Finding The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates in Chicago
The Beautiful Struggle . An eloquent title for a coming-of-age memoir by someone who grew up in Baltimore during the Crack epidemic in the 1980s, an epidemic that we now know was cruelly engineered by a powerful team-- the CIA and the Contras in Nicaragua --to take down urban Black America. The original reporter who brought this information to light in 1996, Gary Webb, was discredited by The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times after his investigation appeared in the San Jose Mercury News. His journalism career was ruined, and the truth about crack in America wasn't fully revealed until after Webb took his life by suicide in 2004. A survivor of this epidemic who was raised, along with six siblings, during this time tells his personal story and the story of his family in his book The Beautiful Struggle : Ta-Nehisi Coates . Even though Coates is well known for his most recent book Between the World and Me , as well as his writing for The Atlantic , I