Ellis Cose, Senior Adviser

Ellis Cose was just a typical Chicago teenager.  While a student at Albert G. Lane Technical High School, he wrote a 140 page paper on the city’s 1968 riots. That brought him to the attention of the Poet Laureate of Illinois who invited him to join her writers’ group. And by the age of 19, he had his own column in the Chicago Sun-Times. He has been writing ever since: for the Detroit Free Press and USA Today, as president of the Institute for Journalism Education at UC Berkeley and editorial page editor at the New York Daily News and, for seventeen years, as a columnist for Newsweek.  Along the way, Ellis has become one of the foremost commentators on race, class, poverty and prejudice in America. He is the author of a dozen books including the best-selling “Rage of a Privileged Class.” In addition to a little personal project—writing his memoirs—Ellis is working on a historical essay for Pinkerton that looks at the foundation’s fifty years of giving in the context of changing trends in youth development.