Leon Dash, who was Rosa Lee Cunningham?

Who's the fellow in the picture here?

Why did you do this book?

Where was Rosa Lee Cunningham born?

How many times did she marry?

How many children did she have in her life?

And what's their basic outline on those eight children? Where are they today?

And after Richard is Eric. Eric works for the US Park Service, which he does today, and lives in suburban Maryland. After Eric is Patty. Patty is in...

She was born in 1958, and this is...thirty-six…

Thirty eight, yes. And then after Patty is Ducky, Rosa Lee's youngest son. He is in jail, a long term crack addict and petty thief. He is presently...

She lived in 18 different places over her lifetime, twice in shelters for the homeless. She grew up in poverty very deep poverty here in Washington...

I use a methodology where you're supposed to ... I try to get as close to the people that I'm interviewing -- as close as possible, spend a lot of time...

At a McDonald's, at First and New York Avenue Northeast, where we spent a lot of time. She went to a methadone clinic near there every day every morning...

Methadone is a synthetic drug that was introduced in the early 1970s to block a heroin addict's craving for heroin in an effort to cut down on burglary...

Orally. And you take it in front of a nurse because there also is an illicit methadone market. So the nurse has to see you swallow it. You have to stand...

I don't know. I really don't know. I think it would be kind of dangerous because it has the effects; methadone in and of itself is addictive. People...

She got AIDS either through prostitution or sharing needles with four of her children. Four of her eight children were drug addicted, two daughters...

Yes.

Yes.

He was just killed in '93. He was killed by a woman who had a long history of crack addiction in a relationship that they had, where he would pay her...

Exactly.

Rosa Lee. She had a lesbian relationship that began in 1972, when she moved into a federally subsidized apartment complex called Clifton Terrace. And...

Exactly. When her daughter was growing up, Rosa Lee would have her tricks she worked in a nightclub called the Cocoa Club, which here in Washington...

This started when Patty was about five years old and continued until Patty was about 10 years old. And Rosa Lee then would have sex with the customer,...

Exactly. When Patty was 11, Rosa Lee prostituted Patty with an adult customer of Rosa Lee's. A man who she knew as a regular customer came by and asked...

How old was the male relative?

At any time in this process, did you just say, "I can't take any more of this"?

How many underclass are there?

What do you define as underclass?

Your full time job?

How long have you done that?

Where did you go to college?

Studying what?

Where did you grow up?

What was that like?

What did your parents do?

How many brothers and sisters?

Are you married?

How old are the kids?

Who in your life affected the direction you took? How did you end up in journalism? How did you go to Howard?

After I graduated from Howard, I took these courses in African studies and I joined the Peace Corps and went off to live in Kenya, East Africa, for...

When did Rosa Lee first shoplift?

We were looking at a picture that I want you to identify here, that Rosa Lee's there on the right. Who else is in the picture?

How much did she steal in her life? And I know you talk a lot about this in the book. How about the rest of the family? Did they all shoplift?

How often did she go to jail?

What was her longest?

And you say, out of the eight children, only two ...

Did you talk to those two?

And it came down to Alvin it came down to a period when they were very young, and both of them were in elementary school. Alvin had a reaction of shame...

Well, the children were teasing him about being welfare poor, and that developed within him a class consciousness because these children who were teasing...

The other children?

I have no idea. They didn't collude. They didn't share this information as children. When I was interviewing Eric, months after I interviewed Alvin,...

And that infuriated Eric, and he did a lot of fighting at school because of that. And he even fought bigger kids, much bigger than him. And if he couldn't...

Did you talk to these mentors?

And they remember these two?

Why did these folks talk to you -- all of them, the whole family?

And were they ever worried about their peers?

And when she went into the jail they don't give you anything in the jail to help you ease your withdrawal from the drug -- and she didn't think that...

So given my relationship with her, which began in DC jail and when she came out in May of 1988, I began then to follow her outside prison. She, over...

The day that Rosa Lee took a shot of heroin in front of me. Now she had told me about this there was a period there was a 14 month period where she...

No, but that's all she had to say. I already knew what I was feeling. I had thought I had covered it, that the facade was the objective and distant...

Amphetamines, that's what she started with in her lesbian relationship. She started relatively late in life. She started using amphetamines at the age...

At that period, it was relatively expensive compared to today. Then it was $40 a billy. A billy is 1/4 teaspoon of heroin. Today, it's down to for the...

Some people snort it in the powdered form. That's usually how people start. And eventually, they switch to intravenous drug use injecting it in a vein...

It can last, depending on the purity of the heroin, six to eight hours.

At any drug market. Rosa Lee herself ran what are called oiling joints in Clifton Terrace. An oiler joint is where heroin addicts go to shoot up their...

Granddaughter.

Five year old granddaughter in the summer of '88. When the child's mother, Rosa Lee's youngest daughter was in jail, Rosa Lee was selling heroin, again,...

I didn't see any of that.

Well, Bob Woodward, then my supervisor at the investigative desk at that time, felt it was too dangerous, that we would be exposing myself and Rosa...

Oh, very often. But he developed his relationship independent of mine. The photograph that you showed, for example, of Rosa Lee going through the stolen...

No. None. Not one.

I think it was in September an eight part series in September of 1994.

She became a minor celebrity in terms of going around, doing a lot of talking, both at drug rehabilitation centers and at different churches in Washington...

Here's a picture and it's chapter ...

You rode down with her in the car?

And so I went and told Rosa Lee that, and she was kind of skeptical at first because she had been there once before when she was 7, and she remembered...

I said, "Why don't you want to go?" And she said, "Well, you know, I was down there when I was a child and they don't have any outhouses or anything;...

Rosa Lee Cunningham got how much public assistance? How many different programs that we hear about all the time, came to her?

Is that welfare?

Public housing?

What did that mean?

What would she pay for public housing?

What would she pay for private housing?

Food stamps?

From public housing, food stamps, AFDC ...

... SSI, all that?

We miss anything there? You said that the trucks would show up with ...

But when she needed drug money, you say that she would finagle all this stuff somewhere?

That would be the local vs. the national Medicare?

But isn't there more state involvement with Medicaid?

Right.

How close did you get to her?

When did she stop prostituting?

How old was she when she died?

What year did she die again?

And where were you when she died?

And I couldn't believe it. I had now known Reco since he was 8 years old. Now here he was at 15 and he was dead. I said, "What are you talking about?"...

That day...

That day, that morning, I went to the funeral, Reco's funeral, which was a very there wasn't a dry eye in the place. It was a very painful funeral....

Well, right after all the celebration died down, I left and went over to Howard University Hospital and went up to the receptionist and said, "Which...

Bobby -- at the same hospital, Howard University Hospital. And that was July 4th the last time I saw her. July 7th, at 7:30 in the morning, her son...

I liked her. I thought that she had made some very bad choices, particularly the prostitution of her oldest daughter. That was a horrible choice and...

That's Rosa Lee's oldest grandson, Rocky Lee Brown Jr. His nickname is "Junior." He is in prison serving a 15 to 45 year term for his second armed robbery...

Oh, actually, the armed robbery took place in February of '94, the second armed robbery.

Oh, yeah. And I'll be seeing him again soon. He's now 24. I saw him in January. I just recently saw his mother, who also is in prison.

That's Patty. Yeah.

I ask them what they are doing. Well, Patty and I talked about the fact that she's moved into full blown AIDS now. A lot of that ...

Patty and Rosa, right.

That was taken ... we determined that she's 38 now. That was taken when she was about 34.

Well, she's in prison, and every day is a struggle just to get out of bed, because she's weak and feverish often.

Only one. She had Junior, the boy ...

There were two. Patty did, two back door abortions with coat hangers. She had Junior when she was 14 and she had Junior essentially because she wanted...

That's two of Rosa Lee's sons. That's the oldest, Bobby, on the right and Richard, her fourth born son, on the left; both of them inside the DC jail...

Yeah.

Forty three.

Poverty. Ignorance. One of the most significant things for me in Rosa Lee's life is that she attended DC public schools up until the seventh grade and...

None. Alvin, who is the station master now at the Metro Rail System, got a GED in the Army and went on to do college study, but he's the only one.

Yes.

One 16.

One 34.

Right.

Oh, yeah. Quite a bit. .

My oldest daughter is a physician's assistant and mother of a five year old son. And my youngest daughter is in the 11th grade at East Chapel Hill High...

I think they have mixed feelings about it because a lot of people, particularly middle class black people, are defensive about looking in depth or in...

Oh, yes. Twenty percent of the underclass is white. But it's mainly ...

... a rural population. It's not...

Oh, yeah.

Right. Criminal and abuse of children, prostitution of children, everything. But they but middle class blacks, because of the legacy of racial oppression...

Yes.

Thank you.