Funeral services will be held Feb. 24 for Angelo B. Henderson, 51, who died Feb. 15, in Pontiac, Mich. He may be the first alumnus of a DJNF sponsored urban journalism workshop to win a Pulitzer Prize.
A native of Louisville, Ky., young Angelo was sponsored by The Courier-Journal in 1980 to attend the summer high school workshop at the University of Kentucky. He was editor of The Lex-vil News, an eight-page tabloid published with 13 other workshoppers and inserted into the campus newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel.
Mr. Henderson graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1985 and began a media career that took him from his hometown paper, to Florida and on to The Detroit News and The Wall Street Journal.
He was outgoing, smart, stylish, deeply spiritual and compassionate. His 1999 Pulitzer-winning feature for The Journal detailed the lives affected by an attempted drugstore holdup that ended in the robber’s death. It examined the anguish of the pharmacist who shot him and that of the unsuspecting mother of the man who was killed. With dogged and patient professionalism, Mr. Henderson turned a nugget from a news brief in The Detroit News into a sensitive, insightful story.
He was host of a news talk show on WCHB-1200 in Detroit, an ordained minister and helped found a large-scale citizens patrol group known as Detroit 300. At the time of his death, he was a home recuperating from surgery following a fall on the ice.
Among his survivors are his wife Felecia Henderson, an assistant managing editor at The Detroit News, and their son, Grant, a college student.
