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PULITZER PRIZE WINNER ANTHONY LEWIS IS OBERLIN COLLEGE'S COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER
APRIL 18, 2003--Anthony Lewis--a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for national reporting and a distinguished civil rights activist--will present Oberlin College’s 2003 Commencement address Monday, May 26 on Tappan Square. More than 700 students are expected to receive degrees at the ceremony, which marks the 170th Commencement at the College--the first in the U.S. to admit students regardless of race or gender.
A columnist for The New York Times for 32 years, Lewis was described by the Boston Globe as "the liberal conscience of The New York Times's op-ed page on topics from foreign policy to civil liberties" when he stepped down in December 2001. For 15 years he served as a lecturer on law at the Harvard Law School, teaching a course on Constitutional law and the press, and he has held the James Madison Visiting Professorship at Columbia University since 1983.
He also is the author of three books: Gideon’s Trumpet, about a landmark Supreme Court case; Portrait of a Decade, about changes in American race relations; and Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment.
Lewis was awarded the Pulitzer in 1955 and 1963 for reporting he did, respectively, at the Washington Daily News and the Washington bureau of The New York Times. After working for the Sunday Department of the Times for four years, in 1952 he became a reporter for the News. Three years later Lewis won his first Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series of articles on the dismissal of a Navy employee as a security risk–dismissal without telling the employee the sources or nature of the charges against him. The articles led to the employee’s reinstatement.
In 1955, Lewis joined the Times Washington bureau. In 1957, following a year as a Nieman Fellow at the Harvard Law School, he returned to Washington, where he covered the Supreme Court, the Justice Department and legal issues including the government’s handling of the civil rights movement. He won his second Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Supreme Court in 1963. In 1964, he became chief of the Times London Bureau. Since 1973, he has been based in Boston, traveling frequently in this country and abroad.
Media Contact: Betty Gabrielli
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