Radio Diaries Radiotopia

On September 28th, we’re launching a new series: The Unmarked Graveyard: Stories from Hart Island.

Hart Island is America’s largest public cemetery—sometimes known as a “potter’s field.” The island has no headstones or plaques, just numbered markers.

More than a million people are buried on Hart Island and many are shrouded in anonymity. Explanations for how they ended up there can be hard to find. Over the next seven weeks, we’ll untangle mysteries about the lives they lived and the people they left behind.

In the spring of 1981, the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings met for a minor league baseball game of little importance. But over the course of 33 innings – 8 hours and 25 minutes – the game made history. It was the longest professional baseball game ever played. This story was produced in collaboration with ESPN's 30 for 30.

On July 19, 1963, at least 15 Black girls were arrested while marching to protest segregation in Americus, Georgia. After spending a night in jail, they were transferred to the one-room Leesburg Stockade and imprisoned for the next 45 days.

Only twenty miles away, the girls’ parents had no knowledge of their location. A month into their confinement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) heard rumors of the girls’ detention and sent photographer Danny Lyon, who took pictures of them through barred windows. Within days, those photographs appeared in publications around the country.

As the girls’ ordeal gained national attention, they were released without charges. This is the story of the ‘Stolen Girls.’

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To see more photos by Danny Lyon, visit bleakbeauty.com and http://instagram.com/dannylyonphotos2.

One day in 1947, NYC bus driver William Cimillo showed up to his daily bus route, but instead of turning right, he turned left. Over the next week, he traveled 1,300 miles in his municipal bus, ending up in Hollywood, Florida. The bus had broken down, he’d run out of money, and had no way of getting home. Plus, he was now the most wanted bus driver in the country.

This story originally aired on This American Life in 2014. Go to www.radiodiaries.org to find more stories and sign up for our monthly newsletter.

This week we’re featuring a story from NPR’s Embedded podcast. It’s the first episode in a new series called Buffalo Extreme, which follows a cheer team from Buffalo, New York, during the year after a racist mass shooting in their neighborhood.

On May 14, 2022, the world changed for residents of Buffalo when a white man approached the Jefferson Street Tops supermarket and started shooting. He murdered ten and injured three people, almost all Black. That day, teenagers and children from a Black cheer team called BASE were at their gym around the corner. “Buffalo Extreme” is their story: a 3-part series that hands the mic to the girls, their moms, and their coaches as they navigate the complicated path to recovery.

This is the story of a song, “Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down.” It was written by a 12-year-old boy on what was supposed to be his deathbed. But the boy didn’t die. Instead, he went on to become a Pentecostal preacher, and later helped inspire the birth of Rock & Roll.

The boy’s name was Brother Claude Ely, and he was known as The Gospel Ranger.