You.

This is Channel Seven's eyewitness news with Ernie Anastas and Kydi Tong.

Good evening. I'm Kaidi Tong. Here's what's happening. Princess Diana arrived in New York tonight for her first visit to the Big Apple, traveling without her husband, Prince Charles. The primary purpose?

It's 1989. We're eight years past the initial public reports on the mysterious illness that would become AIDS with. And it's a lot harder to hide from reality. Federal officials think there are as many as 1.5 million people living with HIV, and the stigma around those who are sick has been and remains really high. I mean, just four years earlier, a poll revealed that half the country would be perfectly happy to quarantine people with AIDS, which is why it's huge news when Princess Diana shows up on the 17th floor of Harlem Hospital.

Well, Princess Diana leaves us tomorrow, but not before a visit to Harlem Hospital at ten in the morning. There, she'll meet with children with AIDS.

It's a powerful juxtaposition, this beautiful young princess arriving at this hospital that had become a home for kids with AIDS. Principit makes international Press Harlem Hospital stands.

In the middle of one of the most dangerous areas of New York, plagued by violence, drugs and poverty. No president, few leading political figures come here. So the personal decision by the princess to visit a children's AIDS ward was warmly welcomed.

Princess Diana is in a bright red skirt suit. She's a full head taller than Dr. Margaret Hagerty, who runs the pediatrics department and is touring the princess around. Princess Nye is poised, she's curious, she seems engaged. I'm kyright. When my colleague Lizzie Ratner and I talked with doctors and nurses from Harlem Hospital about the princess's visit, a certain kid named Chamar kept coming up. Dr. Stephen Nicholas was on call that day.

This kid had the foulest mouth of any child in my whole career that I've ever taken care of.

Steve still remembers when this precocious seven year old barged into Dr. Hagerty's office.

And he flips her the middle finger and says, lady, I'm going to f you. And she says, without missing a beat, well, that'll be very interesting. I'm a spinster. Now go back to YOur room. So we all agree, keep Shamar away from the princess.

And so on the day the princess arrives, Shamar's in his room, and I'm.

Appointed the sentry outside his door to make sure that he doesn't sneak out. So the entourage is going down one side of the wards to see the infants. And I can see the door suddenly creeps open. He's looking down the hallway, hissed Jamar, you get back in your room right now. And then, just as Dai is right outside the door, he flings it open, and he makes a beeline for her and just jumps up in her arms.

Dr. Hagerty sputted out for the tv cameras.

She spontaneously and unrehearsed of her own volition. I think out of her genuine concern for children, she picked up a little boy who has AIDS and hugged him.

This hug from a woman who lived in a palace. For this young boy with AIDS, it's often credited as being a transformational moment in the social history of HIV. But it's hard to know how much Princess Diana actually changed things. Nurse Maxine Freyer spent 40 years working at the hospital, and she isn't so sure.

Still don't know about that one. I think it changed the narrative about her. She was now a woman who can come down and be with the regular people. So I think her image changed a lot more than ours.

This is blind spot, the plague in the shadows stories from the early days of AIDS and the people who refused to stay out of sight. Today we meet the doctors and nurses who actually did change the lives of children who showed up at Harlem hospital long before Princess Diana. And they did it with few resources. At a time when no one else wanted to help these kids, they would.

Come into the hospital, be admitted to my ICU, and die.

There was an awful disease back then. I mean, they were just dying.

There was a lot of beauty, a lot of sadness, and a lot of sort of just like, flying by the seat of your pants, trying to make an educated and a good decision, but really not knowing.

You.

Most people probably don't associate kids with HIV and AIDS. And if they do, they think about Ryan White. He was 13 years old, living in Indiana when he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1984. He got it through a blood transfusion, and when his HIV status became known, he was kept from going to a school. He became the face of children living with AIDS. But in reality, almost all kids who tested HIV positive were born with it. At that time, 80% of the known pediatric cases in New York could be traced to iv drug use, and 90% of these children were black or latino. As my colleague Lizzie Ratner and I learned, harlem Hospital was an epicenter.

Maxine, what year did you start working on aid stuff, specifically at the hospital?

The day has started.

Here's what it was like at the hospital early on doctors and nurses and pediatrics started hearing from colleagues in other departments about a new illness they were seeing. But as we talked about in episode one, everyone thought it was just about gay men, including Dr. Margaret Hagerty, the woman who headed up the pediatric ward.

And I think to myself, self, whatever this is, I don't have to worry about it. It's in gay men now. You know, I was brought up by the nunnies, so what do I know about all this? Gay men and things like that? And I am not an immunologist. I wouldn't know a t cell if I tripped over it.

Steve Nicholas worked for Dr. Hagerty. He's the doctor who guarded Shamar when Princess Diana visited. He had read the MMWR reports, but he wasn't worried either.

I'm a brand new pediatrician. I'm learning about Kawasaki disease, which was the hot new disease that year. I remember reading those reports and I threw them away. I thought, that's got no relevance to kids whatsoever.

Steve had just arrived in Harlem for a residency. He was from Wyoming and kind of.

Stood out as a white boy from Wyoming in cowboy boots, parachuting into Harlem hospital. What did you.

He didn't know if he would stay in New York City. But one thing he was clear about.

The last thing I wanted to do on earth was to take care of dying. Mean, who wakes up in the morning and says, boy, that's what I want to do?

Kids were showing up at the hospital with a range of symptoms. The doctors at Harlem may not have worried about the new disease to start, but soon they were forced to confront it head on.

Big liver and spleen, big lymph nodes, yeast infection both at the mouth and down into the esophagus. That was like an explosion.

And roughly how many kids would you say there were from year to year?

Well, it started as one, then it was two, then it was four. Then it was this sort of progression. I would say that by the end of the first year, we had dozens. And before long, we had a couple hundred.

Couple hundred is a lot.

Yeah, that is a lot. Turns out that the highest rate of mother baby AIDS in the country was central Harlem.

Back in those days, if a woman was HIV infected, she had a one in three chance of having a child who was HIV infected.

Monica Degrado was another nurse on the ward. She worked with nurse Maxine and Dr. Steve.

So those were huge. I mean, horrible odds.

This was long before we understood the science behind mother to child transmission, and long before we could take steps to prevent it. Many of the women were also drug users, and the combination of the drugs and the scary disease admit patients were not always treated well, even at Harlem hospital.

Ignorance of HIV, not just in the community, but professional people, was crazy.

On the 17th floor on the pediatric ward, nurse Maxine says this ignorance meant people kept a certain distance.

They didn't like to come in a room. So when they came to our wall, they knock on the door, there's somebody looking for you. They wouldn't come in a room, but.

On other floors of the hospital, it got worse.

I remember one particular mother who had a baby down the fourth floor. So second m was born, and the baby was, like, over there. And the mother's around the corner, around the bin by herself, postpartum. Nobody wanted to see her until we came down to see her. Where is she? Nobody knew she was isolation. She has AIDS. Nobody was going to be there to see her, to protect her, to watch her. The stigma of being, oh, she's a drug addict, she's anything. And so our families were really abused, neglected, I'll say neglected, not abused. But that's.

You know, you have to remember the know. We were in the thick of the crack epidemic.

Before nurse Monica worked in pediatrics at Harlem, she worked in foster care. She saw firsthand how drug use and our attitudes towards drug users at the time contributed to what was happening inside the hospital.

Women would come in to give birth. They would be tested if there was any suspicion of substance use, and if that substance use test came back positive, those kids were put on a social hold.

Social hold, right.

Especially today. This is a controversial term. Social hold meant kids were prevented from going home with their mothers. These were decisions made often without much thought, given to their birth families. Kids were evaluated by a hospital social worker. What support did the kid need? Can the family provide it? And if the hospital was concerned, they'd mark the kid as a social hold and call child welfare to investigate.

And oftentimes, just with the bureaucracy, these kids were stuck.

The world outside of the 17th floor of Harlem Hospital was not welcoming to kids with HIV and AIDS. But inside the hospital, on the pediatric unit, Dr. Hagerty made sure her doctors and her nurses took a different approach. And in oral history, she remembered going.

On rounds, and I quite deliberately would pick one of those infants up and put them in the arms of an intern, and then I would take another one, and we would continue down the hallway making rounds, carrying these children with us. We managed to do away with the fear and loathing of children with AIDS and over a period of weeks to months, I'd find these kids on the knee of the security guard or being carried around by the children and so on. And so the staff bonded to these children.

We probably, in this room have four.

Or five children here from a documentary. Dr. Hagerty tours the ward who are.

Here not because they're ill enough to require hospitalization, but because we have no.

Alternative placement for them.

And these kids could stay in the hospital for a long time.

That's called a temper tantrum. No.

The average length of stay for babies with AIDS at Harlem Hospital was 339 days.

Some infants were literally growing up in the hospital.

Border babies.

Border babies.

Border babies.

Border babies, as we call them. Border babies. Boarded and raised from birth until they die within the confines of hospital wards.

That got essentially their room and board at the hospital because they had nowhere to go.

Some doctors at other hospitals opposed this practice. But at Harlem, a home away from home was created for kids like Shamar, the boy who jumped into Princess Di's arms. He lived at Harlem Hospital for just under a year. His mom would still visit now.

She didn't come often. She didn't bring him much. She brings some pajamas and, oh, he's so happy.

But social services would not allow Shamar to live with her. The foster care system had experienced a huge spike in the 1980s, and the fear of HIV was high. Nervousness about contagion remained, and many parents didn't want to take home a kid who was assumed to be dying. Shamar did eventually get picked up by a foster family, and nurse Monica said it was a great fit.

It was like a match made in heaven, really was a match made in heaven.

He lived with them through the winter into the spring. Then his immune system failed and he got too sick and he died.

It.

In these early days of HIV, kids didn't live long. Treatment options were slim.

There was nothing. There was nothing.

Many kids got infusions containing antibodies in the hopes that this would strengthen their immune systems. It didn't take away the HIV, but it lowered the rate of other infections.

Part of my job was giving the gammy globulin.

That's the antibodies nurse Maxine would give them to.

The kids saw the iv and do the infusions.

When they first started giving you medication, it was front of your hand, and then eventually it was like on your forearm.

Victor Reyes was born HIV positive at Harlem Hospital in 1989, and during his childhood, he would come back there for treatment. He remembers sitting in a room, a bunch of kids at a time, just.

For hours, we saw a lot of Disney movies.

Lion King and Matilda were on a steady repeat.

We can tell you every single movie by heart.

The staff was protective of these kids as they cared for them.

All the medications that ever came out, we all tasted them. Our staff tasted the nurses. Anyhow, we tasted every single one of those medications, because how are you going to give a medication to a child and you don't know what it tastes like?

As new drugs were developed, Harlem would get them. And studies were happening, trying to better understand how to treat kids with AIDS.

And they asked for a nurse to do clinical trials.

When clinical trials started, Maxine raised her hand.

So I said, okay, somebody has to do it. Like I said, for everything else. So I volunteered.

You said that you had to pray on that.

Yes, I had to pray on that.

Decision to do you, because nobody knew.

Anything about know we have Tuskegee in our background, and so I wanted to make sure Tuskegee wasn't happening again. I wanted to do the clinical trials because I wanted to make sure they were done correctly for my people, because those were my people, my neighborhood, my children. So that's why I did it.

Maxine's willingness to face HIV and the trials at the hospital, it also meant dealing with stigma in her own family.

When I worked at the hospital, I came to my family's house, and they made me take off my clothes at the door and put in a bag and all the kind of stuff, and I did.

It was her father who thought working with people with AIDS wasn't right for his daughter. In the mid 1980s, Maxine's dad was not alone. In Queens, New York, parents protested when a kid with AIDS was allowed to attend school. One day, 11,000 kids boycotted school. Parents chanted, save our kids, keep AIDS out.

To these parents who hold vigils here every day, the question is not about.

One AIDS child anymore, though, but about.

The future, and understood exactly what AIDS.

Was then maybe it would.

The officials say that they will allow school superintendents to suspend students, teachers, or.

Other staff who are suffering from AIDS. But at Harlem hospital, Maxine didn't have time to concern herself with protests or stigma. She prayed on it.

I talked to God, and he told me to do this, and people don't want to hear that, but that's the truth. This was what I was supposed to do.

When did you decide to be a nurse?

I was going to be a nurse all my life.

All your life?

From the time I was born.

How is that possible?

I was a sick kid. People always say you can go. Good nurse. Want to become a doctor? No, that's a different profession completely. Doctors heal illnesses. Nurses heal spirits and souls and everything else. We take in the whole body. Nurses take care of people. So if you come in and you're going to die, you're going to die. I can't fix you from dying, but I can make you comfortable. Welcome to my little church. You've been inside already?

To understand Maxine's devotion to her patients, you need to understand a little more about her. Maxine grew up in Harlem. And then Lincoln projects is just there on the horizon.

It's two blocks wide.

She's been going to the same church since she was a kid. How you doing? Okay.

We have a kitchen because we do have parties. You know about ame church as a food, right?

Gotta have fellowship.

All right, this is our.

And then Harlem hospital is just a couple blocks up here.

That's it right there.

So your life is right in this.

Neighborhood for these few? Yeah. Uh huh. Yeah, I guess you can say that.

Her boss, on the other hand, Dr. Hagerty, she came from what seemed like a whole other world. West Virginia. But Dr. Hagerty was no stranger to hard times. Her father had been a doctor to coal miners back home. Alcohol and addiction were part of the mix growing up. She and her sister were turned over to an orphanage in their teens. Dr. Hagerty died in 2022. We talked to her before she passed away. I went with Lizzie to her house, a modest single family home in the Bronx decorated with cat memorabilia and actual cats.

Does your cat have a name?

Yes, he does. His name is lucky. Dr. Hagerty.

Margaret Hagerty was 84 and long retired from Harlem Hospital.

First of all, I can't walk. You understand?

She had spent more than two decades there, and she trained her staff to do as she did, to do what you can for your patients. When supplies were short, she sought solutions. She gave us an example, a story about cough syrup.

What do you mean, we don't have any Robitussin?

A resident had come to her to say they ran out of Robitussin cough.

Syrup and went to the pharmacist. What do you mean we don't have any? You can't practice pediatrics in the wintertime without Robitussin.

So what did she do? Dr. Hagerty sent her interns and residents to the private hospital nearby to find some robitussin and syringes and gauze and anything else they might need at Harlem.

And they'd steal them.

You got to hustle.

You got to hustle and you always ran out of money. People are not going to pay for poor people. I often thought that I was sort of like coaching men. A gorilla behind the lines. That was part of the fun of it, actually being bastards at their own game.

Hospitals were struggling in part because the city's leaders responded to New York City's fiscal crisis by cutting services, especially in poor communities. Many who could afford to leave the neighborhood had just up and moved out. Housing stock wasn't kept up. Buildings were often just abandoned. So here's a community that the landlords as well as the city of New York had simply turned their back on. Harlem was hit really hard. One of the local hospitals fully closed down.

This hospital belongs to the community, does not belong to mail cots. Now, Governor Kelly.

For every 1000 births in New York City, the infant mortality rate was 19. In Harlem, it was just over 42, more than double the city average. And this was the Harlem Dr. Hagerty met when she arrived. And Harlem hospital could have been seen as pretty bare bones itself. It was always understaffed, but the people who worked on that ward went out of their way to make the 17th floor a place a kid could call home.

Well, I want to go back to those wards. Walk me through the ward.

So you walk off the elevator and you make a left turn and you go all the way to next to last room. And you went into the blue room. There was no identifying mark because we didn't want the kids to be identified. But everybody knew the blue room was the HIV room, right.

I got to be a kid when.

I was there, birthdays were celebrated.

Did you bake them?

No.

Staff brought stuff in from home.

Dr. A's father put a blue carpet down.

They wanted the ward to seem normal.

For kids, even have to show id. You felt really special after a while because your security knows me.

Wash clothes.

The staff did this, right?

Staff wanted their patients to have real lives.

Given tickets to take the kids to Radio City. Right, the circus.

They gave us a lot of outlets, for sure. Went to summer camp every single summer.

We'd have the camp once a year.

It truly was a special place.

And we used to lay out on the sun and the moon and watch.

The see torches lit up all over the ground. Their goal is just to put whoever is there on a pedestal and to show them that there's love here, period. And they did a phenomenal job at that. You're talking about a team of people with little knowledge about a virus who just stepped in and did God's work. They fought for us every step of the way. Monica Maxine women that I call mothers.

I think that the children, this is my own personal view now. Children who have HIV or chronic fatal diseases sort of know that they have a short life and they're going to take in every opportunity they can and nobody can stop them. I don't care what nobody said. They knew that lives are short, and.

That'S why the doctors and nurses would do almost anything for them.

We were a family, and as in.

Many families, there are undoubtedly favorites. We meet one child who practically owned the 17th floor.

He lived on the floor.

He lived on the floor. James was one of our pride and joy.

More about James memes after the break. There have been a lot of jerks making the news week after week. And if you need a little pettiness to go with your politics, hysteria from Crooked Media is the podcast for you. Tune in every week as host, political commentator and comedy writer Aaron Ryan and former Obama White House deputy chief of staff Alyssa Mastro Monaco discuss everything from the profound to the downright absurd. Joined by a bicoastal squad of hilarious women, hysteria leaves no stone unturned, from reproductive rights and voter suppression to the hottest trending topics. Plus, hear all the behind the scenes stories with politicians, actors, writers and more. New episodes of Hysteria drop every Thursday wherever you get your podcasts. This is blind spot, the plague in the shadows. Out of hundreds of kids, everybody we talked to remembered James.

He was the most beautiful and charismatic child.

Dr. Steve Nicholas, who, by the way, did not leave, but spent 25 years at Harlem Hospital. He lit up when he talked about this kid. James was born at the hospital. He went home, but after a couple of months, he was back. He was sick and he never left. James grew up within these hospital walls, like from birth.

He was running for mayor. He was just personable. You'd come in and he'd put his arms know, demanding that you hold him, these big chestnut eyes.

And when he was sad, he was very sad. He could cry.

Between not having a foster care placement and between him being so sick, it just never worked out that he got out of the hospital. All of his life events, you can see the staff just spoiled him as much as they could. You see him here in his little metal barred crib, but smiling and pointing. There's a picture here.

Dr. Steve shows Lizie a set of photos he's kept all these years.

And so what you see here is Dr. Hagerty had a particular soft spot for James.

And there are pictures of Dr. Hagerty actually holding him and just. She looks like she's in a nightgown, even.

No, it's the way she dressed.

Nurse Maxine told me James ran Harlem Hospital's 17th floor. He'd lived there for years. We talked to her and nurse Monica together.

One of the doctors asked Dr. Haggerty if he could get an ice cream cone. So he said yes. And so, not knowing that the doctor is going to take him down the carvells, which is across the street.

Remember, since he was a baby, James had never left the hospital, never been out.

That building, our building, is, like, soundproof. And so he never heard the noises of the street. He never heard a car or a bus or airplane going past another like that.

And suddenly he was out there, not on the water.

So there was an alarm put out. James was missing. And so he comes to the lobby eating his ice cream call, and the doctor didn't think anything wrong. But you said I could get us some ice cream, she said, but you can't take it out. But he had never heard the noise.

Because he lived on the floor.

He lived on the floor.

Do you know what he thought about the noise?

All I know is the doctor said he not scared, but surprised, awed by the sound of the trucks. Because you see tv, we play with cars and the thing. But you didn't know they made that much noise because he was always there.

Do you know what kind of ice cream you got?

It was a nellocomb. He didn't know about ice cream. We didn't have that much ice cream on the floor. Jello and stuff like that.

James was in Harlem in the mid 1980s. Maxine had been working on the pediatric board for several years. Her family, particularly her dad, still didn't like it. But since they were nearby, he would occasionally bring her some food on her shift.

And so my father came to bring me some lunch one day, and he looked in the room, he saw J. O. Right.

Maxine sometimes uses James'initials, J. O. When she talks about him.

I introduced him to J. O. And my father fell in love with. And they would sit there and sing and play.

What did he sing to James?

Anything? I mean, he was a professional singer, mostly blues and stuff like that. My father's a baritone. A beautiful baritone.

Beautiful.

And then when he stopped singing professionally, he sang in church. He's a head singer in the church. He probably sang the blood. That's his favorite song. It's a gospel song. Okay, let's see the blood. The blood that Jesus shed for me way back on Calvary oh, the blood that gives me strength from day to day it could never lose its power. Okay. That was one of his favorite songs. And my father changed his whole idea about how HIV was transmitted and that everybody was not an animal or beast or a drug addict or anything like that. But he fell in love with James.

I suppose we all felt that he was our child because we were all.

Part of the family, but death was never far away.

HIV affects the brain, can affect the brain, and he lost his developmental milestones, so he lost the ability to walk, and then he lost the ability to talk.

What did he end up passing, though?

Because I know Jane never left. Right?

Yeah, that would make sense, because at the time of his passing, treatments were so. We didn't know they were just being put together. And so he probably wasn't on the standard, because there wasn't a standard.

Two months before his fourth birthday, James died in Harlem Hospital.

And I realized that I had to hold a funeral and that the family was in fact the Harlem hospital and virtually the entire hospital knew about James.

Dr. Hagerty recounted this story in her oral history. Harlem staff were used to holding funerals.

I did the eulogy at the little local funeral home across the street, down the street.

The money came from the staff, not just us, but the staff of pediatrics.

Nurse Maxine thinks James was buried on Long island. Nurses who lived out there sometimes donated plots to the kids. Had James survived his illness, he would have been 40 years old this year.

We lost so many kids, it was completely mind numbing.

We actually had set up a bereavement clinic where the kids would tell us what they wanted to have when they die. How do they want to die, what clothes they want to have on. One little boy wanted me to be in his bed with him and his mother and his grandmother. And so we did.

We knew so little in the beginning. It was really like walking through a minefield.

The death was hard. It was hard on all of us. But I think the preparation helped us get through a lot of it, be able to talk about it amongst ourselves, because we needed to have a little counseling sometime ourselves. Crying all the time was very difficult. They trusted us. They trusted us emphatically, I think most of them. I remember one little boy said, if I didn't have HIV, I wouldn't have met you guys. He said, I wouldn't have met you.

And if you were right.

December 1987, Washington, DC.

On Monday evening, a child died in Harlem.

We don't know who Dr. Hagerty is describing. It's not James. The dates don't work out. She could have been talking about any number of kids.

And this is the occasion. And you are the appropriate people to whom to deliver a eulogy for this three year old child. For perhaps you can help me and my staff mourn this death.

President Ronald Reagan has just given his first address on AIDS earlier in the year. More than six years into this epidemic, and with nearly 50,000 people having been diagnosed with AIDS in the US, more than half of them already dead, the federal government seems ready to finally concede that, yeah, there's a crisis. For now, though, the best it can muster in response is a presidential commission to study the problem. Hagerty is addressing that commission now.

This child and most children with AIDS are to be found in places like Harlem Hospital, a city hospital, and city hospitals are medical versions of Hill street blues. AIDS has simply accentuated the perennial problems of health care for the poor. And nobody, not government, not philanthropy, not the church, seems to have noticed that these children are in city hospitals throughout this nation. And on Monday, when this little child died, I decided that only we seemed to love or care about them. So, you see, I felt I had to use this short time to see if I could get you with your power and influence, to worry about them and to love them with us.

She finishes, she puts down her papers, and Dr. Margaret Hagerty darts her eyes back and forth. She is staring the commission members down, demanding action. Thank you very much, Dr. Hagerty. She is not alone. 1987 marked an eruption of AIDS activism. ACT UP was founded that spring in New York. Gay activists displayed the AIDS memorial quilt on the National Mall that fall with panels commemorating nearly 2000 people killed by the virus. And that October, a poll found that 68% of people in the country considered AIDS the most urgent health problem facing the world. Despite chronic underfunding and the chaos and economic collapse of the 1980s, the doctors and nurses on the 17th floor at Harlem Hospital created a community in which kids could survive. Indeed, some even thrived. And slowly, with the help of people like, yes, Princess Diana, people began to pay attention to poor kids with HIV. The tide of public sentiment was turning, and federal authorities were being forced to finally pay attention. Sympathy for kids like Victor Reyes began to open space for a meaningful response from government.

When it first started being talked about, it was the gay disease, and help didn't come until you put a child in front of it, until you get Ryan White, and then you get help. But there had to be a label of innocence for the help to come.

It's not an accident that the first major piece of federal AIDS legislation was named for Ryan White, and he was a heroic kid. His story deserves every bit of the respect and attention it has been given. But the question of innocence and guilt would haunt the landscape of HIV and AIDS for years to come, because that question pointed to an even bigger one who deserved society's sympathy and who did not.

Society forgot about us like they forget once you go to prison. That's it. Especially a maximum security they don't care what happened to us.

We're just dogs and a group of women in an upstate New York prison. They didn't get society's sympathy, but these women would organize to change the very definition of AIDS. That's on our next episode of Blind Spot. The plague in the shadowspot the plague in the Shadows is a co production of the History Channel and WNYC studios in collaboration with the Nation magazine. Our team includes Emily Botin, Karen Frillman, Anna Gonzalez, Sophie Herwitz, Lizzie Ratner, Christian Reedy, and myself, Kai Wright. Our advisors are Amanda Aronchick, Howard Gertler, Jenny Lawton, Marianne McCune, Yoruba Richen, and Linda Villarosa. Music and sound design by Jared Paul, additional music by Isaac Jones, and additional engineering by Mike Kutchman. Our executive producers at the History Channel are Jesse Katz, Eli Lehrer, and Mike Stiller. Thanks to Miriam Bernard, Lauren Cooperman, Andy Lancet, and Kenya Young. I'm Kai Wright. You can also find me hosting notes from America Live on public radio stations each Sunday, or check us out wherever you get your podcasts. And thanks for listening.