Unfinished: Deep South: History and Key Facts

Unfinished: Deep South is a podcast that investigates the unsolved murder of Isadore Banks, one of the wealthiest African-Americans on the Arkansas Delta. The 10-episode podcast was released in June 2020 by Market Road Films and Stitcher Radio. In 2021 it was nominated for a Peabody Award.

Banks was murdered in 1954, just three weeks after the Supreme Court ruling that overturned segregation. Creators of the podcast, journalist Neil Shea and documentary filmmaker Taylor Hom normally cover international stories but decided to focus on the U.S. for their next project. Hom became aware of Isadore Banks after reading about the U.S. Justice Department's Cold Case Initiative of 2006. This was a joint effort between the Civil Rights Division, United States Attorneys' Offices and the FBI to focus their resources on the investigations of more than 100 pending pre-1979 murders. After some initial interviews with members of the Banks family, Shea and Hom decided the story of Isadore Banks was more than just an unsolved murder.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Unfinished: Deep South by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.