Tom Joyner (left) is seeking posthumous pardons for two great-uncles Henry Louis "Skip" Gates (right) found in his lineage.

Nationally syndicated radio host Tom Joyner is going to state appeals court in Columbia, South Carolina on Oct. 14 to seek posthumous pardons for two great-uncles who were put to death for a crime they didn’t commit.

Joyner learned the story of his uncles when noted Harvard scholar Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, PhD, announced the results of genealogy research conducted on Joyner’s family as part of Gates’ PBS special, “African American Lives II.”

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Thomas and Meeks Griffin were executed on Sept. 29, 1915 after their arrest and conviction one day later for the slaying of a woman. Gates and his research team learned Joyner’s uncles were, in fact, framed by a black man who, Gates said, may well have done the killing himself.

The Joyner family knew nothing about the case, just that his grandmother was suddenly uprooted from South Carolina and relocated in a small, migrant town in Florida. She never told the family why she was forced to move.

“It was totally by surprise to me and my family,” Joyner said, noting that Gates did not tell the family the results of his research in advance of the taping, so their reactions were caught on the air as the story was revealed. “My father, who wasn’t in the room at the time, had never heard that story.”

“It hit right in the gut, too, you know?” Joyner said. “I stayed up that night thinking about what they must have been going through. How they had been railroaded, how they knew they were being railroaded. There was all this support, and it didn’t help, and in a matter of days they were gone."

“I tried to put myself in their shoes, in their cell, walking down the hall, like that movie, ‘Dead Man Walking,’" said Joyner. "Were they cool? Were they screaming? What was their reaction as they were led to the electric chair? I think I must have channeled them.”

Joyner, with help from Gates and South Carolina attorney Stephen K. Benjamin, put together the case petitioning the state to exonerate his uncles.

“This is a time when art can affect life. Tom’s great-uncles were electrocuted for a crime they almost certainly didn’t do,” Gates told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “This could be set right because of a television series. As journalists and as scholars, that work we do can have a real-world impact.”

“I’m sure they are not the only African-Americans who have been framed, and their stories will never be told, and they will never be heard,” Joyner said. “I was fortunate enough to have a family that a lot of white people kept records on. I know who the white people in my family are; I know where they are from. On my mother’s family’s side, we found records of people who got off the boat. There are records from the first owner of the slave who got off the ship.”

Joyner said doing the genealogy allows families to put the struggles and triumphs of African-Americans in greater perspective, and he encourages people to do the research.

“The one thing about doing your genealogy is no matter what your struggle is, you can look back and see what people have gone through to get you where you are, and it minimizes your struggle,” Joyner said.

Joyner, who works to help historically black colleges and universities stay vital, discovered that relatives in his mother’s family had .....