Lenard Clark, a Black 13-year-old, was beaten into a coma in Bridgeport in 1997 by white guys for riding his bike into that neighborhood.
At the time, Chicago writer Yohance Lacour was a student at UIC, a marijuana dealer, and a nascent journalist reporting the story for a South Side publication.
In the riveting podcast “You Didn’t See Nothin,” he revisits some of the case’s most unsettling details and confronts the principal players 26 years later.
the essentials Lacour’s recollections of the crime are interspersed with recently discovered documents, old footage, and interviews in seven 30-minute episodes.
In the process, he discovers what appears to be an effort to cover up the case with the help of Black community leaders, whom he considers to be.
Effortless production work by former employees of WBEZ and the Invisible Institute.
The reason behind it, according to Lacour, is that “something that’s seeming eerily similar to the Jim Crow era is being utilized as a pretext to dial us back to something that’s feeling like post-racial society,” he tells Axios.
So, I was inspired to emphasize how little has changed since the time when hate crimes like the assault on Lenard Clark occurred.
What most surprised you? How obstinate the assailants and their allies remained all these years afterwards, Lenard.
