Pulitzers laud Palestine paper, Houstonians
Editor in East Texas town exposed needless jail deaths; others win for books and poems
Jeffery Gerritt fell to his knees and broke down crying in the parking lot of the Palestine Herald-Press, the small East Texas paper where he has served since 2017 as editor.
He had just returned from a coffee run Monday afternoon when the publisher, Jake Mienk, met him at his car. Mienk swallowed him in a bear hug and shared the news: Gerritt had just won the Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s most prestigious award, for editorial writing.
“When I came down here, the last thing I thought would happen was winning this award at this tiny little paper in East Texas,” Gerritt told the Houston Chronicle.
Gerritt wasn’t the only Texan to claim the prize, which awards excellence in a range of categories that include journalism, music, drama and history. Houston native Benjamin Moser won a Pulitzer Prize for his deep-dive biography of writer Susan Sontag. Also Rice University historian W.
Caleb McDaniel and poet Jericho Brown, who received his doctorate from the University of Houston, earned Pulitzers for their work.
But Gerritt, a former longtime columnist and editorial writer at the Detroit Free Press, was the only winning journalist from a Texas publication — one that serves a community of roughly 18,000 people about 110 miles southeast of downtown Dallas.
He won for his “Death Without Conviction” series, 10 editorials that exposed how the horrific death of an Anderson County Jail inmate reflected a wider trend of misconduct and neglect in county jail deaths across the state. The reporting “courageously took on the local sheriff and judicial establishment, which tried to cover up these needless tragedies,” said the Pulitzer announcement.
Once the newspaper uncovered details about the 2018 death of Anderson County Jail inmate Rhonda Newsome, Gerritt filed dozens of public information requests to Texas Rangers about other jail deaths statewide. Through the Rangers’ investigative reports, he learned the state agency had uncovered a variety of discrepancies — including excessive force, falsified time logs and delays in medical attention — in county jail deaths.
“They just didn’t go anywhere with it, because it wasn’t a criminal matter — it wasn’t someone trying to kill someone,” Gerritt said.
When Gerritt took over as editor of the 171-year-old Palestine paper, he brought a wealth of knowledge about prison and criminal justice
reform from his 17 years in Detroit. But he noticed right away the “night and day” difference of working at a small newspaper compared to a large daily metro such as the Free Press.
“For one thing you have to deal with officials that haven’t been used to aggressive coverage,” he said, adding, “Right away, you get shut down. The sheriff is telling everybody in town what a rag this is, using his considerable influence to undermine you.”
Another key difference, especially in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, is the resources at his disposal, he said. Mienk announced May 1 that the sudden loss of advertising revenue will force them to cut publication dates from five to three days weekly.
Gerrit said what started as a staff of six or seven is now down to two: a city editor and a sports editor. In addition to his editorial writing duties, Gerritt edits and assigns all stories. He also coordinates freelance work and picks up the slack with daily news writing.
Lately, he’s been reporting on the spread of COVID-19 in the five Palestine-area prisons, including the George Beto Unit, one of the state’s biggest prison hot spots.
“We have a real skeleton crew right now,” he said. “I don’t even know if I could have done this (series) if we were in the same situation last year.”
In the history books category, McDaniel, an associate professor at Rice, won Monday for “Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America.” The judging committee called his book “a masterfully researched meditation on reparations based on the remarkable story of a 19th century woman who survived kidnapping and re-enslavement to sue her captor.”
Moser, meanwhile, won in the biography category for his 800page biography work, “Sontag: Her Life and Work.” It was described as “an authoritatively constructed work told with pathos and grace, that captures the writer’s genius and humanity alongside her addictions, sexual ambiguities and volatile enthusiasms.”
Though Moser lives in the Netherlands, he is a Houston native, who grew up in the city’s bookstores. His mother opened the Stop, Look & Learn book and toy shop in Rice Village and also worked at Brazos Bookstore.
“So, I grew up in a bookstore,” Moser told the Chronicle last year. “I wish I had a more original story, about how I did something totally different than the way I grew up. But I always lived around books
and book people.”
“Sontag was extremely famous, but not many people really know about her or read her,” he said. “Working on this book, I met so many people who you’d think knew something about her, or who knew her personally. But they’d read almost nothing of hers. It wasn’t surprising. But it was disappointing — this figure who’s famous and fascinating but not being read. It made me sad for her, so I’m hoping this book may send some people to her work.”
A finalist for the National Book Award last year, Brown’s “The Tradition” was awarded a Pulitzer in the poetry category. Brown’s collection was described as having “masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence.”
The Louisiana native earned a Ph.D. from the University of Houston’s creative writing program.
The announcement of Pulitzer Prize winners usually takes place in a ceremony at Columbia University in New York. But Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy exercised proper social distancing and made the announcement via YouTube from her living room.
The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica won the Pulitzer Prize in public service for illuminating the sparse policing of remote Alaskan villages, as the awards ceremony recognized writing, photos and — for the first time — audio reporting on topics ranging from climate change to the legacy of slavery.
The public service winners contacted 600 village, tribal and other local governments and traveled by plane, sled and snowmobile to reveal
that a third of rural Alaska communities had no local police protection, among other findings.
The “riveting” series spurred legislative changes and an influx of spending, the judges noted in an announcement postponed several weeks and held online because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The New York Times won the investigative reporting prize for an exposé of predatory lending in the New York City taxi industry and also took the international reporting award for what the judges called “enthralling stories, reported at great risk,” about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government.
The Times also was awarded the commentary prize for an essay that Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote as part of the paper’s ambitious 1619 Project, which followed the throughlines of slavery in American life to this day.
Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet told the staff — in a virtual meeting — that this year’s prizes were “particularly meaningful because they come as we are managing our lives under great difficulty even as we produce great journalism.”
The Washington Post’s work on global warming was recognized for explanatory reporting. The newspaper tracked nearly 170 years of temperature records to show that 10 percent of the planet’s surface has already exceeded a rise of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times, the threshold world leaders have agreed they’d try not to exceed.