StudioTulsa

"Conviction: The Murder Trial That Powered Thurgood Marshall's Fight for Civil Rights"

Public Radio Tulsa | By Rich Fisher

Published June 10, 2019 at 2:00 PM CDT

Our guests are the father and son team of John and Denver Nicks, who join us to duscuss their newly published, co-written book, "Conviction: The Murder Trial That Powered Thurgood Marshall's Fight for Civil Rights." This book tells the true and shocking but little-remembered story of a triple murder that happened in 1939 near Hugo, Oklahoma. An African-American farm-hand named W.D. Lyons was wrongly accused of this crime, and his lawyer was one Thurgood Marshall, who was then a young counsel with the NAACP's newly created Legal Defense and Education Fund.

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Rich Fisher

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.

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