Mosi Secret

Alfred Knobler Fellow

Mosi Secret is an independent journalist and Knobler Fellow at Type Media Center. He specializes in finding and telling nuanced, character-driven stories that challenge conventional notions about people and their motivations. In these times, he’s especially interested in telling stories that inspire new ways of thinking about our toughest problems. He is currently finishing up his first book, a narrative history of a philanthropic experiment from the 1960s to integrate the elite boarding schools of the South as a way of curing white racism, to be published by Little, Brown.

Mosi’s print features have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, New York Magazine, and National Geographic. And he has done audio stories for This American Life and Radiolab. He was the host and co-producer of the podcast series Radical, about the life and murder conviction of revolutionary Black nationalist H. Rap Brown, and America’s enduring relationship with violence. Before becoming an independent journalist, Mosi was a staff reporter on the Metro Desk of The New York Times, and an investigative reporter at ProPublica covering the criminal legal system.

Mosi’s work has won numerous local and national awards, and has been a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, New America, the New York Public Library, the Russell Sage Foundation, and MacDowell. He was a Public Scholar with the National Endowment for the Humanities, and his work has been supported by grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation.

Mosi grew up in Atlanta and graduated with a degree in comparative religion from Harvard College. He lives with his family in Durham, North Carolina.

https://www.mosisecret.com/

Highlights

Radical

RADICAL is an exploration of the life and murder conviction of Imam Jamil Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, the fiery Black Power leader turned Muslim cleric known for his bold calls for armed resistance to racial violence. When he was arrested in 2000 and later convicted for shooting one sheriff’s deputy and killing another, Al-Amin claimed he was innocent and framed by the FBI. The eight-episode podcast investigates what really happened that fateful night.

"Essay B"

In the late 1960s, a wealthy tobacco heiress saw that integration was happening all around the country—except at prep schools in the South. So she set out to find the best Black students in neighborhood public schools—in hopes of teaching the white prep-school students to be less bigoted. “Essay B” tells the story of how the first two Black students to integrate Virginia Episcopal School succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations.