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In 1990, Dash published “Drugs in the Ranks: Getting High in D.C. Jail” (June 10–14, 1990), about
rampant drug use by the guards in D.C.’s jail system. He stumbled on the story while interviewing
Rosa Lee Cunningham, a heroin addict, mother of eight, who was doing time for selling heroin to feed
two of her grandchildren. Dash wanted to write about the explosion in the population of Washington’s
“underclass,” as defined by the Urban Institute (female-headed, chronically unemployed, marginally
educated, criminally recidivist families), and initially planned to follow four families. When that
became logistically impractical, he settled on Rosa Lee’s family, interviewing Rosa and her children
from 1990 to 1994. Published in eight parts, the series elicited heated responses from thousands of
readers, 4,600 of whom left messages on a special response line set up by the newspaper. “When are
you going to do a story about a white person who moved from Appalachia and is still in a trailer park
three generations later?” one complained. Dash made a point of calling every reader who left a
critical comment, explaining that he had no particular ideological agenda in writing the series. “There
is something in her life story to confirm any political viewpoint—liberal, moderate or conservative,”
Dash writes in Rosa Lee. “The reality however is much more complicated and difficult to grapple
with.” The series won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism (with photographer Lucian
Perkins). It was made into a PBS documentary and published in book form as Rosa Lee: A Mother
and Her Family in Urban America. The book was well reviewed. “Dash’s candor and his
painstaking accumulation of details overcome any dehumanizing effect that the story he gives us might
have,” writes Nicholas Lemann in The New York Review of Books.
Dash’s final investigative series for the Post, “21st and Vietnam: The Making of Teen Killers”
(November 29–30, 1998), was coauthored with New Yorker writer Susan Sheehan. He used his
trademark immersion technique to try to understand why children like Rosa Lee’s grandson had been
murdered, and how young male killers were formed—a process which had led to a 700 percent
increase in the local homicide rate for young victims between 1985 and 1996.
The two-part series was criticized by readers, and some colleagues, who believed Dash was
perpetuating stereotypes of young black men. “Leon Dash has done it to me again. My friend and Post
colleague has coauthored a pair of excruciatingly detailed stories on the underside of black life in
Washington,” wrote Post columnist William Raspberry. “Where does news value end and
exploitation begin?” wondered E. R. Shipp, the Post’s ombudsman.
As in the past, Dash responded that he was only doing his job. “I always do this with no more
interest than informing the public how these circumstances are creating the things you read about on a
daily basis. You know we seldom tell people what the circumstances are that lead to the phenomena
that claim so much of our journalistic attention. Your suggestions suggest that I ought to be prescribing
instead of describing. But that’s somebody else’s job. I’m a reporter, not a policy wonk,” he told
Raspberry.
In 1998, Dash left the Post to take a professorship in Journalism and Afro-American Studies at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was later awarded the first Swanlund chair in
2000.
What kinds of subjects are you drawn to?