Paper in Akron Gets Pulitzer for Stories on Race

By DAVID SHAW

April 13, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

The Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal won the Pulitzer Prize for public service Tuesday for a yearlong examination of race relations and a subsequent campaign that enlisted more than 100 local groups in an effort to improve those relations in the community.

The New York Times won three Pulitzers, two of which were awarded to staff members. The paper was honored for its spot news reporting on the World Trade Center bombing and for Isabel Wilkerson’s feature writing--a profile of a fourth-grader on Chicago’s volatile South Side and stories on last year’s floods in the Midwest.

The paper’s third Pulitzer came in feature photography, for South African free-lancer Kevin Carter’s photo of a starving Sudanese girl who collapsed on her way to a feeding center while a vulture waited nearby. The photo was first published in the New York Times.

The Chicago Tribune won two Pulitzers, for explanatory journalism--Ronald Kotulak’s “lucid coverage of current developments in neurological science”--and for editorial writing--R. Bruce Dold’s editorials on the child welfare system in Illinois, specifically the events leading to the murder of a 3-year-old boy by his abusive mother.

In the arts categories, the most notable victory was probably that of Edward Albee, in drama, for his play “Three Tall Women.”

Albee, who had previously won Pulitzers for “A Delicate Balance” in 1967 and for “Seascape” in 1975, has been in artistic and commercial eclipse for almost 20 years. But “Three Tall Women” opened Tuesday night in an off-Broadway theater after a successful run in a smaller, off-off-Broadway theater, and his Pulitzer triumph means that only Eugene O’Neill has won more Pulitzers for drama. O’Neill won four--in 1920, 1922, 1928 and 1957.

The other arts winners, all announced Tuesday at Columbia University, included:

* Gunther Schuller, in music, for “Of Reminiscences and Reflections.”

* E. Annie Proulx, in fiction, for “The Shipping News”--which, appropriately, has a journalist as protagonist.

* David Remnick, in general nonfiction, for “Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire.”

* David Levering Lewis, in biography, for “W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race.”

* Yusef Komunyakaa, in poetry, for “Neon Vernacular.” Komunyakaa has Southern California connections, having gained his Masters of Fine Arts degree from the writing program at UC Irvine and having won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award presented last week at the Claremont Graduate School.

The Pulitzer Prize Board, which makes the final selections based on nominations by individual juries in each journalism and letters/drama category, decided to give no award this year in history.

The three history finalists were “Crime and Punishment in American History” by Lawrence M. Friedman, “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK” by Gerald Posner, and “William Faulkner and Southern History” by Joel Williamson.

The board, which previously gave no history award in 1919 and 1984, thought each of this year’s finalists was “flawed in certain ways,” said board member John L. Dotson Jr., president and publisher of the Akron Beacon Journal.

David Kennedy, a member of the history jury and a history professor at Stanford University, said it was difficult not to regard the board’s decision as “a slap in the face of the judgment of the jury.”

Kennedy said he was on the history jury in 1984, when the jury itself decided no nominee was worthy of a Pulitzer. But for a jury of respected scholars to select three prize-worthy books and then have their judgment overruled is “pretty egregious,” he said.

The board has that absolute right, however, and invokes it frequently--overruling juries by shifting nominees from one category to another or giving the prize to someone not a finalist or bypassing all jury nominees and giving no award on occasion.

This year, for example, the prizewinning feature photograph was originally entered as a feature photograph, nominated as a finalist by the jury in the spot news category and then switched back to the feature photo category by the board.

The public service award is the most coveted journalism prize every year.

Dale Allen, editor of the Akron Beacon Journal, said his paper’s triumph in that category actually began in the immediate aftermath of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.

That violence “prompted a group of editors here to get together and decide the paper should examine race relations in Akron by getting beyond what you usually hear about housing, jobs, education, crime and the criminal justice system,” Allen said.

The ensuing effort--which involved 29 members of the paper’s 161-member staff--relied on traditional reporting as well as on focus groups and computerized analyses of housing patterns, ownership and discriminatory redlining practices by local financial institutions.

Reporters and editors shaped these findings into five separate series that ran four or five days each, published throughout 1993, under the title “A Question of Color.” But editors thought that the Beacon Journal, as an institution, “had to do more than just report this stuff,” Allen said.

After prolonged deliberation, the paper hired outside consultants and had them work with 140 social, civic and religious organizations in an effort to bring about better race relations in the city.

“We hired the consultants so we could continue the integrity of the editorial process,” Allen said. “We reported on what they did that was newsworthy, but we didn’t want to be directly involved in it editorially.”

The paper published a model New Year’s Resolution, urging readers to pledge: “My New Year’s resolution is to do everything I can in 1994 to help improve race relations.” More than 22,000 signed resolutions were returned to the Beacon Journal.

Although the Pulitzer Prize for public service is always awarded to a newspaper staff, rather than to an individual, the board generally prefers to give most other awards to individuals. This year, however, several major team reporting projects won prizes.

In addition to the New York Times’ prize for what the board termed “comprehensive coverage” of the World Trade Center bombing by a team of more than 75 staff members, the board honored the staffs of the Providence (R.I.) Journal-Bulletin and the Dallas Morning News.

Providence won in investigative reporting for its disclosure of pervasive corruption in the Rhode Island court system. Dallas won in international reporting for a 14-part series examining violence against women in many nations. Eleven reporters from five departments at the paper traveled to more than a dozen countries to work on the series.

Jim Landers, international editor of the Morning News, said Tuesday that one of those reporters, Toni Y. Joseph, was so determined to be part of the team going abroad that she withheld from her editors information on her heart condition. She collapsed and died of a heart attack not long after the series was published.

Morning News staffers toasted her with champagne during Pulitzer celebrations in the paper’s newsroom Tuesday.

Champagne toasts were the order of the day in several other newsrooms across the country. Sometimes--as in Albuquerque and Akron--it was nonalcoholic champagne.

At the Albuquerque Tribune, Eileen Welsome won the national reporting prize for her stories on five Americans who had unknowingly been injected with plutonium during government radiation experiments in the 1940s.

Welsome was investigating radiation experiments on animals in 1987 when she came across a footnote mentioning the experimental injections into human beings. She worked on the story on and off for several years, then began to look into it virtually full time in July, 1992.

After Welsome’s disclosures were picked up and advanced by other news organizations, Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary called on the federal government to investigate various radiation experiments, determine their medical and ethical propriety and, later, to compensate victims of the experiments.

Welsome, in New York to accept another award for her work Tuesday, was on the telephone with her editors in Albuquerque waiting for the Pulitzer announcement. But the Tribune’s computers were not working properly. The editors only found out Welsome had won when, simultaneously, a reporter heard it over the telephone from a friend at the Orange County Register and a staffer from the Associated Press office down the hall came running in with a news bulletin.

Other Pulitzer winners Tuesday included:

* Eric Freedman and Jim Mitzelfeld of the Detroit News, in beat reporting, for stories disclosing flagrant spending abuses in Michigan’s House Fiscal Agency.

* William Raspberry of the Washington Post, in commentary, for what the board termed “compelling commentaries on a variety of social and political topics.”

* Lloyd Schwartz of the Boston Phoenix, in criticism, for his “skillful and resonant classical music criticism.” The Phoenix is an alternative weekly, the first such paper honored by the Pulitzers since Jules Feiffer won for editorial cartooning in 1986.

* Michael Ramirez of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, in editorial cartooning.

* Paul Watson of the Toronto Star, in spot news photography, for his picture of a U.S. soldier’s body being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by a mob of jeering Somalis.

Watson originally took six other photos of the soldier, all showing his exposed genitals, but--certain that no paper would use them--he ordered his driver to catch up with the mob so he could take more pictures. After arguing with his armed Somali bodyguards, he was able to take six more photos, partial body shots, while the hostile crowd threatened him.

The Associated Press transmitted the pictures, and when newspapers in the United States published one of them, it helped fuel demands that the United States withdraw its troops from Somalia.

Each of the Pulitzers carries a $3,000 cash award except for the public service prize, which consists of a gold medal.

Since the prizes began in 1917, the New York Times has won 69 Pulitzers, far more than any other newspaper. This is the second time the New York Times has won three Pulitzers in a single year. The first time was in 1978.

The Los Angeles Times, which has won 19 Pulitzers--eight of them in the past 10 years--won none Tuesday. But the paper did have four finalists, more than any other paper except the New York Times, which had six. The Los Angeles Times’ finalists were:

* The Times staff, in spot news reporting, for its “richly detailed coverage of the first day of the fires that ravaged Southern California.”

* Carol J. Williams, in international reporting, for her coverage of the former Yugoslavia.

* Peter H. King, in commentary, for his columns on California.

* The Times staff, in spot news photography, for pictures of last year’s fires.

* RELATED STORIES: E3, F2

The Winners

Winners of the 1994 Pulitzer Prizes:

ARTS

* Fiction--”The Shipping News,” by E. Annie Proulx

* Drama--”Three Tall Women,” by Edward Albee

* Biography--”W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919,” by David Levering Lewis

* Poetry--”Neon Vernacular,” by Yusef Komunyakaa