Post editor and reporter shone a light on the voiceless

Marcia Slacum Greene, 57, a tenacious Washington Post editor and reporter whose assignments included politics, housing and social services and who saw journalism as a way to humanize and illuminate the lives of the marginalized and voiceless, died Jan. 4 at her home in Washington. She had complications from pancreatic cancer.

Mrs. Slacum Greene spent 26 years at The Post before retiring in July as city editor. She had earlier been assistant District editor for politics and government, where she helped oversee the paper's award-winning series about the discovery of excessive levels of lead in the city's water supply. She also had been a reporter on the Metro projects team, a unit that focused on long-term investigative or in-depth explanatory topics.

In 2002, she was the first to get an extensive interview with Mildred Muhammad, who explained during a four-hour conversation how her ex-husband, sniper John Allen Muhammad, transformed "from a loving husband to an angry, controlling man."

But in a reporting career spanning three decades, Mrs. Slacum Greene was captivated less by the newsmaking blockbuster than assignments that were seldom obvious candidates for front-page display. Her interest in the lives of the poor and desperate came decades after the anti-poverty beat was considered a bold new frontier -- and often seemed not to have priority in a city that valued stories about the socially and politically connected.

She wrote of being motivated by the need "to understand and present the often hidden, sometimes ignored dimensions of the poor, of children at risk and of those who have no American dreams."

Robert McCartney, a Post columnist who was Mrs. Slacum Greene's supervisor when she was city editor, said: "Marcia was aggressive and thorough, both as a reporter and editor, and really pushed to hold the city and others accountable. She was quiet but had a wonderfully ironic sense of humor."

Her persistence often paid off, with prominent attention given to stories that were heartbreaking. During a surge in crack use in the late 1980s, she was among the first to report on "boarder babies," newborns abandoned in hospitals by their addict mothers and who sometimes stayed for months beyond when they were medically ready for discharge.

Hundreds of babies in Washington alone, she reported, "linger in hospitals because the District's operationally troubled child welfare system has failed to locate enough foster care and adoptive homes for them. As a result, there is an increasing number of babies, some of them as old as nine months, who have never seen the sun or felt the wind, who have never slept in a darkened room, whose only form of human bonding is with a changing sea of doctors and nurses."

The nurses often put ribbons in the girls' hair and threw birthday parties for the 6-month-olds. "And when the babies move to other parts of the hospitals," she wrote, "it is the nurses who cry."

In 1991, when the city was in the midst of a violent drug war, Mrs. Slacum Greene explored the lives of young black inner-city men whose presence alone was enough to inspire fear and hostility in passersby. In a long article titled "Presumed Dangerous," she interviewed 24 black teenagers who spoke candidly about seeing women clutch their pursues or cross streets to avoid them.

Her former projects team editor, Mary Pat Flaherty, said Mrs. Slacum Green "had a remarkable ability to get very young, very tough and very leery young people to open up to her about their fears and dreams. She achieved that, I had always thought, by being patient, respectful and persistent -- the same traits she displayed inside the newsroom in her dealings with bosses and colleagues."

Marcia Anita Slacum was born in Baltimore on Sept. 27, 1952. She was 4 when her mother died and was raised by her maternal grandmother and two aunts in Meherrin, in rural Prince Edward County, Va. She was a 1974 graduate of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. She taught English in Prince Edward public schools before receiving a second bachelor's degree, in journalism, from the University of Maryland in 1976.

"I decided to become a journalist," she once wrote, "after teaching at a Virginia high school where the students still carried the burdens created by an education system that closed it doors in the 1960s rather than integrate its schools. Journalism, I promised myself, would give me the opportunity to write about people behind the government policies."

She worked for the St. Petersburg Times in Florida and the Philadelphia Inquirer before joining The Post in 1983. The next year, she married journalist Jackie Greene. He survives, of the home in Washington, along with two stepchildren, LaSonja Greene of Laurel and Jeffery Greene of Gainesville, Fla.; a sister, Barbara S. Harried of Meherrin; three brothers, Reginald Slacum and Michael Slacum, both of Meherrin, and Rodney Slacum of Landover; a half-brother, Conrad Slacum of Baltimore; and two grandchildren.

Mrs. Slacum Greene was active in the National Association of Black Journalists and was awarded a Nieman Fellowship in 1990 to study social policy at Harvard University.