72395873289

LEON DASH
April 18, 1995, was a bittersweet day for Washington Post reporter Leon Dash. At four a.m., Rosa
Lee Cunningham, the principle subject of his eight-part series “Rosa Lee: Poverty and Survival in
Washington” (September 18–25, 1994), entered the hospital where she would die from AIDS three
months later. That morning, Dash attended the funeral of her fifteen-year-old grandson, Rico, who had
been murdered in drug-related violence. When he returned to the Post offices, he learned that the
series had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Dash entered journalism in 1966 while an undergraduate at Howard University, a self-described
crusader determined to “right all the wrongs in the world.” After a while, he became disappointed
when he realized his readers weren’t going to “rise up and change the system” whose corruption he
had revealed. But Dash’s early frustration didn’t deter him from employing his rigorous journalistic
methods to explore controversial subcultures—prisons, teenage pregnancy, drugs, adolescent
violence—that few other reporters have the skill, patience, or emotional fortitude to write about in
depth. “My precise intention is to make the reader as uncomfortable and alarmed as I am,” he writes
in Rosa Lee (1996), the book he adapted from the series.
It is fitting that Dash dedicated Rosa Lee to “unfettered inquiry.” Dash’s extraordinary brand of
immersion journalism sets his work apart from most writing about people mired in poverty, drugs, or
crime. The key to his success is time.
Dash will only write about people whom he is living among, and spends months, sometimes years,
interviewing them. For his six-part 1986 series on teenage pregnancy, he lived for a year in a roachinfested
basement apartment in the section of Washington, D.C. with the highest rate of adolescent
pregnancy. Rosa Lee was the result of a four-year-long effort.
Dash’s reporting routine is methodical. The initial cycle of interviews lasts between eight and
sixteen hours (Rosa Lee’s took nine days), and requires multiple sessions. The sessions are divided
between the four spheres Dash believes dominate one’s life: home, school, church, and social life.
The interviews, which Dash tapes and transcribes himself, yield a skeleton of a subject’s life, a rough
map with which he then explores specific episodes in detail during subsequent interviews.
The point of such lengthy interviews is not merely to accumulate facts. Dash’s goal is to remove the
public mask every subject dons when talking to a journalist. “I’ve learned that you don’t really begin
to get the truth of a circumstance or a person’s life until you’ve known that person for at least four to
six months,” he says. Unlike reporters who write on tight deadlines, Dash tries to understand his
subjects in their full historical context, analyzing the poverty, crime, or drugs that vex them as inter
generational phenomena. In Rosa Lee, Dash escorts Rosa Lee to North Carolina to explore the legacy
of her family’s sharecropper past. Dash’s determination to pose what he calls the “Why” question