“I think that it’s important that people know that this podcast is not just about trauma,” said Lee Hawkins, host and executive producer of “What Happen in Alabama?”. “This is a podcast about how slavery and Jim Crow and the integration experience shaped the trauma in my family through generations, and the self-determination and resilience that we use(d) to respond to it, but also the price we paid through the generations as a result.”
Hawkins, a journalist who spent 19 years reporting for the Wall Street Journal, has released the first two episodes of “What Happened in Alabama?,” which looks at the history of his family in America; one that is marked by violence and responses to violence. Though Hawkins grew up in Maplewood, Minnesota, his father, Lee Roy Hawkins Sr., was born in Alabama, and, Hawkins recalls in the podcast, had nightmares of what had happened there.
“In this podcast, I use the term Jim Crow survivor,” Hawkins explained. “It’s not a very commonly used term, but it’s an important one because I know that this was a hundred year system of apartheid that we lived under. Black people over the age of 60 who were raised in the South, who are Jim Crow survivors, survived American apartheid.”
And there are stories of resilience to be found within Hawkins’ family, as well as the Black community that surrounded and supported each other against discriminatory policies and experiences. One prominent example can be found in his great-grandparents, who moved to Minnesota in the 1930s and became the landlords of Carl T. Rowan. While Rowan would rise to become a prominent journalist, with political appointments under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, when he rented from Hawkins’ grandparents he was a student prohibited, as other Black students at the University of Minnesota were, from living in university housing.
“What Black people did, what people of color did at that time was they would provide housing to students who needed it,” said Hawkins. “And that was a very basic form of collaboration. When I studied my family history, I found all of these powerful examples of economic, social and political collaboration. The collective power of the Black American people and the individual power of the Black American family oftentimes came through working together to get around the obstacles that were placed in front of us.”
The systems that necessitated this kind of cooperation, however, also led to intergenerational trauma. Corporal punishment, while not the focus of the podcast, is discussed in the first two episodes – how its use originates in historical trauma, and the trauma it perpetuates.
“The political, social and economic stratification of people of color, marginalized people in America, kind of forces us sometimes into these positions where it becomes very easy to use violence to enforce the rules of the home,” said Hawkins.
For Black families, Hawkins explained, corporal punishment can be used as a way to keep children safe from “incarceration, (or) from becoming Philando Castile or George Floyd (both killed by police in Minnesota).” In the podcast, he said his mother told him that he had been corporally punished because he was “outspoken.”
“I had this intuitive understanding as a young Black boy, that because I was a Black kid, I had to get the belt,” said Hawkins. “That kind of rationalization was because I understood that I was going through discrimination and there was a possibility that I could get killed by the police, and there was a possibility that I could get murdered.”
That possibility was a reality for members of Hawkins’ family. Hawkins’ great grandfather, Isaac Pugh Sr., according to the podcast’s website, was murdered over land and livestock by a white perpetrator in 1914. An all-white jury acquitted the killer, and Pugh’s wife, Ella Pugh – the mother of Hawkins’ paternal grandmother, was forced to leave her home.
“It’s almost as if there is an institutional imperative imposed on Black parents to use violence on their children,” said Hawkins, who stressed that not all Black parents utilize corporal punishment. “I am not saying that this is the case for all Black parents. But for the Black parents who have felt the need to use corporal punishment, that feeling is most often inextricably tied to the legacy of white supremacy in America, and finding a way to help their children navigate through it successfully, alive and hopefully, to see them thrive.”
From the perspective of those parents using corporal punishment, keeping their children in line at home is part of keeping them safe outside the home. But experiencing corporal punishment, along with the environmental stress of experiencing racism, can greatly impact the health of children of color.
“(Traumatic childhood experiences) very easily can place you on a path to a shortened life expectancy,” said Hawkins, who added that according to a study by Kaiser Permanente, failing to address childhood trauma and adverse childhood experiences, such as the experience of racism, shortens peoples’ life expectancies by 20 years. “We have millions of kids in this country, kids of color, who have conferred upon them an extra layer of responsibility. It’s not just ‘Go to school, focus and do well,’ it’s ‘Go to school and fight the dragons that come along with being on the fringes of society’ and figuring out how to navigate that at home, at school, and all of these different environments in the world and stay safe.”
As a child, corporal punishment led Hawkins to believe he had to be perfect. As an adult, he began having nightmares of an incident in his childhood, and for a time, had no contact with his parents after they initially refused to go to therapy,
But while trauma may have been part of the impetus for the podcast, the podcast itself is about healing as well. In the second episode “Meet the Hawkins,” Hawkins speaks to his younger sister Tiffany Morrison, who he refers to as having “broke(n) the cycle.” While Hawkins “believed in corporal punishment” until he began having nightmares in his 30s, Tiffany, he said, was against the concept from a young age.
“She made a conscious decision to break the cycle,” said Hawkins. “I hope that this podcast is showing people that you don’t have to be a United States Senator or a prominent member of society to have a profoundly positive impact on society. The decision that my sister made to not whip her children with a belt freed us from three centuries of violence against children.”
“I never spank my children,” said Morrison in the podcast’s second episode. “I try to talk to them about things and I always want them to feel like they could come to me about different things.”
The participation of Hawkins’ parents, including his father, Lee Roy Hawkins Sr., in the podcast is also a sign of healing. Hawkins Sr. apologized to his son after a period of no contact for the experiences that had scarred him as a child. Father and son reconnected, joining forces to trace their genealogy and the story of their family, a story that inevitably becomes tied with America’s history of racism and violence.
It was a history that weighed on Hawkins – there had been a murder in every generation of his family since 1837. Hawkins Sr., who had gone back to school to get his master’s in psychology, suggested that Hawkins see a therapist who had survived Jim Crow to help process all he was learning – a marked change from the man who had, before, refused to go to therapy.
“I started working with this therapist who I currently work with and have worked with for years, because of my dad. It was almost like I gave him the gift of genealogy, and then he gave me the gift of therapy,” said Hawkins. “I guess I gave him the gift of therapy before, but I had never looked at it as so fundamental and critical to my job as a journalist.”
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For Hawkins, part of addressing the trauma is telling the truth – about what happened in Alabama, and about how the experiences of Hawkins’ family fits into the context of American history.
“I’ll be damned if I lie and say that this country hasn’t been white supremacist for all but 60 years of (its) existence. That’s not a political statement. That’s a fact,” said Hawkins. “And we have to reckon with that every day when we are people of color. This is our reality. When people say, ‘Well, why is everything about race with you?’ Well, everything’s about race because it has to be. When I walk outside my door every day, every day has to be about race.”
“What Happened In Alabama?” releases episodes on Wednesdays, and Hawkins will be speaking with MPR’s Angela Davis on May 22, 2024 at the Minnesota History Center, 345 W. Kellogg Blvd., St Paul.
Hawkins’ book “I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free” is also set to be published in 2025 by HarperCollins.
