Jacqueline Charles, forefront, a Pulitzer Prize finalist who has reported on Haiti with the Miami Herald for more than a decade, will receive Colby College’s 2024 Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism Friday afternoon. Courtesy of the Miami Herald

WATERVILLE — Jacqueline Charles, a Pulitzer Prize finalist who has reported on Haiti with the Miami Herald for over a decade, will receive Colby College’s 2024 Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism Friday afternoon.

Jacqueline Charles Courtesy of the Miami Herald

Charles has covered wars, earthquakes, assassinations and more in Haiti for more than 10 years. She will receive the Lovejoy Award in a 4 p.m. ceremony at the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts on the Colby campus in Waterville.

The award is named for Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a journalist and Colby graduate who founded several anti-slavery newspapers before being murdered in 1837 while defending his printing press from a pro-slavery mob. He was described by John Quincy Adams, America’s sixth president, as the country’s first martyr to freedom of the press.

As a Black Haitian journalist who has spent decades reporting on underserved minority communities in nations where freedom of the press is under attack, Charles said receiving the award is a particularly symbolic honor.

“It’s an honor and it’s a recognition too, not just of me but for all the Haitian journalists who every day are putting their lives on the lines, who every day are being targeted, who every day are working in a country without a guaranteed freedom of the press,” Charles said Wednesday.

Charles first began writing with the Miami Herald at age 14, covering community news in unincorporated areas near Miami. Over time, she would report on everything from education and racial injustice to natural disasters and political violence.

When a catastrophic earthquake shook Haiti in 2010, Charles reported from the scene for 18 months amidst widespread damage and hectic recovery efforts. She would later produce a documentary film about the earthquake, earning a Pulitzer Price nomination in 2011 for her work.

“Some journalists get the luxury of picking and choosing their stories,” she said. “My approach is that I’m there and I’m telling stories that need to be told.”

Charles was selected by a eight-person panel for her “relentless, groundbreaking reporting,” according to Martin Kaiser, chair of the selection committee and former editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

“Her courage and fearless commitment to the truth has produced unequaled coverage of Haiti and the Caribbean,” Kaiser wrote in a news release. “She is the journalistic authority in one of the most difficult places in the world to do reporting.”

The ceremony honoring Charles comes amid a national furor over dubious claims surrounding Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.

Former President Donald Trump claimed during the Sept. 10 presidential debate that Haitian immigrants are eating Springfield residents’ household pets. Charles fact-checked Trump’s claim last week, finding that there is no verifiable evidence behind the assertion.

Charles’ investigation found that a video cited by Trump’s campaign of a Haitian immigrant in Springfield eating a cat actually showed a woman who lived two hours away in the town of Canton, Ohio, who is neither Haitian nor an immigrant.

“I view myself as a bridge. I deal with these different communities, I see the misunderstandings, I see discrimination, I see all the problems,” Charles said. “But what I am able to do is show our similarities more than our differences.”

The Lovejoy Award was presented last year to Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter and 2014 Bowdoin College graduate who was jailed in Russia for over a year on espionage charges.

Other recipients include Watergate reporter Bob Woodward and James Risen, a New York Times journalist who risked jailtime for keeping his sources confidential as he investigated the Central Intelligence Agency’s actions in Iran.

Lovejoy was born in Albion in 1802 and graduated from what would become Colby College in 1826.

In 1833 he began the St. Louis Observer, an abolitionist newspaper that criticized slavery in Missouri, which had been admitted to the union as slave state about a decade prior. A pro-slavery mob destroyed the paper’s printing press and raided Lovejoy’s home three separate times because of his reporting.

Lovejoy moved the paper to Alton, Illinois, after his third printing press was destroyed in Missouri. After changing the name to the Alton Observer, Lovejoy printed the paper for another year.

Lovejoy was shot and killed in 1837 by a pro-slavery mob outside the warehouse where he printed the Observer after he published an anti-slavery editorial.

Colby established the Lovejoy Award in his name in 1952. It has been presented every year since.

Friday’s ceremony will feature a Q&A between Charles and New York Times investigative correspondent Matt Apuzzo before a reception at 5 p.m. Tickets are not required for the event, organizers say.