William Raspberry, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist syndicated with The Washington Post Writers Group, is the 1999 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Fellow. He will receive the 47th Lovejoy award for journalism at a formal convocation on November 12 at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, Colby President William R. Cotter announced. The award is presented annually to honor an important voice in contemporary journalism and the memory of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, an 1826 Colby graduate who was America's first martyr to freedom of the press.

As the Lovejoy Fellow, Raspberry will receive an honorary degree and deliver the annual Lovejoy address at 8 p.m. on Friday, November 12, in Lorimer Chapel at Colby. The convocation is open to the public.

The Lovejoy Fellow is chosen by a committee of distinguished newspaper editors chaired by Bill Kovach, director of The Nieman Foundation at Harvard University.

Raspberry won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary in 1994, the same year that The National Association of Black Journalists gave him its annual lifetime achievement award. In 1997, Washingtonian named him one of the 50 most influential journalists in the national press corps.

Raspberry is the author of Looking Backward at Us (1991), a collection of his columns. He teaches at Duke University, serving in the Knight Chair in Communications and Journalism. He is a fellow of the American Society of Professional Journalists and he has been awarded honorary doctorates by 15 educational institutions.

The Lovejoy Award is named for Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a native of Albion, Maine. He was slain Nov. 7, 1837, in Alton, Ill., defending his abolitionist newspaper against a pro-slavery mob. Colby established the award in 1952 for an editor, reporter or publisher who has contributed to the nation's journalistic achievement.

Besides Kovach the selection committee includes Jane Healy, managing editor of The Orlando Sentinel; William Hilliard, former executive editor of The Oregonian; Ann Marie Lipinski, managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, Matthew V. Storin, editor of The Boston Globe; Cotter and the chair of Colby's board of trustees.

Last year's Lovejoy award was presented to columnist Ellen Goodman of The Boston Globe. Previous recipients include Katharine Graham and David Broder of The Washington Post, John Kifner and Anthony Lewis of The New York Times, David Halberstam, the late Murray Kempton of New York Newsday and the late Robert Maynard of The Oakland Tribune.