CNN unveiled a podcast late last month on the fire that killed 21 boys locked inside the Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville in 1959. It’s called “Up from the Grave” and is hosted by Don Lemon, who says in the first episode that the story came to him from a CNN producer from Arkansas, who learned of the tragedy via social media and was amazed that she’d never heard of it before.

CNN bills it as the network’s “first ever original audio immersion 3-D podcast,” whatever that means.

UA Little Rock professors Brian Mitchell and John Kirk are featured in the first episode.

The state Department of Correction unveiled a memorial on the grounds of its Wrightsville unit, where the fire took place, in April. A year earlier, the deaths were memorialized with a plaque in Haven of Rest Cemetery in Little Rock.


The University Press of Mississippi published Grif Stockley’s “Black Boys Burning: The 1959 Fire at Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School” in 2017.

Leslie Peacock wrote extensively about the tragedy for the Arkansas Times in 2008.

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