J-school alumnus, board member wins UNC GAA outstanding alumni award

Samuel L. Fulwood III, a 1978 UNC journalism alumnus and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., has been recognized with the 2014 Harvey E. Beech Outstanding Alumni Award for Overall Achievement.

He is also a member of the school's Board of Advisers.

The award, given by the UNC General Alumni Association (GAA), recognizes outstanding African-American alumni who have been stellar leaders within the University community and/or within their local community. 

At the Center for American Progress, Fulwood analyzes the influence of national politics and domestic policies on communities of color across the U.S.

Prior to his work at the center, he was a metro columnist at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, the last stop in a nearly three-decade journalism career that featured posts at several metropolitan newspapers. During the 1990s, he was a national correspondent in the Washington bureau of Los Angeles Times, where he created a national race-relations beat and contributed to the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

He also has worked as business editor and state political editor for the Atlanta Journal Constitution; as assistant city editor, business reporter, editorial writer and Johannesburg, South Africa, bureau correspondent for The Baltimore Sun; and as a police, business and sports reporter at The Charlotte Observer.

He is the author of two books, “Waking from the Dream: My Life in the Black Middle Class” and “Full of It: Strong Words and Fresh Thinking for Cleveland.”

In addition to his news and commentary writings, he frequently speaks on college campuses and TV and radio programs to discuss national politics, race relations and pop culture. He is a founding contributing writer for The Root.com, an online publication targeted to the African-American online community.

Fulwood was a 1994 Nieman Foundation Fellow at Harvard University and the inaugural Presidential Fellow at Case Western Reserve University in 2003, where he taught courses on media, politics and pop culture.

In addition to Fulwood, the GAA will present 2014 Harvey E. Beech Outstanding Alumni Awards to Walter “Gene” Egerton ’76, Chief Medical Officer at the University of Marylan Midtown Campus in Baltimore, and Kraig J. Holt ’82, a consulting software sales executive for IBM in Charlotte, N.C.