The 43rd stamp
in the Black Heritage series honors Gwen Ifill, one of the nation’s most
esteemed journalists. Ifill was among the first African Americans to hold
prominent positions in both broadcast and print journalism.
Deputy
Postmaster General Ronald Stroman will be the dedicating official at today’s
ceremony at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington,
DC.
After graduating
from college in 1977, Ifill worked at The
Boston Herald American, The Baltimore
Evening Sun, The Washington Post,
and The New York Times. In 1994, she covered
politics in NBC’s Washington bureau. Five years later, she joined PBS where she
became the senior political correspondent for “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer” and
moderator and managing editor of “Washington Week” — the first woman and
first African American to moderate a major television news-analysis show.
In 2013, she
became co-anchor of the “PBS News Hour,” part of the first all-female team to
anchor a national nightly news program. Among Ifill’s honors were the Radio
Television Digital News Foundation’s Leonard Zeidenberg First Amendment Award
(2006), Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center’s Goldsmith Career Award for
Excellence in Journalism (2009) and induction into the National Association of
Black Journalists Hall of Fame (2012). In 2015, she was awarded the Fourth
Estate Award by the National Press Club. She received numerous honorary degrees
and served on the boards of the News Literacy Project and the Committee to
Protect Journalists, which renamed its Press Freedom Award in her honor.
The 2016 John Chancellor Award was posthumously awarded
to Ifill by the Columbia Journalism School. In 2017, the Washington Press Club
Foundation and the “PBS News Hour” created a journalism fellowship named for
Ifill. Her alma mater, Simmons University, opened the Gwen Ifill College of
Media, Arts, and Humanities in 2018.
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