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African Americans Excel in Pulitzers

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Cartoonist Bell, Editorial Writer Staples Are Winners

“I try to defend people and ideas that I think are being unfairly maligned and burst the bubbles of people and ideas that are unjustly exalted,” says Pulitzer winner Darrin Bell.’ (video)

Cartoonist Bell, Editorial Writer Staples Are Winners

With fellow African Americans often their focus, New York Times editorial writer Brent Staples and Darrin Bell, a syndicated cartoonist based in Los Angeles, were awarded Pulitzer Prizes Monday, making Bell the first African American ever to win in the category.

Darrin Bell

Reports on the mass shootings at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Md., shared honors, while powerful investigations of President Trump and his administration also won approval from the arbiters of the top awards in journalism.

Peruvian-born Carlos Lozada, the Washington Post’s nonfiction book critic, won the prize for criticism “for his ambitious and innovative essays that range across politics, presidential history, immigrant memories, national security reporting and feminist analysis to probe national dilemmas,” the Post reported.

Human suffering in Asia — specifically Yemen and Myanmar — were noted. “Reuters won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for an investigative report that revealed the massacre of 10 Muslim Rohingya men by Buddhist villagers and Myanmar security forces, and another for Central American migrants seeking refuge in the United States,” the news service reported.

“The Reuters award was for an investigative report that revealed the massacre of 10 Rohingya at the village of Inn Din, in the heart of the conflict zone of Rakhine state in Myanmar. . . . Two young Reuters reporters, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, both Myanmar citizens, found a mass grave filled with bones sticking out of the ground,” the news service reported. The two are serving seven-year sentences in Myanmar.

African Americans were also well-represented among the arts and letters winners, with Jeffrey Stewart’s “The New Negro” winning the biography prize for his book on Alain Locke (1885-1954), the gay intellectual and champion of visual artists who is regarded as the dean of the Harlem Renaissance.

Brent Staples

Jackie Sibblies Drury won in the drama category for her work “Fairview.” It is “an investigation into the ways in which we observe and judge each other every day, as well as examination of race and privilege in America,” as described by Playbill.

A much-celebrated biography by David W. Blight of Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist and editor of The North Star, won in the history category.

A special citation was awarded to Aretha Franklin, the “queen of soul” who died last year.

“The South Florida Sun Sentinel won the prize for public service, considered the most prestigious of the Pulitzers, for documenting the massacre of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in February. The paper’s in-depth articles revealed a series of failures by local officials and law enforcement that, the paper wrote, contributed to the loss of life,” Michael Grynbaum reported for the New York Times.

“Reporters spent months documenting the shooting and its aftermath in their community and its affect on the national debate over gun rights. In a harrowing reconstruction, The Sun Sentinel revealed a series of failures by local officials and law enforcement that, the paper wrote, cost children their lives. . . .”

Grynbaum also wrote, “The Times won in the category of editorial writing, for essays by Brent Staples that grappled with questions of race, slavery, and memory in communities across the country. In accepting his award in The Times newsroom on Monday, Mr. Staples, who joined the paper’s editorial board in 1990, thanked his great-great-grandmother, who was born into slavery, saying, ‘I was channeling my family story.’ ”

“The complexities of race and class figured in many of the prizewinning works. . . .”

Grynbaum added in an earlier version of the story,  “His essay on Sugar Land, Tex., has had significant impact on how people in the state saw the city’s plan for relocating the recently discovered skeletons of men and women who were worked to death on sugar plantations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The essay galvanized protesters in the state who wanted the skeletons memorialized in place. A month after the essay ran, a state court stopped the city from moving the remains and appointed a lawyer to oversee the disposition of the remains. The case is now before an appeals court.

“An editorial on suffrage also had a wide impact, leading supporters of a planned women’s suffrage memorial in New York City’s Central Park to withdraw that support and to debate how to fairly memorialize a 19th-century movement that was actually quite diverse. Women who knew little or nothing of this diverse history before the essay have called for revising the memorial to more adequately reflect history. . . .”

Carlos Lozada

The Times posted a sampling of Staples’ work, saying he had “sought to correct the parts of the national narrative on race that have been sanitized and distorted, to remind Americans that the devaluation of black lives that led to slavery still haunts the country.”

Paul Farhi wrote in the Washington Post, “Bell, 44, may be best known as the creator of the ‘Candorville’ strip, but his winning entry consisted of a portfolio of single-panel political cartoons published on newspaper editorial and op-ed pages. Bell’s cartoons commented on subjects such as police shootings of unarmed African Americans, climate change, the treatment of migrants by immigration officials and, especially, Trump.

“Bell often satirized the president by drawing him as a bloated figure in a red necktie that hangs down far beyond his shoes. One of his panels played off Grant Wood’s ‘American Gothic’ painting by depicting Trump gleefully breaking the farmer’s pitchfork. Instead of the implement, the farmer holds a paper marked ‘Welfare,’ a reference to the effect of trade policies imposed by the Trump administration that have hurt agricultural exports. Another shows a grinning Trump removing a red ‘Make America Great Again’ hat, revealing a second hat that reads, ‘Make College White Again.’

“Bell, who lives in Los Angeles, is the first African American recipient of the editorial cartooning Pulitzer, which has been awarded since 1922. His editorial cartoons were syndicated by The Post Writers Group until August 2018 and are now distributed by King Features. (‘Candorville’ is still with the Post syndicate.)

“ ‘It’s the old saying, “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” ’ Bell said of his editorial approach. ‘I try to defend people and ideas that I think are being unfairly maligned and burst the bubbles of people and ideas that are unjustly exalted.’ ”

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