Leonard Pitts, Jr. is a journalist and novelist. He is also a nationally syndicated commentator who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2004.
“I write for myself,” he recently told our sister publication, Artspeak. “I write what I feel needs to be said.”
Pitts, wrote a poem that appeared in the Los Angeles Sentinel published since the age of 12. He went on to see his first paid publishing at 18. The University of Southern California graduate took his next step with Soul Magazine.
“I couldn’t believe people were paying me to go hangout with The Temptations and Gladys Knight and The Pips…this is actually a job,” said Pitts.
He joined the Miami Herald as a music critic in 1991 after ten years with Soul. He went on to become the Miami Herald’s music critic.
He’s written two books. “The Last Thing You Surrender” (2019) and “54 miles.” (2024)
“The Last Thing You Surrender” explores Jim Crow in the south as three Americans face enormous change triggered by World War II. George Simon, a white teenage marine who was badly injured, survives only because a Black messman, Eric Gordy, makes a superhuman effort to save his life. Thelma, a young black woman, widowed by the events at Pearl Harbor, finds unexpected opportunity and a dangerous friendship in a segregated Alabama shipyard feeding the war.
“54 Miles,” a sequel to “The Last Thing You Surrender,” finds George, Eric and Thelma 20 years later and puts them in the middle of the cicil rights struggle — including at the “Bloody Sunday” march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
“I feel like ‘the Forest Gump of American Journalism’,” he said.
Find more of our interview with Pitts by clicking here.
