The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities
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Dyson dresses in a sharp suit. His white shirt is ironed flat. He has trimmed his goatee. We are staying at the same hotel, so I know he’s been up since dawn getting ready because I have seen him. He can’t visit Everett very often. He is anxious. He is excited. He is sad. He misses his brother. Dyson is usually a firecracker. He is accustomed to talking like the preacher and professor he is. He pushes the limits of the common vocabulary, ignites controversy and passion. Today he is quiet. He takes two bites of a powdered donut and seems to forget he is hungry. His forehead looks sweaty and it’s not even hot. I walk quietly next to him. I have two brothers. I can’t imagine the agony he is feeling, much less how to record the measure of this pain throughout an entire community. He turns to look me straight in the eyes.
“My brother didn’t do this,” he says.
We walk into the penitentiary and settle down in a small room. Since we are media, he is taken to a nearby office, so we skip the usual searches. But the place is dry and institutional, belted by razor wire and depressingly quiet. My producers put up cameras and lights.
“Evil is real,” he had told a congregation in Detroit the day we began filming his story. “It’s not a metaphysical projection. It shows up when folk won’t let you have the job you know you should have. It shows up when people won’t give you acknowledgment for who you are. It shows up when you work twice as hard to get twice as far behind and still keep going. Evil is real.” His dark eyes scan the prison guard.
The last thing I said the day I lost my job as anchor of American Morning was the same thing I’d said every day when I signed off: “We are out of time on this American Morning.” I certainly was.
When the storm of Hurricane Katrina hit in August of 2005, it rearranged the television universe as well. The public was outraged. They wanted reporters to ask hard questions, not just spin in windstorms clutching their microphones. We stood in the muck alongside survivors, with not a single public official in sight. Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer, and I, the whole team, raged at the people in charge. The viewers cheered us on by elevating CNN’s viewership to 3.7 million, celestial numbers for a cable news network.
By November, those viewers were slipping away. CNN replaced Aaron Brown and his 10:00 p.m. show NewsNight with more of Anderson Cooper. Anderson’s stature had grown immensely following the storm. By April 2006, as our American Morning numbers began to slip, my good friend and boss, Kim Bondy, also left CNN. But, more important, she left me! American Morning was averaging 330,000 viewers to Fox and Friends’ 836,000. Kim had joined the show with 551,000 viewers, taken it upward with the news; then she had seen it go back down.
American Morning is a hard news show, and when the news out there is soft, a lot of people tune out. Kim was perfectly capable of solving that issue. But she faced a far greater life problem. Her parents had been plucked from a balcony during Hurricane Katrina. The home she’d financed with a lifetime of savings was awash. She suffered the damage daily of feeling like her future was unmoored. She just wanted to heal, and go back to New Orleans to rebuild. CNN was covering one of the biggest tragedies in American history, while Kim was living it. She was a typical Katrina survivor, marching around her property in tears, constantly trying to regroup and shake the memory of her mother’s agonizing days in the storm. Yet she spent much of her time sitting in New York physically exhausted and emotionally distracted. She feared she was letting me down by leaving. The storm had changed both of us, except she was still drowning in responsibilities and stress related to its real-life damage. CNN fought to keep her, but she was determined to go focus on rebuilding.
There are these little moments in life when your friends need you to let them go. I knew the newsroom would feel empty without her. She needed to go home to New Orleans and deal, so I bid her good-bye. She was and is my toughest critic, yet she always had my back. Her departure only deepened our friendship, but suddenly she wasn’t there to pull me aside and give me the 411 on a story, office politics, or the stress of the day.
Kim leaves, our ratings suffer, no one on staff takes vacation. We take the stress of 2005, carry it into 2006, reignite our frustrations with the Katrina anniversary, then fall headfirst into the fall as election coverage begins to wind up. I am so tired I can barely put two sentences together. At some point the blur becomes even blurrier when they move our show an hour earlier to 6:00 a.m. I am flat out running but making no progress, in motion but going nowhere in particular but as is always the case I quickly regain focus when a great story rolls in.
Before I leave the show, an opportunity comes from out of nowhere. We are approaching the fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The King family and Morehouse College offer me an exclusive opportunity to review his private papers. His words have become the treatise of our country’s civil rights movement. Whenever people cry out for justice, they quote King. “There is a new Negro in the South.”
I get to hold King’s papers in my own hands at the Robert W. Woodruff Library at the Atlanta University Center, to see what he crossed out and what he added. I get to read the little annotations in the margins and they are spellbinding. I see the books he read and the parts he underlined. I get to see where anger gave way to hope, where optimism prevailed and dreams emerged. His speeches were like music and I am getting a peek at the notes. He had taken our nation on a journey from Birmingham to Selma trying to wash away the stain of racism. Yet his writings reveal a regular man, young and smart but mostly present when the moment called, steady when most sane men would run. He is poetic and values words. But it is obvious his writings come from a man inspired by a moment. That is what sets us apart in this country, how you rise up after you’re kicked down. He makes me feel like just about anyone can do great things.
“After one has discovered what he is called for, he should set out to do it with all of the power that he has in his system. Do it as if God almighty ordained you at this particular moment in history to do it,” he wrote. So, he does.
It is 1954. King is twenty-five when he writes his first sermon on four pages, back and front, of lined notebook paper. They are the simple words of a young preacher talking to folks in Montgomery, Alabama. But a year later Rosa Parks takes one of the ten seats reserved for whites in the front of a bus. She refuses to budge. Civil rights leaders want African-Americans to boycott the bus system. King is plucked from obscurity to be the voice of the bus boycott movement. He is chosen because he is a noncontroversial young man who everybody likes. He ends up articulating the philosophy of a movement. “This is a movement of passive resistance, emphasis on nonviolence in a struggle for justice.”
I interview King’s former aide Andrew Young and Parks’s lawyer, Fred Gray, who recall how frightened Dr. King was by what came next. “Listen, nigger,” an angry caller told King. “We’ve taken all we want from you. Before next week, you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.” His house is bombed. He steps outside and talks down an angry crowd. He tells them God had suffused him with instant courage. Gray tells me that King believed he’d found a cause worth dying for. No one was taking the bus after that. That was the “new Negro in the South” he had spoken of, people who would rather walk in dignity than travel in fear. Young said King was hardly the leader type, more interested in chatting about his new baby than strategy. Circumstances called for a leader and he rose up and answered.
His notes betray how unprepared he was for living in fear. He and his staff begin to write in code. He is Jack Kennedy and Birmingham is Johannesburg. He is arrested for marching. His jailhouse notes are focused on how much he misses his family. He calls the isolation a living death. His lawyer, Clarence Jones, sneaks in paper for him to write. He is composing his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” where he says, “when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean,’ then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.” I see where he’s added the wo
rds “in agonizing pathos” at the last minute, as if he had conjured up his child’s own face. Those three words make a world of difference. He is not just telling the story of the black community; he is evoking a painful image that any parent can absorb.
King’s private library includes a copy of E. Stanley Jones’s The Christ of the American Road, where he has underlined the part about how “America is a dream unfulfilled, a place where race and birth and color are transcended by the fact of a common brotherhood.” In the book Horns and Halos, he pencils the note: “A dream that did not come true.” I can see that he is in warm-up mode for the “I have a dream” speech. He makes a speech in the late 1950s imploring folks to “confront your shattered dreams.” He goes further in an address to the National Press Club in July 1962, but crosses out the paragraph on dreams. An idea is germinating; he is collecting his thoughts. I can see the epic line of a movement coming together.
The night before the march on Washington in August 1963, Andrew Young remembers giving King notes as his advisors pushed him to come up with a new message. But President John F. Kennedy is so concerned about the march he asks the activists to tone down their speeches. King titles his speech notes “Normalcy—never again.” The word “dream” doesn’t appear anywhere in that early draft. Witnesses said he turned his notes over in the middle of the speech and just gave himself up to the moment. “I have a dream,” he said in the defining words of our country’s civil rights movement. “That my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” They are just words but there are people around the globe and in our country who can recite that speech to its end. They speak of the promise of our country and of promises unfulfilled.
A month later, four little girls die in a bombing at a Birmingham church because of the color of their skin. King delivers the eulogy and writes this:
“The innocent blood of these precious children of God say to each of us we must substitute courage for caution.” And this: “No, we must not lose faith in our white brothers.” He is asking people to tamp it down at exactly the moment when rage can win the day. I look at the notes from a speech he gave years before the Birmingham campaign titled “Loving Your Enemies,” and I can tell this has always been a part of his philosophy. The lesson for the rest of us is clear—don’t let anger win the day, anyone’s anger. “Throw us in jail and we will still love you,” he wrote long before this awful bombing had been conceived. “Bomb our homes and threaten our children and we will still love you,” he wrote. “We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. We will win our freedom.” He had no idea of the suffering that was still to come.
In February 1965, state troopers would fatally shoot twenty-six-year-old Jimmy Lee Jackson, a Baptist church deacon, in Marion, Alabama, while he was trying to stop troopers from beating his mother, Viola. King wrote of Jackson:
“He was murdered by the indifference of every minister of the Gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained glass windows. He was murdered by every negro who passively accepts the evil system of segregation.” Jackson died in Selma, the starting point of the marches to Montgomery, which led to the subsequent attack on protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge by police that became known as Bloody Sunday. Blood was shed to fulfill the words he said at the Capitol that day. King cried at the White House when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voters’ Rights Act of 1965 and said: “We shall overcome.”
King died planning a poor people’s campaign. He came to believe that bigotry imposed black poverty and that poverty perpetuated inequality. He was looking ahead at the time where we live now. He tried marching with garbage workers but some youths broke store windows. He pledged to do it again without the violence. He came to Memphis on April 3, 1968, and stayed at the Lorraine Motel. He had a scrap of paper with him that said: “Gandhi speaks for us. ‘In the midst of death, life persists, in the midst of darkness, light persists.’” Then King wrote:
“We are today in the midst of death and darkness. We can strengthen life and live by our personal acts by saying no to violence. By saying yes to life.” He used it for a speech that night. He focused on death. “I don’t know what will happen now. We have got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now,” he said. “Because I have been to the mountaintop. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” Andrew Young told me they had a silly pillow fight in King’s room the next day. King seemed happier than ever when he walked out his door and into the sights of a killer.
I got this rush from having reported on the King papers. My show may be going nowhere but I feel at least I am doing important work. On this American Morning, I have an exclusive look at a man at least half the world admires. I feel like what he is saying speaks to me and I am honored. I am energized, a new member of the quarter million people who joined him on the Mall, and a new recipient of the grace he handed out in Selma.
Then, out of nowhere, the Reverend Jesse Jackson calls with an invitation to meet and talk, and it brings my reverie to a halt. We greet warmly and sit. A young, clean-cut security guy hovers nearby. He stays close enough to be summoned for a quick question but not close enough to overhear. I notice the china is clinking, but like really good china. I have four small kids so I never hear that particular sound. We’re in a nice restaurant on the first floor of a famous hotel.
The Reverend Jackson begins talking in his strong Southern accent. His voice is very low. He says, “Call me Jesse,” but that’s something I feel like I cannot do. I am confident he doesn’t remember the first time we met. It was my job in 1989 to escort him through his live shots at WBZ-TV around Boston during Nelson Mandela’s historic visit to the United States. I was his “babysitter,” the one making sure no other media plucked him away. He was our contributor. He whispers something. He is speaking so low I can barely hear him. I strain to get closer.
Even though I am not sure what he is saying, I can tell he is angry. Today he is angry because CNN doesn’t have enough black anchors. It is political season. There are billboards up sporting Paula Zahn and Anderson Cooper. He asks after the black reporters. Why are they not up there? I share his concern and make a mental note to take it back to my bosses. But then he begins to rage that there are no black anchors on the network at all. Does he mean covering the campaign? I wonder. The man has been a guest on my show. He knows me, even if he doesn’t recall how we met. I brought him on at MSNBC, then again at Weekend Today. I interrupt to remind him I’m the anchor of American Morning. He knows that. He looks me in the eye and reaches his fingers over to tap a spot of skin on my right hand. He shakes his head. “You don’t count,” he says. I wasn’t sure what that means. I don’t count—what? I’m not black? I’m not black enough? Or my show doesn’t count?
I was both angry and embarrassed, which rarely happen at the same time for me. Jesse Jackson managed to make me ashamed of my skin color, which even white people had never been able to do. Not the kids in the hallways at Smithtown or the guys who wouldn’t date me in high school. I remember the marchers behind me at the trial about the black youth who beat the Latino baby. The folks that chanted “biracial whore for the white man’s media,” even they didn’t make me feel this way. I would just laugh. Biracial, sure, whore, not exactly, white man’s media, totally! Whatever. But Reverend Jesse Jackson says, “I don’t count”?
I am immediately upset and annoyed and the more annoyed I am, the more upset and pissed off. If Reverend Jesse Jackson doesn’t think I am black enough, then what am I? My parents had so consistently pounded racial identity into my head that the thoughts of racial doubt never crossed my mind. I’d suffered an Afro through the heat of elementary school. I’d certainly never felt white. I think my version of black is as valid as anybody else’s. I am a product of my parents (black woman, white man), my town (mostly
white), multiracial to be sure, but not black? I feel like the foundation I’d built my life on was being denied, as if someone was telling me my parents aren’t my parents. “You know those people you’ve been calling Mom and Dad—they aren’t really your parents.” “What?” The arbiter of blackness had weighed in. I had been measured and found wanting.
It knocked me off my equilibrium for a bit, the first time that had happened to me since that guy in a bar back on the West Coast pinched my butt during my first live shot. After two weeks of stewing, I sit upright one day, angry at myself for not telling this man he is wrong. I am a product of my own life. That’s one of the wonders of America, you have the right to define yourself regardless of what little box someone wants to shove you in. He is certainly right that CNN doesn’t have enough people of color on the air, even the bosses say that and spend their time trying to fix it. But “You don’t count”? Screw that. Of course I count. Who is he to say that? My experience is not universal—no one’s is—but it is legitimate. I get to be who I am outside and in.
I was embarrassed that I didn’t call him back and ask what he meant. I (like my mother) like a good fight. So I should have called him up and said, “What the heck does that mean?” But I didn’t. I slunk away. Annoyed. And more annoyed that I never forgot his words. I look at other mixed-race people now and wonder. Did their parents slam their identity into their head as mine did? Or do they not even get a category? Jesse Jackson caught me off balance.
But that day I couldn’t say a word to Reverend Jackson. I run into the man all the time. We are invited to the same events. We kiss at functions but still I say nothing. I see how deeply people respect him. Al Sharpton tells me Jackson taught him civil disobedience. Roland Martin credits him with paving the way for Obama. Jackson sat at lunch with me telling me how he hates always being asked to talk only about black issues, hates to be tagged as only the black expert, never the guy negotiating peace or brokering deals with Wall Street. He lashes out at people who define him by the color of his skin. It matters that they don’t see inside him. It mattered to me that he didn’t see inside me.