USA TODAY Network newsrooms across the South region won a prestigious journalism award Thursday honoring an ongoing project that explores the long shadow of racism in the American South.

“The Confederate Reckoning,” a multimedia series powered by dozens of journalists working across five states, received the grand prize from the 2021 Robert F. Kennedy Book and Journalism Awards. The annual competition recognizes outstanding domestic and international reporting on issues of human rights and social justice.

Renowned TV journalist Katie Couric praised the work during the online ceremony as a “detailed, unusual, and difficult examination.”

The project harnessed the reach of the USA TODAY Network South, which includes journalists working in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Together, they traced the complicated history of the Confederacy from historic battlefields of the 1860s to contemporary classrooms and halls of government.

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