had a lot of his own challenges that he was going through as a kid, in childhood trauma, and the role that that can play, and socialization and the way you're raised and the things you pick up on. Everybody in here said, you know, because I said that he used to call me the N-word as a kid and other Black kids. And then, but we all agreed that he changed, that he did evolve, right?
Cassie Block: [00:51:09] Right, oh for sure.
Lee Hawkins [00:51:09] I was hoping that you could tell me, you know, what is it that makes a third, fourth, fifth grader, say that to a black kid?
Cassie Block: [00:51:25] For me personally, and I'm going to assume that my brother faced the same challenge— there was no exposure, to my family, my family, my parents didn't have any Black exposure or, you know, culturally or physical or, you know, their jobs, their life. They didn't interact with folks that were Black But how do you have a perspective on what's good or what's bad if you have zero exposure, you know. It was easy for him to deflect that on, the easy, the easy target. And back then, you know, the easy target was, you know, the minorities.
Lee Hawkins [00:54:19] I think that many of the kids that we were brought up with, they were going through their own struggles.
Cassie: [00:54:36] Yeah.
Lee Hawkins: What was your brother going through, what was it like?
Cassie: [00:54:40] All of us were, were kind of poor. I mean, we, our families spent our money how we wanted to, but, so I think that's the kind of the hidden thing there is that we all were working hard. Our families are all working hard to, like, get us into a place where we thought it would be better for our family. That was the one thing we all had in common.
Lee Hawkins [00:55:30] What was. So is, was there resentment of the fact that the Black people were coming into and wanting the same thing
Cassie: [00:55:39] Yes. Absolutely. I mean, I think it was kind of like, well, how did they get that? How do and why do they. You know, why did they deserve that? And let's make ours better. You know what I mean? Like those. I mean, it it did. It became competition to a certain point. Like especially for my brother. Like, let's show them, we can do better. We are better, you know. They don't deserve the same rights as we do or whatever.
[break]
Lee Hawkins [01:01:30] There was a part of that conversation where I felt like everybody, kind of getting emotional.
DiAndre Hodges [01:02:01] Yeah.
Lee Hawkins [01:02:02] And it was no, I thought it was when she was telling the story about that, his stuff really happened. And that we needed her to cosign what we really went through.
Marcel Duke [01:02:14] Yeah. I don't believe.
Lee Hawkins [01:02:16] It. You see, that's the psychology of white supremacy, too. Is that…
DiAndre Hodges [01:02:19] Well, because this right here wouldn't have really went as far as you want it to go, right? Unless you got to see from the lens. From the other side.
Lee Hawkins [01:02:29] Right.
DiAndre Hodges [01:02:30] You know what I mean? So hearing her side of it. And to cosign what we are already talking about, what we've been through. She watched it.
Lee Hawkins [01:03:29] And to put it into context, this was a time when I mentioned prison, And, I was I want to make sure that I'm clear on saying that this was a time where disproportionately they were giving Black men unfair sentences.
Marcel Duke [01:03:44] Yes. Big time.
Lee Hawkins [01:03:44] And we were also, if you remember the song Self-Destruction.
Marcel Duke [01:03:49] Right.
Lee Hawkins [01:03:50] We were trying to help our communities, but we were also young Black men in situations where, yeah, we had to watch it in Maplewood, but we also had to watch our own people because we had friends being killed in the streets. And we did try to speak out about it. Yeah, we did try as a community to engage in activism around it, but that didn't mean that we as Black boys were ever safe. We weren't safe from the police.
DiAndre Hodges [01:04:22] No, but that was structured by, that was structured by white folks, though. When you talk about, when you look at the gangbanging. And you look at, competing or you're competing within your own culture because we're put in such a small place, with so many of us.
Lee Hawkins [01:04:41] Right.
DiAndre Hodges [01:04:42] And we're already seeing what they're doing to us. So it started to almost be groomed into us. We have to be the same way toward one another. Because if you think about it, it was always about territory with Blacks. It was all about, okay, you're this color and I'm this color. So you're fighting back and forth for this or this person got this so we over there getting it.
Lee Hawkins [01:05:03] The whole idea of haters I got a lot of it was about, people looking in the mirror and hating and.
DiAndre Hodges [01:05:09] Hating themselves.
Lee Hawkins [01:05:11] They were looking at us. They will look at another Black man, and all of a sudden, you know, you're at the mall and you're getting mean mugged because you have a nice coat on or you're wearing a chain. And now, okay, my dad used to always say, who are these [n-words] over here? Watch out. Here, put your hand in your pocket. Yeah. You know, and I hate to say it like that.
Marcel Duke [01:05:32] But it's true.
Lee Hawkins [01:05:33] But this is -Now the question is like, what would you like to see happen? Like how, how do you get around this to protect future generations of students of color?
Marcel Duke [01:10:56] I think, for my son, who's a Black boy at 16, I would say this - I'm involved. I'm an involved parent.
DiAndre Hodges [01:11:25] Yes.
Marcel Duke [01:11:26] And I want to say when, back in Maplewood my father would send my sister. He was old school like that, and I don't know why. I never really got the answers why.
Marcel Duke: Now they see me. And it's funny because my wife is white and we go to everything.
DiAndre Hodges: [01:12:46] Right?
Marcel Duke [01:12:46] And, my son is biracial. But he's still a [n-word].
DiAndre Hodges: [01:12:53] 100%. Don’t get it twisted. Still a [n-word].
Marcel Duke [01:12:59] So.. but because they see me and they know me and I'm involved, and I look at them in the face. And I don't care what you want to talk about, I can talk about that. And I'm very involved. Where I think back then my parents weren't. My older siblings were my parents, kind of, and I just, you know, I remember now that I'm married and have kids and stuff like that. I was going to change that. I'm going to be there. I'm going to be involved and they're going to see me. And what I didn't have as a child. I didn't have the confidence like that.
Lee Hawkins [01:14:28] What I love about that, Marcel, is you just highlighted a generational shift because I think that, yes, our parents did want to defend us, and they did in many cases. But on the racism piece, I feel like they didn't. I feel like they failed us in the sense that it would have taken too much, they felt, to do that because I feel like they were scared.
Marcel Duke [01:14:55] Yeah.
Lee Hawkins [01:14:55] Because of the generation that they were from. I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to talk down on them. I'm trying to say like, this was the reality, coming out of Jim Crow, Alabama, that my dad came out of, that mindset. And then your stepfather was from Mississippi. I mean, they were coming in and they didn't have what we have now because of them. We have the confidence. And now you're imparting it to your son. But was that part of it that they didn't have the confidence to stand up to these institutions?
Crosstalk: Yes. I agree.
Jason Johnson [01:15:32] I just think the history of lynching, I remember my grandmother, that's was one thing that she was always scared for us. was to get lynched. You know, be careful talking to white girls. You got to be careful for being late, because in their days, you get lynched in front of the sheriff. The sheriff was there. I mean, all those type of things, you know.
[break]
DiAndre Hodges [01:15:51] So I have two daughters and Soraya, my youngest, she goes to a predominantly white school,
Lee Hawkins [01:15:58] Do you whoop kids? Did you whoop your kids?
DiAndre Hodges [01:16:01] No. Well, I'll say, I'll say in the beginning. Right in the beginning. Probably when they were four or five.
Lee Hawkins [01:16:09] What made you change?
DiAndre Hodges [01:16:12] I found a better way. And the better way was to have conversations. And I got sick of crying after I was done whooping ‘em, because I felt like I only knew that way, but I needed to find a different way. And it had to be whenever I talk to them and I'm teaching them something, there's a question behind it. So is if I say, well, this or this or this or happened, do you understand why I'm saying this?
Lee Hawkins [01:16:55] You know I love what you're talking about. Because when I reflect on all of this in our generations, right, the difference between our generations and and the new generation, I feel like in a way, we didn't have a childhood.
DiAndre Hodges [01:17:13] Well, we always had to be in fear.
Lee Hawkins [01:17:14] Right? We had to be adults, we had to operate as adults.
Marcel Duke [01:17:16] Yes.
Lee Hawkins [01:17:17] As adults. From the time we were little kids. And I remember, not too long ago, I was at my building out east, and this, this Black woman walked in with her son, and he looked like he was maybe five, maybe five years old. And they walked up to the concierge desk, and I looked and I noticed he was holding a teddy bear. And the first thing I said to myself was, what is this kid doing holding a teddy bear?
Crosstalk [01:17:47] Right? (Laughter)
Lee Hawkins [01:17:51] How did he, how is she letting him hold a teddy bear?
Crosstalk: [01:17:52] That's kind of soft.
Lee Hawkins [01:17:53] And then I had to check myself. Yeah. And then all of a sudden I got this really great feeling and I was like, wow. You know, things are changing. He's being allowed to be a kid.
Crosstalk: [01:18:04] Yeah.
Lee Hawkins [01:18:04] He doesn't have the stress that we carried.
DiAndre Hodges [01:18:08] But the fact that you had to stop and think about that..
Lee Hawkins [01:18:12] Yeah, I had to check myself. Because our childhoods were stressful.
Crosstalk [01:18:15] Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Lee Hawkins: Am I right?
DiAndre Hodges [01:18:18] 100%. Aggressive at all times. Adult at all times.
Marcel Duke [01:18:22] I think that's the balance. As a parent, I whoop mine. I want to make that clear.
Crosstalk: (Laughter)
Marcel Duke [01:18:31] So, I believe in that. And if you ask my three boys, they would say that. But I say that to say this. We have an awesome balance, because they know every time someone meets my kids or whatever anywhere in the world we've been, right away, and this might be the sad part, but they always like, oh my God, your kids are so good. So I pride myself on them having to be a certain way with everyone in the world and me.
DiAndre Hodges [01:19:15] That comes from slavery too though, whooping our kids.
Marcel Duke [01:19:19] Yeah. And I got I got it from my dad and now my brother Andre, he has three kids. Totally different. And he has awesome kids and he's awesome.
Lee Hawkins [01:19:33] Marcel, this really quick. Do you believe that your children would be out of line and that they couldn't be reasoned with without the whoop?
Marcel Duke [01:19:44] Perhaps. But I look at it. I don't agree with a lot of the way my dad governed us, but I do feel that living in Maplewood when we moved out there, fear of him - helped me.
Marcel Duke [01:20:19] I knew that if I messed up that fear, underlining fear of my father, guided me to this day.
Lee Hawkins [01:21:19] Yeah.
Marcel Duke [01:21:20] And that's how. That's the perspective that I carried to them.
DiAndre Hodges [01:21:25] No, And I don't disagree because like I said in the before, in the beginning, I whooped my kids. But that was to put in place...
Marcel Duke [01:21:34] Yes.
DiAndre Hodges [01:21:35] Of now, the framework, the framework of now the voice comes in and I ain't got to do this no more because now they fear the conversation.
Lee Hawkins [01:21:42] I think this is a debate that the Black community is going to continue to need to have.
Crosstalk: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
DiAndre Hodges [01:21:48] And sometimes these kids need they ass whooped.
Marcel Duke [01:21:52] They didn't get a lot of whoopings. It's the fear.
Lee Hawkins [01:21:57] But I'll tell you. Let me just tell you because okay, when you go back into slavery and you see the way that the juvenile justice system after slavery even I, we found some, some opinions from cases that involve young Black boys, okay, juvenile delinquency cases. And there's one judge in I believe it was 1901. They sentenced him and then they said, but wait a minute, we've got to give him 50 lashes, because a Negro cannot be reasoned with and he only understands the lash. And so I'm not. First of all, I would never condemn a Black person who uses corporal punishment on their children because, you know, when it happened to me, I believed in it too. And you know, I know that history and, and when I couple that with the history of what I experienced as a Black boy in Maplewood, having a father who felt literally like at any given time, if a white girl says, you raped her, you raped her.
Marcel Duke [01:23:07] Yeah, yeah,
Lee Hawkins [01:23:09] We can't do anything. So I'm going to beat you so that you're not even— you’re telling a white girl you can't go to the prom. Right? And so this was the reality that I was up against and that we were, you know, we were socialized into. And so I think as we start to understand history and we start to get a little bit more distance from the brutality of our generation, and we start to allow our children and your grandchildren, when you have grandchildren, to have that kind of secure, safe childhood that we didn't have.
Lee Hawkins [01:37:15] This is so powerful. Brothers, I thank you. Thank you so much. Because what you're doing is, you know, this is a hard thing doing a podcast like this. Opening up your whole life, going through and dissecting and remembering certain things that were traumatic and also all of the good things. But the hard part is to really sit down and confront this stuff. And I feel that you all have been like a support group. I needed to hear that you all went through this and we went through it together.
Marcel Duke [01:38:09] Yeah, right.
Lee Hawkins [01:38:10] And so I wanted America to meet some of my brothers in the struggle. And my brothers in the empowerment, because that's what you are.
I left that conversation feeling proud of those brothers – of all of us – because we fought through a lot and hopefully paved the way for the Black and Brown kids who came after us in Maplewood. It was never easy, but we thrived through it as Black boys, as families, and as a community. That experience positioned us to move through society with an ease that mystifies those raised in segregated environments. America is still a patchwork of segregation, and stepping out of a homogeneous world into the unknown can be intimidating for people of all races. But for me, it was all I knew, and I learned to navigate it from a young age, much to the alarm of my parents and many around me.
I now realize that the criticism I received – being too Black or not Black enough – often stemmed from others' confusion. Our critics, both Black and white, struggled to accept that we could inhabit both spaces and still be authentically Black. Their discomfort reflected their own insecurities, not ours.
We were an anomaly many had never seen before. I knew Black people who had never interacted with anyone but other Black people and whites who had only known other whites. The latter would often turn red-faced, sweaty-handed, and clammy around Black people, unsure of what to say and afraid of saying something wrong. I am grateful to my parents for integrating us into a new community while keeping us grounded in our roots. Our involvement in the church and Black community helped us learn the intricate layers of Black and American history that our suburban schools often refused to teach.
Today, I see the advantage this gave me and feel genuine sadness for white children in places like Florida, where diversity and inclusion, and the darkest chapters of Black American history are being erased from curriculums. Our Black and Brown children must learn to navigate the mainstream world, but they also often gain exposure to their history through their own communities. White students, however, denied access to this history, will face a diverse America with little understanding of people who don't look like them, yet contributed to the lives they enjoy everyday. This is not only sad but cruel. When they enter that college classroom or corporate office and see a Black or Brown professor or CEO, they often won’t have the training that Maplewood gave me, and Diandre, Jason, and Marcel. We knew our world and theirs too. We became resilient, able to resist and protest racism unapologetically, without being broken by the struggle. Our experiences in Maplewood prepared us for the challenges and opportunities of 21st Century America. We can thank our parents — and even bigots like Elroy Stock — for that.
CREDITS
What Happened In Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It’s written, produced and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.
Our executive producer is Erica Kraus.
Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam.
Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga.
Our lead writer is Jessica Kariisa.
Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa.
This episode was sound designed and mixed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Lando.
Our fact checker is Erika Janik.
And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.
Special thanks to the O’Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou and Ziyang Fu. And also thanks to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short.
The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.
You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.
Thank you for listening.
Lee Sr: That I can't say. I don't know, man. It was just a, some kind of a stress that I had, evidently.
Lee Sr: it's hard to say how this shit went man.
Asking my dad directly about this I realized that families often repeat certain patterns and cycles from generation to generation, without understanding why or where they come from.
That four year process of interviewing my father about his upbringing in 1950-era Jim Crow Alabama shined a powerful light on why I was raised the way I was. But while I had gained a better understanding of some of the historical factors that shaped my upbringing, I still needed to understand the forces that prevented my father from breaking the cycle of belt whipping when we were kids.
Lee: But what were the stresses that you were going through?
Lee Sr: Things that I had seen my mom had to go through with people and shit and that was hard to push it. And so when I thought you guys did something, that was when I would, you know, get out of control like I did man, because that is out of control. I don't give a fuck how you put it.
It was validating to hear Dad declare that hitting children with belts was wrong, and something that he profoundly regretted, and was genuinely sorry for, because I struggled for my whole life to understand the sentiment that Black children – especially – need to be beaten, even as I accepted it. I didn’t need much more than to hear my dad acknowledge that no, we didn’t deserve it – Black kids or not.
Lee Sr: If it was up to me and the way I feel about things, I would've never done nothing like that. But I don't know how I got out of control like that. Something was back there in my life that did that and I know it.
My mom told me that there were nights that my dad came to bed and cried after those interviews. Though I never saw those tears, it doesn’t surprise me. Revisiting painful memories that led my father to try to whip us into perfection out of deep love and concern was obviously excruciating for him. Despite my belief in “honor thy mother and father” and occasionally unnecessary guilt, I didn't feel obligated to shield him from the pain he caused my sister Tiffany and me at times. I accepted that the burden of his actions was not mine to carry. Expecting a victim to accept the blame for a perpetrator's actions, fearing that a grown man might cry, just isn’t fair.
I was determined to lead my dad down the path to finally put these generational demons to rest, for both of us and for future generations of our family. If he cried, he cried. When I heard that dad cried, I saw it as a sign of empathy but not a reason to quit researching.
As children, I wept, and Tiffany wept, through the hundreds of belt whippings we received. In fact, our mother would tell us: “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to really cry about.” I now realize that perpetrators rarely recognize the extent of a victim's pain because they aren't the ones being beaten.
My father's tears didn't change the reality of what they had done to us. His crying may have meant he finally grasped that his childhood impacted mine more profoundly than my parents had ever acknowledged. Our pain stung so much more than the feeling of a belt to the behind.
Social justice activists talk so often about how violence impacts Black bodies, but my research, and my memories of my own childhood, have shown me that violence–including within the Black family and community– can also have potentially devastating effects on Black minds—especially the minds of children.
With my mental health journalism training, I now understand why I was always on edge, like my parents. They feared the world, and I feared them. Sometimes I'd go to bed fully clothed, with three layers of clothing on for extra padding, preparing for the possibility of being pulled out of bed for a forgotten chore. This made me high-strung and hard to stay calm.
Around age eight, I started blinking excessively when nervous. One Sunday in the choir stand, I couldn't stop blinking. After church, one of my Dad's friends mentioned it, "I think Lee Lee's got some kind of nervous tic." Dad dismissed it as teasing, ranting to my mom about it the whole ride home.
But his friend was right. My nervous system was firing like crazy. Though I excelled in spelling and reading, I struggled in math that year. My parents thought I was clowning in class and believed more beatings would improve my scores. They'd yell, "You're being the class clown for all those white friends of yours." They didn't realize I needed extra help from a teacher or tutor. Instead of focusing on math, I’d sit at my desk and worry about the belt whipping I could get for writing down a wrong answer, which made me blink even more.
Neither my father nor I connected my nervousness to the beatings. We saw the belt as temporary pain. But it hijacked my entire system. As an adult, I've dealt with stress, but nothing compares to the constant stress I carried as a child. I don’t know how I never developed an ulcer. Imagine an adult experiencing the unpredictability of being overpowered and whipped several times a month, then having to perform at their best the next day. That's what I went through… as an eight-year-old.
What broke my heart as a child was that my mother told me that she gave my teacher permission to hit me if she wanted to. My teacher never did, but she clearly knew I was getting the belt at home. That trend of many schools failing to protect students from violence, or even exacting violence themselves, impacted me in so many ways. One clear way was the reality that my Dad rarely if ever got hit by his parents, but he did get hit plenty of times at school, which, I believed normalized the idea of child beating in his mind at a young age.
And today, Alabama is one of seventeen states that still allow corporal punishment in K-12 public schools, with the schools mostly striking Black children and those with disabilities. In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies reported that Black boys are nearly twice as likely to be hit compared to white boys, and Black girls are struck at over three times the rate of white girls. This, all despite the fact that Black students behave similarly to white ones.
Today, hitting school children is legal and most prevalent in states where enslavement was legal. Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas represent over 70% of all corporal punishment in U.S. public schools, according to the SPLC. Children at some schools are hit nearly twice a month. Notably, during the 2015–16 school year, one Mississippi school reported 871 instances affecting 57 students, averaging 15 times per student. Another school in the same state noted 60 instances for just four students, also averaging 15 times per student.
A few years back, before my dad died, my Dad and his sister, Aunt Toopie, talked about the beatings they received at school while growing up in Jim Crow Alabama
Lee: Did they whoop the kids in school, was it a strict thing?
Lee Sr: Yeah, we got our ass kicked every time we were late, I know that.
Aunt Toopie: And stand in the corner.
Lee Sr: And when you did something in class you got your ass kicked.
Aunt Toopie: They had belts in school in them days.
Lee Sr: They had that board of education. If I was late for school, you’d go right to the principal’s office, and he’d tell your ass up about three times with that paddle, with holes in it. That paddle was a piece of oak wood, and it had varnish on it and it had holes. They had drills holes in it. It was custom made. It said board of education and he’d have you bend over and man, that thing, them holes in that thing, would leave little dots on your ass.”
Being hit at school burned a permanent memory in my dad’s brain - he normalized it when he became a father, handing down the Alabama-born anxiety to another generation, to me.
After the conversation with my dad where he apologized for whipping my sisters and me, I tried to have a similar one with my mom. But it went very differently. "We didn’t beat you,” she said. “We spanked you."
I was disappointed to hear her deny how severely she and my dad beat my sister Tiffany and me. But I also understood why she would say what she did. There’s almost a collective agreement in society that so-called spanking is supposedly lighter than a beating…kinder and gentler and never abusive or harmful. It’s much easier to stomach the narrative that there are acceptable forms of violence to use against children; even though that same violence would never be acceptable to use against an adult. Which is why I give my dad so much credit for being honest and not trying to minimize what they did.
My dad finally understood the full spectrum of damage the American whip had caused generations of our family. We often think the worst of corporal punishment are the welts and physical pain. But through my own experience and my research, I know the real pain is from the belt’s access to the victim's mind. My parents didn’t know these beatings and the mental stress of having to constantly look out for danger all around me, made it harder for me to focus, triggering my nervous system into fight or flight, causing bouts of anxiety that followed me into adulthood. This led me to find experts on the effects of corporal punishment on the body and mind.
Dr. Garner: The thing that separates kids from adults is they're still under construction. Their brain, their physiology is still under development. And so what happens in childhood doesn't stay in childhood.
That’s Doctor Andrew Garner. He’s a primary care pediatrician in Ohio who has studied the effect of corporal punishment on children. I wanted to talk to Dr. Garner to understand the physiological changes that occur in children when they are hit. Whether you hit them with your hand, a belt, a paddle, regardless of how hard or how often you hit them, it’s all corporal punishment.
I'm someone who refuses to get nostalgic about the beatings of my childhood. I would never high-five my friends and say I needed it, I loved it, or credit it as the reason I stayed out of trouble or became a productive citizen. It’s not funny to me, mainly because it took me years to rewire my system. But I don’t want to unfairly judge people either, especially those who don’t have the information. Once I delved into history, I gained a deeper and clearer understanding of why so many people I’ve known—especially Black and white people from the South—have often celebrated and even laughed fondly about the use of corporal punishment. Many have no idea that, when we really look closely at America’s historical foundation, hitting children is akin to setting up a system of white supremacy or a mini plantation in their living room.
Later in this episode, I speak with Professor Geoff Ward, a Professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, to discuss how corporal punishment has extended beyond the home into schools across the South, mainly the states and counties where slavery was legal and lynching was most prevalent. We talk about the institutionalized use of corporal punishment and how deeply ingrained it is in our history.
But for now, let’s get back to Dr. Garner.
The conversation mentions violence and abuse against children, sensitive listeners please take care.
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Lee: I think there are many people who believe, well, if I just hit the kid a few times on the butt with my hand, that's a spanking. If I hit a kid with a belt that's a beating, or if I don't if I hit a kid with a belt, but I don't hit them hard..as hard as the guy up the street who's hitting his kid with the extension cord, then that's not a beating.
Dr. Garner: That's all violence. Right. So, you know, corporal punishment is a negative consequence, for unwanted behavior. But that negative consequence is the use of force and is intended to cause pain or discomfort. So that's violence. So, you know, whether or not you're trying to split hairs between, a spanking or a beating, it's still the use of violence to coerce, and control and modify another person's behavior. And we know that in order to continue changing that behavior, the violence needs to escalate over time. So it's a slippery slope.
I can recognize this slippery slope in my own life. My parents started out with a few hits when I was little and over the years it escalated to something much more serious, to the point where getting hit with a leather belt for five minutes was normalized. In fact, their punishment increased to slaps across the face and attacks that were even more severe. And this was from two parents, who, like most of the parents we knew, felt like, if they truly loved their children, they needed to kick it into high gear and show us that life wasn’t going to be fair and that nobody was coming to save us, especially because we were Black. I can see how this happens.
Dr. Garner: You may think that in the short term, you're doing a good service to your child because you're trying to teach them something. But in the long run, we know the outcomes are worse. There's clear data, you know, increased risk of child abuse, because you have to eventually increase the negative stimuli to try and change the behavior. Part of the problem with corporal punishment, it's a double whammy. In addition to the anticipation, like you're saying what bad thing is going to happen to me? There's also the loss of safety, because one of the things that the the one of the ways that we buffer adversity is through relationships. And now there's, there can be a loss of trust, in the, in the relationship. And that to me is really interesting that, it's not just the, the, the fear of the pain as you were talking about. It's also the loss of trust that when is this going to happen. Where when am I safe? When am I safe?
Lee: Well, never. I was never really 100% safe in my home or outside in the world. Never. There was never a time that I felt safe. And I also feel like my parents did that by design. I don't think they wanted me to ever feel safe, because I don't think they believed that a Black person in America is ever safe. So I believe that they wanted me to feel the hyper vigilance and the hyper cautiousness that they, in the generations before them, felt because they didn't believe enough in the system of America. Another thing is that when you said you have to increase the punishment if you're going to use this system, that's exactly what happened to me. And I know my dad. I know that he…lost control and did not know what he was doing. And I think at that time he got to a point where he realized, what have I done? What have I become?
Dr. Garner: I think where we break down sometimes is trying to decide what's more important, you know, is it the connection or is it the structure? Well, they're both important. You need to have connection. So kids trust the instruction you're giving them. But the way I think about it is it's a lot easier to teach a kid what they should do than to keep from doing something you don't want them to do.
Lee: But it's also forcing us to understand that children are multiple times smaller than adults. And so we if we apply some empathy here, we have to understand that even if you're hitting a child once or twice, you're still multiple times larger than the child, and the child may not have a bruise. Or the bruise may go away. But it's really this person who's supposed to be taking care of me, who is the only thing in this world I love, and this person who is providing meals and food and shelter for me is hitting me. Oh, he's going to hit me again. But for some reason, children have a different standing in society. They're the most vulnerable in the society, but they have the least protection.
Dr. Garner: Yeah. It's crazy. The thing that separates kids from adults is they're still under construction. We know if there is significant adversity, and there aren't opportunities to turn off the body's stress response that can result in a thing called toxic stress. Right. So toxic stress is this inability to turn off the stress response. And it can literally change who we are at the behavioral, at the cellular, even at the molecular levels. We know that adversity can sort of become biologically embedded and and changing the way our genomes work.
Lee: And this is just even with just hitting a child once or twice occasionally. Right?
Dr. Garner: Absolutely. I mean, that's the point, is that we have to understand the way brains develop. Brain development is an experience driven event. It's the experiences that happen that drive brain development. And so the question is, what are those experiences in childhood, are they adverse in the sense that they're leading to expectancies of bad things and always being on edge, or are they nurturing to the extent that people get me? I have agency and things are going to be positive in the future. So those early experiences are truly foundational and they can influence the way we see ourselves and the way we see other people and the way we see our future.
For me, belt whipping taught me not to ever trust anyone, including and especially my parents. I loved them, but I never fully trusted them and rarely confided in them. And that turned me into an adult who simply refused to trust another human being. Despite the active social life I’ve always had, my childhood groomed me to be a rugged individualist, putting all my trust in God and myself. I never put even an ounce of faith in the idea that another person would not be capable of betraying or letting me down. And in relationships with girlfriends -– especially if they wronged me in any way – I developed the very unfortunate ability to be able to walk away from them and never look back and never miss them. And I often wanted to be able to be vulnerable and feel some level of paralysis or regret, but I always could just keep going.The beatings also made me perfectionistic.
My mantra became, “if you want something done right, do as much as you can by yourself, because most people will almost always fall short and disappoint.”
At a very young age, I just adopted the posture that I was on my own, and that I should not count on anyone or expect anyone to come up with a net and try to catch me if I fell. And also I also believed that you should always keep people out of your personal business, because in most cases, they’ll take your plans, your confiding in them about your most vulnerable feelings or moments, or the smallest mistakes and weaponize them to try and hurt you. And that’s how my father was. And yes, he came from a family of Jim Crow survivors and had family members murdered, but I believe a lot of this view of the world I’ve seen in my family, especially in my case, came from being beaten as children. These beatings – and yes, I have finally given myself permission to call them abuse – just wreaked havoc on my capacity to receive love without skepticism. Even now, I mean, speaking this, I’m wondering if this revelation will somehow be used against me by somebody down the line. But at least I can recognize it now. My new mantra is, “I’m free and I’m safe.” And to be fair, I’m a lot better than I used to be, and I can’t say that the skepticism hasn’t helped me a great deal – especially in the media business – but I wouldn’t wish that level of steel-heartedness on anyone.
I asked Dr. Garner to break down what happens to a child’s nervous system when they get hit or know there’s a possibility they’re about to get hit. He said there are three biological pathways.
Dr. Garner: The most simplest and the most evolutionarily, primitive is freeze, right? So you may see that the deer in the headlights type thing. Right. And so the first temptation is to freeze, if I be small and don't move, maybe the threat will go away.
The second, which you might recognize, is fight or flight.
Dr. Garner: And that's where you have a release of all kinds of biological mediators. Cortisol and epinephrine, that basically make your blood pressure high, make you ready to fight or run away. Those hormones are very useful in the short term. So if you see a bear, you can run away fast. But if that if that stress response isn't turned off through the presence of safe, stable, nurturing relationships and that constant bathing in those physiologic mediators of stress is there that results in changes. Changes at the molecular level, changes at the cellular level changes the behavior that really can change who we are. And we call that toxic stress.
The third response is to affiliate, that means our ability to collaborate with others, to seek help when there’s a threat. It’s part of the reason humans have existed so long as a species. But Tiffany and I didn’t have that support. There was no escaping the belt.
Dr. Garner: Where are my friends? Who's going to help me through this? The problem is, for a young child, the friend is the person who's beating you. So you've really sort of lost that that ability to turn off the stress response from an affiliate response. You're really stuck in flight or flight, and if you're constantly bed with those hormones, again, that's going to lead to a child who's going to be more defiant, more aggressive. Not be able to think things through, not be able to think about the broad perspective because you're. Constantly in fight or flight mode. You're constantly in survival mode instead of relational mode.
Lee: Right? Yeah. And if you can think about this to bring some empathy in here for people to understand, if you were hitting a dog and a dog who depends on you for everything, is experiencing this toxicity in this toxic environment, you can actually see a lot of times when dogs are abused because you'll go to pet them and they kind of squirm. Sometimes they might bark, sometimes they might even try to bite you. And that's because they've been abused. Children are the same, right? I mean, children can have some of the same effects that we see, in dogs, that we empathize with. Children who are treated the same way in their home. Can have that same impact.
Dr. Garner: But here's the good news. And this is the really fascinates me, is that the more we learn about the biology of adversity, the more we learn about toxic stress and how adverse experiences become biologically embedded and really affect life course trajectories. That same biology underlies how positive experiences get embedded. Right? And that that is the good news, right? So adversity is not destiny in any way, shape or form. In the last few years, there's been a really interesting thing called biobehavioral synchrony, which is a big phrase, but what it means is in those moments of magical connection that you have with another being in particularly between parent and child, there's literally an alignment of the brain waves of the autonomic functions of hormone levels and behavior. Right. And so we sort of know this intuitively that emotions can be contagious. Right? So, if a child's crying, the sibling mates are crying and specters may join an angry mob so it can go in the negative way, but can also go in a positive way, in a sense that engaged and trusted caregivers, they literally have the ability to hack in remotely and turn off the child stress response.
Dr. Garner explained that you can see this in action if you look up the still face experiment on Youtube. It’s a famous psychological study that was first conducted in 1975 by the psychologist Edward Tronick.
Dr. Garner: Basically they take a young child about a year old, and usually it's a mother, and they bring him into the laboratory and they have three two minute blocks. The first two minute block is engaging, so they're just playing back and forth. It literally they call it serve and return - the baby coos the mom responds. And it's really this biobehavioral synchrony. You can literally see it happening for you. And then they tell the mom to turn away and then turn back and to not engage for two minutes. And if you watch the video it is viscerally painful because the child noticed there's a rupture in the synchrony and does everything they can to try and get back engaged, everything they can to get back engaged.
And then they tell their mom to turn back again, and now to start to repair. And it's palpable. The children's relief immediately. Oh, we're back again. You're back again? I'm safe. You got me. The important thing is, is there repair, right? And the most recent evidence suggests that it's the latency to repair that's associated with secure attachments and distress tolerance, that ability to say the goodness is coming. We're going to get back together again. It's really, really important. And so, again, that's great news for parents. We're not going to be perfect. We're all going to make mistakes as parents. We can't always be perfectly engaged. The important thing is it's all about repair. It's the ability to come back and become back engaged and basically be saying that, child, your perspective is important to me. The relationship's important to me. And it's way more important for me to be kind than right.
Lee: Yeah. And I think that that's one of the challenges for me as part of people from the African-American community who had my experience. For me, knowing that my parents loved me and knowing that that love could be shown, but then the next minute I could be being beaten with the belt. And then they're loving me again. And then I'm beaten with the bel,t going back and forth. I do wonder…I do believe that there were there were some kind of protection outcomes that came from the love that was shown, but the unpredictability of it was, was very difficult because the relationship to violence was weird. Like it because violence was almost framed as love.
Dr. Garner: Yeah. That's one of the one of the big paradoxes, I think, of corporal punishment is that having been a victim of corporal punishment, that increases your risk of being a victim of other physical violence down the line, which is sort of counterintuitive. But I think it gets at what you were saying there is that leads to what those expectations of what love are.
And throughout my research, I found disturbing instances where enslavers used Bible verses to justify corporal punishment and enslavement. This deeply troubled me as both a Christian and a Black man. I've often heard the phrase "Spare the rod, spoil the child," which, contrary to widespread belief, isn't even in the Bible. And even still, this metaphorical use emphasizes guidance and care rather than punishment. Dr Garner’s wife is a Methodist pastor, and I talked to him about how people have often manipulated and weaponized scriptures and proverbs to justify and advance slavery, whipping, and their own agendas. As a result, generations of people have come to believe that it is moral, righteous, and holy to beat children.
Dr. Garner: I think it's very upsetting when, these scriptures are being used in a way to propagate violence, when clearly that is not what Christ's intention was. He said, bring the children to me. Bring the children to me. Right. He didn't say, bring them to me so I can whip them. Right. Said, be like a child. Be be like a child. Be empathic. Be full of wonder. Right. And somehow we sort of lost that. So, discipline, you know, comes from the Latin word to teach. Right? So it doesn't mean to punish. Right. And of course there are multiple types of punishment, which actually runs the spectrum right from, a loss of privileges, right. So, you know, if you, you lose your driver's license, if you speed too much, right, to possible incarceration and then all the way to physical harm and even even death. Right? So punishment is the, are those negative consequences. They're imposed for undesired behavior. But punishment is only one form of discipline. And the more we know about it, the more we know it's actually not as effective in the long term and actually can cause potential harm.
Lee: And what I love about this research that you've done in everything that you're sharing with us today, is that you're showing that a child's brain is being wired as we go, right, that we're creating the future adult every day when we're working with that child. What do stress toxins do to the body in terms of health?
Dr. Garner: Toxic stress, which can be precipitated by any number of different forms of adversity, is associated with basically all of the leading causes of death. Right? So if you want to look at, asthma, you want to look at cancer, do you want to look at suicide and mental health issues. You want to look at obesity. You want to look at substance abuse. Right. So I mean, there's no doubt that, when we are programmed to expect adversity, that we're going to find ways to try and cope. And so if you think about it, you know, people overeat and abuse substances and, are promiscuous for a reason. In the short term, they turn off the stress response. But in the long term, the worse health outcomes down the line. Right. And so, yeah, I mean, I think your point, though, that the brain is, is being made over time is really important, and so are the relationships. And so one way I think to try and frame all of this is affect regulation, how we handle our emotions. Because if you have an angry parent who's spanking a child, the message to the child is when you get angry, it's okay to hit right. And so, that's not what we really want for our kids in the long run. We actually want them, to learn that it's okay to have strong emotions. It's okay to be angry. It's okay to be frustrated. But when you have those emotions, what can we do with them? How can we channel them?
Dr. Garner has worked with parents and treated children as a Primary Care Pediatrician for more than two decades. He co-authored the book "Thinking Developmentally: Nurturing Wellness in Childhood to Promote Lifelong Health" and the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Policy Statement on Preventing Childhood Toxic Stress and Promoting Relational Health. As a speaker, he focuses on early brain and child development, preventing childhood toxic stress, and promoting early relational health, and he considers himself to be an advocate for all children and their families.
Lee: And what do you tell parents when they bring their children in to be treated about corporal punishment?
Dr. Garner: One, to heal any wounds that they've had as a parent? Because we've talked before, parents tend to parent the way they were parented. So, I'm going to want to know, what the stressors are in their life with, what the stressors were when they were kids. What a good question often is, what, did your parents do that you want to make sure you do for your kids? But then also, what are the things your parents did that you want to make sure you never do for your kids? As kids get older, I'm going to help them understand, that it's really not the behavior you want to focus on. That a child's behavior is always telling us there's something they need or something they want. And what we need to do is trying to interpret it and help them figure out a better way to have that behavior met. And so this starts really early, you know, with temper tantrums in 3 or 4 year olds. It's really not about the behavior. It's the emotion that’s driving the behavior. And if we can help parents understand that, then we can help parents help their child say, look, you're allowed to be angry. You're allowed to be frustrated, allowed to be disappointed. But when that happens, we're not going to yell and scream. We're going to do the things that bring us joy. We're going to try and, spend some time doing some Legos or some coloring, teach them how to cope instead of just saying stop. The problem with, with corporal punishment and all punishments is it's basically saying, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. And then the child, then in, in sort of in their own mind, thinks there's something wrong with me. Because I feel this way and the message needs to be, you're allowed to feel that way, but when you feel that way, do this instead. If the parent is able to say, I'm so sorry I lost it, I'm so sorry I used those harsh words. I'm so sorry I was demeaning. I'm going to try better and we're going to work together to build this relationship. Then that's what those kids are going to do someday, right? I mean, I tell kids that empathy is a superpower. It is an absolute superpower. Not everyone has it, but we can teach it. And when you have it that allows you to repair, that allows you to have relationships.
After speaking with Dr. Garner I want to believe that if more well-meaning parents knew hitting their children can also harm their brains and emotional health as opposed to just being temporarily painful, fewer would do it. However, in a country where hitting children is part of a centuries-long pattern of violence, and amid a system that offers the smallest people the least protection, I understand why many believe hitting children is beneficial, especially for Black children.
But now that I’m out of that situation, I do view it as abuse and a legacy of my country’s legal system and culture, and the enslavement and torture of my people.
And it’s not just in the home - in 17 states across the U.S. corporal punishment is legal in public schools. Most of these states allow educators to hit students three times in the rear with a long wooden board. And in all states except for just a few, corporal punishment is allowed in private schools.
To help me understand it more I reached out to Professor Geoff Ward at Washington University in St Louis. He’s a historical sociologist and the director of the Washington Slavery Project. Some of his work connects the dots between the history of lynching in southern states with the modern usage of corporal punishment in schools today. I’ve had a couple conversations with Professor Ward, the first time was about 2020. I spoke to him again more recently to learn more about the logic of racial violence, how it intersects with our judicial system and how we can break the cycles of racial violence.
Lee: You know, before when we talked, we talked a lot about racialized social control. Can you give us a definition, to hold on to here?
Prof. Ward: I think a good place to start would be is to recognize that we live in a racialized social system, a society where rewards are allocated along racial lines, where meaning is constructed along racial lines, things like, you know, reliability or, beauty, or intelligence, morality, are riddled with racial logic because we live in a society where race has sort of been infused in the way we relate to and understand each other, the way the society has been organized. And in that context, social control becomes racialized. And social control generally describes the definition and enforcement of norms. And social control can be informal, you know, a sideways glance or a disapproving look. But we also have systems of formal control. And that brings in the State. And our regulatory systems, our courts, our criminal legal system and so forth that are part of the system of social control. And, you know, all of that complex is racialized.
I remember reading Professor Ward’s work and being shocked by his citation of a 1901 Alabama constitutional debate over the legality of whipping prisoners, in which a county official remarked that “everybody knows the character of a Negro and knows that there is no punishment in the world that can take the place of the lash with him.” And he noted, that juvenile court records from 1930s-era North Carolina reveal that court-ordered whippings were reserved almost exclusively for Black boys and girls, given “widespread feelings among white county juvenile court judges that whipping is the most effective way of handling delinquent Negros."
Another court official noted a common diversionary practice of “sending
delinquent Black boys downstairs with a big police officer to have them
flogged” prior to release.
Prof. Ward: So this was a an example we, we used from the historical record in the article I mentioned where we examined how histories of racist violence, particularly lynching, relate to patterns of corporal punishment in contemporary public schools. Where we found that, that net of other factors, every additional lynching in the history of a county increased significantly the odds that a child would be corporally punished in a school in that county. This was after accounting for things like how, the funding of the school, the racial makeup of the school, whether it's urban or rural, how experienced the teachers are, how religiously conservative the residents of the county are, and so forth. And in that article, we used the story you're referring to to provide some context for how this relationship could come to exist. How is it that contemporary schools, likelihood of using violent strategies of school discipline has anything to do with the history of slavery or lynching in in that county? What is the story there? What are the mechanisms that connect the past to the present? And we cited that example because it speaks to the racial logic of corporal punishment, the idea that African-Americans are not fully human, are not sentient beings, can cannot be, influenced through, you know, appeals to things like morality or decency or logic, you know, white supremacism historically asserted that that Black people could not think deeply about anything. And so you and so this what this judge is saying in this case and we found numerous examples of this, judges, legislators, you know, rationalizing corporal punishment. And was saying that, you have to appeal, you have to reach, you have to address African-Americans through pain.
Lee: Yeah.
Prof. Ward: Because, because the you can't reach them through the brain.
Lee: Yes. And and what I love about your research is that you've really just blown the doors off of this and shown that the public record is full of governmental rationalizations of violence against Blacks, even after emancipation. you show that African-Americans have always been framed as warranting more violent control strategies. And this is deeply rooted in the idea that we are not fully human. Is that something that you just have seen all through your research?
Prof. Ward: Well, yeah, it is, I know it has to also be said that that, you know, racialized social systems are contested. You know, this this idea, this attempt to dehumanize African Americans, never actually fully succeeded. It resulted in a tremendous amount of oppression and pain and violence and death and so forth. But, simultaneously, you know, my research is also showing that Black communities and their allies are countering these measures. But even with respect to the juvenile justice system in my book, ‘The Black Child-Savers’ is mostly about how generations of Black women organized, beginning in the 1890s, to dismantle this Jim Crow juvenile justice system. And, they were fundamentally motivated by their own recognition that Black children and people were, in fact, fully human and fully capable of realizing the benefits of a more enlightened approach to social control. One that focused on, on child welfare and development. You know, the system that was being developed for white kids, who were not being subject as much to this, yeah, this brutality. And so they did create, you know, other kinds of institutions and practices that also have to be kept in mind as we think about the sort of how this history unfolded.
Lee: You talk about the connection between corporal punishment and the history of lynching, which is really an incredible contribution to this body of work.
Lee: Are you still seeing the trend in which, historical areas where lynching was the most prevalent tend to correspond to the amount of corporal punishment that's being done in a particular school district?
Prof. Ward: There certainly have been study after study showing that that that histories, area histories of lynching and other racialized violence, predict contemporary patterns of of conflict and violence and inequality. Things like, Black victim homicide rates today and, patterns of vote suppression and white supremacist mobilization, you know, and, white political conservativism, things like Black infant mortality or racially disparate infant mortality, differences in heart disease. I mean, all kinds of contemporary outcomes have been shown by social scientists to be associated with histories of racial violence in, in specific areas. So I would I would imagine that, you know, that that the relationships we saw with respect to corporal punishment in schools, have not suddenly gone away.
Understanding how governmental institutions have historically ensured that Black children are subjected to corporal punishment, including in schools, helps me see why my parents feared they had to use violence to protect me. They were conditioned by a system of legal white supremacy to equate violence with love. Like agents of the state, they and generations of Black parents saw violence as a necessity, convinced that nonviolent reasoning wouldn't work with a Black boy.
As a result, while my parents were opposed to police violence, they turned our living room into a whipping station, becoming indirect agents of the very police brutality our people protested. Each generation in my family had a hypervisible white police officer who symbolized the need to beat Black children. For my father’s generation, it was Birmingham's white supremacist "Commissioner of Public Safety" Bull Connor. In my generation, it was the officers who brutalized Rodney King, and epithet using Officer Mark Fuhrman from the O.J. Simpson trial. For Millennials and Gen Z, it’s Derek Chauvin, who murdered George Floyd. It felt as if my parents unconsciously partnered with America's most racist police elements to enforce violence and keep their Black son in line.
As I delved deeper, I saw similar patterns among some Black educators and religious leaders. Despite the disproportionate use of corporal punishment against Black children, many administrators and school board members advocated for its use. Legendary psychiatry professor Alvin Pouissaint once told me he once traveled to the South to lobby for the repeal of corporal punishment, only to find that Black educators and leaders were some of its most vocal proponents. One of the school board members who once adamantly advocated for corporal punishment in Mississippi was also a prominent pastor in the Black church. He was one of the many people I’d studied who used the Bible to justify their pro corporal punishment stance
Prof. Ward: I think one of the issues here, which relates to what we're talking about in terms of Black religious leaders, is there's an issue here of a kind of sovereignty where local community figures in a context of generally diminished power, economic power, political power, are holding on to a form of power that they do have, which is in the home, through the church, and saying, look, don't, let this, you know, social research fool you. And don't listen to these people who aren't from here and don't know our ways and aren't part of our church. We know what works, we've been whipped and we're fine, and listen to me, and I think there is a fair amount of, you know, manipulation on this issue that is about really about power. About holding on to power, holding onto power in community context, but also asserting power, as you mentioned, in the context of the home. In a society where, you know, there is so much humiliation and alienation, and and refusal of influence on things like, policy and practice and so forth.
We commemorated Doctor Martin Luther King Junior, and I was part of an event at my university where we specifically focused on his theme - beloved community. And, our conversation is making me think about, you know, some of the basic, you know, fundamental, tenets of this concept of beloved community, which include that we are stuck in a society marked by, you know, a chain of violence, you know, where we're just in this situation where violence is seemingly a constant. It's almost how we communicate. He talked about how our society is organized by fear and resentment and that fear, you know, the politics of fear and resentment... We for good reason often in that in that context, think about, you know, white reactionary politics. But but our conversation today is also about how fear and resentment contribute to other communities and, and their politics and that are, that are part of this larger chain of violence. If we're ever going to realize this idea of a beloved community, you know, that is a community organized by mutual understanding and universal goodwill. And King, King stressed that to get there, we'd have to reckon with these realities of how our politics of difference breed violence, breed fear and resentment. We'd have to get to a place of mutual understanding and goodwill and, and, you know, for example, to see our to see how, we have common interests in an issue like corporal punishment, whether it affects us directly or not, we have interest in creating a society where we aren't, reifying a culture of violence starting in the high chair, or assuming that there is also going to be an electric chair. How do we get to that place where we collectively disavow, violence as a means of social organization?
Lee: Geoff Ward, thank you so much. This has been powerful. And we'll keep the dialog going. But thank you for the wonderful work that you're doing. Fabulous. Keep up the good work.
Prof. Ward: Thank you. Lee, it's great to talk to you again.
Lee: All right, brother.
For years, I had an inner voice that told me, "My parents hate me." So much around us in America, from Black comedians who entertain and electrify crowds with their jokes about beating Black kids, tells us that there is often great contempt for Black children – that they hold the lowest standing in society and therefore should be violently punished with impunity. It takes a countercultural, conscious Black parent to see that every Black child deserves life, liberty, happiness, and positive reinforcement every day.
These interviews helped me understand that the first step towards breaking this toxic belief—that violence with Black children is a necessity—is recognizing that they possess bodily integrity and innate intelligence and are neither superhuman nor subhuman, even if the broader society doesn’t always see them in that light. We must be careful about internalizing the historical belief that Black children are built differently than white children and can endure more pain. The reams of science proving that corporal punishment has harmful long-term effects apply to them too. I believe that my parents and others unconsciously internalized these classically American beliefs about Black children. We have experienced every facet of America, from its deepest injustices to its greatest achievements. Because of that, it is easy to embrace the prevailing philosophies of this country that we played a heavy hand in building—we are deeply interwoven with its history and its belief system. But those who continue to advocate violence against Black children in homes and schools must reject those racist beliefs and instead embrace a new paradigm that sees and nurtures the full potential and worth of our children.
There’s a gospel song that says, “He saw the best in me when everyone else around could only see the worst in me.” We need more Black parents and communities to take the lead in seeing the best in our children. I hope that, armed with information about the generational and ongoing cycle of governmentally codified violence against our children, combined with the ever-evolving neuroscience showing that even the anticipation of being beaten can trigger the brain in ways that lead to anxiety in adulthood, more parents—Black and of all races—and school administrators will make a conscious decision to retire the hand, tree branch, belt, and wooden boards of the slavery and Jim Crow eras. We need to breathe life and affirmation into all children, ensuring they grow up with the support and validation they need to thrive, both at home and in society.
If corporal punishment was designed to protect Black children, did it really help when it came to growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood? Black kids and the American Dream - that’s the next episode of What Happened In Alabama…
CREDITS
What Happened In Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It’s written, produced and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.
Our executive producer is Erica Kraus.
Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam.
Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga.
Our lead writer is Jessica Kariisa.
Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa.
This episode was sound designed and mixed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Lando.
Our fact checker is Erika Janik.
And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.
Special thanks to the O’Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou and Ziyang Fu. And also thanks to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short.
The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.
You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.
Thank you for listening.
In past episodes you’ve heard me talk about the rules of my household growing up in Maplewood, Minnesota, and the many layers of history that get to the root of those rules. Talking with my father and other family members who lived under Jim Crow apartheid provided one piece of understanding. Learning of my white ancestry from Wales dating back to the 1600s offered another.
But we have to revisit my ancestors on both sides of enslavement, white and Black – back to the physical AND mental trauma that was experienced to really connect the dots to the tough rules that governed the household, and why my parents and some other relatives felt they needed to whip their children. Also, why so many other racial stereotypes were both imposed on us by society, and often internalized by some within our Black families and communities.
For that, we have to dig deeper into the story of my Grandma Charity, her experiences as a Black girl born enslaved and kept in bondage well into adulthood, and the rules that governed her life, both during her time of captivity and after that, under Jim Crow apartheid.
This is What Happened in Alabama: The Slave Codes.
[music up, and a beat]
I can't tell you how many thousands of hours I’ve spent digging through genealogy reports, archives and police records looking for documentation about my family. Sometimes I can do the work from my computer at home, other times, for the really specific details around my dad’s family, I’ve had to make the trip back to Alabama, to gather oral history, go to courthouses, walk through cemeteries, and drive around.
[sifting through papers]
It can be slow and tedious work. Sometimes you think you’ve found a lead that’s going to take you somewhere that you could have never imagined - but then you realize it’s a dead end. Sometimes, you get a huge rush of endorphins when you make a discovery that blows open the doors that once seemed forever closed.
One night, in 2015, I’d recently received my DNA results showing a strong connection to the white side of the Pugh family. I was sitting in my dark living room, looking into the illuminated screen of my computer at two in the morning. I’d just found the last will and testament of Jesse Pugh, a white ancestor who genealogists surmise is my great great great grandfather, from Pike County, Alabama. We met Jesse Pugh in the last episode.
The will was dated March 24, 1852. Jesse Pugh died two years later.
To his wife and children, he left hundreds of acres of land, household furnitures, plantation tools, farming animals, bushels of corn, and a number of enslaved people – all listed as “Negroes.”
As I pored over the details of the will, I came across a name I’d heard before: Charity.
I read it over again.
“Second, I give and bequeath to my son Mastin B. a Negro Girl, Charity…”
Fixating on those words,“a Negro girl, Charity” my eyes welled up.
She was left to Jesse Pugh’s son, Mastin B. Pugh.
Charity was the grandmother Uncle Ike told me and my father about on our trip to Alabama back in 1991. I remember Uncle Ike telling us about how, when Charity's son, his own father Isaac Pugh Sr., acquired his own farm, mean ol’ Grandma Charity would constantly beat Uncle Ike, my Grandma Opie, and their other siblings, right there in the field, usually because she thought they weren’t working fast enough.
Rosa: Now I'll tell you the exact word he told me, he said "that was the meanest old heifer I ever seen."
That’s my cousin, Rosa Lee Pugh-Moore, Uncle Ike’s daughter. She has few memories of her father talking about his grandmother Charity. But she says whenever he did talk about her, he always had one thing to say.
Rosa: He hated his grandma, said she was just really mean. And that's all he talked about. How mean she was and how people tried to get over on her doing things she didn't like them to do, and she would fight.
I’d heard so much about Cousin Rosa - a real Pugh matriarch. In 2018 I headed to Birmingham, Alabama to meet my sweet cousin for what I thought would be a conversation with just the two of us. I didn’t realize it was her birthday, and when I arrived, it was cousin Rosa, plus about 30 other relatives - her grandchildren, great grandchildren and even a newly born great-great grandchild.
Stepping into the home, I was surrounded by generations of family members - and they were just as excited as I was to hear what Cousin Rosa had to say. There was so much they hadn’t heard about her life - from walking for miles as part of the Montgomery bus boycott, to leaving the country in Georgiana for the big city in Birmingham, all the way back to the stories she’d heard about Grandma Charity.
Before I settled in, I kissed her cheek and sat in a chair next to her to hear as many of the stories of her life and our family as I could. That’s what some of the elders who weren’t reluctant to share stories used to do, she told me.
Rosa: And at night sit up and they tell us about the families and stuff like that. Pots of peanuts and sweet potatoes, stuff like that.
With the rest of the family close by, still celebrating her birthday, I can feel those stories passing through her childhood memories into my recorder. I feel so blessed to be here. And I realize she’s my gateway to the family in Alabama, because she’s called family members all over the country, and pushed them to talk with me. She was brave, never afraid to talk about Alabama, the good and the bad. And her knowledge went all the way back to Grandma Charity.
Lee Hawkins:So when, how old were you when you learned when you first learned about Grandma Charity?
Rosa: I guess. Oh, good gracious. I was about nine or ten like that. Something like that.
Cousin Rosa and I remember Uncle Ike saying that she hated white people
Uncle Ike: She hated white folk... And uh, and uh one time my daddy was fifteen and one of them told them get out or something and someone knocked them down and Grandma kicked them and she did all three of them yeah.
This is a recording of Uncle Ike from 1991, when my Dad and I sat down with him at his home in Georgiana, Alabama. It’s hard to hear, but he’s telling us about how a group of white men showed up at their house one day and tried to pull Grandma Charity out of the house to whip her, until she came out fighting.
Rosa: Yeah, that kind of stuff he told us. I don't know that whole story. I don't remember the whole story.
Rosa: So then she had that boy.
That boy is Isaac Pugh Sr. Uncle Ike’s father, Rosa’s grandfather, and my great grandfather
Rosa: And daddy say he was too light for Black people like him, and he was too dark for white people to like him. So he's kind of a loner.
As I listen to Cousin Rosa talk about Grandma Charity, I can’t help but think about the most obvious fact about her that eluded me for so much of my life – Grandma Charity was born enslaved. No one had ever told me that! No one had mentioned it. I only learned this that early morning in 2015, when I found Jesse Pugh's will.
As Cousin Rosa said, Uncle Ike hated his grandmother. But understanding that she was enslaved for the early part of her life - around 20 years - added a dimension to this supposedly “mean ol” woman. Just how learning more about my father’s experiences under Jim Crow added nuance to him as a man in my eyes. They both went through Alabama’s version of hell on earth. We model what we see and many of us adopt the rules and customs of the country we’re born into. America, before anything else, was founded on violence.
Knowing that, I felt skeptical about the way Grandma Charity was characterized for all those years in the family history. And once I discovered Jesse Pugh’s will I realized that she’d been simply pathologized – even by her own family– and that, like me with my father, my ancestors and elders didn’t know enough about the atrocities she’d experienced to be able to explain why she sometimes thought the way she did, and was the way she was. For the benefit of this project, for my family, and most of all, for Grandma Charity, I knew I had to learn more about what life was like for an enslaved Black woman in the mid-1800s, to add meaningful context to her story.
So, what did Grandma Charity endure? What laws and codes governed her life? To learn more, I started with a conversation with Daina Ramey Berry.
Dr.Berry: I am the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts and a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I call myself a scholar of the enslaved. Most of my time in the academy has been in archives, conducting research, and trying to find and tell stories like people like your Great Great Grandmother Charity.
Dr.Berry: A number of historians are skeptical about making connections between the past and the present. But if we trace the past decade by decade, year by year, we can see connections to contemporary America, and if you look at history as a foundation, the foundations that were laid are still what have built our houses, and we need to, we need to dismantle the parts of our history that need to be rewritten to be more inclusive, right?
I reached out to Daina Ramey Berry after I found records and research on Grandma Charity and her mother Laner. It was all words and numbers on a page and I needed more context. I don’t remember how I found her - I was knee deep in books and papers and articles at the time. But I wanted to understand more about what life was like for enslaved Black women.
LEE: What don't we know about Black women during history? What haven't people been able to pay attention to or, as I would believe, haven't always wanted to pay attention to?
Dr.Berry: I think the latter is really where I'd like to start because there are conferences over the years that I've attended with historians, my colleagues, and oftentimes scholars will say, well, Yes, Black women were exploited during slavery, but not that much.
Dr.Berry: And my question always is, have you tried to calculate it? How do you know it's not that much? What is not that much? When I look at narratives, I've looked at court records, I've looked at letters and diaries and all kinds of different documents, where enslaved girls and women are talking about sexual exploitation and abuse, physical and sexual abuse.
Dr.Berry: Mothers were teaching their daughters how to quote unquote protect their principal at a very young age. Young girls did not want their enslavers to know that they had their first menstrual cycle. And on the flip side, some women even bound their breasts up so that they didn't look like they were developing and they were maturing, um, into adulthood.
Dr.Berry: So there's a number of things that enslaved women and girls did to try to protect themselves from puberty and from signs of showing evidence of puberty, because they knew what that meant. On the flip side, enslavers were often hyper focused on women's menstrual cycle, and you might ask, well, why something so personal would they be so concerned with?
Dr.Berry: That often was because enslaved people were expensive to purchase. To purchase in the auction, you had to be quite wealthy, and the values of enslaved people were high. So if you could quote unquote grow your own enslaved people, or if natural reproduction, forced reproduction, i. e. rape, then you're gonna, you're gonna grow your plantation workforce without having to purchase somebody.
This practice of growing your own free labor is in my bloodline - and repeated for generations. Grandma Laner - Charity’s mother - was raped while enslaved. Grandma Charity - who was described as a light skinned woman - is the product.
Grandma Charity was also raped by a white man while she was held captive under enslavement, and Isaac Pugh Sr is the result. This is the so-called “white man” I saw as an image on Uncle Ike’s mantle when I visited in 1991. If I had just seen his picture without the history, I would never have known his mother was Black.
Dr.Berry: So enslaved women's bodies, their reproductive capabilities, their fertility was one of the most important aspects of what maintained and grew through the 19th century the institution of chattel slavery in the United States.
LEE: Which is inextricably tied to capitalism.
Dr.Berry: Yes.
LEE: Yes, and one of the most painful things that I've experienced in the course of doing this research was a conversation that I had with a genealogist who said, well, you know, um, how do we know that she was raped?
LEE: Maybe she was a mistress?
Dr.Berry: No.
Like other enslaved women, Grandmas Laner and Charity had no legal right to refuse sexual advances from their male enslavers - because they were property, nowhere near a relationship of equals. They were also often young girls.
The sexual abuse of young girls is shocking, yet this is a key part of maintaining the power dynamic during slavery. Ripping enslaved families apart made it easier for white slave owners and other men to prey on young girls. When she was about 14 years old, Grandma Charity was separated from her mother, Laner. Just a child, she had to adjust to a different plantation and community, and a new enslaver, alone.
Dr.Berry: Family separation was one of the most traumatic experiences that enslaved people went through. And it's something that they lived in day to day fear of, of being separated from their, from their parents, from their siblings, from any, any kin that they had, um, on their, in their proximity.
Dr.Berry: We've seen it from the perspective of a child remembering the wailing of their mother as they were pulled off and put on a wagon and the child is remaining and they hear their wailing cries of their mothers up until like a mile later or just until they can't hear it anymore.
Dr.Berry: There's extreme examples of, babies, infants being ripped from the mother's breast and being sold, literally, uh, breastfeeding mothers. There are also examples of fathers and sons standing on the auction block holding hands, you know, and just silently tears coming down their face because they know that after that day, after that moment, they won't, they most likely won't ever see each other again.
Dr.Berry: Um, there's other stories of mothers knowing that this, this stranger that's come to the, the property has asked me to put my son in his Sunday best and I, I've said this before, it's like that child was a child and didn't have really any clothes but a smock and their first set of clothings that they received was the clothing that they were going to put for the auction.
Dr.Berry: Another mother talked about braiding her daughter's hair for the last time and putting a ribbon in it, knowing. that she was preparing her for the auction and that she would no longer see her again. These were traumatic experiences and we find that the closeness of the families and the desire to be connected to a family was a survival mechanism for Black people.
Dr.Berry: And that even if you look at the evidence we have now in information wanted ads,and these advertisements are powerful testimony to Black genealogy from the perspective of the enslaved and formerly enslaved people searching for, I haven't seen my mother since I was two. I'm 40 years old now. You know, I remember her name was Laura. Her hair was shoulder length. She was wearing an apron and a, and a, and a long dress.
Dr.Berry: You know, those kinds of testimonies just show the strength and the impact of the desire to connect to your family, but the impact of separation still did not push them away from trying to locate and connect with their blood relatives or kin.
In trying to connect my family tree, I found so many sources of loss.
There’s the parental loss Grandma Laner experienced with Charity, knowing almost certainly the physical brutality her daughter would face once separated from her. Two generations later, Charity’s granddaughter, and my grandmother Opie, experienced the loss of her father at age nine, after seeing him blood splattered and slumped over his horse. And then my father - Opie’s son and Charity’s great grandson - lost his mother to health inequality when he was just 12 years old. These are the building blocks of a cycle of generational loss.
So when I hear Daina Ramey Berry talk about the desire to connect to your family and the impact of separation, I get it. Genealogy is like a giant DNA puzzle that stretches across time. Until you dig, you don’t learn these things. Geneticists have data that shows that Black Americans have on average 24 percent European blood in their veins. Yet, there's a denial or an unwillingness to acknowledge how prevalent and pervasive rape was. And some of this is embedded in the laws and the codes of slavery…
Dr.Berry: We need context to understand, like you said, the contemporary connections to our current bloodlines.
Dr.Berry: And that we are, that slavery was an intimate institution. We are interlaced. We are connected whether we want to be or not, but we are connected.
LEE: Thank you so much. Thank you for this magnificent work you're doing.
Dr.Berry: Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it.
[MUSIC BEAT]
Learning more about what enslaved Black women lived through deepened my love for my strong, brave matriarch, Grandma Charity. And to think she then had to live through Jim Crow apartheid.
But I wanted to drill down even more into the specific rules that she – in Greenville in the 1800s - had to live under and follow. For that, I dug up the Alabama Slave Codes of 1852, which governed every facet of Black lives. Under the slave codes, enslaved people were property, not people. The codes were used to regulate the behavior of enslaved people and ensure their subjugation by curtailing many aspects of their lives.
Note that I didn’t say that these codes only restricted the enslaved, but ALL Black people. I discovered that one widespread myth is that the Black people who weren't in bondage were FREE.
Under the slave codes, enslaved people were property, not people.
After the abolition of slavery the Black codes picked up where the slave codes ended, and restricted the freedoms of the “free”
And then there were the restrictions of Jim Crow policies.
In states like Alabama– and the many states in the North that had their own Jim Crow rules – ALL Black people lived under laws and codes, at the country, state or national level, that curtailed their physical and emotional freedom in the United States.
As Daina Ramey Berry mentioned in our conversation some of these rules still hold us in invisible bondage and shape how we live and how for some - we parent.
For more on “the rules” I spoke with Sally Hadden, a professor at Western Michigan University…
Prof.Hadden: I'm a specialist in legal and constitutional history, particularly of early America. My first book was entitled, “Slave Patrols, Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas”. And that book tracked the development of slave patrols as a legal institution from the 1600s to the 1870s.
I told Professor Hadden about my family, my white European ancestry, and the enslavement of Grandma Charity and other family members. By then, I’d studied the Slave Codes, the Black Codes, and Jim Crow, and realized that the slave codes that governed Grandma Charity’s life informed how she raised her children and grandchildren. And in many ways, the rules my dad learned while growing up under Jim Crow apartheid governed the way my parents raised me.
The whip used to punish Slave Code and Black Code violations, became the belt I often faced in the living room. But it was more than the physical. The fear of disobeying the rules added to the mental toll. Those codes also helped shape how many others– both in my family and beyond– expected me to act..it shaped the idea that I needed to stay in my place, or be punished.
Prof.Hadden: People parent the way that they experienced being a child with their own parents. It's very hard to break that cycle of parent to child. And I, I’m not a parent myself, I don’t have kids. But I see this with my brother’s children, and my sister’s children, who are all now in their 40s and have kids of their own. And it's remarkable how, to use an old phrase, how close the apple drops from the tree.
LEE: So you get it. And, and the academic term is intergenerational trauma. But I like the way you put it because, um, this is my, this was my way to show some level of graciousness to my dad when I got this history. And then for him to show me the grace of being able to go through the journey and study it with me and to say, Hey, you know what?
LEE: This should stop in our bloodline.
LEE: But one way to heal is certainly, the best way to heal, I think, is to confront it. And that's why the work that you've done is so important, because history just holds so many powerful clues, um, into how, you know, how we got to the way we are. But very few people understand the role of violence and, but the necessity in the context of the capitalism and the, you know, the system of capitalism and what we were trying to accomplish as a nation.
Prof.Hadden: A lot of people think that when they discuss slavery, what they think of is, they think of a two party relationship, a master and an enslaved person. And what I was trying to write about was, there's always a third party, and the third party is always government. It's always the state, and whether it's the, uh, at the national level, the state level, or the county level, there's this, third party.
Prof.Hadden: And the state is always the backer up of this because the state creates the laws that make it, that, that within the society of that time, legitimated the institution of slavery.
Prof.Hadden: So for the purposes of our discussion about the law, we're interested in the common law and how slave patrols were developed as legal institutions. South Carolina had the first laws on the books about, um, slave patrols and, uh, attempts by the state to control enslaved people.
LEE: So what did patrols do?
Prof.Hadden: Patrols were required by their government, either the, the local or state government or the militia, to perform surveillance and to use violence towards enslaved people. That was their job. They were responsible for going into slave cabins, to see who was there, to make sure there were no runaways.
Prof.Hadden: They looked for uh, goods that they thought slaves shouldn't have, they hunted, uh, nighttime music to its source, uh, to look for, uh, dancing groups or for religious meetings where African Americans might be in attendance.
Prof.Hadden: Their job was to effectively enforce a curfew. that would have kept every enslaved person on the farm of the master who owned them. They were effectively the government's backstop to a master to make sure that the slaves were where they were supposed to be. So they were a type of government group that used white on Black violence to achieve their ends.
The slave patrols enforced the slave codes - created by a colonial or state legislature.
Walking into the interview with Professor Hadden, I knew the Slave Codes restricted Black people’s movement, requiring written passes for travel. They forbade assembly without a white person present. It was often illegal for Black people to read or write, or for a white person to teach them to do so.
Marriage and family rights were non-existent, allowing enslavers to separate families at will. Enslaved people could not testify in court against white people; their testimonies were generally inadmissible. They were also barred from owning property, entering into contracts, or earning wages, with any income typically claimed by their enslavers. Whipping was often the punishment. In Greenville, it was usually 39 to 100 lashes for an offense. And in the case of a rebellion or insurrection, the penalty could be death.
And what was most devastating, was that I knew that some of our white family members – mainly Mastin Pugh, the man who inherited Grandma Charity from his father, Jesse – was also in charge of the enforcement of the Alabama Slave Code across Butler County. Him holding that power would have been brutal for Grandma Charity. And eventually, generations later, for me.
It made sense that my parents would be overly cautious about us kids not doing anything wrong. They policed us so the law - or those who felt empowered to police us, even without authority - wouldn’t. It all goes back to the codes and patrols.
Prof.Hadden: The very earliest laws put a requirement on ordinary individuals, uh, to have them be responsible for enforcing slave laws. The idea here was that all whites theoretically would understand that it was in their best interest to keep slaves controlled.
Prof.Hadden: Now, this kind of enforcement didn't necessarily work terribly well to ask just everybody walking around in society who's white to keep an eye on everybody who's, um, enslaved. And so, gradually, colonial legislatures switched to other systems of using patrols to say, you people are designated as individuals.
Prof.Hadden: Uh, to control slave behavior and so legislatures, um, either required the militia to carve out groups of patrollers and have them do the work or county courts turned to their tax lists and used tax lists to nominate people to serve as patrollers for three months or six months. And, and Alabama's solution was to use the militia, to have the militia be the substitute and say the militia will choose patrollers to work in rotation.
Prof.Hadden: So, the militia were ordinary people who were supposed to be self arming. That is to say, you're supposed to show up with your own, uh, rifle, your own gun, uh, with ammunition and enough shot to, um, uh, carry out orders issued by a superior commander. Um, and to do what was necessary to protect your community.
Something to highlight here: Patrolling and policing was EVERYWHERE. There was no option for Black people to escape the patroller’s whip and gun, and white men were EXPECTED to patrol - they were governmentally required to do so. There was a financial consequence if they didn’t. This was the culture and the law.
And while it may not be explicit now, we see the ways this culture of being policed versus feeling empowered to patrol plays out along racial lines.
There are countless news reports of white people calling the police on gatherings of Black people at cookouts or for watering a neighbor’s lawn. Or questioning a Black person’s right to be in a gated community - when they live there. That’s patrolling - the power of oversight.
And then you have some Black parents who continue to have “the talk” with their children, warning them of the ways to address police officers if stopped. Or telling them not to stay out after dark. Or not to gather in large groups in case it draws the wrong kind of attention. That’s self policing for preservation and to avoid white oversight.
Even though slave patrols came to an end - in theory - with the abolition of slavery, the culture remained.
Prof.Hadden: After the Civil War ends, white Southerners are afraid. There's a lot of fear about, um, the African Americans who live around them, who live in their communities, and if patrols no longer exist, um, just like slavery no longer exists, then from the perspective of white lawmakers, Who is supposed to keep African Americans in line? Who is supposed to supervise them if there are no more slave masters? What would be done to stop crime, what would be done to control African Americans?
Prof.Hadden: Southern whites in the 1860s were terrified of the possibility of race war, and they lived with that. They talked about that race war was likely to happen, and without patrols, they were sure that they would they had no way to prevent one. So the work done by patrols was divided, you could say. The work that they had done that was about surveillance, that was about stopping crime, became part of the work of police forces. Some southern cities had had police forces, but others had not, in the world when slavery still existed.
Prof.Hadden: But the other thing that happens with patrol work after 1865 is that some of the work that patrollers had done, intimidation work, becomes, uh, the, the central feature of the Ku Klux Klan, that, that's, um, that their legacy of intimidation, of, uh, race based violence, uh, very much becomes, um, part and parcel of the Klan's, um, operating uh daily operational activities. Um, the Ku Klux Klan wanted to scare African Americans in the Reconstruction South into doing what the white community wanted. They wanted African Americans to only do agricultural work, not to have schools, not to have guns, not to vote, not to organize, not to demand um, appropriate wages, and the Klan used violence or the threat of violence to get African Americans to do what they want, what they wanted, which was all of those things.
This form of control remains, but as we’ve talked about throughout the series, it’s fear based. The whip controlled the enslaved. Scare tactics and violence were used by the Ku Klux Klan. And today, corporal punishment - the threat and the practice - is still perceived by some as a way to keep children safe.
LEE: Can you tell us about the differences and similarities between the violence of the slave patrols and corporal punishment that we see in modern times in homes and schools?
Prof.Hadden: Well, the, the use of violence usually has one object in mind to get obedience, to get control. And so there's, there's the root of the similarity is if, if corporal punishment or violence has an objective of to get to control, then they spring from the same kinds of beginnings. Now, there are some key differences, obviously. Um, control as a parent might be for an immediate and a transient reason.
Prof.Hadden: Um, you know, a mother spanks a child to reinforce the idea in the child's mind that it's a bad idea to go out and chase a ball onto a road where there are lots of cars. Um, I speak on, from personal experience on that one, Lee. Um, having been on the receiving end of my mother's hand when I chased a ball out into the street.
Prof.Hadden: I think she probably lost a few years off of her life watching that happen, but she wanted to make sure that I got the message as a preschooler that I shouldn't do that again. Believe me, I remember it firmly. But control can also be about long term domination. And that's different. Um, an abusive parent that beats a child every weekend for no reason, just to reinforce the idea that the parent is bigger, um, badder, a bully, an abuser.
Prof.Hadden: Um, you know, the very threat of violence can almost be as intimidating as the actual use of violence in that sort of situation. Um, an abusive father. puts his hand on his belt and the child doesn't have to see anything more because the connection between the belt and its use on them is there. as an instrument of corporal punishment is very live.
Prof.Hadden: It's nearly as terrifying that the belt itself is almost as terrifying as, as seeing it in use. Now, of course, there are several large differences between what patrols did and the kind of, corporal punishment or violence one might experience in a home or in a school. One of the biggest is that when a patroller used, um, a rod or a whip against an enslaved person, they could be strangers to each other.
Prof.Hadden: That is to say, they might be, the patrol member might not know who the enslaved person was. The enslaved person might never have laid eyes on that patroller before that night. Um, uh, a second difference obviously is, is the racial one. That is to say, patroller is white and the enslaved person is Black. And within the family or within a school, that sort of distinction, both of those distinctions are missing.
Prof.Hadden: They're not strangers to each other. They're maybe share the same race as each other. And there are also differences of expectation. Um, we expect, or at least society teaches us to expect, kindness from our family members, from our teachers, that we're going to be nurtured or supported by them. But that may or may not be the case.
Prof.Hadden: Whereas, I don't think enslaved people ever thought that they'd see the milk of human kindness coming from a patroller. So they're bearing those differences in mind. There are some similarities, and one of the similarities is the use of an instrument of violence. whether it be a belt or a whip or a rod, um, certainly the instrument by which punishment is inflicted might look very much the same.
LEE: Yeah. And you touched on kindness and the expectation of kindness. When I was a kid, I didn't expect kindness from my parents, and the reason was, I did receive kindness from my parents, but I also received the brutality of violence, and in my community, it was stressed to me that violence was kindness, because we're protecting you from the evils of the world, we're protecting you, we're scaring you so that when you go out, you know how to act right, When you're at the mall with your friends so you don't get killed by the police or accused of stealing something you didn't steal or decide to steal something and get arrested and in the process of getting arrested, get killed or join a gang because you're, you're not being disciplined and then get killed on the streets.
LEE: And so we're doing this because we have to do this, because the society will kill you if we don't do this, if we don't instill this fear in you. And so it was a very mentally, it was a very, um, hard thing to process as a kid, because I just fundamentally did have that understanding that as a Black kid, there were a different set of rules for me.
We talked alot about how concepts and ideas are handed down through generations.
Prof.Hadden: But I can tell you that in the early 20th century, um, there was tremendous fear. Again, we're back to a period of fear in American society and fear motivates people to do very strange and dangerous things. And one of the things they were afraid of was the massive influx of immigrants that were coming to America from Southern Europe.
Prof.Hadden: Um, this was a time when, um, immigration numbers were going through the roof, nationally, and there's a backlash to that. And for some people, that backlash takes the form of joining, um, uh, political organizations, and sometimes it takes the form of joining a group like the Klan, uh, to demonstrate white supremacy against these perceived outsiders. But it's also just as much about in the 20s, you begin to see the migration, the out migration, of a large number of African Americans from the South to other parts of the country. Um, this is something that had, obviously started in the 1860s and 70s, but it accelerates in the early 20th century, and, um, people moving to Detroit, people moving to Cleveland, people moving to, um, uh, St. Louis, moving to loads of cities where there were industrial opportunities.
Prof.Hadden: Um, many of those individuals, African American individuals, moved during, uh, World War I in the late 19 teens. And what this did, it changed the, uh, population complexion of a lot of previous cities that had previously had, um, very large, uh, white, um, populations to being ones that were more racially mixed, where before more than three quarters of the African American population lived in the American South.
Prof.Hadden: When you move into the 20th century, this outward migration of African Americans to other parts of the United States meant that, in other communities, a lot of whites begin to experience fear, fear of the unknown.
And that concept – the fear of the unknown – also applied to my family and my own community. My father’s family moved from Alabama to Minnesota, but those fears of Jim Crow remained.
I thought back to my interview with my mother, in which she told me, “we didn’t know if something could happen to you, because things have happened.”
For Black parents who used the belt to keep their children in their perceived place – or even for Black people who called other Black people “acting white” for excelling in school or having friends of other races – they were paralyzed by that generational fear, which, if you really sit down and read them, are the same attitudes that the Slave Code is rooted in.
Prof.Hadden: Um, you know, violence. is something that is passed down just like a family name. And it starts with knowing our history, but then it takes action. And that kind of action, I think, is up to each individual. It can't, you can't wait around for government to do it.
It's up to the individual to act and to try to make a change. That's my own personal view.
LEE: Okay. Incredible. Thank you, Professor Hadden.
Prof.Hadden: You're so welcome, Lee.
My research into Grandma Charity's life under the brutal rule of Mastin Pugh and the Alabama Slave Code of 1852, led me to confront a painful question: When my father whipped me with that belt, hoping to mold me into an exceptionally productive Black boy who had to grow up too fast, who was really whipping me? Was it Lee Roy Hawkins Sr., the strong, omnipresent Black father who, drawing on the power of our irrepressible Black village, wanted me to achieve our wildest dreams?
Or was it Lee Roy Hawkins Sr., the great-grandson of a Black woman enslaved by Mastin Pugh, driven by the white supremacist DNA in his veins, believing he had no other choice?
For me, one of the biggest challenges was accepting that both could be true. As Americans, the same complexity that inspires and haunts the American family hung over my father and our family for generations.
To confront this generational tragedy, I had to peel back the layers of truth about the origins of this country and our family's place in it. For only then did I truly understand why so much of my upbringing was defined by rules enforced by the whip, which, for generations, was meant to keep us enslaved.
In facing this undeniable American history, I hope that I helped position us to reclaim my family’s power and to rewrite our narrative, transforming the pain inherited from “mean ol’ Grandma Charity” into a legacy of resilience, and, most importantly, liberation.
[outro music]
CREDITS
What Happened In Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It’s written, produced and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.
Our executive producer is Erica Kraus.
Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam.
Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga.
Our lead writer is Jessica Kariisa.
Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa.
This episode was sound designed and mixed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Lando.
Our fact checker is Erika Janik.
And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.
Special thanks to the O’Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou and Ziyang Fu. And also thanks to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short.
The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.
You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.
