The Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award of Colby, established in 1952, is awarded to a journalist who continues the Lovejoy heritage of fearlessness and commitment to American freedom of the press. The award is granted annually to a member of the press, regardless of title, who, in the opinion of selection committee members, has contributed to the country’s journalistic achievement.
Elijah Parish Lovejoy was born in Albion, Maine, Nov. 9, 1802, the son of a Congregational minister. He graduated in 1826 from Waterville College (now Colby), where he was valedictorian and class poet.
At age 29 he entered the Princeton Theological Seminary. While there he was persuaded to return to Missouri to launch a religious newspaper, the St. Louis Observer. He was named editor. Lovejoy wrote moderately about slavery, and his views were at first acceptable in Missouri, a slave state. As fear of slave uprisings increased, an incident occurred during which a freed man was trapped and killed. When the mob leaders were freed by the court, Lovejoy vehemently criticized the decision. His press was destroyed and his home burglarized.
He moved across the river to the free state of Illinois, where he believed he could write without fear. When his press was shipped to Alton, however, thugs smashed it at the dock. Local citizens raised money for a new press, and Lovejoy published successfully for a year. His position on slavery hardened, and on July 6, 1837, he published another editorial condemning the practice. That night his press was again destroyed. He bought another, which was also destroyed. Friends then organized a militia and secretly bought and installed another press.
By Laura Meader
Jacqueline Charles, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Emmy Award-winning Caribbean correspondent for the Miami Herald, will receive the 2024 Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism from Colby College. Charles is heralded for her extensive reporting on Haiti, covering the nation’s natural disasters, political turmoil, and healthcare crises, often from the front lines.
Charles, whom former U.S. President Bill Clinton referred to as “Haiti’s ambassador to the world,” will be honored Sept. 20, 2024, at 4 p.m. for her bravery and relentless determination covering Haiti for more than two decades. The public is invited to attend the free event in the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts on Colby’s campus.
“With courage and compassion, Jacqueline Charles ensures that the turmoil in Haiti and its effects on the people of that country remain visible to the world,” said Colby President David A. Greene. “Ms. Charles has spent her career revealing injustice and threats to humanity, just as Elijah Parish Lovejoy did.”
From its devastating 2010 earthquake to the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse to the current gang violence strangling the country’s capital, Charles has shown an unwavering commitment to telling the story of Haiti and its resilient people.
“It is with tremendous honor that I accept Colby College’s 2024 Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism,” Charles said. “I do so not on behalf of myself but my fellow journalists in Haiti who every day courageously carry on Elijah Parish Lovejoy’s commitment to press freedom.”
Championing Lovejoy’s ideals
Since 1952 Colby has presented the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award to honor contemporary journalists for their courageous reporting. The award is named for Lovejoy, the 1826 valedictorian at Colby and a crusading abolitionist editor murdered by a mob in 1837 for his impassioned anti-slavery editorials. John Quincy Adams called him America’s first martyr to freedom of the press.
“Jacqueline Charles’s journalism represents the best of the ideals of Elijah Parish Lovejoy and what the Lovejoy Award exemplifies,” said Lovejoy Selection Committee chair Martin Kaiser, editor and senior vice president, retired, of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Her courage and fearless commitment to the truth has produced unequaled coverage of Haiti and the Caribbean.”
Charles joins a lengthy list of notable recipients, including Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal journalist recently released after 16 months in a Russian jail in the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War; Ukranian photojournalists Evgeniy Maloletka and Mstyslav Chernov; and New York Times foreign correspondent Alissa Rubin.
Charles impressed the Lovejoy Selection Committee with her “relentless, groundbreaking reporting through the perils of political unrest, human rights battles, and natural disasters,” said Kaiser. “She is the journalistic authority in one of the most difficult places in the world to do reporting.”
The presentation of the Lovejoy Award will include a discussion between Charles and New York Times Investigative Correspondent Matt Apuzzo ’00, a member of the Lovejoy Selection Committee. President Greene will offer remarks and present the award.
Her assignments are challenging—and dangerous.
“Today, Haiti is a nation under siege, where journalists are forced to flee after enduring shootings or kidnappings, and where the act of self-censorship no longer offers protection,” said Charles. “Yet in the face of this, some of us continue to tell the story of the pain of a people forgotten and often dismissed.”
Receiving the Lovejoy Award is an opportunity to illuminate her work to a wider audience.
“This is an incredible honor, and I’m deeply humbled. I urge journalists everywhere to stand in solidarity with Haiti to make sure that we tell the story of a nation besieged by conflict, isolation, and disaster—natural and man-made—since its founding more than 200 years ago by former slaves. But it is also a country of great beauty and potential, and where its citizens and far-flung diaspora continue to dream and hope for a brighter future.”
Telling Haiti’s story
Charles has deep ties to the Caribbean and embodies the region’s diversity. Born in English-speaking Turks and Caicos, she came to the United States at age 7 and was raised in Miami’s Overtown neighborhood with her Haitian mother and Cuban-American stepfather. She joined the Miami Herald as a high school intern and returned to the paper shortly after earning her bachelor’s in journalism and mass communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1994.
Her first foreign-desk assignment as a full-time journalist with the Herald was the 1994 return of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Since then, she’s used her fluency in Creole to cover an array of diverse stories about the country. Charles is one of the few journalists ensuring Haiti’s news reaches Miami, with its burgeoning Haitian population, and the larger world.
Charles was among the first journalists to arrive in Haiti after the powerful 7.0 magnitude quake in 2010, and she spent 18 months on the ground chronicling the recovery and reconstruction. For her unprecedented coverage of that catastrophe, she was named a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist and Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).
In 2011 Charles co-produced the Miami Herald’s feature-length documentary film Nou Bouke: Haiti’s Past, Present and Future, which offers a comprehensive look at the nation in the aftermath of the earthquake. The film aired nationally on PBS January 11, 2011, and later won a regional Emmy Award.
Charles possesses the compassion and drive to tell stories of people whose voices often go unheard. For example, Charles and photojournalist José A. Iglesias published a four-part series titled “Cancer in Haiti” that chronicled the lack of cancer care there. The series won the prestigious June L. Biedler Prize for Cancer Journalism from the American Association of Cancer Research in 2019. Earlier, in 2016, Charles tracked Haitian migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border to understand their motivations.
Taking journalism seriously
Charles joined the Miami Herald’s World Desk full time in 2006 and has traveled across the Caribbean on assignments. She’s written about race in Cuba, whale hunting in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and child trafficking in the Dominican Republic. Her byline appears in stories from Liberia, Kenya, Italy, and, more recently, Mexico, Canada, and Chile.
In Florida, she’s covered impoverished communities in Miami, schools and government in Broward County, the state legislature, social services, and immigration.
Charles has been broadly recognized for her wide-ranging coverage of critical issues. In 2023 she was once more named Journalist of the Year by NABJ, for her coverage of the presidential assassination, and won the Excellence in International Reporting Award from the International Center for Journalism. In 2018 she was awarded the Maria Moors Cabot Prize—the oldest award in international journalism—for coverage of the Americas.
She also received recognition for her contributions to the Miami Herald’s Panama Papers investigation, awarded a 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.
Her alma mater honored her with a Distinguished Alumna Award, and she currently serves on UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media’s Board of Advisers. She is also a founding member of the Carolina Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Black Journalists’ student chapter.
Charles mentors young journalists and frequently appears on National Public Radio, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, MSNBC, Aljazeera, and Sunday morning public affairs shows.
Despite years of demanding assignments, Charles remains a dedicated journalist who takes seriously her position as a “witness to Haiti’s pains and triumphs.”
“The world’s first Black Republic, it is a nation that has yet to realize its full potential, but where hope lives on despite this current period of darkness,” she said. “The story of Haiti is an inspiration to all freedom-loving people, and as journalists, we should be proud to stand up for the plight of the Haitian people, including its journalists.”
Current Lovejoy Selection Committee members include Matt Apuzzo ’00, investigative correspondent, New York Times; Nancy Barnes, editor, Boston Globe; Sewell Chan, editor-in-chief, Texas Tribune; Neil Gross, Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology, Colby College; Martin Kaiser, editor and senior vice president, retired, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and director of the Capital News Service at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism; Mindy Marqués Gonzales, vice president and executive editor, Simon and Schuster, and former editor, Miami Herald; Amna Nawaz, co-anchor, PBS NewsHour; and Ron Nixon, global investigations editor, The Associated Press
On the night of Nov. 7, 1837, a mob attacked the new press. The militia fought back, killing one. The mob eventually set fire to the building, drove out the militia. Lovejoy was shot and killed as he attempted to extinguish the blaze.
He was buried Nov. 9, his 35th birthday. John Quincy Adams called him the “first American martyr to the freedom of the press and the freedom of the slave.”
On Sept. 29, 2000, Lovejoy was inducted into the Maine Press Hall of Fame.
Listen to an engaging conversation with Ken Ellingword, author of First to Fall, a book about the legacy of Elijah Lovejoy on National Public Radio’s (NPR) “Morning Edition”.
The purpose of the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award is threefold:
~To honor and preserve the memory of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, America’s first martyr to freedom of the press and a Colby College graduate (valedictorian, Class of 1826) who died bravely rather than forsake his editorial principles.
~To stimulate and honor the kind of achievement in the field of reporting, editing, and interpretive writing that continues the Lovejoy heritage of fearlessness and freedom.
~To promote a sense of mutual responsibility and cooperative effort between a news industry devoted to journalistic freedom and a liberal arts college dedicated to academic freedom.
Nominees must be reporting for a U.S.-based outlet and nominations should be sent to [email protected]. Once all nominations are received, the selection committee recommends finalists for the award on the basis of:
~Integrity, without which no news organization can function in its traditional role as a public servant.
~Craftsmanship, without which no one can succeed as a journalist.
~Character, intelligence, and courage.
~Potential of the work to stimulate engaging campus conversations around important issues of our times.
Martin Kaiser, Chair
Editor and Senior Vice President, retired, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Matt Apuzzo ’00
International Investigations Editor, New York Times
Nancy Barnes
Editor, Boston Globe
Sewell Chan
Executive Editor, Columbia Journalism Review
Aminda Marqués González
Vice President and Executive Editor, Simon and Schuster; former Executive Editor and Vice President, Miami Herald
Neil Gross
Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology, Colby College
Amna Nawaz
Co-anchor, PBS NewsHour
Ron Nixon
Vice President for News, Investigative, Enterprise, Grants, and Partnerships, The Associated Press
David A. Greene
President, Colby College
Richard Uchida ’79
Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary, Colby College
Jane Powers ’86
Chair, Colby College Board of Trustees
Alison Beyea
Executive Director, Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs, Colby College
Ruth Jackson
Vice President and Chief of Staff, Colby College
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