Legacy

In 1968, Walter Lomax is sentenced to life in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. After spending nearly four decades fighting the conviction, he’s exonerated entirely of the crime. Today, Walter uses his freedom to help others battle injustices within the court system.

Paul and his wife Jane have lived an unlikely life. After both making careers as high-powered lawyers in D.C., Paul began to descend into alcoholism. What seemed like a successful family life from the outside came crashing down.

For Cecilia Hayden-Smith, her faith in God and coming out as a gay woman, are intimately tied together. She experienced many changes both socially and politically for the LGBTQ community -- and gone through many of her own. Cecilia found God in adulthood, and used her faith to fight addiction, overcome trauma -- and to come out.

Theresa Saxton and Patricia Tyson participate in the March on Washington in 1963, which became best known for Martin Luther King Jr's “I Have a Dream” speech. It was a turning point for America, and the sisters.

Jan Evans Houser grew up in a military family, traveling the world in tandem with international affairs. But in 1959 when her husband is assigned to maintain U.S.-Cuban relations at the embassy in Havana, there was no way to prepare for what was ahead. Listen to the third episode of Legacy to hear Jan’s story of living as a diplomat’s wife in Cuba leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Mary Tamaki Murakami was still swooning over pop stars, and worrying about her homework when her life suddenly took a very real turn. After the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, she saw an immediate crackdown in her own neighborhood in San Francisco. Mary begins seeing the F.B.I. take people within her community, but it was only the beginning of what would become explicit discrimination, justified by war, and empowered by the Supreme Court. Today, she shares her experience to schools and organizations because she fears history is already repeating. As more parallels emerge between her own experience and new policies impacting Muslim-Americans, Mary hopes her own story can serve as a cautionary tale.

In the late 1960s, the D.C. police department was becoming overwhelmed with protests against the Vietnam War, Civil Rights demonstrations, and a surge in crime. The government decided to recruit thousands of new officers -- many of them through the armed forces. In the first episode of Legacy, we hear the story of Gary Hankins who was one of those recruits, what he learned about policing from his transition, and what it was like to control protests against the war he just got back from fighting.