When Jamie Kalven met Yohance Lacour in 2017, the two men quickly realized they had something important in common.
Kalven, founder of the Invisible Institute, a Chicago nonprofit newsroom, was working in Chicago’s Stateway Gardens housing development in 1997 when a vicious hate crime deeply hurt the community there. And Mr. Lacour helped a local newspaper cover that story at the time.
With Kalven’s help, Lacour’s memory of that period (and the story of his eventual imprisonment on a drug conspiracy charge) became the subject of an 11-episode podcast, “You Didn’t See Nothin,” that on Monday he won. the Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting.
Lacour’s podcast won one of two Pulitzers this year for the Invisible Institute, a small newsroom on Chicago’s South Side known for holding city officials accountable. The other award, for local reporting, went to the organization’s chief data officer, Trina Reynolds-Tyler, who reported on an investigative series on missing black girls and women in Chicago.
The awards made Invisible Institute the biggest surprise of Monday’s Pulitzer Prize announcements, an annual celebration of the news industry’s best work.
“It’s impressive,” Kalven, 75, said in an interview. “I just left our office, which is full of emotion.”
The Invisible Institute, which employs about a dozen journalists, is known for partnering with other newsrooms to publish its investigations. Mr. Lacour’s podcast was created in partnership with USG Audio, a division of Universal Studio Group. Ms. Reynolds-Tyler shared her Pulitzer with Sarah Conway of City Bureau, a nonprofit newsroom in Chicago.
Incorporated in 2015, the Invisible Institute focuses on high-impact journalism that examines issues of race, housing and criminal justice. He is known for his investigations into local police, including the 2014 murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer, and his fight for government transparency; Kalven won a landmark case in 2014 that resulted in the disclosure of records of police misconduct.
This is not the first time that the Invisible Institute has won a Pulitzer. A year-long investigation into police K-9 units with AL.com, the Marshall Project and IndyStar received a 2021 national reporting award.
Mr. Lacour, who served most of a 10-year sentence, had been a writer all his life and wanted to pursue that professionally when he was released from prison. Before meeting Mr. Kalven, he was considering asking his neighborhood newspaper if he could do anything, including editing classified ads. His father guided him to Mr. Kalven, one of his neighbors.
The couple quickly realized that the 1997 attack on Lenard Clark, a black teenager who was accosted in a white neighborhood, was a hugely important story that deserved to be revisited. While many of the facts of the case were known, the full context, including how it affected South Side residents, was largely unexamined.
So Lacour began the painstaking process of trying to locate people familiar with the hate crime decades after it occurred. It took years, long enough for Lacour to offer to return a $3,000 stipend he had received for a one-year fellowship, since his work had not been published when he finished. But Kalven told her to keep digging: “It takes as long as it takes,” she said, and they finally decided to tell the story in a podcast.
“I think this is the perfect medium to tell this story,” Lacour recalled Kalven saying. “And I think I can see where your personal story should be included.”
In 2023, about six years after Kalven’s first conversation with Lacour, the podcast debuted. It shed new light on Clark’s attack, attracted listeners around the world and won a series of awards, culminating Monday with the Pulitzer.
Lacour, 50, said the award was emotional for him, in part because it recognized the possibility of retelling such a personal story.
“It’s overwhelming,” Lacour said. “It’s literally like your dream coming true in many ways.”