As a little girl living in the Roxbury section of Boston, Tatsha Robertson remembers her eyes lingering on a Boston Herald photo of a black woman and child falling off a fire escape. “It scared me to death,” says Robertson, whose family later moved to Greenville, South Carolina, “but I wanted to be a reporter because of it.” When she landed a job at The Boston Globe years later—the start of an investigative journalism career spanning more than 20 years—her first assignment was tracking down the little girl who survived the accident. “I found her,” Robertson says, learning about the hard life she had endured. Years later, as a professor at New York University, she always discussed the story behind the picture with her journalism students.
There is nothing more I would rather do than to write and tell stories. I can’t not do it. It’s like breathing. And I’m good at it. And when you’re good at something that you love, that’s a blessing.
While editing news stories at magazines like Essence and People, 48-year-old Robertson was “obsessed with how parents raise high-achieving people—not just high-achieving kids, but people who grow up to be more successful.” After years of conducting interviews—“I even interviewed Obama!” Robertson says proudly—she teamed up with Harvard professor Ron Ferguson to write an upcoming book. “The stories are just un-friggin-believable,” she says. The WeWork Montague St. member is also working on a “street blog” called The Ordinary Genius Project, highlighting the stories of people she meets on the streets of New York. “Everybody has a genius in them, and I wanted to pull that out of them.”
Photos: Andrew Prise