The Pulitzers that got away

Like Rodney Dangerfield, Arkansans sometimes feel that we get no respect. That’s especially true when it comes to the turned-up noses of cultural elites on the east and west coasts, who often seem barely aware that the Natural State exists.

A couple of examples come to mind following the April death of Paul Greenberg, who’d been Arkansas’ only living Pulitzer Prize winner until his passing at age 84.

Greenberg was the retired editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which he joined in 1992. He’d received one of the premier U.S. journalism awards in 1969 for his Pine Bluff Commercial editorials about race relations.

But it turns out that Greenberg should have received a second Pulitzer Prize nine years later, based on the normal procedures for selecting winners via a jury of authoritative colleagues. The peculiar circumstances were once explained in “Pulitzer Prize Editorials,” a book by W. David Sloan:

“In most years, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing has been the writer preferred by the jury, but this has not always been the case. In 1978, for example, the Pulitzer Prize Board chose another finalist over Paul Greenberg of the Pine Bluff (Ark.) Commercial, whom the jury had recommended.”

Sloan added that “the controversy over the selection of the 1978 winner of the Pulitzer Prize [for editorials] received as much attention as the winner did. The jury choice for the award was Paul Greenberg of the Pine Bluff (Ark.) Commercial, who’d won the 1969 prize. Greenberg’s exhibit contained eight editorials on educational standards and quality in the schools of Pine Bluff and Arkansas. The Advisory Board rejected Greenberg and selected Meg Greenfield of The Washington Post.”

Greenberg was also a finalist for the Editorial Writing Pulitzer in 1986. In that instance, the jury opted for one of the other two finalists, and the Advisory Board went along.

Back in 1958, Will Counts, another Arkansas journalist, was bypassed by Pulitzer’s Advisory Board, even though the jury had chosen him for the prize. He was unanimously recommended by the Photography jury for riveting Arkansas Democrat images he’d taken in September 1957 at the onset of the Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis.

The late Robert McCord, an editor at the Democrat in 1958, told an interviewer many years later: “We were so proud of Will’s work that we put together a portfolio, something like 16 or 18 of his Central High images, and submitted it for a Pulitzer. We knew how powerful his photos were, and even the Gazette people agreed he had done a tremendous job.”

McCord said he later learned that the Pulitzer Advisory Board had overruled the unanimous jury. The board, using its final say, apparently reasoned that bestowing four prizes for coverage of a single event would be too many.

For its Central High desegregation coverage, the Gazette won a Public Service prize. Harry S. Ashmore of the Gazette received the Editorial Writing award. The National Reporting co-winner was Relman Morin of the Associated Press, for his accounts of mob violence around the school.

So the Photography Pulitzer went to an innocuous image by William C. Beall of the Washington Daily News. The picture showed a District of Columbia police officer waiting patiently for a 2-year-old boy to cross a street during a parade.

Arkansans seeking further evidence that Arkansas journalists are generally off the radar of the New York-based Pulitzer process can point to John Deering. The veteran Democrat-Gazette editorial cartoonist continues to be shut out of an award long deserved for his wry and trenchant work.

A Democrat-Gazette editor once remarked in jest that “most Pulitzer Prizes go to newspapers near large bodies of saltwater.” By that coastal criterion, Arkansas journalists are generally left high and dry.