Published by the University of Cincinnati Press

Across the Color Line: Reporting 25 Years in Black Cincinnati presents newspaper reporter Mark Curnutte’s stories published in The Cincinnati Enquirer over a twenty-five-year period beginning in 1993. With hard-won insights gained from years of community reporting, Curnutte describes experiences of African-Americans living in Cincinnati through individual and neighborhood profiles, explorations of community institutions, historical perspectives, and issue stories. The anthology tells a sweeping narrative of a city suffering and maturing through turn-of-the-century racial growing pains and increased racial sophistication and diversity. These stories are complimented by excerpts from Curnutte’s personal journal, providing his reflection on his role as a white man and reporter making the intentional decision to work and live across the color line.

Mark Curnutte is a full-time faculty member in the Department of Sociology and Gerontology at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, his alma mater. He is a career newspaper reporter who worked 25 years at the Cincinnati Enquirer, where he was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team for “Seven Days of Heroin” in 2017 and was selected Best Reporter in Ohio three times (2012, ’13 and ’18) by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). He is the author of A Promise in Haiti: A Reporter’s Notes on Families and Daily Lives, published in 2011, and was a winner of the Foreword Reviews 2011 award for a book in the social sciences . He lives in Cincinnati with his wife, Diana Maria Lara.