Chatting with Michael S. Sweeney Award Winner, Krystal Akehinmi

By Josie Vine, RMIT University, Melbourne.

The first inkling Krystal Akehinmi had about winning the prestigious 2026 Michael S. Sweeney Award for Best Article published in Journalism History, was when she was pottering around the internet.

“And I was like ‘What?’ Because I just kind of discovered it. I didn’t know, and I just saw my name on Google, and so that’s how I found out, and I thought ‘that’s pretty extra cool’,” she said.

(For the record, the publications committee did reach out to Krystal before announcing her win, but she had changed email addresses).

Krystal’s winning article, “‘To Make Pen-Friends through the Medium of Your Journal’: The Role of the Chicago Defender’s Bud Billiken Club in Forging Foreign Reporting and a Transnational Cohort among 1930s Black Youth,” was published in 2025 in Volume 52, Issue 2 of Journalism History.

The article “grew” out of a missing section of Krystal’s dissertation on African- American history and patterns of family reunions “many moons ago”.

“As I kept reading the Chicago Defender, I kept seeing these interesting reports of people’s summer trips abroad, and then discussions about their friends abroad. I’m like, ‘this is so interesting’. So I was just really intrigued by those young people, and that’s how I came to the article, just really trying to learn more about them,” she said.

Krystal, a trained historian, but without an extensive journalism background (other than “always kind of appreciating” the role of the press), was striving to “really understand” where her emerging research would fit.

And then she read D’Weston Haywood’s work, ‘Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement’ and thought “this is kind of what I’m trying to do too”.

“So I kind of discovered myself in journalism history,” she said. “So I really see myself in the middle of journalists and historians, which is of course what journalism history would be.”

In 2025 Krystal resigned from her position as Assistant Professor at Tennessee Technological University to homeschool her nine-year-old son and tutor for his homeschool collective (which, according to Krystal, has a “totally different” classroom dynamic to an undergraduate classroom).

But, on the advice of her mentor and history professor, the late Bernice Johnson Reagan, Krystal continues to research and write, particularly in her area of interest, the Chicago Defender’s “Defender Junior” page and the part it played in the internationalism of the Black press.

Krystal said she wanted to say “thanks” to the Journalism History editorial team for “taking the time to understand” what she was trying to relay through her article.

“And for helping me celebrate these very fascinating historical people who are real, right, and I think when we look at what they did, it’s a reminder that journalism actually is a tool to connect us to other people and to help us think about ourselves in ways we might not have.”

The Michael S. Sweeney Award recognizes the most outstanding article published in the previous volume of the Journalism History journal.

The History Division created the Sweeney award in 2018 to honor Michael S. Sweeney. He served as editor of Journalism History from 2012 to 2018 and worked to ensure its future by initiating the transition from an independent publication to the official scholarly publication of the History Division.