The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities

by Soledad O'Brien;Rose Marie Arce

  It wasn’t until recently that I called him and reminded him of what he’d said to me that day. I had done four documentaries on race in between the two conversations. He was totally surprised and barely remembered the details. He had not known I was black! He said he honestly did not know, that when he said I didn’t count he was alluding to the fact that he thought I was a dark-skinned someone else. That is how precise the game of race is played in our country, that we are so easily reduced to our skin tone. That even someone as prominent in African-American society as Reverend Jackson has one box to check for black and one for white. No one gets to be in between. I thanked him for his candor.

  Soon there would also be one less black anchor, whether I counted or not. The story of King’s papers was my last major story as the anchor of American Morning. I did the show not long before I lost the job. Reading those letters, though, had rendered my own inconsequential losses so silly. I decided I knew nothing of real adversity. I carried the project over to my new job, which had felt like a consolation prize but now seemed like an enormous opportunity.

  I did an hour-long documentary on the King papers. As it came together, I realized that mine was a very real promotion, a chance to grow as a journalist and contribute powerful reporting, I was going to report long-form journalism, thoughtful documentaries that could go beyond the news of the day. I could do stories that give voice to the voiceless. I was being named the go-to reporter on race and ethnicity at a time of high viewer interest in both topics. CNN had taken my anchor slot while at the same time had loosened the leash that a more structured show has. I had never had professional aspirations much higher than rising through the ranks of journalism. Now I dreamed of telling untold stories, of making a small difference in the way we all view each other. I had the option of looking at my firing as the anchor of American Morning as one of those backhanded opportunities, like many we get handed in life. I can seize this and run with it or get bogged down in feeling lost and bitter. We can all rise up to the occasion in our own small ways.

  I walked away from the King papers with the gift of clear vision. I also brought with me one particular thought he wrote: “The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. The door that slams shut, the plan that got side-tracked, the marriage that failed. Or that lovely poem that didn’t get written because someone knocked on the door.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  BLACK IN AMERICA

  The door swings open abruptly at the penitentiary and in walks Everett Dyson. He is wearing an orange jumpsuit. He limps from a leg injury. His face is sullen, almost snarling. He sees his brother and the sourpuss cracks. He is nearly smiling when they fall into a strong embrace. They look so very much alike.

  Michael and Everett were raised on Firwood Street in Detroit. Michael was a gifted public speaker as young as eleven. He dreamed of writing books. His buddies called him “the professor.” That’s a lot of dreaming for a kid raised in a place consumed by violence and poverty. “When you look at the reality of being poor and black, it is psychically depleting; it is spiritually exhausting; it is emotionally enervating; and it just does something to your morale. It’s a wonder that more poor people don’t misbehave,” he said to me on a visit to his childhood home. The brothers say they are separated by the choices they made. Everett says Michael is a symbol of what could have been. Michael was on the front page of the Detroit News when he was twelve: “Boy’s Plea Against Racism Wins Award.” “A teacher told him he had taken all the talent out of the family.” Everett remembers riding his minibikes and playing in the dirt. “I’m not articulating anything great. I’m not talking about saving brotherhood,” he said.

  Life was equally unkind to them both. Michael was on welfare and raising a son by the time he was eighteen. Michael remembers how he was treated when he went to apply for welfare. The unemployment counselors would shout: “Have you been looking for work?” “Oh, my God. And it was so loud,” Michael remembers. “And ‘Are you working? Are you trying to work?’ ‘Yes, I really am.’ I shoveled snow. I did sodding with my father. I painted houses. I worked as a manager trainee at Burger King, and I did everything I could to make ends meet. And then finally, I decided I’ve got to go to school. My son has to have a better way of life.”

  Meanwhile, Everett figured the marines might be his way out of poverty. But he was discharged after going AWOL and found himself back on these same streets, selling dope. Michael went to college. He gathered degrees. He tasted sweet success. In 1989, Everett says a wounded man stumbled from a drug den. Before the man died, he uttered Everett’s name. Everett says that dying declaration led to his conviction for murder. Twenty years later, twenty years he has spent in jail, both brothers still insist Everett is innocent. There is no telling whether that is the truth, but it is clear both brothers believe Everett doesn’t belong in jail. Everett acknowledges that he was living on the wrong side of goodness. Michael says the biggest difference between them was their skin color. Everett is much darker than Michael.

  “I saw how the differential treatment was accorded me, little curly-top, yellow Negro child. I’m not dissing any yellow Negro children. That’s who I am. I’m saying that being a dark-skinned black man has a kind of incriminating effect to many people. And I’m not even getting to white brothers and sisters yet. I’m talking about within black America. And I’m saying to you, many darker-skinned black children don’t get the opportunity,” Michael says. I tell him that plenty of dark-skinned black children are very successful. Both the brothers take a beat. Everett responds for both of them: “It takes a keen eye to look beneath the rough exterior of a person and see the beauty that’s within.”

  Then Michael heads off to a book signing in Canada. His brother, Everett, heads back to his cell.

  Racism was very clear when I was a kid. The racism of forty years ago in this country was of the can and cannot. My mother couldn’t marry my dad. There were places people couldn’t go. Those concrete boundaries were replaced by the social discrimination of my youth—the nasty kid in the hall who tries to pick-pocket your self-esteem. America now suffers from a wound that won’t heal because you can’t help but pick the scab. Black folks can go anywhere they want, do anything they want. But we have to have the resources and the wherewithal to do it. American racism now has less to do with a lack of access than with opportunities denied. So much of the African-American community is victim of this great pile-on, this mountain of injustices so high they can’t bring themselves to climb over it. Families are divided by who got a shot at something better, and who just got shot down.

  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention once began a campaign to try to teach black children to swim because so many die of drowning. The reason was simple. Generations ago slaves weren’t taught to swim so they couldn’t escape by water. Then the pools were segregated so few had access to pools and never learned. Then some folks just thought blacks couldn’t swim. Today, three times as many black children between the ages of five and fourteen die of drowning as white kids, largely because they can’t swim.

  But there are no longer people keeping us out of the pools. Is there a point where the psychological damage ends and the obligation to just pick up and get on with it begins? Now that the National Guard has escorted us in, shouldn’t we just sit down and crack the books? Or are we too hampered by the journey to get past the spitting morons at the gate? I learned to push ahead, keep steady forward motion. But I had two loving parents, with jobs and a strong education. One of them is white. The other is my immigrant mother, who grew up absent the history of American slavery and desegregation. She separated from her own history by traveling across the sea.

  We ended up wrapped in suburban middle-class comfort, bound for college from the time we first picked up a book. My white dad and Latino mom had the backbone to look us in the eye and say, “You’re black, don’t let anyone ever tell you you’re not black. Don’t let anyone ever tell you you’re not Latino.” I co
uld never figure out who “they” were, but I was prepared if they were to show up. They drilled into us that both identities were things to be proud of. I filled up a deep reserve of self-esteem of immeasurable value.

  I am in no position to judge someone for whom the wall was built too high. I can only tell their tale. That is my way of helping push them forward, by getting their story out, by sending out a cry for understanding and accountability. By urging them on with the sentiments of my own family to push forward, push ahead; rise up. I am still living my life of perpetual motion, and when I am in a position to tell stories that aren’t being told, it is helping me propel my work. The very least I can do is bring some folks along for the ride. Is it reasonable to expect that my work can help build bridges of understanding about race and racism, or at the very least motivate a few people to open doors? I’m not sure. But I can try.

  I find it hard to tell if reporting a documentary called Black in America means doing a documentary about a race—the black race—or racism. Those things are so inextricably interwoven in this country it’s often hard to pull them apart. So trying to report this documentary unfolds as one of the hardest projects of my career. My producers feel the strain as well. There is perhaps nothing more challenging than reporting on race. CNN adds four producers of color to my team, which helps bring some fresh perspectives—two black men and two mixed-race women who are part Latina and part black. We also have several long-form producers who are accustomed to assembling these far-reaching surveys.

  I can tell instantly that everyone is feeling the strain of getting this right. One of the biggest challenges to this project is its name, that it is called Black in America. Because the very title seems to promise a survey of all things black, and that is impossible. There is also a presumption out there that it will somehow magically make up for the lack of thoughtful coverage in the babble of overall news reporting, another impossibility. I can’t possibly cover every black experience, even in four hours over two nights, nor can I hit every social issue. I’m a little worried and the ideas flowing in from my staff are great, but mostly contradictory. Some of the team wants to tackle all the social issues facing the black community, while others want to provide new, more positive images. What we need are great human stories that unveil a community so often reduced to nothing more than the sum of its problems. We need keen eyes to look beneath the rough exterior of a person, not to mention a whole people.

  I fly across this great land several times a month. I am on this crazy mission to tell the story of what it means to be Black in America. I crisscross the country, entering people’s lives to tap their lows and highs. I crash an enormous family reunion in Lodi, Texas, the tentacles of a line of black folks who turn out to have a very distant white ancestor. I unite them with their white distant cousins. I tell the stories of various members of the family, the black women who can’t find soul mates and black men who can’t find jobs. The stories will be worked together as our first night on women and families.

  Then we plan to devote a second night to men. I follow around a hyper-successful advertising executive who worries that people see his race rather than his smarts. I talk to celebrities like my friend Spike Lee, who included me in his Katrina documentary I am like this bird, migrating so I can feed. I want to tap into some of the crisis of the black community without dwelling on their sorrows. I want to show the striving black middle class, the plight of the single mother, to give a snapshot of where we stand as a people.

  In my effort to spotlight men, I go visit Little Rock, Arkansas. I meet some of the children of desegregation, the graduates of the class of 1968 of Little Rock Central High School—kids who entered the school more than ten years after the U.S. Supreme Court forced it to accept blacks. They are celebrating their fortieth class reunion, so it makes sense to see where they are. I begin to follow the lives of four of them, all men, and their sons and grandsons.

  Little Rock Central High School is a mirror of our country’s ambitions for its children. The building cost $1.5 million in 1927 and was trumpeted as a rosy model for America’s future schools. Every time I pay a visit, I experience a chill. The school is impressive with its towering brick facade and reflecting pool. To this day, the academic achievement here is notable. The school frequently ranks among the top in the nation, gathering armfuls of awards and recognition for its science and sports achievements. There has always been plenty going on in this building that a black parent would want for their kid. So in 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered American schools to integrate, black families wanted in to Little Rock Central High.

  Perhaps no moment better reflects the ugliness of American racism than when the federal government had to use U.S. troops to escort nine frightened black teenagers into class. The grand-children of these brave pioneers now attend a school that memorializes the standoff. Little Rock is one of those fault lines that have fractured America’s promise of equality. No black person in this country can watch those children braving angry white racists without believing that the promise of America’s possibilities has its limits. I am aware that history has moved on, but they can point to experiences like that in their own life. They know those angry white people standing outside are not dead; they’re not necessarily even altered. They’re just a part of our history. They are real live obstacles to unity. I followed the men who graduated from that school ten years later because I wanted to see what an average man can do with that heavy weight on his shoulders.

  One of our Little Rock Central High class of 1968 graduates is Donald “Duck” Gray, who is remembered by his classmates as a fast talker and a bit of a hustler, labels he’s not quick to shake. Duck, as his friends call him, fathered ten children and raised none of them. He acknowledges his brushes with crime and drugs and womanizing have left his children bitter. “I was a drug dealer. I was a pimp. I mean, you name it, I damn near done it,” he says. Today he is a contractor who says his life is back on track. Every time we visit Duck he’s lounging around in a one-piece painter’s suit. He seems attached to his battered pickup and pint of beer. The man is drop-dead charming, still a fast talker, and he’s obviously recommitted himself to hard work.

  We track him as he paints one home, re-pipes the next, throws up some drywall in another place, then rips out old carpeting and redoes a floor. He has two grandsons living with him when we meet and is determined to do better by both. “Sometimes I sympathize with him. Sometimes I understand him. Sometimes you want to beat the hell out of him,” Duck says of one grandson. He is funny and swift. I can totally see spending a hot afternoon on the front porch sipping a cold beer with this guy. It’s hard not to like him. He is, however, the farthest back we can go among the living to where this sobering statistic began: Nearly 60 percent of all black children are growing up without a father in their home.

  Duck’s daughter Tina Smith seethes with resentment over her father’s lack of concern for his wives and children. She sees what he’s doing now as too little, too late. She is a social worker and she knows all about men who create and foster social problems. I go to her house. It is small, white, and looks like it is slinking into a mountain of earth. Gates and trees and the slope of the land separate it from the houses around it. There is an angry pit bull slobbering and snarling next door and a lot of cars parked in awkward directions on her neighbor’s lawn.

  It’s clear Tina has drawn a line between her home and whatever is going on around this neighborhood. The floor inside her house slopes and sinks and there are boards missing, but there is something tidy about the setup. She is broad but moves quickly. She has pretty eyes that her head and shoulders follow around as she picks up the mess left by two boys, her husband, and her sleepy daughter, who emerges from her bedroom to wrap her arms around her mother’s waistline before shaking off a nap.

  Tina offers water and we open up foam cartons of barbecue. She has an easy smile, but Tina is a woman on the defensive. She is at war with a list of social ills and my team and I h
ave the potential to be another headache. Her youngest son, Braylon, looks and acts just like her. She tells us he is mad inside, just like her. One in three black men will have a criminal record in their lifetime. That makes Tina just crazy with regret. Braylon was charged recently with assaulting a police officer who was frisking one of his friends. “The police officer told me stop. And I stopped. I turned around and he came and grabbed me and I hit his hand the first time. Then he grabbed me again and I just hit him in the face,” he told me. The day Braylon’s mother, Tina, walked him into court, she feared she would lose her son.

  “The kind of things I was afraid of was I would never see my child again,” she said. Braylon could have gotten a felony conviction and served time behind bars. Instead, he was sent to juvenile rehabilitation to deal with his anger issues. Now he’s back home. Tina believes this experience might be an eye-opener for him, or his undoing.

  “You are a young man. You’re an African-American man. You already have a strike against you. But, no matter what people say or what people do with you, you can do anything that you set your mind to doing,” she tells him.

  Braylon is going back to school soon and says he’s scared enough of prison to control his anger. He talks about his temper as if it is another person he can’t control. He says he wants his temper to go away. He wants to feel less angry. I ask him what he’s angry about. He is not even certain he knows. He just knows that when he saw that police officer grab his friend, his temper paid him a visit.