Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America [Hardcover]

Leon Dash (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 22, 1996

Based on a heart-rending and much discussed series in the Washington Post, this is the story of one woman and her family living in the projects in Washington, D.C. A transcendent piece of writing, it won the Pulitzer Prize and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.For four years Leon Dash of the Washington Post followed the lives of Rosa Lee Cunningham, her children, and five of her grandchildren, in an effort to understand the persistence of poverty and pathology within America’s black underclass. Rosa Lee’s life story spans a half century of hardship in the slums and housing projects of Southeast Washington, a stone’s throw from the marble halls and civic monuments of the world’s most prosperous nation. Yet for all of America’s efforts, Rosa Lee and millions like her remain trapped in a cycle of poverty characterized by illiteracy, teenage pregnancy, drugs, and violent crime.Dash brings us into her life and the lives of her family members offering a human drama that statistics can only refer to. He also shows how some people—including two of Rosa Lee’s children—have made it out of the ghetto, breaking the cycle to lead stable middle-class lives in the mainstream of American society.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Drug-addled, welfare-using and AIDS-infected, Rosa Lee--a black woman living in the slums of Washington, D.C.--shines an enormous amount of light on the seemingly intractable problems of the underclass by allowing Leon Dash to tell her story. You won't find any diagrams or number-crunching in this book, just an absorbing tale of inner-city despair. Dash won the Pulitzer Prize for his series of articles on Rosa Lee for the Washington Post. The book is even better--easily the best of its type since Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here.

From Library Journal

Dash, a Washington Post reporter and author of When Children Want Children (Viking, 1990), has written a biography of someone we normally would never read about. His subject is a grandmother who has been on drugs a good portion of her life, been in and out of prison for drugs and theft, and on welfare much of this time. She had eight children, six of whom are following in her footsteps. She and several of her children have AIDS due to their drug habits, and six of them are functionally illiterate. Dash shows us how two of her children learned enough to achieve middle-class lives for themselves and escape the drugs and poverty in which the rest of the family is mired. He links Rosa Lee's story to sociological trends and historical reasons and points out that while she is unique, she also serves as an exemplar of many others with similar stories. Most interesting are the tidbits of information about the two successful sons, who both pointed out that they had received motivation and assistance from someone outside of their family, which they felt was what caused them to be different. Well written and researched, this is strongly recommended for all social work and social science collections.?Anita L. Cole, Miami-Dade P.L., Fla.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1st edition (August 22, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465070922
• ISBN-13: 978-0465070923
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #283,585 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A nuanced, essential look at life on the edge in D.C., May 28, 1998

By 

Matthew Budman - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America (Hardcover)

In recent years, welfare and the underclass have become a prominent part of the national conversation. But pundits' portrayals of the urban poor are often distressingly simplistic, usually presenting the underclass as a mass of indistinguishable brown and black people inhabiting a murky, foreign land. In 1988, Washington Post reporter Leon Dash began a seven-year project that he hoped might dispel reductionist thinking, trying to make this unfamiliar world complex and real by focusing on a single case, one that shows many of the facets of underclass life. He tells the story of a single Washington, D.C., woman and her family-four generations of poverty, pathology and crippling dysfunction. Rosa Lee Cunningham "is fifty-two years old, a longtime heroin addict, with a long record of arrests for everything from petty theft to drug trafficking," Dash writes. "Her eight children-the oldest of whom she bore at age fourteen-were fathered by six different men, and six of the children have followed her into a life of teenage parenthood, drugs, and crime." Rosa Lee's story is hardly inspirational-and yet in it there are glimmers of brightness. Amid the sadness and squalor, Dash leaves room for hope.

"Rosa Lee" grew out of a controversial Washington Post newspaper series that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994; about half the book is fresh material. Dash paints detailed portraits of Rosa Lee and her children; presented nonjudgmentally, his depictions are founded on ambiguity. He makes it clear that-in the name of "survival"-she condemned at least two succeeding generations to follow her example, alienated from broader, productive society. "Rosa Lee exposed all of her children to her criminal lifestyle, the underworld path she argues was her avenue to survival," he writes, "and four of her six sons followed her onto the same path, with ruinous outcomes for each of them." One chilling example: Early in the book, Rosa Lee describes a shoplifting trip with an 11-year-old grandson and how a 5-year-old granddaughter had once helped her sell heroin. "Rosa Lee has introduced her granddaughter to the drug trade," Dash writes, "as something to do to earn enough money to eat." Despite her behavior and legacy, though, Rosa Lee remains somehow likable and sympathetic throughout the book. "I can't help but think that if circumstances had been different, if she hadn't faced so many obstacles in her life, her drive and her charisma might have caused her to create a different life for herself, her children, and grandchildren," Dash writes.

Facing poverty, dysfunction and ruined lives, Americans weaned on tabloid TV tend to look to assign quick blame. Who's at fault for Rosa Lee and her children? "There is something in her life story to confirm any political viewpoint," Dash writes. "Some may see her as a victim of hopeless circumstances, a woman born to a life of deprivation because of America's long history of discrimination and racism. Others may give her the benefit of the doubt in some cases but hold her personally acountable for much of what she did to herself, her children, and her grandchildren. A third group might say that Rosa Lee is a thief, a drug addict, a failed parent, a broken woman paying for her sins, and a woman who seemingly was so set on placing her children on the path to failure that it is amazing that even two of them manage to live conventional lives." If Rosa Lee is invisible to lawmakers who-only a mile or two away-see her as only a nebulous parasite, they are equally intangible to her. She "has no interest in politics or government. She has never voted," Dash writes. "There is almost no connection between Rosa Lee's world and the world of Washington's policy-makers and politicians." She is unaware, he notes, that elections even take place. Though wards of the state, entirely dependent on government subsidies and handouts, the family is completely alienated from civil society: They don't seem to recognize that their drug abuse and shoplifting have larger societal costs-indeed, that their actions affect others at all.

Dash shows us the most troubled of Rosa Lee's family: "Bobby, Ronnie, Richard, Patty, and Ducky live a kind of nomadic existence, bouncing from friends' apartments to jail, to the street, to Rosa Lee's. All five are addicted to heroin or cocaine, or abuse both drugs," he writes. "Their lives and choices provide an intricate blueprint of just how bad guidance and bad decisions so easily ensnared them in lives of drug addiction and criminal recidivism." But he also focuses on Alvin and Eric, the two of Rosa Lee's sons who "found a different path and moved up out of poverty into conventional middle-class and working-class respectability." Somehow, "they rejected the lures, avoided the pitfalls, and got around the obstacles that they faced in their home and in their neighborhoods from the day they were born." Dash attributes much of the family's continuing poverty to its lack of education and frequent teenage parenthood. Rosa Lee had her first child at 14; so did her daughter Patty. Rosa Lee's mother Rosetta gave birth three days after her 13th birthday. All dropped out of school still illiterate.

Dash's writing is nonjudgmental, enviably clean and straightforward, without pseudonyms or euphemisms. He never pretties up his language with gratuitous adjectives or unnecessary color; he never clumsily writes around a cliché if the cliché is clearer. The only stylistic flaw is his confusingly frequent tense shifts to accomodate his jumping back and forth in the chronology. As a black, middle-class journalist, he is an inextricable part of his own tale, and it's fascinating to see him run up against his own journalist-subject boundaries. "I lay down ground rules that I will buy them meals and even cigarettes, but I will pay for the purchases. I explain I will never give or loan any of them any amount of cash. I know from past experience that drug users go to considerable lengths to collect small amounts of money from many people until they gather enough to buy drugs. The drug-users among Rosa Lee's children boast to her that they will eventually get some money out of me. They are sorely disappointed." Dash fights not to show feelings, to remain scrupulously impartial, all the way through his realistic and informed book's-end discussion of remedial action. "Viable solutions to poverty will never be simple," he writes. "As Rosa Lee's story shows, immense difficulties await any effort to bring an end to poverty, illiteracy, drug abuse, and criminal activity. In the poorest neighborhoods, these problems are knitted together into whole cloth. . . . Reforming welfare doesn't stop drug trafficking; better policing doesn't end illiteracy; providing job training doesn't teach a young man or woman why it's wrong to steal.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars related, June 20, 2010

By 

Tracy Williams (baltimore,md) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America (Paperback)

Rosa Lee Cunningham was a relative of mine. Although I really did not know that much about her, it was still sad to read what she, my cousins(her children) went through in urban Washington,DC. I feel sad for my grandmother(Rosetta) as well because even though she moved from North Carolina to Washington, DC to get away from the abuse of white people and make a better life for herself, she suffered too. As an African-American woman, we are considered the low man on the totem pole. Black men think they have it bad to survive in society-no no! Black women such as my grandmother and my aunt Rosa Lee have carried the weight of America on our backs. Both my paternal and maternal grandmothers have endured so much growing up in the south. My maternal grandmother raised 13 children and had aspirations of becoming a teacher but let people including her husband who could not read. She and her children worked in the fields to make ends meet. My paternal grandmother however, raised her children often by herself but managed to sell dinner plates and own an ice cream truck when she was not cleaning houses for whites in Washington,DC. Listening to my family members tell their memories of my grandmothers has inspired me to pursue a Bachelor's Degree in Business Management. Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I can see my grandmothers and I cry from sadness as well as joy because of them, I am a strong black woman and I am raising my daughter to be one. AUNT ROSA LEE-R.I.P.! I LOVE YOU! AND THANKS TO MR. DASH FOR PROVIDING ME WITH FAMILY HISTORY TO HELP ME AND OTHER FAMILY MEMBERS TO BREAK THE CYCLE!!!!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars INNER CITY DRUG LIFE, December 12, 2000

By 

Mary Allen "Mary B Allen" (HARRISBURG, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America (Paperback)

The subject is depressing, but the research and writing are superb. ROSA LEE is a lengthy and well-chronicled look into the daily lives of one multi-generational family in an environment of poverty and drug-infestation, where routine crime and imprisonment are accepted as normal, and where escape is possible, but extremely rare. I'd recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand the mentality and hopelessness of drug addition. This story couldn't have been written any clearer than Leon Dash did in ROSA LEE.