The first Pulitzer Prizes were presented in 1917. It took 33 years of prizes for a Black artist — the poet Gwendolyn Brooks — to be declared a winner. It took 52 years for the first Black man — photojournalist Moneta Sleet — to win as an individual.
During the first seven decades of Pulitzer Prizes, the likes of W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston produced work equal or superior to their white counterparts. Reporters, editors and columnists from dozens of influential Black newspapers were doing a better job of covering the race beat in America than papers like The Washington Post and The New York Times.
But the color line would not be crossed for many of those American institutions, including the Pulitzer Prizes, for most of the first half-century of their existence. The great Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947 for Major League Baseball — three years before Brooks won her prize.
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