Black Journalism

When a Black Journalist Wins a Pulitzer, Chances Are It’s For Writing White

NEW YORK — In her 1993 bestseller, Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience, the African-American author Jill Nelson wrote that when newsrooms and police departments began to integrate following the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., white journalists and patrolmen often encouraged their new black co-workers to prove their professional loyalty by “shooting their own.”