Beth Macy
Deadlines help! Seriously, a story has to move me for me to dig into it. Then teasing out the facts, unraveling one thread at a time, becomes this great search. In "Truevine," the most astonishing things didn’t revolve around the sideshow spectacle but rather around what ordinary African-Americans faced during Jim Crow. The daily cruelties didn’t seem to shift so much between the end of slavery and civil rights. To bring those truths to light, I had to piece together so many disparate threads, driving octogenarians and nonagenarians and even centenarians around the old neighborhoods, sifting through old property deeds and maps, and reading oral histories. Archival research only took me so far; to really put meat on the bones of the story, I had to go out and really talk to people on the ground. And that, to me, is inspiring. Reporting is such fun, though -- there are still days I can't believe I get paid to do it!
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