Acclaimed Author Seeks to Be a Builder of Bridges

  • DALLAS -- Isabel Wilkerson is the best-selling author of two books, The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. In 1994, while serving as Chicago Bureau Chief for The New York Times, she won the Pulitzer Prize, becoming the first African American to win for individual reporting.

    “I stand before you as a proud product of the District of Columbia Public Schools,” Wilkerson told the urban educators who assembled to hear her keynote speech at the Council of the Great City Schools’ 68th Annual Fall Conference in Dallas. “So, it can be said that the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism came out of public schools.”

    Wilkerson said that in everything she does, she thinks about her ancestors who survived the Middle Passage and the unimaginable horrors of slavery so that America could exist.

    The bestselling author is humbled by the fact that at one time in the country it was against the law for African Americans to learn to read and to write, saying: “Yet, here I stand before you as a Pulitzer Prize winner who makes my living doing the very thing that they were prohibited from doing.”

    A recipient of the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama, Wilkerson told the story of her father, a Tuskegee airman in World War II, and noted that “they were among the finest pilots our country has ever produced.”

    However, after the war the airmen were prohibited from working as pilots, barred from doing the very work they loved and at which they excelled. As a result, the men had to forego their dreams and remake themselves.

    Wilkerson recounted how her father went back to school for a second degree and became a civil engineer.  “That means that my father was literally the builder of bridges,” she said. “And so that makes me the daughter of the builder of bridges and that is what I seek to do in all that I write.”