About Sam Fulwood

Sam Fulwood is a Senior Fellow at American Progress, where he analyzes the influence of national politics and domestic policies on communities of color across the United States.

Prior to joining the Center, Sam was a metro columnist at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, the last stop in a nearly three-decade journalism career that featured posts at several metropolitan newspapers. During the 1990s, he was a national correspondent in the Washington bureau of Los Angeles Times, where he created a national race-relations beat and contributed to the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Los Angeles riots in 1992.

He has also worked as business editor and state political editor for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, as assistant city editor, business reporter, editorial writer, and Johannesburg, South Africa bureau correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, and as a police, business, and sports reporter at The Charlotte Observer.

Fulwood is the author of two books, Waking from the Dream: My Life in the Black Middle Class (Anchor, 1996) and Full of It: Strong Words and Fresh Thinking for Cleveland (Gray & Company, 2004).

In addition to his news and commentary writings in mass-circulated publications and anthologies, Sam frequently speaks on college campuses and television and radio programs to discuss national politics, race relations, and pop culture. He is a founding contributing writer for The Root.com, an online publication targeted to the African-American online community.

He was a 1994 Nieman Foundation fellow and is currently a member of the foundation's board of advisors. During the spring of 2000, he was an Institute of Politics fellow at Harvard University. Sam was an inaugural presidential fellow at Case Western Reserve University in 2003, where he taught courses on media, politics, and pop culture.

Sam earned a B.A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1978.