Her desk faces the side where the five streets meet, the side with the “pig ear shack” barbecue stand and Ethel’s House of Soul cafe. Behind her lies a redeveloped Washington Street, lined with rebuilt homes and offices.
It’s not that she’s turning her back to the new side of Denver’s Five Points neighborhood – her quaint white house- turned-office is one of the neighborhood’s upgrades. It’s just that her heart is still with the side that takes heat for being one of the worst areas in Denver. The side that she says isn’t as bad as the reputation that precedes it.
Rosalind “Bee” Harris-Diaw, 55, didn’t set out to change a community when she moved to Denver in 1980. She wasn’t particularly interested in the media, and she definitely wasn’t planning on starting a monthly newspaper.
But despite her intentions, or lack thereof, she did all that.
She’s come a long way from the girl who got to Colorado from Nebraska on the coattails of her second husband. Her busy-bee lifestyle – where many assume her nickname came from – has molded her into an icon of Five Points.
Most people know her as the publisher of Urban Spectrum, the monthly newspaper that targets people of color in Denver. Most people don’t know she was initially lured into the project by two partners who bailed before the third year.
Harris-Diaw said she stayed with the paper because the black community needed an alternate media outlet. Now, after 18 years, she’s hoping to morph the content of the paper into “Urban Spectrum Live,” a monthly lifestyles television show.
The show has been in the works for almost a year but now sits on a dusty shelf because of a common hang-up: lack of money.
“It’s really difficult trying to do this when you don’t have a whole lot of staff,” she said. “I just wish the right person would come along and see the big picture.”
Harris-Diaw has become accustomed to shoestring budgets, having run the paper on one for years. Coordination with the contract staff has become second nature, and Urban Spectrum has missed only one edition since its start.
She can run the paper with her eyes closed, even though her roots in journalism are weak. Her background is in graphic design and business, and she studied fine arts during her time at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
“I sometimes think of Bee as a camel when it comes to sleeping and working,” said Rosanne Makinen, the editor of Urban Spectrum. “She can sit there for eight, 10, 12, 14 hours. Sleep for an hour. Maybe take a shower, go to an event. Go back to work for eight hours. She goes on very little sleep, then: big crash.”
Harris-Diaw’s workaholic lifestyle seems to be a testament to her nickname, but she said it really came from a pronunciation problem her siblings had as kids. They called her “Baby” because “Rosalind” was too long for them to say. Then it changed to “Bebe,” and now she’s known as “Bee.”
The nickname, however, fits her perfectly, and she admits she needs to learn to say “no” to the bureaus, boards and committees that line up for a piece of her time. She said she’s been doing better with it, but her goal of cutting back falls short nearly every time youths are involved. Harris-Diaw’s heart for youths is partially what fueled “Junior Spectrum,” a youth-produced newspaper from Denver middle and high school students.
“There’s a lot of them that need some support, that need something to do,” she said. “It allows the students to use their talent and energy in really positive ways. A lot of them are creative with graffiti. We like them to put that down on paper.”
East High School student Nadirah LuQ man met Harris-Diaw through the summer program and has since become the paper’s office assistant. Though LuQman doesn’t see journalism on her horizon, she said working with Harris-Diaw has taught her skills she’ll take outside of the Urban Spectrum office.
“She’s taught me to stand up for myself and to take risks and observe all you can,” she said. “I see the way she handles things.”
Harris-Diaw has become an expert at the juggling act that is her packed schedule, balancing work with family and frequently intermixing the two. She met her husband, Papa Babacar Diaw, through a trip to Ghana with the Colorado-Ghana Children’s Fund, an alliance that raises money for children’s education in Ghana.
The time she spends with her husband is sometimes limited to how many city events she can drag him to, but she hasn’t forgotten the value of personal time. Between her duties to the newspaper and the city, she manages to find time for her two grandsons, whose pictures are taped proudly to her office door.
She has yet to find time to write the book she’s been thinking about, but she assumes that eventually the time will come.
“I always wonder,” she said, “how do people get so much done in their lifetime?”
Staff writer Melissa Cassutt can be reached at 303-820-1475 or mcassutt@denverpost.com.
