In this month’s episode of the Problem Solved Podcast, I sit down with former New York Times and Washington Post reporter Lee Daniels to talk about his extraordinary career writing “the first draft of history.” Daniels co-wrote  Jackie Robinson: A Memoir with Jackie’s widow Rachel Robinson and wrote the New York Times obituary for the civil right’s activist James Baldwin. If you’ve ever wondered how great journalists do their craft and make the decisions that lead to powerful storytelling, this episode is for you!

Listen to the episode and learn:

More about Lee Daniels: From the 1970s to the early 1990s Lee A. Daniels’ was a  reporter for WGBH-TV in Boston, a reporter and editorial writer for The Washington Post and a  reporter the New York Times. He spent another decade as editor of the National Urban League’s The State of Black America, and subsequently was founding editor of TheDefendersOnline.com, the blog of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. For several years, he contributed an opinion column to the National Newspaper Publishers Association and to the online publication, Emerge.com.  Daniels collaborated with Rachel Robinson on Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait, (1996) her memoir of her life with the baseball great; and with Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. on a collection of his speeches, Make It Plain: Standing Up and Speaking Out (2008). More recently, he collaborated with John E. Jacob —  who succeeded Jordan as head of the Urban League in 1982 and led it through the Reagan and Bush 41 presidencies — on his just-published memoir, I Will Fear No Evil.  Daniels also contributed an essay on Martin Luther King, Jr. to Africa’s Peacemakers: Nobel Peace Laureates of African Descent (2014) and an essay on Malcolm X / El Hajj Malik El Shabazz for The Pan-African Pantheon: Prophets, Poets and Philosophers (2020) Daniels is the author of Last Chance: The Political Threat to Black America (2008).

Lee A.  Daniels was born in Chicago and grew up there and in Boston. He is a graduate of the Boston Latin School and a 1971 graduate of Harvard College. 

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