“When I was a freshman, sitting in my room in Griffin House,” John Guess, Jr. ’71 remembers, “I read that line, and it stuck with me. It’s with me to this day.” From the classic 1902 W.B. Dubois essay “Of the Training of Black Men,” the passage was somewhat of a starting point for Guess’ experience at Johns Hopkins and his lifelong appreciation of the arts.

Raised in segregated Houston, Texas, Guess arrived in Baltimore in 1967 during what he gently recalls as “a very special period” in the history of Johns Hopkins University, and America in general. The city was beginning to embrace civil rights and multiculturalism, but was a far cry from desegregated. The same could be said for Johns Hopkins University, which had only recently welcomed its first black students.

John Guess, Jr. ’71 in front of “Fort HMACC,” a contemporary art installation by Otabenga Jones & Associates inside the Houston Museum of African American Culture. The museum’s CEO, Guess commissioned the piece to symbolize the museum’s fight to reestablish itself in the Houston arts scene.   

Yet those who came, like Guess, were inspired to hasten Hopkins’ acceptance of different races and cultures. Not far into his freshman year, Guess played a critical role in insisting that the university authorize and recognize a Black Student Union – going as far as occupying the Homewood Museum (formerly used for JHU offices) for a day, when administrators downplayed this request.

That’s the side of his story everyone wants to tell, says Guess. “But what was really the best part of Hopkins for me, as a kid who came from segregation, was being exposed to other cultures and people. I really became cognizant that the African American experience never has, and never will be, impacted by only African Americans.” For example, Guess was the first black president of the JHU Student Government. “There were about 20 or so other black students at the time,” he remembers. “I couldn’t have done that without other people voting for me.”

Thus, ironically during a time of civil divide and turmoil, Guess left the Krieger School feeling culturally broadened. “When I was at Hopkins, the students and professors were very cultural. I was there when people like (poet and musician) Gil Scott Heron and Lowery Stokes Sims (the first black curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) were on campus,” says Guess, “and the Baltimore Museum of Art is just sitting right there at the bottom of the place… can’t miss it.”

Guess put his cross-cultural experience to use upon returning to Houston, where over the years he helped grow a family real estate consulting firm. He stayed heavily involved in the arts as well, working to bring significant works of art to lower income communities and garnering board member and leadership appointments at local institutions like the Houston Contemporary Arts Museum, the Houston Arts Alliance, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts Glassell School.

In 2009, Guess was vaulted further into the spotlight of the Houston arts scene when community leaders urged him to lead the revitalization of a dormant effort to establish the Houston Museum of African American Culture. As CEO, Guess was inspired to take the struggling museum in a new direction, and quickly gained a reputation for supporting contemporary African American artists who transcend race and build a multicultural community – not unlike those who inspired him at Hopkins. “Once you turn on to the fact that everybody has something you can learn from,” he says, the sky’s the limit. “I use the arts to expose people to the fact that we are all Africans. The whole history of man started in Africa. At the end of the day, we’re all the same people.” And true art, to paraphrase Dubois, winces not at the ethnicity of its viewer.

When Donald Koran ’80, MA ’82, PhD, worked in Rwanda from 1999 to 2001, as deputy chief of mission, the second-highest diplomatic post in a U.S. embassy, the country’s 1994 genocide was still a fresh wound. Parts of Rwanda were still dangerous, and at times, U.S. officials had to travel with armed guards.

When Koran returned to Rwanda last summer, this time as the newly appointed U.S. ambassador, conditions were different. “Living in Rwanda today is a pleasant surprise,” he says. Coming back “makes me appreciate the fairly dramatic changes that have occurred since I was last here.” The country is safer, the economy is growing, and the health sector is improving.

But Rwanda is still very much a developing country. That makes Koran, an economist, well-suited to his new role. After completing his PhD at Johns Hopkins, Koran worked at Tulane University, the Federal Trade Commission, and the National Cable Television Association. But he soon realized he didn’t want to focus on narrow economic problems; he wanted a more “varied” career. That desire led him to the Foreign Service. Joining in 1984, Koran has worked all over the world, including Cuba, Venezuela, Morocco, Niger, and Madagascar.

Now as ambassador, he has found the ultimate in varied job loads. “I deal with it all: politics, economics, public diplomacy, consular issues, embassy management, the Peace Corps, military relations, and the whole range of our foreign assistance programs,” he says. On a typical day, Koran may meet with representatives from the Centers for Disease Control to discuss health programs in Rwanda, help an American nongovernmental organization understand legal issues, and tour local businesses making jewelry and crafts that are exported to American markets.

It’s also rewarding to see the country doing better, he notes. “Rwanda has made impressive economic strides since the genocide.” Over the last 10 years, the country’s gross domestic product has grown by an average of 7 percent, managing to expand even during the recent global economic crisis.

“A number of factors have contributed to its success,” he says, “but it largely comes down to attracting resources and using them well.” In addition to effectively using foreign aid—the United States provided Rwanda with more than $200 million in foreign assistance last year, mostly for health-related initiatives—the Rwandan government has instituted economic policies and political reforms that have cracked down on corruption and have made Rwanda an attractive place to invest in and start a business, Koran says. In fact, this year, the World Bank ranked it as 45th out of 183 countries in terms of ease of conducting business.

Rwanda is also making social and health improvements. With better access to health care, for example, rates of childhood mortality under the age of 5 have dropped by half over the past five years. And women have gained greater rights, playing an active role in reshaping the country. The 2003 Rwandan Constitution specifies that women must fill 24 of the 80 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, Rwanda’s lower house of parliament. Today, women exceed that quota, making up more than half of the Chamber.

Given all these developments, Koran says, “a remarkably large number of Rwandans, many highly educated and well-established abroad, have returned to build their country.”

Still, “Rwanda remains a poor country with many needs,” he says. “Rwanda has made great strides in reconciliation since the 1994 genocide, but it is a long-term process, and much still needs to be done.” Rwanda has to find a balance between preventing future ethnic conflicts and allowing an open, democratic political system to flourish. Critics of the government say that Rwanda’s genocide laws, some of which are aimed at preventing ethnic hate speech, limit legitimate political opposition and debate.

But for Koran, Rwanda’s successes are what make it such a “fascinating” place to work. “So much is happening here,” he says. “It’s exciting to watch it and satisfying to be part of it in some small way.”

After a childhood that took her from Vienna to Belgrade to Washington, D.C., and Jakarta, it’s only fitting that Marian Smith ’05 would make her career covering the globe. Only now she’s doing it from her desk at msnbc.com in London.

As an editor-producer for the online news organization, Smith has a high-pressure job producing the website’s front page and updating stories about everything from Europe’s economic woes to the nuclear disaster in Japan. “It’s really, really busy, all the time,” she says.

With both parents in the Foreign Service, Smith grew accustomed to moving every few years as a child, changing not just countries but continents. Having at one time or another spoken Serbo-Croatian, Indonesian, French, and Italian, she says with a laugh, “I grew up with this dilemma, where am I from?”

Although she attended high school in London, Smith, now 29, wanted to attend college in the States, and Johns Hopkins was her first choice. “A big appeal of Hopkins was the strong international community,” she says. She pursued a major in international studies until discovering a passion for literature and writing, and changed her major to English. Smith says she especially enjoyed Professor Allen Grossman’s courses on the Bible and Shakespeare.

After graduating from Johns Hopkins, Smith entered an 18-month graduate program in journalism at New York University, with a focus on cultural reporting and criticism. For a time she fancied herself following in the footsteps of film critic Pauline Kael. “I really enjoyed it, but I discovered that I prefer hard news,” she says. She returned to London in 2007 and took a job on the news desk at the BBC. “They were just beginning to integrate all three forms of media: radio, TV, and Web,” she says, “so it was pretty exciting.”

Smith met some people who worked at NBC News and msnbc.com and put in an application there. That began what she describes as a “very long interview process.” While waiting for an opening, she held a couple of other writing jobs, including a stint at the company that publishes Monocle magazine, before getting the call to join msnbc.com in 2010. “It has been two years, and I absolutely love it,” she says.

London is where the globetrotting Smith is finally putting down roots—at least for the foreseeable future. She and her husband, Dan Montalbano, who works for CBS Interactive, recently bought a house there.

When Smith is at work, she and her colleagues are responsible for updating the website to cover world events that occur on their shift. MSNBC, based in Redmond, Wash., has bureaus in New York, London, and Washington, D.C., with the latter focused mostly on U.S. political coverage. Content management duties for msnbc.com are assigned on the basis of time zones, Smith explains.

The team in Washington state covers news that is breaking on their shift, and the London team comes on board at 6 a.m. London time. Seven hours later, the London team hands the reins to their New York colleagues, who pass it back to the Redmond team for the overnight.

Smith described 2011 as an “insane” year for news, starting with the shooting of then U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and including the Arab Spring, several natural disasters, and the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, which was followed just two days later by the killing of Osama bin Laden. The European debt crisis and the U.S. Republican primary have kept them hopping as well.

And 2012 should be just as eventful, she says, with London hosting both the Olympics and Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee celebration this summer.

But for Smith, as for any journalist, the pressure and fast pace are part of what she loves about the job. “As much as I stress about it, I think we all get a really big kick out of it,” she says. “And when we’ve done something well, it’s so satisfying.”

Frank Bond ’77 inside the Newseums’s News History Gallery.

Will Kirk / Homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

Standing beneath 12-foot-tall slabs of graffiti-covered concrete, Frank Bond ’77 explains journalism’s role in bringing down the Berlin Wall. Whereas people could not travel across the barrier, information could. “As technology advanced,” he says, “it got to a point where the Iron Curtain could not keep the truth from the rest of the world.”

To design the Newseum’s Berlin Wall Gallery, one of the world’s largest displays of a section of the wall, Bond spent more than a year researching Cold War–era Germany, sifting through newsreels and interviewing American and German journalists and activists who had witnessed the wall’s effects firsthand. Working as a producer at the Newseum—a Washington, D.C. museum dedicated to the history of news and journalism, as well as the importance of the First Amendment—has been a “refreshing” change for Bond, a 20-plus-year veteran of TV news reporting.

“I’m using the process of journalism to find out the ‘who, what, where, and how,’” he says. “But the fundamental difference is, rather than asking people the questions they are guarded against answering, rather than asking people to react to huge trauma they have not processed yet, I [find] myself asking people questions they have thought about their whole lives, but no one had ever asked them.”

Bond’s early inspiration for journalism came from an unlikely source: his parents. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father was one of the first black bus drivers employed by the Baltimore Transit Company in the 1950s. Driving a bus gave his father the chance to enter into a world few blacks ever saw at the time, Bond says. “We would eat dinner together every night, and my father would talk about the things he saw and experienced that day, and that was kind of like a nightly news report,” he says. “I could imagine taking my life experience from my mother the teacher and be a teacher of a different sort on the evening news every night, like my father did at the end of the dinner table.”

At Johns Hopkins, Bond majored in social and behavioral sciences. Sociology and psychology gave him a background every good reporter needs: insight on how society works and how people think, feel, and react.

The social upheaval of the 1970s—the civil rights movement, the women’s movement (Bond was around when Hopkins admitted the first female undergraduates), and the anti-war movement—further influenced what kind of journalist he wanted to be. As one of the few black students at Hopkins, Bond realized many Americans still had few relationships that crossed racial lines. He wanted to tell stories that showed people interacting in new ways and revealed new sides to familiar issues.

And that’s what he did. From 1977 to 1999, Bond worked variously as a cameraman and reporter at WBAL in Baltimore; a correspondent for Gannett News Service, which provided broadcast news to 10 TV stations across the country; and a reporter and anchor at WUSA in Washington, D.C. He reported many memorable events—the Challenger space shuttle explosion, Ted Bundy’s execution, the Oliver North trial, Super Bowl games—and he always tried to bring a unique angle to his coverage. While working for WUSA, for instance, the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. Thinking like a social scientist, he saw the story as an act of betrayal: Linda Tripp divulged Lewinsky’s biggest secret. He took to the streets to see how Washingtonians handled secrets.

He learned true D.C. insiders keep mum. “I work for the government, I have no personal life,” one 20-something told him. “That’s the inside-the-beltway mentality that I wanted to reveal,” Bond says.

But by 1999, the landscape of local TV news was changing. Economic pressures forced news organizations to make choices “based on the bottom line rather than good journalism,” Bond says. Reporters had less freedom to craft original stories. So it wasn’t a hard decision to join the Newseum.

More than 10 years later, journalism is still evolving. To prepare for the Newseum’s New Media Gallery, which opened in April, Bond began exploring how the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, and the like are changing how people find and share information. In many ways, new forms of media make it easier for Americans to exercise their First Amendment rights, he says. But with greater freedom comes greater responsibility.

“Without gatekeepers, there’s all this information out there,” Bond says. “Your responsibility as a news consumer is to be skeptical, to ask questions, to be in charge of the quality of news that you consume, and not be a dupe.”