Radio Diaries

This episode includes topics and archival audio that some people will find disturbing.
Seventy-five years ago, on the night of May 7th, 1951, close to a thousand people gathered around the courthouse in the small town of Laurel, Mississippi. They came to witness an execution. Willie McGee was a young Black man who had been accused of raping a white woman and sentenced to death.
Six decades later, Bridgette McGee-Robinson teamed up with Radio Diaries to find the truth about what happened to her grandfather.

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From ancient myths of sea monsters lurking below to Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the ocean has long been both a source of fear and fascination. For Captain George Bond, a Navy medical officer in the 1960s, the deep sea was humanity's next frontier. Undersea agriculture, deep sea mining, and human colonies on the ocean floor made up his dream for the future. 
Today we bring you the story of the U.S. Navy's little-known experiment building homes on the ocean floor. They called it, Sealab.

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This week we're bringing you a story from our friends at History This Week, a podcast from the History Channel.
April 3, 1951. A man who escaped slavery is grabbed off the streets of Boston and thrown into a carriage. He fights back, shouting to the crowd, but it doesn’t matter. Under a new federal law, even the North isn’t safe.
The Fugitive Slave Act has turned cities like Boston into hunting grounds. Freedom seekers are being captured, and ordinary citizens are being forced to help.
But across the North, resistance is growing. In Pennsylvania, a man named William Parker is building a network to fight back. When slave catchers come to his door, that resistance explodes into violence.
How did one law push the country dramatically closer to war? And what happens when the people targeted by this law refuse to surrender?

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Last week, Leqaa Kordia, young Palestinian woman from Paterson, New Jersey, walked out of an ICE detention center in Texas. Kordia had been held for more than a year. 

Radio Diaries has been following her story and recorded Kordia while detention. Now, we bring you her first interview since her release. 

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When the Hollywood classic, Casablanca, was released in 1943, moviegoers were thrilled by the love story. Humphrey Bogart stars as the cynical owner of Rick’s Cafe, a nightclub in Morocco. Ingrid Bergman is his old flame, Ilsa, now married to Victor Laszlo, a dashing resistance leader hunted by the Nazis.
Many of the characters at Rick's Café are European refugees trying to make their way to America. What most viewers didn't know is that those characters were played by actors who themselves had recently fled the Nazis. This casting choice lent the film an authenticity that helped deliver its message: that a war far from our borders was a war worth waging.

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