Gone South

A working-class public school in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana became a national sensation when its students began landing acceptances at Harvard, Stanford, and other Ivy League universities. The viral videos were inspiring. The story seemed almost too good to be true. It was.New York Times reporters Katie Benner and Erica Green investigated T.M. Landry and uncovered a years-long college admissions fraud: fabricated transcripts, invented extracurriculars, and personal essays built on trauma the students never experienced. Behind it all was the school's charasmatic and manipulative founder, Mike Landry.This episode explores the rise and fall of T.M. Landry, the college admissions scandal it exposed, and who really pays the price when a system built to exclude finally gets gamed.

Subscribe to our newsletter:⁠https://jedlipinski.substack.com/⁠

Connect with Jed Lipinski: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/

To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Patterson Hood grew up in Florence, Alabama — a deeply conservative, Bible Belt town where his father was quietly making history. David Hood was a session bassist for the Muscle Shoals rhythm section, recording with Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, and Wilson Pickett at a time when it wasn't always safe to go to dinner with the artists you were recording with. Patterson learned early not to mention his dad's job at school. When people asked what church his father attended, he changed the subject.Decades later, Patterson co-founded Drive-By Truckers — a band that has spent 25 years wrestling with Southern identity, racism, abuse of power, and what it means to be American. In this conversation, he talks about growing up progressive in the Deep South, why he thinks a Black and white soul band should replace the Confederate flag as the symbol of the South, and what he hopes listeners will make of his songs 20 years from now.

Subscribe to our newsletter:⁠https://jedlipinski.substack.com/⁠

Connect with Jed Lipinski: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/

To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Before the Civil Rights Movement's major victories of the 1960s, a pro wrestler named Sputnik Monroe was already integrating Memphis, Tennessee one arena at a time. Born Roscoe Brumbaugh in Dodge City, Kansas, Monroe became one of the most beloved figures in Memphis wrestling history, counting Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash among his friends and fans.

This episode of Gone South tells the story of how Monroe — a white heel wrestler with a bleached streak in his hair and a gift for provocation — used his fame to desegregate the Ellis Auditorium, challenge Jim Crow on Beale Street, and form one of the first interracial tag teams in the South. He was arrested repeatedly for socializing in Black nightclubs. He didn't stop.

Featuring interviews with music historian Robert Gordon, wrestling journalist Steve Johnson, and Jerry Phillips (son of Sun Studio founder Sam Phillips) plus archival audio of Monroe himself. A story about race, rebellion, and one of the most unlikely civil rights figures the South ever produced.

Check out Robert Gordon's book It Came From Memphis https://tinyurl.com/yys8pxdhSteve Johnson has written many fine books about wrestling history, includingThe Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: The Heelshttps://tinyurl.com/28h6nacm​Follow Jerry Phillips on Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/p/Jerry-Phillips-61559154401992/

Subscribe to our newsletter:⁠https://jedlipinski.substack.com/⁠

Connect with Jed Lipinski: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/

To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was a city of wreckage, rumors, and strange things washing up where they didn’t belong. When transplant Skip Henderson buys a battered table lamp at a post-storm rummage sale, along with a set of drums and an Allen Iverson jersey, the seller casually drops a chilling line: “That’s a Nazi lampshade.”

At first, it feels like just another piece of post-Katrina chaos. But when Skip takes a closer look at the lampshade’s translucent, veined material, the object starts to haunt him. He ships it from friend to friend, trying to get it out of his life until it lands with veteran journalist Mark Jacobson, who can’t let the mystery go.

In this episode of Gone South, host Jed Lipinski follows the lampshade’s bizarre journey from the Lower Ninth Ward to DNA labs, Holocaust institutions, and a decades-old urban legend where the truth may be even harder to pin down than the myth.

Subscribe to our newsletter:⁠https://jedlipinski.substack.com/⁠

Connect with Jed Lipinski: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/

Follow Marc Jacobson on Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/markjacobson48/Marc's book: The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleanshttps://www.amazon.com/Lampshade-Holocaust-Detective-Buchenwald-Orleans/dp/1416566287/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 1903, South Carolina’s most powerful journalist is gunned down in broad daylight, and the shooter is the lieutenant governor.

Narciso Gonzalez, editor of The State newspaper in Columbia, spent years attacking the Tillman machine: “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, the architect of South Carolina’s post-Reconstruction political order, and Ben’s volatile nephew James Tillman, a rising politician with a reputation for drinking, gambling, and vendettas. On January 19, 1903, that feud turns into a street-corner assassination outside the State House.

From Red Shirts intimidation and the Hamburg massacre, to Ben Tillman’s state-run liquor “dispensary” system and the riots it sparked, to a murder trial engineered to let the shooter walk, we trace the bloodline politics and raw violence behind the killing with writer Jack Hitt (This American Life, Uncivil).

It’s a story about press power, political revenge, and how a state’s myths, and its laws, get written when the loudest voice in the room can be silenced with a gun.

Subscribe to our newsletter:⁠https://jedlipinski.substack.com/⁠

Connect with Jed Lipinski: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/

Listen to Jack Hitt on This American Life https://www.thisamericanlife.org/archive?contributor=8770Read some of Jack Hitt's best magazine stories on Longform.orghttps://longform.org/archive/writers/jack-hitt

To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices