USG Audio, the podcast division of Universal Studio Group, is launching its latest audio series. The company has teamed up with Yohance Lacour, a formerly incarcerated writer, on You Didn’t See Nothin, a seven-part series that investigates the 1997 race-related attack on Lenard Clark. The show is produced by USG Audio and the Invisible Institute, which produced 2020 Pulitzer Finalist podcast Somebody.
In 1997, Clark was beaten into a coma by a gang of older white teens simply for being Black in a white neighborhood. The media quickly turned towards stories of reconciliation and racial healing, with cooperation by Black leaders and the attacker’s family. At the time of the attack, Lacour was in his early 20s, writing plays, selling weed, and living at his dad’s house on the South Side of Chicago. Unable to stand by as the media transformed the hate crime into a fairy tale of racial reconciliation, Lacour began working with a local neighborhood newspaper to investigate the vicious hate crime. Part memoir and part investigation, the series uses archival audio and new interviews with those involved to bring a fresh perspective to the narrative and correct the historical record of this case nearly 25 years later.
The first three episodes of the podcast will launch on February 15.