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In September 1994, the Washington Post ran a gripping series of articles about a black Washington grandmother and her family. The daughter of North Carolina sharecroppers, Rosa Lee Cunningham along with six of her eight children had become mired in drug addiction and crime, while her other two offspring had not. In his intimately detailed articles, veteran reporter Leon Dash sought to understand how it was that these "children and grandchildren from migrant families" could take such divergent paths.

His brilliant reporting won Dash a Pulitzer Prize. But inside the Post, according to Ruth Shalit, an associate editor at the New Republic (Oct. 2, 1995), Dash's series dismayed many other black reporters, who worried that it tarnished the image of "the black community." They ostracized Dash.

Shalit's cover story about race at the Post created a sensation in the national news media. That was not surprising, perhaps, since, as she writes, newspapers across the nation in recent years have also embarked upon "a course of 'compensatory' or preferential minority hiring."

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