A New Historical Fiction by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

"I so love this story!  Mr. Pitts has done it again. The man crafts a novel as well as the great storytellers of our time. "Freeman" captured my attention from the very first sentence and my heart throughout. Sam and Tilda will stay with me for a very long time. I can't let them go."  --- Reviewed by Sybil Wilkes, co-host of the Tom Joyner Morning Show, a nationally syndicated radio program heard in over 115 markets with an audience of more than eight million.


In 2004, Pitts was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He was also a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1992. In 1997, Pitts took first place for commentary in division four (newspapers with a circulation of over 300,000) in the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors' Ninth Annual Writing Awards competition.  His recent columns on the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman have garnered much attention from his peers and readers alike.  Click here to read the archive of columns by Leonard Pitts Jr.   

Freeman

Book Summary

Shortly after the Confederates surrender, a runaway slave leaves the safety of Philadelphia in search of his wife who he left in Mississippi 15 years earlier, but who has been taken by gunpoint to Arkansas by her former landowner. Original.  Excerpt

'Freeman': A Liberated Slave In Search Of Family

"To me, it's such a fascinating and little known fact that all of these African-Americans newly freed slaves went to such lengths to reconstitute their marriages and reconstitute their families," he says.

"In terms of the emotional aspect of it, if I've been owned all of my life and I'm 20, 30, 40 years old, I have to define for myself intellectually and emotionally what freedom means, and what I can now do," Pitts says.


NABJ Journal the Journalist of the Year, page 10

“I always knew I was a writer. It was not a matter of deciding, it was a matter of accepting what I already was."



“His columns speak to those silenced by poverty, violence and discrimination.” ... Pitts, ...writes a twice-weekly column for The Miami Herald