91.5 Chapel Hill 88.9 Manteo 90.9 Rocky Mount 91.1 Welcome 91.9 Fayetteville 90.5 Buxton 94.1 Lumberton 99.9 Southern Pines 89.9 Chadbourn
The Broadside

The takeover of The Robesonian

Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 audio

In 1988, two armed Native American men occupied a newspaper office in Southeastern North Carolina. In an effort to raise the alarm on corruption and institutionalized racism in their mostly rural community, they took 17 hostages and demanded to negotiate with the governor. Decades later, the small town is still grappling with the events surrounding that day.

Special thanks to WRAL for providing archival audio included in this episode.

Featuring:

  • Sarah Nagem, staff writer at Border Belt Independent and contributor at The Assembly

Links:

Charlie Shelton-Ormond is a podcast producer for WUNC.
Jerad Walker is WUNC’s editor of narrative audio and podcasts. He joined the station in 2022 after nearly a decade at Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Latest Episodes
  1. Our trash lives next to this community
  2. Zombie deer and our looming conservation crisis
  3. Can we save the banana from extinction?
  4. Breaking Southern baseball's color barrier