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It's the Brian Lairor Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With us now, Jelani Cobb, the New Yorker writer and dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He'll talk about this year's winners just announced on campus last night of the Columbia DuPont Broad journalism awards and the state and meaning of journalism

right now. I'm delighted to be able to say that WNYC's on the media was one of the DuPont

winners. We'll get to what they won for. Others ranged from local stations like KPRC TV

in Houston, which covered their city's crumbling water infrastructure,

to a group called The Ocean Project, which reported an investigative piece on illegal fishing

practices and human rights abuses in that context by China, to MTV for a documentary on the

practice of forced reproduction in the antebellum South. Here's a short

excerpt from that documentary, which was called birthing a nation, the resistance of Mary Gaffney.

A version of cotton grows on the West African coast.

And there is a depth of botanical history that makes us know that West African women understood cotton root as being a contraceptive for hundreds of years.

This is a transfer of knowledge between women who are trying to rest some control back from

an obscene system.

Enslaved women were able to prevent themselves from giving birth. That was a political act of resistance.

She could protect herself in a way that was clandestine,

and that undermined the institution of slavery.

And enslaved women did that every single day. mind the institution of slavery.

An enslaved woman did that every single day.

Mary's decision totally disrupted the profit-making enterprise of her enslaver.

We also note that men supported women's efforts to control their fertility.

And to say, without saying it out loud, my future children will not be born into the system of enslavement.

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