When the flames died, the spin began. Governor Orval Faubus tried to shift blame while reporters and investigators searched for answers. Deputy State Fire Marshal Bill Struebing examined the ashes, Dr. Howard A. Dishongh, Pulaski County coroner, signed the death certificates, and survivor Roy Davis kept telling the truth about what really happened. With commentary from Marlon Weems and historical insight from Dr. Brian Mitchell, Tracey Carrington and Steve Nawojczyk expose how the tragedy was buried under politics, payroll scandals, and racism. Jim Hawley and Keith Hulse, former New York City firefights, discuss the blaze. Letters from William Piggee, sermons by Rev. Roland Smith, and the collective defiance of the school’s staff reveal a community demanding justice for twenty-one lost boys and a state that refused to listen.

March 5, 1959—sixty-nine boys were locked inside a wooden dormitory as flames tore through the building. Twenty-one never made it out. Survivors Roy Davis, Archie Ray Poole, and Otis Sidney describe the terror of waking to smoke and locked exits, while fire investigators Jim Hawley and Keith Hulse, both retired New York City firefighters, explain how panic and bad design turned the dorm into a furnace. Superintendent Buddy Gaines, Governor Orval Faubus, and Captain W.A. Seaton of the Little Rock Fire Department appear through archival accounts as the episode reconstructs every minute of the blaze—from the first flicker in the caretaker’s office to the failed rescue attempts in the storm-soaked Arkansas night.

It began as a promise and it ended in betrayal. In 1936, Arkansas built the Negro Boys’ Industrial School in Wrightsville, calling it a place for “wayward youth.” What they created was a prison farm for children. In this first episode, Tracey Carrington and Steve Nawojczyk uncover how decades of racism, neglect, and forced labor turned a so-called reform school into a deathtrap. With historian Dr. Brian Mitchell exposing the state’s pattern of segregation, juvenile-justice expert Judge Steve Teske explaining how the system failed these kids, and journalist Marlon Weems recalling life in Little Rock’s shadow of Jim Crow, the picture becomes chillingly clear. Lawmakers warned of fire hazards. Inspectors documented locked doors. Editorials begged the state to act. But no one did — until twenty-one boys burned to death inside.