Edda Fields-Black, a Miami native and daughter of prominent Black historian Dorothy Jenkins Fields, has been awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for History for her groundbreaking book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War.
The announcement last week, Monday, May 5, made Fields-Black one of the few Black scholars to receive the Pulitzer in this category — alongside Annette Gordon-Reed. The honor also marked a full-circle moment in a lifelong journey sparked by her mother’s influence.
At just eight years old, Fields-Black and her older sister were paid by Jenkins Fields to go door to door in their Brownsville neighborhood with a tape recorder and legal pad to collect family stories. That early project planted the seeds for a career steeped in the preservation of African American history.
Now a Carnegie Mellon University history professor and director of its Dietrich College Humanities Center, Fields-Black has authored two books, with COMBEE taking nearly a decade of research and three years to write. The book centers on Harriet Tubman’s leadership during the Combahee River Raid of June 1863, which Fields-Black identifies as the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history…