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Pulitzer Winners: Black women win record number; Wilkerson is first. African American woman to win individual award
Isabel Wilkerson, Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times, received an outpouring of congratulatory phone calls and letters on winning the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing this year. And a simple question: "Are you the first?"
While some black women journalists have participated on teams that have won the prize, Wilkerson is the first African American female journalist to win for her individual work in the 78-year history of the Pulitzer competition.
Wilkerson said she was not certain that she was the first and that the NABJ Journal was the first to ask of the journalists who had interviewed her. She may also be the leader of a class that includes more black women team winners than ever before. Three black women journalists including the assistant foreign editor were on the Dallas Morning News' team that won for international reporting and six women worked on the Akron Beacon Journal's effort that won the public service award.
In 1992, the NABJ Women's Task Force issued a report citing the lack of black female prize winners and analyzing the poor positioning of black women to produce prize-winning work.
Wilkerson said of the prize, "It's a tremendous honor. I feel a sense of being a symbol. The response I've gotten since the Pulitzers were announced has indicated to me, I am being viewed as a symbol by some people."
Her winning body of work included a feature story on Hardin, Mo., where the flood waters ripped open a cemetery and washed away the dead; a Week in Review piece on the relentless struggle between man and nature; and a profile of a little Chicago boy who shoulders a man's responsibilities.
It was Barbara Reynolds, chairwoman of the Women's Task Force, who agitated about the lack of prizes won by black women. She said when NABJ honored Pulitzer Prize winners in 1990 she was struck by the absence of women to point of being shaken. The task force conducted a study and issued a report talking with a cross section of black women journalists, surveying editors of daily newspapers.
"I just knew that it couldn't have been our lack of...