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The Middle for Public Integrity’s landmark challenge, 40 Acres and a Lie has taken second place within the annual Philip Meyer Journalism Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors, which acknowledges the most effective use of social science analysis strategies in journalism.
Black Individuals have been demanding compensation and restitution for his or her struggling for the reason that finish of the Civil Battle.
40 Acres and a Mule stays the nation’s most well-known try to supply some type of reparations for American slavery. Immediately, it’s largely remembered as a damaged promise and an deserted step towards multiracial democracy. Much less recognized is that the federal authorities really did subject tons of, maybe hundreds, of titles to particular plots of land between 4 and 40 acres. Freedmen and girls constructed properties, established native governments, and farmed the land. However their utopia didn’t final lengthy. After President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, his successor, Andrew Johnson, stripped property from previously enslaved Black residents throughout the South and returned it to their previous enslavers.
Over the course of two and a half years, a group of Public Integrity reporters, editors, and researchers recognized 1,250 Black women and men who had earned land as reparations after the Civil Battle. From there, the group carried out genealogical analysis to find residing descendants of lots of those that had obtained after which misplaced the land. For the primary time, these residing Black Individuals have been made conscious of the particular land that had been given to after which taken away from their ancestors.
Printed in collaboration with Reveal and Mom Jones, this challenge is an unprecedented and modern use of Freedmen’s Bureau data—an inconceivable activity for many of American historical past, till current advances in genealogical analysis and the digitization of hundreds of pages of Reconstruction-era paperwork made it possible.
A authorities program gave previously enslaved folks land after the Civil Battle, solely to take practically all of it again a 12 months and a half later. We used synthetic intelligence to trace down the folks, locations, and tales that had lengthy been misunderstood and forgotten, then requested their descendants about what’s owed now.
This challenge was led by Public Integrity’s Alexia Fernández Campbell, Pratheek Rebala, April Simpson, Jennifer LaFleur, with further help from editors Mc Nelly Torres, Jamie Smith Hopkins, Wesley Lowery and Matt DeRienzo. Public Integrity’s truth checking group included Peter Newbatt Smith, Ileana Garnand, Sophie Austin. Different contributors from Public Integrity included Janeen Jones, Ashley Clarke, Vanessa Freeman and Lisa Yanick Litwiller.
Public Integrity’s journalists have been acknowledged with quite a few different honors, together with the Paul Tobenkin Award, a Peabody Award nomination, a Nationwide Headliner Award, an Excellence in Monetary Journalism award, a Nationwide Affiliation of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award, the Sigma Award recognizing the world’s finest knowledge journalism, two finalist honors for the Shaufler Prize for reporting about underserved folks, the Society for Advancing Enterprise Enhancing and Writing’s “Greatest in Enterprise” awards, the Gracie Awards honoring media produced by and for girls, the D.C. chapter of the Society of Skilled Journalists’ Dateline Awards and nominations for Peabody and Ambie awards.
In August of 2023, the newsroom was named a finalist for the On-line Journalism Awards’ common excellence award and received a nationwide Edward R. Murrow Award for General Excellence.
Based in 1989, the Middle for Public Integrity is likely one of the oldest nonprofit information organizations within the nation and is devoted to investigating methods and circumstances that contribute to inequality in the US.
