Wendi C. Thomas
MLK50: Justice Through Journalism
This ProPublica article was produced in partnership with MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, which is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.
Fannie Stanberry had been on the job for two months as a package handler at FedEx Express’ massive World Hub when, toward the end of her overnight shift, packages started to fall from a huge shipping container that rolled past her.
As Stanberry, then 61, bent to pick up the packages, she fell and became trapped between the catwalk she’d been standing on and the wheeled platform carrying the shipping container, also known as a dolly. “I thought I was a goner,” Stanberry said. She broke eight ribs and her left arm and lacerated her liver, she said. “I had to learn how to walk over again.”
Two ProPublica projects have been honored with the National Association of Black Journalists’ 2020 Salute to Excellence Awards.
An investigation on the dispossession of African American landowners in the South, co-published with The New Yorker, won in the Magazine-Investigative category. Reporter Lizzie Presser came to the story after reading in a newspaper article that African Americans made up only 1% of the nation’s farmers. After poring over academic articles on the vulnerability of African American landowners who had, for generations, passed down land without a will, she decided to investigate the legal loopholes and systemic abuses that permitted the seizure of these so-called heirs’ properties.