Five years ago, journalist Dick Weiss ’73 was hired to write a book about an African American icon who had started a boys club in St. Louis, Mo., in the 1960s. A former editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Weiss set out to interview some of the club’s former members from the predominantly African American neighborhood of north St. Louis. “I ended up interviewing like 85 people — I just couldn’t stop,” Weiss says. “I was fascinated.” Although he grew up only a few miles away, he had no idea what the lives of his community members were really like and the racial inequities they faced. “These people were my age, reflecting on their boyhood, and I realized how much I was oblivious to what was going on — how cruel our town was, and how resilient these men were.”
From that first deep dive grew Weiss’ current project, a nonprofit racial equity storytelling initiative called Before Ferguson Beyond Ferguson. He named it after the St. Louis inner suburb that burst into national consciousness in 2014 during the unrest following the police killing of Michael Brown. Along with a racially diverse team of journalists, Weiss has written long-form stories profiling families in St. Louis’ communities of color. “We wanted to write stories that would be compelling to privileged people and show what people in this region have been up against for generations,” Weiss says, “how the educational system has been stacked against them and how they have struggled to gain their purchase on the American dream.” With financial support from the Pulitzer Center and other donors, the team partnered with local newspapers and magazines to publish the articles. They are also available on the Before Ferguson Beyond Ferguson website.
Weiss grew up in a journalistic household, with a father who worked as a producer for a TV station and a mother who worked in public relations for a department store. “From the time I could remember, I was having dinner with Pulitzer Prize winners and hearing them tell their war stories,” he says. At Colgate, he majored in Russian studies and dabbled a bit in journalism himself when he and a friend hitchhiked across the country during one January term, writing up the experience for the Maroon.
After graduation, Weiss embarked upon his newspaper career, first with the Kansas City Star, before coming home to the Post-Dispatch, where he worked for 30 years. Starting as a general assignment reporter covering everything from fluff pieces to crime scenes, he worked his way up to a variety of editing positions. He never gave up writing, however. “I found if you wrote stories in a narrative form, people will read them and engage with them,” Weiss says. He has followed a similar strategy with his current project, delivering richly painted portraits of struggling families that defy the odds.
When the pandemic hit, the organization started a new endeavor — the 63106 Project, named after a downtown ZIP code hard hit by health concerns. Average life expectancy there is 67, compared with 85 in the ZIP code one digit away. Weiss says: “Privilege is being able to draw breath at age 70.” Recent stories include one about a single father with four daughters who lost his job as a garage maintenance worker due to the pandemic, and another about a woman with a congenital heart defect who’s nevertheless been working to organize community food drives. “I like to think that when people see how resourceful some of these folks are, it will erase the stereotypes people have,” Weiss says. “Hopefully our stories will inspire people to engage with policy issues sensibly and with sensitivity, and actually do things in their everyday lives to help people less well off than them.”
Wiley Price, the photographer who took Weiss’ portrait for Colgate Magazine, lent his skills to the 63106 Project.