Pulitzer Center Update February 28, 2025
Celebrating '1619' Educators Shaping History
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Framing Black History Month With 1619
Black History Month is the time for us to engage, perhaps more intentionally than we usually do, with stories about the often unacknowledged contributions by Black people who have helped shape our shared histories. The Pulitzer Center seeks and shares stories of Black people achieving seemingly impossible things, not because they are predisposed to withstanding stress, but because they have been historically put into situations with impossible choices.
This year, I’m sure that feeling of being left with impossible choices resonated with educators across the United States. Teaching is a difficult job made even more uncertain and overwhelming in our social and political landscape. Our K-12 newsletters highlighted resources from our 1619 Education Program partners meeting the challenges of the moment. The resource collections were grouped according to four weekly themes that I hoped might speak to some of the conversations teachers, students, and communities are having among themselves:
- Expanding Origin Stories, Empowering Learners
- The Classroom as a Democratic Space
- Local and Global Legacies of Slavery
- Art That Reflects and Defines Culture
In Impact blogs by our 1619 Education grantees, we heard from teachers in Philadelphia connecting over Zoom to consider which Black histories, such as those of Black deaf people, should be integrated into African American history courses. In two Kentucky-based projects, one in Louisville and one in Appalachia, we saw communities come together to address the erasure of Black history in their local context and to right the injustice through art, dialogue, and community memorials. In New York, a 60-year-old university education opportunity program was radically transformed by the inclusion of The 1619 Project in its onboarding classes.
The Impact blogs brought a necessary personal element to the resource collections. Reviewing and preparing them felt like a great honor and responsibility. You can read these and meet our full group of Impact grantees on our 1619 Education website. After visiting, I hope you will also consider supporting our programs for educators doing the bold, necessary work of teaching Black history year-round, even in the face of great uncertainty and in new and innovative ways.
Appreciatively,
Impact
The Pulitzer Center-supported project China: The Superpower of Seafood has won a duPont Award. Each year, the duPont Columbia Awards honor excellence in reporting, storytelling, and public impact, celebrating the journalism profession while supporting journalism education and innovation.
The winning reporting project is a four-year investigation by The Outlaw Ocean Project that looks at human rights and environmental crimes on Chinese fishing ships and in Chinese processing plants, and how they connect to the global seafood market.
See the full project here.
Photo of the Week
This message first appeared in the February 28, 2025, edition of the Pulitzer Center's weekly newsletter. Subscribe today.
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