Pulitzer on the Road Podcast Episode 3 Transcript: “Freedom to Dominate”

Recorded in Eufaula, Alabama.

Jefferson Cowie: Black people had been organizing out in the countryside on Election Day November 1874. An altercation, that appears to have been staged, happened while these voters were lined up to vote. That appears to have been a signal for whites to pull guns out of every nook and cranny in town. They appeared out of second-story windows, they appeared out of first-story windows, they came pouring out of doors, and they opened fire on Black voters in the streets. And voters were lucky to make it out alive. Many did not. That brought about the collapse of Black voting in Barbour County.

Nicole Carroll: That's historian Jefferson Cowie talking about the massacre of Black voters in Eufaula, Alabama in 1874. Eufaula is a town of about 13,000 residents, the largest in Barbour County. It's nestled in the southeast corner of the state and is known for 19th century homes set among leafy dogwood trees. White people in this county, he writes, fought the federal government for over 200 years to maintain their profits and their power. They fought for the freedom to dominate and oppress. This was just one and a line of atrocities against Indigenous and Black people along the way. In his book "Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power," Cowie, who goes by Jeff, tells how white speculators in Eufaula forced Muscogee Creek Indians out of their homes and into starvation, how Black residents were lynched for daring to exercise their rights, and how local son George Wallace rose in politics fighting for segregation as activists marched for civil rights. Jeff's story of this one town, this one county, won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for History. And here, he'll share with us the stories behind this extraordinary work.

Welcome to "Pulitzer on the Road," bringing you closer to Pulitzer-winning work through discussions between Pulitzer judges and winners. I'm your guide, Nicole Carroll, a Pulitzer Board member and professor of practice at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Each spring, the board meets in Pulitzer Hall at Columbia University in New York to choose its winners. The conversation is rich and insightful. This podcast is designed to bring a similarly thought-provoking experience to you. In this episode, we travel back to Eufaula with Jeff, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University, and Kelly Lytle Hernandez, a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a fellow Pulitzer Board member. You'll come along as these two noted historians discuss their observations and opinions of the winning work. Please note, the material they cover is disturbing, and it's sometimes graphic. We took a small elevator to the second floor of the historic Eufaula Carnegie Library where we entered a grand auditorium, the scene of countless graduations, dances, and now, this interview. Let's listen in.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: I really want to talk to you about the core idea at the heart of this book before we get into the details of the history. And I wanted to invite you first to tease out what you call the three threads of American freedom, and why there is a tension at the heart of that idea.

Jefferson Cowie: I borrow from historical sociologist Orlando Patterson, this idea that there are three notes in a chord that make up this sort of Western idea of freedom: the first being civil liberties, freedom to do as one pleases; the second is to participate in your political community in some way, shape, or form – voting, community engagement; and the third is the problematic one, and that is the freedom to dominate, the freedom to control. But what I found in this story was it was very prominent, and the first two were actually mobilized very effectively to pursue the third. In other words, people use their individual liberties and their political participation in the community to pursue a freedom to dominate, in this case, dominate the land and the labor of other people.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: Can you take us on a quick tour of the substance of this book and the epic that you're telling?

Jefferson Cowie: Right, so the book is divided into four parts, each based on federal power having an impact or a lack of impact on local circumstances. And the first looks at the fight over land, and how federal authorities actually tried to stop the white land grab from the Muscogee Creek people, and in the process fomented a sort of resistance to federal authority that went by the name of freedom. The second section looks at the Civil War, and especially reconstruction, in which the federal government came in and made a political military commitment to enforcing Black citizenship and voting rights. The third section looks at this different period when the federal government is not there, and we see this sort of white freedom in all of its ugliness, and some of the most heinous aspects of American history: lynching, Jim Crow, convict leasing, disenfranchisement. The fourth section is about the modern civil rights era and the rise of George Wallace, who is by far the most famous person to come from this county. Wallace found a sort of anti-federal power approach to politics that proved so powerful, so meaningful, that resonated in a way that just simple racism didn't.

Nicole Carroll: During the early 1830s, Anglo-American settlers invaded and squatted on Creek territory. Thousands of men, women and children died on the forced march to Indian Territory, now known as Oklahoma. Those that made it rebuilt. Today, Eufaula, Oklahoma is a small town just off I-40 in the eastern part of the state. It's named for the Creek tribe and its former home. Back in Eufaula, Alabama, we're in the center of town near the intersection of Eufaula Avenue and Broad Street. Over the years, the historic Eufaula Avenue turned into US 431, a major artery for trucks and travelers headed toward the Florida Panhandle. You'll hear them as we walk. The conversation will go back and forth between the quiet of the library and the noise of the streets.

Jefferson Cowie: We're on the median dividing the main commercial boulevard in Eufaula, Broad Street, and where the slave market is located. The slave market was the destination for all these people who are brought west to the emerging cotton economy. And the reason Eufaula is significant is because it had very good port access, known as the Bluff City at the time, to be able to ship commodities down the river to Apalachicola Bay and out to Mexico and onto the industrial harbors of the world from, you know, whether it's New England or old England. And so, this was also a banking and commercial center, warehousing center for the entire area. Over the course of 20 years, there were thousands and thousands and thousands of enslaved people. There were slaves that belonged to the Creek Indians. They were few and far between, and it wasn't on a plantation scale. But this is where it happened. Those that did survive, made it, made it here to be sold to the local planter class, which are the people whose mansions all around here are named after.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: Can you talk just a little bit about how slavery became so entrenched in Eufaula so quickly. And it, you said it lasted less than 30 years here, but it was the center of social, political and economic life. How does it go from settlers in early 1830s to that?

Jefferson Cowie: Well, these weren't just settlers who are, you know, looking for a little plot of land to call their own. Most of the people were major speculators, and they were they were interested in land swindling. Settler is just sort of a bit of an innocent name. It sounds like Little House on the Prairie, but they're basically setting up massive industrial enterprises, large numbers of slaves working enormous fields of cotton. There's nothing quaint about it. It's a large scale enterprise.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: Talk to us about the land.

Jefferson Cowie: Barbour County is split between what's called a Black Belt line, goes right through this county, and on the northern end is this rich black soil. We call it the Black Belt because of the soil – tends to get conflated with the color of the people who worked it, but it's really because of this rich soil. And this soil makes cotton, and cotton fuels the entire industrial enterprise of the 19th century. This is the most precious resource in the early industrial age, because it can make white gold, and therefore we need as much freedom from federal authority and other sources, and certainly black organizing, to pursue that. And the goal after the Civil War is to reassemble that as effectively as possible, even if the slave regime is over, and of course, that becomes sharecropping. It's a sort of resource curse that we see in a lot of societies that become overdependent on one thing, whether it's oil, that's the most obvious, or blood diamonds, or whatever it might be. If you have that resource, everything twists around it. And that's what happened in the Deep South.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: You have this incredible line on page 99 of this book, where you write "clearly for the slaves purchased in the East, torn away from their families and driven West in chained 'coffles,' the line of black soil arching across the South was little more than a cursed crescent of oppression." Damn. That's a powerful line, when you think about the dreadful surge of the domestic slave trade, which was ripping babies out of arms, parents, siblings away on a daily basis. That "cursed crescent" is the deepest horrors of human history. That becomes everything you just talked about, in terms of the cotton economy that's driving the United States economy, which is booming in the global economy. But at the base of it all, are these stolen children, broken families, whipped bodies. We were just walking outside, the extraordinary heat here – to think about the conditions that people were living and laboring under…

Jefferson Cowie: Ira Berlin called it the "Second Middle Passage," after the crossing of the Atlantic, except they did this on foot, in chains, and it was absolutely horrific. It wasn't like they arrived in a plantation. They arrived in the woods, and were told to turn it into a plantation. And so, they cleared the land, they planted the cotton, and turned it around into a profitable enterprise in a matter of two years. And the number of enslaved people grew astronomically in the 40s and 50s. And it was so successful that people were willing to die for it. White people were willing to die for this world that they'd created. And they didn't think they were going to die, they thought they were going to whip the Yankees in no time. But they're willing to go to full scale war footing to defend what had been around for a generation. One of the many things that struck me about this, was the appeal to tradition. The appeal to 'this is the way we do things, this is how it's always been.' How it's always been? The Creek Indians had only been out since 1837. And by 1861, they're launching a war to defend the Southern way of life. It's pure material interest. There's no tradition here.

Nicole Carroll: Just a block from the side of the market is Eufaula's Confederate monument rising taller than the street lights in the middle of Eufaula and Broad. A Confederate soldier stands atop a stone pillar inscribed with a Confederate flag and the words, "Our Comrades."

Jefferson Cowie: Does anybody know which way Confederate monuments are supposed to face? The north, because if they're facing off against the northern enemy… This one faces east toward the Chattahoochee River because the enemy would come from the river – so, it's not just the north, it's the approaching enemy. In 1904, this Confederate monument, sponsored by the Daughters of the Confederacy, was revealed and it was the biggest event in town. There were 10,000 visitors, fans, all sorts of stuff. What's interesting about it is, you know, we have much controversy about monuments today and a lot of people say, "Well, these were sponsored by the Daughters of the Confederacy and therefore, you know, they're very suspect," and they are. But it wasn't just them throwing up monuments around the turn of the century to commemorate the lost cause. I argue that it actually commemorated a whole bunch of things, mostly the reestablishment of white supremacy in the absence of federal power. It was the reestablishment of a complete social order and economic order. Sharecropping was in place and they were able to kind of rebuild what they quote, unquote had lost in the Civil War period and Reconstruction period. It's more than just kind of a simple monument with a lost cause. The event in which they unveil this, is an enormous celebration of the reestablishment of white supremacy in Barbour County and throughout the South. And they're thrown up all over the place. Every little town ends up with one of these things but this one was really a big deal. There's a parade in which there was a float with eleven women representing each state of the Confederacy. So it was very much connected to this kind of lost cause, but they were celebrating the fact that they had overcome a lot.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: After the Civil War, your book takes us through the extraordinary efforts of African Americans to vote – that they organize by night, they collectively meet up, they go to town together, they register, they vote. They're able to send somebody to the Congress, they're able to elect local representation. Local whites organize a massacre that shuts that down in November 1874.

Jefferson Cowie: The Black voters of 1874 assumed that the federal troops were there to keep the peace. They were there, they were here in downtown Eufaula, and those troops were there seemingly to protect the voters. Turns out, they were not. They had orders to stand down, and to not interfere in civic affairs. And so, as the violence, the shooting, and the murders that ended up in what I call a coup d'état here in Eufaula happened, they sat on their hands and watched it unfold. And this is the tragedy of that weak-kneed, clay-footed federal government.

Nicole Carroll: We've walked just a block south from the Confederate statue – you can still see it from where we're standing on Eufaula. Trucks honk as they head through the busy intersection. This is where Black citizens were murdered for trying to exercise their right to vote. There's no indication, no plaque, no memorial, no mention of the horror that happened here.

Jefferson Cowie: To the best of my knowledge, this is where the Reconstruction coup took place. The voting booths were set up along Eufaula Avenue or at the corner of Eufaula and Broad. The rural areas were Black and the city was mostly white. So Black people had to get into town to vote, and so they did it together. They marched in in a sort of rank-and-file way and they made sure nobody had any weapons because they didn't want to trigger backlash by the white population. The local, so-called scalawag judge recommended this, the Black Congressman recommended this, so they stripped themselves of any weapons, came to town collectively, assembled here at the voting booths. And then at midday, a fight was picked, and the white locals opened fire on voters. And it was done with military precision. These were all veterans, and they shot at least 80. Some people here say that 160 people who were theoretically federally protected in the right to vote. Unfortunately, federal troops had orders to stand down in the face of civil disturbance. And they let the whole thing unfold. After eight years of Reconstruction, voting collapsed. And this is basically where the federal experiment and Reconstruction ended for Barbour County.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: So there's absolutely no historical marker...

Jefferson Cowie: Nooo...

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: ...where the massacre occurred or near it. The closest thing is the Confederate statue. What do you think it would take to get a marker in a town like Eufaula?

Jefferson Cowie: Yeah... that's a good question. A lot of change.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: You've given us this extraordinary epic that goes from the beginning of Anglo American invasion and occupation you called squatting on Creek Muscogee lands in the early 1830s, and the federal government at first tries to protect Creek lands and Creek peoples, but very quickly, in your words, becomes "weak-kneed," right? and "clay-footed." You then take us to the post-Civil War, Civil War period, and post-Civil War period. And you talk about how, under federal protection African Americans gain a portion of political power, but very quickly there's another white resurgence backlash, if you want to call it. And the federal government again steps back and leaves Black folks at the mercy of this white power structure, that then, when the federal power is in total repose, descends into lynchings, disenfranchisement. And then you turn to the civil rights movement when the federal government comes back in, and African Americans win political rights and some civil liberties. But at the same time, you have this George Wallace, who was growing, and he's building this new formula of racialized anti-statism, which is going to flourish in the years ahead. What I want to ask you is, did you know that you were going to come to this conclusion that the federal government is what stands between this country, and the first two notes of freedom?

Jefferson Cowie: That is a very profound question. I had no idea this is where I was going. And I was motivated at first to figure out why people disliked the federal government, why the federal government was the bogeyman of so much of American politics. But then I found the answers because actually, surprising enough to me, that if they filled the space they promised to fill, it worked. It worked in the civil rights era, it worked during Reconstruction. It worked when it worked. Obviously, once the abandonment of these communities happened after the mid-1870s, it didn't work anymore. It was hell for Black people. I think you could criticize the book and say, "Well, the federal government doesn't actually do its job. So why are you celebrating the federal government?" And the answer is, it's the only tool, besides, perhaps arming local people to fight back, which would probably end in a massacre, that I can see in this 200 years of history. And I'm not totally comfortable with that. But this is a pragmatic idea, that short of federal government, enforcing citizenship rights for everybody, I don't see how it works.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: What is it that we need to know about this period when the federal government disappeared?

Jefferson Cowie: Without federal intervention, without federal check on white freedom, the worst aspects of the dominant culture came to the surface: the recreation of a neo-slavery under convict leasing, the freedom to perpetuate a capital crime on another human being without fear of any accountability. In fact, to be celebrated for lynching a person.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: What was it like for you to enter into that, that archive of lynching, and here I'm talking about the newspaper articles in particular, but family remembrances, memoirs... I'll give you space to talk.

Jefferson Cowie: Ooof, yeah, it was horrible. I'd always kept it sort of arm's length, not naively, just sort of as a kind of psychic survival way. And so, it was a little like Indian Removal, to kind of peer into the darkest aspects of American history and see that the soul of the country was not good. Lynching was celebrated as being done not by ruffians and mugs, but by the city's best citizens - right? And it was seen as a civic good. Like it was seen as patrolling the boundaries of what was right, and especially with regard to gender, and that the accusation of rape was just thrown around with absolute impunity by white accusers and ended up in these horrible, horrible deaths. The other thing that comes to mind is, it's not just lynching. It's torture, then death. It is castration. It is delimbing. It's burning, it's shooting, and then it's hanging.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: The entire families in attendance...

Jefferson Cowie: Yeah, right, yeah. And the one where the mother is pinned up against, tied to the tree and made to watch her son get lynched, it's... And so, you know, I had I thought long and hard about what about the lynching chapter in this book. One it's difficult to write because you don't want to be sensationalistic, at all, and you need to be respectful. But you don't want to not tell this story because it is the horror of the story that needs to be told.

Nicole Carroll: We walked from the site of the massacre down Eufaula Avenue, to the Shorter Mansion. The street is lined with stately homes dotted with hot pink azaleas and American flags. The Shorter Mansion was completed in 1906 and is now home of the Eufaula Heritage Association. The white two-story Greek Revival home has 17 Corinthian columns. At the top of each column there's an "S" that stands for "Shorter." The Shorters make frequent appearances in Jeff's book, starting with the removal of the Creek Indians. The Shorters prospered with their plantation and in politics across generations. I asked if we could record this podcast from the Shorter Mansion and interview the executive director of the Heritage Association. They declined saying, “As a board, we feel like this book is just too controversial for the Shorter Mansion, and therefore believe we should not be involved.” So, when we toured the home, we took no microphones or cameras. We didn't interview the host. We simply paid our admission and took a look around. By the time we returned to the library, a storm had rolled in.

Jefferson Cowie: What did you see in the Shorter Mansion?

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: You're asking me?

Jefferson Cowie: I'm asking you what you saw there.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: I am – I’m truly speechless. I saw a hovel that wasn't, it wasn't discussed in any of the literature around the exhibit. Did you see that? It was the celebration of enslavement that left me feeling so unsettled. I've never done a tour like that. I've avoided these places and probably avoided this history, frankly.

Jefferson Cowie: I can understand why. The Shorters are a long standing elite family, dating back to the Indian Removal period where one of the main Shorters was responsible for much of the land theft and speculation that converted Muscogee land into plantation land and stole it, actually, not just from the Indigenous people, but also from many of the so called roughs, the working class people and converted it into large scale plantation agriculture. That goes down through generations of political power and economic power throughout Barbour County, all the way up until the 20th century, when actually most of that mansion was built. And it's interesting to me that it was built to look like an antebellum structure, even though it was actually a 20th century structure, the real sort of architectural imposition of authority and power.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: Yeah, so we just spent maybe 30 minutes, 45 minutes at the Shorter Mansion, where they host an annual pilgrimage to visit as close as you can the old South. Lots of pictures of the family, across generations. Lots of Confederate memorabilia, lots of dresses, and gowns and uniforms and furniture...

Jefferson Cowie: Swords and flags...

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: Swords and flags. I have no words. It really hit me in the gut.

Jefferson Cowie: Oh, did it?

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: Yeah, this place felt so violent to me. And they're – all their pictures up on the wall, just smiling down at you.

Jefferson Cowie: There's a room at the end that had all six governors that came from Barbour County, county of governors as it's called. It's kind of remarkable, even though I stumbled across this place, how much political power and economic power came from this otherwise obscure corner of the state. It raises the question about to what extent is "Freedom's Dominion" the story of a lot of places or one place? How different is Eufaula in Barbour County from other places? Or could you tell a similar story from almost any place?

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: Let us move to the final section of your book, which is about the civil rights era. You had George Wallace, who is creating a new formula for political power, which is racialist anti-statism – right? And on the other side is an incredible man named Fred Gray, who's an attorney with the NAACP. And they are working at odds against each other in the sense that one, Fred Gray, is building democracy, and George Wallace is building the freedom to dominate.

Jefferson Cowie: Fred Gray, who is this young green attorney in 1955, when Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat in Montgomery, goes and defends her and then goes on to doggedly, determinedly, just doing the gritty, everyday grind of local people's concerns and taking them to federal court. And but again, it's federal court, right? So, but he's the one, he's gathering the evidence he's bringing it together, he's very clever. Wallace is different a little bit, because he's trying to take the national stage, right. He wants to get up there and pronounce, "I'm gonna save you from the federal bayonets that are accumulating on the horizon and steal your freedoms."

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: As we know, the Barbour County schools aren't desegregated until the late 20th century, in fact, but Fred Gray comes in to try to enforce and implement and hold local authorities to account.

Jefferson Cowie: So, Brown versus Board breaks down the door, but doesn't say anything about what's going to happen next. So even though the idea of segregation has been fundamentally challenged, there's no roadmap forward. And that roadmap is created by guys like Fred Gray, right? Who are grinding it out in these local cases. And the first one that pops up in Barbour County is this Albert Street situation: a set of Black homeowners on the North Side of town, that the city is by eminent domain trying to replace and move to the South Side because they feel like if they can geographically divide the city, then they can maintain Jim Crow, just because it'll be a geographic separation, and there's no need for integration at all. And so, Fred Gray intervenes on this, and you know, it's a minor victory. He goes on to do a series of cases throughout this entire region for the next 30 years.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: George Wallace in the 1970s that you write about is a really key lodestar or participant in the reforming, the fracturing of the working class, along lines of race.

Jefferson Cowie: In his formula that I sort of figured out along the way was that he was great at setting up a fight with the federal government, losing it, and then winning the politics. Remind you of anybody? You fight, and then it doesn't matter if you win or lose, you're on the treadmill of fighting and where he crystallized all the potential of that model was after the 1957 Civil Rights Act. What came of that was the Department of Justice could come in and look at the voting records of Barbour County, and he was judge of Barbour and Bullock counties at that time. And he basically says "over my dead body is the federal government gonna come in and look at our voting records." And so he made a big, big deal out of this fight, and then he was going to stand up to the feds and the feds coming in to look at the voting records is like Sherman's March through Atlanta, and this is the worst thing that ever happened, but fortunately, "I'm your fighting judge," and this is where he gets the moniker the "fighting judge." So he completely lost this – the federal government got the voting records, and said that Barbour County was not at all fair in voting rights – completely lost it and made a total win out of it politically. He went into the next gubernatorial race as the guy who stood up to the feds, even though he lost, and won the governor's race. And I think that's the moment where he goes, "I got it. I run against the feds, it doesn't matter what they do, because I can win just by fighting them."

Nicole Carroll: Back at the library, we had fashioned a podcast studio up on the auditorium stage. As we walked up the stairs, we were thrilled by what we saw. On shelves reaching to the ceiling were stacks and stacks of the "Eufaula Daily Tribune" dating back to the 1870s. Some were bound and in good condition. Others were fragile and falling apart. We wanted to know how the city's newspaper covered its own history in real time. In particular, we were looking for articles about the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision. That's when the Supreme Court ruled you couldn't separate schoolchildren based on race, and overruled the racist principle known as separate but equal. The library gave us permission to look through the piles, so we dug in.

Jefferson Cowie: Well, we can negotiate which of... we could ‘rock paper scissors.’

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: I want to look at the old newspaper first. So, we're here at the Eufaula Carnegie Library hoping to climb up high on a ladder and reach the oldest newspapers, which are at the top of this bookshelf.

Here's a good editorial.

Jefferson Cowie: Okay.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: So, the court speaks.

Jefferson Cowie: May 20th, the week after.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: "Last Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its long-awaited decision on the question of segregation in the public schools in the South. The court's unanimous decision was a cruel blow to the traditions and customs which have so long prevailed in the South. Speaking before the Eufaula Rotary Club yesterday, former governor Chauncey Sparks said, 'The South has been crucified on the matter of segregation for many years, and this week, we have come to the last crucifixion. While the court's decision was sweeping in its implication, it lay down no rules for its enforcement. We believe decision was bad, if not a vicious one, that to attempt to overthrow a way of life that has been the very foundation of biracial cooperation in the South as a deathblow to that cooperation, and will in the long run, do the Negro in the South more harm than good.’” So that's the editorial from the "Eufaula Tribune."

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: Going into an election, when we sit in the crowd...

Jefferson Cowie: Not the election...

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: No, no, we're not doing the specifics, but when you sit in a crowd, or you watch it on TV and you watch people chant "Freedom!" What do you see when, or hear, or feel, when you see freedom chants happening, now that you have this deep historical knowledge?

Jefferson Cowie: Well, freedom is a, you know, as we said earlier, it's a complicated thing, right? There's, if we break it down to those three dimensions, two of those are great: civil liberties and the ability to participate in the political community. What are people talking about when they say freedom, right? What are they appealing to? And too often, if people are crying freedom in an abstract way, I'm hearing power. I'm hearing 'I want power.' The system of democracy in this country is a broken mess. And I actually am naive enough to believe that if we fix the systems of democratic governance, the rest of it takes care of itself. It's just a long struggle to fix those institutions.

Nicole Carroll: Jeff says, despite the deep material of "Freedom's Dominion," the most common question he gets is, "How did you find out you'd won the Pulitzer Prize?" So, we couldn't let him go without asking that ourselves.

Jefferson Cowie: I was in my living room on a Monday afternoon, and suddenly my phone lit up with "Congratulations!" and I had no idea what those congratulations were for. And then in the back of my mind, I thought, "Oh, I think the Pulitzers are being announced at this time of year," and I thought "I must have gotten runner-up or something." Phone kept blowing up and then finally a friend of mine called and said, “You won the Pulitzer Prize,” and then I walked into the kitchen and told my wife and she said, "That doesn't make any sense." And it wasn't necessarily because of the quality of my work, it was because who hears about like a national prize of that stature through the grapevine? My son was, where was he? He was somewhere, and I wrote him and I said, "I won the Pulitzer Prize." He wrote back and said, "WTF?" And I said, "Yeah," And then it was while, a while later he says, "I Google-checked you. You're right, but WTF?" Another friend just wrote, "Dude, dude, dude." And my PhD advisor just wrote, "Attaboy."

Nicole Carroll: So, what makes a work worthy of a Pulitzer Prize? In describing the selection of "Freedom's Dominion," the jury called the book "harrowing" in how "it traces the development of white supremacy and a county with a long tradition of resistance to federal power; a place shaped fundamentally by settler colonialism and slavery." The jury praised Cowie for "covering familiar territory with a fresh analytical lens," and commended his work for "drawing powerful connections between racist and anti-government ideologies." This, stated the judges, "was a work of historical storytelling at its best."

Thank you for joining "Pulitzer on the Road." We're honored to bring more attention to Pulitzer-winning work and the creators behind it. This series is a production of the Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University in collaboration with the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. It is supported by a grant from the Knight Foundation. All episodes are edited for length and clarity. In future episodes, we'll hear from authors Barbara Kingsolver and Hernan Diaz. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and tell your friends to listen in.

To see this work and the work of all the 2023 winners, please go to Pulitzer.org. "Pulitzer on the Road" is produced by Central Sound at Arizona PBS. Our producers are Anna Williams and Alex Kosiorek from Arizona PBS, Roddy Nikpour from Cronkite and me. Audio engineering by Robert Disner, Alex Kosiorek and Joe Miller. Editing, promotion, and other support by Sean Murphy, Edward Kliment and Pamela Casey. Fact checking by Jessica Quesada. Pulitzer administrator Marjorie Miller is our executive producer. I've been your guide, Nicole Carroll.

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