Buried Truths

In 1946, Orson Welles, the director of Citizen Kane, was at the height of his fame. At the time, he had a national radio show called Orson Welles Commentaries on ABC. After a year on the radio, discussing politics and Hollywood, Welles heard of a shocking crime.

It was the end of World War Two. A Black soldier, heading home, was brutally beaten by a white police officer in South Carolina. No one knew the identity of the police officer. No one even knew the town where it happened. 

Welles pledged to solve the mystery… on the air...

Today, we’re bringing you a special episode from the Radio Diaries Podcast and their new series, Orson Welles and the Blind Soldier. It’s the story of a crime in a small, southern town…that became a spark for the budding civil rights movement.

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What happened inside of the courtroom when Joe Cameron stood trial for the murder of Reverend Pickett? The trial tells a deeper story about who could receive equal justice in a small southern community where everyone, from the prosecutor, to the judge, and even the lawyer representing Clarence Pickett’s family, knew each other.

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The Columbus police investigate one of their own, Joe Cameron in the Reverend Pickett’s death and come up with a surprising conclusion. Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover sends in the FBI.

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Did the World War II battle of Peleliu, where more than 20,000 American and Japanese combatants fought on an island they could walk across, shape Rev. Pickett’s fate?

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How medical myths about Black people led American health care to fail Clarence Pickett in 1957. It is a tragedy that, 70 years later, is still failing African-Americans.

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Rev. Clarence Pickett’s final days: his arrest, his beating and how he saw a doctor one day and was dead the next.

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After enthralling congregations for several years, Rev. Pickett landed in the Georgia state mental institution, then a county jail where the jailer beat him to the edge of death.

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Rev. Clarence Horatious Pickett was a celebrated young pastor who developed behavioral problems that drew attention and arrests. But none should have led to what followed.

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Four days before Christmas in 1957, Clarence Horatious Pickett, a preacher and newspaper ad salesman in Columbus, Georgia, walked into town to pick up his paycheck. Forty-eight years old and known as “Reverend” to many, the tall, lean man with wire-rimmed glasses left his home and headed toward The Columbus World, a black newspaper where Pickett worked.

Pickett, who’d been a boy preacher, was showing signs of mental instability and had spent time in the county jail and the state mental hospital, which was notorious for employing doctors with addictions, poor training and racist beliefs. Before the day was over, Pickett would be arrested, jailed, and beaten senseless by a white police officer. An examining physician would conclude that Pickett was “putting on.” He wasn’t. His injuries would lead to his death two days later. Pickett’s killing would spur police and FBI investigations where a remarkable number of eyewitnesses would come forward to testify on what they saw. But would an all-white criminal justice system bring charges against a white cop for beating a black man?

Season 5 of Buried Truths follows the story of Pickett and the criminal justice and medical professionals who failed him. Why was he thrown in jail in the first place? Why wasn't he able to receive adequate medical care in those fragile days after his encounter with police? We'll explore Pickett’s life as a mentally disturbed Black man in the dark heart of the Deep South in the 1950s.

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or listen at wabe.org/podcasts/buried-truths/ starting August 26.

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Caroline Herring is a singer, songwriter and scholar of the South. She discusses the evolution of her music and of the song she wrote for Buried Truths.

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