[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 9 (Wednesday, January 24, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E75]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      NEW BEDFORD HONORS LEON DASH

                                 ______


                           HON. BARNEY FRANK

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, January 24, 1996

  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, on Martin Luther King Day I 
was very pleased to be able to attend a breakfast organized by the 
Black Professional Association of New Bedford, MA.
  The event was attended by hundreds of people, and was an impressive 
tribute to Dr. King. The main speaker at the breakfast was, very 
appropriately, Leon Dash, now an award winning reporter for the 
Washington Post, and a native of New Bedford
  Mr. Dash's speech was an extraordinarily thoughtful and informative 
discussion of the problems of teenage pregnancy. It reflected the 
painstaking and creative investigative work he has done on this 
subject, and indeed Mr. Dash's work represents one of the major 
contributions that anyone has made to our understanding of this 
important problem.
  The quality of the speech Mr. Dash gave is an indication of the high 
quality of the work he has done as a journalist and sociologist over 
the past several decades. After graduating from Howard University in 
1968, he worked as a reporter at the Washington Post, and then joined 
the Peace Corps serving as a volunteer teaching in a rural high school 
in Kenya from 1969 to 1970. In 1971 he returned to the Post, serving 
from 1979 to 1984 as West Africa's bureau chief. At that point he 
joined the newspaper's investigative desk where he continues to work 
and where he does enormously important journalism.
  His book on teenage pregnancy, ``When Children Want Children: The 
Urban Crisis in Teenage Childbearing'' was published in 1989, and he 
has also coauthored ``The Shame of the Prisons'' which was published in 
1972. Last year, along with Washington Post photographer Lucian 
Perkins, Mr. Dash won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism. He 
also in that year won first prize for print journalism from the Robert 
F. Kennedy Book and Journalism awards. And in 1990 his book received a 
PEN/Martha Albrand special citation for nonfiction work. He has also 
won the Washington Independent Writers President's Award for excellence 
in urban affairs reporting, first prize--Public Service from the 
Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, the international reporting 
awards of Africare and the Capitol Press Club, and the George Polk 
Award of the Overseas Press Club. Mr. Dash has won a number of other 
awards as well, and they reflect the extremely high quality of his 
work, and his dedication to helping provide our society with the 
information we need if we are to deal seriously with the problems that 
confront us.
  Racism is the unhappiest legacy of our Nation's history. We have 
struggled hard with this terrible legacy over the past decades, and we 
have made significant progress in lessening its terrible affects. But 
much remains to be done, and our ability to continue this work in the 
spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, is enormously enhanced by the kind of 
serious, thoughtful and intellectually honest work that Leon Dash does. 
There is no greater service that someone can perform than to give to a 
democracy the information it needs if it is to deal honestly with its 
gravest problems. Leon Dash does this with excellence and commitment.

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