Mosi Secret, Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fellow, spent his fellowship year writing a book about a little known effort to desegregate elite boarding schools in the South beginning in the late 1960s. The desegregation project recruited and provided scholarships for black students to go to prep school, and quietly doubled as a social experiment, seeking to measure whether integration would decrease bigotry among elite whites. Secret is an independent journalist based in Brooklyn, whose features have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, and GQ. Previously he was a reporter for the Times, and before joining the Times, he was a reporter at the nonprofit investigative newsroom ProPublica. He got his start in journalism at alternative weekly newspapers. His work has won numerous local and national awards, and has been supported by fellowships with the American Academy in Berlin, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowship. He grew up in Atlanta and graduated from Harvard College.
