The National Association of Black Journalists named Alabama Public Radio the winner of its “Salute to Excellence” award. This national honor is for APR’s documentary “More Bridges to Cross,” about the 50th anniversary of “bloody Sunday.” It was on March 7, 1965 when voting rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma were attacked by a sheriff’s posse armed with clubs and tear gas.
“The APR news team is delighted with the news, and very grateful to NABJ for this generous recognition,” says news director Pat Duggins. “To be mentioned in the same breath with The Washington Post, the NBC Nightly News, and ESPN is very flattering.”
NABJ’s “Salute to Excellence” award is the only journalism competition which honors exemplary coverage of African/American people or issues. APR won “best documentary” in radio markets size 16 and below. Cities in that range include Baltimore, San Diego, and New Orleans.
APR’s documentary “More Bridges to Cross” mixed breaking news coverage of the chaotic 50th anniversary observance in Selma with stories that were enterprised by Duggins, assistant news director Stan Ingold, and APR student intern Sarah Sherrill. Duggins explained how the 1965 voting rights march wasn’t the “first” march to freedom in Selma. During the Civil War in 1865, freed black slaves followed Union troops out of Selma on the same route Martin Luther King and his marchers would take one hundred years later. Ingold reported on Sonja Houston, a young lady from Selma who wanted to be married on the iconic Edmund Pettus Bridge. Intern Sarah Sherrill produced a feature for the documentary on Selma “from a young person’s perspective.”
Other winners of 2016 “Salute to Excellence” awards include "60 Minutes" on CBS, ABC-TV network news, “This American Life,” The Philadelphia Daily News, and Yes! Magazine.
APR’s documentary “More Bridges to Cross” was also honored with two first place “PRNDI” awards from the group Public Radio News Directors, Inc., as well as the New York Festivals International Radio competition’s “Bronze Radio Award.”
