March 29, 2024

The New York Times Just Won 2 Pulitzers. Read the Winning Work.

Brent Staples, a member of the editorial board of The Times, received the prize for editorial writing for a series of essays showing how America continues to be tormented by its racist past. It is the first The Times has won an award in the category in 23 years.

Digging into such subjects as the suffrage movement’s betrayal of black women, racist tropes and monuments to white supremacy, Mr. Staples brought attention to lesser-known stories. In May, for example, he wrote about how Southern newspapers perpetuated racial violence.

“The real damage was done in terse, workaday stories that justified lynching by casting its victims as ‘fiends,’ ‘brutes,’ ‘born criminals’ or, that catchall favorite, ‘troublesome Negroes,’” he wrote. “The narrative that tied blackness inextricably to criminality — and to the death penalty — survived the lynching era and lives on to this day.”

Mr. Staples also wrote at length about the recently discovered remains of 95 African-Americans in Sugar Land, Tex., and the debate over what to do with them. The remains, he argued, should be memorialized where they were found because of what they revealed about efforts in the southern sugar industry to replace slave labor with an infamous convict-leasing system.

“Abolition crushed the industry, but the convict leasing system resurrected it in a form that can legitimately be seen as more pernicious than slavery: Slave masters had at least a nominal interest in keeping alive people whom they owned and in whom they held an economic stake,” he wrote.

Mr. Staples, a 34-year Times veteran, joined editorial board in 1990. Before that, he served as an editor on The New York Times Book Review and an assistant editor for metropolitan news.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/business/media/nyt-pulitzer-prize-winners.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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