Pulitzer Prize Recipient. Louis Isaac Jaffé received professional recognition after being awarded the 1929 Pulitzer Prize in the category of Editorial Writing. He was given the award "for his editorial entitled "An Unspeakable Act of Savagery," which is typical of a series of articles written on the lynching evil and in successful advocacy of legislation to prevent it." At the time of the article, he was the editor of the "Virginian-Pilot" of Norfolk. He was the editor of, as it was called locally, the "Pilot" from 1919 to 1950. During this time, he wrote about the Ku Klux Klan and lynching of African Americans. The article that gained national attention was the coverage of the 1928 lynching of Robert Powell, a 24-year-old black man, in Houston, Texas. Powell, who was in the hospital with a near-fatal gunshot wound in the stomach, was accused of shooting a police detective. An angry mob of eight forced him from his hospital bed and without any due process of the law, sentenced him to be hung from a nearby bridge. In 1930, Jaffé was nominated for another Pulitzer Prize for his editorial "Not Heresy but Hunger." Since the rules for the competition were not clear that a writer from the same newspaper could receive the Pulitzer Prize two years consecutively, he did not receive the award. Besides his editorials on lynching, he wrote about the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, the prevention of the teaching of evolution in public schools, and Virginia's laws stating no interracial marriages and that public places had to be segregated, which applied to not only the Black race, but Native Americans. Born in Michigan into an Orthodox Jewish family, his parents were Lithuanian immigrates. By the time he was seven years old, his parents relocated to Durham, North Carolina. In 1911 he earned his bachelor's degree at Trinity College, which became Duke University in 1924. During college, he worked in various North Carolina and Virginia newspapers. After graduation, he started, for only six weeks, his journalism career at "Durham Sun" before joining with the "Richmond News-Dispatched", becoming a political writer and as an assistant city editor. During World War I, he enlisted in the United States Army in 1914, training at the first officer's training camp, becoming a second lieutenant and being deployed to France, serving in the American Expeditionary Forces. Witnessing the terror of war on the civilian population, he served for three months on the Balkan Peninsula, before serving at the rank of captain as the director the American Red Cross News Service, headquartered in Paris. After the war in 1919, he accepted an offer to become editor of the "Virginian-Pilot." As a determined crusader, he printed in ink his support of an anti-lynching law. The Virginia General Assembly declared lynching a state crime and the law was signed on March 14, 1928, becoming the first state to pass such a law, yet no one has ever been convicted by a jury of a lynching. The "Washington Post," July of 2005 edition, states the last lynching in Virginia was 1955. Lynching has never been a federal offense until March of 2022 when the Emmett Till Antilynching Act was signed into law. Jaffé married twice and with each wife, had a son that lived to adulthood. He died with a heart condition at the age of 62. At his death, his younger son, Louis Isaac Jr was a four-year-old. A collection of his papers is archived at the University of Virginia. In 2002 Alexander Leidholdt published Jaffe's biography, "Editor for Justice: The Life of Louis I. Jaffé."