A Raleigh News & Observer and ProPublica short documentary, which offers a rare view of the racial justice movement in small-town America, won a regional Emmy from the Nashville/Midsouth chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
“Sound of Judgment,” by News & Observer reporter Carli Brosseau, visual journalists Julia Wall and Jessica Koscielniak, and ProPublica executive producer Almudena Toral, was recognized for excellence in news or journalistic coverage of current issues of societal concern, community or immediate public interest.
Over the course of eight months, Brosseau and Wall immersed themselves in vastly different social environments in the town of Graham, located in central North Carolina’s Alamance County, spending hundreds of hours with people whose affiliations ranged from the New Black Panther Party to defenders of the Confederacy. The reporting team also delved into extensive archival and genealogical research to understand a county where a long history of violence and a recent fight over the removal of a Confederate monument created a salient battlefield in the national conflict over race, police accountability and political power. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, this extensive documentation allowed Brosseau to write with authority about people with opposing worldviews in an unsettled time.
