June 20th the annual Juneteenth celebration took place in downtown Meridian and attracted over 2500 people. Brick and Vick Allen headlined the event, which also included local and regional gospel acts. We were proud to be the exclusive host radio station.
Tom's Late Uncle's Get Pardon
The South Carolina Parole and Pardons Board has unanimously granted Tom Joyner a posthumous pardon for his great-uncles, Thomas and Meeks Griffin, who were executed in 1915 for a crime they didn’t commit.
Officials believe the men are the first in the state to be posthumously pardoned in a capital murder case.
Joyner, his brother, Albert, and two sons, Thomas and Oscar, were joined by Harvard scholar Henry Louis “Skip” Gates and his legal team in presenting their case. The host of "The Tom Joyner Morning Show" called in to the program right after the decision came down shortly after 9:30 a.m. to inform co-hosts Sybil Wilkes and J. Anthony Brown, along with his nationwide listening audience, who'd been texting their well-wishes for the family all morning.
“They did give my uncles a posthumous pardon,” Joyner said. “We’re getting ready to go now for the signing of the pardon letter.”
Joyner had been on a quest to clear his uncles’ names after learning of their story when Gates announced the results of genealogy research conducted on Joyner’s family as part of Gates’ 2008 PBS special, “African American Lives II.”
Joyner, with help from Gates and South Carolina attorney Stephen K. Benjamin, put together the case petitioning the state to exonerate his maternal great-uncles.
The brothers were executed with two other black men for the April 1913 shooting death of John Lewis, 73, a wealthy Confederate veteran living in a town 40 miles north of Columbia.
Trell
