Payne, Leslie “Les”

Impact on the world

Payne helped report Newsday’s 33-part 1973 series “The Heroin Trail,” tracing narcotics from Turkish poppy fields to New York City streets, which won the paper the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service; his subsequent reporting from South Africa during the 1976 Soweto Uprising was recommended for a Pulitzer by the nominating jury before being overruled without explanation by the prize’s advisory board. As a co-founder and fourth president of the National Association of Black Journalists and a Newsday columnist so provocative that editors reportedly learned the names of local bomb-sniffing dogs, Payne spent his final three decades interviewing more than a hundred people who had known Malcolm X, from surviving siblings to FBI informants, for what became, after his death, the definitive biography The Dead Are Arising, winner of the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

Life & background

Born July 12, 1941, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and raised from age thirteen in Hartford, Connecticut, Payne was the first in his family to attend college, earning a B.A. in English from the University of Connecticut in 1964 before serving six years as a U.S. Army journalist, including writing speeches for General William Westmoreland in Vietnam. Newsday hired him as an investigative reporter in 1969; he rose to national editor and assistant managing editor, began writing a syndicated column in 1980, retired from the paper in 2006, and continued researching his Malcolm X biography — begun in 1990 — until his death from a heart attack on March 19, 2018, in New York, with the manuscript nearly complete.

Sources

1. The Pulitzer Prizes; National Book Foundation; Hobart and William Smith Colleges