This week, we’re featuring an episode of a podcast we’re big fans of: The Last Archive! The Last Archive tells little known histories and how they affect our modern lives. It tells stories that at first seem to be about something small, but turn out to be about much more.

“Parakeet Panic,” explores a moment when invasive parakeets began to spread in New York City in the 1970s — and the government decided that the solution was to kill them all. If you liked this episode, you can listen to more of The Last Archive at thelastarchive.com, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Joe Richman (host): From Radio Diaries, I’m Joe Richman, and this is the final episode of The Unmarked Graveyard, a series about people buried in America’s largest public cemetery, the lives they lived, and the people they left behind.

[montage of clips from the series]

Joe Richman: Back in 1995, LaMont Dottin was 21 years old and a freshman at Queens College, when one evening, he didn’t come home. Within 48 hours, his mother was at a local police precinct trying to report him missing. His name was added to a pile of almost 20, 000 cases that the NYPD’s Missing Persons Squad was supposed to be investigating.

And LaMont’s case fell through the cracks. This is a story about the New York City Police Department and a woman’s search to find out what happened to her son.

Dr. Arnita Fowler: It took me 30 days to get him officially reported missing. My name is Dr. Anita Fowler and LaMont Dottin was my son who went missing in 1995.
I remember walking in to the precinct, there was a full room of people scurrying around, when I’m talking to a man who’s being very nonchalant with me. Now here I’m a mother, trying to report my one and only child missing. And no matter what I said, he says, “no, take my word for it, he’ll be home soon.” You know. He was considered an adult.

There was a Hispanic lady listening, and she came over, she said, “I’ll take your, uh, report, I’m not sure how far I can get it.” And then I called at least twice a week at night because that’s when they would work the shift for missing persons. One day turned into two days, and two days turned into three days, and unbelievably, months.

Kameron Brown: Definitely remember his mom being very persistent. My name’s Kameron Brown. I was a detective in the missing persons department from 1997 to 2002. She would constantly call the missing persons. She wanted to know what was going on today, what was happening.

Fowler: But they refused to meet with me and just said there’s no update or we have a new detective on it.

The case kept opening and closing, and one time I showed up and his picture wasn’t even on the board. So I said, “how are you searching for my son if his picture’s not here?”

Phillip Mahony: The missing persons squad at that time was In a state of disrepair, there was no work being done on cases, record keeping wasn’t good.

I’m Phillip Mahony. I was the commanding officer of the missing persons squad in the New York City Police Department from 1998 to 2000.

Brown: The amount of case law that each individual detective had, there was… Amazing. This was 10, 11 detectives with between 20 and 40 cases apiece. And there was not a lot of investigation.

They didn’t have vehicles for us to actually go out and do the interviews. It was just mostly phone calls at that point. You know, “hi, this is Detective Brown. You made a report on so and so missing. Did they come home? No, they didn’t. Okay, thank you.”

Mahony: I remember looking at this spreadsheet of open missing person cases. It just went on for like a hundred pages. Someone with an adult missing son that would be low on the totem pole.

Fowler: And this article is from the Daily News, November 21st, 1995. Hollis resident Arnita Fowler hadn’t had time to prepare for Thanksgiving. She’s been too busy checking city hospitals, the morgue, and jails in a desperate search for her 21 year old son. I was known as a one woman search party. I’m creating my own press conferences.

I learned how to write press releases on the fly. I would look in every homeless person’s face as I walked the streets. I go, was I crazy? But I know that I could not live the rest of my life not knowing. If he was out there,

I was 17 when I had my son, and everything I did evolved around him. He was a very loving, very loving son. He had that spirit of happiness with him, you know what I mean, like, carefree. We were always together. And I know he was saying, my mom’s gonna find me.

Mahony: I became Lieutenant and Commanding Officer of the Missing Persons Squad in 1998. Then I immediately tried to organize the Missing Persons Squad, and so we appointed a couple of people to go through that list, the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of active cases that had accumulated over the years, page by page, name by name, and find out what happened to these people that the Missing Persons Squad never followed up on.

Brown: It felt good. I was actually out doing investigations, and we had two or three cases from, you know, the 50s. And when you really go back and still speak to parents, that same pain of their child being missing was still there.

Mahony: They would start with very basic checks, fingerprint checks, and so on. We did find a lot of people through routine checks.

Fowler: I spent four years looking for my son and then this one particular night, I was so frustrated that I picked up the phone in frustration and called and the same man who had been telling me no, it was the same guy. He said, sure, we’ll meet you. And when they came, my house was full, and it was a lady officer.

She said they had discovered that they had dotted every I and crossed every T.

Mahony: Okay, so I’m reading from a missing person’s report. The report says that the missing person was found floating in the river, October 1995, and after

Fowler: that… So apparently, eight days after Lamont went missing, they found his body.

The body would have been sent to the morgue. And their process required them to submit fingerprints.

Mahony: To identify him through fingerprints, which could be difficult if they were in the water for a long time.

Fowler: And the FBI matched it with an arrest that was made. He was arrested for a stolen car when he was in high school.

But the NYPD never followed up for results of that identification until 1999, four years later.

Mahony: “On this date, the deceased was identified as LaMont Dottin through fingerprints. In view of the facts stated above, the undersigned recommends that this case be marked closed.”

Fowler: I couldn’t imagine that this was the outcome after four years. I don’t know how he died, I do not believe it was suicide, and there was no blunt force trauma. Nothing indicating foul play.

This is the paper that shows where my son was buried at in Harts Island. There’s no name, it just says “male.” To bury my son in a place as though he had no one. As though he had no one. And I’m in your face. He was somebody’s child, and it shows the date of death and the day he was exhumed, four years later.

Brown: I remember opening the paper and seeing the picture of the body in the horse drawn carriage going around Queens. I was like, wow, if we had that case, look. And we’re all looking at it. I just can’t imagine any of my children not coming home or not knowing what happened to them. This is the Daily News September 21st, 1999.

Fowler: Student laid to rest. Four years after being buried in her papa’s grave, a missing Queens student was finally given a proper burial yesterday. And it was a perfect funeral. He was drawn by two horses and a A carriage, and the casket itself is all white, like the horses. It is what I believe that he deserved, nothing but the best.

I needed memories to be something that you could reflect on who he was. The prince that he was to me.

So Lamar is now buried at the Calverton National Cemetery. I just went there yesterday and put flowers, I just took pictures there. There are seasons of my feelings that shift. One major shift was when I realized he’s been gone longer than he’s been with me. But I can, as a mother, you know, still smell what he smell like, still hear what he laugh like.

And when I’m looking at his picture, I can imagine what he’s actually sounding like. So it’s just really, people just don’t disappear.

Joe Richman: Following years of advocacy by Fowler, New York State passed a law in 2016 requiring the police to expedite searches for missing adults. It’s called LaMont Dottin’s Law. In recent years, advances in fingerprinting and DNA technology have improved the identification of unnamed bodies in New York City.

This is the last episode in our series, The Unmarked Graveyard, Stories from Hart Island. The whole time we’ve been working on this series, Hart Island has been mostly off limits, as it has been for 150 years. But today, we are able to report that Hart Island is officially opening to the general public. Tours begin this week.

When we first started thinking about this project, I kind of imagined it as a series of audio obituaries for people who never got one. But each story became more than that. More complicated. More mysterious. More surprising. In the end, this series isn’t just about individuals buried on Hart Island.

It’s about the people who went looking for them. And the people who remember them, because once the body is gone, all that’s left are the stories.

Our story about LaMont Dottin was produced by Alissa Escarce. The producers behind our series, The Unmarked Graveyard, are Nellie Gilles, Mycah Hazel, Alissa Escarce, and myself. All the stories were edited by Ben Shapiro and Deborah George. Our NPR editor was Matt Ozug. Sound Mixing by Ben Shapiro and Mitra Kaboli. Marketing and Development by Lena Engelstein.

Theme music is by Matthias Bossi and SteelWagon Symphonette. Thanks to Melinda Hunt and the Hart Island Project. And thanks to our broadcast partner, NPRs All Things Considered, we’re proud members of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent creator, own listener supported podcasts. You can hear them all at Radiotopia.fm.
Radio Diaries has support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Lily Auchincloss Foundation, New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs, and for listeners like you.

I’m Joe Richman of Radio Diaries, thanks for listening.

Joe Richman [host]: Two years ago, a former detective named Angel Irizarry set out on a personal investigation to track down an uncle who had been out of touch with the family for decades. But early in his search, he made a disappointing discovery. His uncle, Caesar, had died.

From Radio Diaries, I’m Joe Richman and this is The Unmarked Graveyard. A series of untangling mysteries from America’s largest public cemetery. Each week we’re bringing you stories about people buried on Hart Island, the lives they lived and the people they left behind.

[montage of clips from the series]

Today, episode six. The story of Angel Irizarry and his long lost uncle, Caesar.

Angel Irizarry: Alright, this is um, Angel Irizarry. I just received the death certificate of my Uncle Cesar.

[sound of opening envelope]

It says the date of death was July 19th, 2020. Which would have made Uncle Cesar 64 years old. And it says place of disposition is City Cemetery at Hart Island. Everything else pretty much says unknown. The usual occupation unknown, kind of business unknown, says mother and parents are unknown, but the truth of the matter is he does have family and he did have family.

Uncle Cesar was estranged from our family, I would say about 40 to 50 years. I’m 45 years old and I only seen him one time. I think I was probably about six or seven sitting on the floor playing with toys at my grandparents house. And then there was this tall, dark gentleman standing at the door. I looked and was like, who the heck are you?

You know, you look like my dad, close to a spitting image. And I have never seen you before. I think I went to my dad and was like, you know, who is this guy? My dad was like, that’s your uncle Caesar. But after that, I never seen him again.

From that point forward, I was asking questions like, well, where is he? How come I don’t see this guy? My aunts and even my grandparents wouldn’t want to speak a word of who Uncle Cesar was. There would be times that I would go through some pictures and I would ask, Hey, who’s this guy? And people would say, that’s nobody.

My father did finally sit me down and told me that when Uncle Cesar was about 21, 22, he was hanging out with a very bad crowd who used to drink a lot. One day he came to the house asking my grandfather for money. And my grandfather was very mad at him because he was drunk. And uncle Caesar punched my grandfather.

And then my grandfather told him that he was banished from the family forever.

It’s sad, man. He was isolated from the family, so I know that’s sad, man. I know it’s sad for me. I start, you know, relating to him more as a teenager to the point that I was like, Well, I can see how people get banished because I feel like that’s kind of like what’s happening to me a little bit. I was getting into some, I don’t want to incriminate myself, but I was getting into some things that have to do with gangs, drugs, alcohol, to the point that I got kicked out of my house.

But I became the man that I am now because of my father and the family who stood by my side and I believe that Uncle Caesar, he was a man who needed to be forgiven just like I need to be forgiven. I always knew that he was out there and always. Wanted more of a relationship with him. And now that he’s gone, I started looking to see if anyone knew him.

Someone who can give me a little bit of insight on how he died, but also how he lived.

[sound of car doors opening and closing]

Irizarry: Okay, so, um, today, me and my wife, we just drove from Virginia to the Bronx, New York. We’re going to the last place where Caesar lived before he passed, we were able to locate his roommate, who he lived with.

[knocking sound, door opening, man’s voice speaking spanish]

Irizarry: Hi. Nice to meet you. My Spanish not so good, so, oh, uh, he’s going to speak for me.

William Calderon: Okay.

Irizarry: So I am the nephew of Caesar Irizarry.

Calderon: [man speaking Spanish and English translator] My name is William Calderon. I lived with Cesar I think 5, 6, 7 years. I can start from the beginning if you want.

Irizarry: Uh, yeah, definitely. How did you come to meet him?

Calderon: Yeah, my mom and I, we rent out rooms, uh, so we can make rent, and he came and rented out a small room, but then, uh, due to his drinking, we started to have some issues and he decided himself to go to rehab. That time, he lasted about a year, almost a year without drinking, but then he started drinking again. But he started to calm down over time and we started to have a really good relationship.

Irizarry: Would you consider him a good man?

Calderon: Of course, great person. The only thing is that when he started drinking, he would become someone else. But you know, he was good to me and my mom. And he would pay his rent first day of the month when he would get his check from the government.

Irizarry: Why did the government take care of him? He wasn’t working?

Calderon: No, he did not work. We would talk, we would chat. He would talk to me about his family. He would say that he had a family, but he wasn’t in touch with any of them. And he would say he felt bad for not being what his family wanted him to be. And he said he knew he was the one who messed up with his family and he was the one that strayed away.

That’s actually why he would call his dad and his dad would get annoyed because he’d be drunk when he called.

Irizarry: You know. If Caesar contacted my grandfather and he was drunk, that type of situation brings back the past.

Calderon: He would tell us precisely that. I’m laughing. Um, it’s not funny, but I’m laughing because that’s exactly what he would tell us. That his dad hated when he called him while he was drunk.

Irizarry: Did he pass away in this house? Do you know when he passed?

Calderon: I remember it like it was today. It was July 4th, and he went out as usual to drink.

And then from the park, they called the ambulance because he couldn’t stand up or walk or handle himself. When I got the call from the hospital, I was told his organs started failing and that he could stop breathing at any moment. They asked me if I wanted to say anything to him over the phone. And I told him, Cesar, remember there’s a God and that I’m with you.

And I couldn’t continue speaking with him because I started tearing up and I couldn’t say anything else. But the doctor said, uh, rest assured that he heard you because he moved his hand when you were speaking.

Irizarry: That’s beautiful, man. That’s beautiful. This. Whole. The situation really shows you that time is short and you don’t have time to hold grudges.

Calderon: Let me tell you something that might give you some peace. He wasn’t with his own family, but I can tell you that he was loved. While he lived here, he had that love of a family. He would even tell us, my mom and I, you’re my family.

Irizarry: So that makes me feel more happy than anything. And um, thank you for being his friend. It really goes and shows that it doesn’t have to be blood to be family.

Calderon: Amen. Amen.

When he passed away, uh, they called me from the hospital asking what should I do with his body. And I told them that he himself, while he was alive, told me for the government to take care of it. I don’t even know where they buried him.

[sounds of boat and nature]

Irizarry: Test 1 2, 1 2. We are here at the beginning of the ferry to go to Hart Island. And, uh, at this time we’re going to go see the gravesite of Uncle Cesar.

He’s more alive to me now. He’s more alive to me now because… I walked in a place where he walked. I talked to the people he talked to. Oh, this is it. And I wanted to speak with him, but I’ll go. Caesar. We’re here. I wish I could have. Known you more, wish I could have spent time with you and, um, I’m sorry for that, but I never forgot about you and everything that we have done as a family against you, we ask for forgiveness and everything that you have done against us.

We forgive you until we meet again. I’ll go Cesar. God bless you. [Spanish] in Jesus name. Amen.

Joe Richman [host]: That was Angel Irizarry remembering his uncle Caesar. Our story was produced by Alissa Escarce. Daniel Gross and Tyler Brady. It was edited by Deborah George, Ben Shapiro, and me. Our interpreter was Ramon Mendez. Sound mixing by Mitra Kaboli. The Radio Diaries team also includes Nellie Gilles, Mycah Hazel, and Lena Engelstein.

This story was reported in collaboration with the Missing Them Project from the non-profit news site The City. Thanks to editor Anjali Tsui. Missing Them is supported in part by the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University. And thanks to our broadcast partner NPR’s All Things Considered.

We’re proud members of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator owned, listener supported podcasts. You can hear them all at radiotopia. fm. Radio Diaries has support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs, and from listeners like you.

Coming up on the Unmarked Graveyard, the mystery of a woman who lived in a hotel room in midtown Manhattan.

Unidentified male voice: Hisako Hasegawa lived here for at least 40, 50 years, and she lived alone. You see such a person and you can’t help but wonder what her life has been.

Richman: I’m Joe Richman of Radio Diaries, see you next week.

Joe Richman: From Radio diaries, I’m Joe Richman, and this is The Unmarked Graveyard, a series about people buried on Hart Island, the lives they lived, and the people they left behind.

[Montage of clips from the series]

If you’ve been listening to our series, you know we’ve been attempting to untangle mysteries from America’s largest public cemetery.

There was a story about a woman’s search for the father she never knew, a successful writer who was largely forgotten, and a guy who spent every day for two years on the same park bench. But there’s some mysteries in Hart Island. We have not been able to solve. The Belvedere Hotel is in the heart of New York City’s theater district.

Many of its guests come to see the sights or take in a show, but there are also a few dozen people who call the Belvedere home. Decades ago, they came to New York and rented rooms there, and as the hotel changed hands over the years, they never left. One of them was Hisako Hasegawa, who lived a private and quiet life.

Nobody at the hotel knew much about her.

Today, Episode 7, The Woman in Room 208.

[SOUNDS OF HOTEL LOBBY
Unidentified man: Welcome to the Belvedere.]

Ali Mahmood: My name is Ali Mahmood, and I work at the Belvedere Hotel in New York City. Hisako Hasegawa lived here for at least 40, 50 years. And she lived alone.

Jerry: She was a very sweet lady. She would stop by, always say hello to me. My name is Jerry. I’ve been a bellhop at the Belvedere Hotel for 22 years. I would have a morning shift on Fridays and Saturdays. We always open the door for her. She’ll look up with a smile, huge smile. You know, she was always bowing, saying “hello, hello, hello.”

Mahmood: When she spoke, she spoke with an accent, but she was able to convey herself very clearly.

Every time I ran into her in a hallway or in the lobby, she said, nice to see you. She actually meant it.

If you wrote her a rent receipt, for example, you would magically find a hand drawn card next day on your desk. Someone took 45 minutes to make that card.

Jerry: Her handwriting was beautiful, like… poetry. I don’t know, I’ve never seen something like that. One time, I say hello, and she just waved and rushed into the elevator with her little shopping cart.

So she came and gave me a letter. “Hello Jerry, I do want to apologize that I didn’t get to say hello to you correctly.” You know, and just how bad she felt. And it touched me. There’s some tenants here that don’t got nobody to talk to. Nobody say, have a good day. Nobody say, happy holidays. Nobody say, I love you. Nobody say, I hate you. You know. [laughs]

Mahmood: I always saw her alone. Alone yet happy. Perhaps to each their own. You see such a person and you can’t help but wonder what her life has been.

[sound of elevator and a woman saying “come in, come in.”

Renee Querijero: My name is Renee. And I live here in Belvedere Hotel when Miss Hisako was still alive. This is where she lives, room 208, and I live in 207, across the hall. As far as the nearest neighbor, I am the only one she talks to and she knows my name. Doesn’t say so much, you know, except, you know, the usual greeting.

“How are you? Weather is nice. I’m gonna get my mail.”

[piano chord]

I always play this, you know.

[Renee begins to play classical music on the piano]

This is my piano. And I play it in the evening most often. She knows when I play the piano. Because she hears it. She tells me, you know, “It’s a good thing you played the piano last night. How nice is it.” Those things. Very gracious.

Nancy Boyce: My name is Nancy Boyce. And I have lived in this building at the Belvedere for the past 41 years. So, this is the living room and the bedroom. It’s just one, one big room. Hisako’s room, just like mine. This is the hallway. And then this is a depressing kitchen. Yeah, it’s very small. The size of a closet. I have my hot plate and refrigerator.

At least we had our own little kitchen, tiny. Our own private bathroom. That’s what was important to me.

People who don’t know, or like tourists or friends, they are amazed. Wow. You live in a hotel in the heart of the city, especially, you know, it’s a big deal for them. But to me, having lived here for such a long time, for decades, you know, I can’t stand this apartment.

At the end of the day, I feel lucky that I have my family and a wide circle of friends. But I see a lot of older people like Hisako. They’re all alone.

Jerry: One Friday I realized that she didn’t come down. And it bothered me. So I like, I asked upper management to please check up on her. Because we’ve had tenants that have passed away in the hotel.

Querijero: When I came in from work, everybody was on the hallway. The police and then the investigators were all there. And then they started asking questions, questions.

I said, what happened? She died. She fell from the bed. I cannot believe that she died that way. And investigator was telling me, Oh, you’re the next neighbor. Okay, do you know anybody who knows her? My gosh, after all these years, I never, I never saw her with anybody. I wish… if she only knock at my door, you know.

I should have asked her. They think that you are, uh, intruding or something, but no, that is, that’s a misconception. I think you should ask.

Ali Mahmood: New York is a place for the dreamers, and we all come from somewhere to leave and leave your families behind and come here and make a new life and one would hope that you’d find love and meet people and have a family and… Maybe not end up alone in a hotel room somewhere.

[Piano music]

Joe Richman (host): Thank you to the staff and tenants of the Belvedere Hotel. Piano performed by Renee Querijero in room 207. In our research, we discovered very little about Hisako Hasegawa. We know she was born in Japan in 1934 and probably came to the U. S. in the 1970s. One thing we do know is that after she died at the Belvedere in 2016, She was buried in plot 379 on Hart Island.

This story was produced by Nellie Gilles. It was edited by Deborah George, Ben Shapiro, and me. Sound mixing by Ben Shapiro. The Radio Diaries team also includes Alissa Escarce, Mycah Hazel, and Lena Engelstein. Our theme music is by Matthias Bossi and Stellwagen Symphonette. Thanks also to our broadcast partner NPR’s All Things Considered.

We’re proud members of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator owned, listener supported podcasts. You can hear them all at Radiotopia. fm.

Radio Diaries has support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs, and from listeners like you.

Coming up next week, our final episode of The Unmarked Graveyard, a missing persons case that fell through the cracks.

Unidentified male voice: The missing persons squad at that time was in a state of disrepair. I remember looking at this spreadsheet of open cases. It just went on for like a hundred pages.

Joe Richman: I’m Joe Richman of Radio Diaries. See you next week.

JOE RICHMAN (HOST): Celebrity graves are some of the most beloved places in the country. Elvis Presley’s burial site — at Graceland — draws more than half a million fans every year. Fans leave red kisses on Marilyn Monroe’s headstone in Los Angeles. And jazz lovers trek to Flushing, Queens to drape Mardi Gras beads on the grave of Louis Armstrong. 

But there aren’t many celebrities buried at Hart Island. 

This is the Unmarked Graveyard. I’m Joe Richman of Radio Diaries. And each week we’re untangling mysteries from America’s largest public cemetery.

[MONTAGE OF CLIPS FROM THE SERIES]

JOE RICHMAN (HOST): On Hart Island, there are no names on headstones, no plaques. Just white posts with numbers on them. Each one marks a trench containing about 150 coffins. And buried in one of those graves is a woman that Ernest Hemmingway once called his “favorite living writer.” Today, episode 5: the story of how a well-known writer’s books and body disappeared. 

ARCHIVAL TAPE: Mutual presents, Author, Author. Now we’d like you to meet our guest authors for tonight, the playwright, novelist, and author of Happy Island, Ms. Dawn Powell.  

TIM PAGE: Dawn Powell looked on society and she wrote it up. She made fun of millionaires and communists. She was a very smart, tough, sarcastic, woman who put all of that into her books. 

ARCHIVAL: When they got back there, you see, he had opened up and there was a tearoom and it was dinner time and they had to have the regular blue plate. 

FRAN LEBOWITZ: She was a truth teller: women who pointed things out, women who observed things, women who told the truth. Those kind of women scare men

PAGE: I do think there will come a time when people will realize that she’s one of America’s greatest writers.

ARCHIVAL: Well, Miss Powell, thank you for joining us this evening.  

PAGE: But after she died, Dawn Powell was really kind of forgotten.

JOHNSON: My name is Vicki and Dawn Powell is my great aunt. 

JOHNSON: When I was a teenager, I read My Home is Far Away, which is about her childhood growing up in Mount Gilead, Ohio. When she was seven years old, her mother died and she had to live with a stepmother who was very unkind. Dawn had a secret hiding place for stories that she wrote. And the stepmother burned her stories. So, Dawn went to college, and then moved to New York and really never came back. 

ARCHIVAL TAPE: Greenwich Village is recognized as being the center of arts and letters in America.

PAGE: Dawn Powell arrived in Greenwich Village in 1918. My name is Tim Page and I wrote Dawn Powell: A Biography.

LEBOWITZ: My name is Fran Lebowitz. I’m a writer. You know, she came from nowhere. She was no one. All right? But she knew that she was smart enough, good enough to be very good in New York, which is the most competitive place in the world. 

PAGE: She met people like Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker and she knew all of the famous writers. She was very funny and people like that, and she liked to drink. So, she was out at taverns a lot of the evening, sleeping around and not caring what other people thought.

POWELL: Had best party. Had new dress and was very drunk. Met Floyd Dell at dinner.

PAGE: She started keeping a diary. It touches on her friends. It touches on sights she saw in New York, and the whole city comes alive.

POWELL: I contend that a writer’s business is minding other people’s business.

PAGE: She wrote for the New Yorker and places like the Saturday Review and Esquire Magazine.  And she wrote for any place that would pay her. But then she started writing novels about New York. Funny books. 

LEBOWITZ: She had contempt for the rich. She had contempt for any kind of falsity. 

PAGE: She’s a satirist. She basically thought human beings were silly and frivolous, but she loved them, you know?  

POWELL: Nowadays, men want a woman to work but not be too good at her job. Why couldn’t the rich mind their own business, invite each other to dinner, and feast on each other’s fruity conversation? Men used the term “career woman” to indicate a girl who made more than he did, and who was unforgivably good at her job when he was not able to hold one. 

LEBOWITZ: Does that seem to you like it couldn’t have been written yesterday? Dawn Powell was incredibly observant. That is the thing that she succeeded at.

POWELL: By this time next year, I will have a fortune, have cut the throats of my best friends, have kicked my inferiors in the pants, and be loved and respected by all. Perhaps I will be considered a real artist, a positive dreamer, a genius. 

PAGE: Dawn Powell’s personal life was not easy. She had one child. Today, he would be diagnosed as autistic. He got sent to mental hospitals and nursing homes. 

JOHNSON: That was always a sadness, overall sadness, that it was her only son and he needed a lot of care.

PAGE: She saw life as a tough business, as a very tough business. All the very famous women writers were usually ending their stories with  a man and a woman falling in love and living happily thereafter. Dawn had seen enough of life to realize, well, sometimes that’s the case but it’s not what usually happens in the world. And so that’s the way she wrote.

LEBOWITZ: But that is not appealing to many people, especially to the critics. Reviewers were really powerful, but she was not beloved by people in that world. Like Edmund Wilson — a man, by the way — with the nickname “Bunny.

POWELL: If Bunny’s review had been offset by a powerful, favorable one, the book would’ve gotten off. It is very discouraging to have someone who actually has told me I’m equal to Sinclair Lewis at his best do me so much genuine damage. I have enough damage. I have enough damage done me already merely by the desire to write and my pleasure in people and strange angles of life. 

PAGE: Her last novel, the Golden Spur, was published in 1962 but at this point, she was really starting to get sick. 

JOHNSON: In my family, we knew that Dawn was not doing well health-wise. My grandmother Phyllis told me that she had trouble eating and she was losing a lot of weight.  

POWELL: Letter to Phyllis Powell, March 14, 1964. Dear Phyllis, I am really fascinated by the aging process, even if the victim is me. Somebody told me humans age like trees. Almost overnight, teeth and hair and all age, and you are 50. Then with a big clank like a rusty chain, you are 60, and so on. Anyway, they tell me trees do this too. The ring of the age cycle on the trunk shows up the same way. Suddenly. Love, Dawn. 

JOHNSON: We went to New York City and visited her. It was in 1964 and I was in high school then. I had a feeling my grandmother thought she’d never see her again after that visit, which is pretty much what happened. 

PAGE: It was intestinal cancer. She just shrunk, down to less than a hundred pounds. She died in St. Luke’s Hospital November 14th, 1965. After she died, a lot of her books went out of print. And so she was pretty much forgotten. She was so unknown that you would go into a bookstore and you’d ask, “Do you have any Dawn Powell?” And they said, “I’ve never even heard of Donald Powell!” She was just kind of lost. But then in 1987, Gore Vidal published an article about her in the New York Review of Books. 

GORE VIDAL: In her lifetime, Powell should have been as widely read as, say, Hemingway or the early Fitzgerald. The fact is, that Americans have never been able to deal with wit. Wit, deployed by a woman, is a brutal assault upon nature. That is, Man. 

LEBOWITZ: I had never heard of her until Gore wrote that piece and I bought whatever books there were. And I kept telling people, “You have to read this. Your life will be better for reading this.”

PAGE: The last years of her life, Dawn wanted her body donated to science, so it was claimed by Cornell Medical Center. Five years after she died, the hospital had a box of some of her remains left and they talked to her executor and she wrote back something saying, “We do not wish to claim this. You can do with it what you want.” So in 1970, whatever was left of Dawn was buried out in Hart Island.  The family knew nothing about this. 

JOHNSON: My mom told me it was a potter’s field, and it was just a place where people are buried who didn’t have any money or no family to take care of them. My grandparents would have certainly found a better resting place for her than where she was buried. 

PAGE: She is for better or worse on Hart Island forever. 

LEBOWITZ: There are people who say, “I want this when I die.” This is where I want to be buried.This is the kind of gravestone I want. I think Dawn Powell was too smart and realistic to care about this. I don’t think she would’ve cared. I just don’t. 

PAGE: I mean, in a weird way, she might’ve been pleased in a funny way that the city of New York paid for her burial. She loved New York. She told the truth about New York and I’m not sure she’d want to be anywhere else.  

POWELL: July 6th, 1953. There is really one city for everyone, just as there is one major love. New York is my city because I have an investment I can always draw on: a bottomless investment of building up an idea of New York, so no matter what happens here, I have the rock of my dreams of it that nothing can destroy. 

JOE RICHMAN (HOST): In the 1970s, a fire on the island destroyed many of the cemetery’s burial records —likely including Dawn Powell’s. So today, no one knows exactly where on Hart Island she’s buried. 

In recent years, Dawn Powell has developed a cult-like following. Nine of her novels are back into print — and a volume of her diaries and letters has been published. A few celebrities, like Julia Roberts, have tried turning her books into films. And she’s even gotten a shout-out on Gilmore Girls. You can read more about Powell’s life in Tim Page’s book, Dawn Powell: A Biography. 

Thanks to actress Tessa Flannery, for being the voice of Dawn Powell in our story. Tom Cole was Gore Vidal. Our story was produced by Mycah Hazel. Our team also includes Nellie Gilles, Alissa Escarce, Lena Engelstein, and myself. Our editors are Deborah George and Ben Shapiro. Sound mixing also by Ben Shapiro. Music in this episode was by Hank Jones and Fletcher Henderson.

We couldn’t make this series without the help of Melinda Hunt and the Hart Island Project. Visit HartIsland.net to learn more. And thanks to our broadcast partner, NPR’s All Things Considered. We are proud members of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. You can hear them all at radiotopia.fm. Radio Diaries  has support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and from listeners like you. 

Coming up on the Unmarked Graveyard

ANGEL IRIZARRY: There was this tall, dark gentleman, standing at the door. Looked like my dad. Close to a spitting image, and I have never seen you before. Who is this guy? And my dad was like, “That’s your uncle, Cesar.” But after that I never seen him again.

RICHMAN: I’m Joe Richman of Radio Diaries. See you next week.

[Sound of a fog horn and a boat engine]
JOE RICHMAN (host): On a recent rainy Saturday morning, I visited Hart Island for the first time. It’s New York City’s potter’s field. There are more than a million people buried there, on a narrow strip of land. And it’s not easy to visit. You have to get permission from the city. If they grant it, you show up at an industrial dock in the Bronx and ride a small ferry to the island.
PARK RANGER: Um, everybody has a designated area where they’re visiting their loved one. We will take you to that area.
RICHMAN: Then you get on a bus. A guard escorts you to the specific grave that you’re signed up to visit. In my case, plot 414. You’re not allowed to just wander around. Everywhere you look you can see simple white posts with numbers on them.
No names. Just 414, 383, 201. Each post represents a mass grave, containing about 150 coffins. The guards give you a little time to pay your respects. Then the bus picks you up and takes you back to the ferry.
RICHMAN: This is the unmarked graveyard. A series where we untangle mysteries from America’s largest public cemetery. I’m Joe Richman. If you’ve been listening to our series, you’ve already heard a few stories about people who ended up on Hart Island and the people they left behind. We have more stories coming up in the series, but today we’re doing something different. A bonus episode about Hart Island itself. For more than a century, Hart Island has been mostly off limits.

The fact that we were able to make a series of stories about this place, we owe a lot of that to a woman named Melinda Hunt, who runs the Hart Island Project. Here’s Radio Diaries Producer Alissa Escarce to tell you more about her story.
ALISSA ESCARCE: I haven’t met a lot of people as single mindedly committed to anything as HUNT is to Hart Island. She’s been documenting the place 30 years. I sat down with her recently to talk about it.
HUNT: Every inch of the city needs its own little advocate.
ESCARCE: Right. Hart Island is your corner.
HUNT: Yeah, it’s my, it’s my space. It’s my turf.
ESCARCE: Melinda first heard about Hart Island from a doctor. This was back in 1990, at the height of the AIDS epidemic.
HUNT: And she was describing how babies would be buried in shoeboxes in mass graves in this island in the Bronx. And at that time, I thought that was extraordinary.
ESCARCE: So, she went to the library and started reading old articles about this island.

New York City had been burying unclaimed bodies there since 1869. Over the years, the island had also been home to a prison and a POW camp and a drug rehab center. Melinda’s a visual artist, and she wanted to take pictures of this place. She teamed up with the photographer, Joel Sternfeld. The island was mostly closed to the public, though, so they had to get permission from the New York City Department of Correction, the agency that oversees jails.
It also managed Hard Island. And actually, the people burying bodies on the island were men incarcerated at the Rikers Island Jail nearby.
Melinda was finally able to visit for the first time in 1991.
HUNT: It was a very cool and cloudy day, late fall, and we rode on the ferry. Over to Hart Island with the morgue truck from the medical examiner with the bodies that were going to be buried that day and the bus load of inmates from Rikers Island.
And when we got over there, the correction officers were actually very Happy to have someone to talk to about what they were doing. And they gave us a tour of Hart Island, driving around. And then, because I was pregnant, actually on that first visit, they gave us the keys to their van, and I was allowed to drive this prison van around Hart Island to the locations that we were Looking at to photograph and I was really surprised at how beautiful it was as a location and how spiritual it felt. And I, I felt that somehow the story wasn’t quite as dark as I imagined.
ESCARCE: Could we look at a couple of those photos from your early trips?
HUNT: Uh, sure. This, yeah, this is the first time we saw a burial. The inmates are standing in a plot that is 60 feet long, 25 feet wide, and 8 feet deep, and they are by hand shoveling dirt, 4 feet of dirt, on top of. these boxes, I quickly learned that the inmates were the people most connected to these burials. Not only did they perform them, but many of them know somebody from their neighborhood or their family who was buried on Hart Island.
So, they understood the experience of losing someone in your community and having them disappear onto Hart Island.
ESCARCE: Melinda spent about three years photographing the island. The photos show a place that was sort of wild looking and overgrown. There were abandoned buildings and a big sign that said, prison, keep off.
And men unloading pine coffins off of a morgue truck. Each coffin had a person’s name scrawled on the side. In 1998, these photos were published in a book.
ESCARCE: So what happened after you published this book?
HUNT: Well, people started contacting me because in the book there’s a photo of a woman named Vicky Pavia who I helped arrange for her to visit on the 40th anniversary of her baby Denise’s birth and death.
And so people seeing this book felt that maybe there was hope that they could visit. And people from all sorts of backgrounds contact me for assistance. And I felt that Hart Island had this. stereotype of being a burial ground of the unwanted, um, of those people that we step over and see on the subways.
And I felt that when I was speaking to these families that that isn’t how they viewed their relative. And I felt that there was this stigma that was so unnecessary and really placed a weight on these families that carried from one generation to the next that it was a stain on the family To have somebody buried in this place this shameful place
ESCARCE: Some of these people were looking for proof that their relatives were buried on hard island but records of the burials there were hard to get Melinda decided to help them, and in this way, her work started expanding beyond art into a kind of activism.
HUNT: I was just trying to help one person initially find out where his father was buried and on what day. And this was a man who, both his parents committed suicide and he was adopted. And New York state law allows for him to find out who his birth parents were once he turned 18. So he, he started looking. He got a death certificate, but it didn’t have anything listed under cemetery.
So he very much wanted a confirmation that his father was buried on Hart Island.
ESCARCE: Melinda submitted a freedom of information request to get burial ledgers with information about this man’s parents. The ledgers were handwritten pieces of paper with people’s names and the dates that they’d been buried.
Then she got a lawyer.
HUNT: And the attorney said, It’s not worth getting just one. How many do you think they have going back to 1985? And I saw it for a minute, I said, 50, 000. And he said, let’s request 50, 000. So that was the first time that I realized that I was going to be working with quite a number of families.
There were thousands of people who wanted to know. What happened to the body of their relative? And many of these people were children who had lost a parent, and it’s a, it’s a much different feeling to know that your mother died versus your mother abandoned you. Mm hmm. So it’s extremely important to people to know for sure what happened to their relatives.
And I felt they had a right to know it.
ESCARCE: Melinda Hunt finally got access to the Hart Island burial ledgers in 2008. There were lists of all the burials, going back to the late 1970s. So, tens of thousands of names and dates. She used them to build this online database, where anyone can type in a person’s name and find out when they died. And when and where they were buried.
The database is pretty amazing to look through. Because on top of the names and dates, it has spaces where people can write messages about their loved ones. That’s actually how we found several of the stories in this series. I spent a few weeks combing through the database, reading these messages. Many were pretty raw.
Stories about hard lives and complicated family situations. But also about love. Here’s a note about a woman named Connie, written by her son. It says,

“At 11 years old, I lost my mom, and we didn’t know where she was buried because she didn’t want to be found. 27 years of not knowing where she was buried, and now I know. Love you and miss you so much. R. I. P. Mom.”
Or here’s another note I love, about a woman named Hisako Hasegawa. We’ll actually have an episode about her in a couple weeks. It says,

“Ms. Hasegawa lived in the hotel I worked at. She had no family that we know of. She was the sweetest old lady to us all. I was so sad to have learned of her passing while in her room, all alone.”
One of the notes that stood out to me especially was about Neil Harris, the man you heard about in episode one of this series. Here’s his mom, Susan, reading a missing persons flyer that she made after Neil went missing a few years ago.
SUSAN HURLBURT: Neil Harris was last seen in Inwood, New York on December 12th, 2014. He was last seen wearing a tan Carhartt jacket, black hoodie, blue jeans, tan work boots, and a backpack.
ESCARCE: Susan ultimately found out that her son was buried on Hart Island. And afterward, she wrote in the database,

“Never once did I give up on him. I was sure I was going to find my son. Just not in this way.”
Melinda and I looked at the note together.
HUNT: It says,

“Rest easy, my son, August 29th, 1984 to March 9th, 2017,” when he died. And there’s a photo from 2010 of him sitting on a couch.
ESCARCE: You know, I went with Susan to Hart Island. And she told me that when she first heard that he was buried on Hart Island that she really was upset and that the idea of him being there was hard for her.
But that talking to you about Hart Island changed her mind because you had described it as a beautiful and very peaceful place near the water and that it wasn’t a thing to be ashamed of. And so that just struck me as a testament to your work and the way that your work has reframed the way people perceive the place.

HUNT: I think that some artists, the importance is, is gallery shows and museums. For me… It’s city policy and reframing this terribly dark image of a place that is so damaging to so many people, so that they believe. That their life matters to the city of New York, that the lives of their relatives matter.
ESCARCE: A big part of how she’s done this has been by pushing the city to make it easier for family and friends to see where their loved ones are buried and to pay their respects. Basically, to make Hart Island feel more normal.
Without so much stigma, Melinda thinks more people might choose to be buried on Hart Island. That’s what composer Noah Creshevsky did. We told his story in episode 2. Here’s his husband David Sachs.
DAVID SACHS: The idea being…buried collectively in a, in a, what they used to call a pauper’s grave seemed very meaningful to him. And the more we talked about it, the more it seemed appealing, you know? The simplicity, the anonymity, the humility, and it was on the water, which he loved. For someone who was such an egalitarian, who believed genuinely in everyone’s equality, It was the right decision for him.
ESCARCE: Melinda’s pretty enthusiastic about people choosing Hart Island, partly to reduce the stigma around it, but also because she says burials there are better for the environment.

HUNT: The body is unembalmed in a plain pine box and will naturally turn to compost in about 20 years.
Most funeral directors offer cremation, which is not green because you’re turning a body into carbon. Most burials in cemeteries are now in concrete vaults. And they do that in cemeteries because You can have bodies much closer together without the ground collapsing and it’s easier to mow because as the bodies decompose it doesn’t become all lumpy and hillocky, so it’s what makes, you know, cemeteries look like these very manicured, you know, level ground and everything easy to maintain, but those in fact are not green, whereas Hard Island, The bodies decompose and become parkland.
ESCARCE: You’ve devoted now three decades of your life to Hart Island. What is it that has kept you doing this work for all these?
HUNT: I just think it’s a beautiful place. And unlike other parts of the city, there’s something about it that, brings about a sense of humility, just the scale of it, and the sense of being a small person in a big space, a little speck in the earth, so you know that your little existence is just a very brief moment, that, oh, these things that we worry about every day are so small. Relatively small when it comes to the rest of humanity and how brief human history really is.
ESCARCE: Thanks so much, Melinda.
HUNT: Thank you for having me.
RICHMAN: That was Melinda Hunt of the Hart Island Project with our producer Alissa Escarce.

Partly in response to Melinda’s efforts, in 2021, New York City transferred management of Hart Island from the Department of Correction to the city’s Parks Department. Today, incarcerated workers from Rikers Island no longer dig the graves.
Most of the abandoned buildings on the island have been removed. And just recently, the Parks Department announced that they plan to open Hart Island to the general public in the coming months. To learn more about Melinda Hunt’s work, visit Hartisland.net. And to see drone footage of the island, visit our website, radiodiaries.org.

The Radio Diaries team includes Alissa Escarce, Nellie Gilles, Mycah Hazel, Lena Engelstein, and myself. Our editors are Ben Shapiro and Deborah George. And thanks to Sarah Kate Kramer and Daniel Gross for their help with this project. We’re proud members of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator owned, listener supported podcasts.
You can hear them all at radiotopia.fm. And Radio Diaries has support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Lily Auchincloss Foundation, New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs, and from listeners like you.

Coming up on the Unmarked Graveyard, Hart Island is often seen as a place for the unrecognized or the unclaimed, but some stories don’t fit that script.

TIM PAGE: I do think there will come a time when people will realize that she’s one of America’s greatest writers, but after she died, Dawn Powell was really kind of forgotten.
RICHMAN: I’m Joe Richman of Radio Diaries. See you next week.

JOE RICHMAN (HOST): Death is inevitable. We don’t get any choice in the matter. But we can have some say in what happens to our body after we die. Burial and cremation are the traditional options. Some people donate their body to science. Green burial and human composting are becoming more common. And for those who can afford it, you can have your ashes launched into space or turned into a diamond or a vinyl record.

What most people don’t choose is to be buried on Hart Island. More than a million people are buried on Hart Island. In mass graves with no headstones or plaques. It’s commonly known as a potter’s field. Many people end up here because the city couldn’t identify them or couldn’t find their families. The city buried a lot of people here at the height of the COVID pandemic. It’s America’s largest public cemetery, but for more than a century, it’s been mostly off limits.

I’m Joe Richman, and this is The Unmarked Graveyard, a series from Radio Diaries where we’re bringing you stories about people buried on Hart Island, the lives they lived, and the people they left behind.

[montage of clips from the series]

RICHMAN: Today, episode two. Noah Creshevsky. 

Creshevsky was a composer who wrote experimental electronic music. He called it hyperrealism. He died a few years ago at the age of 75. But before he died, he made a surprising decision. His husband, David Sachs, tells the story. 

DAVID SACHS: My name is David Sachs. I was the husband of the late Noah Creshevsky. We lived together for 42 years.

He was always lighthearted and interested in everything. And we agreed with so much. We found the same movies funny. We read the same books. It was just a remarkably satisfying relationship. So I was lucky and I’m so glad that I have his music. These are all his CDs. I think I will start with this piece.

[music: bell rings, electronic sounds, voice of someone getting punched]

When I first knew him, he was doing what we call field recordings. He would go out with a tape recorder and tape sounds and so on.

He takes sounds that we have all heard and all known and plays with them a little bit. Stretches them, integrates them with other sounds. He loved walking down the street in Manhattan and where you could hear languages. Not only that you didn’t speak, but that you didn’t even recognize.

[music: instrumental with voices of people speaking in gibberish]

The idea of a sound, you couldn’t quite identify, squint and, squint your ears, you know what I’m saying?

Let me just play one more thing if I may. This one is called Sleeping Awake.

[music,: dark in mood, with vocals slowly singing “Pleasure to die. Sleeping, Awake.”Dramatic drums.]

As he got older, I mean, the music became a little bit more serious. In other words, a little bit less playful. The way life becomes a little bit less playful as you get older. You become more and more aware of the inevitable termination that will await us all. So this was the last piece that Noah completed.

I think just before he knew he was sick.

No one knew he was going to die for several months. He had bladder cancer and he, um, declined to have his bladder removed. He was 75 and he thought this was the beginning of a slope and he didn’t want to go down it. And I remember the surgeon was stunned because no one had ever declined. Everyone wanted to grapple for every minute of life.

So anyway, we knew for a while that he was going to die. But we didn’t know at that time whether he would live three more weeks, three more months, three more days, three more hours. We didn’t know.

[music: sleeping awake reprise]

We tried not to talk too much about death because he didn’t want to, um, see me crying or see me upset. And so I had to, um, put on a happy face. Everything is hunky dory. 

But we did talk about what he wanted to happen to his remains after he died. The options are always the traditional burial, I mean, the way one’s parents had a family plot. Nothing seemed to him more vulgar than fetishizing death with real estate. You know, a stone, a marker, a mausoleum. He just didn’t want a part of it.

And then, as we were looking at various options, I, I guess we first learned about Hart Island during the pandemic. So the idea of being buried collectively in a, in a, what they used to call a pauper’s grave seemed very meaningful to him.

And the more we talked about it, the more it seemed appealing, you know, the simplicity, the anonymity, the humility, and it was on the water, which he loved for someone who was such an egalitarian who believed genuinely in everyone’s equality. It was the right decision for him. 

We didn’t tell anyone we didn’t discuss it with anyone I remember when the hospice nurse who was wonderful I was very upset when she learned he was going to be buried in Hart Island, she had this idea that it was not decent.

It was just like a garbage dump for only the unknown who no one cared about, but she came to realize the meaningfulness of his decision. A lot of people, I think, look at death as a kind of way to extend your ego, either your monument or the way in which you’re buried, and ego stops with death.

At one point, Noah thought he would try to accelerate the process of dying, and he invited me to come with him on that last voyage, and we would do it together. It was a serious offer, and I seriously considered it, because we had been such a unity, that I couldn’t imagine going from the we to the I. But the more I thought about it, the more I decided, um, to not do something to myself.

I was more interested in continuing, and um, we had a wonderful time, three more months, and then he got too weak. He became delirious, and not the kind of delirium like when you’re high or drunk, you know, festive and funny, but the sad kind, you know, where you don’t know who you are. It was hard, man, it was hard.

[sigh]

At the very end, I had been up several nights with him, you know, I was tired. We went to sleep together, kissed him goodnight, told him I loved him, as I did every day for the previous 42 years, and um, in the morning he was dead. You know when someone is dead. It’s not only that you poke them and they don’t get up, but you know, you have the feeling that that person is dead.

And it was quiet for a long time, and then I was left alone in the apartment, and, um, That was how it ended.

I still find it very difficult, even though it’s been two years, I find it difficult.

You know, I wake up sometimes, and I see he’s not in bed with me, and my first instinct is to call to him, assuming he’s in the other room. And then I realize, more or less quickly, that no, he’s not there. And that hits you sometimes like a ton of bricks. He’s not in the other room, or in another city. He’s not anywhere. And then, almost immediately, a more calming realization sinks in. Well, he’s… Everywhere.

[MUSIC]

RICHMAN (HOST): David Sachs, husband of the late Noah Creshevsky.

Our story about Noah Creshevsky was produced by me, Joe Richman. Our team also includes Nellie Gilles, Mycah Hazel, Alissa Escarce, and Lena Engelstein. Our editors are Ben Shapiro and Deborah George, sound mixing by Ben Shapiro. We couldn’t make this series without the help of Melinda Hunt and the Hart Island Project.

Visit hartisland.net to learn more. And thanks to our broadcast partner, NPR’s All Things Considered. We are proud members of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator owned, listener supported podcasts at Radiotopia.fm. Radio Diaries has support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and from listeners like you.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be bringing you more stories from Hart Island. Coming up, a woman looking for the father she never knew. 

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE #1: There were thousands of questions. Do I have brothers? Do I have sisters? Do I have a grandmother? Do I have an aunt? Where’s his family? Where’s his people? 

RICHMAN: I’m Joe Richman of Radio Diaries. See you next week.

JOE RICHMAN (HOST): From Radio Diaries, I’m Joe Richman, and this is the Unmarked Graveyard. A series untangling mysteries from America’s largest public cemetery.

[montage of clips from the series]

RICHMAN: Over a million people are buried on Heart Island. It’s often called a potter’s field. People end up there if their family can’t afford a private burial, or the city can’t find anyone to claim the body. And when New York City gets hit hard by an epidemic, like the flu of 1918, or just recently COVID, Hart Island gets hit hard too.

During the 1980s, the epidemic was AIDS. More than 100, 000 people would ultimately die because of AIDS in New York City alone. Many were buried on Hart Island. Some of their families never found out what happened to them. Today, episode three. One woman’s search for a man she never knew.

[FOG HORN, BOAT ENGINE SOUNDS, BIRDS CHIRPING]

ANNETTE VEGA: Oh my god, that’s the island? It’s crazy. There’s not a lot of land for that many people to be buried.

At first I thought it was eerie. But it’s kind of pretty because the fog just like erases the city. It’s just so beautiful. It’s nicer than I thought.
[BIRDS FADE OUT, MUSIC]

My name is Annette Vega. I’m a registered nurse. I am 52 years old. I will be 53 this month. I grew up in the Bronx. I lived with two of my younger sisters, and my mom and my dad. Dad was always working. He was an electrician for a local three. And he was always the strong guy. And a lot of the neighborhood teenagers looked up to him.

Not everybody had their dad in their life, you know. Looking back at it, I was like, it was a great childhood.

So, when I was about 7 or 8, I found out that my dad wasn’t my biological father. That’s the first time I came to know that there was… Someone else out there. This is a picture of my biological father, Angel Garcia. He looks like he’s in his thirties, and he has a long mustache and a DA. Hair that’s kind of brushed back.

Who was this person? Why hasn’t he been in my life? Could he be looking for me? I just felt a persistent urge to find out.

JEANNE ORTIZ: Hello?

VEGA: Hey mom.

ORTIZ: Hi Annette

VEGA: So did you win that bingo yesterday?

ORTIZ: I won 75 yesterday and 370 something on Tuesday.

VEGA: Wow.

ORTIZ: I wish there was a bingo today.

VEGA: So, I wanted to ask you some questions, if you don’t mind.

ORTIZ: Yeah, go right ahead.

VEGA: Okay. The questions are related to Angel Garcia, who’s my biological father.

ORTIZ: No kidding.

VEGA: No kidding. All right, mother. So, what do you remember about him?
ORTIZ: He was very sweet. He was good to me. He knew he was good looking, and he was sure of himself, and who knows? He had this cologne. Oh my God, it was the best cologne ever.

[fades under]

VEGA [VO]: My mom had me at 16. I was a mistake. Not a mistake, but you know. I was in a planned pregnancy, you know. She was a teenager growing up in the Bronx. And there was a young man, everyone called him Machu. You know, they had a little summer romance. He’d be working in the auto body shop. She’d go home happily with grease on her backside of her shorts.

And I’m like, Mom!

ORTIZ: He talked about Puerto Rico, where his family came from. He talked about the future, uh, when we got married. He was a charmer. Lemme tell you.

VEGA: [laugh] Were there things about me that remind you of him?

ORTIZ: I think you look like him a lot. You had green eyes.

VEGA: Green eyes.

ORTIZ: You had very green eyes like he did.

VEGA: Remember my Monte Carlo, my six cylinder that I would be driving fast. And you’d be like, Oh, you remind me of your father. And I’m like,

ORTIZ: Oh yeah. Cause he used to love to drive. He used to steal cars. And I think he used to steal cars just for the fun of it. Wow. He was a bad boy. So I guess maybe I was into bad boys, who knows?

VEGA: [laugh] Aren’t we all? Do you remember the last time you guys saw each other?

ORTIZ: I’d seen him after I gave birth to you. We hooked up again, and um, he used to pick you up, and talk to you, and we used to go on car rides with you and everything like that.

VEGA: When’s the last time you spoke to him? What was that conversation like?

ORTIZ: All I remember I was, I was insulting him,

VEGA: [laugh] You were insulting him? By what?

ORTIZ: I told him that he was not your father, that he was only a father because he made you, but not because he raised you or supported you. I knew that that would hit him hard. And then he disappeared one day and I went to his job and they told me no, that there was another woman looking for him and all that.

So I never went back, and I never looked for him again.

[MUSIC]

VEGA: I remember my mom telling me he was kind of a tough guy, and she thought that he was in a gang.
[ARCHIVAL SOUND OF MOTORCYCLES]
BILL CURTIS [DOCUMENTARY HOST]: The South Bronx, one of New York City’s roughest neighborhoods, and since the mid 60s, home to an outlaw motorcycle gang who call themselves the Ching a lings.

VEGA:I remember hearing about the Ching a lings. They were notorious motorcycle gang that people were fearful of. I thought he might be with them.

CURTIS: So what does it mean to be a Ching a ling?

MEMBER OF CHING A LINGS: The religion we got is the Ching a ling religion. That’s the only religion we have. Ride our bikes, party, hang out. This is like a family thing.

VEGA: So I literally walked up to the Ching a ling’s house in the Bronx. It’s like painted in black. You know, motorcycles all around, and another guy comes out looking rough. He comes over, he talks to me, and I tell him, I’m trying to find my father. They call him Machu, he has green eyes. Oh, I haven’t seen that dude in years.

Another woman comes out, and she’s, you know, out on the stoop, having a cigarette, and she goes, I remember him. I remember one night we were partying really hard. I got so messed up and he helped carry me upstairs to the bedroom. That man could have done anything to me. And he put me in the bed and put a blanket on me and left.

Nice guy. They wished me luck. They said, I hope you find him.

[ARCHIVAL FADES OUT, MUSIC]

VEGA: I felt kind of silly, looking for so long, without a real reason as to why I was looking for him. I didn’t need him to be my father. I still really wanted to find him. There were thousands of questions. Where’s his family? Do I have brothers? Do I have sisters? Do I have a grandmother? Do I have aunt? Where’s his people?

VEGA: It was late January. I got a message from someone on Ancestry who gave me names. I used the white pages, I used Facebook, and I sent the messages. That evening, my phone rings. I hear this woman crying, emotional. She said, Annette,

all this time my niece, I’ve been looking for you. I was like, you have. You know about me?

[CAR DOORS]

VEGA: Hi, Titi!

So I’m here. I arrived at my Titi’s house. My Titi Miriam, my father’s sister. It’s a really pretty home.

MIRIAM GARCIA: My name is Miriam, Miriam Garcia. My brother is Angel.

VEGA: Angel was your brother. He was younger than you or older than you?

[GARCIA ANSWERS IN SPANISH, VEGA TRANSLATES]

GARCIA/VEGA: Her younger brother. He only went to sixth grade. But there was something about him that he could just pick up things. He learned how to work on cars. He could take a car that was destroyed and make it look like new.

Angel was a good man, but he had a really, really hard life.

There was issues in the home growing up because their father was an alcoholic and my father went to the streets and he started using drugs at the age of 13.

He was arrested and in prison from selling drugs, but it wasn’t like a traditional prison. It was like a camp.

GARCIA/VEGA: So she said in 1985 or 86, police came to the house to tell them that he escaped. They don’t know how he did it, and someone had to have helped him. She said she received a phone call from him in the summer of 1989 that he was very sick with pneumonia and he wanted to come home.

Her and her husband went to New York. They walked through the streets looking for him, but she never heard from him again.

She hasn’t seen him in 30 years. She said, I don’t think he’s alive.

[MUSIC]

VEGA: Okay, so this is what I find out. I received an autopsy report and I actually have it with me and it says, Angel Garcia died August 3rd, 1989 at 11 p. m., 37 years old. Immediate cause of death, pneumonia. Due to AIDS as a consequence of chronic intravenous narcotism. IV drug abuser. It says he was buried in a place called Hart Island.

People are buried there. People with no ID on them. People who haven’t been claimed. And then I spoke to Titi Miriam. We went through it together and she put it down and she said, This is him. You found your father.

[CAR DRIVING BY]

ANGEL GARCIA: Hi.

VEGA: What’s up?

ANGEL GARCIA: Nice to meet you.

VEGA: Yes you too. I can’t believe I’m standing here with my brother. Like his smile, like he’s so cute. Look at him. Thank you. Mwah.

So I found out that I had A brother named Angel. I’ve never met him. He also didn’t know where our father was.

ANGEL GARCIA: She reached out to me and wrote me a letter telling me she was my sister. I was incarcerated. I was incarcerated, so at first I was like, what? What the hell is going on here? She went into detail telling me who she is and how she went about finding me. So all our research have paid off.

VEGA: I know, I should be a private investigator. Ha ha ha. Garcia investigations.

Now we’re gonna go see our father, where he was buried.

ANGEL GARCIA: It’s weird, like, nobody knew where he was at all these years.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER #1: Block 201, section 3.

VEGA: Right there? 201, grave 27. So this is the plot where Angel was buried.
ANGEL GARCIA: Our dad.
VEGA: Our dad. Wow.
ANGEL GARCIA: I was always his biggest fan, like rooting for him. Yeah. I must have been like seven years old. And we went to the prison to visit him. And he took us from the visiting room to, to like the dormitory. He introduced us to all the dudes that was locked up with him or his friends or whatever. He gave me like a boat made out of like wood and that’s the last time that I’ve seen him.

VEGA: The people that loved my father, whether it’s my brother, my aunt, my cousins, everyone talks about how he was such a good guy. I think they were afraid to tell me the bad stuff. Whether it’s being in a gang or in prison, being an IV drug abuser, you know, Angel was not an angel, but it’s who he is. I mean, it’s not a complete story without all of it.
[PLASTIC RUSTLING, MUSIC]

VEGA: I’m putting flowers here at his grave. Just planting and marking. Because he’s here. He’s not lost.

ANGEL GARCIA: I’m happy to see where he lays, and to like, tell him like, YO, Annette found you, she found us, and we here. Now we know who you are.

RICHMAN (HOST): That was Annette Vega and her brother Angel Garcia.

This story was produced by Nellie Gilles. Our team also includes Mycah Hazel, Alissa Escarce, Lena Engelstein, and myself. Our editors are Ben Shapiro and Deborah George.

Sound mixing by Mitra Kaboli. Music in this episode from Roy Brown and from Matthias Bossi and Stellwagon Symphonette. We couldn’t make this series without the help of Melinda Hunt and the Hart Island Project. Visit hartisland. net to learn more. And also, thanks to our broadcast partner, NPR’s All Things Considered.

We’re proud members of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator owned, listener supported podcasts. You can hear them all at Radiotopia. fm. Radio Diaries has support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs, and from listeners like you.

Coming up on the Unmarked Graveyard, the woman who has led the charge to open up Heart Island.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER #2: The importance is… For me, reframing this terribly dark image of a place that is so damaging to so many people so that they believe that their life matters to the city of New York. That the lives of their relatives matter.

RICHMAN: I’m Joe Richman of Radio Diaries. See you next week.

JOE RICHMAN (host): In 2017, a man was buried on a narrow, mile long island off the coast of the Bronx in New York City. He’d been dead for months, but the city hadn’t figured out his name, so he was placed in a simple pine coffin that was stacked in a mass grave. The only marker was a white post that read, Plot 383.

Since 1869, more than a million people have been buried on Heart Island. It doesn’t look like a typical cemetery. There are no headstones or plaques, just white posts with numbers on them. Each one marks a trench with about 150 coffins inside. There’s a broad range of people buried here. People whose families couldn’t afford a private burial, people who couldn’t be identified, and people who died in various waves of epidemics that swept the city.

In the 1980s, it was AIDS, and most recently, COVID 19. But for more than a century, Heart Island has been mostly off limits.

This is The Unmarked Graveyard, a new series from Radio Diaries where we’re untangling mysteries from Heart Island, America’s largest public cemetery. I’m Joe Richman. Over the next several weeks, we’ll be bringing you stories about people who ended up on Heart Island, the lives they lived, and the people they left behind.

[MONTAGE OF CLIPS FROM THE SERIES]

JOE RICHMAN: Today, episode one, it’s about the unidentified man buried in plot 3 83. At the time he was buried, he actually had several people looking for him. He had lived two lives, in different places and under different names. We begin in Inwood, Long Island, with his mom, who named him Neil.

SUSAN HURLBURT: My name is Susan Hurlburt, and I’m Neil Harris’ mom. I kept all of Neil’s pictures and memorabilia. This is the Neil box. This is his father. I always saved the picture for Neil. Neil’s father and I, unfortunately, were just a one-night stand. But things happen, and Neil happened. This was something that Neil wrote to me when he was little in school. (Reading) My hero is my mom because she has always been there for me. She always brings me and my friends to Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. I remember when we didn’t have a home or any money, and we were living with my aunt. After a while, she got a job and we got a home. And that’s why my mom is my hero.

Life was good then. I would come home and make a little dinner or whatever, and we’d eat and play a little video games. He was fun. He was cuddly. This was him sleeping with all the dogs, and the dogs adored him. We wound up calling him Dr. Doolittle because this kid loved the animals.

And then as he got older, something switched – like somebody flipped a switch on him. One night, I heard him talking in his room. And I thought, oh, he’s got somebody over. So I knocked on the door and I said, who are you talking to? The ghost. And I’m like, what ghost? And then he started fighting. And he’s like, they’re all over me. They’re all over me. And I was in my office one day, and he came in and he’s like, Ma. And he pushed me, and I went flying across the room. And he said, you don’t think that I don’t know you’re trying to poison me? He had a glare, like he wanted to kill me. I was actually afraid of my son, the first time in my life.

And I said, I want to have him put in a hospital for psychiatric evaluation. He went. And I spoke to the doctor, and she said he is schizophrenic. On medication, he’s fine. She said, but he has asked to stop the medication, which is his right. And he has asked to be released, and off they sent him. He was 29 years old. I felt helpless. I felt like there was nobody there to help – nobody. And then one day he’s like, I want you to drop me off at the Inwood train station. And he would sleep on the platform. When we pulled into the parking lot of the Inwood train station, he just got out, took his little backpack, threw it over his shoulder, walked away. Never looked behind.

And there was a cop sitting in the parking field there, and I got out and I said, that’s my son, and he wants to be here. He wants to be homeless. And the cop said to me, and it’s his right. He said, but we’ll check up on him. So I figured, OK, so I’ll go every week. And the first time we went down, we looked and we did see him, but he walked away from me. And I was like, Neil, wait. I just want to give you money. And he stopped, took the money and walked away. And that was the last time I saw him.

JOY BERGMANN: My name is Joy Bergmann, and I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And this is my dog, JJ (ph). JJ, let’s go. Every day, JJ and I are in Riverside Park. This is the bench where we would see Stephen in all weather, all times of day. He’d always be sitting bolt upright on the bench, big canvas rucksack at his feet, same clothes, same facial expression. Yeah, JJ. You remember Stephen.

BILLY HEALEY: I’m Billy – Billy Healey. I used to sit up at the corner there, feed my little birds. And that’s when I talked to him. And he told me that he was from Long Island, and his name was Stephen. It was like pulling teeth to get him to say anything. He was not a talker. He didn’t seem to trust people much. At the time, I still wasn’t sure if he was sleeping in the park because I see him sitting on the bench every day with his knapsack, but I never saw him sleep. So I called the outreach for the homeless. They went to talk to him, and they told me Stephen doesn’t want any help.

BERGMANN: It was always kind of reassuring to see him ’cause he was such a big guy and so gentle in his presence. He was a constant presence in the park, but a mysterious one. Couldn’t quite figure out where he was from, what he was doing here, and why he just never left.

HURLBURT: (Reading) Neil Harris was last seen in Inwood, N.Y., on December 12, 2014. He was last seen wearing a tan Carhartt jacket, black hoodie, blue jeans, tan work boots and a backpack. If you have seen or know Neil’s whereabouts…

This was a missing persons flyer that we made, and that went out every week – every week, like clockwork, on Mondays. Monday morning, on every social media platform that I could get my hands on, it went out. And then a year went by – nothing. And then another year – still nothing.

BERGMANN: After about maybe a year of seeing him in the park, I was going to recycle some magazines or something one day. And I said, oh, maybe I’ll bring them to the guy in the park. Maybe he’d like something to look at. So I would bring him, periodically, bags of magazines. And I would see him, as I walked away, start looking through them with interest. He never said thank you. He just kind of gave me a half nod as I would approach.

HEALEY: After seeing him for so long and seeing there were some needed things, I told him, oh, do you like pork ribs or do you like potato salad? I would ask him, and he would say yes. So my wife would put something in the microwave of leftovers, and I would bring him a plastic container with a fork. And when it got real cold, I brought him a winter coat. And he said, oh, no, I don’t want one. I have one in my pack. I said, do you like this? And I was wearing a Burgundy hoodie, and it had, like, fake fur inside or something. It was warm. And he said, yeah, I like that. So he wore it for two years that I know of. But I know he died in it.

JIM LITTLEFIELD: My name is Jim Littlefield. I was formerly a director of security for The Trump Organization and ran security for four condominiums on Riverside Boulevard – luxury condominiums with Broadway actresses, baseball players of note. I believe it was around Easter time, early spring. I pulled up that morning and parked my car, and then I looked over and I noticed a backpack sitting on top of, like, a milk crate. And then I looked, and I saw a person sitting down, knees bent, and his head was hunched down, almost as if in contemplative prayer. I thought maybe he’s asleep. You know, poor guy. I’m going to let him stay there. And I walk away and went to work.

Next morning, I came back to work and I saw he – basically in the same position. So I kind of yelled loud, hey, fella, you all right? He didn’t budge. And at that point, I touched him. And I’m a 70-year-old retired New York City police sergeant. I know what rigor mortis feels like, and he was in it. This guy had reached the end of the road. I called 911. The police arrived. I was happy that I was able to do what I could do and then went to work. I think I spoke to the police officer again a week or two later. And I said, did you ever identify that young man? And he says he didn’t and he didn’t think anybody did at that point.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

HEALEY: It was the next day I was told they found him dead. Right away, I said, was it trauma? Was he murdered? You know, was something bad done to him? And they said absolutely no trauma. It looked like he just had a heart attack or something.

BERGMANN: After he died, people put flowers on the bench where Stephen would sit. They put signs up and cards. You know, when you live in a big city, there’s the anonymity of the big city that I think we all sort of treasure. But then there are the constant presences, the people whose names you don’t know but you see them every day. The guy who sells the fruit on the corner, the guy you see sweeping the sidewalk – these are people that become woven into your fabric of your experience in a neighborhood. And when one of them goes away, there is a loss. There is a loss.

HEALEY: He was a sweet young man, and many people thought that about him. Rest in peace, Stephen.

JESSICA BROCKINGTON: My name is Jessica Brockington, and I’m a journalist. I was living on 70th Street. I have two little dogs, and we would walk in Riverside Park. I felt sad that he had died. I felt sad that the bench was empty. You know, maybe it’s a year later, year and a half. I’m looking in a database of missing persons. And as I’m scrolling through the photos, I recognize a photo of Stephen. And I thought, holy [expletive], I know that person. And it’s got a name attached to it – Neil Harris Jr.

So I take the name and I turn around and start Googling it and I find a Facebook profile. I was going through every single post on that Facebook page, trying to figure out who set it up. Who was Susan Hurlburt?

HURLBURT: Monday, July 2nd, 2018. Still missing, still praying. I’ll never give up on you.

BROCKINGTON: Noticing pretty quickly that Susan Hurlburt is posting A plea, Every Monday.

HURLBURT: Monday, July 16th, still missing, still praying. If seen, please tell him he is missing.
Monday, July 23rd, 2018, still missing, still praying.
Monday, August 6th, still missing, still praying.

BROCKINGTON:And I’m, I’m completely obsessed with it at that point.

HURLBURT: Help me locate my son. I will never give up on you, Neil.

BROCKINGTON:I know that the person is dead. And I know that somewhere the New York City Police Department have information on him that would help her. But when I talked to the detective who had the case, he says that he’s reviewed what he has in his files and the photos that I have sent him, and he has decided that this is not the same person.

So I called the organization that is helping Susan Hurlburt put out missing persons posters. And I tell the guy, I don’t want to upset her if it’s not as sure as it should be, but he turns around and calls her immediately.

HURLBURT: And he’s like, I have some information for you. Do you know a Jessica? And I’m like, Jessica?

No. And he’s like, well, I think she knows where your son is. And I was really overjoyed and he’s like, well, if it is Neil, then he’s deceased. And I’m like, oh. She called me. And she said, OK, so there’s this guy that’s been sitting in Riverside Park. And I’m like, Riverside Park? Where is that? She said, in Manhattan. It’s on the West Side. I’m like, are you kidding me? Neil would never. He was petrified of the city. So she said, who’s Neil? Then she’s like, oh, that’s right. I keep forgetting. She said…

BROCKINGTON: I know this guy as Stephen. That’s what he called himself, right?

HURLBURT: And I’m like, Stephen? She said, yeah, I’m just going to tell you what I got from him. She said, I would walk through the park. I have two dogs. And they would immediately run to him.

BROCKINGTON:And he just reached down and started petting them and kind of smiled and wasn’t necessarily smiling at me, but was focused on the dogs.

HURLBURT: And I’m like, that’s got to be Neil. And then I’m like, arguing within my own head – my head, you know, saying, no, no, no and then saying maybe, maybe, no, no, no, no, no.

BROCKINGTON: And then I sent her the medical examiner’s photo of her son after his autopsy.

HURLBURT:And the picture came up. He was more, like, disheveled. I could tell he hadn’t shaven in a while. But I know my son. And I knew as soon as I saw that picture, that was my son. I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath. He died from an ulcer. That’s what they have down on the death certificate.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Dear friends altogether and dear neighbors. His real name was Neil. We in the neighborhood only knew him as Stephen. That was his adopted name.

BROCKINGTON: There’s a church on 74th Street – a community church. The pastors there and the congregation there also knew Stephen, and they decided that they would have a service for him. Susan and her family came, a bunch of his friends, and then all these people from the neighborhood came.

HURLBURT: I walked in. And looking at all these people, I’m like, I don’t know these people. Neil didn’t know these people. And I said it to my sister. I said, you know, Neil didn’t know them. And she looked at me and she said, well, obviously he did. Listen to what they’re saying.

HEALEY: I talked to him at least two or three times a week. When I didn’t see him, I’d stop and ask somebody, where’s Stephen? Because he was always sitting.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: Children came up to me and said, oh, we knew him. We said hello to him.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: It was after Neil no longer occupied this bench that we realized in the neighborhood how much he had become a part of the fabric of our lives.

HURLBURT: And my husband nudged me. And he said, get up there and say something. And I’m like, I don’t know what to say.

I’m not good at this – not good. But I have to tell you, I said it from when I first heard from Jessica. You’re all angels, every one of you. You watched over my son. You took care of him. And that was all I ever prayed for, for four years.

There are people that really, really care. Even if it’s a stranger, they care. That’s phenomenal.

(APPLAUSE)

HURLBURT: That was the only good feeling I came out of there with because other than that, it was not good feelings. I was hurt that I was left out of his life as his mother. I kept saying, I did something wrong. What did I do? Or what didn’t I do? Everybody kept saying, well, at least now you have closure. There’s no closure. I don’t understand what people think when they say, well, at least now you know. I’d rather not know. I’d rather keep on looking.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: You’re Susan and company, yes? Yeah. This is the marker right here where your loved one is buried.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9: So is this Neil?

HURLBURT: Yeah, that’s Neil. Here I am at Neil’s graveside, finally. I still have your PlayStation, Neil. I love you. I miss you.

When they first told me that he was here on Hart Island, I was pretty upset. I was like, (gasping) disgusting. How could – oh, my God. There are other bodies also in there with him, a bunch of them stacked together. And that’s the only thing that’s a little unsettling because I worry about, is his neighbor a friendly neighbor? I know these things sound crazy, but these are the things that go through in my mind. So, yeah, I thought about – no, I got to get him out of there.

But then I remembered his father is also buried on Hart Island, buried down the block a little bit, I guess. He died, and the family couldn’t afford to have a proper funeral or anything. Neil was only 9. And he did always say he wanted to come here. Neil always wanted a relationship with his father. And my hope is that they’re together now and they’re developing a relationship and they’re hanging out somewhere together. The trees are beautiful. There’s water all around. It’s a very quiet, serene spot. And that was Neil. He was very quiet in life. So, yeah, this is where he will remain.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

JOE RICHMAN (HOST):That was Susan Hurlburt, remembering her son, Neil Harris Jr. It’s only been a few years that family members have been allowed to visit Heart Island. And after decades of being largely inaccessible, the island is expected to open to the general public later this year.

Our story about Neil Harris Jr. was produced by Elisa Scarce. It was also an official selection of the 2023 Tribeca Festival. Our team includes Nellie Gillis. It’s Micah Hazel, Lena Engelstein, and myself. Our editors are Ben Shapiro and Deborah George. Sound mixing by Ben Shapiro. Special thanks to Jessica Brockington, who shared research and audio from her search for Neil Harris family.

This story would not have been possible without her work. We also couldn’t make this series without the help of Melinda Hunt and the Heart Island Project. Visit heartisland. net to learn more. And thanks to filmmaker Eric Spink of Vacant Light for his recording of Neil’s memorial service. Also Matthias Bossi and Stellwagen’s Symphonette.

For the song Plaintiff and to our broadcast partner NPR’s All Things Considered. Radio Diaries has support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs, and from listeners like you. We are proud members of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator owned, listener supported podcasts at Radiotopia.fm. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be bringing you more stories from Hart Island. Coming up next, a story about a man who chose to be buried there.

DAVID SACHS: No one knew who was going to die, but we didn’t know at that time whether he would live three more weeks, three more months, three more days, three more hours. We didn’t know.

RICHMAN: I’m Joe Richman of Radio Diaries. See you next week.

Joe Richman (Host): From PRX’s Radiotopia. This is Radio Diaries. I’m Joe Richman.

Before we jump into today’s story, I want to tell you a bit about how we’re handling the coronavirus here on the show. At Radio Diaries, we have a long history of giving people recorders, and helping them document their own lives. It turns out that’s a journalistic superpower in a pandemic when it’s impossible to do an in-person interview. So we’ve been sending out a bunch of recorders and we’re launching a new series in collaboration with NPR. It’s called Hunker Down Diaries. Surprising Stories From People Thrown Together by The Pandemic. On today’s show, Centenarians in Lockdown. 

Joe Richman (In Scene): Can you hear me? 

Joe Newman: Yes. 

Joe Richman (In Scene): Okay, so you know what question I have to ask is, uh, what’s your date of birth? 

Joe Newman: I was afraid you were gonna do that. Uh, I was born on January 13th, 1913. Uh, it’s, you know, it’s fun to watch people say, what’s your date of birth?

And see if they can figure out how old you are. And then after a few seconds they look at you and it’s fun to see the surprise in some people’s eyes. 

Joe Richman (Host): That’s Joe Newman. If you haven’t done the math yet, he’s 107. He was five during the flu pandemic of 1918. Today. He lives in a senior apartment complex in Sarasota, Florida.

That’s where I reached him over Skype this past week. Yes, he’s a 107 year old who Skypes. He also drives, in fact, Joe Newman was probably the oldest driver in America until last month when he gave up his car. 

Joe Newman: It was a 2001 Mercedes hard-top, red convertible. It was fun right around the block and I read convertible, so for a few years it was a fun life.

Joe Richman (In Scene): What did you love about driving that car? 

Joe Newman: That’s a good question because the answer is stupid, isn’t it? It’s that you have power, you can get behind the wheel of something and start it and it’ll take you wherever you wanted to go. But uh, there comes the point where you have to accept the fact that the person my age should not be risking others people’s life.

And it’s strange, you see, for myself, I thought it was okay, keep driving. But then I look at other people driving and I say, “gee, you ought to quit.” And finally I had to get the strength to tell myself that I oughta quit. That’s it. Tough. 

Anita Sampson: You may be sad about that, Joe, but I think lots of people are glad. [laughs]

Joe Richman (Host): That’s Joe’s fiance, Anita Sampson. They met 16 years ago and now they live together. They’ve been planning a big party for Anita’s hundredth birthday this past week with cake and karaoke. But because of the coronavirus, the party was cancel. They’re in lockdown As part of our new series, Hunker Down Diaries, we sent Joe and Anita a recorder, well-sanitized, so they could interview each other on Anita’s 100th birthday.

Joe Newman: Okay, it’s on. Microphone is plugged in, the light is red. All right, now I say something. I am Joe Newman and I am with my partner Anita. Who today is 100 years old 

Anita Sampson: and we’re sitting here side by side. Well, first of all, I woke up this morning and I was glad when I saw you open your eyes and every morning we both always checked to see if we’re still breathing before we get out of bed.

Joe Newman: Yes, yes. 

Anita Sampson: But getting up this morning and seeing what’s going on in the world, It’s very sad, but we have adjusted to it and we’re really following all the rules, just the way you’re supposed to. 

Joe Newman: Yeah. We’re told to stay in the apartment and are not supposed to go round mingle with the others. 

Anita Sampson: And personally, I didn’t think anything special was going to happen on my birthday, but then all of a sudden I see oh, about 30 people on the screen. I heard the word “Zoom” and we had a party. Of course, there wasn’t anybody here, but it was so real. I, I felt like I could hug and kiss them. That’s how close they were. And now I’m all smiles and feel much happier about my birthday, even though there were a lot of bad things going on in the world.

I’ve never seen anything like this before in my entire life, but Joe, what was the first thing you remember about the 1918 flu? 

Joe Newman: Strangely, the way I remember it is I remember the neighborhood, and the house, maybe a hundred yards across the street from us, was a family we knew. And one of that family was about my age, and I remember that he died because of the flu. 

Of course, as a kid, five years old, death didn’t mean that much to me except that he was now missing. I also remember public health putting signs on the door of the family. The family with the disease was quarantined. 

Anita Sampson: I don’t remember except what my mother told me when I got older and she said there was so much death. She was in her early twenties, and she would go out into the streets and help people that were just dropping. They were just lying there on the streets, but she never got it. How would you compare what was going on then to what is happening now? 

Joe Newman: you can’t compare it because at that time, very few people had radios. Nobody had a television set. Many of them didn’t even have papers, and so the only way you got information was neighbors talking to each other. As far as this coronavirus, I take a philosophical view. It’s another event. It’s another problem. Over 107 years, I’ve faced other problems. Living is a problem.

You do what you need to do to handle the problem that’s in front of you. At this moment and this moment, it’s a virus, which unfortunately we don’t understand too much about. You know, especially the fact that it’s supposed to affect the elderly more than those younger, and well, you have to remember, I’m a little bit older than you are [Anita laughs in the background]. And being my age, uh, and it’s hard to say this, but you have days when you would almost welcome death, because you figure, well, uh, you’ve been here long enough, so be it.

What’s your reaction? 

Anita Sampson: Well, about two weeks before we were told that we had to stay in our apartments, I had gotten a cold and I was really scared that this was happening to me. Fortunately, it was just a, a mild cold. But I was getting anxious because I, I wanted to reach a hundred. All of a sudden it became very important to me, and all of a sudden I didn’t wanna die.

Joe Newman: You know, this is new to me. You’ve always indicated to me that, um, you had no fear. 

Anita Sampson: You know, the reason why I don’t want to die is because I like being around you. I like being in this relationship and I really don’t want it to stop. 

Joe Newman: Well, that’s the best thing I’ve heard in the last two hours. 

Anita Sampson: [Anita laughs]But do you love me?

Joe Newman: Do I ? Do I love you? [Joe Laughs] I think so. I think so. In, in spite of our age, spite of the fact that together we’re 207, you know, the years that we can look forward to, whatever they be, whether they be many or few, and even if they’re just days, you know, to look forward to them and then hope for another one. 

Anita Sampson: Isn’t that beautiful?

I think we’ve been reminiscing enough, and I think it’s time for our nap. 

Joe Newman: All right. [Anita laughs quietly as simple jazz piano comes in]

Joe Richman (Host): Joe Newman and Anita Sampson. They interviewed each other in their apartment at the Aviva Senior Living Community in Sarasota, Florida. Their story is part of our new series Hunker Down Diaries, stories from People Thrown Together by the Pandemic. If you have an idea for the series, we’d love to hear from.

You can send your quarantine stories to info radio diaries.org or find us on Facebook or Twitter. In the coming weeks, we’ll bring you stories about a teenager in foster care, the daily life of hospital workers, and a couple who decided to quarantine together after their first date. Stay tuned. Today’s story was produced by Nellie Gilles and myself with help from Sarah Kate Kramer.

Our editors are Ben Shapiro and Deborah George. Radio Diaries is part of the Radiotopia Network from PRX. You can hear all the shows at radiotopia.fm and if you’d like to know how to live a long life, 107 year old Joe Newman has this advice. Keep breathing. I’m Joe Richman of Radio Diaries. Thanks for listening. 

[Radiotopia audio stinger] 

Joe Richman: From PRX’s Radiotopia. This is Radio Diaries, I’m Joe Richman

In times of war, one of the most difficult decisions people face is whether to leave, to abandon their homes, their possessions, their memories, sometimes leaving loved ones behind. According to the UN close to 4 million people have left Ukraine since the war began.

Sofia Bretl is 33 and has lived in New York city for the last decade, but she was born and raised in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, about 25 miles from the Russian border. The city has received some of the worst shelling so far in the war, and it’s where her mother still lives. Sofia has talked to her mother almost every day since the war began.

And as conditions in Kharkiv have worsened, they faced a difficult decision. Today on the show Sofia’s choice.

Sofia Bretl: Every day I wake up, reach to my phone. And that split second, before I look at my phone, I have a fear of not seeing the message from my mom.

My mom’s name is Vita. She’s a single woman in her fifties. She has a very strong personality. She’s very proud, very loyal. And in the beginning, the building where my mom lives, it’s like, oh, we’re all together. Cook together, laugh together, be scared together, but then it got worse and worse. Every day, artillery fallen into people’s apartments and roofs, buildings explode, and people started leaving, trying to evacuate until only two other families was left in my building.

And I kept asking her, would you be willing to evacuate? There are trains. If I find someone for you to give you a ride or would you go, and my mom told me right away that she’s not going to leave because, she doesn’t want to leave her aunt.

Sofia: So my aunt, it’s hard to describe her. Her name is Vanya . She’s like a kid in a grown-up body. She was mentally disabled all her life because a big tree fell on her when she was 10. So my grandmother took care of her. So my grandmother died this year and left her sister at 92 years old, as heritage to my mom.

Our aunt lives across town. And my mom wasn’t able to get to my aunt. The city was being bombed. So my aunt’s neighbor in the beginning of the war said, “don’t worry. I’m going to take care of her. I’m here in this building. I’m not going anywhere. There is no need for you right now.” But she used to be a home attendant, so she knows how to do all this. So my aunt, she was barely walking . She’s helpless. She doesn’t even understand that there’s a war going on.

Sofia: I was at work and I got a message “call me” from my mom’s friend who she was in shelter with. I called her and she said that next morning, she will leave in evacuation. And she said, “listen, you need to convince your mom to leave because, because it’s really dangerous here and she doesn’t want to go because of the aunt.”

So I called my mom and they said like, “you, you need to make a decision. I want you to leave because I want to have a mother.” I said, “I am sorry to put it this way, but this isn’t me or the aunt.”

Sofia: I know that for sure this choice goes against her basic beliefs. Like to help your neighbor to contribute to the society. The core values came from the best, what was Soviet Ukraine. And up until the very last moment, I was sure she’s not going to go, but she called the neighbor who was taking care of our aunt.

And she said like, if she would let her go. And the neighbor said like, “it’s your decision , of course, what you do is terrible, but how can I stop you?”

Sofia: My mom left with her friend. They took a bus, no one knew where the bus was taking them. And I saw a message from my mom. She said, “I don’t know where our last destination is. It could be in Romania . Kisses.” She doesn’t speak English, never been abroad. And she’s really, really scared. So I have to make peace with the fact that maybe I want to hear from her for two or three.

I just trust that everything is okay, I’ll wait for her to contact me. So I’m waiting right now.

[Phone Rings. Women speaking Russian]

Sofia: I finally talked to my mom.

[Sofia and Vita speaking Russian]

Sofia: She said, “hi, honey, I’m in the bus right now.” I asked her if she is fine and safe, she says, “yes, everything ok. Are you fine, are you safe?” I said “yes.”

Sofia: She said the path was very long and difficult. She doesn’t quite understand where she is, but she’s out.

[Sofia and Vita speaking Russian]

Sofia: She’s safe. And for the first time actually heard her not nervous. And she said, please call our neighbor to find out how the aunt is.

As for me, like getting her out is a giant weight out on my heart and on my shoulders, like she left with two little bags, shoulder bags. Right. But the main thing that she’s alive, um, I know that there’s a lot of guilt and shame because of her aunt. In a textbook of morals what’s right or wrong, it’s probably wrong to leave your family members.

I do not know if she will ever forgive herself, but this is the decisions that war puts people in front of: which live to choose.

Joe: Sofia’s mom crossed the border into Moldova. And because she was traveling with her friend who’s Jewish, both were able to evacuate to Israel. Sophia recently joined her mom there, and they’ve just learned that their aunt Vanya has been evacuated from her apartment to a care facility in Kharkiv. An estimated 40 million people still remain in Ukraine, many because of age or disability or unable to flee.

The music in today’s story comes from the band’s Dakha Baraka, and Dakh Daughters. Both bands are based in Ukraine, and since the start of the war, they’ve left the country. If you’d like to show your support during this crisis, one organization that’s helping resettle refugees is HIAS. You can also support Sofia’s family directly by visiting GoFundMe and searching for Sofia Bretl.

I’m Joe Richman, thanks for listening.

Joe Richman: From PRX’s Radiotopia, this Radio Diaries. I’m Joe Richman. This week, the Senate unanimously passed legislation that would make lynching a federal hate crime. It was a historic moment. Congress has tried and failed to pass anti-lynching legislation more than 200 times over the course of more than a century.

According to the NAACP, more than 4,700 people were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968. The perpetrators rarely faced consequences. The new Emmett Till Anti-lynching act, as it’s called his name for the 14-year-old boy who’s murder 67 years ago shocked the nation. 

In 1955, Emmett Till had traveled from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta to visit family. He was kidnapped, beaten, and killed after allegedly flirting with a white woman.  His body was later found in the Tallahatchie River. 

A photograph of Till’s just figured face was published and his death became a media sensation. Today, his murder is considered the spark that ignited the civil rights movement. But for every Emmett Till there are, of course, many others whose names have been forgotten.

One of them was a Black gas station attendant who lived just a few miles from work Till was killed. Today, the little-known story of Clinton Melton. 

Deloris Melton: My name is Doloris Melton Gresham, I’m the daughter of Clinton Melton and Beulah Melton. 

Dorsey White: My name is Dorsey White Jr. I’m 86-years-old. I’m Beaulah’s nephew. 

Deloris Melton: Growing up, the house that we lived in it was like on a little bayou-like. It was always a happy home and my mom she’s a beautiful woman. Her nickname was pretty mama. This is what everybody called her. 

Dorsey White: Clinton Melton was what you called a good man. He worked hard, took care of his family, he was, you know, well respected by all other Black people that know him, and the white people that came in contact with him, they liked him also.

Deloris Melton: My dad worked at a service station. He pumped gas, fixed flats. We used to stand and wait for him to come home. And, you know, even though we couldn’t tell time, we knew what time he’s supposed to be coming home.  

Dorsey White: Glendora, Mississippi was a small plantation town just a stop on Highway 49. You know, at that time you didn’t have any protection as far as the law was concerned. It could just happen any time. You could be pulled over by highway patrol if you’re driving a car and be abused. And a white person could, you know, start trouble and no one would interfere.

I guess you felt like a rabbit in the forest really what it felt like [laughs] because you had nobody to run to. 

Archival (Voice of a reporter): This is Doug F. Minor, Times-Picayune, Jackson, Mississippi. The kidnapping of Emmett Till the 14-year-old who disappeared on August 28th… 

Dorsey White: I was 20-years-old when Emmett Till was killed. You know, it was the news of the day. 

Deloris Melton: The kids at school would talk about Emmett Till and how they had thrown his body in the river. 

I remember being afraid to go to sleep at night because some white people might come in and do the same thing to my brothers. 

Archival: The brutal lynching of Emmett Till demands prosecution of all persons involved in this hideous crime. 

Keith Beauchamp: Emmett Till wasn’t the only racially motivated murder that took place in the summer of 1955 in Mississippi. But Emmett was the perfect poster child. My name is Keith Beauchamp and I made the documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till. 

After the Till murder trial, you have two men who were involved with the murder of Emmett Till, Roy Bryant, and JW Milam. And they’re acquitted of all the charges by an all-white, all-male jury. And then they get to stand in front of the cameras and smoke cigars and so on; they would get off scot-free. 

Dave Tell: My name is Dave Tell and I’m the author of Remembering Emmett Till. The acquittal fueled this environment, this sense that violence against Black Americans would never be punished. 

Keith Beauchamp: Something was bound to happen again. And three months later, just a few miles away. The 34-year-old gin operator drove to a gas station in Glendora, Mississippi. 

Dave Tell: On that day, Elmer Kimball was driving the car of his good friend, JW Milam, one of the confessed murderers of Emmett Till.  

Dorsey White: They were friends, you know. They would hang out together, and Kimbal and Milam I guess had been drinking beer.

So it was late in the afternoon there, uh, closing time when Kimbal parked the car near the gasoline pump. Clinton approached them and they told him to put the gasoline in. 

Deloris Melton: So, my dad filled the car up with gas. And then when he finished, he told him that, you know, okay, you’re finished. 

And he said, Nah, I didn’t tell you filled it up. I want $2 worth. 

And my dad told him, he said, I distinctly heard you say you wanted a fill-up. 

Dorsey White: That’s when the dispute came. They said he didn’t put the right amount in there. So he told them again, I put in there what you told me. 

Deloris Melton: And he told my father, well, don’t be here when I get back. And so when he told him that,  the service station owner told my father Clinton just go home you know. 

Dorsey White: Clinton started putting some fuel in his car so he can go home and before he finished they returned. 

Deloris Melton: When he came back with the gun, he shot it in the car. From what I was told, he had a bullet hole in his hand and a bullet through the head.

I remember it was a rainy night and we were actually in bed. My mother, she just came in, she was crying and just came in and hugged each one of us, you know, and told us that “your dad won’t be coming back home.”

I remember asking her why, and she said he got shot. Your daddy is dead. 

Archival (Voice of Beulah Melton): I’m Beulah Melton, the wife of Clinton Melton. I have suffered a great loss, the loss of my husband from myself and my four kids. 

Deloris Melton: The news cameras came out and they had an interview with my mom… 

Archival (Voice of Beulah Melton): We had great plans for Christmas. We had planned to get a bicycle for Vivian and a dining room set for Deloris, a basketball for Clinton Jr. 

Deloris Melton: That’s her voice. I like to hear her voice.  

Archival (Voice of Beulah Melton): Now, how will I make this test by myself without some help from somebody.  

Keith Beauchamp: Medgar Evers, who was a field secretary of the NAACP at that time, wanted to bring national awareness to the Clinton Melton case, but Beulah felt that it could be dangerous and they could receive backlash. 

Dorsey White: She had lost a husband and she had these four children. You know, she didn’t have no one to really depend on. So, I’m sure that, you know, she was heartburn. And I guess she was confused too. 

Dave Tell: So, the trial was set for March 1956, but just before that, days before the trial happened, Beulah Melton was driving and her car ended up in the black Bayou river. 

Dorsey White: She had her children in the car with her when she made a wrong turn and went on the water. 

Deloris Melton: My brother was three-years-old and that was five. We are in the car. The car is upside down. You know, you can feel the water just coming in. And my brother told me, he said, water is getting in my face! And so I pulled him close up to me and I was feeling around because I was actually trying to open the door. But you know, if you’re upside down everything is not in place so I’m trying to feel the knob and I felt my mom, but she wouldn’t answer me. 

We didn’t know how to swim. I was scared that we were going to drown. 

Finally, I heard my uncle and this other man come along and he got us out and I remember them taking my mom out and she wasn’t moving.

Dave Tell: HEADLINE: Widow Drowns as Trial Opens. A widow who was set to attend the trial of a white man accused of gunning down her husband drowned under mysterious circumstances last week. Two of Ms. Melton’s children, Deloris and Clinton Jr. were rescued without serious injury. 

Deloris Melton: I was told later that we had been forced off the road. But they never did say who or what, but they were thinking that it was because my mom was going to attend the trial and somebody didn’t want her there. 

Was it an accident, or were we forced off of the road or what? I don’t think nobody really investigated to see what actually happened to her. I would like to know.

Dave Tell: When the Clinton Melton trial began, it opened in the same courthouse where Till’s murders were tried just five or six months before. The same sheriff was on hand, the same lawyers were defending the defendants.  

Keith Beauchamp: But maybe one of the most interesting connections was something that was not known at the time, that Elmer Kimball was an accomplice to the murder of Emmett Till. We now know Kimball was involved with both murders.  

Dave Tell: Kimball was also a manager at the Glendora cotton gin where the Till murderers stole the fan that held Till’s body in the river. But in both cases, the juries ignored evidence and there was a unanimous verdict, not guilty. 

Dorsey White: Uh, well, a little more or less that I understand, it wasn’t a real serious trial, they just, they just went through the motion and did what White people would do during that period of time. A miscarriage of justice. 

Deloris Melton: How could they sit there and know that this man had killed another human being and they still find him not guilty.

[Very deep breath] I really don’t like to say this because I got to remove this from my heart, but I had in my mind at that time that every white person that’s home, that I would just like to just shoot them, let them see what it felt like.

After my mom and dad died, my aunt she adopted all four of us and she had three children of her own. My relatives on my dad’s side, they wanted to split us up and she said, no, because we didn’t want to be separated. 

We used to get together and we often talked about what it would be like, you know, if our mom and dad was living. At times, I could actually picture the house where we lived at and everything that was in it.

The bed, I remember the big heater that sat in the middle of the floor, in the kitchen, the kitchen table. I remember seeing some red curtains at one of the windows. I remember that. At that age, you don’t think you need these memories.

Joe Richman: Deloris Melton Gresham, the daughter of Clinton and Beulah Melton. Today, Clinton Melton’s name is engraved at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama honoring victims of lynching in the United States.

Thanks to Dolores Melton Gresham, Dorsey White, journalist Aaron Hayes, filmmakers, Keith Beauchamp, and historians Dave Tell Carlos Hill and Alex Lichtenstein. The Radio Diaries podcast is produced by Alissa Escarce, Nellie Gilles, Micah Hazel, and me. Our editors are Ben Shapiro and Deborah George. Our marketing and operations manager is Stephanie Rodriguez. Radio Diaries is part of Radiotopia’s listener-supported network from PRX. I’m Joe Richman. Thanks for listening.

Joe Richman: From PRX is Radiotopia. This is Radio Diaries. I’m Joe Richman. We’re proud to be part of a network of some of the most unique boundary-pushing independent podcasts out there. And every year we ask for your support to continue the work we do. But this year we all wanted to do something a little different.

And this episode is part of a special Radiotopia wide project. Shows across the network are releasing episodes tied together by one theme, making trouble. You can learn more and donate to support our work at Radiotopia [dot] fm. And here’s our take on making trouble.

Rosa Parks is one of the most well-known names of the civil rights movement. Most school kids in America can tell you that she was the one who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus. Her arrest mugshot made her the face of the Montgomery bus boycott. But the boycott could have had a different face. On March 2nd, 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks, Claudette Colvin also refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded Montgomery bus.

Colvin was arrested. She was 15 years old at the time. For decades after a few people knew of Colvin’s story. In recent years, her name has become a bit more recognized as efforts are made to remember the unsung heroes of Black history. And because she has recently returned to court to fight her original arrest charge six decades later.

We’ll tell you more about that later, but first let’s go back to 1955 today on the show, the teenage Rosa Parks.

Claudette Colvin: My name is Claudette Colvin, and I was 15-years-old when I was arrested for violating the Montgomery segregation law. Well, that was the kind of teenager that wore my hair in braids. Everybody else was battling with the straightener comb and pomade. I didn’t mind being different.

Montgomery is a nice little Southern town, but everything was segregated. This is for color folks, and this was for white folks. Couldn’t try on clothes in the store, couldn’t go to the movie theater, but a good movie come in town. You know, things that teenagers like to do. So, I knew that this was a double standard. This was unfair. 

Phillip Hoose: My name is Phillip Hoose,  and I wrote a book titled Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. March 2nd, 1955 was a Wednesday Claudette got onto the bus with three other students, and they all settled themselves into a row in the middle of the bus. The rule back in Montgomery at that time was 10 seats in the front of the bus were for whites only. And the whites always had to be in front. 

Claudette Colvin: I knew that rule by heart. I was sitting near the window, the last seat that was allowed for colored people. And so, as the bus proceeded on downtown, more white people got on the bus. Eventually, the bus got to full capacity and a young white lady was standing near the four of us. She was expecting me to get up. 

Phillip Hoose: The bus driver looked in the mirror and saw the situation and said, “I need those seats.” And three of the girls got up and walked to the back of the bus and Claudette didn’t.

Claudette Colvin: I just couldn’t move. History had me glued to the seat. 

Phillip Hoose: And people started yelling on the bus. “Come on, let’s go. Let’s move.” 

Claudette Colvin: Hear those white people complaining to each other, talking, talking, talking, talking, talking. I could see their mouths moving and talking to each other. I didn’t know what was going to happen. 

Phillip Hoose: The bus driver called for a police officer and a police officer boarded the bus and confronted Claudette. 

Claudette Colvin: “Girl, why are you sitting there? You didn’t know the law. And I said, “I paid my fare. It is my constitutional right.” 

I remember they dragged me off the bus because I refused to walk. They handcuffed me and they took me to an adult jail. I had three charges, assaulted battery, disorderly conduct, and going against the segregation law. 

My mom and dad got me out of jail, and my dad said, “Claudette, you know, you put us in a lot of danger, in a lot of danger.”

He was worried about some repercussions from the KKK, and so that night he didn’t sleep. He sat in the corner with his shotgun fully loaded. 

Phillip Hoose: When she got to school the following Monday after the arrest, it was a very divisive thing. On one hand, some students were impressed by her courage. On the other hand, there were many students who thought Claudette had made things tougher for them now, and they didn’t appreciate it one bit.

Claudette Colvin: Everything changed. I lost most of my friends. Their parents told them to stay away from me because they said that, uh, I was crazy. I was an extremist. 

Phillip Hoose: There was precedent for African-Americans refusing to surrender their seats to white passengers. What was without precedent though, is she wanted to get a lawyer and she wanted to fight. 

Fred Gray: My name is Fred Gray. Claudette Colvin was my first civil rights case. I received a phone call from her parents telling me about the incident. I was prepared to file a federal lawsuit to desegregate the buses, but because she had not had the age experience, the maturity, nor the training and civil rights activities, when we discussed it with other persons in the community, they felt that we should not do it at that time. 

Claudette Colvin: My parents wasn’t connected to the elite Black people. Later, I had a child born out of wedlock. I became pregnant when I was 16, and I didn’t fit the image either someone that they would want to show off.

Archival: Just the other day, one of the fine citizens of our community, Mrs. Rosa Parks was arrested because she refused to give up her seat for a white passenger. 

Phillip Hoose: Nine months after Claudia took her bus stand. Rosa Parks did the same. 42 years old, she was a professional, an officer in the NAACP and at last African-American Montgomery had its symbol. 

Archival: I didn’t feel that I was being treated as a human being. I refused to give up this seat. I said, no. I wouldn’t give it up. 

Claudette Colvin: I knew why they chose Rosa. They thought I would have been too militant for them. They wanted someone mild and gentile like Rosa. They didn’t want to use a teenager. 

Fred Gray: I represented Claudette Colvin in 1955 and also Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King. And what you have to realize is there are literally hundreds and probably thousands of individuals like Claudette Colvin, and many of them you never see the name, you never see the faces, but they laid the foundation so that we could honor the Dr. Kings in the Rosa Parks. 

Claudette Colvin: Well, today it’s good to see some of the fruit of my labor. To me, it doesn’t bother me not being named, as long as we have someone out there so we can tell a story.

Joe Richman: This story originally aired on NPR’s All Things Considered in 2015. A year after Colvin refused to give up her seat, her lawyer, Fred Gray filed a federal lawsuit Browder vs Gayle, which ended segregation on public transit in Alabama. Claudette Colvin was the star witness.

Over six decades, a lot has changed in Colvin’s life. She has raised two sons. She worked as a nurse’s aide for 30 years. She’s moved around the country from Alabama to New York to Texas. But one thing that hasn’t changed is she still has a criminal record. A charge of assaulting a police officer from when she was taken off that bus at age 15.

So now at 82 years old, Colvin is doing something about it. 

Archival: This is the CBS news. Civil rights icon, Claudette Colvin, known for her role in desegregating buses in Montgomery, went to court today looking to have her arrest record expunged.

Joe Richman: Recently Colvin and her lawyer filed to clear her record of all charges. One month later, the judge issued his ruling: motion to seal destroy and expunge juvenile records filed by Colvin, Claudette is hereby granted for what has since been recognized as a courageous act. 

Judge Calvin Williams: I’m Judge Calvin Williams and I’m the juvenile court judge in Montgomery, Alabama, that ruled in the Claudette Colvin expungement case.

Joe Richman: Judge Calvin Williams wasn’t even born at the time that Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat. Our producer, Mike, a Hazel spoke to judge Williams about what it means for a criminal charge to become a courageous act six decades later. 

Mycah Hazel: How did you first even hear who Claudette Colvin was? 

Judge Calvin Williams: So I learned of it when I was an adult.

You know, her story is not told as much as it should be. It certainly wasn’t told when I was growing up as a young boy coming up in Montgomery, Alabama, in elementary or junior middle school or high school. I think up to that point, everyone just thought that Rosa Parks was the first person to assert her rights on the bus.

Mycah Hazel: It’s been nearly 70 years since Ms. Colvin refused to give up her seat. You know, some people have said that perhaps getting her record clear, is kind of like symbolic, really. You know, it’s nothing more than just due diligence at that point. I’m wondering your thoughts on that. 

Judge Calvin Williams: I think it is symbolic, but more importantly, it means something to her and what she wants, and what she has expressed is that she wants her children, her grandchildren to see that you can get justice. You know, you can have fair judges to decide your cases. 

Mycah Hazel: In 1955, you know, there were no Black judges in Montgomery. How does it make you feel, personally? Like, what are your reflections on just going from that time period to now being a Black judge in Montgomery and having the authority to really confront this case?

Judge Calvin Williams: So when I received a call, I thought, wow, what an opportunity it is to correct an injustice that was perpetrated.  You know, as a child growing up in Montgomery, I had to ride the bus and fortunately, due to her stance and her assertion of her rights, I didn’t have to sit in the back. Now we have different perspectives, we have diversity on the court that can bring fairness into decisions that we give out. 

Mycah Hazel: Great! What were Ms. Colvin’s impressions when she realized that you, you know, a Black man growing up in Montgomery, was the judge on her case?

Judge Calvin Williams: She did not know that it was an African-American judge that was over the case. And so when we met for the first time, it was, uh, quite emotional for her, and consequently, it was emotional for me too. And she was proud not just to have her record expunged but proud of the fact that the byproduct for action was an African-American judge that could do that for her. 

Mycah Hazel: This is great talking, and I’m sure this is a very kind of, honorable case to have under your belt. 

Judge Calvin Williams: It is; it’s a blessing. Glad to be a part of it. 

Joe Richman: Our producer, Mycah Hazel, with Judge Calvin Williams, who recently cleared the record of Claudette Colvin. After the ruling, Colvin said, “At 82, I’m no longer a juvenile delinquent.”

Thanks for listening to this special episode, part of our annual network-wide fundraiser; make sure to check out making trouble-themed episodes from all of the shows this week. Your donation supports the research and travel, and production that goes into finding these stories and supports the talented producers that create them.

You can donate today at Radiotopia [dot] fm. The Radio Diaries team includes Nellie Gillis, Mycah Hazel, Alissa Escarce, Stephanie Rodriguez, Ben Shapiro, Deborah George, and myself. We’re supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and from listeners, just like you. I’m Joe Richman Thanks for listening.