William Raspberry, Washington Post columnist, dies at 76

William Raspberry, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post who was one of the first black journalists to gain a wide following in the mainstream press, died at age 76.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist William Raspberry wrote an opinion column for The Washington Post for nearly 40 years before retiring in 2005. Raspberry died Tuesday at age 76. He had prostate cancer, said his wife, Sondra Raspberry.

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William Raspberry with his wife, Sondra. More than 200 newspapers carried Raspberry’s syndicated columns, which concerned education, poverty, crime and race and were filtered through the prism of his experience growing up in the segregated South.

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William Raspberry and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist William Raspberry. Raspberry derived some of his core principles from a bedrock belief in self-reliance and the importance of education. Raspberry taught journalism for more than 10 years at Duke University and received more than 15 honorary doctorates. A collection of his columns, “Looking Back at Us,” was published in 1991.

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William Raspberry and his family. Raspberry was born Oct. 12, 1935, in Okolona, Miss. He was one of five children of James and Willie Mae Raspberry. His father taught shop and his mother taught English at a high school and a two-year college for African American students. “I grew up in apartheid,” he told the News Record of Greensboro, N.C., in 1996. “And yet it never induced my parents to teach us anything else than that we were responsible for our own behavior, for our own minds.”

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William Raspberry and wife, Sondra. When strident voices were shouting for attention, Mr. Raspberry often favored a moderate tone. He did not consider himself a political partisan and even stopped appearing on argumentative news-talk shows because, as he said in 2006, “they force you to pretend to be mad even when you’re not.”

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William Raspberry dances with R&B singer Toni Braxton.

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When William Raspberry won the Pulitzer for commentary in 1994, he was the second African American columnist to achieve the honor. (The Chicago Tribune’s Clarence Page was the first, in 1989.) Mr. Raspberry’s Pulitzer-winning columns covered a range of topics, from female genital mutilation in Africa to urban violence and musings on the legacies of civil rights leaders.

Marvin Joseph / The Washington Post

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