media matters
Crossing the BlackWhite Divide Mark Curnutte ’84 shares 25 years of reporting in Black Cincinnati
“The African American story, with all of its complexities, was the one I wanted to learn and the one I wanted to tell,” said Mark Curnutte ’84, author of Across the Color Line, published by University of Cincinnati Press in December. The former Cincinnati Enquirer reporter is now teaching at Miami as a visiting instructor of social justice studies and journalism.
Chloe Vyzral ’21, from Columbus, is a social justice studies and environmental science major. After graduation, she wants to gain some experience in farming and food sustainability, and then earn a master’s.
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miamian magazine
It was a blisteringly cold January day as I trudged through the city slush to my internship at Our Daily Bread, the largest soup kitchen in Cincinnati. The numbing chill threatened to turn my mood sour, but I simply couldn’t help but feel a light elation wash over me on those lively streets. I saw children skipping home from school, old women smoking cigarettes while chatting at the bus stops, and jam-packed little corner markets, their windows steaming up with customers’ collective exhales. Then a passerby waved and smiled at me from a cocoon of winter garments. It was my Miami professor, Mark, the man who connected me with this incredible internship. He blended in seamlessly with the bustling ecosystem that is Over-the-Rhine. He is a devoted observer of the stories told on every street. He is the author of Across the Color Line. Mark Curnutte ’84, the former race and social justice reporter for The Cincinnati Enquirer, spent decades cultivating a bond with the Black community, illuminating its triumphs and tribulations. “It was bigger than me. Nothing ever made more sense to me — intellectually, emotionally, spiritually — than the singular African American experience of racism, oppression, brutality, and through it all, resilience and perseverance,” Curnutte said. For Across the Color Line, he curated 80 of his journalistic works and selected those that illustrated a narrative of experience, ranging from civil rights victories to the lived reality of generational poverty,
setting them up with an original 11,000-word introduction that explains how, for him, the professional turned personal. The book has a symbiotic relationship with the author, as if the stories helped write the author, instead of the other way around. He explains, “Every story, in a way, added another piece to my ongoing education.”
P HOTO BY CARA OWSLE Y
By Chloe Vyzral ’21
