March 8, 2022 • 20 mins
Paula Johnson, whom listeners heard in the podcast, is a professor at the Syracuse University College of Law, and co-director of the Cold Case Justice Initiative (CCJI). Her team at CCJI could soon begin investigating Jim Duncan's death from a legal perspective. In this extended interview, Johnson talks about how her team of student-volunteers approaches Civil Rights-era investigations, what could come next in Jim's case, and that elusive concept of closure. To continue supporting work like this, visit heraldonline.com/podcasts and consider a digital subscription.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome back to Long Shot, a production of McClatchy Studios
and I Heart Radio. I'm executive producer Davin Coburn. This
is a bonus feature for a return man, taking you
behind the scenes of a reporting process that lasted more
than three years. Having listened to the show, audiences will
know that we have far more context now for the
events of October twentieth two. It involves rates the mental
(00:25):
state of the person and a town that was scared
to death to say anything, but it's not clear we
have actual answers yet about what happened in the Lancaster
police station. They say he committed suicia, but basically as
you heard in Part eight, Paula Johnson and her team
at Syracuse University's Cold Case Justice Initiative could soon work
(00:45):
to change that, bringing legal expertise to the case. Brett
McCormick and our production team investigated as reporters. Sometimes our
training may lead us to find that something raises an
issue for us that journalists may not pick up on.
At the time of Jim Duncan's death, no outside organizations
(01:06):
investigated the shooting, and we initially reached out to Johnson
to see if her team at c c J I
might have done so more recently, Johnson told us they
hadn't and we did not collaborate with her team on
this project. But after reading the few publicly available stories
about Duncan's death, Johnson told us she too had many
questions and that her team might now begin looking into it.
(01:28):
I had the chance to speak with Johnson at length
about how her team of student volunteers approaches these investigations,
what could come next in Duncan's case, and that elusive
concept of closure. This conversation has been edited for length
and clarity. My name is Policy Johnson. I am Professor
(01:49):
of Law at Syracuse University College of Law. I am
also the director of the Cold Case Justice Initiative at
Surcus University College of Law. Our work is to assist
families and speaking information and justice and accountability for racially
(02:09):
motivated killings of their loved ones that have not been
solved and no one has been held to answer for
those crimes. When Jim Duncan died, there were a few
stories written in national publications like Jet Magazine in the
New York Times, but that was about it. What was
your reaction to reading some of those stories. It clearly
seems like they raised some questions for you the way
(02:31):
they did for us. Yes, I mean I having read
the Jet magazine piece, having looked at the New York
Times piece, you know, and just having a sense of, um,
the kinds of suspensions that are raised by this pace.
You know, there are more areas that we would want
to look into, you know, what his experiences were, what
(02:53):
his demeanor was at least relevant times. It was very
interesting to see the different accounts about what was going on,
you know, for Mr Duncan with respect to drugs, and
that needn't be you know, really here or there as
opposed to the most pivotal part of this, and that
(03:15):
is when he goes into the police station. I mean,
he's really curious to me, for instance, that he walked
in there and didn't say anything to anyone. It just
doesn't quite made sense to me. Now, I've got the
impression from what I've read that, you know, there were
some real issues, racial issues in terms of the police
(03:38):
department and the rest of the community, and so whatever
has been documented, or even those things that have not
been documented but that people would be willing to discuss.
I think those things are really critical with respect to
the black community and would appear to be a pretty
all white or largely white police force in that community.
I mean, I could go on and on about the
(03:59):
kinds of things we want to know, but that's the
sort of thing that we want to be able to
learn more about. At times in the past, C c
J I has collaborated with reporters. How do you think
journalists and lawyers approach these sorts of investigations differently? Yeah.
One of the things that you know, we would do
as an initial matter is to read everything that we
(04:22):
can get our hands on that's available in the public sphere,
that includes any reportage that has taken place, you know, print, broadcast,
you name it, and we would begin to identify a
list of people that may have some knowledge or may
have some impressions. We'd want to talk to those people.
(04:43):
But beyond that, we would UM look into any kind
of documents that may be part of the legal investigation
aspect of this, and that sometimes we will require um
certainly for your request, and you know that's something that
we would do. Now you know, we ourselves are not prosecutors,
(05:04):
and so what we try to do is put that
information in some kind of report, and if it looks
as though there was something, you know, criminal involved, then
we present that to the relevant authorities. They may be
local prosecutors, they may be federal or state prosecutors, you know,
but as attorneys we kind of speak that language and
(05:26):
understand what kinds of things would be important for them
to take that and say maybe we'll convene a grand
jury or take this at that point. But it's all
about really the comprehensiveness and the thoroughness of following every lead.
And you know, and it's something that I tell the
students all the time, and that is, don't draw conclusions
(05:48):
on things before we get as much information as we can,
because something may seem to be insignificant, but we can't
player that it's insignificance unless we have followed it, and
only then are we able to dismiss it as something
that really may have no bearing on the situation. So,
(06:11):
as lawyers, then your team would take on a family member,
in this case, a family member of Jim Duncan's as
a client. Is that right? Yeah? Generally speaking, very often
what happens is that a family member will contact us
or community member will say it's been However, many decades
and law enforcement has said one thing, We've never quite
believed that or we think that there is more to
(06:34):
be discovered about this. Can you help us? And so
we yes, we take on you know, that matter, and
we are doing that on behalf of the families, you know,
to try to help a mass as much information and
create some sort of case, you know, profile as to
what we think has happened. And by definition, your team
(06:56):
is looking into cases that are decades old. That means
paperwork and other evidence could have been destroyed, things simply
get lost over time. How do you handle that? How
does your team make a case out of evidence that
may no longer exist. Well, I mean that's the most
difficult thing with cases that are defined as cold cases.
(07:18):
When you're talking about something that's forty or more years old,
people have passed away, documents have been you know, lost
just in the process of moving. And so sometimes we
really are looking for a needle in a haystack. So
that becomes a very difficult task. It's very meticulous to
(07:39):
have to go through it. And again, as I say
to our students, sometimes you don't even know what you're
looking for, right, You simply know that you're looking for
something that suggests that it is connected to the main inquiry,
and so that process can be quite difficult. And even
if there might not be a satisfying league resolution to
(08:01):
one of your cases, is it fair to say that
family and friends just getting more clarity on what actually
happened begins to provide a little bit more closure. Yeah.
The word closure in these contexts I find to be
a very loaded term because in a number of instances,
people will ask us, why are you continuing to look
(08:23):
into these cases that are decades old? Right? Why don't you?
And by you, what is really meant is why don't
these families just move on? Right? It's been fifty years,
don't stay stuck in the past. And our response to
that is, to the extent that the families do not
(08:46):
have as much information as is possible to obtain about
what happened to their loved one, there is no moving
on right. There is is no closure because it remains
an open wool. Certainly, people go on with their lives,
(09:09):
but it does mean that there is something that has
not been determined and they want for there to be
something final about it, and that finality is a sense
of justice. If someone is responsible for taking someone else's life,
(09:31):
or for propagating a story that is not accurate, you know,
if they are shielding other people who participated and so
are responsible. The families deserve to know that. Whole communities
deserve to know that. You know, those things were done
as messages to entire Black community, and so the closure,
(09:53):
so to speak, goes beyond any particular family member, any
particular community. This is a demand for justice for the
entire American society. We'll be right back after the break.
When you take on a case, how long do these
(10:14):
investigations take? How much time are you and your students
going to be investing in it? Well, you know, the
time frames always differ with respect to the cases, and
we've been working with some for upwards of but you know,
a decade ourselves. I really should put it this way.
The information is there because there are people who are knowledgeable,
(10:36):
right and so if the people who are knowledgeable would
come forward, that would make our work exceedingly less difficult.
But to the extent that that is not availing, we
have to try to find it, you know, when we
have the wherewithal the means, the time. So much of
(10:57):
this really requires footwork. You can just do it sitting
at a desk and getting to know people right, developing
a rapport so that they will be willing to speak
with you. You know, you don't you simply don't just
go to folks and and really, you know, trying to
ask them about one of, if not the most harrowing
(11:17):
experiences that they have had in their own lives. If that,
to spend time with people before they have a reason
to trust you, And that's simply the human dimension of it.
There has to be empathy and compassion even as you
are trying to gather information. So it's a constant process
of visiting and revisiting and going back over territory that
(11:42):
you may have covered before to see if it leads
you to something else, and when it does, to follow
those paths as well. C c j I has a
very specific commission, what was the genesis of this program
and why did you feel like these particular kinds of
cases were important to be focusing on well. In the
first Emmett Till Act was passed in two thousand and seven,
(12:05):
really signed into law in two thousand eight. We began
to look into this and my COLD director Janice McDonald,
who was now an America professor at the College of Law,
was in Faraday, Louisiana, and she and a journalist, Stanley Nelson,
(12:25):
had struck up a conversation and he was looking into
the death of a man named Frank Morris. Mr Morris
had been killed in December of nineteen sixty four when
three white men had come to his shop instead of
a flame, and is believed that the people who set
(12:46):
his shoe shop of flame were members of the local
law enforcement and possibly planned members as well. So, as
you know, Professor McDonald and Stanley Morris were discussing this,
he mentioned that the family was really interested in getting
more information that he, as a journalist, didn't feel that
(13:08):
he might be able to provide for them, and would
we be willing to, you know, talk to the family
and see what we as lawyers might be able to do.
And from there we began to notice that there were
other cases that hadn't been solved. And as we began
(13:28):
to travel, people began to become aware of the work
we were doing. And whenever we would make these trips,
you know, invariably people would come to us and say,
you know, something suspicious happened about our family members death.
We never accepted what was told to us, you know,
the official story. Would you be able to help our
family as well? And so that is how it just grew.
(13:49):
I mean, it just grew. There, just so many of
the instances and from there we actually you know, we
created of course looking at racial history, legal analysis, you know,
around the work that we were doing, and so the
project itself blossom from that. We'll be back after the break.
(14:17):
I've seen that in the past few years you've taken
students to the King Center in Atlanta and other historic
locations in the civil rights movement. For your students today,
what's their understanding of events that happened fifty or sixty
years ago. Yes, we did. Part of the work with
the students is that the civil rights era, you know,
as we understand that from the say, you know, mid
(14:41):
to late nineties fifties to the mid seventies, with a
concentration in the nineteen sixties. It's something that this younger
generation of students don't know as as a first hand
matter and have not generally been taught about it in
(15:03):
their secondary or even undergraduate educations. So so much of
what we have done in the course of working on
the cases, has been also educating our students about this
era in American history. I mean, they certainly knew that
(15:25):
there's racial discrimination in the United States, but they didn't
have the kind of in depth awareness that this was
so endemic in American society and what that meant. Some
of you may be familiar with the Emmett Till case
(15:47):
in your view, familiar with at least the name Emmett
Till in Mississippi in nine, fourteen year old youth, young
person who was As they were reading through the accounts,
sometimes the students would come back to us and say
they sometimes couldn't tell whether they were reading something from
(16:07):
the present or something back in the nineties sixties, because
the stories and the accounts sounded so familiar to something
that they heard on the news just days before. It
has always been the families who have insisted that the world,
that government officials, that the entities and the apparatus of
(16:30):
society and law enforcement take notice of these events, that
the lives of their loved ones, of their children matter,
and that they matter in the places where other people's
lives matter. And so, you know, this was part of
the education for them to understand that to some degree,
(16:51):
there was an unbroken chain in these racially motivated killings.
So we took the students to it, and we've taken
them to Mississippi so that they would get a first
hand understanding of what had happened in US history. Now.
I think the Atlanta trip that you're also referring to
(17:12):
was one in which c c j I and Syracuse
University sponsored a retreat or the family members of victims
of racially motivated crime seats. What you will hear this
evening are from several family members who will speak with
you briefly about the experiences that they've had in their families.
(17:33):
And we had a public forum at Ebenezer Baptist Church,
and as you know, that was Dr King's church, So
there was a public forum where we talked about the work.
We talked about the emotional and you know, psychological aspects
of racial trauma. We know that this isn't all about law.
(17:53):
We know that the family's needs go beyond simply making
sure that there is say a conviction or there is
even a civil matter that happens in the legal system.
We want to recognize that before those needs are met,
we can't consider this work to be finished either. But
then there was a closed aspect of this that was
just for the families to meet and interact with each other.
(18:18):
It was emotional for all of us. I will never
forget that. As the family members went around and it
kind of talked about, you know, why they were there,
what happened in their own family, you know what they
knew about it, and all the questions that remained in
the cases. One man stood up and he said, I
(18:40):
have always thought that what our family experienced was one
of the worst things I had ever heard about, ever
known about. And then he said, until right until I
heard from this other family right because in a since
(19:00):
they had all been doing this in isolation, but now
they were able to connect with each other about something
that no one else could really understand. And it was
just an incredibly powerful, powerful moment. That retreat was something
(19:22):
that really epitomized the enormity of what has taken place
in this society and how much the families have had
to hold throughout the years of longing for justice for
(19:43):
their family members on Davin Coober return Man is a
production of the Herald McClatchy Studios and I Heart Radio.
Brett McCormick is the lead reporter and the show is
produced by Matt Walsh, Karat Tabor Cotta Stevens, and Rachel Wise.
(20:03):
I'm the executive producer from McClatchy Studios. The executive producer
for I Heart Radio is Sean t Toone. For lots
more on this story, go to Harold online dot com
Slash return Man. If you have any additional information about
Jim Duncan's life or death, email us at return Man
at Harold online dot com. To continue supporting this kind
(20:24):
of work, visit Harold online dot com slash Podcasts and
consider a digital subscription. And for more podcasts from my
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome back to Long Shot, a production of McClatchy Studios
and I Heart Radio. I'm executive producer Davin Coburn. This
is a bonus feature for a return man, taking you
behind the scenes of a reporting process that lasted more
than three years. Having listened to the show, audiences will
know that we have far more context now for the
events of October twentieth two. It involves rates the mental
(00:25):
state of the person and a town that was scared
to death to say anything, but it's not clear we
have actual answers yet about what happened in the Lancaster
police station. They say he committed suicia, but basically as
you heard in Part eight, Paula Johnson and her team
at Syracuse University's Cold Case Justice Initiative could soon work
(00:45):
to change that, bringing legal expertise to the case. Brett
McCormick and our production team investigated as reporters. Sometimes our
training may lead us to find that something raises an
issue for us that journalists may not pick up on.
At the time of Jim Duncan's death, no outside organizations
(01:06):
investigated the shooting, and we initially reached out to Johnson
to see if her team at c c J I
might have done so more recently, Johnson told us they
hadn't and we did not collaborate with her team on
this project. But after reading the few publicly available stories
about Duncan's death, Johnson told us she too had many
questions and that her team might now begin looking into it.
(01:28):
I had the chance to speak with Johnson at length
about how her team of student volunteers approaches these investigations,
what could come next in Duncan's case, and that elusive
concept of closure. This conversation has been edited for length
and clarity. My name is Policy Johnson. I am Professor
(01:49):
of Law at Syracuse University College of Law. I am
also the director of the Cold Case Justice Initiative at
Surcus University College of Law. Our work is to assist
families and speaking information and justice and accountability for racially
(02:09):
motivated killings of their loved ones that have not been
solved and no one has been held to answer for
those crimes. When Jim Duncan died, there were a few
stories written in national publications like Jet Magazine in the
New York Times, but that was about it. What was
your reaction to reading some of those stories. It clearly
seems like they raised some questions for you the way
(02:31):
they did for us. Yes, I mean I having read
the Jet magazine piece, having looked at the New York
Times piece, you know, and just having a sense of, um,
the kinds of suspensions that are raised by this pace.
You know, there are more areas that we would want
to look into, you know, what his experiences were, what
(02:53):
his demeanor was at least relevant times. It was very
interesting to see the different accounts about what was going on,
you know, for Mr Duncan with respect to drugs, and
that needn't be you know, really here or there as
opposed to the most pivotal part of this, and that
(03:15):
is when he goes into the police station. I mean,
he's really curious to me, for instance, that he walked
in there and didn't say anything to anyone. It just
doesn't quite made sense to me. Now, I've got the
impression from what I've read that, you know, there were
some real issues, racial issues in terms of the police
(03:38):
department and the rest of the community, and so whatever
has been documented, or even those things that have not
been documented but that people would be willing to discuss.
I think those things are really critical with respect to
the black community and would appear to be a pretty
all white or largely white police force in that community.
I mean, I could go on and on about the
(03:59):
kinds of things we want to know, but that's the
sort of thing that we want to be able to
learn more about. At times in the past, C c
J I has collaborated with reporters. How do you think
journalists and lawyers approach these sorts of investigations differently? Yeah.
One of the things that you know, we would do
as an initial matter is to read everything that we
(04:22):
can get our hands on that's available in the public sphere,
that includes any reportage that has taken place, you know, print, broadcast,
you name it, and we would begin to identify a
list of people that may have some knowledge or may
have some impressions. We'd want to talk to those people.
(04:43):
But beyond that, we would UM look into any kind
of documents that may be part of the legal investigation
aspect of this, and that sometimes we will require um
certainly for your request, and you know that's something that
we would do. Now you know, we ourselves are not prosecutors,
(05:04):
and so what we try to do is put that
information in some kind of report, and if it looks
as though there was something, you know, criminal involved, then
we present that to the relevant authorities. They may be
local prosecutors, they may be federal or state prosecutors, you know,
but as attorneys we kind of speak that language and
(05:26):
understand what kinds of things would be important for them
to take that and say maybe we'll convene a grand
jury or take this at that point. But it's all
about really the comprehensiveness and the thoroughness of following every lead.
And you know, and it's something that I tell the
students all the time, and that is, don't draw conclusions
(05:48):
on things before we get as much information as we can,
because something may seem to be insignificant, but we can't
player that it's insignificance unless we have followed it, and
only then are we able to dismiss it as something
that really may have no bearing on the situation. So,
(06:11):
as lawyers, then your team would take on a family member,
in this case, a family member of Jim Duncan's as
a client. Is that right? Yeah? Generally speaking, very often
what happens is that a family member will contact us
or community member will say it's been However, many decades
and law enforcement has said one thing, We've never quite
believed that or we think that there is more to
(06:34):
be discovered about this. Can you help us? And so
we yes, we take on you know, that matter, and
we are doing that on behalf of the families, you know,
to try to help a mass as much information and
create some sort of case, you know, profile as to
what we think has happened. And by definition, your team
(06:56):
is looking into cases that are decades old. That means
paperwork and other evidence could have been destroyed, things simply
get lost over time. How do you handle that? How
does your team make a case out of evidence that
may no longer exist. Well, I mean that's the most
difficult thing with cases that are defined as cold cases.
(07:18):
When you're talking about something that's forty or more years old,
people have passed away, documents have been you know, lost
just in the process of moving. And so sometimes we
really are looking for a needle in a haystack. So
that becomes a very difficult task. It's very meticulous to
(07:39):
have to go through it. And again, as I say
to our students, sometimes you don't even know what you're
looking for, right, You simply know that you're looking for
something that suggests that it is connected to the main inquiry,
and so that process can be quite difficult. And even
if there might not be a satisfying league resolution to
(08:01):
one of your cases, is it fair to say that
family and friends just getting more clarity on what actually
happened begins to provide a little bit more closure. Yeah.
The word closure in these contexts I find to be
a very loaded term because in a number of instances,
people will ask us, why are you continuing to look
(08:23):
into these cases that are decades old? Right? Why don't you?
And by you, what is really meant is why don't
these families just move on? Right? It's been fifty years,
don't stay stuck in the past. And our response to
that is, to the extent that the families do not
(08:46):
have as much information as is possible to obtain about
what happened to their loved one, there is no moving
on right. There is is no closure because it remains
an open wool. Certainly, people go on with their lives,
(09:09):
but it does mean that there is something that has
not been determined and they want for there to be
something final about it, and that finality is a sense
of justice. If someone is responsible for taking someone else's life,
(09:31):
or for propagating a story that is not accurate, you know,
if they are shielding other people who participated and so
are responsible. The families deserve to know that. Whole communities
deserve to know that. You know, those things were done
as messages to entire Black community, and so the closure,
(09:53):
so to speak, goes beyond any particular family member, any
particular community. This is a demand for justice for the
entire American society. We'll be right back after the break.
When you take on a case, how long do these
(10:14):
investigations take? How much time are you and your students
going to be investing in it? Well, you know, the
time frames always differ with respect to the cases, and
we've been working with some for upwards of but you know,
a decade ourselves. I really should put it this way.
The information is there because there are people who are knowledgeable,
(10:36):
right and so if the people who are knowledgeable would
come forward, that would make our work exceedingly less difficult.
But to the extent that that is not availing, we
have to try to find it, you know, when we
have the wherewithal the means, the time. So much of
(10:57):
this really requires footwork. You can just do it sitting
at a desk and getting to know people right, developing
a rapport so that they will be willing to speak
with you. You know, you don't you simply don't just
go to folks and and really, you know, trying to
ask them about one of, if not the most harrowing
(11:17):
experiences that they have had in their own lives. If that,
to spend time with people before they have a reason
to trust you, And that's simply the human dimension of it.
There has to be empathy and compassion even as you
are trying to gather information. So it's a constant process
of visiting and revisiting and going back over territory that
(11:42):
you may have covered before to see if it leads
you to something else, and when it does, to follow
those paths as well. C c j I has a
very specific commission, what was the genesis of this program
and why did you feel like these particular kinds of
cases were important to be focusing on well. In the
first Emmett Till Act was passed in two thousand and seven,
(12:05):
really signed into law in two thousand eight. We began
to look into this and my COLD director Janice McDonald,
who was now an America professor at the College of Law,
was in Faraday, Louisiana, and she and a journalist, Stanley Nelson,
(12:25):
had struck up a conversation and he was looking into
the death of a man named Frank Morris. Mr Morris
had been killed in December of nineteen sixty four when
three white men had come to his shop instead of
a flame, and is believed that the people who set
(12:46):
his shoe shop of flame were members of the local
law enforcement and possibly planned members as well. So, as
you know, Professor McDonald and Stanley Morris were discussing this,
he mentioned that the family was really interested in getting
more information that he, as a journalist, didn't feel that
(13:08):
he might be able to provide for them, and would
we be willing to, you know, talk to the family
and see what we as lawyers might be able to do.
And from there we began to notice that there were
other cases that hadn't been solved. And as we began
(13:28):
to travel, people began to become aware of the work
we were doing. And whenever we would make these trips,
you know, invariably people would come to us and say,
you know, something suspicious happened about our family members death.
We never accepted what was told to us, you know,
the official story. Would you be able to help our
family as well? And so that is how it just grew.
(13:49):
I mean, it just grew. There, just so many of
the instances and from there we actually you know, we
created of course looking at racial history, legal analysis, you know,
around the work that we were doing, and so the
project itself blossom from that. We'll be back after the break.
(14:17):
I've seen that in the past few years you've taken
students to the King Center in Atlanta and other historic
locations in the civil rights movement. For your students today,
what's their understanding of events that happened fifty or sixty
years ago. Yes, we did. Part of the work with
the students is that the civil rights era, you know,
as we understand that from the say, you know, mid
(14:41):
to late nineties fifties to the mid seventies, with a
concentration in the nineteen sixties. It's something that this younger
generation of students don't know as as a first hand
matter and have not generally been taught about it in
(15:03):
their secondary or even undergraduate educations. So so much of
what we have done in the course of working on
the cases, has been also educating our students about this
era in American history. I mean, they certainly knew that
(15:25):
there's racial discrimination in the United States, but they didn't
have the kind of in depth awareness that this was
so endemic in American society and what that meant. Some
of you may be familiar with the Emmett Till case
(15:47):
in your view, familiar with at least the name Emmett
Till in Mississippi in nine, fourteen year old youth, young
person who was As they were reading through the accounts,
sometimes the students would come back to us and say
they sometimes couldn't tell whether they were reading something from
(16:07):
the present or something back in the nineties sixties, because
the stories and the accounts sounded so familiar to something
that they heard on the news just days before. It
has always been the families who have insisted that the world,
that government officials, that the entities and the apparatus of
(16:30):
society and law enforcement take notice of these events, that
the lives of their loved ones, of their children matter,
and that they matter in the places where other people's
lives matter. And so, you know, this was part of
the education for them to understand that to some degree,
(16:51):
there was an unbroken chain in these racially motivated killings.
So we took the students to it, and we've taken
them to Mississippi so that they would get a first
hand understanding of what had happened in US history. Now.
I think the Atlanta trip that you're also referring to
(17:12):
was one in which c c j I and Syracuse
University sponsored a retreat or the family members of victims
of racially motivated crime seats. What you will hear this
evening are from several family members who will speak with
you briefly about the experiences that they've had in their families.
(17:33):
And we had a public forum at Ebenezer Baptist Church,
and as you know, that was Dr King's church, So
there was a public forum where we talked about the work.
We talked about the emotional and you know, psychological aspects
of racial trauma. We know that this isn't all about law.
(17:53):
We know that the family's needs go beyond simply making
sure that there is say a conviction or there is
even a civil matter that happens in the legal system.
We want to recognize that before those needs are met,
we can't consider this work to be finished either. But
then there was a closed aspect of this that was
just for the families to meet and interact with each other.
(18:18):
It was emotional for all of us. I will never
forget that. As the family members went around and it
kind of talked about, you know, why they were there,
what happened in their own family, you know what they
knew about it, and all the questions that remained in
the cases. One man stood up and he said, I
(18:40):
have always thought that what our family experienced was one
of the worst things I had ever heard about, ever
known about. And then he said, until right until I
heard from this other family right because in a since
(19:00):
they had all been doing this in isolation, but now
they were able to connect with each other about something
that no one else could really understand. And it was
just an incredibly powerful, powerful moment. That retreat was something
(19:22):
that really epitomized the enormity of what has taken place
in this society and how much the families have had
to hold throughout the years of longing for justice for
(19:43):
their family members on Davin Coober return Man is a
production of the Herald McClatchy Studios and I Heart Radio.
Brett McCormick is the lead reporter and the show is
produced by Matt Walsh, Karat Tabor Cotta Stevens, and Rachel Wise.
(20:03):
I'm the executive producer from McClatchy Studios. The executive producer
for I Heart Radio is Sean t Toone. For lots
more on this story, go to Harold online dot com
Slash return Man. If you have any additional information about
Jim Duncan's life or death, email us at return Man
at Harold online dot com. To continue supporting this kind
(20:24):
of work, visit Harold online dot com slash Podcasts and
consider a digital subscription. And for more podcasts from my
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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