Darnella Frazier Awarded Pulitzer Special Citation
The Pulitzer Prize Board has consigned Darnella Frazier to a special place in American History:
“The Pulitzer Prize jury has the option of awarding special citations and awards where they consider necessary. Since 1918, forty-four such special citations and awards have been given. The awards are composed of sixteen journalism awards, twelve letters awards, fourteen music awards, and five service awards. Prizes for the award vary. The Pulitzer Prize Board has stated that the Special Citations given to George Gershwin, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Duke Ellington were in response to criticism for the failure of the Board to cite the four.[1]
On May 4, 2020, Ida B. Wells was announced as the recipient of a Pulitzer Special Citation “[f]or her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.”[2] The Pulitzer Prize board announced that it would donate at least $50,000 in support of Wells’ mission to recipients who would be announced at a later date.[2] No specific category was announced for this citation.
On 11 June 2021, Darnella Frazier was announced as the recipient of a Pulitzer Special Citation.[3]“
—–Wikipedia
Darnella Frazier won the citation “for courageously recording the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists’ quest for truth and justice,” according to the Pulitzer Prize Board.
The award comes with a monetary prize consistent at least with the other prizes, $15,000, according to Edward Kliment, a spokesperson for the Columbia University Pulitzer Prize organization. Previous special citations have been awarded to Ida B. Wells, Aretha Franklin and Duke Ellington.
Frazier was also honored last year by PEN America, a literary and human rights organization. She was awarded the PEN/Benenson Courage Award.
PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said at the time: “With nothing more than a cellphone and sheer guts, Darnella changed the course of history in this country, sparking a bold movement demanding an end to systemic anti-Black racism and violence at the hands of police.”
The video was seen worldwide and was prominent in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck, pinning him to the pavement for 9 minutes, 29 seconds, as he said repeatedly that he couldn’t breathe. Chauvin was convicted in April of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter. He will be sentenced June 25.
The prosecutors have stated that without her video they would have had no case for the conviction….
I’m certain that I speak for all here in extending our heartfelt congratulations and best wishes to Darnella Frazier on receiving the well deserved accolades.
Her act of extraordinary courage and presence of mind has changed the course of world history and the nature of the conversation about police misconduct and the need for meaningful reforms in law enforcement.
06/13/2021 @ 9:40 pm
I’m pushing 60… and that young lady very rapidly became one of MY Heroes. She had to be absolutely terrified and yet she held her ground and showed the WORLD what was happening. That sort of courage is astounding in one so young and deserves her a place in history.
06/14/2021 @ 12:32 am
You rightly gave credit to her from the beginning. I was glad to see this in the news. Thanks for filling in the details.
07/28/2021 @ 8:58 am
Here’s a weird question for you:
Was the George Floyd video a modern day Uncle Tom’s Cabin?
07/29/2021 @ 2:58 pm
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S. and is said to have “helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War”. Wikipedia
While both the book and the video changed attitudes, it is important to keep in mind that the book was a fictional work of imagined relationships and conditions. H. B. Stowe never traveled below the Mason Dixon Line. The fact that she never visited the south made the novel both extraordinary and controversial.
Darnella Frazier’s video is a clear and unequivocal slice of the reality of the environment that black people must live in, survive, and endure on a day to day basis.
It is the reality that MS Frazier was experiencing even as she stood her ground to shoot the video that shocked the world into the realization that police reform is a necessary undertaking that can no longer be denied or delayed.
A close ‘modern’ literary equivalent to Stowe’s book is:
“The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South a non-fiction book about slavery published in 1956, by academic Kenneth M. Stampp of the University of California, Berkeley and other universities.[1] The book describes and analyzes multiple facets of slavery in the American South from the 17th through the mid-19th century, including demographics, lives of slaves and slaveholders, the Southern economy and labor systems, the Northern and abolitionist response, slave trading, and political issues of the time.”
——-Wikipedia
Note that Stampp’s. book was first published a century after Stowe’s novel but validates and verifies the descriptions of the subject matter in Stowe’s book.
If you haven’t already done so, the book is well worth the read for far more than academic and rhetorical purposes.
07/29/2021 @ 11:37 pm
I don’t mean in form, I mean in function.