105: Take A Negro Home
Jun 12, 1998
Two stories of people who try to cross the color line — and why it's still so hard. We hear the story of a failed interracial marriage and the story of a teenager from a poor inner city neighborhood (Cedric Jennings, pictured) who ends up at an Ivy League University — and how he barely survives there.
- Cedric Jennings grew up in Southeast Washington, in one of the poorest communities in the country. Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind followed him for over two-and-a-half years, as Cedric tried to make it through high school and work his way into an Ivy League university. Once he gets there, he discovers that all the qualities that got him out of the ghetto make him an outcast in the Ivy League. Ron Suskind's reports on Cedric for the Wall Street Journal won a Pulitzer Prize; his book about him is called A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League. (21 minutes)
