‘You Didn’t See Nothin’ In The Works From Yohance Lacour & USG Audio

EXCLUSIVE: USG Audio, the podcast division of Universal Studio Group, is launching its latest audio series.

The company has teamed up with Yohance Lacour, a formerly incarcerated writer, on You Didn’t See Nothin, a seven-part series that investigates the 1997 race-related attack on Lenard Clark.

In 1997, Clark was beaten into a coma by a gang of older white teens simply for being Black in a white neighborhood. The media quickly turned towards stories of reconciliation and racial healing, with cooperation by Black leaders and the attacker’s family. At the time of the attack, Lacour was in his early 20s, writing plays, selling weed, and living at his dad’s house on the South Side of Chicago. Unable to stand by as the media transformed the hate crime into a fairy tale of racial reconciliation, Lacour began working with a local neighborhood newspaper to investigate the vicious hate crime.

You Didn’t See Nothin finds Lacour back in Chicago after a 10-year prison sentence, tracking down key players to examine how the story connects to the present moment, reflect on his role as a journalist and storyteller, and explore the exploit of power in Chicago.

Part memoir and part investigation, the series uses archival audio and new interviews with those involved to bring a fresh perspective to the narrative and correct the historical record of this case nearly 25 years later.

The first three episodes of the podcast will launch on February 15.

Lacour is a recipient of a fellowship at the Pulitzer Prize-winning Invisible Institute to support his work as a writer and storyteller committed to chronicling stories of Black Chicago. He was previously a journalist for the South Street Journal and has also worked as a playwright.

The show is produced by USG Audio and the Invisible Institute, which produced 2020 Pulitzer Finalist podcast Somebody.

“The story of the attack on Lenard Clark — and my attempt to do something about it — has held me for the last quarter century. The fact that what happened to that child in 1997 is still as relevant as ever speaks to how far we haven’t come. But the fact that I’ve found a platform as a Black writer to tell the story in its fullness speaks to how far we have come. I hope this podcast inspires my people to not only take back the mic and tell our own stories, but to follow them up with meaningful calls to action,” said Lacour.

It is the latest podcast for USG Audio, which is behind Alligator Candy, The Lost Kids and The Followers: House of Prayer and Sam Esmail’s scripted series The End Up.