Sunday Mornings with Big Mitch: Ep. 1

This is Lee Habib, and these are Our American Stories. This next story is about a friend of mine. We’re close in age, but have little else in common. Mitchell Rutledge, a.k.a. Big Mitch, was born Black and poor in Georgia. I was born kind of brown and middle-class in New Jersey. He never met his father. I still talk to my 94-year-old father every week. He dropped out of high school in his early teens and was illiterate into his early twenties. I was surrounded by books growing up and finished graduate school in my early thirties. Big Mitch spent the last 44 years of his life in Alabama prisons for killing a man. But this is not a story about an innocent man sentenced to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Big Mitch never denied the crime or made excuses for it. This is the story of my friend’s spiritual transformation while serving his life sentence. It’s also about a friendship. Only God could have engineered a friendship that began with a single Sunday morning call. Through these weekly conversations, I hope you come to know and love him as much as I do. Welcome to Sunday Mornings with Big Mitch. Here’s episode one, my conversation on January 14th, 2024, where I learned where Big Mitch grew up and…

This is a free call from an incarcerated individual at Alabama Department of Corrections.

This call is not private. It will be recorded and may be monitored.

To accept this pre-call, press one. To refuse this pre-call, press two. Thank you. Securus. You may start the conversation now. My name is Mitchell Rutledge. Everybody calls me Big Mitch. I was born in 1959, October. Anyway, I think between Phoenix City and Columbus, Georgia, somewhere there. My mother is Mary Ann Rutledge, and she was born in Phoenix City, Alabama. My father, he was in the military, and folk being so, I never really knew my father. My mother, she was 13 years old, I think, when I came in the world, when she got pregnant or something like that. I think when she was 16, she got into trouble and she went off from 16 to 18, girls’ reform schools or what have you. And from my age one through teen, I never lived with my mother because my mother lived with my grandmother because she was young. So I had opportunities to live with my mother when she married my youngest sister’s father. And I was 10 years old when she married him, and I had an opportunity to know my mother for six years because she died when she was 29. I was 16, going on 17.

After talking about how he grew up, Big Mitch talked about where, and talked about living in the projects when I…

When I went to the project, when I was coming up as a youth, especially when I was like in my eight, nine, ten level and stuff like that, and I used to go in the bronze and go to her and go inside the guy’s house. You know, I thought I was in the middle-class neighborhood because my family still stayed in the poverty realm before they built the projects for the poor people. And so my family never just made it from those shotgun plywood shotgun houses. Even in the in the in the sadness, we still live in the shotgun houses. And we know you had running water, but you didn’t have bath till then. So I came out of a real poor environment. Before then, the guys, the average guys in the project.

You know, I asked Big Mitch what gave him a sense of hope and freedom? The hope and freedom I was hearing in his voice.

Just because you physically liter restraints doesn’t mean that you know it. All forms of bondage. All forms of imprisonment and physical restraints. And that’s that’s what one looks at most often. But it’s all kinds of bondage. You know, all kinds of things that imprison an individual. And the only thing that’s going to help you to be free of any of that is a spiritual relationship with Me. What has helped me is develop a relationship with Jesus Christ. And once I did that, then I was able to, even though I’m physical restraint, I can still be free, free from a lot of the things that other individuals may be in prison with, such as, you know, greed, anger, selfishness, self-doubt, drugs. There were so many things that capture us in life. There’s so many things that, you know, just like the guy that was a Wall Street guy, he’s got money, but money is not the defining answer to happiness or freedom; it is not. It’s just a vehicle to be able to accomplish some of the things that an individual needs to accomplish in life. But he was, he was in prison, and I tell a lot of guys, as in here, you can’t lock yourself in here just because you’re physically in here. You know, you got you got your spiritual freedom, you got your mental freedom, being able to read and think and and and imagine yourself in a place far greater than being able to reinvent yourself. And so, just give you freedom, you know.

We then started to talk about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His birthday was coming up, and I told Big Mitch about King’s faith. I was writing about it at the time, how his father was a preacher and King’s only real job in his entire adult life was as the co-pastor at his father’s church, and that the last speech King ever gave in his life in Memphis, he preached the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

Yeah, speaking of Martin Luther King, I tell a lot of guys, you know, Martin King had said something that he’d said years ago. I was listening to some of his earlier tapes and he was talking about God, you know, and he was saying, you know, that God set the boundary for everybody. So he said, man understands the boundary for gravity, since man understands that instantly. You know, when you violate gravity, and you understand that instantly, so you ain’t work. You ain’t going to do that too much more. You’re not going to get on top of a building, you know, and you’re going to try to be careful. But he said, God also set the boundary of morals and morality. But since it’s not instantaneous like gravity, you don’t feel it right there. And he said, man has the tendency to go further and further across the boundaries of morals and morality until he reaches a reprobated mind. And that’s true, and, see, God sets laws and boundaries for everything, everything, even morals. But Martin Luther King, he said, since it’s not instantaneous, you don’t feel the impact of it right then. So you have the tendency to go further and further across the boundary of morals and morality until you cross until the realm where God said, “I can’t do anything with you anymore.” You’re that, and now, now, now you have a reprobated mind. Now you’re in the realm, or unsafe. Now you operate in his area and his territory, you know, and people do that. And so when I heard that years ago, I thought about it. So, you’ve got to be careful and mindful of what you do. You’ve got to be careful and mindful how you treat people. You can’t be so clever and smart going through life stepping on people, abusing people, using people. You’ve got to be mindful.

And a beautiful job on the production, editing, and storytelling: our own Greg Hengler and Reagan Habib. And you’ve been listening to our first installment of Sunday Mornings with Big Mitch, a series of calls I had with Mitchell Rutledge as he is serving his 44th year in an Alabama penitentiary for killing a man. And I got to tell you, I was nervous when I started this call. I’d never spoken to somebody who’d killed a guy and had spent his life in a penitentiary. But, my goodness, it didn’t take long for us to bond. And when he started talking about bondage and being captive and being imprisoned, and when he started to list the things we can all be captive to or in bondage to, and he mentioned greed and selfishness and self-doubt and sex and drugs and liquor. I added to him work, that some of us are workaholics, and I’d suffered from that, and that bondage, and the damage it did to my life. And it was a confessional of sorts, the two of us. Again, we had nothing in common. By the end of that first hour, I felt like I was talking to this man about things I talked to very few men about. Sunday Mornings with Big Mitch, the series continues every Sunday here on Our American Stories.