The Word

ELLIS COSE is a respected and best-selling author, columnist and contributing editor for Newsweek, and producer of a Public Radio International documentary series Against the Odds. In The Rage of a Privileged Class, Cose brilliantly examined the emotional price the African-American middle class pays in its pursuit of social equality and economic parity. The book laid bare the endurance of racism as a fact of life for even the most materially successful Blacks. Bone to Pick: Of Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation, and Revenge is a wide-ranging look at a number of societies--the United States, Ghana, South Africa, and Peru among them, and their ways of coping with shared legacies of national cruelty and pain. And The Envy of the World: On Being a Black Man in America was featured on the cover of Newsweek and was the basis of a special program produced by National Public Radio. Coses's other books include the novel The Best Defense, A Nation of Strangers: Prejudice, Politics, and the Populating of America, and Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World.

In his capacity as president of Ellis Cose, Inc., Cose produces Against the Odds, which profiles individuals around the world who have overcome tremendous adversity. The program airs on public broadcasting stations around the United States. Cose has appeared on The Today Show, Dateline, ABC Evening News, and Good Morning America and has won many awards for his journalism.

Ellis Cose has, with insatiable curiosity about the world and a commitment to seeking out and telling the hardest stories, enlightened and informed and challenged himself, his readers, and listening audiences.

Marita Golden: What advice would you give to a young person starting out in journalism today?

Ellis Cose: I would say that you really need to cultivate your curiosity. Journalism can take you lots of different places and have you talking to lots of different people about a whole variety of subjects and things. It's even more important, I think, to have a broad-ranging set of interests that will be able to serve you well as you talk to people from every walk of life and from various kinds of cultures.

MG: You've become a multimedia person, now branching out from journalism into writing books and producing a radio program and planning to move into television. But you began writing books at a pretty young age; how did you start?

EC: I got into my head, essentially when I was sixteen, that I wanted to be a writer. And so the first serious thing that I really tackled was trying to write a book that grew directly out of the riots in 1966 and 1968. There were two sets of riots in Chicago; one came in '66, which began with a police incident and then grew into a huge riot, which was my first experience with that.

MG: What was your neighborhood in Chicago?

EC: It was a West Side community called Henry Horner Housing Projects. Those housing projects no longer exist. But they were not too far from downtown Chicago. My family and I heard and saw gunfire going back and forth, and large parts of the community were torn up. That sort of repeated itself in '68 after the death of King. I was a witness to the coverage of the Chicago Tribune and how stereotypical it was, how it painted my community, how nonrepresentative it was. I wanted to respond to that.

MG: To put this in some perspective, describe your neighborhood.

EC: Honey, our neighborhood was the projects. By definition it was poor as you could get. I mean, there were certainly people who worked, and so it was working class, and welfare, and a combination of all those kinds of people who needed subsidized housing. And when we moved into the projects from the, quote, "ghetto," community, it was really a step up. I remember I was five when we moved into it, and I remember running around thinking it was like this palatial place.

MG: One of your teachers played a crucial role in your starting to write about all this, didn't she?

EC: My English teacher Mrs. Klinger and I had been having this ongoing battle about English. It was just a battle that I had with every English teacher in high school. And the battle essentially was I felt their assignments were boring, and uninteresting, and unchallenging, and I was pretty much refusing to do the work.

I attended Lane Technical. Lane was considered the best public school in Chicago and it was a school for the kids who were bright but who couldn't afford to go to private school. It had a sort of elite tradition. And if you could do well on standardized tests and you grew up in a certain area, you could go to Lane. And I always knew I was a bright kid. I had always tested extremely well even when I was in my so-called ghetto schools. I was always testing in the 98-99 percentile.

We were very poor, yet I always tested well. My parents, who were not terribly well educated themselves, were both products of the time when educating Black people was not at all a priority in the South, but despite this, my parents emphasized reading. And so we had library cards when we were very young.

At Lane, a lot of what we did consisted of reading passages and then answering questions about them, and I knew I knew the answers, and the questions didn't strike me as very interesting. So I just refused to do it.

So I had these perennial run-ins with my English teachers because of that.

By the time I was a senior I was totally fed up with English and English classes. I thought that's where people who weren't very interesting thinkers ended up.

MG: It didn't stretch you creatively or intellectually?

EC: Not at all. And so Mrs. Klinger called me one night at home. She was my last English teacher. And she said to me, Ellis, I know you can do the work because whenever you do it, it's fine, but you're not doing it, why? I asked her why don't you give me a research and writing assignment and I'll do something with that? And of course the riots were on my mind, so I said, why don't I do a paper on riots and why they happened in my community, why they happened in America, what the history of all this is. And she said, well, fine, you go do that.

So all of a sudden for the first time in my high school experience I got excited about English and ended up turning in a 150-page essay that I worked on for several weeks, looking at the history of riots in America, race riots in different areas, in the community, and I was looking especially at Chicago. And she took it home, and she came back after the weekend. She called me up after class and she said, "Ellis, I'm going to give you an A in the course. But I'm not really capable of judging this material. I've taken a course with Gwendolyn Brooks, we'll send it to her." And she said, "You know who she is, right?" I said, "Well, sort of. I mean, she's a poet laureate, whatever that is, I know that."

So I packed up this manuscript and sent it to her. In the interim I had really gotten into my head that this writing thing wasn't bad at all, and I started work on a novel.

MG: What was it about that assignment that gave you so much satisfaction?

EC: It gave me a chance to express a lot of thoughts and ideas and feelings that I hadn't really had a medium to express these things in. And even though I had always had this sort of, for lack of a better word, contempt for the English classes I had been taking, I had from a very early age fallen in love with reading, which I had to do a lot of for that assignment.

MG: What books were you reading as an adolescent?

EC: I remember I must have been thirteen or fourteen when I read James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. I think the first riots had taken place in Chicago. I remember that being a revelation to me, the fact that somebody thought about things that I had thought about and made connections to things that I felt needed connecting. I felt the same thing with Invisible Man, which I read when I was quite young.

I was hooked on reading as a child and never became unhooked. As a kid growing up on the West Side of Chicago, I had very little sense of the larger world beyond what I saw on television or discovered through reading. And even as a youngster, I always found the experience of reading about something much more satisfying than watching TV. There is something more profound and also more intimate in exploring a subject by reading about it. Reading has taken me in both a figurative and literal sense around the world. And it continues to open new horizons. Reading matters for one very simple reason. There is no way to acquire deep knowledge without reading. It scarcely matters what the subject is, the gateway to knowledge is still the written word.

MG: What books have been most influential in your life and your work?

EC: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky were both important books in terms of shaping my conceptions of writing, and of its power. I read Invisible Man when I was twelve or thirteen and remember being deeply moved not just by the story but by the beauty of the writing. I discovered Crime and Punishment when I was in high school and that book gave me insight into the power of fiction in communicating big ideas.

MG: So the writing really gave you a way to express things that you felt very deeply about. Reading worked in tandem with that and that was important.

EC: Oh yeah. At that point I, of course, had this dream that other people would read it, but it was also just an interesting way for me to learn how to express myself. And so during the time when I was waiting for Gwendolyn Brooks to respond, and I had no idea what Gwendolyn Brooks would do, I started writing this novel; I haven't looked back at it in years, and I don't even know where it is, but it's about coming of age in the hood.

MG: I find when people say, well, I'm going to write a book, they have no idea how difficult it is to marshal the emotional and creative energies over the length of time required to write even a first draft of a novel. So when you say you were doing that at sixteen, that is really an extraordinary endeavor.

EC: I think my parents thought it was kind of weird that I was around the kitchen table, dining room table, writing, writing, and writing.

MG: Did you finish the novel?

EC: Well, between the ages of sixteen, seventeen, and nineteen I finished a couple of novels. Well, manuscripts. Actually I even got a contract for one of them, which ended up not being published for a variety of reasons. Gwendolyn Brooks ultimately called out of the blue one Saturday. And she said to me, "Ellis, you have got to come and talk to me." And I said, "Okay, where?" And she gave me the name of the college, Northeastern Illinois State College, and it was like three bus rides away, I remember that. So it was like this long journey to see Gwendolyn Brooks.

I knew her books of course, but that's all. When I get to the school, she ushers me into her office, and she pulls out my manuscript. And she has scribbled across it in both red and blue ink, "One day you will be a great writer," which is characteristic of her generosity and spirit and her way of nurturing young people. But of course it made a huge impact on me. And she gives me what amounts to a lecture. She says I don't know what you're going to do, what you plan to do with your life, but you really should be writing because you have this gift. And I was just sort of blown away. So she invites me to join her writers' group. That's where I met Dudley Randall, all these folks who were part of her group, Haki Madhubuti, who was Don Lee back then. You have to remember again I was seventeen I guess at the time. And I went to a few of these writing groups, which, first of all, it was a bus ride to get to it. But, secondly, the thing I remember thinking was that I really don't have much in common with these folks because they were all in their thirties.

So I didn't stay in the writing group for very long. I ended up dropping out. But in the process I had met some of these people and gotten sort of more into this idea of writing.

MG: How did the writing group work, what was their process?

EC: I remember the process was that people would read things they were working on, and people would talk about it. They would talk about their projects. Sam Greenlee was working on The Spook Who Sat By the Door, and he came through there at one point even though he wasn't really in Chicago, and he talked about that. Haki was there with all his different poetry talking about what he was doing, and so was Carolyn Rogers.

Ms. Brooks just made it very clear she respected my talents. She was there to be helpful. She would be supportive, and I was very grateful for that. It was such a tremendous sort of thing knowing somebody who had validated me. I mean she was poet laureate of the state of Illinois. And she had won the Pulitzer. Yeah. So she was as major as it can get. And I continued writing.

And I think it was my second novel, which I sent to Path Press. It was just a small group out of Chicago who decided to start a publishing company. And they accepted the novel for publication and sent me a contract, and my mother had to sign it. But they never published a book. They could never put together the resources to do that.

I wrote one nonfiction book, two novels, and a bunch of essays, and none of them were published. The nonfiction book was the essay I had done for my course, then I did two, three novels. And then by this time I had graduated; I'm in college at the University of Illinois, Chicago campus.