Panther: Blueprint for Black Power is the story of the unexpected birthplace of the Black Panther, a site that changed the course of the nation. But it’s not where you might expect. Far from Oakland, the Black Panther and its principles came from just outside Selma, Alabama. Lowndes County, Alabama: a county where every single thing Black folks did was an act of rebellion. A county where an all-Black party made it to the ballot in the year 1966. A county that paved the way for revolution. The fourth season of the Murrow Award-winning Reckon Radio examines the first year the Voting Rights Act was put to the test, deep in the heart of the Jim Crow South. Pulitzer Prize finalist Roy S. Johnson and journalist Eunice Elliott tell the story of Lowndes County and the election that shaped politics - and activism - as we know it. Available on Apple, Spotify, Amazon or wherever you get your podcasts.
How did a county known as “Bloody Lowndes” become the birthplace of the Black Panther? Because the people of Lowndes met vicious, racist violence with a powerful response.
In this episode, you’ll learn more about the history of Lowndes County and just how dangerous the path to progress was for the members of the LCFO.
Below you’ll find a full transcript of the episode.
(OPENING MUSIC IN)
ARCHIVAL TOWNSPERSON 1:
Y’all going to go to the polls this poll season?
ARCHIVAL TOWNSPERSON 2:
Yeah. We’ll be on time.
ARCHIVAL TOWNSPERSON 1:
Yeah. You doing all right? All right. All right. Take some of [inaudible]. Come out November the 8th. Come out November the 8th. How you doing Miss [inaudible].
ROY S. JOHNSON, HOST:
November 8th, 1966. That’s a long time ago. And then, it’s not. It’s Election Day morning. The sun is shining and the carpool train is going strong. Viola Bradford, that intrepid reporter you met in the last episode, spends the day riding around with Stokely Carmichael. Remember, he’s the youngster from New York who came to Lowndes County, Alabama to learn. Learn how to organize, learn how to create change. Revolutionary change.
VIOLA BRADFORD, GUEST:
We went by this man’s house. He was 85 years old and blind, sitting on his porch ready for us to take him to the polls. He had never voted. His parents were slaves. And so all day long, that’s what we did from poll to poll.
JOHNSON:
Folks pull up the park in dirt lots outside the polling place. People pile out and join the line behind dozens and dozens of men and women, all of them waiting to vote.
BRADFORD:
It was a beautiful day for voting here. Men and women from 21 years of age to at least 82 were waiting at different stations so that SNCC workers could come and pick them up. Many were voting for the first time in a general election.
EUNICE ELLIOTT, HOST:
So LBJ, you may know him as President Lyndon B. Johnson. He signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 more than a year before, but now it’s being tested. America is being tested.
BRADFORD:
Stokely Carmichael rode along the highways, down rugged dirt roads and through downtown areas. He would holler, “Did you vote right?” and the Negro voters would holler back, “Sure did.”
JOHNSON:
Lines at the polls stretched on and on and on. They wind down porch steps through dirt parking lots, in and out of shady patches cast by the oak trees that are everywhere. In some of those lines, every single person is Black. Every single one of them lined up to vote for the first time in their lives. Every single one of them risking their homes, their livelihoods, their very lives just to vote. Now, Whites worked against this day for decades after slavery ended through reconstruction and into Jim Crow. They tried to keep Blacks powerless. Not anymore. But just who were Black folks there to vote for?
(THEME MUSIC IN)
JOHNSON:
I’m Roy S. Johnson.
ELLIOTT:
And I’m Eunice Elliott. And this is Panther, episode two.
ARCHIVAL NEWS ANCHOR:
A long anticipated freedom march from Selma to Alabama’s capital of Montgomery finally gets underway.
MARY MAYS JACKSON, GUEST:
If I died, I didn’t care because I was dying for a purpose. We were afraid, but I guess the purpose was greater than the fear.
JOHNSON:
This is Panther: Blueprint for Black Power from Reckon Radio.
ELLIOTT:
This is the seldom told story of one of the most famous and notorious organizations in the Black Power Movement and its origins in Lowndes County, Alabama.
FANNIE LOU HAMER:
Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave?
LILLIAN MCGILL, GUEST:
The one in Oakland started out ... They heard about us.
BRADFORD:
These people wanted to vote. They wanted to pull the lever for the Black Panther and then go on home, and this is what they did.
ED MOORE KING, GUEST:
We’ve come a long ways, but we got a long ways to go.
REV. AL SHARPTON:
Politicians have been trying to roll back the franchise all across the country. Voter ID, early voting, even the number of polling sites have all come under assault.
FANNIE LOU HAMER:
Because we want to live as decent human beings in America.
(THEME MUSIC OUT)
ELLIOTT:
When we last left you, Stokely Carmichael and SNCC, that’s the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, they had just arrived in Lowndes County and they had seen a slew of Black folks brave enough to be seen watching and supporting that 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery. That’s the march that helped light a fire in Washington for the passage of the Voting Rights Act. And now, they were back to find those same people in Lowndes and to organize them.
JOHNSON:
But Eunice, what exactly was it that intrigued Stokely Carmichael, that kid from New York? Let’s go back. Let’s remember just how dangerous it was for Black people in Lowndes County in 1966, how dangerous it was just to exist. Forget voting or even registering to vote. Even though eight in every 10 folks living in Lowndes were Black, those folks risked their lives just standing on the side of Highway 80. That act alone, that act of quiet defiance was enough to pique Stokely Carmichael’s interest. It was enough to tease out an idea to plant seeds that would someday birth a powerful fruit.
REGINA MOORER, GUEST:
So Lowndes County had this history right, being called Bloody Lowndes. That didn’t just fall out of the air. Lowndes County had this history of being a violent county in terms of white supremacy and white terrorism in the county.
ELLIOTT:
That was Professor Regina Moorer of Alabama State University. Now, although this was the 1960s, entitlement and supremacy, it still seeped from the dirt in Lowndes. I mean, the parents of many of these Black folks living there had been enslaved. I want you to think about that, Roy. Their parents, we’re talking about mom and dad, slaves.
JOHNSON:
I just can’t, Eunice. I just can’t. It’s too hard to think about. Let’s just keep going.
ELLIOTT:
But think about this. That also means that the parents of many of their white neighbors, they owned slaves or they at least worked on plantations as hateful, racist overseers. And so now, in the 1960s, their children did any and everything they could to keep that same hate alive.
JOANN MANTS, GUEST:
We knew that you could find yourself in a river, in a creek, on a tree limb. You could find yourself dead in every one of the places, but here in particular because of the nature of the plantation ownership and how the law was pretty much within the hands of owners of plantations in Lowndes County.
ELLIOTT:
That’s Joann Mants, the widow of SNCC organizer and longtime Lowndes County activist Bob Mants. She breathed Lowndes County’s activism.
MANTS:
You have to be very careful because where you live will determine whether or not you live or die. Because a lot of people along this County Road 23 can tell you the number of times that their homes have been shot into, how they had to have people to guard every night because marauders would shoot into their living quarters. Some people could not work within this county because if they were associated with these Freedom Riders, or with SNCC, then they could lose everything that they had. So they had to give up a lot of things in order to register to vote.
JOHNSON:
But that’s a reputation that was true in a lot of places in the South.
ELLIOTT:
You know what? We should just take a quick step back here just so we can get a better sense of those states. Now, the part of the south that we are talking about is known as the Black Belt, and that’s partially for the rich, black soil that makes the region so good for agriculture.
JOHNSON:
Agriculture, Eunice? Really? We talking about cotton. Cotton! Let’s be real now, fam. Cotton.
ELLIOTT:
Okay, perhaps. Perhaps. But it’s also called the Black Belt because of all the Black folks who still call it home today, and that’s a direct result of White plantation owners profiting off of enslaved Black labor to pick that cotton from that dirt that it’s so good for. And when those plantation owners had to free their slaves, well, Roy, you could guess that it was not pretty. The years immediately after the end of the Civil War are known as reconstruction. And in those years, when free Black folks and angry White folks were forced to coexist, the federal troops were the only things standing between them and violence.
JOHNSON:
Those federal troops facilitated some progress. There was the opening of Black schools, even the election of Black public officials in some areas. But as soon as those troops pulled out, the ex-Confederates rolled right in. They seized power and rewrote state constitutions in places like Mississippi and Alabama to make sure Black people never gained power again. And they killed and terrorized anyone who tried to stop them, Eunice.
ELLIOTT:
So reconstruction ended technically in 1877, Roy. But afterwards, at least 16 Black people were lynched, and I’m talking about just in Lowndes County. Keep in mind that others were jailed or even killed by police just on trumped-up charges, no pun intended. But countless others were beaten, brutalized, and just plain old dehumanized. And so now maybe you can understand why they call it Bloody Lowndes, and you can see why in this community, the taste of freedom was savored just a little bit more than other places. Places that, by now, were probably taking some of their freedoms for granted. Freedoms that still struggle to exist in Lowndes County. Here’s Regina Moorer again.
MOORER:
This particular area was almost like the hub of Black activism for this side of the county. If you look and trace land ownership in Lowndes County, you would notice that most White landowners would concentrate on the north side of Highway 80, while Black landowners will concentrate on the south side of Highway 80. But when you get here in White Hall, you see that Black families pretty much occupied both sides of Highway 80.
JOHNSON:
White Hall is a town in Lowndes, just about halfway between Selma and Montgomery. Black land ownership there translated into action.
MOORER:
It is the only part of this stretch of Highway 80 where you have Black land ownership on both sides of the highway, so I think that helped this particular area become a safe space for activism because it wasn’t so much of the threat and intimidation that you saw in other parts of the county. And I’ve heard stories, and I don’t know the accuracy of those stories, but it traces back to the attempts of Black families to actually acquire and own land during that period of reconstruction. And so this was one of the areas where Black families were able to acquire land and pretty much hold onto it, as opposed to in some other parts of the county where they may have acquired land, but they lost it because of getting a loan or something from a bank and having their property foreclosed on.
ELLIOTT:
Highway 80 was a dividing line in a lot of places. But in Lowndes, it unified Black folks and it ignited Black activism.
JOHNSON:
For too long, Black residents there contended with threats of physical violence for demanding even basic services like clean water. Forget muttering the word “vote.” Black areas of the county had pitiful roads, porous plumbing, conditions that were borderline inhumane, all courtesy of county government, the White county government. Let Lillian McGill and Viola Bradford tell you about it.
MCGILL:
We wanted better for our kids. I had gone off to school. I went to Selma University in Selma, then I went to Carver. And see, when you get off and you learn more, you want that.
BRADFORD:
There was no plumbing. You had to use the outhouse. There was no electricity. She had oil lamps and candles and a wooden fireplace. I mean, know who lives like that? Yeah, and this is 1966.
ELLIOTT:
Now, you think about it. These days, the mantra around that kind of treatment from those in power would be what? To vote them out. Well, that option wasn’t even available to Black folks in Lowndes, Roy. I mean, not in the 1960s.
JOHNSON:
Not even close, Eunice, even though Black men had legally been eligible to vote there since 1870, Black women since 1920. Yet there was not a single, solitary, Black registered voter in Lowndes County in the early 1960s.
MANTS:
You’re talking about people who have been miseducated or not educated, and you’re working with people who are having to deal with all of these situations, trying to live, trying to exist, and moving through the Jim Crow period trying to survive. Here we have Lowndes County. From what I can understand, it’s the second poorest county in the country. So you’re talking about poor folks who are trying to register to vote. Somebody’s telling them, “If you register to vote, you can change something.” But in doing so, a lot of those folks are losing home, livelihoods, and life. So you have to make a decision as to how it is that you’re going to deal with this entire matter of trying to get these young folks that are telling you that registering to vote can get you this. But it also got me kicked off of a plantation that my generations and I have lived all my life. And so what do I do once I’m kicked off? Where do I go? So I got to figure out how will I survive through this entire process?
ELLIOTT:
Exactly. I mean, this is the kind of nonsense that the Voting Rights Act was, at least in theory, going to fix. Because voting, and even just registering to vote, it was not a simple process, at least not for Black folks. They had literacy tests that absolutely had nothing to do with literacy, poll taxes of just arbitrary amounts. And how about the jelly bean counts that obviously had nothing to do with anything and was just plain old-fashioned intimidation? Ed King was a teacher in Lowndes County back in the 1960s and he experienced all three.
KING:
When we first tried to get ready to vote, they was using that literacy test. In other words, the only one that they were going to let vote was one that would take that literacy test and pass, which would be a small number. I took it. I don’t know whether I passed it or not, but the man that was registering me was Mr. Goldson and he was teasing me. He said, “You are one of the teachers in the county and if you don’t pass this test, I’m going to report you to the superintendent,” and he kind of teed me off. And I told him, I said, “Mr. Goldson.” I said, “If I don’t pass this test, I’ll be back here every day that you all give the test until I pass it.” But the next week, I got a letter that said that passed it. I don’t know whether I did or not.
MANTS:
Each literacy test would pretty much be different from the next one. You never knew exactly what literacy test questions you would be asked. How many bubbles are in a box of washing powder? How many seeds are in a watermelon?
JOHNSON:
The questions Joann Mants remembers make discrimination as plain as the Black Belt’s dark earth. How many seeds in a watermelon? Really, Eunice? On top of that, whites closed everything down in the part of town where people could register. Closed it down in hopes Black folks would get too hungry, too thirsty, or just too worn out to stick around.
ELLIOTT:
And I’m sure anybody listening in Georgia might feel like that’s just a little familiar, huh?
JOHNSON:
You right. You right. You right.
ELLIOTT:
Okay. But you know what? We’ll come to that later on. But for now, let’s get back to Lillian McGill. She had a hard time getting registered to vote too.
MANTS:
The days we went to register, the stores would close up and we couldn’t even get a soda. The jailhouse was next door to where we registered. They wouldn’t even let us get water out there from the faucet outside of the jail. They cut the water off. So we started fixing food like you’re going to take out to a church picnic, and everybody come in and started going to Montgomery or Selma and getting sodas and water and bringing it back and putting it in with ice. And then they would feed anybody coming by who wanted to register and you stay all day. When you get there, you stay all day till the registration was open.
JOHNSON:
The whole system was rigged. But the only way to change it, even more than a year after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, was in the voting booth. Hello, SNCC.
ELLIOTT:
But SNCC’s field organizers weren’t the first activists on the scene. More on that when Panther returns.
Now, it’s still important, though, to point out that SNCC wasn’t really starting from scratch in Lowndes, because there were already folks there doing the work, and they were doing the work in face of possibly finding themselves hanging from a tree limb. It was that dangerous. And the laws? They were pretty much useless.
MANTS:
We were tired. And sick and tired of being tired, so they decided then that they would get together and organize so they would have a unit rather than everybody trying to do something on their own.
ELLIOTT:
The White folks in power, they were pulling every trick in the book they could to keep Black Alabamians out. And Roy, you may or may not find this hard to believe, but the state of Alabama went so far as to ban the NAACP.
JOHNSON:
Very easy to believe, Eunice. Very easy to believe.
PASTOR AARON MCCALL, GUEST:
If I was to choose a hero for the movement here in Lowndes County, it would be John Hulett.
JOHNSON:
Okay, Eunice, let’s introduce our listeners to John Hulett. Pastor Aaron McCall and Ed King, they remember him real well.
MCCALL:
He moved back here with his family a few years before the movement started and he started talking to various people about doing something to change the political economy here in Lowndes County. And when Stoke and them showed up, he was already working in the community trying to get people registered to vote and stuff like that because he had been a part of the Jefferson County Freedom Movement there in Birmingham. And so he brought those same ideas and stuff here, and they took on the establishment here.
KING:
They decided they wanted to set up an organization in Lowndes County, and they named it the Lowndes County Christian Movement. It was organized at a social club.
JOHNSON:
It started with 27, but grew. The group went door to door. Lillian McGill vividly remembers working to recruit her neighbors.
MCGILL:
We had organized, but we would go around and talk about what we had planned and how we would do. There were people who didn’t even want us at their house because they feared. There were people who feared that if you come to their house, their job would be in jeopardy and their kids was in jeopardy. You were there for a lot of things. First place, you needed to get them registered hopefully. Next place, you needed to know if they had children. We wanted to integrate the school system. We wanted them to bring them out those one rooms. Because see, they had a lot of one-room schools or one teacher is in there, and she’d have 40 or 50 kids and she’s teaching six different grades with all the different classes. Well, you know that’s not going to be right.
ELLIOTT:
They called themselves the Lowndes County Christian Movement, and groups like this popped up all around the state to get around the state’s ban of the NAACP, and they also had a list of priorities. Simple things like more resources for schools, plumbing and electricity, more equitable living conditions. But the first step was them being able to just register to vote, being able to have a say in who would be making the decisions affecting their lives.
JOHNSON:
So it’s now March 1965. We’ve got a cadre of Blacks in Lowndes beginning to advocate for themselves, something that could cost them their lives. We’ve got SNCC, a national committee of organizers, whose primary mission is to register and empower Black voters. For both groups, this next election is vital. Vital because it will test the realness of the Voting Rights Act.
ELLIOTT:
And it’s possibly transformative, potentially changing the faces of elected officials in Lowndes County. Stokely Carmichael, SNCC’s rising star, was all over that.
MOORER:
Because Stokely Carmichael came here to organize residents around the message that all politics are local. You can look at what’s happening at the state level and even the federal level, but if you really want to realize your full potential and your full power when it comes to politics, focus on your county government.
ELLIOTT:
He sought a particular route to improving living conditions for Black Southerners, and his message was to take over the county courthouse, and he had an idea of what that could look like.
JOHNSON:
Now let’s pan west to our neighbors in Mississippi. In April 1964, just about a year before the march to Montgomery, Black organizers in that state got similarly fed up with the racist BS. There, political power and White power slept in the same bed. Everybody else, they slept on the floor. The state’s entire delegation to the Democratic National Convention was white. Let’s just be real, Eunice. Mississippi Democrats were segregationists.
ELLIOTT:
Roy, as were most southern Democrats in the 1960s.
JOHNSON:
Yeah, you right. You right.
ELLIOTT:
George Wallace, he was a Democrat. Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. Yeah, that George Wallace. They were called Dixiecrats. As you can see, that was a nod to their Confederate roots. In Mississippi, SNCC tried something new. They founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, or MFDP, and it was a new political party and it was open to everyone regardless of race. And it was an effort to rally more Black voters to register while also challenging the legitimacy of this all-White, Democratic Party. In 1964, the MFDP sought recognition from the National Democratic Party at its convention in Atlantic City.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY:
I first want to thank all of you, delegates to the Democratic National Convention and the supporters of the Democratic Party.
ELLIOTT:
The MFDP wanted recognition of the new party itself, but also of the racists and exclusionary practices of the traditional Democratic Party in Mississippi.
JOHNSON:
Now one of the main voices behind this push was Fannie Lou Hamer. You know her name even if you don’t know exactly why. Fannie Lou was born and raised in the Mississippi Delta. When SNCC came to the Delta in the early 1960s, she attended one of their meetings. She was just curious. Here’s Terry Cannon, one of SNCC’s few white field secretaries at that time.
TERRY CANNON, GUEST:
I mean, Fannie Lou Hamer didn’t know that Black people had the right to vote when SNCC first got in contact with her. She thought it was illegal or something.
ELLIOTT:
So after she learned that she was able to vote, oh, Fannie Lou registered as soon as she could. But then, she was thrown out of house and home, off the plantation she had lived and worked on for 18 years. She was beaten. And Roy, she was involuntarily sterilized.
JOHNSON:
Man.
ELLIOTT:
All of this just because she tried to access the ballot box. Now her notoriety, the reason why you have heard her name, is because of her subsequent work with SNCC, work for which she was arrested and beaten. Violence she turned into a powerful demand for change, the kind of change Stokely Carmichael wanted to see in America. She and others made the trek to New Jersey to the Democratic National Convention, and she implored the White delegates there to stand with them and to reject Dixiecrat racism.
FANNIE LOU HAMER:
I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave? Where we have to speak with our telephones off of the hook because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America? Thank you.
JOHNSON:
Unfortunately, Eunice, that powerful speech just didn’t work. The all-White Mississippi delegation was allowed to stand.
CANNON:
That was such a depressing, terrible defeat and demoralizing to many people. It was really the recognition that the Black Liberation Movement could no longer depend on white liberals for its support.
JOHNSON:
This happened as Stokely began to rise within SNCC.
ELLIOTT:
Now Roy, this sounds to me like a moment of reckoning, or maybe it was a moment of realization. Because think about it. The system was not broken. It actually was working exactly as it was intended to, to keep Black folks out of power and out of the voting booths so they couldn’t vote for their own. For our own.
JOHNSON:
Boom, Eunice, you nailed it. For Stokely, what happened in New Jersey clenched it. So yes, thank God for Mississippi. It helped one young organizer realize that relying on White folks and their systems for change was fruitless. He wanted Blacks to build their own systems to create their own change.
MOORER:
And I think I would be remiss as a professor at an HBCU to not mention the HBCU legacy that influenced his work here in Lowndes County because we know SNCC was started at Shaw University, a historical Black college started by Ella Baker, and Stokely Carmichael was a graduate of Howard University. So I think that the education that he got at Howard, we saw that manifest in his organizing practices in Lowndes County, but he perfected what he learned in the classroom. So he had the educational or the institutional background, but he got the practical experience on the grounds here in Lowndes.
CANNON:
They knew that marching and praying and sitting in was dead. And appealing to the white liberals, appealing to the federal government, appealing to the FBI. None of that had helped. And as a matter of fact, it had, in great part, harmed and held down SNCC.
ELLIOTT:
Now this was the beginning of some tension within SNCC because not everyone in the organization saw what Stokely saw. And you also have to remember that John Lewis was SNCC’s president and he was a strict adherent to the principle of nonviolence, just like his mentor, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But Stokely Carmichael? He was about results by whatever it took by whatever worked. And nonviolent efforts to change the Democratic Party, they weren’t working at all.
MANTS:
John Lewis was also, at the time, pushing Black voters to vote for the Democratic Party. So you were starting to see a little bit of divide within the leaders of SNCC, particularly in the path that John Lewis wanted the organization to take and the path that Stokely Carmichael wanted the organization to take.
JOHNSON:
This is where Stokely was when he and a few other SNCC organizers set up in Lowndes, just after the march to Montgomery. Ed King and Lillian McGill were there. So let’s let them set the scene.
KING:
They came in during the time we was trying to get the Lowndes County Christian Movement started.
MANTS:
I’m going to remember it. Stokely Carmichael came in here the following week. He and Bob Mants and Scotty B, and some others because they came in. And the Freedom House is right down there on that road, and that’s where the SNCC workers stayed.
ELLIOTT:
And SNCC’s work throughout the county was not top-down. They were there to provide the connective tissue for true grassroots organizing, but it was bottom-up organizing.
CANNON:
So once you’ve gone in, you’ve had Freedom Schools, you’ve talked to everybody you’ve discovered, people like Fannie Lou Hamer or John Hulett. You’re not there to set up the SNCC party or the SNCC government. You’re there to get things rolling and it required an involved trust in the local people also.
JOHNSON:
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed just a few months after SNCC arrived and the Lowndes County Christian Movement got off the ground. That painted change in broad, broad strokes.
MOORER:
You have these people who are now finally able to register to vote, even though we had the Voting Rights Act. And so there are these discussions about, “Okay. Now that we can vote, who do we vote for?” And so you have these discussions about, “Well, LBJ, he’s a Democrat.” But then you also have the SNCC organizers who are constantly reminding voters like, “Yeah, LBJ’s a Democrat. So is Bull Connor. So is the sheriff here in Lowndes County.” So it’s like, “Yeah, they’re Democrats. But are you sure that this is the party that you want to vote for and align yourself with?” Right? And so there’s this idea of, “How do we fully realize the power of a Black vote? And we can’t do that if we align ourselves with the Democratic Party in Alabama, which is still the party of white supremacy.” So the only viable alternative for voters here in Lowndes County was, “We’re going to start our own political party. We’re going to see how that works out.”
ELLIOTT:
That’s next time on Panther.
JOHNSON:
I can’t wait. Eunice. See you there.
MCCALL:
I mean, just think about what the panther represents. Number one, he is sleek with precision. He’s strong and he’s fierce. And then he was Black and we’re Black, and he represented us. For us, it represented freedom. He represented freedom.
(THEME MUSIC IN)
JOHNSON:
Panther is produced by Reckon Radio in partnership with Pod People. It’s hosted by me, Roy S. Johnson.
ELLIOTT:
And me, Eunice Elliot. Our executive producer is John Hammontree with additional writing, reporting, and production for Reckon by Isaiah Murtaugh, Sarah Whites-Koditshek, and R.L. Nave. Special thanks to Kelly Scott, Katie Johnson, Minda Honey, Abby Crain and Tom Bates.
JOHNSON:
And at Pod People, Anne Feuss, Alex Vikmanis, Matt Sav, Aimee Machado, Ashton Carter, Rebecca Chaisson, John Asante, and Carter Wogahn. Our theme music is composed by Jelani Akil Bauman.
ELLIOTT:
Head to Reckon.news to learn more about the events featured in today’s episode, and please make sure to rate, review, and subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcast.
(THEME MUSIC OUT)
Pod People transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a Pod People contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of Pod People’s programming is the audio record.