An Intimate Dispatch from the Underclass   

For eight days in September, readers of the Washington Post got a steady, stomach-turning dose of the life of an impoverished black woman in Washington, D.C. According to the Post's series, the woman had shoplifted to feed her children and then taught them how to steal. She used heroin. She sold her 11-year-old daughter into prostitution. She sold drugs to feed her family, sometimes peddling her clean urine to clients in a methadone clinic. And she still supports her adult children's drug habits with her welfare checks.

The voraciously read series was an intimate, almost voyeuristic view of the intersection of poverty, racism, teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, crime and illiteracy. More than 4,600 readers called the Post, leaving editors over 45 hours of comments. One-fourth of the calls were negative, while nearly 50 percent were positive. Many callers were concerned with the author's passive observance of illegal activity. Others questioned how accurately he could portray someone to whom he had become so emotionally attached.

At the center of the controversy is Leon Dash, 50, an African American, award-winning reporter on the Post's special projects team, who spent four years living and breathing the sorrowful life of Rosa Lee Cunningham, 58. He worked closely with photographer Lucian Perkins, who shot a photo of one daughter seconds before she injected herself with heroin.

Dash shaped the painful intergenerational saga from nearly 300 hours of intense interviews with Cunningham, seven of her eight children, five of her 32 grandchildren and other family members. By the series' end, the Post had published as many as 35,000 words a day, enough for a 175-page book.

The series jarred Washington, a city that focuses more on political culture than on the pervasive poverty inside the Beltway. Many readers thought the series was a fascinating portrayal of a life they knew nothing about. The racial issues raised by the series sparked considerable debate and controversy among D.C.'s 65 percent black population, as well as among Post staffers. Concerns over the articles prompted heated discussions at two Post staff meetings about the series. Some staffers agreed with charges that the articles were another example of the Post's racism.

"We are writing about a family in Washington that's poor," says Steve Luxenberg, Dash's editor. "Poverty in Washington is primarily black. It wasn't a racial story. It was a story about poverty."

Others were furious that Dash spent so much time portraying one troubled black family. "I am one of those highly incensed by the fact that the Washington Post chose to again picture a highly dysfunctional black family," said one man who called in to speak with Dash on WAMU radio's Derek McGinty show. "This is unfortunately the kind of view that whites in general associate with blacks in D.C. If you are really interested in solutions, do a series on a group or number of families who have been successful and illuminate how they were able to escape."

That criticism has been so constant that it prompted Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. to collect a stack of 11 African American success stories that had appeared on section fronts in the last six weeks – six on the front page.

Dash says he did not create a problem, but rather shed light on a crisis. "I wanted to make people uncomfortable and alarm them," Dash says. "I didn't write about middle-class blacks who had overcome these barriers because they are not part of the crisis."

*hile Dash grew up in Harlem and the Bronx, he was not familiar with Cunningham's world because he had lived in a small, middle-class enclave.

That changed in 1984 when Dash rented an apartment in a very poor neighborhood in Washington and spent 17 months on a series that explored adolescent pregnancy.

He began his latest project in 1988 with the idea of writing about repeat criminal offenders and their children. He interviewed several prisoners and found 40 heads of households who had been in and out of jail for nonviolent crimes. Cunningham, by then a recovering drug addict, had gone to jail 12 times. While working on that project, Dash became sidetracked by a story about drug-addicted correctional officers and spent two years working on that. In 1990 he returned to repeat offenders, focused on Cunningham's family and began reporting the story full time.

Dash's technique is simple, although it's one few reporters have the luxury to try: take as much time as necessary to immerse yourself in a subject. He says reporters can't understand what people must deal with until they're intimately informed about the circumstances of their lives.

He began the Rosa Lee series by questioning each principal subject about childhood memories, leading them up to the present. He focused his reporting on four areas: the family, school, church involvement and social development. He spent two hours on each area until he had an initial eight hours worth of interviews.

The process was especially tough with Cunningham's drug-addicted children. "You couldn't sit them down for two hours," Dash says. "They'd fall asleep on you. They'd nod out. I went into prison a lot to interview some of them."

It took three years for Dash to convince the two sons who had escaped the poverty cycle to speak with him. One daughter did not cooperate, but, according to Dash, told her mother she regretted it once the series was published.

Dash, a bachelor, says the series didn't interfere with his personal life but did take a physical toll. "When Patty told me that Rosa Lee had prostituted her, I groaned," says Dash. "My head began to pound. It was nothing I anticipated. The headaches were brought on by tension." More of them followed.

"[Rosa Lee] was constantly badgering me for advice," says Dash, who continued reporting until the Thursday before the series began. "I drew the line at giving advice."

In the summer of 1992, Dash turned in a 10-part series, conventionally written in the past tense. Luxenberg thought Dash had become part of the story. Because of Dash's close relationship with Cunningham, Luxenberg suggested that Dash rewrite the series to reflect his involvement.

"When I crossed the line was the day she got so ill," says Dash, who took Cunningham to the hospital. "I was frightened that she was dying in front of me." Dash admits he left the observer role behind, and in some cases influenced the course of the story. For example, Dash took Cunningham back to her original home in North Carolina and hunted down her relatives, something he acknowledges Cunningham might never have done. "My interest in taking her back was to elicit more memories from her," he says.

Dash strayed from the Washington Post's style guide by calling Cunningham "Rosa Lee" while she referred to him as "Mr. Dash." "I don't see it as demeaning," says Dash, who says he asked Cunningham to call him by his first name, but that she refused. "I knew others would interpret it that way. I decided I'd have to take my lumps."

After the series, Dash's relationship with Cunningham shifted from professional to personal. He gave Cunningham, who is infected with the HIV virus, his home telephone number for the first time. "We will probably be together for the rest of our lives," says Dash. "She beamed when I said the series was done and published and now I could advise her."