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The Heart for Public Integrity’s landmark undertaking, 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 People have been demanding compensation and restitution for his or her struggling because the finish of the Civil Battle.
40 Acres and a Mule stays the nation’s most well-known try to offer some type of reparations for American slavery. At this time, it’s largely remembered as a damaged promise and an deserted step towards multiracial democracy. Much less identified is that the federal authorities truly did challenge tons of, maybe 1000’s, of titles to particular plots of land between 4 and 40 acres. Freedmen and girls constructed houses, 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 workforce 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 workforce carried out genealogical analysis to find residing descendants of a lot of those that had acquired after which misplaced the land. For the primary time, these residing Black People had 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 undertaking is an unprecedented and revolutionary use of Freedmen’s Bureau data—an unimaginable job for many of American historical past, till current advances in genealogical analysis and the digitization of 1000’s of pages of Reconstruction-era paperwork made it possible.
A authorities program gave previously enslaved folks land after the Civil Battle, solely to take almost 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 undertaking was led by Public Integrity’s Alexia Fernández Campbell, Pratheek Rebala, April Simpson, Jennifer LaFleur, with extra help from editors Mc Nelly Torres, Jamie Smith Hopkins, Wesley Lowery and Matt DeRienzo. Public Integrity’s reality checking workforce 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 information journalism, two finalist honors for the Shaufler Prize for reporting about underserved folks, the Society for Advancing Enterprise Enhancing and Writing’s “Finest 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’ normal excellence award and received a nationwide Edward R. Murrow Award for Total Excellence.
Based in 1989, the Heart for Public Integrity is without doubt 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.
