Sunday Mornings with Big Mitch: Ep. 1

In this first episode of our new series, Sunday Mornings with Big Mitch, we meet Mitch — a man serving life in the Alabama State prison system for taking another man’s life, a crime for which he takes full responsibility. Each Sunday, Our American Stories host Lee Habeeb talks with Mitch over the phone about life, faith, and redemption behind bars.

In this opening conversation, Mitch shares where he came from, how he grew up, and what those first days in prison were like. What begins as a story of punishment becomes one of transformation — and the freedom he’s found through his Christian faith.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories.
This next story is about a friend of mine. We're
close in age, but have little else in common. Mitchell
Rutledge aka Big Mitch, was born black and poor in Georgia.
I was born kind of brown and middle class in
New Jersey. He never met his father. I still talk

(00:33):
to my ninety four year old father every week. He
dropped out of high school in his early teens and
was illiterate into his early twenties. I was surrounded by
books growing up and finished graduate school in my early thirties.
Big Mitch spent the last forty four years of his
life in Alabama prisons for killing a man. But this

(00:55):
is not a story about an innocent man sentenced to
prison for a crime he didn't commit. Big Mitch never
denied the crime or made excuses for it. This is
the story of my friend's spiritual transformation while serving his
life sentence. It's also about a friendship. Only God could

(01:15):
have engineered a friendship that began with a single Sunday
morning call. Through these weekly conversations, I hope you come
to know and love him as much as I do.
Welcome to Sunday Mornings with Big Mitch. Here's episode one,
my conversation on January fourteenth, twenty twenty four, where I

(01:35):
learned where Big Mitch grew up and.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
How this is a free call from an incarcerated individual
at Alabama Department of Corrections.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
This call is not private, it will be recorded and
maybe minored.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
To accept this pre call, press one to refuse this
pre call, Press to thank you producing securis. You may
start the conversation now. My name is Michel Ruttledge. Everybody
call me Big Mitch. I was born in nineteen fifty
nine octob Hey anyway, I think between Phoenix City and

(02:18):
Colomba Charge somewhere there. My mother is Mary Ann Ruttledge,
and she was born in Phoenix City, Alabama. My father,
he was in the military and folk being so I
never really knew my father. My mother she was thirteen
years old, I think when I came in the world,

(02:40):
when she got pregnant or something like that. I think
when she was sixteen she got in from trouble and
she went off from sixteen to eighteen girls reform schools
or what have you. And from my age one through
teen I never lived with my mother because my mother
lived with my grandmother because she was young. So I

(03:03):
had opportunities to live with my mother when she married
my youngest sister father, And I was ten years old
when she married him, and I had an opportunity to
know my mother for six years because she died when
she was twenty nine. I was sixteen going on seventeen.

Speaker 1 (03:28):
After talking about how he grew up, Big Mitch talked
about where and talked about living in the projects when I.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
Went to the project when I was coming up as
a youth, especially when I was like in my eight nine,
ten level and stuff like that, and I used to
go in the bronze and go to her and go
inside the guy's house. You know, I thought I was
in the middle class neighborhood because my family still stayed

(03:57):
in the poverty ram before they built the projects for
the poor people. And so my family never just made
it from those shotgun plywood shotgun houses. Even in the
in the in the sadness, we still live in the
shotgun houses. And we know you had running water, but
you didn't have bath till then. So I came out

(04:19):
of real pole environment. Before then, the guys, the average
guys in the project.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
You know, I asked Big Mitch what gave him a
sense of hope and freedom? The hope and freedom I
was hearing in his voice.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
Just because you physically liter restraints doesn't mean that you
know it. All farms of bundage. All farms are imprisonment
and a physical restraints. And that's that's what one look
at most often. But it's all kinds of bundage. You know,
all kinds of things that in prison are individual and

(04:56):
the only thing that gonna help you to be free
of any of that is that a spiritual relationship with me.
What have helped me is develop a relationship with Jesus Christ.
And once I did that, then I was able to
even though I'm physical restraint, I can still be free,

(05:18):
free from a lot of the things that other individuals
may be in prison with, such as you know Creed Ainger, selfishness,
self doubt, drugs. Here was so many things that capture
us in life. There's so many things that you know,
just like the guy that was a Wall Street guy,

(05:41):
he's got money, but and money is not the defining
and answer to happiness of freedom is not. It's just
a vehicle to be able to accomplish some of the
things that individual needs to accomplish in life. But he was,
he was in prison, and I tell a lot of guys,
as in here, you can't lock yourself in here just

(06:03):
because you physically in here. You know, you got you
got your spiritual freedom, you got your mail to freedom,
being able to read and think and and and imagine
yourself in a place far greater than the being able
to reinvent yourself. And so just give you freedom, you know.

Speaker 1 (06:25):
We then started to talk about doctor Martin Luther King Junior.
His birthday was coming up, and I told Big Mitch
about King's faith. I was writing about it at the time,
how his father was a preacher and King's only real
job in his entire adult life was as the co
pastor at his father's church, and that the last speech
King ever gave in his life in Memphis, he preached

(06:48):
the parable of the Prodigal Son.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
Yeah, speaking of main Luther King, I did a lot
of guys, you know, Madel King had he's said something
that he is years. I was listening to some of
his earlier takes and he was talking about God, you know,
and he was saying, you know that God side of
the boundary for everybody. So he said, man is out

(07:15):
of the boundary for gravity, since man understand that instantly.
You know when you violate gravity, and you understand that instantly,
so you ain't work. You ain't gonna do that too
much more. You're not gonna get on type of building it,
you know, and you're gonna try to be careful. But
he said, God also side of the boundary or morale
and morality. But since it's not instantaneous like gravity, you

(07:40):
don't feel it right there. And he said, man have
the tendency to go further and further across the boundaries
of morale and morality until he reached a reprobated mind.
And that's true, and see God out of laws and
boundaries for everything, everything even morell but black volunt king,
he said, since it's not instantaneous, you don't feel the

(08:04):
impact of it right then. So you have the tendency
to go further and further cross the boundary of morale
and morality until you cross until the rain with God
said I can't do nothing with you no more. You
that and now now now you have a reputated mind,
Now you're in the ram, are safe. Now you offer

(08:24):
rate in his area and his territoria, you know, and
peoples do that, and so when I heard that years ago,
I thought about it. So, you got to be careful
and mindful of what you do. You got to be
careful and mind for how you treat people. You can't

(08:45):
be so clever and smart going through life stepping on people's,
abusing people's, using people's You got to be mindful.

Speaker 1 (08:56):
And a beautiful job on the production editing and storytelling
our own Greg Hangler and Reagan Habib. And you've been
listening to our first installment of Sunday Mornings with Big
Mitch series of calls I had with Mitchell Rutledge as
he is serving his forty fourth year in an Alabama

(09:17):
penitentiary for killing a man. And I got to tell you,
I was nervous when I started this call. I'd never
spoken to somebody who'd killed a guy and had spent
his life in a penitentiary. But my goodness, it didn't
take long for us to bond. And when he started
talking about bondage and being captive and being imprisoned, and
when he started to list the things we can all

(09:38):
be captive to or in bondage to, and He mentioned
greed and selfishness and self doubt and sex and drugs
and liquor. I added to him work that some of
us are workaholics, and I'd suffered from that and that
bondage and the damage it did to my life. And
it was a confessional of sorts, the two of us. Again,

(10:00):
we had nothing in common. By the end of that
first hour, I felt like I was talking to this
man about things I talked to very few men about.
Sunday Mornings with Big Mitch the series continues every Sunday
here on our American Story.