CCLP is pleased to welcome Sylvester Monroe as a Senior Fellow and as a new member of the USC Annenberg community. For the past three years, Monroe served as an Assistant Foreign Editor at The Washington Post in charge of reporting from Europe and South Asia. As a Senior Fellow, he will focus on news and media issues related to the condition of black males in America.
During his storied career, Monroe has had a variety of important assignments with Newsweek, TIME, The San Jose Mercury News, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Ebony. During his career at Newsweek, he served as Boston Bureau Chief and one of the magazine’s White House correspondents. At TIME, he was a national correspondent in Los Angeles and the South Bureau Chief in Atlanta, where he was responsible for news coverage from the Mason-Dixon Line to Florida and the Caribbean and from the Atlantic Ocean to Texas. While reporting from Los Angeles, he was TIME’s principal reporter for post-riot coverage of the Rodney King trial, as well as on the 1993 cover story, “Is L.A. Going to Hell?” He has also covered topics ranging from school desegregation to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
Monroe originally started as a full-time correspondent in Newsweek’s Boston bureau in 1973, eventually becoming the Boston Bureau Chief from 1983 to 1985. In 1987, Monroe led a team of reporters for a Newsweek cover story about his return to Chicago’s housing projects, exploring the lives of eleven of his childhood friends. He turned the story, co-authored with Peter Goldman, into a bestseller called Brothers: Black and Poor—A True Story of Courage and Survival.
“Sylvester Monroe’s award-winning writing about foreign policy, technology, politics, and the intersection of race, poverty, and public policy, will be an invaluable addition to the life of the Center,” CCLP Director Geoffrey Cowan said.
Originally from Leland, Mississippi, Monroe, who now lives in Los Angeles, is a graduate of Harvard University and was a Knight Fellow at Stanford University. A long-time member of the National Association of Black Journalists, he is currently researching a new book for Random House about the Harvard Class of 1973.