William Raspberry (b. Okolona, Mississippi, United States, October 12, 1935) is an American columnist. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated urban affairs columnist at The Washington Post , as well as the Knight Professor of the Practice of Communications and Journalism at the Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University. In 1999, Raspberry received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College. After earning a B.S. in history at the University of Indianapolis in 1958, Raspberry served as a public information officer with the U.S. Army from 1960 to 1962, before joining the staff of the Washington Post as a teletypist. Raspberry quickly rose in the ranks of the paper, becoming a columnist in 1966. Raspberry was first nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1982, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1994. He is the author of Looking Backward at Us, a collection of his columns from the 1980s. He retired in December of 2005.
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