One number reveals a lot about how race is covered in America and how it is prized by the Pulitzers.
Of the 29 Black people who have won individual Pulitzer Prizes in journalism through 2022, 28 were awarded in categories usually not associated with hard news. Black journalists (two of whom were born outside the United States) have won 11 individual Pulitzers in commentary, six in criticism, five in feature photography, four in feature writing, one in editorial writing and one in editorial cartooning. The sole hard-news winner is Dele Olojede, the Nigerian-born journalist at Newsday who won the 2005 International Reporting Pulitzer “for his fresh, haunting look at Rwanda a decade after rape and genocidal slaughter had ravaged the Tutsi tribe,” as his Pulitzer citation graphically put it.
But what does this cluster of individual winners really mean? What do they have in common besides being talented, insightful and Black? In many cases, they were lauded for coverage that, rightly or wrongly, is associated with the African American experience: voting rights, busing, affirmative action; culture and arts; violence, poverty; African suffering and misrepresentation.
More tellingly, their words and images demonstrate an extraordinary fluency in translating their disparate Black experiences to white America. Unlike many of their white counterparts, nearly all of the winning Black columnists shared personal information to make their points.
Cynthia Tucker, winner of the 2007 commentary Pulitzer, said that she wanted white readers “to understand that our desires as Americans are not that different from yours.”
“We want to be able to support our families,” she said in an interview. “We want our children to get a good education. We want to be safe from crime just like you do. I didn’t start out sharing personal experiences a lot — but somewhere along the way it occurred to me that it humanized me, that people could see things that they could relate to, and it was helpful in my writing.”
Another familiar topic is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., his holiday and Black leadership (or the lack thereof) since his assassination in 1968. The obituaries of civil rights leaders emphasized their personal suffering and adjacency to King, so it’s not surprising the first Pulitzer won by a Black journalist included both traits.
Ebony photographer Moneta Sleet Jr. had been chronicling the King family for more than a decade. But according to numerous accounts, he wasn’t allowed to join the all-white photography pool at the funeral until Coretta Scott King demanded that he be let in or no photographers would be. The image that newspapers ran across the country captured grief, dignity and family — universal yet undeniably Black. Mrs. King, her veiled head tilted, sits at the end of a church pew. Five-year-old Bernice, with ribboned, neatly parted hair, slumps in her mother’s arms just a few feet from the casket of her father.
Pulitzer jurors originally selected Sleet’s photograph as their fourth choice in spot news photography. The 1968-69 Pulitzer Board — including journalistic titans Ben Bradlee, Norm Chandler and James Reston — exercised its right of final say by elevating Edward T. Adams’s “Execution at Saigon” from the jurors’ second choice to the spot news winner. The board moved Sleet to the feature category, where he became the first Black journalist and a Black man to win a Pulitzer (Gwendolyn Brooks won the 1950 Pulitzer in poetry). Sleet remains the only Pulitzer winner from the Black Press.
The Pulitzers have long been champions of journalists fighting racial injustice. The Pulitzers’ extensive “Social Justice and Equality Resource Guide” (compiled by Poynter senior scholar Roy Peter Clark and Poynter researcher David Shedden as part of a Pulitzer centennial event) starts with Harvey E. Newbranch, who won the 1920 Pulitzer in editorial writing after imploring his Omaha readers: “It is the duty of all, whites and blacks alike, to uphold especially the might of the law — to insist, if need be, on its full exercise — in protecting every colored citizen in Omaha in his lawful and constitutional rights.” Five more Pulitzer winners in the 1920s addressed the KKK and lynching. After being preoccupied by World War II, the Pulitzers, like the rest of journalism, returned to race in America and the struggle for integration, and hasn’t wavered since.
But Sleet’s award signaled the kind of Black subject matter and focus the Pulitzers favor to this day.
“It aligns with what they do in the other categories,” Pulitzer winner Mitchell S. Jackson said in an interview. “If you win a Pulitzer in drama or fiction or poetry, there’s a really good chance that work is grounded in Black oppression.”
Of course, Black journalists have won reporting awards as part of “team” Pulitzers, in which two or more people are recognized, and as part of “staff” Pulitzers, in which many journalists are awarded but usually are not officially named. By my own measure, 11 Pulitzer-winning “team” entries and at least 16 “staff” entries included Black journalists. Some of these entries had nothing to do with race; some had a lot to do with it.
The individual Pulitzers, though, might suggest a kind of journalistic Black subjectivity rising just as allegiance to objectivity (as seen through the lens of cisgender white patriarchy) wanes. Two of the individual winners in feature writing, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah (2018) and Jackson (2021), were deeply personal and reflective as they dug into the minds of high-profile racist murderers. Jackson pointed to the circumstances in which both pieces were published.
“I think in journalism, it actually might be the story in context that’s more important than the writing,” Jackson said. “I think with her piece and with my piece is, it is the Black experience and it’s also kind of an indictment on whiteness. At the end, what was a bigger story than Dylann Roof that year? Then obviously George Floyd was a bigger story than Ahmaud Arbery, but if you take them as a whole, there was nothing bigger than Black Lives Matter the year that that story came out.”
“I could’ve written the same story this year, and it wouldn’t have won.”
NYU professor Rodney Benson said that Blackness — marginalized in most institutions, including journalism — could be an asset, an embodied “cultural capital” in the language of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
“If indeed, this is a ‘very odd situation’ as you describe it,” he wrote in an email, “when suddenly, and long overdue, there is a growing societal demand to hear the distinctive authorial voices of Black experience, then it makes sense that forms of journalism that highlight ‘voice’ and subjective ‘experience’ (commentary and editorials, criticisms, photography, features) are going to have a very high value in the field.”
He said that this could play out at the level of both supply and demand.
“Up-and-coming Black journalists would see that this is the kind of journalism that will give them the maximum cultural capital, and they may thus seek out opportunities to do this kind of journalism,” Benson added. “Editors may attempt to hire journalists who seem to possess this kind of cultural capital and encourage them to do this kind of writing. And prize committees, like the Pulitzers, may tend to disproportionately reward Black journalists working in these genres because it is through these genres that, as you say, ‘Black subjectivity’ can be most directly expressed and heard.”
These Black writers “inject their identity in their work in a way that a pure journalist can’t do,” Jackson said. “The same reason they love us singing — and now they love us painting, and they love our novels — is the same reason that they might love feature writing or editorial because they’re getting a part of the writer’s identity.”
Benson suggested finding other similarities among the winners, like educational and professional pedigrees. “Bourdieu would say that it’s not just any marginal voice that gets heard but those that have this kind of cultural ‘consecration’ that gives them legitimacy,” he added. Thanks to Columbia’s journalism program, Ivy Leaguers outnumber HBCU grads. Sleet earned a master’s from New York University. Six journalists worked for The New York Times, five at The Washington Post.
Tucker pointed out the obvious flip side to this abundance of Black subjectivity.
“We have to think about whether newspapers are giving Black talent enough of an opportunity in other assignments,” she said.
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