Richmond Journalist Michael Paul Williams Wins the Pulitzer Prize
Image by Brian Palmer.
On the afternoon of Friday, June 11th, Michael Paul Williams received the news by phone that he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. A longtime journalist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch since 1982, Williams has been at the forefront of critical storytelling about the city’s painful racial divides and the people-fueled efforts to overturn them. Never one to mince words, readers have come to rely on the heavy and hopeful truths that Williams always lays bare through his soulfully connected writing.
In fact, Williams has worked as a collaborator with Initiatives of Change USA’s Hope in the Cities program for over two decades, participating in and documenting our facilitation and dialogue processes from the 1993 Healing the Heart of America: Unity Walk to the 2010 unveiling of the Reconciliation Statue in Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom, Liverpool, UK and Cotonou, Benin to our Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) lesson sharing with Selma grassroots leaders in 2017.
Michael Paul Williams shares the importance of Hope in the Cities’ “Healing the Heart of America: Unity Walk” in 1993. This is one year after he becomes the first Black columnist with Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Nominated by editor K. Burnell Evans, she wrote to the Pulitzer committee:
“Michael Paul Williams has been spurring Richmond toward an awakening since 1992, when he became the first Black columnist at an institution that endorsed Massive Resistance.
The combustible summer of 2020 marked by more than 100 days of protests that saw an already frayed trust between police and communities shredded, Williams charged us all to be better than we are. While many people cheered as statues began coming down 155 years after the Civil War, Williams urged us to look deeper and reach farther.”
We are grateful for the loving labor that Michael Paul Williams provides as a columnist every week for nearly 30 years. We celebrate with you on this extraordinarily deserved accomplishment.