The Takeaway

Original Air Date: March 13, 2022

In the early morning of August 10, 1984, Deborah Sykes, a 25-year-old copy editor at a local newspaper in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death. Without any evidence, Darryl Hunt, a 19-year-old Black man, was implicated and convicted for Sykes murder. Although DNA evidence was found to exonerate him in 1994, he spent another 10 years in prison. The case is the subject of the 2007 HBO documentary "The Trials of Darryl Hunt."

After Hunt was finally exonerated in 2004, he started a nonprofit called the Darryl Hunt Project for Freedom and Justice which helped provide resources to individuals recently released from prison and advocated for criminal justice reform. On March 13, 2016, Hunt tragically killed himself.

To commemorate his death six years ago, we take a long look at the grave injustices in his wrongful conviction with award-winning investigative journalist, narrative writer, and college professor Phoebe Zerwick. She wrote an eight-part series for the Winston-Salem Journal in 2003 that led in part to Hunt’s exoneration, and she is the author of Beyond Innocence: The Life Sentence of Darryl Hunt, in which she spent years investigating and covering Hunt’s case. 

We also speak with Suzy Salamy, the director of social work at the Innocence Project, about some of the mental health impacts of wrongful conviction and the trauma caused by racial discrimination and biases in the criminal justice system.

Right now HB 359 is making its way through the Montana state  legislature.  The measure would ban drag performances  in schools, libraries, and some businesses. The ban defines drag in terms that are quite broad. It states, in part, that a person is performing drag if their presentation:

“...is different than the performer’s gender assigned at birth using clothing, makeup, or other physical markers and sings, lip syncs, dances, or otherwise performs for entertainment to appeal to a prurient interest.”

 As the fate of HB 359 still hangs in the balance, earlier this month, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee recently signed into law a bill banning drag shows when children are around, along with a bill preventing trans kids from accessing medically sanctioned, and often life saving, gender affirming healthcare. We talk about the bills, what they mean for the community, and where advocates fear these bills might lead.

Congress has not passed meaningful immigration reform in more than two decades. So when  President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he promised to craft immigration policies far more humane than those of his predecessor and to “reassert America’s commitment to asylum-seekers and refugees.”

But the realities of immigration during the Biden years have been far more mixed. In recent months, the administration put in place more restrictions on who and how people can claim asylum in the U.S. at the U.S./Mexico border. These rules are some of the administration's harshest asylum policies yet. 

These tightened restrictions are coming just ahead of the end of the Trump-era border restriction, Title 42. Since 2020, Title 42 has allowed border security to turn away hundreds of thousands of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers attempting to enter the country through the southern border. Title 42 is set to expire when the Biden Administration lifts the COVID-19 national and public health order on May 11. And the White House has voiced concern with a possible “surge” in migration at the border.

For more on this, we're joined now by Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, President and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. And Isabela Dias a reporter at Mother Jones covering immigration.

The National Brotherhood of Skiers was founded in 1973 with a mission of expanding a love of skiing and other winter sports within the Black community, and supporting talented Black skiers chasing olympic dreams.

The organization celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, and current NBS president Henri Rivers shares his love of skiing, the current status of the organization, and how to nurture a love of winter sports in children.

The 95th Academy Awards will take place this Sunday. Feeling like you've missed out on all the buzz? Wanting to catch up on your Oscars movie bucket list? Or just interested in hearing some great predictions for the category winners? You're in luck! 

Kristen Meinzer, host of the By The Book podcast and Rafer Guzman, film critic for Newsday, sit down with The Takeaway to give us all of their 2023 Oscar Awards predictions and analysis. 

It’s been ten months since the Southern Baptist Convention passed a number of reforms aimed at helping prevent abuse within its churches and caring for survivors of past abuse. But progress on implementing those reforms has been slow, and the Convention has continued to field debates within its churches about who is really accountable.

We speak with Liam Adams, religion reporter at The Tenneseean.

In June 2022, The Takeaway reported on the third-party investigation of the SBC's top governing body, which found that leaders systematically ignored, belittled and intimidated survivors of sexual abuse for the past two decades while protecting the legal interests of churches accused of harboring abusers. Listen to that piece here.

Original Air Date: June 06, 2022

A third-party investigation of the Southern Baptist Convention’s top governing body found that an influential group of leaders systematically ignored, belittled and intimidated survivors of sexual abuse for the past two decades while protecting the legal interests of churches accused of harboring abusers. Despite recent declines in membership, Southern Baptists are still the largest evangelical group in the United States, with more than 13 million members. How they respond to this moment is deeply consequential for America.

We speak with Robert Downen, a reporter at The Houston Chronicle, and Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University and author of "Jesus and John Wayne," about the recent findings and the SBC's response. We also hear from two survivors of abuse in the SBC, Hannah-Kate Williams and Christa Brown, about their long fights for justice and accountability. 

Non-alcoholic liquor and beer sales have exploded in recent years, and bars across the country now have non-alcoholic cocktail options on their menu along with alcoholic drinks.

Takeaway producers Katerina Barton and Ryan Wilde talk to a few folks in the industry and and customers at a sober bar in New York City about this growing trend. They look at what makes a sober bar still a bar, and discover the deeper importance of folks being able to share physical space to come together and connect in environments that are alcohol free.

Guests:

Abby Ehmann, owner of Hekate, a sober bar in the East Village in NYC.

Brianda Gonzalez, owner of The New Bar, a non-alcoholic bottle shop in Los Angeles.

Chris Marshall, owner of Sans Bar, a space with all the fun and social life of a bar without the alcohol in Austin, Texas.

Arielle Ashford, co-founder of Unity Recovery and co-owner of The Volstead, a vegan restaurant and zero-proof bar in Philadelphia. 

This week in Atlanta, supporters of an environmental movement to defend the Atlanta Forest are having a Week of Action against "cop city," following the January police killing of queer, Indigenous-Venezuelan Forest defender Manuel Teran aka Tortuguita.

Over this past weekend, some protestors engaged in property damage of construction infrastructure around a security outpost set up by police. Police responded, rushing to Weelaunee’s People Park, where many attendees of the week of action were attending a music festival.

35 protesters were arrested during the festival and 23 accused of domestic terrorism, including a legal observer from the Southern Poverty Law Center who was representing the National Guild of Lawyers. Our digital producer Zachary Bynum got the chance to speak with participants who’d been taking part in the week of action. 

You can listen to our other segments on cop city below:

Cop CityCop City:Forest Defender KilledCop City: Welcome to RIOTSVILLE, USA

Editor's Note: We reached out to the Atlanta Police Foundation for comment.  If we hear back from them, we will be sure to post their comments on our website.

Modern businesses and governments are entrenched in relationships with the consulting industry: a multibillion dollar industry that promises expertise and efficiency to cut through the stagnancy of bureaucracy. But according to our guest, it rarely delivers on those promises.

Rosie Collington is a political economist at the University College London’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. She and Mariana Mazzucato are co-authors of "The Big Con: How The Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies." 

Collington joined us to discuss the book. She and Mazzucato expose our economies’ reliance on consulting firms and how they have obfuscated corporate and political accountability, heightened the extraction of privatization, and capitalized on crises like climate change — to the world’s detriment.