A DIFFERENT KIND of STORY
One morning in early 2002, I parked my car in front of the same house I’d been visiting for weeks in Cleveland’s Hough neighborhood. Robert Mandell, a man who’d been answering my questions for weeks, was waiting on the other side of his front yard fence. He usually greeted me with a big smile, but this time his face was a map of concern.
I stepped out of my car and walked toward the house, pausing at the fence gate. “What’s the matter Mr. Mandell?”
He shook his head and spoke slowly. “I can’t believe you keep showing up here, and it’s not because someone’s been killed.”
We both knew why he was wondering. The reasons fueling his skepticism were why I was there, and they have driven my work ever since.
Most of Hough’s residents are Black, and many of its oldest citizens still share eyewitness accounts of the July 1966 riots there that killed four residents and injured dozens more. By 2002, some new housing had sprouted up, but much of the community was still crippled by poverty and governmental neglect. I was there for what would be one of the biggest stories of my journalism career.
I am white and Mr. Mandell is Black. At that time, I was still working for the largest newspaper in Ohio, . Like most news organizations, our newsroom was run mostly by white men who saw little value in covering day-to-day life in these communities just blocks from us in downtown Cleveland. Editors tended to send reporters into these neighborhoods only after a person, too often a young Black male, had been killed.
