If there’s one thing Soledad O’Brien has learned in her career as an award-winning broadcast journalist and documentarian, it’s that data doesn’t resonate with audiences the way stories do.
“I think in the craziest of times, the unhappiest of times, the most stressful of times, storytelling matters the most,” O’Brien says. “I don’t know how we find a way for people to come together around being kind and just and fair and not hateful except for understanding each other. And I don’t know how you help people understand each other better except for stories.”
O’Brien’s own background is full of the type of narrative elements you might see in some of her acclaimed work. Her white Australian father and Afro-Cuban mother came to America seeking an education and the opportunities that came with it. Her mother arrived in the 1940s and went to high school in the states, while her father moved here in the 1950s to attend college. They met at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where her father was getting his PhD in physics and fluid mechanics and her mother worked in the chemistry department.
Interracial marriage was illegal in Maryland at the time, so the couple wed in Washington, D.C., in 1959. They later moved their growing family to an all-white neighborhood on Long Island. Soledad was the fifth of six children in the O’Brien brood, all of whom grew up with a distinct sense of who they were and who they weren’t.
“My mother was such a tough nut, and she would be like, ‘Do not let anyone tell you you’re not Black. Do not let anyone tell you you’re not Latino,’” she recalls. “I used to think, ‘You are insane. Hello, crazy lady. Like, what are you talking about?’ There was no one telling me I wasn’t Black. They were all like, ‘Who are you? What are you? Why are you? Why is your hair so funny?’ My mother was trying to tell me that people don’t really get to weigh in on your identity as much as they’ll want to. And so, it was very helpful to me that I didn’t get too stuck in feeling like somebody else got a vote in how I saw myself.”
O’Brien’s mother also taught her the importance of standing up to right a wrong whenever possible. She recalls an incident when a young woman who had been scammed into coming to the United States under the pretense of working as an au pair came to her family’s Catholic church for help. Church officials connected the woman with O’Brien’s mother—who was trilingual in English, Spanish, and French—and she stepped in to spend time with her, offering comfort and support.
“I think sometimes it’s the small things,” says O’Brien. “When somebody says, ‘I think this is wrong, I think this is not okay, so I’m going to do what I can to make it better.’”
After high school, O’Brien attended Harvard University and considered applying to medical school before deciding against it. While she wasn’t quite clear on what she wanted to do career wise, she thought TV news might be interesting. The self-described “good multitasker” got a production assistant job at a Boston NBC affiliate.
Originally, O’Brien says that working in local news was more about paying the rent than anything else. But as she worked her way up the ladder at NBC and then CNN, moving from news writer to field producer to correspondent and anchorwoman, she learned she was good at her job. Even better, she enjoyed it.
While covering Hurricane Katrina in 2005, O’Brien says it was the first time she really felt like she had a mission to explain what was unfolding, and in a way that centered people whose stories weren’t normally told. In the years after, she focused her spotlight on the realities of race in the United States in such CNN documentary shows as Black in America and Latino in America.
“Most of the stories I do, no one else is there with me,” she says. “And that, I think, is a good sign that I need to be there, or else it’s not going to get covered.”
After leaving CNN in 2013, O’Brien went on to establish her own production company, Soledad O’Brien Productions, which aims to develop and produce television and film projects that center character-driven stories about marginalized people and pressing social issues. Two years later, she launched the newsmagazine show Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien, which concluded its final season in August after 10 years. For her work, O’Brien has received 10 Emmy Awards, an Independent Spirit Award, an NAACP Image Award, a Television Academy Honors, two Cinema Eye Honors Awards, five Gracie Awards, and a Critics Choice Awards nomination.
“It has been really fun and really stressful and really challenging and really hard at times—and really freeing at times too,” she says of her work. “I like policy stories. I like stories that confront race in America. I like stories that [make us] confront what we believe and what we think we believe. Finding those projects and figuring out how to tell them is the creative part.”
O’Brien was working on a story about gentrification in West Palm Beach when she met Pranati “Pranoo” Kumar, a former New York City teacher who founded the social justice–driven children’s bookstore Rohi’s Readery in 2021. Earlier this year, Kumar relocated her readery from CityPlace to the Historic Northwest District and launched Rohi’s Liberation Station, a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to honoring historically marginalized communities through a multigenerational literacy learning approach.
“Immediately, Soledad told me that she believed in what I was doing and that she had a place in Harlem that I could use for a fundraiser,” says Kumar, who will host her first New York City fundraiser September 18-20. O’Brien and other advocates will be participating in the weekend, with the opening event taking place at O’Brien’s Harlem home.
“I’ve always been in awe of her,” Kumar says. “Now that she’s taken me under her wing as a mentee and a friend, I know I can come to her when I’m going through a challenging experience because she’s been through her fair share of them. She’s just helped me so much in all facets of my life. I consider her family.”
“Honestly, what I’m doing for her is so minimal to what she’s doing,” O’Brien says of Kumar. “She is a good-hearted person, and she’s got a project that needs to be funded. I can’t imagine how much she does, and she has a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old, too.”
O’Brien is planning another fundraiser for Kumar in West Palm Beach’s Flamingo Park neighborhood, and she’s also focused on her next documentary project, which is taking form right here in the Palm Beaches—an area she now calls home.
O’Brien and her eldest daughter are both equestrians who had been shipping their horses to Wellington for the winter season each year. At first, they were staying in local hotels. But, during a weekend stay at an Airbnb, O’Brien fell in love with Flamingo Park. She bought one bungalow, then a second, and finally the house where she and her family live from November to May each year.
“The neighborhood is so cute, and people are so friendly,” she says, adding that she loves Flamingo Park’s Halloween festivities and her two daughters and two sons—all grown—come down for Thanksgiving. “I’ve lived a zillion places, and I have never had anybody say, ‘Oh my Gosh, we’re so happy that you’re here. Welcome to the neighborhood.’”
As she has settled in, O’Brien has learned that West Palm Beach is a far cry from what it was in the late 1980s, when it was greatly impacted by the crack epidemic. She is working on a yet-to-be-named documentary that explores how far the area has come since then. She is busy researching and lining up funding to finish the project, actively looking for individuals who have been in Flamingo Park since the 1980s and can share their remembrances, as well as those who are interested in investing in the documentary.
“I love West Palm, and I think there’s a great story to be told here,” she says. “All these decisions were happening, like where should the Kravis Center go or should a school go here? Neighbors decided they were going to invest and stay here. And I think what they did is an interesting story.”
And there’s no one better to tell it than O’Brien herself.
Story Credits:
Photography assistant: Kierra Keegan
Hair: Wendy Evans
Makeup: Deborah Koepper, Deborah Koepper Beauty, Palm Beach
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