Why I Write
I pondered why it was that my city, my world, was so divided by color.
I did not seek out the '60s; they found me: in my living room where, as a kid during a hot summer night, I bore witness to the madness of the times. That madness took the form of a massive police assault unfolding outside two buildings just across the way. As my parents, my brothers and sisters and I sat huddled away from the windows, listening in horror to the gunshots and screams, I knew that something huge was happening outside and that the world I thought I knew was about to change.
The assault was a response to a sniper attack. Upwards of 100 policemen flooded the area and eventually evacuated the two huge buildings about a block away and cater-cornered to my own. This happened during the riot that broke out on Chicago's West Side in July 1966, after police turned off a fire hydrant sprinkling water on residents trying to escape the heat. That riot was only a prelude to the explosion to come. Two years later, in April 1968, my neighborhood was among those that erupted after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
I lived in a housing project a couple of blocks away from the Madison Street commercial strip that was the epicenter of the '68 explosion. Some 1,500 National Guardsmen were rushed to the area as Madison Street went up in flames. Some days after the worst was over, I took a walk and was amazed that I could still feel the heat from fires extinguished hours earlier.
The high school I attended, Lane Technical, was for boys who tested well. Its mission had nothing to do with integration, but with giving bright young men who could not afford private school the kind of education public-school kids didn't typically get. Attending Lane meant that, every day, I left my almost all-black community to go into one that was virtually all white. After the riot, I pondered why it was that my city, my world, was so divided by color. And why was it that the distance between those two worlds seemed so difficult to bridge?
My obsession with such matters led me to write a paper on race and riots in America that grew into a manuscript of more than 100 pages. My English teacher, Helen Klinger, suggested I send the opus to Gwendolyn Brooks, then poet laureate of Illinois. Brooks invited me into her writers' group and told me to focus on becoming a writer.
Both the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune, the city's two mainstream dailies, did an impressive job covering the chaotic events of 1968. But they covered my community, for the most part, as if it were a dark, forbidden universe. "The white man trespasses on West Madison Street. He has crossed into a foreign country, he bears no passport, and the natives mistrust him," the Tribune observed in one article I recently reread. At another point, the same article refers to the "West Madison Street Jungle," and notes there were "only 2,500 policemen … to control about 300,000 blacks." Reading such stuff years later, it's easy for me to remember why I concluded I might be able to produce better journalism than the writers I was reading. I, at least, knew I didn't live in a "jungle" and that my 300,000 (generally law-abiding) neighbors did not need to be controlled by the cops.
After the riots of April, my interest in journalism grew. The more I read, the more convinced I became that I had something to contribute. In many news accounts, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, held in Chicago, was chronicled as a war between the forces of order and deranged hippies—with innocent newsmen caught in the middle. I suspected the real story was much more complicated and regretted not being able to report on and tell the story myself. I also suspected that, with the streets in seemingly constant turmoil, there would be plenty of things worth writing for some time. So I endeavored to follow Brooks's advice. I wrote editorials and edited stories for a college publication. And at some point after my 18th birthday, I decided I was ready for the big time. I applied to the Sun-Times for a columnist job that had not been advertised and did not really exist. Instead of laughing me out of their offices, editor James Hoge and managing editor Ralph Otwell took me under their collective wing. They gave me a column in a small Sun-Times publication; and when I was 19, still in college but presumably somewhat better prepared, they gave me an op-ed column in the newspaper itself. Their decision confirmed, at least for me, the sagacity of Brooks's counsel and set me on a new life course.
The building where I spent my childhood has since been torn down; a condominium development is going up in its place. The new residences will feature fireplaces, granite kitchen counters, balconies, private backyards, garages and other luxurious amenities, according to prominently placed signs. The old neighborhood, in others words, is no more, finally having reached the end of a cycle of destruction and renewal that began with the fires of '68: the same fires that shook my world, upended my life and turned me into a writer.
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Ellis Cose, author, columnist and contributing editor (since 1993) for Newsweek magazine and former chairman of the editorial board and editorial page editor of the New York Daily News, began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times—becoming, at the age of 19, the youngest editorial page columnist ever employed by a major Chicago daily. Cose, who is also an independent radio producer, is a popular campus lecturer and public speaker.
In addition to serving as a columnist, editor and national correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, Cose has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education, chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today (where he has also served as an occasional columnist and member of the board of contributors) and a member of the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press. He has also been a fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, a senior fellow and director of energy policy studies at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political Studies, and a consultant to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Cose's Bone to Pick: On Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation and Revenge, was published by Atria (a Simon and Schuster imprint) in April 2004. The book is a wide-ranging look at a number of societies—the United States, Ghana, South Africa, East Timor, and Peru among them—and their ways of coping with cruelty and pain. The Washington Post had this to say: "The complex questions surrounding 'forgiveness, reconciliation, reparation, and revenge' probably require a scholarship of jurisprudence, philosophy, psychology, history and literature. This is the kind of ambitious enterprise that the world's great religions deal with. But Cose meets the challenge, and Bone to Pick ranges over centuries of contested histories, across five continents, spinning individual tragedies in and out of collective traumas, seeking the nature of 'forgiveness, albeit as a proxy for a larger set of values.' … The truth may be a prized (and politicized) commodity in the quest for social justice, but as Cose observes, quoting Czech novelist Milan Kundera, 'The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.' Bone to Pick is a timely reminder of that axiom and a useful addition to the canon of that struggle."
Cose's The Envy of the World, an in-depth essay on the state of black men in America, was published by Washington Square Press (an imprint of Simon and Schuster) in 2002 and has appeared on several best-seller lists, including the Essence magazine list, where it was number one. Newsweek featured the book on its cover and National Public Radio produced a special a program based on it. Kirkus Reviews called The Envy of the World, "A slender volume with a substantial and significant message." The Washington Post described it as "lucid, eloquent and deeply personal book." The Chicago Tribune called its author "a gifted, rhapsodic essayist." "Cose charts both an urgently argued history of black masculinity and a moving and nuanced snapshot of where it is now," declared Publishers' Weekly. The paperback edition was published in January 2003.
In May 2004 the Rockefeller Foundation issued Beyond Brown v. Board: The Final Battle for Excellence in American Education—a major report authored by Cose on the legacy of the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision and the current challenges facing American educators. The report was the basis of a Newsweek cover feature and for a David Broder column and other stories in the national press. In November 2006, the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC's Annenberg School published Cose's Killing Affirmative Action: Would ending it really result in a better, more perfect Union? That report, featured in several newspaper and in Newsweek magazine, examined California's 10-year experience living with Proposition 209, the measure that ended affirmative action in the public sector in California.
Cose's best-selling The Rage of a Privileged Class, a book-length essay on race in America, was published by HarperCollins in January 1994. It was featured as a Newsweek cover story and described by The New York Times Book Review as a "disciplined, graceful exposition of a neglected aspect of the subject of race in America." His A Man's World (published by HarperCollins in June 1995), was featured in a front page review in The New York Times Book Review. The Washington Post called it "a valuable, cogent and well-written contribution to an enormously complex subject."
Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World (published in January 1997 and also excerpted in Newsweek) explored America's continuing obsession with race. The New York Times Book Review called it "a book this country desperately needs, one with genuine healing potential," and included Color-Blind among its best book of the year recommendations for 1997. Cose edited an essay collection entitled The Darden Dilemma published by HarperCollins in March 1997. His debut novel, The Best Defense, was published by HarperCollins in September 1998 ("a formidable first novel...crisp, fast-paced and engaging. In a genre glutted with lightweight fare, The Best Defense reaches higher"— The Seattle Times).
Cose is also the author of A Nation of Strangers, a history of American immigration, published by William Morrow and Co. in 1992 and of The Press, published by Morrow in 1989. He is the author of Energy and the Urban Crisis (1979) and the editor of Energy and Equity: Some Social Concerns (1978), both published by the Joint Center for Political Studies. He also wrote The Rebirth of Community Power, published by Westview Press: 1983.
At the Institute for Journalism Education (at the University of California, Berkeley), Cose designed and directed a widely quoted study on journalism careers published by IJE: The Quiet Crisis: Minority Journalists and Newsroom Opportunity (1985). He also instituted and served as inaugural director of IJE's Management Training Center at Northwestern University.
In his capacity as president of Ellis Cose, Inc. Cose has produced, written and hosted the pilot for a multimedia documentary series: "Against the Odds." The radio project (which has received funding from the Ford Foundation and will be distributed by Public Radio International) profiles individuals who have overcome tremendous adversity. It aspires to provide continuing and better coverage—in public radio but also on the web and in other media, including print—of people and communities often relegated to the margins of society. It also aims to stimulate thinking on how they, and their respective societies, can overcome that marginalization. The pilot focuses on a young man from a refugee camp in northern Kenya who, studying by the light of a rechargeable lamp, managed to get himself into Princeton University.
Cose has appeared on The Today Show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC Evening News, Good Morning America, the PBS "Time to Choose" election special, Charlie Rose, CNN's Talk Back Live, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He has been interviewed for British, Brazilian and Canadian television. He is also a judge for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Cose has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and numerous journalism awards—including the University of Missouri medal for career excellence and distinguished service in journalism, two Clarion awards, and four National Association of Black Journalists first place awards. He was also named the 2002 winner of the New York Association of Black Journalists' lifetime achievement award, winner of the 2003 award for best magazine feature from the National Association of Black Journalists as well as the winner of two New York Association of Black Journalists' first place 2003 awards for commentary and magazine features. In 2004 Cose was named the first recipient of the newly inaugurated annual Vision Award from the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. In 2006 he won a Unity award for commentary and also shared in a first place award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
A Chicago native, Cose holds a master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy from George Washington University. He is married to Lee Llambelis, former legal director for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and current director of intergovernmental relations for the Attorney General of New York. He has a daughter, Elisa Maria.
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