Pulitzer Prize Winner to deliver first Hodding Carter Lecture on civil rights and the press, April 21 at Newhouse

Pulitzer Prize Winner to deliver first Hodding Carter Lecture on civil rights and the press, April 21 at NewhouseApril 08, 2005Jaime Winne Alvarez jlwinne@syr.edu

On April 21 at 7:30 p.m., The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist William Raspberry will deliver the first Hodding Carter Lecture on civil rights and the press at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. He will speak in Room A1 of Newhouse I. The lecture, part of the newly established Hodding Carter Lecture Series, is free and open to the public. Paid parking is available in the Waverly and Comstock lots.

In delivering the series’ first lecture, Raspberry will share personal reflections on growing up in the segregated south and almost five decades of journalism experience. Raspberry is a native of Okolona, Miss., which he once described to The Washington Post as a place where “we had two of everything there, one for whites and one for blacks.”

Raspberry began his career in 1956 with a summer job at the Indianapolis Recorder. In 1962, he started work at The Washington Post, serving as a teletype operator, reporter, copy editor and assistant city editor. He is now one of the paper’s most respected columnists. He won the Capital Press Club’s Journalist of the Year Award for his coverage of the 1965 Watts riot in Los Angeles and in 1994 received the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary. The same year, the National Association of Black Journalists honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Raspberry graduated from Indiana Central College and has been awarded honorary doctorates by more than a dozen universities. He has taught journalism at Howard University and, with wife Sondra, at Trinity College. He is currently the Knight Chair in Communications and Journalism at Duke University and continues to write his nationally syndicated column at The Washington Post; it is also carried by 220 other newspapers.

“It is quite appropriate to launch a series named for Hodding Carter by featuring a journalist with the moral stature of William Raspberry,” says David Rubin, dean of the Newhouse School. “He has continuously used his column at The Washington Post to challenge power, protect the disadvantaged in American society and force the United States to live up to its own ideals on liberty and equality.”

Charlotte Grimes, the Newhouse School’s Knight Chair in Political Reporting and lecture series organizer, calls Raspberry a strong conscience in journalism. “He and his work embody journalism’s highest traditions of public service in exploring our country’s long struggles over civil rights for all Americans,” says Grimes.

The Hodding Carter Lecture Series celebrates the journalism of conscience and courage that was the hallmark of award winning father-and-son journalists Hodding Carter, Jr., and Hodding Carter III, who championed tolerance, challenged bigotry and embraced civil rights throughout their careers.

An early and eloquent voice in America’s 20th century debate on minority civil rights, Carter Jr. won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for his editorials calling for tolerance and social justice, was censured by the Mississippi legislature for criticism of the White Citizens Councils, wrote numerous books, lectured across the country and inspired a generation of journalists covering civil rights.

Carter III was editor and publisher of the Carter family’s newspaper, the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Miss., throughout the 1960s civil rights era, served as State Department spokesman during President Jimmy Carter’s administration, created award-winning TV news programs and became president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in 1998. He retires from the Knight Foundation this July.