August 3, 2017 • 35 mins
Arrested, arraigned, indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to die in the electric chair in 24 hours.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. This episode contains material that may be upsetting to
some listeners. I finished law school on the first Friday
in June of nineteen sixty. On the following Monday, I
went to work for Donne L. Holliwell, who was the
(00:38):
ultimate civil rights lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia at the time.
Vernon Jordan, one of the great figures in the American
civil rights movement talking about his mentor, and I went
to work for him right out of law school for
thirty five dollars a week, and there were no other
jobs at the local government level, county, state, or federal.
(01:05):
We couldn't even take the bar review course at John
Marshall University because Georgia law required education be separate and segregated.
So I wanted to work for don Hollowell. My first
day at work, I was in the Atlanting Municipal Court
helping him get demonstrators from the Atlanting University system out
(01:28):
of jo My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to
Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This
episode picks up with a previous one left off with
the story of an extraordinary man named Donald L. Holliwell.
(01:54):
Halliwell died in two thousand and four, but I wish
he were still alive, because he has so much to
teach us, like how do you keep going when all
seems lost? How do you behave? How do you conduct
yourself if you're one of the leaders of a loose
in cause? And for most of his life Holliwell fought uphill.
How do you prepare those behind you for the day
(02:15):
when you might succeed? What did he look like? Holliwell,
big heavy guy, played quarterback at Lane College Vernon. Jordan
is a big guy as well, imposing charismatic. I mentioned
that only because it's not a trivial fact. The two
(02:36):
of them, Jordan and Holliwell, would drive around Georgia from
one end of the state to the next, to towns
and courtrooms where a black lawyer was not just an
anomaly but a provocation. If you were five foot two
with a little squeaky voice, it didn't work. I would
just like to think that the people at the university
(02:57):
and around the university are sufficiently firm minded. I watched
all these old, grainy videotapes of Hollowell in the Auburn
Avenue Library and at Anna, and I became fixated on
his hands, which would rise and fall as he talked.
They were enormous. In Atlanta's segregated buses, there'd be a
(03:20):
little sign on the back of the seat where the
white section ended. It would say colored, directing black people
to their place. Sometimes, when no one was looking, Hollowell
would unclip it and stick it in his coat pocket,
mess things up a bit until the bus driver noticed,
or some white lady got hysterical because she inadvertently sat
(03:40):
in a seat still warm from the presence of a
black person. Hallowell was subversive in his own way, but
also formal proper. They used to say, he talked like
the Black Shakespeare. Hallowell once paused in the middle of
a trial to instruct the court on the correct pronunciation
of negro, not nigra, your honor negro. Another time, he
(04:06):
was up against two district attorneys in court, and the
moment he got up to speak, the white judge swiveled
in his chair with his back to halliwell, so he
would not have to suffer the indignity of gazing upon
a black man. What did Hallowell do? Just kept talking
and talking in those slow, formal tones, until it was
(04:27):
the judge who looked like a fool. I did all
the driving, and we get to a town and so
a principal or school teacher or the local doctor. Somebody
just got some independence. That's where you spend the night.
(04:50):
I slept a minute a night with Holloway. You know
we're piling the same bed. It better be a big bed.
Two of you were, Yeah, but there were no big
beds in those there were no King's bed. Ah. But no, no,
(05:10):
it was Halliwell was a real hero. In the early
morning of November fifth, nineteen fifty three, a woman named
Betty Joe Bishop calls the Atlanta Police Department in hysterics.
In her car is the badly beaten corpse of her boyfriend,
(05:32):
Marvin Lindsay. She tells the police that two of them
had been attacked when they were parked on a secluded
road on Atlanta's South Side. It's a sensational case. In fact,
it was written up in one of those pulp crime
magazines that were so popular back then, Official Detective Stories,
March nineteen fifty four issue Wanted the Man in the
(05:52):
Pyramid hat I can't do justice? To the spirit of
pulp journalism. So we're going to re enact some scenes
from the article, starting with its description of the moment
Betty Joe Bishop meets Atlanta's Chief of Detectives, Glenn Cowan,
on in November morning. Suppose that you begin by telling
(06:14):
us your name, Bishop, missus, Betty Joe Bishop, I'm a widow.
You were with Marvin Lindsey tonight. Yes, tell me what happened?
Bishop tells the detective about driving to Jonesboro Road. We
were only there a few minutes when this man came
(06:34):
out of the woods. It was terrible. He struck me
with his fists and Marvin had to fight him off.
Then he walked around the car and hit Marvin with
something heavy. Marvin pleaded for him to stop, but he wouldn't.
She covered her face with her hands and broke into long,
(06:57):
racking sobs. Cowen waited patiently until she recovered her composure.
What happened? Then he asked what happened? Then? Well, after
he got tired of hitting Marvin, he ran into the woods.
Marvin was lying half in and half out of the car,
so I walked around at the driver's side and made
(07:20):
him lie across the seat. He was bleeding something awful,
so I knew he was hurt bad. I drove to
his home in Blair Village and told his brother John
what had happened, and John got in the car. We
drove to Gratty Hospital, but it was too late. Marvin
was already dead. They're in the police station. She can
(07:42):
barely hold it together. She's all beaten up. Her lover
is dead. She tells the officer that the assailant had
come back after killing Marvin and raped her. Maybe Detective
Cowen takes her hand in sympathy. Maybe he waits a
few moments to let her collect her thoughts. Then, as
(08:03):
the article describes it, he asks her to describe the assailant.
I'm not sure. It was very dark, and I was scared.
He was tall, and then I remember that much. Also,
when I grabbed one of his hands, I remember it
felt kind of bony. Slowly, gently Cowen draws a description
(08:24):
out of her. The man was in his late thirties
or early forties, about five ft eleven then, wearing a
leather jacket, dungarees, a funny kind of hat, pyramid shaped,
and he was swarthy and had dark oily hair. The
article never comes out and says so explicitly, But if
(08:48):
you're a reader of the pulp magazine Official Detective Stories
in March nineteen fifty four, you know what swarthy means.
The killer's black. That's why this is such a sensational case.
Betty Joe Bishop is an innocent white widow and she
and her boyfriend had been attacked by a mysterious black man.
(09:09):
Atlanta's finest immediately got to work. They scour the crime scene.
The killer had a rolled up newspaper, which he had
apparently left at the scene, and he'd circled two want ads,
one for a dishwasher at a local restaurant. The police
go to the restaurant. Did a thin, swarthy man with
(09:31):
oily hair answer an ad yesterday for a dishwasher? The
only the restaurant says yes, doesn't remember his name, but
remembers the man said he used to look at Elite
Bowling Alleys on Hunter Street. The coat check girl at
Elite Bowling Alley says, oh, that's Willie. An eyewitness comes
forward says he saw a man near the crime scene
(09:54):
swore thee wearing a pyramid shaped hat. They scour the
area around the crime scene, stumble on a little cottage
inside his thirty nine year old Willie Nash, unemployed handyman,
swore thee dark hair. They arrest him, he confesses, So
(10:14):
who do you call? If you're Willie Nash? Things are
pretty bleak. What you really want is a white lawyer.
Because it's nineteen fifty four. The jury is going to
be all white, the police department is all white, the
judge is going to be white. Willie Nash knows where
the power lives in Atlanta, Georgia. But Willie Nash is poor,
so he's forced to settle for one of the very
(10:36):
few black lawyers in town, a man two years out
of law school, still wet behind the ears, Donald L. Holliwell.
When Nash realizes he has no other choice, he breaks
down into tears. I'd have cried too, Holliwell says years later,
if I'd have been Willie Nash under those circumstances. This
(10:57):
was years before Vernon Jordan joined Holliwell's firm, but he
knew all about the Willie Nash case. Everybody in black
Atlanta did. That's the case where he held up the
latest pennies before the jury, and that was a case
set set Hallowell up. A few years ago, the Smithsonian
(11:23):
interviewed a man named Robert Carter, another legendary black attorney.
Carter talks about trying school segregation cases in the Deep
South in the nineteen fifties with Constance Baker Motley and
Thurgood Marshall, two other pioneering black lawyers of that era.
They would be in court up against the local white
school superintendent, and black people from the community would show up,
(11:47):
cram into the balcony, hang on every word. It wasn't
that they expected to win, because they often didn't. They
just wanted to see a black person in a position
of formal authority over a white person in Mississippi or
Georgia or Alabama. At the height of Jim Crow, that
was history being made. Every hearing, every trial with a
(12:08):
black lawyer was theater. During cross examination, a white witness
might forget his role in the trial and start asking
questions of the attorney of Motley, say, and Connie Motley,
a black woman in nineteen fifty something, would reprimand the
white male witness say, my job is to ask the question.
(12:28):
Your job is to respond, and everybody would gasp. In
the evening, Carter says he would walk through the black
neighborhoods and hear people re enacting the trial in barbershops
and beauty parlors. In other words, there were two conversations
going on at any given time. There was the legal
(12:49):
conversation witness, judge, lawyers accused. If you were a white
lawyer dealing with the white world, that was the conversation
you worried about. But there was a second conversation, which
was between the black lawyers and the people in the balcony.
And if you were an underdog with a limited chance
to win at the first conversation, then that second conversation
(13:10):
was really important. Donald Holliwell was very good at the
first conversation, the legal one. He was a master of
the second. At home the defense of liberty and democracy
for African Americans. There's a great documentary about Holliwell made
(13:31):
by the Georgia's civil rights scholar Maurice Daniels. This fight
will require foot soldiers for equal justice. Daniels does a
long interview with an attorney named Howard Moore, who worked
with Holliwell in the nineteen sixties, and Moore talks about
arriving early at a hearing into the police shooting of
a black teenager to handle things before holliwell got there.
(13:53):
I got down to Bibb County and went to the courthouse.
There were about three thousand negroes on the steps. And
I went into the courthouse and there were about three
thousand or as many as they could get into the
balcony of stand. And when I walked into the courtroom,
the people upstairs, the black people, said that ain't Hollowell.
(14:16):
Where's Hallowell. That ain't Hollowell. I don't know what to do.
I don't know, Hey, I have no idea what I
was supposed to do, you know. So I said, well,
I'll act like Hollowell. I'll just object in the loudest
voice I can. And then people upstairs in the in
the in the back, and they said, what it ain't Hollowell,
but he sound like Hollowell. When Hollowell showed up at
(14:39):
the court in quest, he put the police officer on
the stand he shot a seventeen year old boy named
Acy Hall. Hollowell took the officer through his testimony bit
by meticulous bit slowly exposing the officer's lies. The coup
was in tears by the end. I've never seen that
before since, when a lawyer just take completely control of
(15:02):
a witness and buying that witness to his will, not
with shouting and screaming, but with systematic, well structured, well
played questions. Now, did Hollowell win a victory for the
bereaved family of ac Hall. Was the officer prosecuted? Of
course not. It's hard enough to win a conviction against
a white cop who shoots a black kid today, let alone.
(15:24):
In nineteen sixty two in Bibb County, Georgia, this was
about the second conversation between Hollowell and the thousands of
people on the steps. We are not entirely powerless. I
can bind a witness to my will one more case,
(15:45):
because there are dozens of them. Hollowell never stopped moving
in those years. This one was in nineteen sixty one,
and this time Hollowell was with the young Vernon Jordan.
Our client, James Fayre, a black kid from New Jersey,
had been arrested, haraigned, indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to
(16:10):
die in the electric chair in twenty four hours, Hallowell
and his team go down to the town of Reidsville,
Georgia to argue for a new trial. The judge in
the case was Judge w I and the niggas in
my court gear. He had that reputation. On Monday, we
(16:38):
went and we tried to gaze. At lunchtime, the judge
and the white lawyers and the white court officials went
across the town square to the white only restaurant and
had their lunch. Hallowell, CB. King and I went to
the owner grocery store on the Cornell Square or the
(16:59):
pound of bologney, loaf of bread, musta Coca cola and
the baby Ruth and sat in mister Hallowell's car in
the parking surrounding the courthouse and ate our lunch. We
did it on Monday. We did it on Tuesday. Wednesday,
(17:21):
we're trying the case. And the black lady waved at
me and I met her in the vestibute of the
courthouse and never forget it, and she said, Lawyer, we've
been watching y'all eat that bologney for two days now.
(17:41):
She says, just have a Coca cola and don't eat
that bologney today and when the court ends, which is
three thirty or four, your drive to my house for lunch.
So they go to her house. That's the moment Jordan
remembers fifty years later, that moment of grace and quiet
(18:03):
rebellion outside the courtroom. And we walked in, and the
table but was set for royalty, her best learning, her
best china, her best crystal. The aroma of the southern
food was almost crippling. It was as a circle. I noticed,
(18:26):
and her neighbors had come and put on nice sundresses,
and their husbands had cleaned up, and they welcomed us.
And then we joined hands, and and her husband gave
the grace, and he said this unforgettable sentence, which was, Lord,
(18:48):
we're down here in Tatnall County. We can't join the NAACP,
but thanks to your bountiful blessings, we can feed the NAACP. Lawyers.
(19:09):
So Willie Nash, Betty Joe Bishop's swore the assailant. The
case we began with Donald Hollowell's Trial by Fire. If
you look back on Hollowell's career, it's all there, every
theme in that first case. Nash has been indicted for murder, rape,
and robbery. The prosecutor has a murder weapon, a bloody
(19:31):
piece of pipe. He has Nash's confession, and he has
a witness, a black man named Julius Harris, who places
Nash at the murder scene. The moonlight was shining directly
on his face when I glimpsed him. Harris testifies for
Hallowell and Nash. It looks pretty bleak. But then one
of the prosecutors is trying to remember Julius Harris's name
(19:54):
and can't, and he says, in an open court room,
the eye witness, you know that fat nagger. Holliwell jumps
out of his seat and almost shouts a negro is
as entitled to respect as any other person. The judge agrees,
declares a mistrial. The second trial is two months later.
(20:16):
This time Holliwell has time to prepare. He puts the
head of the Georgia State Crime Lab on the stand
and asks, did you find any blood on the alleged
murder weapon. The man says, actually he didn't. Holliwell moves
on to the police. Turns out they have multiple conflicting
stories about what happened that night. Willie Nashe testifies says
(20:37):
his confession was beaten out of him. As for the
witness who said he saw Nash's face by the light
of the moon, Holliwell points out there was no moon
over Atlanta that night. Finally, Holliwell turns to the alleged victim,
Betty Joe Bishop. Turns out she had a second boyfriend
who left town right after the murder of her first boyfriend,
(20:58):
and when she pulled up to Marvin Lindsay's brother's house
with Marvin's dead body in her car, the first thing
out of her mouth was, I know you think I
did it, but a nigger did it. Finally, Halliwell calls
the doctor who examined Bishop right after the alleged rape occurred,
and the doctor concedes that he could find no evidence,
(21:20):
not bruises or sperm, to indicate that a rape actually occurred.
That's when Holliwell holds up an item from police evidence,
Betty Joe Bishop's underwear. Hollowell waves them in front of
the jury. Nineteen fifty four, Atlanta, Georgia. A black man
waves a white woman's underwear in the air in front
(21:40):
of an all white jury. Now, who's at four? Is
it for? The jury. Of course, he's saying, Betty Joe
Bishop is lying through her teeth, But it's really for
the audience. He sang enough. You can imagine that up
in the balcony there was a collective intake of breath
at that moment, something that could be heard clear across Atlanta,
(22:01):
and that night, in a thousand homes, somebody stood up
and played out that scene just like Hollowell, to a
chorus of disbelief. Willie Nash goes free. But it's still
not a real victory, because what's the real lesson of
(22:22):
the false indictment of Willie Nash? That every white person
in that courtroom lied freely and blatantly. The police liede
the witness lied, the victim lied, the press lide. The
murder weapon wasn't a murder weapon, the rape wasn't a rape.
And the only reason all the liars got caught was
(22:43):
they couldn't even be bothered to keep their story straight.
It didn't seem worth the effort. I know you think
I did it, but a nigger did it. It's not
as if the whole group of them, the victim, the police, officer,
the witness, the doctor, the press got in a room
and worked out an elaborate story to tell the court
that would be a conspiracy, which you only need a
(23:05):
conspiracy where there is a system to conspire against. There
was no system to conspire against. They were the system.
The Nash case wasn't a victory, but it was a warning.
Things got worse for the civil rights movement before they
(23:25):
got better. The William Ash case was in nineteen fifty four,
the same year that the Supreme Court ruled in the
Brownvie Board of Education decision that racial segregation was unconstitutional.
After Brown came what is known in civil rights history
as massive resistance. The white political power structure of the
(23:45):
South rose up, and the backlash began. One by one,
white governors and mayors and senators who had been at
least moderate on racial issues were replaced by hard line racists.
Alabama had a governor in the nineteen fifties, Big Jim Fulsom,
who used to say, all men are just alike. I
don't think he really meant it, but at least he
(24:07):
was willing to say it. By the early nineteen sixties,
Alabama had taken a big step backwards. Their new governor
was George Wallace, who famously declared sagregation now segregation, the
MA and segregation father. The decade leading up to the
(24:29):
nineteen sixty four Civil Rights Act was a dark time
in American racial history. We forget this now. Martin Luther
King led the Montgomery bus boycott in nineteen fifty six,
but after that he had years in the wilderness when
even members of his own community had turned against him.
And in October of nineteen sixty at the lowest EBB
(24:52):
King gets arrested. He was already on probation for a
traffic violation. He'd move from Alabama to Georgia and didn't
get a Georgia driver's license within the requisite ninety days,
for which he had been sentenced to twelve months in
public works camp, which was the Georgia euphemism for a
chain gang. King got that sentence suspended, but then he
(25:13):
got picked up for taking part in a sit in,
and the prosecutor said that meant he'd violated his probation
and now he needed to do his twelve months on
the chain gang. By the way, if you think that
this has anything to do with driving in Georgia with
an Alabama license, you're crazy. This is what things had
come to in nineteen sixty. You have asked me what
(25:37):
other plans do we have in connection with Reverend Martin
Luther King's release? So who does King call for help?
Donald L. Holliwell. Of course. In the morning after King's arrest,
Holliwell stands on the DeKalb County Court House steps addressing
a group of reporters. Of course, this would depend upon
whether or not the court granted our motion to vacate
(26:01):
the order of yesterday. If the court fails to release him,
of course we would take other steps to appeal or
to effect. Hallowell is trying to get King's case thrown out,
but the problem is that King is no longer in Atlanta.
He's banished. In Maurice Daniel's documentary, Hallowell's wife Louise talks
(26:23):
about what happened when her husband went to retrieve King
from the county jail, only to be confronted by the
warden when he got there. He said, I came to
get a king out this morning, or something like that
to that effect, and he said, well, he ain't here.
And he said, well, what do you mean he ain't here?
(26:44):
He said, well, they took him away this morning sometime,
and they carried him down to the state prison and
he said that's where he is. He ain't here, so
you can't get him. Well, mister Halliwell didn't like that.
I love that line. Mister Halliwell didn't like that. Daniels
picks up the story with Andrew Young, another of King's
(27:07):
inner circle. That was a night of Martin Luther King's life.
They took him from the DeKalb County, put him in
leg irons and handcuffs, laid him on the floor in
the back of a paddi wagon with nobody back there
but a German shepherd, and they drove him from Atlantat
of Reidsville. It's three hundred miles. There were no expressways then,
(27:30):
three hundred miles on bad Georgia roads. Reidsville, the same
place where Jordan and Holliwell ate their Bologna sandwich in
the car. They know the town well. The state prison
in Reidsville was notorious. It was the kind of place
where they used that phrase in quotation marks that somebody
got shot trying to escape, or where they got beat
(27:51):
up by a guard out of the chain gang. When
King's followers heard Reidsville. They honestly feared that he was
going to end up dead, but there's not a hint
of that in his attorney on the courthouse steps, learning
that Reverend King had been taken to the Reidsville prison,
I would say that I indicated two authorities on last
(28:12):
evening that we were desirous of having Reverend King at
this hearing. However, they informed me that they had already
transmitted the papers yesterday afternoon to the Board of Correction
and that it was in their purview to move him
when they desired. Hallowell's composure does not break why because
(28:36):
he's not just talking to those reporters, he's talking to
the black people of Georgia, telling them that it will
take more than the abduction of their leader to break
the spirit of their movement. We know that it's a
matter of normal practice. It is several days before a
prisoners moved. However, when we called at eight for the
purpose of ascertaining the whereabouts with the sheriff for making service,
(29:00):
we were informed that Reverend King had been taken down
to Reidsville at four or five this morning. That day,
Halliwell flew to Reidsville invited along the national media. The
White House was watching. Holliwell walked into Reidsville and walked
out with his client. It's a surreal moment. The state
(29:24):
of Georgia basically tried to kidnap the nation's leading civil
rights leader. There's press everywhere. Someone puts a camera in
Martin Luther King's face. Everyone's eyes are on him. There's
a famous picture of that moment. It ran in all
the newspapers, and you can imagine that when people from
the movement saw it, they first looked to see whether
(29:44):
King was okay, and then they asked, where's Holliwell. Sure enough,
there he was in the background, off a little to
the left, crisp white shirt, elegant black bowtie, impassive, implacable.
This is put gave me hope. Okay and Jordan again.
(30:10):
I went to see him to talk about Holliwell, but
more than that, because I wanted to understand what it
means to persevere. It's not just that these stories are
shocking and extraordinary. It's the sheer weight of them. A
white woman has her boyfriend murdered and then just randomly
pins it on a black man who just happens to
(30:30):
be in the neighborhood. A police officer shoots a teenager
in the back and gets off scot free. A kid
gets arrested, arraigned, indicted, tried, convicted, end sentenced to die
before he can even mount a defense. Your leader gets
whisked away to a chain gang because he didn't get
his license changed within ninety days. You fight an uphill
(30:51):
battle all morning in the courtroom. Then you eat your
bologny sandwich in your car like a fugitive, and it
never ends. You get in the car and you drive
to one end of the state, and the judge swivels
in his chair and will not offer you the basic
courtesy of facing you as you speak. Then you sleep
two in a bed in a stranger's house, and do
(31:12):
it all again the next day and the next day.
I don't understand how Donald Holliwell did it, And maybe
more importantly, I don't understand how he kept everyone else,
the people behind him who didn't have his strength, from
giving up. Is there any question more fundamental than that?
I'm not sure there is. So I went back to Vernon,
(31:42):
Jordan a second time after he's told me about Nathaniel
Johnson and Willie Nash. I sat in his office in
Rockefeller Center and he told me one last story. It's
about when he was in high school, the same school
Martin Ruth the King went to David Howard High on
Randolph Street, an all black school in the black part
(32:03):
of town. Jordan was in the band, and one day
the principal gets a call from the school superintendent, a
white woman. The senator from Georgia, Richard Russell was running
for president. She wanted that David Howard High School band
to be at Peastree in Baker Streets to play with
these hand me down instruments in white schools. As Richard
(32:26):
Russell went up Peastree Street on his way to sixteen
hundred Pennsylvania Avenue. Richard Russell was a hard core segregationist,
one of the most powerful men in the Senate who
used his position to block anything even looking like civil rights.
A man who was a matter of principal did not
think black people should be allowed to drink from the
(32:48):
same water fountain as white people. This man one of
the black students of Atlanta to play in his honor.
The principal told the bandmaster, and the bandmaster told us
at band practice at two thirty, a trumbone player named
Maynard Jackson and a trumpet player named Vernon Jordan said hell, no,
(33:12):
we won't go. Big discussion took place, right, you and
Maynard Jackson were at school together. Yeah, Maynard Jackson in
his day was part of the same band of brothers
as Donald Holliwell and Vernon Jordan and Martin Luther King.
The big argument took place, and at the end the
(33:35):
trumbone player and the trumpet players said, wait a minute.
We raised it, but we gotta go because if we
don't go, our principal and our bandmaster would lose their jobs.
So we played at Peachtree in Baker Street for Richard
Russell in nineteen fifty one. Swallow your pride. It wasn't
(33:55):
a pride, It was a practical decision. Twenty one years later,
Maynard Jackson was sworn in as mayor of Atlanta. Right,
so you got nineteen fifty one a bad situation, and
you get through it. Twenty one years later he is
conducting the political Symphony of Atlanta. And that's why you
(34:18):
can't get angry. I have to get smart. Yeah, he
at least did you at least play badly no, we
were too good. We who we were? A hell of
a man. Revisions History is produced by mail La Belle
(34:51):
Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel and ciel Maarra
Martinez wife. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is
our engineer. Original music by Luis Gara. Special thanks to
our actors Jody Markel and Ken Marx, and to Andy
Bowers and Jacob Weisberg. Panoply, I'm Malcolm Gradwell
Pushkin. This episode contains material that may be upsetting to
some listeners. I finished law school on the first Friday
in June of nineteen sixty. On the following Monday, I
went to work for Donne L. Holliwell, who was the
(00:38):
ultimate civil rights lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia at the time.
Vernon Jordan, one of the great figures in the American
civil rights movement talking about his mentor, and I went
to work for him right out of law school for
thirty five dollars a week, and there were no other
jobs at the local government level, county, state, or federal.
(01:05):
We couldn't even take the bar review course at John
Marshall University because Georgia law required education be separate and segregated.
So I wanted to work for don Hollowell. My first
day at work, I was in the Atlanting Municipal Court
helping him get demonstrators from the Atlanting University system out
(01:28):
of jo My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to
Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This
episode picks up with a previous one left off with
the story of an extraordinary man named Donald L. Holliwell.
(01:54):
Halliwell died in two thousand and four, but I wish
he were still alive, because he has so much to
teach us, like how do you keep going when all
seems lost? How do you behave? How do you conduct
yourself if you're one of the leaders of a loose
in cause? And for most of his life Holliwell fought uphill.
How do you prepare those behind you for the day
(02:15):
when you might succeed? What did he look like? Holliwell,
big heavy guy, played quarterback at Lane College Vernon. Jordan
is a big guy as well, imposing charismatic. I mentioned
that only because it's not a trivial fact. The two
(02:36):
of them, Jordan and Holliwell, would drive around Georgia from
one end of the state to the next, to towns
and courtrooms where a black lawyer was not just an
anomaly but a provocation. If you were five foot two
with a little squeaky voice, it didn't work. I would
just like to think that the people at the university
(02:57):
and around the university are sufficiently firm minded. I watched
all these old, grainy videotapes of Hollowell in the Auburn
Avenue Library and at Anna, and I became fixated on
his hands, which would rise and fall as he talked.
They were enormous. In Atlanta's segregated buses, there'd be a
(03:20):
little sign on the back of the seat where the
white section ended. It would say colored, directing black people
to their place. Sometimes, when no one was looking, Hollowell
would unclip it and stick it in his coat pocket,
mess things up a bit until the bus driver noticed,
or some white lady got hysterical because she inadvertently sat
(03:40):
in a seat still warm from the presence of a
black person. Hallowell was subversive in his own way, but
also formal proper. They used to say, he talked like
the Black Shakespeare. Hallowell once paused in the middle of
a trial to instruct the court on the correct pronunciation
of negro, not nigra, your honor negro. Another time, he
(04:06):
was up against two district attorneys in court, and the
moment he got up to speak, the white judge swiveled
in his chair with his back to halliwell, so he
would not have to suffer the indignity of gazing upon
a black man. What did Hallowell do? Just kept talking
and talking in those slow, formal tones, until it was
(04:27):
the judge who looked like a fool. I did all
the driving, and we get to a town and so
a principal or school teacher or the local doctor. Somebody
just got some independence. That's where you spend the night.
(04:50):
I slept a minute a night with Holloway. You know
we're piling the same bed. It better be a big bed.
Two of you were, Yeah, but there were no big
beds in those there were no King's bed. Ah. But no, no,
(05:10):
it was Halliwell was a real hero. In the early
morning of November fifth, nineteen fifty three, a woman named
Betty Joe Bishop calls the Atlanta Police Department in hysterics.
In her car is the badly beaten corpse of her boyfriend,
(05:32):
Marvin Lindsay. She tells the police that two of them
had been attacked when they were parked on a secluded
road on Atlanta's South Side. It's a sensational case. In fact,
it was written up in one of those pulp crime
magazines that were so popular back then, Official Detective Stories,
March nineteen fifty four issue Wanted the Man in the
(05:52):
Pyramid hat I can't do justice? To the spirit of
pulp journalism. So we're going to re enact some scenes
from the article, starting with its description of the moment
Betty Joe Bishop meets Atlanta's Chief of Detectives, Glenn Cowan,
on in November morning. Suppose that you begin by telling
(06:14):
us your name, Bishop, missus, Betty Joe Bishop, I'm a widow.
You were with Marvin Lindsey tonight. Yes, tell me what happened?
Bishop tells the detective about driving to Jonesboro Road. We
were only there a few minutes when this man came
(06:34):
out of the woods. It was terrible. He struck me
with his fists and Marvin had to fight him off.
Then he walked around the car and hit Marvin with
something heavy. Marvin pleaded for him to stop, but he wouldn't.
She covered her face with her hands and broke into long,
(06:57):
racking sobs. Cowen waited patiently until she recovered her composure.
What happened? Then he asked what happened? Then? Well, after
he got tired of hitting Marvin, he ran into the woods.
Marvin was lying half in and half out of the car,
so I walked around at the driver's side and made
(07:20):
him lie across the seat. He was bleeding something awful,
so I knew he was hurt bad. I drove to
his home in Blair Village and told his brother John
what had happened, and John got in the car. We
drove to Gratty Hospital, but it was too late. Marvin
was already dead. They're in the police station. She can
(07:42):
barely hold it together. She's all beaten up. Her lover
is dead. She tells the officer that the assailant had
come back after killing Marvin and raped her. Maybe Detective
Cowen takes her hand in sympathy. Maybe he waits a
few moments to let her collect her thoughts. Then, as
(08:03):
the article describes it, he asks her to describe the assailant.
I'm not sure. It was very dark, and I was scared.
He was tall, and then I remember that much. Also,
when I grabbed one of his hands, I remember it
felt kind of bony. Slowly, gently Cowen draws a description
(08:24):
out of her. The man was in his late thirties
or early forties, about five ft eleven then, wearing a
leather jacket, dungarees, a funny kind of hat, pyramid shaped,
and he was swarthy and had dark oily hair. The
article never comes out and says so explicitly, But if
(08:48):
you're a reader of the pulp magazine Official Detective Stories
in March nineteen fifty four, you know what swarthy means.
The killer's black. That's why this is such a sensational case.
Betty Joe Bishop is an innocent white widow and she
and her boyfriend had been attacked by a mysterious black man.
(09:09):
Atlanta's finest immediately got to work. They scour the crime scene.
The killer had a rolled up newspaper, which he had
apparently left at the scene, and he'd circled two want ads,
one for a dishwasher at a local restaurant. The police
go to the restaurant. Did a thin, swarthy man with
(09:31):
oily hair answer an ad yesterday for a dishwasher? The
only the restaurant says yes, doesn't remember his name, but
remembers the man said he used to look at Elite
Bowling Alleys on Hunter Street. The coat check girl at
Elite Bowling Alley says, oh, that's Willie. An eyewitness comes
forward says he saw a man near the crime scene
(09:54):
swore thee wearing a pyramid shaped hat. They scour the
area around the crime scene, stumble on a little cottage
inside his thirty nine year old Willie Nash, unemployed handyman,
swore thee dark hair. They arrest him, he confesses, So
(10:14):
who do you call? If you're Willie Nash? Things are
pretty bleak. What you really want is a white lawyer.
Because it's nineteen fifty four. The jury is going to
be all white, the police department is all white, the
judge is going to be white. Willie Nash knows where
the power lives in Atlanta, Georgia. But Willie Nash is poor,
so he's forced to settle for one of the very
(10:36):
few black lawyers in town, a man two years out
of law school, still wet behind the ears, Donald L. Holliwell.
When Nash realizes he has no other choice, he breaks
down into tears. I'd have cried too, Holliwell says years later,
if I'd have been Willie Nash under those circumstances. This
(10:57):
was years before Vernon Jordan joined Holliwell's firm, but he
knew all about the Willie Nash case. Everybody in black
Atlanta did. That's the case where he held up the
latest pennies before the jury, and that was a case
set set Hallowell up. A few years ago, the Smithsonian
(11:23):
interviewed a man named Robert Carter, another legendary black attorney.
Carter talks about trying school segregation cases in the Deep
South in the nineteen fifties with Constance Baker Motley and
Thurgood Marshall, two other pioneering black lawyers of that era.
They would be in court up against the local white
school superintendent, and black people from the community would show up,
(11:47):
cram into the balcony, hang on every word. It wasn't
that they expected to win, because they often didn't. They
just wanted to see a black person in a position
of formal authority over a white person in Mississippi or
Georgia or Alabama. At the height of Jim Crow, that
was history being made. Every hearing, every trial with a
(12:08):
black lawyer was theater. During cross examination, a white witness
might forget his role in the trial and start asking
questions of the attorney of Motley, say, and Connie Motley,
a black woman in nineteen fifty something, would reprimand the
white male witness say, my job is to ask the question.
(12:28):
Your job is to respond, and everybody would gasp. In
the evening, Carter says he would walk through the black
neighborhoods and hear people re enacting the trial in barbershops
and beauty parlors. In other words, there were two conversations
going on at any given time. There was the legal
(12:49):
conversation witness, judge, lawyers accused. If you were a white
lawyer dealing with the white world, that was the conversation
you worried about. But there was a second conversation, which
was between the black lawyers and the people in the balcony.
And if you were an underdog with a limited chance
to win at the first conversation, then that second conversation
(13:10):
was really important. Donald Holliwell was very good at the
first conversation, the legal one. He was a master of
the second. At home the defense of liberty and democracy
for African Americans. There's a great documentary about Holliwell made
(13:31):
by the Georgia's civil rights scholar Maurice Daniels. This fight
will require foot soldiers for equal justice. Daniels does a
long interview with an attorney named Howard Moore, who worked
with Holliwell in the nineteen sixties, and Moore talks about
arriving early at a hearing into the police shooting of
a black teenager to handle things before holliwell got there.
(13:53):
I got down to Bibb County and went to the courthouse.
There were about three thousand negroes on the steps. And
I went into the courthouse and there were about three
thousand or as many as they could get into the
balcony of stand. And when I walked into the courtroom,
the people upstairs, the black people, said that ain't Hollowell.
(14:16):
Where's Hallowell. That ain't Hollowell. I don't know what to do.
I don't know, Hey, I have no idea what I
was supposed to do, you know. So I said, well,
I'll act like Hollowell. I'll just object in the loudest
voice I can. And then people upstairs in the in
the in the back, and they said, what it ain't Hollowell,
but he sound like Hollowell. When Hollowell showed up at
(14:39):
the court in quest, he put the police officer on
the stand he shot a seventeen year old boy named
Acy Hall. Hollowell took the officer through his testimony bit
by meticulous bit slowly exposing the officer's lies. The coup
was in tears by the end. I've never seen that
before since, when a lawyer just take completely control of
(15:02):
a witness and buying that witness to his will, not
with shouting and screaming, but with systematic, well structured, well
played questions. Now, did Hollowell win a victory for the
bereaved family of ac Hall. Was the officer prosecuted? Of
course not. It's hard enough to win a conviction against
a white cop who shoots a black kid today, let alone.
(15:24):
In nineteen sixty two in Bibb County, Georgia, this was
about the second conversation between Hollowell and the thousands of
people on the steps. We are not entirely powerless. I
can bind a witness to my will one more case,
(15:45):
because there are dozens of them. Hollowell never stopped moving
in those years. This one was in nineteen sixty one,
and this time Hollowell was with the young Vernon Jordan.
Our client, James Fayre, a black kid from New Jersey,
had been arrested, haraigned, indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to
(16:10):
die in the electric chair in twenty four hours, Hallowell
and his team go down to the town of Reidsville,
Georgia to argue for a new trial. The judge in
the case was Judge w I and the niggas in
my court gear. He had that reputation. On Monday, we
(16:38):
went and we tried to gaze. At lunchtime, the judge
and the white lawyers and the white court officials went
across the town square to the white only restaurant and
had their lunch. Hallowell, CB. King and I went to
the owner grocery store on the Cornell Square or the
(16:59):
pound of bologney, loaf of bread, musta Coca cola and
the baby Ruth and sat in mister Hallowell's car in
the parking surrounding the courthouse and ate our lunch. We
did it on Monday. We did it on Tuesday. Wednesday,
(17:21):
we're trying the case. And the black lady waved at
me and I met her in the vestibute of the
courthouse and never forget it, and she said, Lawyer, we've
been watching y'all eat that bologney for two days now.
(17:41):
She says, just have a Coca cola and don't eat
that bologney today and when the court ends, which is
three thirty or four, your drive to my house for lunch.
So they go to her house. That's the moment Jordan
remembers fifty years later, that moment of grace and quiet
(18:03):
rebellion outside the courtroom. And we walked in, and the
table but was set for royalty, her best learning, her
best china, her best crystal. The aroma of the southern
food was almost crippling. It was as a circle. I noticed,
(18:26):
and her neighbors had come and put on nice sundresses,
and their husbands had cleaned up, and they welcomed us.
And then we joined hands, and and her husband gave
the grace, and he said this unforgettable sentence, which was, Lord,
(18:48):
we're down here in Tatnall County. We can't join the NAACP,
but thanks to your bountiful blessings, we can feed the NAACP. Lawyers.
(19:09):
So Willie Nash, Betty Joe Bishop's swore the assailant. The
case we began with Donald Hollowell's Trial by Fire. If
you look back on Hollowell's career, it's all there, every
theme in that first case. Nash has been indicted for murder, rape,
and robbery. The prosecutor has a murder weapon, a bloody
(19:31):
piece of pipe. He has Nash's confession, and he has
a witness, a black man named Julius Harris, who places
Nash at the murder scene. The moonlight was shining directly
on his face when I glimpsed him. Harris testifies for
Hallowell and Nash. It looks pretty bleak. But then one
of the prosecutors is trying to remember Julius Harris's name
(19:54):
and can't, and he says, in an open court room,
the eye witness, you know that fat nagger. Holliwell jumps
out of his seat and almost shouts a negro is
as entitled to respect as any other person. The judge agrees,
declares a mistrial. The second trial is two months later.
(20:16):
This time Holliwell has time to prepare. He puts the
head of the Georgia State Crime Lab on the stand
and asks, did you find any blood on the alleged
murder weapon. The man says, actually he didn't. Holliwell moves
on to the police. Turns out they have multiple conflicting
stories about what happened that night. Willie Nashe testifies says
(20:37):
his confession was beaten out of him. As for the
witness who said he saw Nash's face by the light
of the moon, Holliwell points out there was no moon
over Atlanta that night. Finally, Holliwell turns to the alleged victim,
Betty Joe Bishop. Turns out she had a second boyfriend
who left town right after the murder of her first boyfriend,
(20:58):
and when she pulled up to Marvin Lindsay's brother's house
with Marvin's dead body in her car, the first thing
out of her mouth was, I know you think I
did it, but a nigger did it. Finally, Halliwell calls
the doctor who examined Bishop right after the alleged rape occurred,
and the doctor concedes that he could find no evidence,
(21:20):
not bruises or sperm, to indicate that a rape actually occurred.
That's when Holliwell holds up an item from police evidence,
Betty Joe Bishop's underwear. Hollowell waves them in front of
the jury. Nineteen fifty four, Atlanta, Georgia. A black man
waves a white woman's underwear in the air in front
(21:40):
of an all white jury. Now, who's at four? Is
it for? The jury. Of course, he's saying, Betty Joe
Bishop is lying through her teeth, But it's really for
the audience. He sang enough. You can imagine that up
in the balcony there was a collective intake of breath
at that moment, something that could be heard clear across Atlanta,
(22:01):
and that night, in a thousand homes, somebody stood up
and played out that scene just like Hollowell, to a
chorus of disbelief. Willie Nash goes free. But it's still
not a real victory, because what's the real lesson of
(22:22):
the false indictment of Willie Nash? That every white person
in that courtroom lied freely and blatantly. The police liede
the witness lied, the victim lied, the press lide. The
murder weapon wasn't a murder weapon, the rape wasn't a rape.
And the only reason all the liars got caught was
(22:43):
they couldn't even be bothered to keep their story straight.
It didn't seem worth the effort. I know you think
I did it, but a nigger did it. It's not
as if the whole group of them, the victim, the police, officer,
the witness, the doctor, the press got in a room
and worked out an elaborate story to tell the court
that would be a conspiracy, which you only need a
(23:05):
conspiracy where there is a system to conspire against. There
was no system to conspire against. They were the system.
The Nash case wasn't a victory, but it was a warning.
Things got worse for the civil rights movement before they
(23:25):
got better. The William Ash case was in nineteen fifty four,
the same year that the Supreme Court ruled in the
Brownvie Board of Education decision that racial segregation was unconstitutional.
After Brown came what is known in civil rights history
as massive resistance. The white political power structure of the
(23:45):
South rose up, and the backlash began. One by one,
white governors and mayors and senators who had been at
least moderate on racial issues were replaced by hard line racists.
Alabama had a governor in the nineteen fifties, Big Jim Fulsom,
who used to say, all men are just alike. I
don't think he really meant it, but at least he
(24:07):
was willing to say it. By the early nineteen sixties,
Alabama had taken a big step backwards. Their new governor
was George Wallace, who famously declared sagregation now segregation, the
MA and segregation father. The decade leading up to the
(24:29):
nineteen sixty four Civil Rights Act was a dark time
in American racial history. We forget this now. Martin Luther
King led the Montgomery bus boycott in nineteen fifty six,
but after that he had years in the wilderness when
even members of his own community had turned against him.
And in October of nineteen sixty at the lowest EBB
(24:52):
King gets arrested. He was already on probation for a
traffic violation. He'd move from Alabama to Georgia and didn't
get a Georgia driver's license within the requisite ninety days,
for which he had been sentenced to twelve months in
public works camp, which was the Georgia euphemism for a
chain gang. King got that sentence suspended, but then he
(25:13):
got picked up for taking part in a sit in,
and the prosecutor said that meant he'd violated his probation
and now he needed to do his twelve months on
the chain gang. By the way, if you think that
this has anything to do with driving in Georgia with
an Alabama license, you're crazy. This is what things had
come to in nineteen sixty. You have asked me what
(25:37):
other plans do we have in connection with Reverend Martin
Luther King's release? So who does King call for help?
Donald L. Holliwell. Of course. In the morning after King's arrest,
Holliwell stands on the DeKalb County Court House steps addressing
a group of reporters. Of course, this would depend upon
whether or not the court granted our motion to vacate
(26:01):
the order of yesterday. If the court fails to release him,
of course we would take other steps to appeal or
to effect. Hallowell is trying to get King's case thrown out,
but the problem is that King is no longer in Atlanta.
He's banished. In Maurice Daniel's documentary, Hallowell's wife Louise talks
(26:23):
about what happened when her husband went to retrieve King
from the county jail, only to be confronted by the
warden when he got there. He said, I came to
get a king out this morning, or something like that
to that effect, and he said, well, he ain't here.
And he said, well, what do you mean he ain't here?
(26:44):
He said, well, they took him away this morning sometime,
and they carried him down to the state prison and
he said that's where he is. He ain't here, so
you can't get him. Well, mister Halliwell didn't like that.
I love that line. Mister Halliwell didn't like that. Daniels
picks up the story with Andrew Young, another of King's
(27:07):
inner circle. That was a night of Martin Luther King's life.
They took him from the DeKalb County, put him in
leg irons and handcuffs, laid him on the floor in
the back of a paddi wagon with nobody back there
but a German shepherd, and they drove him from Atlantat
of Reidsville. It's three hundred miles. There were no expressways then,
(27:30):
three hundred miles on bad Georgia roads. Reidsville, the same
place where Jordan and Holliwell ate their Bologna sandwich in
the car. They know the town well. The state prison
in Reidsville was notorious. It was the kind of place
where they used that phrase in quotation marks that somebody
got shot trying to escape, or where they got beat
(27:51):
up by a guard out of the chain gang. When
King's followers heard Reidsville. They honestly feared that he was
going to end up dead, but there's not a hint
of that in his attorney on the courthouse steps, learning
that Reverend King had been taken to the Reidsville prison,
I would say that I indicated two authorities on last
(28:12):
evening that we were desirous of having Reverend King at
this hearing. However, they informed me that they had already
transmitted the papers yesterday afternoon to the Board of Correction
and that it was in their purview to move him
when they desired. Hallowell's composure does not break why because
(28:36):
he's not just talking to those reporters, he's talking to
the black people of Georgia, telling them that it will
take more than the abduction of their leader to break
the spirit of their movement. We know that it's a
matter of normal practice. It is several days before a
prisoners moved. However, when we called at eight for the
purpose of ascertaining the whereabouts with the sheriff for making service,
(29:00):
we were informed that Reverend King had been taken down
to Reidsville at four or five this morning. That day,
Halliwell flew to Reidsville invited along the national media. The
White House was watching. Holliwell walked into Reidsville and walked
out with his client. It's a surreal moment. The state
(29:24):
of Georgia basically tried to kidnap the nation's leading civil
rights leader. There's press everywhere. Someone puts a camera in
Martin Luther King's face. Everyone's eyes are on him. There's
a famous picture of that moment. It ran in all
the newspapers, and you can imagine that when people from
the movement saw it, they first looked to see whether
(29:44):
King was okay, and then they asked, where's Holliwell. Sure enough,
there he was in the background, off a little to
the left, crisp white shirt, elegant black bowtie, impassive, implacable.
This is put gave me hope. Okay and Jordan again.
(30:10):
I went to see him to talk about Holliwell, but
more than that, because I wanted to understand what it
means to persevere. It's not just that these stories are
shocking and extraordinary. It's the sheer weight of them. A
white woman has her boyfriend murdered and then just randomly
pins it on a black man who just happens to
(30:30):
be in the neighborhood. A police officer shoots a teenager
in the back and gets off scot free. A kid
gets arrested, arraigned, indicted, tried, convicted, end sentenced to die
before he can even mount a defense. Your leader gets
whisked away to a chain gang because he didn't get
his license changed within ninety days. You fight an uphill
(30:51):
battle all morning in the courtroom. Then you eat your
bologny sandwich in your car like a fugitive, and it
never ends. You get in the car and you drive
to one end of the state, and the judge swivels
in his chair and will not offer you the basic
courtesy of facing you as you speak. Then you sleep
two in a bed in a stranger's house, and do
(31:12):
it all again the next day and the next day.
I don't understand how Donald Holliwell did it, And maybe
more importantly, I don't understand how he kept everyone else,
the people behind him who didn't have his strength, from
giving up. Is there any question more fundamental than that?
I'm not sure there is. So I went back to Vernon,
(31:42):
Jordan a second time after he's told me about Nathaniel
Johnson and Willie Nash. I sat in his office in
Rockefeller Center and he told me one last story. It's
about when he was in high school, the same school
Martin Ruth the King went to David Howard High on
Randolph Street, an all black school in the black part
(32:03):
of town. Jordan was in the band, and one day
the principal gets a call from the school superintendent, a
white woman. The senator from Georgia, Richard Russell was running
for president. She wanted that David Howard High School band
to be at Peastree in Baker Streets to play with
these hand me down instruments in white schools. As Richard
(32:26):
Russell went up Peastree Street on his way to sixteen
hundred Pennsylvania Avenue. Richard Russell was a hard core segregationist,
one of the most powerful men in the Senate who
used his position to block anything even looking like civil rights.
A man who was a matter of principal did not
think black people should be allowed to drink from the
(32:48):
same water fountain as white people. This man one of
the black students of Atlanta to play in his honor.
The principal told the bandmaster, and the bandmaster told us
at band practice at two thirty, a trumbone player named
Maynard Jackson and a trumpet player named Vernon Jordan said hell, no,
(33:12):
we won't go. Big discussion took place, right, you and
Maynard Jackson were at school together. Yeah, Maynard Jackson in
his day was part of the same band of brothers
as Donald Holliwell and Vernon Jordan and Martin Luther King.
The big argument took place, and at the end the
(33:35):
trumbone player and the trumpet players said, wait a minute.
We raised it, but we gotta go because if we
don't go, our principal and our bandmaster would lose their jobs.
So we played at Peachtree in Baker Street for Richard
Russell in nineteen fifty one. Swallow your pride. It wasn't
(33:55):
a pride, It was a practical decision. Twenty one years later,
Maynard Jackson was sworn in as mayor of Atlanta. Right,
so you got nineteen fifty one a bad situation, and
you get through it. Twenty one years later he is
conducting the political Symphony of Atlanta. And that's why you
(34:18):
can't get angry. I have to get smart. Yeah, he
at least did you at least play badly no, we
were too good. We who we were? A hell of
a man. Revisions History is produced by mail La Belle
(34:51):
Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel and ciel Maarra
Martinez wife. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is
our engineer. Original music by Luis Gara. Special thanks to
our actors Jody Markel and Ken Marx, and to Andy
Bowers and Jacob Weisberg. Panoply, I'm Malcolm Gradwell
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Ridiculous History
History is beautiful, brutal and, often, ridiculous. Join Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown as they dive into some of the weirdest stories from across the span of human civilization in Ridiculous History, a podcast by iHeartRadio.